Christianity

[Dubious]

you missed the point
which is not surprisin' at all

You haven't told me what the point is yet...which is not surprisin' at all.

I mean look! You're a John Wayne style American ready to shoot the first guy who steps on your lawn; why be sneaky about it?

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand. A small puzzle for you, the guy who'd boxcar the un-jabbed to the camps, from me, the guy who'd shoot you if you tried.

Haven't got a clue, have you! If you did have, you'd be more than happy to point it out! No wonder you and IC get along so well. You both have so much in common character wise.

[Immanuel Can]

You haven't told me what the point is yet...which is not surprisin' at all.

I mean look! You're a John Wayne style American ready to shoot the first guy who steps on your lawn; why be sneaky about it?

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand. A small puzzle for you, the guy who'd boxcar the un-jabbed to the camps, from me, the guy who'd shoot you if you tried.

Haven't got a clue, have you! If you did have, you'd be more than happy to point it out! No wonder you and IC get along so well. You both have so much in common character wise.

Ah, flattery will get you nowhere.

[henry quirk]

Haven't got a clue, have you! If you did have, you'd be more than happy to point it out! No wonder you and IC get along so well. You both have so much in common character wise.

What's that supposed to be? Reverse psychology? Gaslighting?

[Dubious]

Haven't got a clue, have you! If you did have, you'd be more than happy to point it out! No wonder you and IC get along so well. You both have so much in common character wise.

What's that supposed to be? Reverse psychology? Gaslighting?

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yeah. It's again pretty weak. He prompts other forum members to reveal their intent on this forum, and in this respect implies that his own intent is to have a certain conversation - but when I try to have the conversation with him that he appears to claim to want, I get merely the response that I indicated above ("Do your own work").

But here you would have to show a bit of, say, charity and try to understand my position a little better. I have established, if only through one reference, that I place a great deal of emphasis on 'the metaphysical'. The idea that Idea enters our world and transforms the world unlike any other process and certainly those that we think of as natural. The world left to itself -- without the human -- is simply material process and biological process. And as long as humans were just other animals they were just part of the same determined processes. So the emphasis is on intelligence and, to use a Catholic concept, intellectus:

The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.

So again the idea, the notion, or the metaphor if you wish, of something ineffable that 'incarnates' into our selves and into our world. However it is always asserted that what is received 'from above' -- for example this is how the Rishis understood Vedic revelation as literally the incarnation of higher vibrations and a divine 'word' -- demands response. Obviously, this is expressed in the Christian traditions as a decision to change the way one thinks and lives. That is to say that those early Christians understood that becoming a Christian meant, literally, taking curative medicines. Submitting to a supervised process in which one consciously sacrificed the 'lower element' in order to attain and hold onto the 'higher element'. To become a catechumen was a serious affair. The process of 'conversion' took place over years.

I have to mention what I consider another vital element here. It is that all religions (that I am aware of) and all spiritual paths always recognize that in order to perceive what I have called the higher elements (subtle metaphysical perception and realization) recognize that the addiction to sensuousness, the indulgence in mutable sensation, must be sacrificed so that the higher element can be received and cultivated. This idea is crucial to the general way I understand decadence and the falling away from 'our own traditions'. But it is actually (in my mind) an extremely serious affair.

If you are asking me to define what it is about Christianity and our Christian traditions that seem to me to have the most value, one way to talk about that is to talk about what happens, and what is now happening, when the restraining power of Christian ethics and the guiding/restraining power of the appreciation of the metaphysical principles, even the understanding of them, is abandoned. I say 'abandoned' which implies a voluntary decision. But the other element here is when these are deliberately undermined. And how does that happen? It happens first on the intellectual plane. My view is that when the 'higher metaphysics' are abandoned that people fall down into brutality. If there is no longer a strong sense that pure sensuousness needs to be avoided, and if the notion that the higher things in life are only achieved when the lower element is sacrificed so that the higher element can be encountered, I suggest that an average person -- an Everyman if you wish -- falls into a brutish state.

The higher dimensions of man are dimensions gained through just that sacrifice I refer to. If revelation is received as caritas what is received has to be honored and valued, protected and cultvated. Here I would introduce the notion of paideia. Paideia is, essentially, spiritual education (I mean seen in its best light). It could certainly be understood if it is seen in its original context: a Platonic education. You have to be trained up in the fundamentals -- the first principles -- and you have to give your assent to them, to believe in them, and when this foundation is established the individual in which it is established carries it forward.

I won't go into details but I assert that because this 'foundation' is being undermined, the individual is undermined, and when the individual is undermined in relation to guiding and restraining higher principles, the individual falls down, literally, into brutal modes of life. This is how I understand 'perdition'. Now, the question is What is recovery? How does the individual reconstitute himself? I suggest it is through one core means only: the rediscovery, the reestablishment, of those first principles that make the foundation I refer to.

I feel that I can say with a good deal of certainty that Christianity -- which is really a wide, broad and inclusive term in my own view -- had been the structure of the foundation and in this sense the 'anchor' through which individuals moored themselves. When the foundation is undermined the structure falls. When the moorings are lost the individual goes adrift.

So to say 'do your own work' means that I believe it is the moral individual's responsibility to become aware of these things. Processes of degeneracy. It does require a perspective 'outside and above' of life in its mutable sense and it does require a sense of a definition of the immutable and those higher dimension I refer to.

[henry quirk]

Haven't got a clue, have you! If you did have, you'd be more than happy to point it out! No wonder you and IC get along so well. You both have so much in common character wise.

What's that supposed to be? Reverse psychology? Gaslighting?

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand.

Does Polly want a cracker?

Well, here I am...

[Alexis Jacobi]

"The feeling of the contrast between what ought to be and what is, is one of the deepest springs of faith in the unseen."

That is a sentence from Mysticism by Inge that got me thinking about another crucial element in Christianity which I'd say needs to be seen and better understood. And that is that the idea of a 'transforming spirit' (the third person of the Trinity) acts in the present and in history in creative, and progressive, ways. If the Earth is understood as 'the devil's domain' and if something understood as coming from above and outside incarnates:

The Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen His glory.

[Note that I take this as a universal idea and broaden it to a metaphysical principle operating in all possible worlds.]

There is no way around the understanding that the Spirit is one of transformation. So it turns back to the idea communicated in Isaiah of 'the word' that is set loose and does not 'return' until its work is done. The idea is far-reaching.

Now here is a curious thing. In the Eastern religions (say on the Indian subcontinent) religion's purpose is not, or not in the same way, to transform in a progressive sense. So I would say that (again as far as I am aware when Christianity is compared to other religions) Christianity has and will always have a progressive element. I mean just think about the idea of being 'born from above' and all that this can imply if it is separated from a controlling, doctrinaire interpretation of what it must mean.

So here I am suggesting another of these 'metaphysical' factors which seem to me the most important.

It seems to me that when intellect, consciousness and awareness are not grounded in 'higher principles' and when these things are not understood and appreciated (valued, cultivated) as real things (though they have a metaphysical origin), that a whole other set of things insidiously penetrates the individual. They come from all angles. If the individual does not have adequate foundations and a strong sense of self then a whole range of powers begins to have determining influence. Commercial influence, the consumer man, the consumer culture, the entertainment culture, the culture of unending stimulation and in this sense of manipulation (always from someone else's benefit) will dominate. Propaganda and rhetoric that is not grounded in first principles (you who have read Richard Weaver will understand) gains the power to trick the individual, to overpower grounded intellect.

Where does this tend? Is it a myth, a paranoia or a developing reality (?) that it tends in the direction of a powerful, tyrannical administrative State where technological means, and perhaps chemical-technological means, are employed as mechanisms of supreme control. Here I would mention the work of James Lindsay who explains and reveals how Marxist ideas have functioned and are functioning in conjunction with these technological control mechanisms. To confront these idea-constructs and to begin to *see* our world (what it is becoming) requires a renovation of the sort of awareness I refer to as 'spiritual'.

If one has no lever or axis within ideas, and if one is effectively no longer capable of reasoned, ordered thought, and if one is seduced by the 'brutality' I refer to, one cannot any longer act as a sovereign, creative individual. In this sense the Spirit is thwarted.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You seem to have a unique view in the sense that you seem to see the historical Christ as merely a sort of symbol of "the Word become flesh" rather than as the actual Word become flesh. The interesting questions that come up for me at that point are who the historical Christ actually was (is?) - his spiritual nature, power, authority, and relevance - and what the actual Word "looks like" - if not the historical Jesus Christ - when it Incarnates. But that's just me with my kind of literal and dogged mind. They may not be of concern to anybody else, and I doubt that they are of concern to you, or, at least, not the first.

Well, no matter what was the actual case, at this moment you (and me and all of us) will only and can only approach the issue -- whatever the issue is -- within and through our imaginations. That is, what we think about, what we see. I would not deny that something, somehow, got set in motion and the Apostles carried it forward. But I'd have to say that they also interpreted, adapted, modified and transformed the essential message into a religious and political movement.

To try to extract out of, or to locate, something quintessential

quintessence
Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. the fifth essence, of which the heavenly bodies were thought to be made, distinguished from the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth; hence, the most pure essence or most perfect embodiment of a thing or being.

Is a way to try to get to the heart of the matter.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Does Polly want a cracker?

[promethean75]

Polly ain't got shit on Pebble.

"I axed you before and I--ain't--work. Actual I fucked your logic up!" - Pebble

https://youtu.be/EYpwOucI-f4

[Dubious]

What's that supposed to be? Reverse psychology? Gaslighting?

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand.

Does Polly want a cracker?

Well, here I am...

Brilliant response but...

as far as your wit is concerned I'd remove the W from wit and add SH to the left of IT!

You don't have enough brains left to be pathetic.

[henry quirk]

I think I'll let the minor mystery stand.

Does Polly want a cracker?

Well, here I am...

Brilliant response but...

as far as your wit is concerned I'd remove the W from wit and add SH to the left of IT!

You don't have enough brains left to be pathetic.

I love you too, you lil nazi.

[Alexis Jacobi]

It was not easy … but I found the vid that ties the two themes together!

Voilà!

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein
und das heißt: Erika!

On the heath there blooms a flower
called Erika!

Me siento tan orgulloso!

[henry quirk]

It was not easy … but I found the vid that ties the two themes together!

Yep, there's dub and all the other beer virus fearin' goose-steppers.

Only thing missin' is their lil masks.

[Dubious]

Does Polly want a cracker?

Well, here I am...

Brilliant response but...

as far as your wit is concerned I'd remove the W from wit and add SH to the left of IT!

You don't have enough brains left to be pathetic.

I love you too, you lil nazi.

...and here I thought you didn't like Nazis. What a mistake-a to make-a!

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