Philosophy Now Forum

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 9:17 pm

Dubious wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 7:41 pm Nowhere describes your ability to answer a perfectly logical question.

Still having grammar problems?

Not anywhere near your cognitive ones! But, in spite of that, please point me to the error!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:20 pm

Dubious wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 7:54 am The historical facts are that prior to the Turin event he wrote brilliant works now regarded as among the most influential in recent history.

Oh yes...he's definitely influential. And I've said that he is.

Historical influence can be good or bad. Those that Nietzsche has influenced have fared very badly.

You must really enjoy rowing against the current. It seems, in that group, which is only partial, even theologians acknowledged their debt to Nietzsche without believing they were treasonous to god or the miraculous.

In effect, another lie you convinced yourself of. Can a normal debate ever be possible with you without the prejudice, the lies and hideous distortions you consistently insert??

For such as thou, that would be a miracle!

From Britannica...

Nietzsche’s influence

Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and that is certainly true in his case. The history of philosophy, theology, and psychology since the early 20th century is unintelligible without him. The German philosophers Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger laboured in his debt, for example, as did the French philosophers Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Existentialism and deconstruction, a movement in philosophy and literary criticism, owe much to him. The theologians Paul Tillich and Lev Shestov acknowledged their debt, as did the “God is dead” theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin Buber, Judaism’s greatest 20th-century thinker, counted Nietzsche among the three most-important influences in his life and translated the first part of Zarathustra into Polish. The psychologists Alfred Adler and Carl Jung were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that he had a more-penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live. Novelists like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, and John Gardner were inspired by him and wrote about him, as did the poets and playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, and William Butler Yeats, among others. Nietzsche’s great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German language’s most-brilliant prose writers.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:18 pmYou make statements about Christianity

...only according to its history which offers no consolation to types like you.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:18 pm...and about God

...ditto

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:18 pm...and, of course, about me personally

Well, since you aren't dead yet, I don't owe you any hypocritical eulogies...according to which only good people die and never the assholes, which in turn explains why there are so many assholes around.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:18 pmIt's a perfectly fair conclusion, therefore; and I'll warrant that if I check further, I'll find it's exactly as I have said.

I encourage you to do so! Upon examination, I hope you will be forgiving enough to enlighten me on all my faux pas.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 6:53 pm

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 5:51 pm ...

Sorry, DAM. I"m just not interested in a conversation-to-nowhere.

Apology accepted,so now we'll just never speak to each other again, because it's got to be on your watch, always on your terms, so fine by me. I'll instead throw appropriate quotes at your comments. I'll do what you do, because every thing you and I say will always spring forth from the human mouth piece which is the only source available....there is no other source of knowledge....and this is the nondual truth.


Reality is nondual IC... until you accept that with all your heart and mind, everything you say will be history, just dead irrelevant facts TURNED TO FICTION. Imagine mistaking the past for the living present that has not even been written yet. And that's exactly what you are doing. The only knowledge there is to know IC...is of the past, that has already happened, gone and died.

Think about it. The entire universe is functioning perfectly well, alive and kicking and going about it's business..all without a story...it's only the mind that spins the tale.

The (unwritten truth) of (eternal presence) is that which appears to give the illusion of self-autonomy in the here and now ....NOWHERE.... and that is what you cannot accept, so be it.

After all...

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 12:16 am
For such as thou, that would be a miracle!

What I'd like to see... is if IC knows what is meant by this Nietzsche quote ....



Notice you'll never see IC's interpretation put to paper.. what the quote means to him...he'll maybe have an idea that he keeps only to himself, but you'll never see him reveal it's meaning so that everyone can see his inner thoughts. Rather, he prefers to hide his most inner thoughts, and I think I know why, it's because if he even dared to reveal his true inner thoughts, he wouldn't really like himself that much.

And so it is obviously clear to everyone that if IC was to reveal his most true inner thoughts to paper...For such as thou, that would be a miracle!

I'd love to find out what IC thinks that quote means.


.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:50 pmThere is another thing too but it is difficult to talk about -- problematic I would say because there are so many possibilities of misunderstanding. Frankly, it is what might be termed the opposite of 'reason'. Opening up to intuitive, inner 'processes' (for want of a better word) where the rational needs, to some degree, to be suspended. I think this would amount to a very difficult operation for many because it involves a degree of surrender of one's own power in the face of something -- higher intelligence, and even 'the divine' if one is still capable of using that word -- which seems to require what you refer to as 'leap of faith'

I don't believe reason would have any objection to that view and may, in fact, without resistance, integrate itself to it - especially so if reason were allowed to express itself beyond the purely rational...its "hope in mystery" aspirations being by no means irrational. Why is it always assumed that the inner and outer must be opposite, that there is no "gravitational force" binding them into wider orbits of operation!! Admittedly, being a thorough-going realist doesn't preclude in any way the psyche from acknowledging and necessitating its own imperatives.

The most potent feelings are the nameless ones in which any circumscription by labels limits the flow. Within that experience music - which few would call irrational - is a more powerful expression than words in annulling all boundaries which hinder the mysteries of inner expansion.

...and that is my two and a half cents worth.

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 8:08 amWhy is it always assumed that the inner and outer must be opposite

It's a conceptual mind trick.

The truth is, there is no inner or outer. No higher or lower. No here as opposed to there.

The default position of all positions is always HERE smack centre of all other positions - HERE never moves, it's always perfectly still. Only the mind moves, in conceptual relation to the perfect stillness of infinite presence awareness.

Energy flows where attention goes...always HERE.

.

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 8:05 am

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 12:16 am
For such as thou, that would be a miracle!

What I'd like to see... is if IC knows what is meant by this Nietzsche quote ....



Notice you'll never see IC's interpretation put to paper.. what the quote means to him...he'll maybe have an idea that he keeps only to himself, but you'll never see him reveal it's meaning so that everyone can see his inner thoughts. Rather, he prefers to hide his most inner thoughts, and I think I know why, it's because if he even dared to reveal his true inner thoughts, he wouldn't really like himself that much.

And so it is obviously clear to everyone that if IC was to reveal his most true inner thoughts to paper...For such as thou, that would be a miracle!

I'd love to find out what IC thinks that quote means.


.

Not me! It's just a pejorative, petty, pathetic trope theists use to get even with Nietzsche for having prematurely given their god his last rites. But what's the big deal! Everything that lives will die including Jesus who died 2000 years ago. As things worked out, Jesus was dead before Nietzsche was...a historical fact completely without meaning beyond its chronology!

Open the bible to any page and there you will find his thoughts expressed. A literalist doesn't need to interpret; only accept as written.

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 9:17 am
Not me! It's just a pejorative, petty, pathetic trope theists use to get even with Nietzsche for having prematurely given their god his last rites. But what's the big deal! Everything that lives will die including Jesus who died 2000 years ago. As things worked out, Jesus was dead before Nietzsche was...a historical fact completely without meaning beyond its chronology!

Open the bible to any page and there you will find his thoughts expressed. A literalist doesn't need to interpret; only accept as written.

The truth is not for the faint of heart.

IC...is not so much miffed that man killed god or that god killed man.

It's the brutal nature of reality that IC cannot handle ......''Life is one long battle; we have to fight at every step''

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbSjeBTtjS8

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:44 pmWell, let's put a summary to this, because I think we've hit a point of difference we can't cross.

First, some points of agreement. You and I are both of conservative concern, it seems. And we read some of the same books, and we think quite a number of things in common. In particular, we're both concerned about things like the manipulating of people and of political processes through media, and with the rise of large power-groups interested in mendacious manipulation of nations...among other things. Neither of us is keen or optimistic about the major social trends of our day. We both see them as precipitating civilization and people in bad directions; and both of us are concerned to figure out where the best site of resistance to that trend is.

On all that, we seem to agree. Fair enough? (You may even think of other things, I'm sure.)

One key are where we differ is on the level at which our diagnoses take place.

Reading this post I find that the best way I can respond to your summary of similarities and differences would be to offer a description of how I wound up in the position that I have and the orientation around which I carry out my (so-called) researches.

I approach an *answer* or response to what you have written through an attempt to become aware of the causal factors that produced *me* but also *us* (the cultural situation we are in; what we now face). In a sense I am engaging in personalized ad hominem when you think about it. I am aware that I have ideas, perceptions, views and visions, but I am also aware that it is my *context* that has produced *me* in this sense.

"The man" as such must be examined. I do not see this as unfair nor as un-useful.

First, I am a product of California radicalism. And California radicalism has surprising roots. This is why I mentioned the Burned-Over District and that time frame. There is a strange line of connection between those events and social processes in the East and the rise of radical forms of spirituality in the West. Harold Bloom's book The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992) influenced the way I see American religiosity. (Obviously, I always list sources because it seems important to demonstrate how one's line of thinking has been influenced). Principally, what I want to point out is that I do not think enough of us spend time researching the causal chains that have produced us in the sense of produced our outlook, our Weltanschauung to use the pretentious term.

(I am not only speaking about the spiritual movements famous in California though. I don't want to deviate too much here into all the forms or social and political radicalism that arose there over a century).

I could create a list of those elements that make up the California radicalism I grew up in and under. But the point is that when it happened that I took the decision to undertake that examination, influenced mostly by Richard Weaver who traced what he defined as a destructive causation back to the 14th century:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

Is this not glaringly clear in what it implies? If through those paths of ideation, those rightly grounded or those wrongly grounded, we (our culture) has 'abandoned belief in the existence of transcendentals', and if this shift can be defined carefully & fairly as 'destructive' (always in a certain degree but never absolutely), then it is imperative to recover the conceptual pathway to define and defend those transcendentals.

So, in my case, and I also think that *my case* is similar to many others because there is a larger movement afoot that resists those shifts which Weaver defines as "the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals", I can at least suggest a motive for a turning away from various forms of radicalism. What this effort leads to is that of turning against a predominant current. To the degree that one *sees* is the degree that one *opposes*. One then begins to define an ideological position that operates against the main, and powerful, current that largely defines Our Present. But there are various ways to do this. One is instinctually and intuitively. The other is perhaps somewhat more conscious but still *ensconced* within some tendentious perspective or bias. And then there is another level or operative means which is, perhaps one could say, more strictly intellectual.

So when we talk about *manipulation* and media-systems we are, if you will permit the reference, dealing on Weaver's notion of The Great Stereopticon.

Weaver gives the name "The Great Stereopticon" to what he perceives as a rising, emergent construct which serves to manipulate the beliefs and emotions of the populace, and ultimately to separate them from their humanity via "the commodification of truth".

A stereopticon is "a slide projector or "magic lantern", which has two lenses, usually one above the other. These devices date back to the mid 19th century, and were a popular form of entertainment and education before the advent of moving pictures." The implications and the extensions of the implications are wide and varied. And here I will refer not just to a so-called Conservative view of this Device (and process) but include the views of Chomsky, Lippmann, Bernays, not to mention those of the Frankfurt School who were, but through a different orientation, concerned with a similar thing.

So as it turned out, at a certain point and for certain reasons, and recognizing that I had been and was in many respects a product of the cultural radicalism I mentioned, I chose as an act of the will, as a conscious decision, to turn against that current. What I found is that this is not done in a day, nor a month, nor a year. The first glimmer of realization may come to one relatively clearly but the *working out* of the reorientation takes, literally, years & years.

So with this said let me ask you -- and certainly those who read here -- does it or does it not make sense to a) turn the lens of examination around to *see* our own selves and what has made us what we are, and b) can this sort of expressed realization (I call this *location*) help us as we examine what *Christianity* is but also what it means to *tear down the edifice* which is the container of 'transcendental concepts'?

I often ask, in so many words: Are we termites or are we builders?

Is the approach I am taking in respect to your question a fair one?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:44 pmI look at Christianity from the inside; you tend to speak about it from an external, more detached position, as a thing to be analyzed, not as a spiritual challenge to be responded to.

My response to this particular statement will be I think quite different than what you suppose. But it is not easy to communicate and it involves 'subtle thought'.

First, I am certainly aware that you are *inside Christianity* but that it is a specific form of Christianity. So in this sense it is not *Christianity itself* but an interpretive, and really intensely tendentious Christian branch. What I will note, because I think it is true, is that you define yourself as a True Christian. You have defined a fundamentalist position and you declare that it is the *right one to have* and indeed the *only one*. Others, you criticize (or critique) and also dismiss. But it is more than just that.

I am more interested in what in Christian influence is invisible. So let's say there is a Christianesque culture (I have used this term as a substitute for a Kierkegaardian Christendom and I accept the term and aslo what it means: partialness). What I notice is that the influence of a Christian attitude often shows up where it should not.

I could say outlook or relationship or also way of being. I do have ways to refer to and present that can illustrate what I mean. I realize they are anecdotal in the real sense of the term. I will refer to an example -- it is an interview with a former vet of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through which I noticed an 'attitude of awareness' and, as I said, an 'invisible presence' of what I define as quintessentially Christian-influenced, and yet the man himself, according to his own definition, has problems with religion (and I assume with a defined and stated ideological Christian position).

You say that I "speak about it from an external, more detached position, as a thing to be analyzed, not as a spiritual challenge to be responded to" and, certainly, you are right in some very real senses. As I have said I have been influenced by Christopher Dawson's The Historic Reality of Christian Culture. You have made no comment about this and, as well, I doubt that you have read (or even wish to read) someone like Dawson. So you stick to your peculiar contextual viewpoint though it certainly can be challenged and countered.

It is not possible that you draw a distinct line between, say, a practicing and self-defining Christian such as yourself, and those who operate under an aegis or influence who do not define themselves in that way but who yet respond in various ways to 'the Christian impulse'. Now, many months back I did include a specific reference which, I say, illustrates the point I am making. Chet Atkins wrote the song Get Together but he was not, in any conventional way, a practicing Christian. (I researched for a long while within the zone of *popular song* as I was trying to get clear about social and ideological shifts in American culture and Get Together stood out as highly exemplary.)

(This does not mean that I see it as expressing a pure Christian perspective or some specific Christian ideological platform. I have to include a bloody disclaimer so I will not be misunderstood! My assertion is that it definitely expresses a Christian spirit and one that I would say, as Bloom says, that is very specifically American. And if that is so one can also recognize similar impulses that went toward the construction of Pentacostalism which, as you well know, has had a global influence. I suggest taking a wider view of Christian influence. Call that seeing from the outside if you wish to).

Here is an interview on a very interesting YouTube channel where many of the class that, according to you, Jesus would have hung around with and influenced, an interview of a Vet who, as a result of many different influences, got pretty lost. In the course of time, and also for different reasons, things shifted inside of him and, as you will see if you watch the whole thing, he expresses his process of growth.

You talk about 'being born from above' and such things but your reference is often within strict bounds that you define (and seem to want to control). I am interested in, and moved by, something more free-ranging.

When I watched it I realized I was seeing 'invisible influence' of what we could define as Spirit (which moves accordingt to its own impulses and like a wind that bloweth where it listeth. I think this is a large part of what I am referring to.

(I realize it is a 45 minute video but I recommend it highly if you or others here have the time. It speaks also very topically about the Antiwar sentiment and an antiestablishment impulse developing in the United States and the rise of a reactionary movement to the sort of machinations I have outlined in other places).

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 12:16 am The German philosophers Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger laboured in his debt, for example, as did the French philosophers Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault...

These were, indeed, men who truly followed Nietzsche. And if you know their biographies, and what they actually did, you know they support the claim. As for his influence on Existentialism, he had zero possibility of influencing Kierkegaard, and no reason to be proud of influencing the later ones. That he fed Constructionism is true...and also tragic for us.

However, some of the characters you mention were only "influenced" in the sense of "reacting against" Nietzsche's ideas. What you need is somebody who followed Nietzche into amoralism, and lived as Nietzsche exhorted people to do. You know, like the Nazis did.

Foucault might fit the bill...why don't you look at his biography?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 1:49 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:44 pmWell, let's put a summary to this, because I think we've hit a point of difference we can't cross.

First, some points of agreement....Fair enough? (You may even think of other things, I'm sure.)

One key are where we differ is on the level at which our diagnoses take place.

Reading this post I find that the best way I can respond to your summary of similarities and differences would be to offer a description of how I wound up in the position that I have and the orientation around which I carry out my (so-called) researches...

I've clipped our post in quoting it above merely for the sake of brevity. I hope you'll understand that I mean to comment on the whole, okay?

Thanks for your very interesting and informative summary of the origins of your thought. I can see that you haven't stayed entirely with the "California radicalism" thing, but in your own thinking, have moved somewhat beyond it. Your fondness for Weaver and Bork, for example, would not square with what people conventionally mean when they speak of what "California radicals" tend to believe. And that's to your credit, actually, because a lot of California radicalism is quite hare brained, as I'm sure you know. And you don't strike me as a leftover hippie lunatic or member of the hard Left.

At the same time, your description also reinforces the key difference between our approaches that I identified in my summary: namely, that you undertake analysis at the cultural or macro level, and I at the spiritual and existential, or personal level. Each of us sees our respective levels of analysis as not only the most revealing and informative, but also as the determinative one. I believe that no progress is possible without reconstruction of the individual man (or woman), and you seem to hold that social reconstruction will somehow issue in any progress of the individual man, assuming you suppose such is necessary at all.

In short, you're attempting cultural analysis, and I, spiritual analysis. Two conservative viewpoints (essentially), but different styles of analysis.

You are somewhat drawn to a form of cultural determinism, in that culture "determines" the outcome for the individual; I am not convinced of that viewpoint, but rather would say that human freedom, as exercised by the unpredetermined choices of the individual, is the important force to engage in any attempt to improve things.

Have I pegged your position aright? Is that not the difference you perceive as well?

So with this said let me ask you -- and certainly those who read here -- does it or does it not make sense to a) turn the lens of examination around to *see* our own selves and what has made us what we are,

To this, I would have to respond, "Of course." But your next point makes me pause and retract my enthusiasm.

and b) can this sort of expressed realization (I call this *location*) help us as we examine what *Christianity* is but also what it means to *tear down the edifice* which is the container of 'transcendental concepts'?

This strikes me as problematic two ways: one is that it has no substantive definition of "Christianity," -- but you know that's what I say. The second problem is that it priorities the cultural as determinative of the individual. And I don't think that's the right level of analysis at which to get at things.

I often ask, in so many words: Are we termites or are we builders?

If we are termites, then we are culturally determined. Nobody's less of an individual and more predetermined by his society than a termite worker. Termites can "build" too...but only termite mounds, as predetermined by the nature of being a termite. This, too, is mere determinism.

But what if man is neither? What if he is a creative, individual person, a volitional agent? Then the analogy with termites and builders disappears completely. The one thing no termite or termite-builder has is freedom of volition.

Is the approach I am taking in respect to your question a fair one?

Yes, it's fine -- not quite as direct and point-by-point as I might have expected, but illuminating nonetheless.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 2:41 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 2:44 pmI look at Christianity from the inside; you tend to speak about it from an external, more detached position, as a thing to be analyzed, not as a spiritual challenge to be responded to.

My response to this particular statement will be I think quite different than what you suppose. But it is not easy to communicate and it involves 'subtle thought'.

First, I am certainly aware that you are *inside Christianity* but that it is a specific form of Christianity. So in this sense it is not *Christianity itself* ...

To say that is only to restate the same definitional problem we were facing before. You think of "Christianity" in terms of a large, amorphous, cultural movement premised on little more than self-identification as a member of "Christendom," it seems. That fits with secular historicism, but secular historicism has always had a devil of a time (to coin a phrase) trying to locate this thing called "Christianity" in the first place, and has settled for delusory generalizations instead of facing the harder business of sorting out religious confessions to see who is really what they say they are.

This is understandable. Secularism does not presuppose that theology is really about anything...it refers to no real facts or agencies, but merely involves disputes among people who believe in unicorns....or so secular analysis presumes. And this contempt for theological truth accounts for the fact that secular historians spend so little time thinking about the differences, and don't regard them as in any way telling of anything important.

But that's their error, one that may be understandable (given their own beliefs), but continually cripples their ability to make reasonable or coherent statements about what "Christians" did. They just don't really know, and can't really say, and don't think they need to go further in their analysis than to bounce off the surface of the issue, using the "self-identification" criterion as good enough.

But from the inside perspective, these things matter profoundly. And every theologian or serious lay thinker within Christianity believes that they do. So no thinking Christian would ever drop the theological for the convenience of generalizing toward some secular thesis. And they would know instantly what follies any such move was guaranteed to issue in.

...but an interpretive, and really intensely tendentious Christian branch.

You will find that there is not a single person who is a serious thinker in any religious tradition at all who is not "tendentious," as you put it. To fail to contend for what one believes is quite simply not to really believe in it at all.

...a Kierkegaardian Christendom...

Funny that you mention him. I love Kierkegaard. But Kierkegaard passionately believed the same thing I'm telling you.

Kierkegaard hated the Lutheran establishment, and excoriated it as dead, legalistic, cultural and ultimately vaccuous pseudo-Christianity. He argued instead for an intensely personal, existential, relational kind of Christianity, one that definitely required personal beliefs and commitment. For him, the term "Christendom" would elicit nothing but scorn. He hated all such fake, merely-cultural manifestations of superficial religiosity, and would never have included them as genuinely "Christian" at all.

There could be no more graphic illustration of the difference, and that it makes a difference, than of the common tendency of secular historicism to refer to things like the Crusades, the Inquistion or the Wars of Religion as "Christian." For it must be quite obvious to anybody who has even a rudimentary knowledge of just the teachings of Christ Himself, that in no way would these things be permissible by Him. Nothing genuinely "Christian" is in them. Indeed, Christ spoke so explicitly and forceful about things like "loving enemies," "turning the other cheek," and "suffering for righteousness's sake," that there is not a sensible reading of the gospels at all that will allow the Inquisitions or Crusades to be called "Christian." Nevertheless, that is what secular historians have preferred to do.

I would not want to think, though, that you were unaware of their error, and thus were fooled by their mistake.

You say that I "speak about it from an external, more detached position, as a thing to be analyzed, not as a spiritual challenge to be responded to" and, certainly, you are right in some very real senses. As I have said I have been influenced by Christopher Dawson's The Historic Reality of Christian Culture. You have made no comment about this

Not explicitly, perhaps. But I've certainly rejected his titular presuppositions, and made that very clear.

It is not possible that you draw a distinct line between, say, a practicing and self-defining Christian such as yourself,

Not for a dismissive secularist historian, perhaps. But very little is "possible" to them, in terms of understanding Christianity.

For any Christian, it's not only "possible" but necessary.

Get Together stood out as highly exemplary.

I know it.

I don't mistake it for articulating a Christian viewpoint. It might as easily be sung by a Unitarian, secular Humanist or Marxist. No one would know the difference.

You talk about 'being born from above' and such things but your reference is often within strict bounds that you define

I don't "define" them at all. I merely point out what the Bible says about that. You can as easily read it for yourself...which I certainly encourage you to do. Don't take my word for it...check me out.

Again, it seems right to me to say that you're pitching for a more cultural, vague and creedless view of "Christianity," more what people call "Christendom" than for any view that includes faith, truth, belief, choice or personhood. But I think you'll find that there is no shortcut here; either one understands Christianity with specific reference to what Christ actually says, or one understands it not at all.

Plato critiques those who are "wise" through their study of society. From Book Six of the Republic:

I might compare them to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him--he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes...

A society is a great beast. It is a creature of reaction reacting to both earthly and cosmic influences. Can an elephant or a rhinoceros be a Christian? The essence of Christianity is the devolution of being beginning with a conscious source. Can the great beast be Christian? Of course not. Its life requires freedom from a conscious influence.

Yet there are some within the great beast beginning to awaken to conscious influences and strive to become human, These are the ones who introduce the value of obligations. As Simone Weil wrote"

Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.

That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.

Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men.

These rare people are able to introduce the good into society. But society is still the beast and dominated by the need for power within Plato's cave. Of course the good must be rejected since it threatens the life of the beast.

Jesus offered the way out and freedom from cave life. That is Christianity. But man as an atom of the beast lacks the quality of consciousness, attention, and will to practice experiencing what society needs to awaken, to transcend the cave. Man needs the help of Grace, but it is denied in favor of the attractions the world offers.

Matthew 16:26

What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

To understand this a person needs to appreciate the purpose of Christianity and its potential for our being. Such understanding is very rare.