Christianity

[Harry Baird]

I was indoctrinated from birth to be a liberal follower of Jesus. This has been my main motivation towards socialism. A socialist maintains that universally and without exception everyone is or should be equal in rights and needs.

I and many others have concluded the only way to adore the good, the true , the beautiful, and be morally a universalist- socialist is to nurture the immanent force for good as it's defined by Jesus and others. Jesus showed how practical God-worthship is during a historical event, Roman occupation, when God- worthship is passively opposed to colonialism.

OK, so, we're no longer discussing my refutation of your argument, and have switched to a discussion of your own view of God and Jesus, so I'll assume that you concede that my refutation succeeds.

That said, I'm agreeable with your views in a political (if not theological) sense: the socialism, egalitarianism, and anti-colonialism that you describe are to me ideals to which we should strive.

[Harry Baird]

OK, I think then that what you are saying is simply that a story can be a metaphysical one, perhaps as opposed to one devoid of either metaphysical assertion or allusion.

Yes, but there's more to it than that: in the case of Christianity, that which you've (we've) been referring to as the Story (with a capital S) is not mere story (in the sense of narrative) but is also and already comprised of metaphysical principles. An example is original sin. This is part of the Story but it is also very much a metaphysical principle: the principle that the consequences of the abrogation by the first created human beings of the divine commandments are inherited by their descendants.

With that said...

However, in the way I create a separation between *story* and *metaphysical principles*

...I don't think that this separation that you make holds very well in the context of Christianity's Story (with a capital S).

[The] Story [...] is replete with principles, metaphysical principles. First, we have to identify what those metaphysical principles are

And this is where my critique of your process comes in. The metaphysical principles that I consider to be truly Christian in the Story are those such as I gave an example of above: original sin (I can supply other examples on request). They are straightforwardly a part of the Story.

You, though, claim to be abstracting metaphysical principles from the Story. This is not straightforward, and results in principles that are too generic and divorced from the Christian context to be considered to be truly Christian. The example you've given - and it is the only example of which I'm aware - is that to which I've referred as your Principle of Incarnation, a principle which - as best as I can tell - kind of vaguely states that divine concepts are manifest and embedded into reality in some undefined(?) way.

To the extent to which you base your claim to value Christian metaphysics on your endorsement of such abstracted principles as this, I think your claim is false: this is not a "Christian" principle; it is far too generic for that. At the very least, you would have to also endorse more specific, straightforwardly Christian principles for your claim to hold.

If one asserts that metaphysics is false then one is making declarations about what is really true, and if one denies metaphysical reality (the realness and the power of principles in our human world) one then, necessarily and without any further choice, must reduce our being to purely physical reality.

Yes, but there is more to metaphysics than just principles. There is also a sense in which "metaphysical reality" refers to a transcendent reality (including the divine) beyond physical reality, and, too, there is a sense in which "a metaphysic" refers to an overarching ontological view, thus...

When metaphysics is destroyed one walks back into a prison. The prison of a mutable, meaningless world in which one is powerless.

...this does not require the "destruction" of metaphysics, but rather the choice of, say, "atheism plus physicalism plus hard determinism" as one's metaphysic rather than, say, "theism plus substance dualism plus libertarian free will".

While your thrust here is relevant in the sense that the atheist-physicalist types often do claim to have dispensed with metaphysics, they are wrong, because atheistic physicalism is a metaphysical view, and we should not grant them the concession that you do here: that they really have "destroyed" metaphysics.

When I say *powerless* I mean that in a world ruled by physical principles that mirror the (cruel) reality of nature, one cannot put together an argument against those who apply natural principles to your control.

I don't think it's useful to conflate ethical principles with metaphysical principles as you do in this context. Of course there is some overlap, but it's clearer to be more specific when discussing ethics.

In any case, I disagree with your deterministic and rule-driven view of the natural world (and physical reality in general). The natural world is in my view much more animistic and consciousness-driven than you allow.

When the Self is undermined -- that is when the metaphysical principles that undergird it are no longer seen as 'real' and validatable -- I assert that the Self begins to collapse.

It would be helpful if you listed some of these metaphysical principles, because it isn't clear to me what you're referring to here.

It falls back from being understood as being eternal (immortal if you wish) to being merely an epiphenomenon and essentially unreal. The Self and then everything human is invalidated and reduced to meaninglessness.

We see eye-to-eye here: physicalism, including epiphenomenalism, is obviously and demonstrably false, and, in all honesty, pretty much deserving only of contempt.

The odd thing for me though is that - as I commented above - you actually endorse a sort of biological determinism that is not all that divorced from the hard determinism that follows from physicalism.

[Harbal]

It serves my purposes to make statements about how I conceive your existential, philosophical, cultural and historical position, as an emblem of Ortega y Gasset’s mass man,

I don't condemn you for having a purpose, no matter how trivial. As for Ortega y Gasset, I cannot even begin to express how uninterested I am in him.

but there is little to be gained in trying to convince you to see, think, conceive or understand in any way differently than you do.

That isn't entirely true. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing to be gained by it.

I write relationally to you. But what I write is not addressed to you.

I'm afraid I committed the grave error of reading it before I knew that.

You cannot understand what I mean and why I say the things I do say. All your responses prove this, time and again.

Had I thought it might be worth understanding, I might possibly have attempted to understand it, and who knows? I may even have succeeded.

What I hope to achieve then is to better illustrate my own beliefs and views through relational commentary. You are merely ‘emblematic’.

I am content to be merely emblematic. I wouldn't want to play a significant role in such an insignificant pursuit.

[Belinda]

I was indoctrinated from birth to be a liberal follower of Jesus. This has been my main motivation towards socialism. A socialist maintains that universally and without exception everyone is or should be equal in rights and needs.

I and many others have concluded the only way to adore the good, the true , the beautiful, and be morally a universalist- socialist is to nurture the immanent force for good as it's defined by Jesus and others. Jesus showed how practical God-worthship is during a historical event, Roman occupation, when God- worthship is passively opposed to colonialism.

OK, so, we're no longer discussing my refutation of your argument, and have switched to a discussion of your own view of God and Jesus, so I'll assume that you concede that my refutation succeeds.

That said, I'm agreeable with your views in a political (if not theological) sense: the socialism, egalitarianism, and anti-colonialism that you describe are to me ideals to which we should strive.

I was responding to your explicit invitation:

Belinda wrote: God, then, is immanent and in no way transcends nature.

(Your reply)
Can you explain how you reached that conclusion?

I can't understand how values can be theological and not also political.

[Harbal]

For the powers in authority, religion has always been a way of keeping the masses in order; a way to control them. For the followers of religion, at least until anything resembling science started to emerge, it was a way of explaining nature and existence, but we hardly need it for that any longer.

A statement that is the very synthesis of ignorance. Religion is (to reduce it) a set of stories that elucidate metaphysical principles. And these we need desperately.

I find your criticism somehow reasuring, just as I would find your approval worrying.

The actual question, the important one, is on what principles will our (or any) authority structure be built from and upon.

Most certainly not religion!

[Harry Baird]

I was responding to your explicit invitation:

Belinda wrote: God, then, is immanent and in no way transcends nature.

(Your reply)
Can you explain how you reached that conclusion?

Yep, I know: I was asking how you had reached the conclusion that God then - i.e., based on the constraints I described, as I understood you to mean by that - is immanent.

I can't understand how values can be theological and not also political.

I wasn't contending either that they could or couldn't, but it's an interesting question.

[popeye1945]

I was responding to your explicit invitation:

Belinda wrote: God, then, is immanent and in no way transcends nature.

(Your reply)
Can you explain how you reached that conclusion?

Yep, I know: I was asking how you had reached the conclusion that God then - i.e., based on the constraints I described, as I understood you to mean by that - is immanent.

I can't understand how values can be theological and not also political.

I wasn't contending either that they could or couldn't, but it's an interesting question.

Values in theory, are not values at all, values are what you do.

[Harry Baird]

Values in theory, are not values at all, values are what you do.

That's an interesting theory.

[Belinda]

Values in theory, are not values at all, values are what you do.

That's an interesting theory.

Yes, but what you believe is what you do. All politicians know this , even dictators, and strive to control people's ideas and beliefs.

Values are relatively good or bad. The values set out by Jesus are relatively good ones because they conduce to cooperative living among peoples. We in our twenty- first century knowledge can apply these universalistic values to cooperatively caring for our native planet and all it contains.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yes, but there's more to it than that: in the case of Christianity, that which you've (we've) been referring to as the Story (with a capital S) is not mere story (in the sense of narrative) but is also and already comprised of metaphysical principles. An example is original sin. This is part of the Story but it is also very much a metaphysical principle: the principle that the consequences of the abrogation by the first created human beings of the divine commandments are inherited by their descendants.

To have said that we seem to rely on Story as a means by which meaning and value are communicated, and to have said that in the Christian Gospels the primary meaning and value conveyed deal with metaphysical principle, is an attempt on my part to hold to what is of essential value while being willing to say 'story is just story' or stories vary. The Story then is not the principal thing. The principal thing is something beyond the story. I can go further as well and say that it is possible that to take this stance (or to use this intellectual tactic) would enable me to examine differing theological-narrative traditions (of India for example or Taoism) and to extract out of them 'metaphysical principles' that can be understood to be separate from the specific story-line and potentially unitive among them.

It would veer away from my general assertion to discuss 'original sin' as a narrative element but it is definitely something that I have thought about. I can provide a way of thinking about the *meaning* referred to while abstracting that meaning from out of the specificity of the (Genesis) narrative. Original sin is said to have originated with the Fall. But what general principle could be gleaned from the general idea of a 'fall' that is not connected to the specificity of the Genesis story? But why would one even attempt this? The answer is one that you and I and nearly all who write here understand: We cannot believe, try as we might, the Genesis story of a forbidden fruit, a woman tempted to eat it, and the resulting exile from a deathless locality into our world of tribulations and death. If once the Story was taken as *history* we can only now take it as allegory. And to do so we must get slippery indeed, and even a little deceitful, if we are to *hold to* the inherent value or relevance of the *meaning* contained in the story. So, what is the essence in the story? and what is conveyed? On one level it seems to be a sort of *memory* that at one time we existed in another sort of realm -- deathless, protected, free of trouble -- but that by some choice we made we lost our protected status and *fell* down into the World that operates around us: a mutable, dangerous, ever-shifting world where flesh & blood creatures prey upon each other in a violent system from out of which there is no escape.

I tried to get Immanuel Can to engage with the idea removed from the specific context but he'd have none of it. Is the entire Universe, indeed the entire Kosmos and all living creatures in it (as indeed there must be other worlds with living, conscious beings, right?) under the same spell as those two people who messed up and fell into the world of mutability and becoming? And if you were to visit one of those worlds, let's say, and to bring a Message of salvation and liberation to those denizens, how would you reveal these Truths to them? Would you refer to the Earth-narrative and the Gospel story? Or would you speak in terms of abstract principles? And if in abstract (metaphysical) principles, what exactly would you say?

The Christian story also expresses ideas, or principles, or potentials, that were not latent in Judaism. Obviously the entire idea, absolutely scandalous, that God became a man. But certainly that idea -- the idea of an avatara that chooses to descend into the World in order to reveal truth -- is quintessentially metaphysical. Connected with it is the notion of *revelation* which is central to Judaism but also to the religions of the East.

I agree with you that the Gospel narrative, and indeed the entire structure of Christian-Catholic religious understanding, is infused with metaphysical ideas. Propositions really, or interpretations about what the world is, what life is, what man is, and essentially how we got her and what we are to do here. And I still maintain my view that, given our incapacity to *believe* the stories, that our last refuge is intellectual metaphysics.

...I don't think that this separation that you make holds very well in the context of Christianity's Story (with a capital S).

First, what I do and what I am doing is, as I have often said, a sort of manoeuvre. A slight-of-hand if you will. It is a tactic through which I can allow myself to see story as story and not feel bound to ridiculous, childish narrative that have become (literally) impossible to believe. We spent months talking about these impossibilities in this thread. We are moderns. We cannot believe what we cannot believe.

I would not say that the manoeuvre that I employ is ideal. And it may actually mean that, at some fundamental level I really & truly could never be a Christian believer, and that my attempt to hold to it is basically dishonest and remedial, but at the very least I am aware that I am employing tactics and tricks to hold something together: a larger metaphysical picture, a 'metaphysical dream' to use Weaver's term.

When I examine the alternative (collapse of metaphysical concepts, and thus the destruction of entire edifices of value & meaning that have been constructed, and indeed upon which our *self* depends, I describe my *desperation* (this is a term I use to refer to our human situation today) as making some sense. But I am not unconscious about what I am doing in facing an assault by destructive forces that are essentially mechanical (machine intelligence).

[Alexis Jacobi]

And this is where my critique of your process comes in. The metaphysical principles that I consider to be truly Christian in the Story are those such as I gave an example of above: original sin (I can supply other examples on request). They are straightforwardly a part of the Story.

You, though, claim to be abstracting metaphysical principles from the Story. This is not straightforward, and results in principles that are too generic and divorced from the Christian context to be considered to be truly Christian. The example you've given - and it is the only example of which I'm aware - is that to which I've referred as your Principle of Incarnation, a principle which - as best as I can tell - kind of vaguely states that divine concepts are manifest and embedded into reality in some undefined(?) way.

To the extent to which you base your claim to value Christian metaphysics on your endorsement of such abstracted principles as this, I think your claim is false: this is not a "Christian" principle; it is far too generic for that. At the very least, you would have to also endorse more specific, straightforwardly Christian principles for your claim to hold.

Yes, they are straightforwardly part of the story. They are part of a core metaphysics. I agree. But they also have a Universal aspect that 1) can be discerned in other religious traditions, and 2) therefore, if they are true, must operate in this and all possible worlds. How would you talk about what these truths are, say, if you were visiting some fish-like beings, immensely intelligent, living in some galaxy and planet-system billions of light-years away? Revelation, original sin, redemption, salvation, ethics and morals -- how would these be described?

This is not straightforward, and results in principles that are too generic and divorced from the Christian context to be considered to be truly Christian.

How can I be blamed for this? Where then did I go wrong? When you try to repair my error, or to discover where I deviated, I assert that you yourself will involve yourself in dishonesty. Why? Because you are in some senses even more of a deviant from 'fixed Christian belief' than I am. I am frankly uncertain how I could encapsulate what I understand your *manoeuvre* to be and to have been. You've described it in Manichaean terms. I see you as coming from a Catholic context but needing to make sets of alterations to the 'core story' to maintain some sort of intelligibility. This is not criticism per se. Just an attempt to accurate describe what goes on in people who can no longer (honestly) believe the official story-line.

All of us who have written on this thread -- taking a sort of oppositional stance to Immanuel Can -- are in the same boat, in one way or another.

But let's consider the implications of dissolution. I have spoken about the intellectual and metaphysical situation in which Iambiguous and Dubious find themselves. These men are emblems and I am not speaking of them personally. They are outcomes of specific processes. And here is how I see then and what has happened (or been done) to them: they see The Story as you and I see the Story, and they can no longer (honestly) believe it if it is maintained as such, as a historical account. But what about the essences? Can these be abstracted and extracted? Can intellectual metaphysical technique (manoeuvre) enable one to hold to something essential, or must the entire structure crumble absolutely? I have said that *the self* begins to disssolve when the metaphysics supporting it are no longer seen as *real*. Is this still unintelligible to you?

Presently, you will notice, people are attempting all sorts of different manoeuvres in order to maintain and hold to those anchors needed to held their worlds together. These are manoeuvres of desperation in my way of seeing things. Nihilism has strange effects! How then, Harry, will the integrity of the individual be maintained in a world where solid meanings, and solid metaphysical structures, are dissolving?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yes, but there is more to metaphysics than just principles. There is also a sense in which "metaphysical reality" refers to a transcendent reality (including the divine) beyond physical reality, and, too, there is a sense in which "a metaphysic" refers to an overarching ontological view, thus...

I have only been focusing on, say, the metaphysics of higher ideas and ideals as they can pertain to our immediate world and reality. I know of no other plane in which to operate. And if such exist I am excluded from it. In this sense I refer to 'principles'. I recognize that metaphysics can refer to 'worlds beyond this world', or angelical realms, and then certainly the realms so relevant to Christian concept: heaven and hell.

But I can only work with what I can honestly work with. I cannot (yet) turn lead into gold.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 7:48 am
When metaphysics is destroyed one walks back into a prison. The prison of a mutable, meaningless world in which one is powerless.

Harry wrote: ...this does not require the "destruction" of metaphysics, but rather the choice of, say, "atheism plus physicalism plus hard determinism" as one's metaphysic rather than, say, "theism plus substance dualism plus libertarian free will".

Those who are determinists and atheists do not understand how they see, and the impositions they make, and the determining decisions they have taken, as being 'metaphysical'. They see them as 'the way things really are' and as descriptions of reality.

But in whatever case, and however you or I describe what they do (the manoeuvre they resort to) I am not convinced that it turns out as being healthy, positive and productive. As I have said in different ways and at different times, that way of seeing leads from freedom back into slavery (or powerlessness) and to the ultra-controlling machine as the outcome. The former human being, guided by principles, is supplanted.

Naturally, and obviously, I am referring to a sort of dystopian demonism but when I do this I am aware of a certain indulgence in paranoid phantasy. How do we characterize what seems to be developing today? Can we see it in some other way than that of the fulfillment of 'prophecy'?

[Harbal]

Those who are determinists and atheists do not understand how they see, and the impositions they make, and the determining decisions they have taken, as being 'metaphysical'. They see them as 'the way things really are' and as descriptions of reality.

If you mean they are able to get straight to the point, without waffling on endlessly about metaphysics, and such like, then yes, I agree.

[Skepdick]

If you mean they are able to get straight to the point, without waffling on endlessly about metaphysics

How exactly is that supposed to work?

You got straingt to point? Congratulations. Who fucking cares? What's the point of your point?

And you are doing metaphysics again.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Those who are determinists and atheists do not understand how they see, and the impositions they make, and the determining decisions they have taken, as being 'metaphysical'. They see them as 'the way things really are' and as descriptions of reality.

If you mean they are able to get straight to the point, without waffling on endlessly about metaphysics, and such like, then yes, I agree.

Point? What point are you referring to Harbal?

When you use the term 'metaphysics' what exactly do you mean? What is metaphysics?