Christianity

[FlashDangerpants]

You previously demanded that I should have an exhaustive list of published sources in order for me to be at a level worthy of your conversation on this exact subject, so you are obviously lying about not having much interest as you must have done very extensive research.

I had a certain interest, during a certain period, in these questions. I moved on from that era.

You do not have, and you never have had, any substantial interest in it and have done little or no reading. So you have no base of any sort to discuss it.

You are here for other reasons as I made clear in previous posts. Those have to do with a perverse wielding of a moral narrative to attempt to demonstrate and prove villainy.

Are you catching on yet?

Just explain what that one sentence actually meant, without the transparent evasion.

You could clear this up easily, so long as the thing you are hiding isn't that you think the holocaust was justified.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I'll endure you no longer here, you'll endure me no longer here. Win/win.

Now, now, let’s not be unnecessarily rash!

[Alexis Jacobi]

Just explain what that one sentence actually meant, without the transparent evasion.

It can be done. If you’ll be satisfied with a solid answer. And then take your concerns elsewhere. That’s the deal I am offering.

[Lacewing]

The Shoah narrative has some fictional elements which are still contested.

Can you explain what you were referring to here when you said "fictional elements"?

I surely can. If you and FlashDance will agree to accept one good example so that the topic is dropped, I will.

Why do you only want to give one answer instead of just explaining your statement? Mr. Dangerpants has his own issue with you. You usually elaborate on all of your explanations, so I'm wondering why you are resisting doing so on this one?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Why do you only want to give one answer instead of just explaining your statement?

To explain the statement (an assertion) I must offer an example. And the example will explain the statement.

If you agree, and if FDPs will agree, then everyone should be satisfied, right? Make sense?

You usually elaborate on all of your explanations, so I'm wondering why you are resisting doing so on this one?

Have you read my recent posts to him? It is clearly explained there.

I am ‘resisting’ only insofar as I have reasonable terms. If those terms are met there’ll be no more resisting. If they aren’t then *no deal*.

“Trust your mother — but cut the cards” my grandfather used to say.

[FlashDangerpants]

Just explain what that one sentence actually meant, without the transparent evasion.

It can be done. If you’ll be satisfied with a solid answer. And then take your concerns elsewhere. That’s the deal I am offering.

Give your solid answer.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Give your solid answer.

When you agree to my terms: that you’ll take your concerns elsewhere.

[FlashDangerpants]

Give your solid answer.

When you agree to my terms: that you’ll take your concerns elsewhere.

If you give a solid answer then I won't have any further concerns.
If you just present some quibble about the train timetables at Belsen, that won't be very solid.

All you ever do though is lookfor ways to manufacture a series of increasingly absurd ways to pretend I am at fault for you not being able to answer a very simple question. The question is after all, only what did you mean when you wrote that sentence?

So, give us your promised solid answer and end this foolishness.

[henry quirk]

If you found yourself somewhere where no law existed, how could any claim you consider yourself to have be inviolate?

You chain me, you injure me; my right to myself stands as the measure I've been wronged. The chain on my ankle doesn't negate, it highlights. This highlighting will fuel me as I scheme and fight to free myself of those chains. No claim you make to my life, is valid. Every man knows this about himself (even slavers know this about themselves). Imagine yourself taken and confined. Do you think you'd ever accept it as right? You may resign yourself to it if no oppoortunity to free yourself can be crafted or found. But, unless your sanity has been eroded, I do not think even an easy-goer like you would accept it was your place to be property.

Whether or not any right you thought you had was inviolate would depend solely on you own ability to prevent someone from violating it.

No, my right is secure. You, the slaver, violate me but cannot negate my claim to myself. What I can't defend today I may very well avenge tomorrow. You'd do better to kill me outright than chain me.

As aside: there was woman who was kidnapped sometime back, in Ohio, as I recall. The scum who abducted her had her for years. He never broke her. He made her damn clever, though. When her chance finally opened, she was outta there. She never loss her sense of her rightful self-possession. Even locked in a room she was never his.

Besides, who would be the judge of what is 'just cause'?

First off, there's, for example, you. Someone comes at you with a ax handle when you've done nuthun' to him, you know he has no just cause. And, as just laws ought to act as codifications of natural rights, you ought to be able, should Mr Axe handle clean your clock, be able to take your complaint to a constabulary and court. Today's police and courts, the Law, in no way consistently aligns with natural law, though. You'd do better to quietly find the Mr. Axe handle and balance the scales yourself.

If someone shot you and took your wrist watch he might well consider his desire to own the watch to be just cause for killing you and taking it.

Funny how that works: he might consider my watch fair game and think it right to take it from me and mebbe end my life to get it. But he'll never agree his own watch is up for grabs, that it's right someone should take his. He recognizes his own natural right to his property as he tries to deny me mine.

I agree with the sentiment of that, henry, and it would be a far better word if all men believed in natural rights and behaved accordingly. Unfortunately, not all men do behave in accordance with natural rights, which is why I question their worth.

Men are free wills. Each recognizes his natural rights as a matter of course but each must choose to recognize them in other men.

I've yet to hear you defend the worth of a permission or privilege that has been granted to you by an authority when that authority can and will violate, amend, or take away that permission or privilege with impunity.

[Alexis Jacobi]

If you give a solid answer then I won't have any further concerns.

Excellent! Now we are getting somewhere. Now let's define *solid answer* so there is no further misunderstanding.

I wrote: The Shoah narrative has some fictional elements which are still contested.

Now, I here provide an example of a fictional element and you agree to accept this as an example of what I am talking about and you agree to accept it as solid if it comes from a reliable source and to will take your concerns elsewhere...

I had in mind the assertion that the Nazis boiled Jews and made soap out of them.

“It’s a general conception that the Nazis manufactured soap,” says Michael Berenbaum, who was project manager for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) before it opened in 1993 and headed the museum’s research institute until 1997. “But those of us working in this area have not used it as an example [of Nazi atrocity] in the last 10 to 15 years. We don’t have any evidence that the Nazis actually manufactured soap with human bodies.”

By 1990, Yad Vashem, had unequivocally determined that the manufacture of soap was no more than a “mere rumor.” Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at that time, “The Nazis did enough horrible things during the Holocaust. We do not have to go on believing untrue stories.”

The myth was revisited in 2020. In response to a query from Haaretz, a spokesperson from Yad Vashem wrote that “Despite the persistence of these rumors … which began even during the Holocaust, there is no evidence that soap was mass produced from the bodies of Jews.”

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

[henry quirk]

We can both see that fire exists, but you haven't explained in what way a 'natural' right exists.

Go look in a mirror.

I have natural rights because it feels like I should have natural rights.

No. You are a person and you have natural rights to your life, liberty, and property.

You know it, just like every other person, any where, any when, knows it about himself.

[Alexis Jacobi]

So, give us your promised solid answer and end this foolishness.

Man, I am glad we are done with that topic. I was thinking it would have to go in this direction or some equivalent! (True, that might have been even more interesting . . .)

Now -- where were we?

[henry quirk]

Man, I am glad we are done with that topic. I was thinking it would have to go in this direction or some equivalent! (True, that might have been even more interesting . . .)

Now -- where were we?

You know it ain't over with the dynamic duo, right? She may bow out, but he won't.

[iambiguous]

So when you say:

I believe...

1] that my own existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless
2] that I am hopelessly drawn and quartered -- fractured and fragmented -- in regard to moral and political conflicts
3] that I am inching closer and closer to oblivion...death

So, of course I am eager to cement that frame of mind into place.

I realize that it will be impossible to build any sort of bridge between our operating and determining Weltanschauungen.

Well, if you do not believe that your own existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless, and do believe in objective morality and are able to imagine something beyond the grave for "I", then, given particular contexts where things like that might come up, we can at least attempt to communicate to each other the main components of our own philosophy of life. Unless it is required that "technically" we pin down the definition and the meaning of "operating" and "determining" here.

If that is important to you then how about you take your own definition and meaning down out of the technical clouds and note how they are applicable to a particular set of circumstances.

I just want the exchange to be more than words defining and defending yet more words still.

However, I can say -- I am obligated to say -- that the view that you have, seen from my angle and from my values and valuation, is the philosophy of a sick man. Oddly, I doubt that you could say "No! I assure you! It is healthy!"

Okay, again, given actual social, political and economic interactions, how is it "sick" to suppose that in a No God world the manner in which I construe human interactions above is, what, not rational?

Because you cannot make any statement that contradicts the operation of the perspective you have.

A classic "general description intellectual contraption", the truth of which revolves entirely around how you define the meaning of those words placed in that particular order. It does not pertain to any actual existential experiences at all.

You've made your choice but you could have chosen any other one. So you say...

I will certainly describe to you why I view you as a 'sick man' but I am not sure you'll like it. OTOH I cannot see on what basis you'd object. For a man in oblivion what could it matter?

Huh? I'm not in "oblivion" now. I'm still on this side of the grave. All I am noting here is the obvious...

1] that we are all thrown at birth adventitiously -- beyond our control -- out into a particular world historically, culturally and experientially
2] that we are all indoctrinated -- for literally years -- as children to think about the world around us as others tell us to
3] that our individual lives -- experiences/relationships/access to information and knowledge -- as both children and adults can be vastly different, predisposing us to come to vastly different moral, political and spiritual value judgments
4] that though philosophers have been around now for thousands of years there is still no consensus regarding behaviors said deontologically to be the most rational and virtuous...not even close regarding any number of conflicting goods

I presented a view that encapsulated some of my musings as to *proper ways to act* in this nihilistic present:

AJ wrote: [In response to St Paul in 1 Corinthians]: I see this as mind-fuck. It is I think a very good example of Hebrew Idea-Imperialism. If you try to reduce it to what it really says, what it says is really disturbing and destructive. You are told that you must give yourself over to this 'god' and thus give over your own power to see, think, decide, choose. This statement invalidates at the most basic level. It is tantamount to neutering or castrating oneself. I absolutely do not believe this is the way to go.

Yes, but that is because you do not have faith in the Christian God. For those that do, neutering or castrating themselves given that their God is believed to be 1] both omniscient and omnipotent and 2] assures them that worshipping and adoring Him resulting in immortality and salvation, is merely to act out -- to embody -- their faith. A frame of mind alien to you perhaps but not to them.

That's why I focus instead on having them demonstrate [even to themselves] that a leap of faith here is enough. Especially given the fact that there are so many, many, many others on many, many, many other One True Paths insisting it is their souls too that are at stake. Maybe that will sink in, maybe it won't. After all, what do atheists like me have to offer them on either side of the grave...moral nihilism and oblivion?

So in my own view I think that culturally, intellectually, and also politically, it is crucial to see and to throw off this basic idea that everyone must submit to this god-figure defined as Jesus and, as a result, give up oneself and subscribe to a mass-current. Recovery of oneself, at a most fundamental level, must then mean turning against a whole array of false-constructs and false-admonitions that have been thrust on people generally.

I believe much the same. But from a very, very different perspective. All I have to offer is the assumption that if they do eschew the Christian God, their whole life doesn't have to revolve rigidly around "what would Jesus do?" In other words, they would immediately have access to so many more options in their life.

But not in a merely rebellious mode. But creative rebellion. Therefore the object is not spiritual disempowerment, neutering and castration, but rejecting a god-image of uniformity and sameness through which people are controlled. And beginning to reconstruct the self and the actions of the self in contrary ways. Recovering genuine but ordered will. Recovering self-determining power. And as part of that also turning against egalitarianism and also progressivism which are the modern expression of those Pauline ideologies.

Creative rebellion? Again, note some particular social, political and economic contexts in which you imagine this unfolding. And what of those all up and down the No God political spectrum who would insist that by rebelling creatively they mean as "one of us".

Instead, in my view, you sustain this line of reasoning way up in the intellectual contraption clouds...

So I can only continue in the projects and processes that I have defined for myself and declared to be my own. I see Immanuel as carrying forward a distorted and distorting Christian doctrine which I have come necessarily to oppose. His ultimate threat (I mean that of Christianity) is spiritual annihilation! But the opposite is true. Recovery is 'life'. Yet I do not think that everything that was channeled into Catholicism is philosophically wrong -- Platonic doctrines seem sound in most ways still -- but because Christianity is a movement of establishing uniformity through undermining freedom of thought and existential freedom. It disempowers at the most essential and crucial level as that excerpt from 1Corinthians demonstrates.

This is why I am more interested in paths of recovery of power; of concept-pathways that rediscover or redefine *god*; which bring out metaphysical truths that apply in the concrete and *real* world and which empower people to act in their world in an integral way. I am much more aligned with a dissident and Right-tending intellectual movement and more and more opposed to those currents of thought that seem communistic, egalitarian and 'progressive' for these reasons.

Prompting me as always to ask: Given what particular contexts? And then when none are forthcoming to note "thanks but no thanks".

Iambiguous wrote: If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Now, given a particular set of circumstances where moral and political conflagrations run rampant, let's compare and contrast our respective moral philosophies.

Thus there is nothing more to be revealed or discussed. Surely you see that as well, right?

How about this: Given what particular context? Provide us with particular sets of circumstances whereby when you were confronted by those who rejected your own value judgments, you did not react as I would above.

[Lacewing]

Man, I am glad we are done with that topic.

Well, you mainly demonstrated how slimy you are.

It's not surprising that Henry supports your childishness when it's not directed at him.