Christianity

[Dubious]

In actual fact everything pertaining to "spirituality, religious awakening, or faith" have no basis in science or science-facts. But no one could say (fairly) that spiritual awakening or spiritual insight or increased awareness are not real things. There is no person writing on this thread (I would assert) who has not experienced spiritual increase or awareness-awakening in some form or other. And whatever that is has no relationship to the facts of material science and physical relationships.

It has everything to do with material science and physical relationships.

To induce these experiences requires a change of brain chemistry with many methods historically practiced to activate such variances. Whereas its outcome may feel decidedly non-physical, they can only be anchored in the physical brain itself. Instead of these experiences being engendered in which trauma was mostly the cause of spiritual increase we have long had the pharmaceuticals to short-cut our way to the Promised Land of bliss. Such experiences may feel overwhelmingly real but their causes remain exclusively physical.

[Dontaskme]

"Immanuel can" has not yet recognized who nor what the word God refers to exactly, but "immanuel can" does 'try to' categorise and analyze some 'thing' that 'it' has not yet recognized.

IC is attempting to sell other people that they too can know God. Even without ever having known or seen God himself. IC seems to take great pride and courage in the art of surreptitiously duping his own mind, where even his own mind is tricked and conned into believing it's own delusional thinking.

Even though IC has never once seen or known his own personal face.....except through a reflected mirror image, which is a poor imitation of what's already blindingly here, that can never be looked upon or known to exist outside of what's already here.

The reflected mirror image of ( I ) will never be what is sought after since there is absolutely nothing inside the mirror except the looked upon image of what can never be looked upon. And this is an unfortunate quandry for IC. Rejecting the truth of this dire sistuation, IC still clings to the deluded belief that he can sell his story to all those gullible and daft enough to listen.

All those who get drawn into IC's web of lies that even IC himself is never perplexed by since they are his own self-created perplexities just makes the story even more plausible, meaning more applause for IC, and the more his ego grows, so the insanity grows, and will know no limits.


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[promethean75]

"To do that, "u gotta" know what a Christian is. It's obvious that one can't "categorize" and "analyze" something one can't even recognize, because one knows of no critiera for doing so. So what are your criteria?"

i mean the evangelical act itself. endorsing and espousing the gospels, adhering to beliefs derived thereof, preaching to and encouraging others to follow suit, etc. there's the private (individual christian), public (christian organization) and political (christian state apparatus) modes of evangelism.

i wuz jus lookin at the level of influence each kind has and decided that the last type is the most dang-gerous, e.g., banning abortion will get a lotta girls/women into some sirius trouble, whereas being convinced by your christian neighbor while at a cookout to join the church is really no big deal. that's your business and nothing yet of what you believe has effected anyone else who may not share your beliefs.

... until you become a politician, a christian politican, an evangelical nightmare for the people. 

But I don't even remember what I wuz replying to. That wuz like yesterday. I think I thought I saw AJ criticizing u for being evangelical and I wanted to relieve him of that concern by suggesting that this level of evangelism is harmless... maybe even admirable in the right character. Like I think I could hang out with Tolstoy.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Feeble indeed it is! I'm always intrigued when someone counters with "obviously false" which possibly it may be, but how would I know if the one who presumes such won't elaborate. Obviously true, ideas gratuitously accepted for purposes of personal worth or given some external lamination of ultimate meaning are usually the most indefensible and least open to a reasonable explanation.

As for gophers pushing dirt, such is the existential necessity of gopher life; we have a lot in common with gophers, only our piles are a lot bigger. As for any gopher dabbling in metaphysics, the future looks bright trusting there will still be one without any delimiting countdown of days all earthly life must endure.

Woe is me! I wish I could be that gopher (no wry comments please) if only logic and reality weren't such potent immunizers!

As it turns out, the offhand attempt at some humor seems to have provoked your concerted reaction and the metaphors (which were merely humorous) seem to be agreeable to you.

You said:

Only when truth negates itself as absolute does it render service among humans or likely anything else that developed through trial and error.

To which I responded:

Largely true but also notably false [affirmation/negation]. Pretty obviously false [affirmation of the negation] yet with notes of veracity [contradiction but in service to the negation] that pop up like gophers pushing dirt [a reference to 'worlding' and the condition of being stuck within categorical limitation].

I give, I negate. I negate, then I counter the negation. I thought I was doing right! Why must I be punished so mercilessly!

Dubious writes: As for gophers pushing dirt, such is the existential necessity of gopher life; we have a lot in common with gophers, only our piles are a lot bigger. As for any gopher dabbling in metaphysics, the future looks bright trusting there will still be one without any delimiting countdown of days all earthly life must endure.

Great! I seem to have made a point or introduced a metaphor that encapsulates what you get at.

Since I have been reading you, you have been stating and restating the same assertion. This is not a complaint since this is what we all do, isn't it? Make efforts to clarify our own positions in relation to the positions of others.

I wonder if you have ever read a Kafka story called the The Burrow? I would suggest that it is apropos to what I understand an aspect of your essential point to be, and also relevant to the larger meaning that we seem to be coming to when we examine these huge religious constructs which have failed us. Here it is.

Growing up on a sort-of post-hippy commune in the Santa Cruz hills I was actually in charge of gopher elimination in our large communal gardens . . .

Credit where credit is due, brother!

Can't tell you how many of these I've set:

[Alexis Jacobi]

... until you become a politician, a christian politican, an evangelical nightmare for the people.

But I don't even remember what I wuz replying to. That wuz like yesterday. I think I thought I saw AJ criticizing u for being evangelical and I wanted to relieve him of that concern by suggesting that this level of evangelism is harmless... maybe even admirable in the right character. Like I think I could hang out with Tolstoy.

This ties in to the topical and contemporary issues going on around us yet it is this side of things that is never sufficiently referenced here, in my view.

Catholic/Christian Europe built a civilization that endured for 1,000 years. It was based on extremely defined metaphysical ground. It was the strength or the intensity of that established ground that allowed for the creation (our civilization) to come into existence. Then, at a certain moment, and over the course of a certain amount of time, the foundation was undermined.

It was something I read by Waldo Frank in The Re-Discovery of America and the chapter The Last Days of Europe that influenced my thinking. He noted that all the assertions which made up the foundations of the European house were undermined. He describes very succinctly how all the elements that made up the foundations upon which the 'house' of Europe were built no longer 'stand'. I wish that there were a copy of Waldo's book I could link to, it is worthwhile to examine.

He points out that when a living body dies (the structure of the body of Europe) it is inaccurate to see that life has ended. No. A corpse actually burst to life; teeming life that lights up every cell as the body decomposes. The atom has its day. It is 'free' to do whatever it wants for as long as the light of life still remains.

A body breaks. Potent but no more intact, it's energy flows outward. In wholeness, it had been contingent upon God alone: the Gothic spires had expressed it, a universe turned upward. It becomes a multiverse turned horizontal. For it is breaking. Europe bleeds seaward, into soils unknown . . .[his reference is to the Age of Exploration]

Yet what interests me, and this is my fundamental interest really, is just this: the loss of a foundation in certainty that enables a person, and then a people, to have a solid ground upon which to build in this world. So, once upon a time we had a 'foundation' on which to build, now we do not have any sort of foundation that I can see. The hardcore Catholics and Christians go back in time to recover a conceptual world, a picture of the world, that no longer exists as something *real*. It exists like a shadow or an image that the retina retains. But it will not ever be possible to build on such a foundation. And when they try to insist that it be built upon, their efforts seem to Moderns as fascistic impositions on people who, bereft of foundations in any substantial sense, are adrift in a reality without a foundation or anchor.

But here is the curious thing: eventually we will have to come once again to some sort of definitional structure about what this world really is, or really isn't, in a sense that pictures the cosmic entirety ("wholeness") that will be similar to what allowed for the creation of those 1,000 years of European-Christian civilization.

If we live in a world, in a cosmos, that we cannot define and the purpose of which is not discoverable, and cannot be *real* for us, there will never arise a possibility of agreement, and we will never be able to build anything substantial together. The disagreements that are so evident here among us are evidence of that!

We will then have to resign ourselves to a torturous, never-ending atomization of purpose. Purpose will be defined (neurotically) by individual atoms in a dying structure. The choices of those tendentious atoms will seem, and often do seem, as lunatic as extreme ironing. There are a thousand examples of intensity of focus in bizarre and insane directions.

But those atoms (that is to say us and people with even less awareness and comprehension) will not be able to *locate" themselves and will not even be able to understand that once they were a part of a Whole that could be seen and explained and gave sense to their life and their existence (Dante shared a perceived world and a wide set of agreements even with his cook whereas now we cannot agree on anything!) will resolve not to try to explain anything.

Or the explanations, which are really not explanations at all, will follow along the lines of the declarations of BigMike and Dubious. Concise, tenable, coherently explained, but not a great deal more than militant musings of atomized particles in a decomposing conceptual order.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I meant tendentious in this sense

Do I need to explain to you what a "quip" is?

You seek out a contradiction that really does operate within mathematical logic and put emphasis on it -- hoping thereby to win your point.

Actually, yes, it does.

And yes, for any rational person, the point is obvious.

You've contradicted yourself. That you don't care that you have, is probably the most telling thing.

No, really I have not. But it is certainly true that you are working an angle of asserting having contradicted myself because this serves your purpose. This is a typical strategy for you: you latch on to one element and hammer it. Doing so, you avoid actually seeing and understanding what the other person has said and is trying to say.

Curiously, you are a most irrational person who tarts himself up as a rational person. Your belief-system is grounded in irrationality. Is your rational base a sham? Not quite. You are versed in categories of predication and can recognize contradictions when they show themselves in language-constructs. But what I express approaches strict predicate systems with more nuance and I say that a more mature perceiving being must relinquish and modify absolutist predicates and face the terrestrial facts . . . that things are more complex here on the ground.

This notion causes your braincells to overheat . . . simply because if applied to your absolutist mental system it would show that it is untenable, irrational and biased.

[Immanuel Can]

"To do that, "u gotta" know what a Christian is. It's obvious that one can't "categorize" and "analyze" something one can't even recognize, because one knows of no critiera for doing so. So what are your criteria?"

i mean the evangelical act itself. endorsing and espousing the gospels, adhering to beliefs derived thereof, preaching to and encouraging others to follow suit, etc.

How do you distinguish "evangelical" from "prostelytizing"?

Because all religions do prostelytize, and some more aggressively than others. Mormons, JW's, Hare Krishnas...all are famous for "preaching and encouraging others to follow suit." Muslims even use force to compel "reversion" to Islam, and Commies use "re-education camps" to force their views on people. Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris have been called, "evangelical Atheists," for their intensity and fervour in trying to convert people to Atheism. Yet none are even remotely Christians.

So something's seriously missing, there. Your definition is far too broad, and catches everybody in the same net. So what can you add to that, to pin down what you mean by "Christian," and not catch all these other, inappropriate fish?

[Immanuel Can]

You've contradicted yourself. That you don't care that you have, is probably the most telling thing.

No, really I have not.

Follow carefully.

You wrote: "To believe in truth is a folly."

Is that TRUE?

If it is, then you lied: there is a reason to believe in truth...namely, to believe in the truth that to believe in truth is folly. You're saying that's objective.

Or are you not?

Are you saying that the claim "To believe in truth is a folly" is merely subjective?

If so, it's not true for anybody but you. We have no reason to believe it's right. Nothing objective backs it.

So either way, you've cut your own legs out from under yourself.

And the appeal to Eastern modes is just an escape strategy. It doesn't work.

If you say that your Eastern view is right, and mine is wrong, then again, the question reappears: do you mean your view is objectively right, or just subjectively appealing to you?

If you mean the former, then you've just shot the Eastern view to pieces, because you've made it objective.

If you mean the latter, then your view is strictly subjective, and as such, is not one stitch better than mine, and you have given nobody a reason to agree with you.

Either way, you're dead in the water.

[Alexis Jacobi]

So something's seriously missing, there. Your definition is far too broad, and catches everybody in the same net. So what can you add to that, to pin down what you mean by "Christian," and not catch all these other, inappropriate fish?

Am I mistaken in my perception that you are aching to answer your own question?

Not sure if this helps or hinders.

[Immanuel Can]

So something's seriously missing, there. Your definition is far too broad, and catches everybody in the same net. So what can you add to that, to pin down what you mean by "Christian," and not catch all these other, inappropriate fish?

Am I mistaken in my perception that you are aching to answer your own question?

Yes, you are. I know what I think, and I know the Biblical definition; and so I don't need to ask about that.

I'm "aching" for somebody like yourself, who wants to make grand claims about "Christianity" to define their own use of their most fundamental term.

One would not think that was much to ask. It seems, however, it's beyond the ability of many such generalizers to do.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You wrote: "To believe in truth is a folly."

Are you a moron? Can you read and assimilate a clear sentence?

I encapsulated what I understood to be the essence of BigMike's stated view. It is not my view.

[Immanuel Can]

I encapsulated what I understood to be the essence of BigMike's stated view. It is not my view.

So you do believe in objective truth, you say?

[Alexis Jacobi]

One would not think that was much to ask. It seems, however, it's beyond the ability of many such generalizers to do.

You have relinquished all rights to ask questions and expect answers. There are dozens -- likely hundreds -- of instances where you simply skip over relevant questions posed by so many. Te pagan con la misma moneda.

What you can do however is to clarify your own positions. That is, to answer your own rhetorical questions.

[Immanuel Can]

One would not think that was much to ask. It seems, however, it's beyond the ability of many such generalizers to do.

You have relinquished all rights to ask questions and expect answers.

That's impossible.

Just the fact of being a reasonable person requires that you provide basic definitions for your own concepts. Were I not even alive, the same would be true. You cannot be rational without such definitions.

But that you don't care to be rational would be very telling.

[promethean75]

"militant musings of atomized particles in a decomposing conceptual order."

what's so bad about being a militantly musing group of atomized particles in a decomposing conceptual order (like BM and Dubi)?