Christianity

[Walker]

I remember reading once of a man who had no faith but for some reason needed a woman to have faith in him.

If you saw the movie, you know where that got her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxLZWWRKUI

[attofishpi]

...that in fact Christianity of that period and time did have a panentheistic understanding of divinity's penetration of the manifest world.

All you're saying here, really, is that if we use the wrong definition of "Christian," it's quite possible to make any statement, no matter how absurd, about what "Christians" have believed.

Have you considered that your personal belief in what it is to have a Christian belief is wrong? So far you have proved that you make generous assumptions based on vague wording within the bible, hence your entire concept of what denotes Christianity is extremely skewed.

[Immanuel Can]

Have you considered that your personal belief in what it is to have a Christian belief is wrong?

Carefully. And on an ongoing basis.

On what basis would you say you have reason to think it's wrong?

[attofishpi]

Have you considered that your personal belief in what it is to have a Christian belief is wrong?

Carefully. And on an ongoing basis.

On what basis would you say you have reason to think it's wrong?

For example, your belief that the following opening line of Genesis translates as God created the universe, indeed everything. All one could extend to assume from this line is that God created the Earth, and the stars above (if one is to consider 'heaven' refers to the canopy - as you stated, what is visible), NOT the universe.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

[Immanuel Can]

Have you considered that your personal belief in what it is to have a Christian belief is wrong?

Carefully. And on an ongoing basis.

On what basis would you say you have reason to think it's wrong?

For example, your belief that the following opening line of Genesis translates as God created the universe, indeed everything.

No, I'm clear on that. I know enough about idioms and Biblical exegesis to know for sure I'm right about that one. I'm quite sure you've not looked far enough into it to know, so I'm not going to contest it with you; but you're going to find out I'm right, if ever you do inform yourself.

[attofishpi]

Carefully. And on an ongoing basis.

On what basis would you say you have reason to think it's wrong?

For example, your belief that the following opening line of Genesis translates as God created the universe, indeed everything.

No, I'm clear on that. I know enough about idioms and Biblical exegesis to know for sure I'm right about that one.

Well, it should be easy for you then. Since everything you conceive of regarding Christianity comes from the bible, then please provide examples from it where one can consider God created everything.

[Immanuel Can]

For example, your belief that the following opening line of Genesis translates as God created the universe, indeed everything.

No, I'm clear on that. I know enough about idioms and Biblical exegesis to know for sure I'm right about that one.

Well, it should be easy for you then. Since everything you conceive of regarding Christianity comes from the bible, then please provide examples from it where one can consider God created everything.

As I wrote:
"I'm quite sure you've not looked far enough into it to know, so I'm not going to contest it with you..."

[attofishpi]

No, I'm clear on that. I know enough about idioms and Biblical exegesis to know for sure I'm right about that one.

Well, it should be easy for you then. Since everything you conceive of regarding Christianity comes from the bible, then please provide examples from it where one can consider God created everything.

As I wrote:
"I'm quite sure you've not looked far enough into it to know, so I'm not going to contest it with you..."

Surely you can provide chapter and verses to support your claim that God created the universe?

[Immanuel Can]

Well, it should be easy for you then. Since everything you conceive of regarding Christianity comes from the bible, then please provide examples from it where one can consider God created everything.

As I wrote:
"I'm quite sure you've not looked far enough into it to know, so I'm not going to contest it with you..."

Surely you can provide chapter and verses to support your claim that God created the universe?

I did. You immediately denied it said what it clearly says.

And I know you can do that game forever. It goes, "That's what it says," and "No, it doesn't." And there's no arbiter here to settle that question.

So you'll have to play alone.

[seeds]

The notion of monotheism seems sound and also necessary. But panentheism is not dependent on a pantheistic concept, is it?

They share certain similarities, however, pantheism does not allow for a transcendent, personal (self-aware) Creator of the universe, whereas panentheism does.

One could be panentheistic yet monotheistic it seems to me.

Correct.

I’d have thought that Judaism and Christianity both accommodate panentheistic notions.

I don't know about Judaism, but Christianity most definitely does.

For example: Acts, 17:28 (kjv):

"...For in him we live, and move, and have our being..."

Hence, a clear accommodation of panentheism.

And just for the record, we each carry around - right within our own skulls - an example of a panentheistic entity.

And that would be in the form of a mind that subsumes (contains) the phenomenal features of our thoughts and dreams; all of which is owned and presided over by an "I Am-ness" that transcends (yet can willfully manipulate) the thoughts and dreams.
_______

[attofishpi]

As I wrote:
"I'm quite sure you've not looked far enough into it to know, so I'm not going to contest it with you..."

Surely you can provide chapter and verses to support your claim that God created the universe?

I did. You immediately denied it said what it clearly says.

I never denied it said what it clearly said. Indeed, it is you that is in denial...you are deceiving yourself which is rather sad

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth<---DOES NOT EQUAL--->1 In the beginning God created the universe.

[Belinda]

"As I live, says the Lord, to Me every knee will bow, And every tongue will give praise to God"

Empty promises, because god is empty just like me

I imagined the one pictured in the video as being you (it called to mind some scene out of Repo Man!) If so, to have the visual is oddly helpful. It helps to understand better where you are. You (literally) embody the fact that you have no faith at all of any sort. I'd guess there is nothing to have reverence for. It becomes a recital. And the recital is the affirmation. And the medium is the message.

I remember reading once of a man who had no faith but for some reason needed a woman to have faith in him.

Yes, but when he found her did she love him warts and all? Can the woman he found love a human being, or can she love only a Heavenly ideal?

[uwot]

What IS God?

Well, according to Uwot God is -- I don't know how he does this -- an old boot.

Only that he could be.

(But that is Uwot, something of an oddball as philosophers go).

Not really Gus; it's fairly standard to concede that anything not logically impossible could obtain.

(btw I think uwot might be insane)

Well, it's not logically impossible.

[attofishpi]

(btw I think uwot might be insane)

Well, it's not logically impossible.

Well, one wouldn't know would one, or indeed, would one.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Once again -- it will always come up -- I differ with what you propose here in a practical, real-world sense. I regard Christianity (and I will also include Judaism) not as abstract, idealistic theological creations, but as things that can only be studied in context.

That begs an important question, though.

It doesn't even ask whether or not there's anything real behind the "theological creations." It rules, automatically, that they are some kind of mere fiction, or some sort of construct that implicates things other than those things the theological statements purport to speak about, such as, perhaps, the anthropological utility for collective life of a common code (even if based on nothing).

The crucial question remains: in the theology, is there any truth? And if there is any, is it literal truth, or is it merely something that the literal level completely misunderstands, and always has misunderstood, because it's not literal at all, and that now has to be drawn out by the ingenuity of modern or postmodern analysis?

Does Christ used as a metaphor for natural human goodness mean the same thing as Christ, the Saviour of a lost World?

By way of observation: I have noticed that your arguments, when challenged on a particular, often take this tack: you are, as they say, arguing against a Straw Man. I did not say that there is nothing behind 'the theological creations' and I do not say they are mere fictions, and I definitely would never say that in theological ideas that there is no truth. And I have never employed Christ as a metaphor for natural human goodness.

So it often happens that I bring up an important point, of one sort or another, and you oppose it with a welter of generalities that do not apply to the specificity in what I propose, and the point gets lost. It happens quite often and I interpret it as a 'tactic' of debate.

I tend to see you as operating out of strict but also tendentious theological formulas. As I have said at every juncture I merely notice this and I do not critique nor, what is the word, condemn you for it. I notice it. Your relationship to theology seems academic and to a degree removed from the 'reality' of how people actually live their lives within their faith.

So with that said I will note that all of Christendom deviates from strict theological points or rules. Every Christian person lives within a subjective experience in relation to both Jesus Christ who one assumes is their guide, as well as in their application of the ethical teachings that Christianity defines. There is no Christian practitioner that will ever pull it off exactly like any other Christian practitioner. And all Christians, as all religious, and all persons, live their faith through an elaborate interpretation. And that interpretation is subjective.

So there are dozens and dozens of different, and often conflicting, Christian sects. You are a member of such a sect. By that I mean you have an interpretive structure that defines your Christian system of belief and you also must live, day to day, and make all sorts of choices which, I must assume, are your Christian choices.

And thousands and millions do the same. Christianity is therefore not one thing. It is not a monolith. It has had and it has now (literally) hundreds and thousands of different expressions over the course of history. And all of those practitioners are Christians. Though I get the impression at times that you really & truly believe that they were not, and are not, Christians.

To be Christian definitely seats itself -- obviously! -- in an "anthropological utility for collective life of a common code". It was exactly like that in the earliest days. I refer to Hippolytus and the 'Apostolic traditions' (170 – c. 235 AD). To become a Christian was an extremely difficult and demanding choice. It took a number of years and essentially 'spiritual testing'. And the entire base of it, not a partial base but the entire base, involved living out a radical transformative moral and ethical process. The spiritual commitment was interwoven with the ethical commitment. One did not operate without the other.

That defined Christianity and what it meant to *be a Christian*.

Now, any person who makes the choice to 'become a Christian' (which at one time was understood as 'taking the Christian cure' which is a very rich metaphor and implies 'getting better' and beginning to be cured of a pathological psychic and spiritual condition) does this through his or her subjective self. It will always be pulled off in lesser or greater degrees of success but the word I seek is perfection. And I will place some emphasis, because such is far more likely and there are many more of them, on the imperfect Christian. In fact, I assert, what Christianity is is always an imperfect interpretation within mutable circumstances.

And if there is any [any truth], is it literal truth, or is it merely something that the literal level completely misunderstands, and always has misunderstood, because it's not literal at all, and that now has to be drawn out by the ingenuity of modern or postmodern analysis?

The 'literal level' does the best it can within difficult circumstances that always require adaptation and I suppose concession. It operates in relation to an impossible ideal of perfection -- there is no Christian who can pull it off perfectly and even the saints are flawed -- and yet the best of the best do the best they can. My view is that each historical period must be examined *for what it is* not so much for what it should have been.

Christ, the Saviour of a lost World

As I say, and as I can only say because it is (I suppose I will have to say) logically necessary, there is no single human authority capable of deciding who is 'saved' and who is not saved. However, and this is common among some Evangelicals, the notion of salvation is a managed concept in the sense that they do say, and with a great deal of assumed authority, that they define salvation and also what salvation is not. So they seem to set themselves up as mediators of it. (It must be said of course that the notion of 'managed salvation' definitely operates in the Catholic religious modality.)

But when one returns to the *original sources* (for example Hippolytus whose Apostolic Traditions I just read) what one notices both the attempt to define what 'becoming a Christian is' and also a sort of willed effort to concretize it into a set of defined guidelines. Those 'guidelines' were drawn from many different traditions (for example Stoicism). Thus: here is easily seen that a Christian becomes a Christian within a specific context. That *context* could be described, to bridge to another conversation, as Dasein. And every person-in-context will interpret and apply his and her grasp of what is needed and what is right.

But the larger point is that the general ethical and moral teaching (you call this 'works') is just as relevant, and from a certain perspective more relevant, than some assumed 'state of grace'. Thus Christianity is defined, in my view, by those who genuinely practice it. And the act of genuinely practicing it is, in its way, an expression of grace.

All of the quotes from scriptural sources -- this also must be said -- are interpretive statements made by those persons within their subjective circumstances who make an effort to define what is true and what is right. There are many contradictions within such scriptural interpretations. So I do not believe that the issue is ever, shall I say, absolutely decided. Christianity formed itself with a 'confusion of peoples' in the first and later centuries.

The point? The point is that each person, to the degree they can, must enter into the uncertainty of spiritual life. But I have veered here into personal musing.

My original point is that to understand what Christianity is, one must study what it actually was. My other point is that -- as for example with Germanic Europe (I mean Germanic in the widest sense of a generalities of peoples, regions and tribes) -- it modified the Christianity received and adapted it, as it must always be adapted to, say, the specific circumstances of specific peoples. How could it be otherwise?