Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 2:42 pm
Discourse with you is tremendously advantageous to me. You indicate, inadvertently, areas that I need to research more thoroughly.
I do believe that's a compliment. I take it as such.
Thank you. That's very generous of spirit.
And indeed as everyone knows, and as you also state, Catholicism is, truthfully, a blending of many different strains of tradition.
Does everyone know that? I believe you do, and I know I do. I wonder if the majority of Catholics, raised as they are to believe that the tradition of their group recedes all the way back to Peter, would even imagine how much syncretism has gone on. And as for secularists, I think most of them view "Christianity" from the outside, and are baffled by it. They find it convenient to conflate the whole confusing mass into one entity, and dub it "the Christian tradition," or some other such vague collective term, and then make generalizations about what the whole mass allegedly "did," in a given historical period, rather than to face the complexities involved in understanding what Christianity actually is.
I am, in fact, convinced that most of the talk in the press and schools, and even in universities, about "Christianity" is exactly of this type:
overgeneralizing, collective, unnuanced and
indifferent. Needless to say, I find it all also
uncomprehending.
And
erroneous, as well, of course.
Now, according to you...there can be only one reason why the religion spread so quickly.
Point to where I said this. You won't find I did.
In fact, I would say there are
many such reasons, but admittedly, some more important than others.
I would suppose that you would describe that as the essential power of 'saving grace'.
I don't know how to interpret what you mean by the way you use that phrase. I wouldn't have said it that way myself. It's still possible I might agree, but I might not: I can't tell here.
Myself, I often tended to see the power of Christianity as having a great deal to do with the Jewish scriptures
Oh, I agree with that point, anyway.
...the religious performances of Benny Hinn.
Such people have done much to damage the reputation of Christianity. However, Mr. Hinn is not mindful of the judgments pronounced against men like him in Scripture itself. He has put himself in very deadly danger, nor merely for his many frauds but for his constant false teaching. So I will thank you not to conflate Christians with the man you see on the screen. And you will do yourself a service if you do not.
However, there is definitely another level and a far higher level when one considers enthusiasts like CS Lewis, John Henry Newman and GK Chesterton.
These are people who did not hesitate to deal intellectually with the life of faith. They make much more commendable models that does Mr. Hinn. But all human beings are fallible, of course; and not every word they said was right, either. We all have to stay humble about these things when we consider we are trying to speak about God. But yes, they serve as at least approximate examples of the sort of reasonable Christianity I would condone.
...you attempt to bridge two opposed epistemes, the ancient and the modern,
On the reverse, I find the simple bifurcation of history into these two categories insufficiently intellectual. To me, they look like hyperbolical mistakes, the sort of heuristic crutch invented by historians overwhelmed with the actual complexity of the data.
What I'm encouraging, in its place, is a more nuanced understanding of Christianity, one that does not do so much egregious violence to the data.
But let us examine, say, enthusiastic Dionysianism.
Ugh. Are we back to Nietzsche?
So I will share my own impression: there are, beyond doubt, tremendous sources of living water within the Jewish and Christian traditions. This cannot be denied. But neither can it be denied that the pagan religions and pagan pre-Christian philosophy express the same.
This isn't quite right.
You would be right to think, as Lewis said long ago, that it is incorrect to suppose that if a belief system is generally errant, that every single thing within it must also be wrong. That is not the case. And within various world traditions, you will find statements that are true, ideas that are worthwhile, and observations that are, in their own manner, wise. Lewis thinks that this is because all human beings have what he calls, "good dreams" from God, who gives all men signals of the truth, signals to which they attend in varying degrees, and thus may end up represented to varying degrees in various traditions. So far, so good?
At the same time, though, we must be mindful of one simple fact: that every deception is composed of both truth and falsehood. The most poisonous and potent lie is, in fact, the one that is closest to the actual truth in most details, but savagely wrong in the crucial one. What makes that the worst lie is that it will prove the most believable, the most apparently "wise" and "honest" every time we test its particulars; and then the danger is that we will assume, quite wrongly, that the totality is good or benign, when in fact, the totality of the same lie is death.
The principle is simple to illustrate. You've been a teenager, no doubt. And very early on, you probably learned how to "manage" your parents. If you were smart, you realized that to lie to them in any outrageous fashion would get you in trouble. The whole secret of lying was to make your lie plausible, subtle, and hard to detect. And in this, you understood that the truth would serve you well, if you kept as much of it as you possibly could in your explanations to your parents, and varied into a lie only when you absolutely had to. If you did that, then your lie was far more likely to go unquestioned and unchallenged.
So if you were late home, you did not try the excuse, "I was abducted by aliens." You were far too smart for that. Instead, you said, "My friend's car tire was low on air, and we had to stop to fix it." Unless your parents were witty enough to ask you, "Which tire" and to compare your answer with your friend's, they would not catch you.
So when one speaks of pagan religions, one should keep this simple principle in mind:
the more they sound like the truth, the more danger exists in being deceived by their totality, if their totality is a lie. And this problem is compounded by the simple fact that it is often hard to extricate the lies in a tradition from the truth.
The only solution? One must refer to a standard of some sort to test each individual claim, and decide what the relative weight of each claim should be to the whole, and figure out what aspects of a given tradition are worth trusting, and which are in need of review. But what standard to take? That's a key issue.
But when one speaks of 'pagan religions' I'd be more inclined to speak about force of impetus or something irrational, like a longing for participation, a longing to feel oneself 'deeply connected', that is so central to our psychology, our human longing.
I don't have any objection to the saying that pagan religions or any religions are "central our psychology, our human longing." But what are we "longing" for? And why are we "longing" for it? If it's something we don't have now, why do we "long" for something that's impossible? And if we have it already, we would not be "longing" for it?
The question, though, is "Are all human traditions equally true?" They may all articulate human longings, but do they articulate them all truthfully? Are they all "barking up the right tree?" Or are some on the wrong track altogether?
Recent sociology of religion has some definite positions relevant to this. And one of the few things they agree on totally is what's called "incommensurabilty." Incommensurability means that we all now have to recognize, if we're honest at all, that not all world traditions can be reconciled into one thing, such that no tradition "loses" and none "wins" in a given conclusion. The reason for this decision -- made entirely by secular, not theological scholars -- is that detailed investigation of those traditions shows their various claims and precepts to be actually directly contradictory. So they cannot possibly all be true: and to treat them as such turns out to actually do an injury to all of them.
So the myth of universal unity in religions is now thoroughly dead, in all places but in the minds of leftover liberals of a dying age. Secular scholarship, not just religious scholarship, has proceeded beyond the simple-minded conflactions of the Frazers and such of a past day, and even beyond the Jungian architypes. We all agree now that we are dealing with a situation of
incommensurability, not commensurability in traditions.
I gather that in your rather reduced and simplified version of things that Nietzsche is somehow responsible for the Nazi regime
In a way, yes.
Nietzsche is not responsible for positively advocating Nazism itself. That's too simplistic a way to tell the story of what he did. What he did instead was this:
he set out to destroy the only meaningful basis of resistance to things like Nazism. And to the extent that he succeeded in doing that, he certainly raised and fed the dragon. His amoralism could have precipitated different attrocities, and I would argue it did that too. But in the case of the Nazis, they certainly found his terms, like
ubermensch, and his contempt for Jews, women and those others he saw as inferior, or his idea of a superior morality that vacates all conventional morality, as fertile matter for creating their own disasters. They used him, but used him well for their purposes.
We don't know if Nietzsche would have complained about that. Plausible, since he didn't like Nazis, apparently. However, what Nietzsche did was so serviceable to them that we should not take his objections seriously, even if they came. From him and from Heidegger, they derived all the intellectual rationalizations they would ever need. He knocked all the walls flat; and he left nothing that could stand against Nazi attrocities when they arose to make use of him.
That he got what he may not have wanted is his own darn fault. That's what one gets for talking like a madman.
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