Christianity

[Alexis Jacobi]

The noumenal (I took it from Jung who is, as much a mystic as he is a scientist and philosopher) is, for those with a certain sort of psychic structure, a sense about things. Obviously internal, certainly subjective. One could say that those with that “sense” also “operate” it. By operate it I mean interact with it — as Jung did with his omens and synchronicities. He “lived a magical (mystic if you wish) life”. He operated his knowledge (and it was gnosis: a unique knowing).

Jung comes about because of the so-called death of God. But death of God is really an intellectual/scientific affair, right? Jung and a dozen other such figures are forced by circumstances to turn inward. And frankly that could be said to define the early 20th century: thrown back upon themselves, into themselves, a whole vista opens up.

Here we must be frank: they were thrown back into hellishness: i.e. man’s true domain. That hellscape was the First and Second World Wars. Think Sartre: “L’infer, c’est les autres’. Think of your hell-mates here on PN!

No place else to go, no escaping the terrestrial realm.

So, the noumenal, noumenousness, are likely best understood by referring to those who lived in it, through it.

I cede the shifting ground here to Brother Dubious. He knows all sorts of things about Percival, the hyper-conscious Jambalaya goop that bubbles forth mystic sounds that become symphonies, and strings it together in gloriously knotted prose!

Take it away Dubious (note: he wakes up very late so let him sleep, please!)

Roar! lion …

[Belinda]

The noumenal (I took it from Jung who is, as much a mystic as he is a scientist and philosopher) is, for those with a certain sort of psychic structure, a sense about things. Obviously internal, certainly subjective. One could say that those with that “sense” also “operate” it. By operate it I mean interact with it — as Jung did with his omens and synchronicities. He “lived a magical (mystic if you wish) life”. He operated his knowledge (and it was gnosis: a unique knowing).

Jung comes about because of the so-called death of God. But death of God is really an intellectual/scientific affair, right? Jung and a dozen other such figures are forced by circumstances to turn inward. And frankly that could be said to define the early 20th century: thrown back upon themselves, into themselves, a whole vista opens up.

Here we must be frank: they were thrown back into hellishness: i.e. man’s true domain. That hellscape was the First and Second World Wars. Think Sartre: “L’infer, c’est les autres’. Think of your hell-mates here on PN!

No place else to go, no escaping the terrestrial realm.

So, the noumenal, noumenousness, are likely best understood by referring to those who lived in it, through it.

I cede the shifting ground here to Brother Dubious. He knows all sorts of things about Percival, the hyper-conscious Jambalaya goop that bubbles forth mystic sounds that become symphonies, and strings it together in gloriously knotted prose!

Take it away Dubious (note: he wakes up very late so let him sleep, please!)

Roar! lion …

You too are embedded in your culture. It's a mistake to believe a grown adult is free of culture.

[Alexis Jacobi]

We are ‘of our culture’ on this forum, Belinda. Totally.

[Belinda]

We are ‘of our culture’ on this forum, Belinda. Totally.

I am glad we agree.

[MikeNovack]

Of course we live in culture. Not only us, but our two closest relatives, P. paniscus and P. trogdolytes have culture, so presumably we've had culture going back to our last common ancestor. The philosophers who imagined man once lived as individuals or in just nuclear families dead wrong. We are not as closely related to Orangutans or Gibbons.

For a human to not be living "in culture" abnormal.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I was looking for interesting, insightful, fresh critiques of Christianity that might challenge my faith. And at first, I found a few. But they weren't world-beaters, by any means; a little thought helped me see through them fairly quickly. And then the recycling began...all the same old canards, the same misunderstandings, the same objections kept recycling. I went through the Euthyphro Dilemma, it seems to me, countless times. And there was the "evolution is science" objection, the "how could God allow evil" objection, the "there are many gods" objection, and so on. But interesting, insightful and fresh were soon long gone. And I came to see that maintaining one's unfaith is usually done not by people who are searching for truth and run into some serious problem that destroys their faith, but rather by them having decided rather early on to reject the idea of God, and having found the first simple criticism that appealed to them, having clung to it like a life-raft. You could argue people down to the ground, and they'd rebound to their initial unfaith every time.

Sure, sure, I get all that, and it is all pretty standard, and very superficial stuff. It is like a practiced game whose rules are established, and known, by all participants.

But I have another view of you, and what you are up to, and as psychological insight it is extremely offensive to your self-image. You are, or you are deeply involved in, theological sado-masochism. You are, in your presentation of yourself, God’s favored child. His little Christian saint, down in the mud pile doing Jesus’ work. Stop kidding yourself. You must literally believe that Jesus sees you, takes your side, as you set up the game where those who resist your ugly, overbearing apologetic tactics are finally, and sadistically by you told that they will soon, very soon, suffer eternity in hell.

Everyone knows the Christian apologetic gambit but that is not the real point. The view of God that you have, that you have established as an absolute certainty, flies in the face of what God became: that is, one who understands everything. Who sees into the sheer essence of every human act, all human motivations. It is, therefore, not possible for God to throw souls eternally into the fire of sheer SADISM.

That god became inconceivable. There must be more. Processes that are far more complex and nuanced.

You wield a god-image, a picture, a theatrical invention as if it is real — a personality like yours: a sado-masochist. Secretly, or put another way, non-obviously, it is you who punishes your interlocutors with a punishment that you wield. But you don’t face it. “No, it is Jesus himself who will oversee your eternal castigation because Jesus is a god of justice!”

But even if I or anyone might say or believe there is such a god-who-judges, you have no idea what the criteria of that process might be, will be, or is.

You are not God.

But as I say you pretend to be (literally) God’s mouthpiece and voice.

What you evoke in people, asshole, time and again, is a total rejection of the theatrical shtick. And you never notice that this is the point where you celebrate! “I have proven myself God’s sainted one, and I have proven that my errant interlocutors are anti-Christs destined for eternal damnation”.

So this imago of a God who is both masochist and sadist, and the psychological trap that this theatre establishes, is what must be examined with discerning intelligence.

All of this flies over your head. Your obstinacy makes it impossible for you to hear for all that you have ears.

I'm sorry: I'm just not interested in those games. They're what I'm dismissing with the backward wave of a hand. I just cannot be bothered.

Uh-huh.

[Immanuel Can]

But I have another view of you, and what you are up to...

Yeah, I know. But I'm not much a reader of wild fantasy.

And truly, the instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to all your "psychologizing." It hasn't been close to reality on any point yet.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yes, I knew beforehand that your denial would be total. It is that denial, not only in you specifically, but in very wide swatches of Evangelicalism and in Christendom generslly, that I try to bring to the surface for examination.

And truly, the instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to all your "psychologizing." It hasn't been close to reality on any point yet.

And this is what you say to all people who have ever confronted you for as long as I have participated in this forum.

[attofishpi]

Yes, I knew beforehand that your denial would be total. It is that denial, not only in you specifically, but in very wide swatches of Evangelicalism and in Christendom generslly, that I try to bring to the surface for examination.

And truly, the instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to all your "psychologizing." It hasn't been close to reality on any point yet.

And this is what you say to all people who have ever confronted you for as long as I have participated in this forum.

Listen hear Jacobi, you have done a sages yard, thus are not done.

Now, get back to that coal face of our furnace.

[Alexis Jacobi]

…

Here’s another way to look at it, fool. I am going to work within your black and white imaginary picture where The Good are drawn up into heaven and The Bad are sent into that place of sheer torture: forever! For all eternity.

This is a pure, sadistic image and thought.

But here is the fact. No one, no person with even minimal degrees of awareness and sensitivity, there in eternal beatitude, could ever enjoy that glory knowing that some other was undergoing eternal suffering. All the “saved” would communicate among themselves, and they would decide that such an eventuality was not an act of justice but precisely the opposite.

And if (this is all an imaginary scenario we are examining) the God presiding over “heaven” was such a demon to allow such a thing, the denizens of heaven would have to enlighten him, or even put him into therapy. His sadism would require treatment.

[Alexis Jacobi]

And I've come to see, from that, that Blaise Pascal was right: people don't disbelieve because they have reasons; they find reasons because they disbelieve. The God-hatred comes first, and then the explanations that people cling to come afterward. And just about anything will do, so long as it saves people from having to reopen the question and face God again.

So I'd say my time here has rejigged my view of apologetics. I came imagining that people wanted reasons to believe, and that unbelief might be the product of some serious struggle with some kind of sophisticated problem. I'm now convinced, at least for many here, that that is not the situation at all. There are actually no critiques sufficient to warrant any confidence at all that God does not exist -- at least, not here, not that I've seen, not yet. What apologetics can do is not lead a hard heart to faith, but only clear the ground of superficial debris. That has two salutary possibilities: one, it strengthens and deepens the faith of those who already have a faith in God; and two, is clears the ground of debris for any genuine and open-minded truth-seeker who's being stumbled by the road blocks the skeptics are so desperate to put in the road.

Again, this is all your conceptual set-up. You came with the set-up and you certainly played it out just as it was destined to be played! You get the results that you seek, in fact, and your so-called apologetics has an inner dimension (you are unconscious to it) of creating rejection of all that you say you want people to believe.

Believe what? Disbelieve what? Every man lives within life: the living structure of life is where Experience occurs. That is the god-domain. I agree with you that people reject (for example) your Evangelical Christian picture, but so do I reject Benny Hinn’s productions. Similarly, you set it up that people must reject you and your shtick in order to preserve their sovereignty.

But you do not notice and you do not care about how people recoil from you. Actually you exult when they do. That is “success” for God’s long suffering (masochistic) punisher (sadist).

I do not believe in your description of “god-hatred”. The larger part of the rejection of God is actually rejection of The Asshole. There are so many examples (especially in American Evangelical Christianity) of fanatical nut-jobs so hopped up on their egos and their Holy Crusades that aware and sensitive people have no choice but to reject them. Out with the bathwater goes the baby.

What apologetics can do is not lead a hard heart to faith, but only clear the ground of superficial debris.

In many ways, dearest Immanuel, you present here as such debris. That is, with nut-job Evangelical literalist (Arks, Gardens, Original Mating Pairs: the acute rationalism of nuttery) what requires being cleared away.

What is the nature of this “heart” of yours that is so invested in such irrationalism?

I am not disinclined to think about what you call “god-hatred”. But it is a far more complex issue than you are capable of undertaking. Your comprehension of man’s issues today, and post-Christian man, is sophomoric.

You are in fact a huge block — a deliberate, studied opposition — to levels of conversation about where people are now, and why they are there. You deal predominantly in superficialities.

[Immanuel Can]

…

Here’s another way to look at it, fool.

Not interested.

[attofishpi]

…

Here’s another way to look at it, fool.

Not interested.

Completely and utterly biased, scared of the sacred rendering U to remain a fool for fund_a_mental_ism. I suggest you use what GOD gave you, intelligence. Thus analyse and discern the falsehoods within the bible, WISE UP.

[Immanuel Can]

Here’s another way to look at it, fool.

Not interested.

Completely and utterly biased...

Doubly uninterested.

[Alexis Jacobi]

…

Here’s another way to look at it, fool.

Not interested.

I do not write because I desire to excite your interest.