Philosophy Now Forum

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 2:48 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 2:26 pm

I am a 'friend' of Christianity

Man, when you bury the lede, you really bury that sucker.

And you mean this as: "fail to emphasize the most important part of a story or account."

Do you mean that if I say I am a friend I am not at all acting as a friend in truth?

I'm sayin' you've -- finally -- admitted you're not a Christian.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 2:22 pm

As it is an unplanned, spontaneous creation, I think readers should be free to take from it that which they like. What resonates with me in my own creation is *the real possibility that behind Reality is a dark, horrifying secret which only a few know, and guard closely from being more widely known. It is a possibility that has come up in my own anomalous psychospiritual experiences.

*Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

Ye blind idiot, ye noxious Azathoth shal arise from ye middle of ye World where all is Chaos & Destruction where He hath bubbl'd and blasphem'd at Ye centre which is of All Things, which is to say Infinity....

By the way, your play or drama:

This is an important area that needs to be explored.

You (Henry) who have read Castaneda are aware of the idea of 'the shift below' (which implies a shift above although Castaneda does not develop this idea much). The shift below is a perspectival shift where, then, the world is seen through an infernal lens (so to speak). If I remember correctly, in Castaneda's fiction, he brought out this idea in his encounters with La Catalina. The shift below was, obviously, a sexual metaphor. In the vision seen through the shift below the earth is seen as far more dark, far more hellish, than we 'normally' see it.

So let us employ the idea of "beings captured within a dark, determined, cruel world and ruled over by a demonic power". There, right there, you have the essence of Christian belief. The world is a place where Satan has power and authority. But what is that world? I mean, what world is described? What other world can it be but the material and biological world where being must kill and consume other beings in order to live? Where for other beings to live my being must cease? or be recycled in an ecological system where someone (in fact many) did say and still do say along with Kurtz "The horror, the horror!"

One of the core concepts of Christianity is of an avatar outside of the realm of the cruel, determined processes, who enters the world with a mission and a message for the 'ultimate cure'. Ah those accursèd flutes with their discordancies!

Some other harmony has to appear and resolve them . . .

Reminds me of one stanza in Wallace Steven's Sunday Morning:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:02 pm I'm sayin' you've -- finally -- admitted you're not a Christian.

I guess you could say that. But there is a more interesting and paradoxical statement:

A Christian is not a Christian.

Some other harmony has to appear and resolve them . . .

I reckon that's us (or, mebbe, each of us).

A Christian is not a Christian.

I think I get it but you should explain anyway.

Harry

I can go along with all of that to an extent. I get the whole "slave to sin" idea, leading to the need for help from above. I'd have to see how you resolved the contradictions in the standard Story before becoming more enthusiastic though. For example, in my view, the possibility of eternal torment in hell is incompatible with the standard Christian version of God, being all-good (such that He wouldn't want that fate for anybody), all-knowing (such that He would know if such a place existed and anybody was in it), and all-powerful (such that He could prevent anybody from going to such a place, and eliminate such a place from existence). I can see two ways to resolve this incompatibility: reject the idea of hell, or modify the standard conception of God. How about you? Which option do you take?

ETA: And, by the way, what do you see as the nature of Christ's sacrifice? Who was it to?

You must remember that I don't regard the devolution of Christianity into man made Christendom as a legitimate expression of Christianity. For example:

In Simone Weil's life, religion played a dominant role in the years following the mystical epiphanies she experienced in 1938. Long before, however, her wish to partake in the suffering of the distressed led her to a life-style of extreme austerity. It was under these circumstances that, in 1937, Simone Weil became increasingly attracted to Christianity, a religion she considered to be in its true essence a religion of slaves, and therefore in utter contradiction to the actual form it had taken in history. On this assumption, Simone Weil objected against Catholicism -- the denomination she knew best and respected the most --[21] that it had ended by perverting itself for the sake of power. The historical "double stain" on the Church that Simone Weil denounces originates in the fact that Israel imposed on Christian believers the acceptance of the Old Testament and its almighty God, and that Rome chose Christianity as the religion of the Empire.[22] Despite its universal redemptive mission, the Church became from its very beginnings heir of Jewish nationalism and of the totalitarianism inherent in Imperial Rome. As the spiritual locus in which both traditions of power displaced the religion of powerless slaves, Christianity became the actual negation of its own foundational leitmotiv: the self-annulment of divine omnipotence by the godly act of kenosis or self-abasement.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The religion recognizing the human condition leading to slavery devolves for political reasons into a religion of power. God is beyond the limits of time and space. The universe or the body of God, exists within God. It is a necessity much like our body is necessary for you. It is maintained by two essential flows of energy or of being: involution or away from our source and evolution which is the return. Buddhism knows this great cycle as a kalpa.

Time in Buddhist cosmology is measured in kalpas. Originally, a kalpa was considered to be 4,320,000 years. Buddhist scholars expanded it with a metaphor: rub a one-mile cube of rock once every hundred years with a piece of silk, until the rock is worn away -- and a kalpa still hasn’t passed! During a kalpa, the world comes into being, exists, is destroyed, and a period of emptiness ensues. Then it all starts again.

For certain cosmic reasons the being of Man ended up in what we know of as the human condition. Without going into details, Jesus death was able to consciously experience all the horrors our species is capable of intensifying the division between Jesus lower and higher natures. This invited the third force of the Holy Spirit to reconcile it leading to the resurrection from a higher perspective and Jesus return home opening a path for those capable of following..

When we see how quickly we lose conscious awareness if someone looks at us the wrong way it is obvious that Jesus sacrifice is impossible for us. But is it impossible for everyone? Are there some Christians in the world?

Nick wrote:

For certain cosmic reasons the being of Man ended up in what we know of as the human condition. Without going into details, Jesus death was able to consciously experience all the horrors our species is capable of intensifying the division between Jesus lower and higher natures. This invited the third force of the Holy Spirit to reconcile it leading to the resurrection from a higher perspective and Jesus return home opening a path for those capable of following..

When we see how quickly we lose conscious awareness if someone looks at us the wrong way it is obvious that Jesus sacrifice is impossible for us. But is it impossible for everyone? Are there some Christians in the world?

Yes, but to be in the world and to be like Christ is transient. You can't pin down a good action like you might do a dead butterfly . In the world all good passes away and that is also true of beauty and even truth. In Christ we see eternal truth, beauty, and goodness but this not for us who are mortal and each of our little acts of goodness can't last for ever. We can build a good personality and we all know of people who have done so and we call them good people but we can't amass good Karma.

Harry, everyone’s waiting. Get some caffeine into you!

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:44 pm

Some other harmony has to appear and resolve them . . .

I reckon that's us (or, mebbe, each of us).

A Christian is not a Christian.

I think I get it but you should explain anyway.

I'm a pepper, you're a pepper, wouldn't you like to be a pepper too...

Eeeeverybody gets to be a "Christian," just by being born in a country he wants to call "Christian." What does that label mean? Nothing at all. It's apparently utterly undefinable, and unrelated to one's actual beliefs entirely.

So why shouldn't he be a "Christian," since it means everything in the known universe?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:57 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:44 pm

Some other harmony has to appear and resolve them . . .

I reckon that's us (or, mebbe, each of us).

A Christian is not a Christian.

I think I get it but you should explain anyway.

I'm a pepper, you're a pepper, wouldn't you like to be a pepper too...

Eeeeverybody gets to be a "Christian," just by being born in a country he wants to call "Christian." What does that label mean? Nothing at all. It's apparently utterly undefinable, and unrelated to one's actual beliefs entirely.

So why shouldn't he be a "Christian," since it means everything in the known universe?

Is that what Alexis means?

Well, that's crap.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:44 pm

A Christian is not a Christian.

I think I get it but you should explain anyway.

The Christian story (of course this is all my own view) has validity when the content of the story is, let's say, reduced to it's metaphysical bedrock. More on this in a moment.

The Christian story, now, is seen by many as being shot through with so many problems and is now incoherent. That incoherence is an insuperable block for many people -- for example the man who speaks in the video that Harry shared some pages back. There is no way, I repeat there is no way, that this incoherence can be glossed over. The closer it is examined, honestly, the more these incoherencies become obvious. And this leads to *a crisis of faith*.

However, it is true that those who have the *will to believe* (our own IC is a picture-perfect example of such a one) can force themselves to negate the myriad incoherent elements or to 'rationalize' them in the most amazing and bizarre ways (for example in forcing the ridiculous interpretation that the Genesis story, as intended by those who wrote it, describes an 'original mating pair'), or that there really must be an 'ark'; that God parted the Red Sea, and in many different mental and perceptual manoeuvres. So in a sense the elements of the story are made to seem irrelevant to the belief itself. So in this sense the 'story' can fall away yet the true believer will still believe no matter what. It is a curious situation and the *will to believe* then becomes a topic of consideration (but I won't go into it here).

So, when seen in this way, Christians hold to the Christian view by various thinning cords and threads. They patch together the fabric of the Story with rather crude repair jobs but in fact (this is my opinion) they themselves cannot honestly believe what they are forced to assert as being true.

However, we are all clear (of we read and accept the ideas of Richard Weaver) that man lives through metaphysical dreams. There is no man who does not have, in one degree or another, a worldpicture that he lives through, that mediates perception. Having such is what makes humans human. So you might believe that the Earth sits on the back of a cosmic turtle. Or that the people of your tribe crawled up out of the cave of an underworld through some epic event to inhabit this, our present world. Or that the god Yahweh created the heavens & the earth in 7 cosmic days and "formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul". True, these are metaphysical dreams, and they can be examined as such, but they stand in discord to the way that we see things now.

So the issue or problem is that discordancy. Discordancy, in my opinion, leads to mental disorder. And this is another topic that I won't go into here.

What is the solution here? -- for us. I think the solution -- the only one that I can see -- is to return to a way of philosophizing that shows itself capable of extracting the 'operative idea' out of the mythological content. And note that the 'operating idea' is, in essence, metaphysical.

The story? The embellishment? The fantastic tale? The inspiring saga? These all have value but they have value in exactly the same way that a poem has value. Or even perhaps a novel which is entirely the invention of the author. There are some stories whose truths will never erode away or vanish. Often, real & bona fide truths are revealed through fictional stories.

So Immanuel Can states -- and let's make it clear that he employs a threat -- that I must bow down before Jesus of Nazareth and beg Jesus for a sort of permission, a blessing, some special aid and help, in order for me to join up with a current that is referred to as 'salvation'. In the course of this present conversation (!) I have dismantled this admonition. I have had to take it apart as I have encountered a man who, I will suggest, is possessed with a demonic idea. It is not supposed to be that way, is it? Immanuel Can tells me that he is 'blessed by angels' and that he serves Jesus of Nazareth. How could what he does, what he says, how he explains Christinity and Christian belief -- how could any of this not be a product of 'the absolute good'? What I am trying to say is that this is how Christians portray themselves. They sell themselves and the Christian story through connivance.

I have dismantled and disassembled the 'fearful guilt' that is its essential power. And I reject this use of the story. Immanuel Can is pimping a story and he also pimps a sickness of mind, and a sickness of soul, which he defines as 'righteousness' and also as 'faith'. This is how his 'missionary work' functions. I could go on here (and I will in other places). I also have a 'missionary work' in the sense best expressed by Weaver with the phrase 'speech is sermonic'. All utterance, all communication, has representation and influencing at its base.

This is not for me, necessarily, to express here in this battleground on a backwater philosophy forum. What I say here is a part of a long process of my own study and learning. It just so happened that all of my idea ripened when I encountered one who I recognize as a fraud. My work will go on (and I have always said I am here for my own purposes).

(I have mentioned a name (IC) but as I have constantly said no part of this is personal! It only has to do with the ideas that we deal with.)

If there are truths behind Christianity, and the Christian story, I believe these can be extracted through logos-processes from the elements of the picture and the narrative through which Christianity expresses itself. It is not the story but the metaphysical and idea-content that the story pictures that is real and has transformative meaning. There is of course a great deal more that can be said about this and needs to be said but I will keep this now to a minimum.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 6:18 pm Is that what Alexis means?

Well, that's crap.

So, is that indeed what Alexis is saying?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 8:01 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 6:18 pm Is that what Alexis means?

Well, that's crap.

So, is that indeed what Alexis is saying?

What you're sayin': Christianity --except as unifyin' myth -- is crap.

What you've said: man currently lacks a unifyin' myth and so disaster! (now or shortly).

What you've said: a revamped Christianity can, and should, be that chief unifyin' myth.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 11:00 pm What you're sayin': Christianity --except as unifyin' myth -- is crap.

No, that is not at all right. Notice how you seem only to be able to see this (my critique) through a limiting, binary lens. Either it is or it isn't. Christianity is composed of a conglomeration of ideas. Some have referred to the 1st century as a 'confusion of peoples' and I say that it is a 'confusion of ideas'.

I do not think that the Catholic religion (this is what Christianity is) is crap. It is a container and within that container there are all manner of different valuable ideas. One has to locate, and if you will to isolate and accentuate the 'ideas' communicated. The core of values must be recognized and what is recognized, valued.

What you've said: man currently lacks a unifyin' myth and so disaster! (now or shortly).

It is not what I have said, but rather what Nietzsche devoted much energy to explaining. The loss of the 'horizon' is a major event. There are many negatives that result when man -- when a man -- is not longer precisely certain about his role and the 'real' nature of the structure that subsumes him.

But you need look no further than yourself to understand this.

What you've said: a revamped Christianity can, and should, be that chief unifyin' myth.

This is a philosophical forum and as such it is a place where those with some philosophical training come to share their views. It is not a 'religious confession' forum and it is not a forum for the faithful.

The philosophical mind is an analytic and in this sense an 'acidic' mind. And in this sense I have demonstrated how an acid works when I make such statements about Christianity. I do not really have a choice except to be open and honest. But that does not mean that I am destructive. Actually I feel (speaking to the polarity that has predominated on this thread) that Immanuel is destructive. I want to see things as they really are. And that is why I explain things as I do.

But I would not say the things I say on a forum dedicated to the promulgation of the faith-perspective. And I feel that *the container* needs to be protected. I recognize that this means that I will defend what I cannot, not as a faithful person, actually believe. But I can believe in transforming ideas. So my focus is there. On the Greek side of Christianity.

I have not even begun to speak of modern Christianity, and Evangelical scum, in the social-political sense.

Christianity is a container for metaphysical ideas as well as symbols laden with relevant meaning and as a religion is designed to function as social glue. I personally support many of the ideas that the container of Christianity holds -- because they are sound and because they express those 'first principles' Harry 'deadly serious' Baird has shown interest in.

Those ideas, at least for me, are best understood through Platonic (rational-intuitive) processes. In fact for nearly all of us here on this forum that is the only way we could understand.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 8:36 am Nick wrote:

For certain cosmic reasons the being of Man ended up in what we know of as the human condition. Without going into details, Jesus death was able to consciously experience all the horrors our species is capable of intensifying the division between Jesus lower and higher natures. This invited the third force of the Holy Spirit to reconcile it leading to the resurrection from a higher perspective and Jesus return home opening a path for those capable of following..

When we see how quickly we lose conscious awareness if someone looks at us the wrong way it is obvious that Jesus sacrifice is impossible for us. But is it impossible for everyone? Are there some Christians in the world?

Yes, but to be in the world and to be like Christ is transient. You can't pin down a good action like you might do a dead butterfly . In the world all good passes away and that is also true of beauty and even truth. In Christ we see eternal truth, beauty, and goodness but this not for us who are mortal and each of our little acts of goodness can't last for ever. We can build a good personality and we all know of people who have done so and we call them good people but we can't amass good Karma.

It isn't a matter of good or bad reactions defined by society but rather what we ARE; what has become of the lower parts of human being. If we were born with negative emotions our situation would be hopeless and man would be destined to remain a beast, a creature of the earth. But negative emotions are learned.

Plato does a good job of explaining our situation in the Chariot analogy:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/characte ... e-chariot/

In the Phaedrus, Plato (through his mouthpiece, Socrates) shares the allegory of the chariot to explain the tripartite nature of the human soul or psyche.

The chariot is pulled by two winged horses, one mortal and the other immortal.

The mortal horse is deformed and obstinate. Plato describes the horse as a “crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow…of a dark color, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”

The immortal horse, on the other hand, is noble and game, “upright and cleanly made…his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.”

In the driver’s seat is the charioteer, tasked with reining in these disparate steeds, guiding and harnessing them to propel the vehicle with strength and efficiency. The charioteer’s destination? The ridge of heaven, beyond which he may behold the Forms: essences of things like Beauty, Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Goodness — everlasting Truth and absolute Knowledge. These essences nourish the horses’ wings, keeping the chariot in flight.

Where Man should be guided by his higher immortal nature, He has now devolved and become guided by his corrupt lower mortal nature. How does man cure a sick horse so man's conscious evolution may continue as intended? For this, man needs help from above. So it isn't a matter of what we do but of what we are. Can man inwardly turn towards the light so as to become normal as opposed to a slave of the shadows on the wall? Maybe some can.

Christianity is composed of a conglomeration of ideas.

It is a container and within that container there are all manner of different valuable ideas.

Christianity is a container for metaphysical ideas as well as symbols laden with relevant meaning and as a religion is designed to function as social glue.

I personally support many of the ideas that the container of Christianity holds(.)

Refresh my memory: what are those ideas?