Christianity

[Belinda]

A more interesting alternative for you would be to google the story and then comment on my interpretation. Nobody is interested in whether or not you knew the story.

Regarding Greek mythology v The Bible, plausibility is a minor consideration for unbelievers and believers. Some implausible stories are of great moral and psychological moment.

I looked at a version of the story. I obviously see the similarity between Pandora and Eve; blaming the woman for the woes of mankind seems to be a universal strategy in religion and mythology, but I really don't know what lesson, or moral, I am supposed to take from the story. Aesop is more my level; I usually get the point with him.

As a free man you are not "supposed to " take anything in particular from this or any story !You are not even "supposed to " have opinions.
Maybe your reading activities are for entertainment only. I don't know, or maybe you get some new ideas from your reading.

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking.

[henry quirk]

"Yes, pretty hard to speak of many years of interaction with the divine and a sage without being labelled 'self-aggrandising' (among a plethora of other things)"

I wasn't talkin' about you. You, I find highly idiosyncratic (and a lil bit wacky) but not particularly self-aggrandizing.

[attofishpi]

"Yes, pretty hard to speak of many years of interaction with the divine and a sage without being labelled 'self-aggrandising' (among a plethora of other things)"

I wasn't talkin' about you. You, I find highly idiosyncratic (and a lil bit wacky) but not particularly self-aggrandizing.

Well thanks Henry - I was walking my dog when I read your post on my phone and it took me some time to work out whether it was me or more of a generalisation you were making...I got it wrong.

Wacky ain't the atto of it!

[Harbal]

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking.

Do you learn something from it of significant value, and that would never have occurred to you otherwise?

[Alexis Jacobi]

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking.

Do you learn something from it of significant value, and that would never have occurred to you otherwise?

What if she or someone had never acquired language? Like with feral children?

When you say “otherwise”, what do you mean? Belinda, like all of us, was raised in an extremely complex social environment where language and everything associated with it provided the essential human platform. To be “literate” is to have been stepped in language and idea content. That is what being human is!

Your mindless implication, Harbal, seems to be that without access to language and everything that prefigures it, that someone would simply come up with thoughts, ideas, connections, and all the rest of what we do.

I am fascinated by you because you will and indeed you work to become an idiot. It literally seems to be your desired object.

I do not think I have ever come across a more retarded person than you, Harbal (in the strictest sense of the word). You are intellectually deficient and intellectually incurious— or perhaps malnourished in the word?

And you are illustrative of those “dumbing down” processes we can read about. If that process continues in you, in people, in culture, eventually the human being might more resemble a simian.

How proud you must feel!

How did this come about?!? To quote from an Allen Ginsberg poem:

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

What is, where is, the restorative?

[Harry Baird]

Is there an on-going shortage of energy drinks in Australia again?

** Pop **
** Schwwwwizzz **

Just got a shipment in. Shouldn't be too much longer.

[Harbal]

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking.

Do you learn something from it of significant value, and that would never have occurred to you otherwise?

What if she or someone had never acquired language? Like with feral children?

When you say “otherwise”, what do you mean? Belinda, like all of us, was raised in an extremely complex social environment where language and everything associated with it provided the essential human platform. To be “literate” is to have been stepped in language and idea content. That is what being human is!

Your mindless implication, Harbal, seems to be that without access to language and everything that prefigures it, that someone would simply come up with thoughts, ideas, connections, and all the rest of what we do.

I am fascinated by you because you will and indeed you work to become an idiot. It literally seems to be your desired object.

I do not think I have ever come across a more retarded person than you, Harbal (in the strictest sense of the word). You are intellectually deficient and intellectually incurious— or perhaps malnourished in the word?

And you are illustrative of those “dumbing down” processes we can read about. If that process continues in you, in people, in culture, eventually the human being might more resemble a simian.

How proud you must feel!

How did this come about?!? To quote from an Allen Ginsberg poem:

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

What is, where is, the restorative?

Am I still not meant to take this personally, Alexis?

[Harry Baird]

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?

The wrong that I've blamed you for is fairly trivial: that you claim(ed?) to value Christianity even though you (had) abstract(ed) beyond recognition whatever metaphysical principles you take(/took) from it, while otherwise explicitly rejecting pretty much every significant element of its Story. It does though suggest some interesting (to me) further questions:

If a Story is ridiculous and literally false, then does it merit being mined (abstracted) for literal truth? Why, on vital metaphysical questions, would one trust Storytellers whose Story one doesn't straightforwardly value? More generally, is it wise to base oneself intellectually and metaphysically in a belief system supported by such a Story?

Maybe the Story is not as important as the collective intellectual and metaphysical work that has gone on in its name and under its aegis, but if that work is primarily aimed at buttressing the false and ridiculous (Story), then is this work itself, and those who have undertaken it, particularly objective, trustworthy, reliable, and relevant?

If "the fall" is a sound metaphor for our entry into this existential realm, and if Richard Weaver is right that the West has been disintegrating since the abandonment of transcendentals in the late 14th century, then is it possible that after "the" fall, we fell further, such that the 14th century was not the apex of our metaphysical knowledge and understanding, but simply a local maximum attained after falling further, and that the true apex lies deeper back in history?

If, too, the Tower of Babel is a sound metaphor for the splintering of our apex metaphysical knowledge and understanding in deep history, then is our best hope of reconstructing that knowledge and understanding to comb through the world's traditions, especially the older ones, so as to synthesise that knowledge, making this idea of yours an eminently sensible one?:

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.

Is, then, the idea that Christianity - however false and ridiculous its Story - is our heritage both as individuals and as a culture ("the West"), and thus the sensible place in which to ground ourselves, one that sacrifices the integrity of the search for metaphysical knowledge and understanding on the altar of convenience and familiarity?

In any case, is the idea that the West is losing its belief in metaphysical reality a misconception or at least overstatement of the reality? Are many of the West's losses from institutional religion gains to the "spiritual but not religious", "spiritual seeker", or similar groups, whose members retain an interest in metaphysical or at least spiritual reality?

Is the appearance that atheism, materialism, and "skepticism" are rising precipitously to some extent an illusion based on their fashionability in academia and amongst the intellectual elite, and on the evangelism of a vocal online minority, whereas, amongst the general public, their foothold is smaller and more tenuous? Has the popularity of that confluence of beliefs itself reached its apex, and started to decline?

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.

My manoeuvre has not started with basing myself in Christianity. It has instead been (and still is) to try to work out what's going on using inference and intuition given my personal experiences, the reports of others, and the reports of empirical and philosophical research which I come across or seek out. I've found through this process that there are meaningful aspects of Christianity that seem likely to me to be true, but that's not because I assumed or tried to prove as much from the start.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Am I still not meant to take this personally, Alexis?

That is exactly right, Harbal. It is not personal. If you can get to the point where you see and understand this, you’ll have achieved something noteworthy.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Harry: The Power of Question!

[Harbal]

Am I still not meant to take this personally, Alexis?

That is exactly right, Harbal. It is not personal.

What a relief.

[Harry Baird]

Harry: The Power of Question!

Yep. It also works when inverted: The Question of Power! Or as an imperative: Question the Power!

[Belinda]

As for Genesis, I find that nobody seems to know what I am talking about when I try to explain what I learn from it. I am not complaining just remarking.

Do you learn something from it of significant value, and that would never have occurred to you otherwise?

Yes, and No, I got the idea from a favourite novel.

[Harry Baird]

Oops, I forgot to post this:

Yes, but what you believe is what you do.

I get what you guys are pointing at, but I prefer to frame it slightly differently: sometimes, people are hypocrites.

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.

Again, we are in strong agreement on this, albeit that we're focussing here on the sociopolitical aspect of Jesus's values, and largely ignoring the spiritual-religious aspect, which, I think, you largely reject anyway, given that you don't seem to believe in a personal God, who is the focus of Jesus's spiritual-religious values.

[Belinda]

Oops, I forgot to post this:

Yes, but what you believe is what you do.

I get what you guys are pointing at, but I prefer to frame it slightly differently: sometimes, people are hypocrites.

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.

Again, we are in strong agreement on this, albeit that we're focussing here on the sociopolitical aspect of Jesus's values, and largely ignoring the spiritual-religious aspect, which, I think, you largely reject anyway, given that you don't seem to believe in a personal God, who is the focus of Jesus's spiritual-religious values.

I see no difference between political values and spiritual-religious aspect. Values is the main reason religions exist and all other reasons such as social control , and expressing feelings, are subsidiary reasons for religions to exist.