Christianity

[Alexis Jacobi]

That sure helps you, doesn't it? The ad hominem gives you a lot of comfort.

No, it is not ad hominem, it is an actual and a necessary description of your particular brand of zealotry.

You say I do not understand Christianity -- well, that's your prerogative. I say you do not know and understand yourself.

[Harbal]

Actual question?

Or just a kind of half-hearted sideswipe?

I knew you'd think I was up to something.

It was just idle curiosity, so don't answer the question if you don't think it's worthy. Either way, I have nothing up my sleeve.

[Alexis Jacobi]

. . . idle curiosity . . .

It's Harbal after all . . .

[Immanuel Can]

What I do, speaking generally, in this conversation is to acknowledge what you call the theological viewpoint while simultaneously demonstrating that it can, and in my view should, be compared to other theological systems in order to better make sense of what, in fact, is being referred to. Doing that, the tendency to 'condemn' or to vilify other notions of god, other pictures of divinity, is put in check.

No, actually, it's not. You never fail to vilify me and my view, so that's clearly not working for you.

But that's fair: the purpose of a comparative view is to MAKE A COMPARISON, not merely to pretend every theology is merely a different brand of the same softsoap.

Now THERE's a perspective that's judgmental, for sure. It has contempt for every theology.

Secular writers and the secular viewpoint most certainly have a crucial role.

A "role" in what? In your agenda? No doubt.

But "crucial" it's not. And they're myopic. Many of them can't "see" theology, because they're already committed to the premise that none of it really matters.

I visualize god as something realized inside of oneself.

Sorry: no. You're a contingent being, not an eternal one. Nobody's mistaking you for God, I think.

I'm certainly not.

[Immanuel Can]

That sure helps you, doesn't it? The ad hominem gives you a lot of comfort.

No, it is not ad hominem,

Heh. Yeah, definitionally it is.

[Immanuel Can]

...don't answer the question if you don't think it's worthy.

I'm not sure why you're even asking it. So I can't say whether it's "worthy" or not. But I have no particular comment to share, so that works out.

[Harbal]

...don't answer the question if you don't think it's worthy.

I'm not sure why you're even asking it. So I can't say whether it's "worthy" or not.

It was just something that came into my head. It doesn't matter. Maybe I'll start a thread if I can put enough coherent thoughts together.

[Immanuel Can]

Maybe I'll start a thread if I can put enough coherent thoughts together.

I'll look for it. Sounds good.

[Alexis Jacobi]

What I do, speaking generally, in this conversation is to acknowledge what you call the theological viewpoint while simultaneously demonstrating that it can, and in my view should, be compared to other theological systems in order to better make sense of what, in fact, is being referred to. Doing that, the tendency to 'condemn' or to vilify other notions of god, other pictures of divinity, is put in check.

No, actually, it's not. You never fail to vilify me and my view, so that's clearly not working for you.

No, it really is. However, you cannot read any perspective that does not jibe with your own so everything that is said goes in one ear and out the other. You cannot consider any other perspective because of your zealous involvement in your own.

I vilify ideas -- but wait that is not quite right. I acknowledge screwy ideas that gain possession of people. They are 'let loose upon the world' and, factually, there is little I can do about their existence and power.

But that's fair: the purpose of a comparative view is to MAKE A COMPARISON, not merely to pretend every theology is merely a different brand of the same softsoap.

What one does with the comparison depends. Theologies serve functions; these functions can be discerned. The sort of theology that you front has a specific cultural function in our present. But there are numerous levels. There are quiet, solitary practitioners who simply carry on in their devotions, whatever they may be. There are cultural figures who lead masses of people. There is certainly a wide range of theological interpretations.

My question remains: What is the purpose of a religious devotional practice? The question still stands and you have not ever answered it nor come close. The question demands an answer. And I observe that you have a *pat* answer that is really no answer at all.

Now THERE's a perspective that's judgmental, for sure. It has contempt for every theology.

There are some who do arrive at that conclusion and assertion. There is a certain sense to it when a non-mindful religious practice shows itself as ridiculous.

It is quite different if one is, say, deeply involved in genuine questions about this life, its purpose and meaning.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Maybe I'll start a thread if I can put enough coherent thoughts together.

A project for 2023! Say 10 minutes a day . . .

[Harbal]

Maybe I'll start a thread if I can put enough coherent thoughts together.

I'll look for it. Sounds good.

It probably won't happen; my fears about the coherent thoughts are turning out to be justified.

[Immanuel Can]

What I do, speaking generally, in this conversation is to acknowledge what you call the theological viewpoint while simultaneously demonstrating that it can, and in my view should, be compared to other theological systems in order to better make sense of what, in fact, is being referred to. Doing that, the tendency to 'condemn' or to vilify other notions of god, other pictures of divinity, is put in check.

No, actually, it's not. You never fail to vilify me and my view, so that's clearly not working for you.

No, it really is.

Theologies serve functions

Well, that can be said of anything...it "serves a function."

That doesn't tell anyone whether or not that is ALL it does, nor does it suggest whether the "function" in question is main value of the theology. There could well be theology that is true, but fails to serve your wanted "functions." I think there certain are such.

My question remains: What is the purpose of a religious devotional practice?

It's a very poorly-formed question.

"Purpose" for whom? For God? For mankind? For you? You haven't even said what makes a "religious devotional practice," as you call it, apt for purpose, or what purpose it's apt for.

The question demands an answer.

An answer demands a much better-formed question, actually. But I'm not optimistic you're interested in forming one. You seem to delight in being merely indirect and circumlocutious -- a trait upon which I am far from the first to remark, you will note.

It is quite different if one is, say, deeply involved in genuine questions about this life, its purpose and meaning.

Yeah, well, convince me that's you.

So far, all I've seen is superficial, errant theorizing, based on no definition at all and in defiance of the facts -- to which you are blindly wedded, it seems. "Genuinely" devoted, you may be: "deep," that approach is not.

[iambiguous]

My own interest in Christianity revolves around the following factors:

1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual's belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path

This is why I say that you post and repost the same post time and again. Once one has read the first time what your interest and focus is, one gets it.

Fortunately, in a free will world, those who think they do get it the first time can just choose not to read any subsequent posts from me. On the other hand, given how many here do respond to my points, they really don't seem to get them at all. If I do say so myself.

My view is that you (and others here) are missing an opportunity because, as I see it, there is not enough link to the contemporary events that we are in the midst of today. I do not want to critique your focus because of pique but rather because it does not seem to really penetrate to the heart of the issue.

Well, the heart of the issue seems rather obvious. Human beings interact socially. Human beings die. So, religions are born in order to provide mere mortals with a set of commandments to follow on this side of the grave in order to acquire immortality and salvation on the other side of the grave. God in a nutshell, right?

This thread revolves around just one of these One True Paths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

Christianity.

Examining your four-point list I would introduce the following:

1) There will never, ever appear the *proof* you ask for. All god-concepts are just that: god-concepts. There will not ever be a way to encapsulate the totality of existence -- what it is, how it came to be, and our appearance in it -- in any satisfactory form. A god-concept appears to be a sort of abbreviation for a sense of miraculous wonder. And then social rules & regulations, a way of explaining the world, etc. So what you are really asking about is how it has come about that people, mostly in the past I think, developed these sorts of conceptual-pictures.

Let me guess: you know this as an indisputable fact going back to what you know indisputably about the existence of existence itself.

2) Here I think is another instance of opportunity offered and opportunity squandered. If I were to focus more or less exclusively on the Occident, and the Classical world where Christianity had its birth, I would know that notions of 'immortality' and the mysterious paths that were said to be available and *real* were part-and-parcel of what was absorbed and integrated into Christian belief, specifically Catholic doctrine and ritual. So you are asking a question but you seem to have no real interest in the question you ask. So in my own view, if you and anyone else is especially concerned for the Occident (and you may not be) it would behoove you (i.e. people like you) to become more genuinely interested in the topic. To research it more. To then be able to talk about it at the very least more entertainingly. But here is my *poignant observation*: I do not think you really care. You seem like a broken record that skips over the same position. Should I apologize for making such a horrifyingly bold statement? For heaven's sake man this is supposedly a philosophy forum.

Right. The history of religion. Of Christianity. And, no, I don't really care about it. I care about morality and immortality and salvation. I'll leave all the rest of it to pedants like you. You know, if you are a pedant. And I certainly think that you are. Well, in a "subjective, rooted existentially in dasein" sort of way.

3) My observation is that you do not actually write about the main topic that you indicate is most important to you and most relevant. You refer to it constantly though. And then link to lengthy posts that you hope other people will read. But it seems to me that you miss an opportunity by not writing more directly and immediately on this issue of dasein. If you are so into Heidegger's thought it seems to me that you could do much better in drawing other people into it.

Well, let's just agree to disagree then. When it comes to Christianity [having once been a devout Christian myself] dasein is of fundamental importance to me. And my interest in Heidegger revolves only around the extent to which his Dasein is taken down out of the ponderous philosophical clouds and made applicable to actual flesh and blood human interactions. Dasein and the Holocaust, say. The stuff I explore on this -- https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529 -- thread.

Not counting the pinheads of course.

4) Sure, but that is an observation ("horrible things happen with or without god") that once it is made does not need to be made again. It seems to be for you the dagger in the heart of a believing religionist. But they simply refuse to lie down and die.

Of course they don't. After all, what's the alternative? If there is no God, no immortality and no salvation, you're left with just accepting that all the terrible pain and suffering in the world [especially your own] is just embedded in the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence that you endure for 70 odd years and then tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion.

Like I don't get that!!!!

Then back to my own interest in God, religion and Christianity:

It's simple. Men and women interact from day to day to day. How, they wonder, ought they to behave? On this side of the grave in order to facilitate the least dysfunctional communities. And, for the Christians, to assure the arrival of their soul in Heaven on the other side of it.

Again you miss the opportunity to link this observation/question to the events of the day. I get the impression that you do not pay much attention to the news, to contemporary discourse, to social conflict, to the deep divisions that widen at every moment. Do you read books and articles that deal on these issues and problems? I'd have to say "no" from what you write.

Huh? What am I supposed to do, note things like the war in Ukraine, the covid pandemic, the latest mass shooting, the latest natural disaster, the countless contexts in which human beings suffer terribly and come here and ask, "hey, what about God here all you True Believers!"

But this is a philosophy forum and one that is linked to a philosophy magazine. Those who write articles for that magazine are deeply involved in contemporary cultural issues. Therefore, at the least, they set the tone for what should take place here. But what do we wind up with here? Disturbed people who can do little else but endlessly bicker.

What should take place here, from my frame of mind, revolves more around an observation that Will Durant once made:

"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist."

As for you, I almost never read your own "wall of words" posts. Paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of words defining and defending other words. Words that almost never actually convey anything relevant to our day-to-day interactions.

Do you read the *walls of words* that are the articles in Philosophy Now? Do you read the walls of words that make up the works of philosophical literature? How about articles in journals of opinion? What are you actually saying? You do not *believe in* the use of language on a forum where it is only the written word that is or means? And hold on a minute: if our day-to-day interactions are important to you why don't you focus on these things in your posts?

Yeah. And when the articles I read are basically just words defining and defending other words, with almost no connection to the world of actual human social, political and economic interaction, I stop reading them and move on to the next article.

And, over and again, I make it clear that my own main interest in philosophy [aside from the ever fascinating "big questions"] revolves around this...

"How ought one to behave morally in a world awash in both conflicting goods and in contingency chance and change?"

Given a particular context.

Go ahead, pick one yourself and let's have a go at it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

circumlocutious . . .

Careful! Belinda may be lurking about …

And then Orwell from his vantage on high …

[Immanuel Can]

circumlocutious . . .

Careful! Belinda may be lurking about …

And then Orwell from his vantage on high …

Would that you had ability to hear either. They might do you so much good.