Christianity

[uwot]

I asked uwot if he knew the difference between knowledge and understanding. Of course he avoided it.

My apologies Nick_A; if you can point to the parts of my answer that went over your head, I will happily dumb them down for you.

[Belinda]

When Jesus or anyone speaks in parables one takes the literal meaning of parable for what it is namely a story that conveys a message external to the main text. People, children and adults love stories! Something which can be meaningful, though somewhat abstract are best rendered in a manner which makes the message clear giving it a poetic ambiance. Such stories well told do that whether in the bible or elsewhere. Importantly as well, such stories are easier to remember.

Interestingly, when Jesus is given parables to speak within the Gospel narratives it is not the parable that has the most importance but that 'secret meanings' that are for 'those who hear' and which are to be kept from those who 'won't hear' that is the real message. The reader is made to believe that he gets the message that no one else does.

From Isaiah: "He said, “Go and tell this people: “’Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’

There is a worthy poem by Robert Frost that touches on this, and subverts it in a way. Directive.

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Your support for mystification is no use to man or beast.

Simply, neither of the meanings of the Parables is a mystery.Each parable is a) an explicit narrative and b) a generalisation from the narrative. There is no grandiose or esoteric mystery.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I asked uwot if he knew the difference between knowledge and understanding. Of course he avoided it. Now I ask you. Would you agree that knowledge consists of all our associations. However understanding is defined by what we do. We know many facts but if we absorbed them we wouldn't do the opposite.

It seems to me that what you are getting at is a further elaboration of, and the desire to receive some sort of affirmation (?) that some people here grasp what mysticism entails. Mysticism, either in the Christian or the pagan (or semi-Christian) tradition, best describes my own situation and relationship. So I would certainly say that 'understanding' is a very different animal that assembly of facts (which is what I take your term here 'knowledge' to mean). I definitely agree that mind and intellect can be 'illuminated'. The best people, the most realized people, have always seemed to me to have spirits and minds illuminated by something ineffable.

So as you might guess I tend to place stock in Plato's declaration about a 'leaping spark' that 'self-nourishes'. That is a mystical insight. But I am certain that mystical insight does not depend on some slavish relationship to Christianity nor, I must say, to Jesus of Nazareth. I take 'Logos' and 'the Word' in a different sense.

The best minds -- the best (Christian) theological minds -- I have encountered are of the Oxford Movement. I am just now reading Christian Mysticism by WR Inge:

Inge was a strong proponent of the spiritual type of religion—"that autonomous faith which rests upon experience and individual inspiration"—as opposed to one of coercive authority. He was therefore outspoken in his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. His thought, on the whole, represents a blending of traditional Christian theology with elements of Platonic philosophy. He shares this in common with one of his favourite writers, Benjamin Whichcote, the first of the Cambridge Platonists.

My own orientation (within Christianity and the pagan-Christian traditions) has been influenced by this school of Christian thought.

[Belinda]

I asked uwot if he knew the difference between knowledge and understanding. Of course he avoided it. Now I ask you. Would you agree that knowledge consists of all our associations. However understanding is defined by what we do. We know many facts but if we absorbed them we wouldn't do the opposite.

It seems to me that what you are getting at is a further elaboration of, and the desire to receive some sort of affirmation (?) that some people here grasp what mysticism entails. Mysticism, either in the Christian or the pagan (or semi-Christian) tradition, best describes my own situation and relationship. So I would certainly say that 'understanding' is a very different animal that assembly of facts (which is what I take your term here 'knowledge' to mean). I definitely agree that mind and intellect can be 'illuminated'. The best people, the most realized people, have always seemed to me to have spirits and minds illuminated by something ineffable.

So as you might guess I tend to place stock in Plato's declaration about a 'leaping spark' that 'self-nourishes'. That is a mystical insight. But I am certain that mystical insight does not depend on some slavish relationship to Christianity nor, I must say, to Jesus of Nazareth. I take 'Logos' and 'the Word' in a different sense.

The best minds -- the best (Christian) theological minds -- I have encountered are of the Oxford Movement. I am just now reading Christian Mysticism by WR Inge:

Inge was a strong proponent of the spiritual type of religion—"that autonomous faith which rests upon experience and individual inspiration"—as opposed to one of coercive authority. He was therefore outspoken in his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. His thought, on the whole, represents a blending of traditional Christian theology with elements of Platonic philosophy. He shares this in common with one of his favourite writers, Benjamin Whichcote, the first of the Cambridge Platonists.

My own orientation (within Christianity and the pagan-Christian traditions) has been influenced by this school of Christian thought.

Are you perhaps confusing independent thought and mysticism?

There have been a few admirable mystics who are identifiable by their ability to communicate their wisdom.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Your support for mystification is no use to man or beast.

Is there anything in-between?

Simply, neither of the meanings of the Parables is a mystery. Each parable is a) an explicit narrative and b) a generalisation from the narrative. There is no grandiose or esoteric mystery.

Have you encountered the work of Frank Kermode? (The Genesis of Secrecy?) He talks a great deal about *inside knowledge* and *outside knowledge* and certainly about parables (designed to be dense) and interpretation generally.

From a Kirkus Review review:

Contra Susan Sontag and a whole generation of structuralist literary critics, Kermode might have titled these essays—the Norton Lectures on Poetry, 1977-78—as "For Interpretation." Because all narratives share a "radiant obscurity," as we read we honor this mystery by helplessly trying to figure it out. Hermeneutics is usually the province of biblical scholarship, so Kermode resolves to start right there. Laminated with "secret texts," "midrashim," and corollaries to the Old Testament, the Gospels are a perfect ur-text: agents can be seen to become characters in the course of successive interpretation. Mark, the earliest written gospel, is a harsh story, purposely elusive, almost taunting. Matthew becomes more vivid, but also lops off edges that can make the reader/believer very edgy. Luke and John add verisimilitude—novelistic touches, necessary alignments. The synoptic Gospels, therefore, are created, Kermode argues, like any other text: they receive and consolidate sketchy mysteries, respond to the historical realities of their time (and prospective audience), and in their structures behave like any fiction: the how of the telling shapes the narrative fully as much as what's being told. Not to interpret, Kermode's argument goes, is to write off this hermetic, layered dignity of texts, to fix them to an ideology, to deny their mystery, treating them either as neutral architecture or journalistic propaganda. (There are modern references also—to Pynchon, Green, Kafka.) Though Kermode slips into jargon now and then, the thesis is well wrought, the scholarship varied and well-distributed, and the examples clear and deft.

[Dubious]

Knock yourself out

How many times I heard that expression from you I can't count. You've already done that to yourself by using every kind of deceit, subterfuge and devious maneuver to uphold all your uncompromising views of an ancient text based on a world-view long defunct. Having knocked yourself out, you'd no-longer feel the effect of that.

You made it clear; everyone who disagrees with you is just plain wrong, logic and evidence not withstanding, single-handedly dismissed as ultra vires upon any infringement of biblical content. On this site you are the supreme example of the Appeal to Authority fallacy, in your mind, the bible having subsumed that authority, one never requiring justification or examination which inevitably requires a host of fallacies to follow in its defense in which you've been so very prolific.

As I said many times, if religion were as intransigent now as it once was, you'd be burning heretics left and right. All that's required for that to happen is not agree with your kind of orthodoxy. In addition, any pursuit of knowledge would be subsumed and judged under biblical dogma for heretical content in which even a silly Adam & Eve story preempts the eons required for evolution to LET THERE BE.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Are you perhaps confusing independent thought and mysticism?

There have been a few admirable mystics who are identifiable by their ability to communicate their wisdom.

I do not think so. Essentially, I am reviewing my own experiences (over the course of my life) which I could only classify as mystical. My concern, at this point, is to make sense of my own unconventional perspectives and my need to 'honor the traditions of Europe' (such as Catholicism and Catholic mysticism) while not negating the importance of my own experiences (which I have been inclined to do).

My *encounter*, as it were, with Immanuel put (so to speak) the fear of God into me. To confront a man so possessed by fanaticism, and to internalize how negative this is, has brought about a revolution. [As I said I will soon begin my World Mission .. but lack proper transportation. Does $66,000,000.00 for a new Gulfstram G550 seem seem like high dollar? Perhaps the spirit will prompt me to buy used? Still I am sure God wants me to have it.]

I do not think the essence of mystical experience can be 'communicated' as you say. It can be alluded to though. The nature of a mystical experience is that it is extremely personal.

The turn to mysticism often comes about when conventional structures have become too rigid and stifling. I am interested in the period of time, in Europe, when mystical experience was sought because the ossified structures curtailed deeper realization.

[Immanuel Can]

I said the truth: that the Bible does not explicitly tell us. To carry on your hypothesis, how do you know God didn't create multiple person, and Cain married one of them?

Oh, so, you're open to that hypothesis?

No, but you are. So I'm trying to figure out what you actually believe.

But you need better sources. The ones you're culling right now are severely dated and completely unoriginal.

I'm not drawing from sources, at least not consciously. It's possible of course that I've encountered the points I've raised previously and forgotten.
[/quote]
Yeah, that could be, I suppose.

It's just that the "Cain" question is highly conventional. It's been thrown around for a long, long time. For example,
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-char ... ains-wife/
https://www.gotquestions.org/Cains-wife.html
https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don ... rt_717.cfm
There are dozens and dozens more.

And though it's been answered plenty, it seems the skeptical set is never listening anyway, because they keep asking it, when they could just look up the answer. Same with Jonah, Noah, the Red Sea...

But I think the point is still simply this: I've never met a person who kept or lost his faith based on the identity of Cain's wife. Never. The whole point of anybody bringing it up is always the same -- simply to argue that if the answer to the Cain's wife problem is unsatisfactory to the speaker, or (as the case is) the Bible simply doesn't tell us how that worked, that they don't need to pay any further attention to the other 65 books in the Bible, or to Christ Himself, because of the Cain issue. As absurd as that is, that's how it's usually played.

Now, you'd think that any honest inquirer, even at the most basic level, would get this: that Christianity's core is Jesus Christ. That fact is even analytically obvious from the name "Christ-ian" itself. And a person who is serious about understanding Christianity or the Scripture begins his search with Christ -- for the very simple reason that Christ is literally the make-or-break issue of it all. After that, Cain's wife is a footnote, obviously.

So my recommendation is this: if you are, as you say you are, an "honest" searcher, go to the Source. Go to Christ. Start there. And let Cain worry about his own wife.

Like me, I'm certain he's not troubled about it now.

[Immanuel Can]

Knock yourself out

How many times... BE.

You done yet?

Not impressed by the bluster.

[Harry Baird]

I said the truth: that the Bible does not explicitly tell us. To carry on your hypothesis, how do you know God didn't create multiple person, and Cain married one of them?

Oh, so, you're open to that hypothesis?

No, but you are. So I'm trying to figure out what you actually believe.

But what I believe is irrelevant to the point in contention: whether the (your) literal interpretation of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve as the first humans from whom all other humans descended is plausible. Asking how I know that God didn't create multiple persons then is beside the point: it can't save the plausibility of the literalist account because the literalist account rules it out from the start!

It's just that the "Cain" question is highly conventional. It's been thrown around for a long, long time. For example,
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-char ... ains-wife/
https://www.gotquestions.org/Cains-wife.html
https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don ... rt_717.cfm
There are dozens and dozens more.

Apologists such as yourself and the writers of those articles of course have their answer, but whether it's a plausible answer is another matter. Personally, I think that the idea that the human species began in universal incest is a ridiculous one.

But I think the point is still simply this: I've never met a person who kept or lost his faith based on the identity of Cain's wife. Never. The whole point of anybody bringing it up is always the same -- simply to argue that if the answer to the Cain's wife problem is unsatisfactory to the speaker, or (as the case is) the Bible simply doesn't tell us how that worked, that they don't need to pay any further attention to the other 65 books in the Bible, or to Christ Himself, because of the Cain issue. As absurd as that is, that's how it's usually played.

It would be absurd if that was the only issue a person was taking into account in assessing the plausibility of a literal reading of the Bible, but, in fact, there are dozens, and probably hundreds, of others, and the account taken as a whole has huge holes in it.

[Dubious]

Knock yourself out

How many times... BE.

You done yet?

Not impressed by the bluster.

It seems there aren't many left impressed by you either!

I wonder why that could be!

[Age]

HOW is it 'logically' possible that human beings can live without air or oxygen?

Oh. So, you don't understand logical possibility. It's a formal concept - do some research on it if you need to.

Your INABILITY to just SAY and EXPLAIN, HOW, it is, SUPPOSEDLY, 'logically, possible for human beings to live without air or oxygen here, SHOWS and REVEALS MORE where you are, EXACTLY. That is; you are ACTUALLY NOT even ABLE TO explain HOW.

But there is absolutely NOTHING in the WHOLE Universe that could convince you of absolutely ANY thing, contrary to what you are currently BELIEVING is absolutely true.

That's quite a sweeping statement, but, yes, I did indicate in my initial response to you that I don't know how I could be convinced that some putative One Truth really is The One Truth,

What is this One Truth, that you speak of here, which is considered or reputed to be the One Truth, EXACTLY?

and that I only hold out hope for a revelation that contains within itself its own validation - whatever that might be.

That may well be just a Self-revelation. Or, in other words, thee ONE and True Self just revealing Its OWN Self, to 'you', human beings, for example.

And that way, and by the way, then 'you', human beings, will finally HAVE, and thus KNOW the, proper AND correct, answer to the question, 'Who am 'I', EXACTLY?'

And, literally, just KNOW thy Self.

Which would, literally, be thee Self revealing Its Self, and so also be itself, Its OWN (Self) validation.

You tried to convince me of one possible means of validation: that everybody agrees on what the One Truth is. I've explained why that's not a satisfactory means of validation to me (because in a meaningful modal sense, it's possible that everybody is wrong).

LOL

You are OBVIOUSLY STILL NOT reading, NOR thinking this through, FULLY. AND, OBVIOUSLY, do NOT want to.

I NEVER began to even try to convince you of absolutely ANY thing AT ALL here.

Anyhow, NOT in ANY WAY if some thing could be Wrong, then EVERY one is going to agree that it is right.

Thanks for proposing your means of validation. It's not rigorous enough for me. Maybe it is for you or others. Cheers.

If, and when, EVERY one is agreeing on some thing being true, right, or correct, then, unfortunately for you, and contrary to what you BELIEVE, this will actually absolutely rigorous enough for you.


See, you can NOT even DISAGREE with this, let alone even try and REFUTE it.

[Harry Baird]

HOW is it 'logically' possible that human beings can live without air or oxygen?

Oh. So, you don't understand logical possibility. It's a formal concept - do some research on it if you need to.

Your INABILITY to just SAY and EXPLAIN, HOW, it is, SUPPOSEDLY, 'logically, possible for human beings to live without air or oxygen here, SHOWS and REVEALS MORE where you are, EXACTLY. That is; you are ACTUALLY NOT even ABLE TO explain HOW.

If you actually understood what logical possibility means, then you wouldn't need an explanation. Do me a favour and look it up.

I did indicate in my initial response to you that I don't know how I could be convinced that some putative One Truth really is The One Truth,

What is this One Truth, that you speak of here, which is considered or reputed to be the One Truth, EXACTLY?

I'm not proposing any particular candidate, just referring in general to potential candidates.

If, and when, EVERY one is agreeing on some thing being true, right, or correct, then, unfortunately for you, and contrary to what you BELIEVE, this will actually absolutely rigorous enough for you.

So, if everybody agrees that the Earth is the centre of the universe, then it's true. What nonsense.

See, you can NOT even DISAGREE with this, let alone even try and REFUTE it.

More nonsense.

[Immanuel Can]

Oh, so, you're open to that hypothesis?

No, but you are. So I'm trying to figure out what you actually believe.

But what I believe is irrelevant to the point in contention: whether the (your) literal interpretation of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve as the first humans from whom all other humans descended is plausible.

Well, an original mating pair is the easiest option to explain, from all perspectives.

And it accords with Genesis as well as Evolutionism.

It's just that the "Cain" question is highly conventional. It's been thrown around for a long, long time. For example,
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-char ... ains-wife/
https://www.gotquestions.org/Cains-wife.html
https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don ... rt_717.cfm
There are dozens and dozens more.

Apologists such as yourself and the writers of those articles of course have their answer, but whether it's a plausible answer is another matter.

Well, that's a judgment you'll have to make. But to think that Cain's wife is some sort of important, deal-breaking issue, whatever answer you choose to accept, is clearly ridiculous. It is, at most, a minor matter of so little consequence that the Scriptures themselves don't even bother to tell us the explicit answer.

Literally nothing rests on it.

But I think the point is still simply this: I've never met a person who kept or lost his faith based on the identity of Cain's wife. Never. The whole point of anybody bringing it up is always the same -- simply to argue that if the answer to the Cain's wife problem is unsatisfactory to the speaker, or (as the case is) the Bible simply doesn't tell us how that worked, that they don't need to pay any further attention to the other 65 books in the Bible, or to Christ Himself, because of the Cain issue. As absurd as that is, that's how it's usually played.

It would be absurd if that was the only issue a person was taking into account in assessing the plausibility of a literal reading of the Bible, but, in fact, there are dozens, and probably hundreds, of others, and the account taken as a whole has huge holes in it.

Well, no: there are actually very few issues that remain to be resolved, at least among those that make any difference. But of course, skeptics can niggle, no matter what anybody says to them, and even when they should know better. So show me one that matters, instead of penny-ante stuff like Cain's alleged wife.

In fact, I've even pointed out to you how you could best do it: prove Christ never was who He said He was. That would put an end to every Christian on the planet.

Take your best shot.

[Harry Baird]

Age, some further thoughts:

HOW is it 'logically' possible that human beings can live without air or oxygen?

Oh. So, you don't understand logical possibility. It's a formal concept - do some research on it if you need to.

Your INABILITY to just SAY and EXPLAIN, HOW, it is, SUPPOSEDLY, 'logically, possible for human beings to live without air or oxygen here, SHOWS and REVEALS MORE where you are, EXACTLY. That is; you are ACTUALLY NOT even ABLE TO explain HOW.

I can verify personally, for myself, that, at present, I am unable to live without air or oxygen. Nobody else can personally verify that I am unable to live without air or oxygen though - for all they know, I am some sage who has learnt how to avoid it - and nobody can personally verify that any other person is equally unable to live without air or oxygen. Therefore, it is irrelevant whether or not everybody agrees, because they don't truly know. Thus, you have failed to prove your point with this example.

I think what you're missing is that I'm interested in incontrovertible proof. "Everybody agrees" is not incontrovertible proof.