Would Jesus condemn or condone Yahweh for his crimes against

Why wouldn’t it be possible that they could do all those things for a self-centered reason?

What’s an example of selfish love? I love you so much that I’m going to eat all your pizza? Or I love you so much that I’m going to share my pizza with you? It seems there always needs to be some self-sacrifice to constitute love, but it’s hidden from view that the self-sacrifice is for the person’s own benefit. IOW, I share my pizza, you are happy, I’m happy that you are happy. But people don’t see it that way at first since they see it as giving up some pizza and that’s a sacrifice and an expression of love. Aww… he’s sharing his pizza. No, I just value your happiness more than I value the remaining pizza that will probably be stale in the morning anyway lol.

It doesn’t matter what the situation is, I will always do what I perceive as best for me and that would be true of any being because how could any being do what it didn’t want to do? If God sent his only begotten son to die, then he did it because he wanted to and because that’s what made him happy… or happier than the alternative. So it’s ultimately not about our salvation, but God’s happiness.

What the heck, I am going to make a little digression. I think we currently are way too reductionistic when it comes to intelligence and identity in that we refer to ourselves as basically brains driving cars (the rest of our bodies) and even narrow it down to neurons. First we have large neuronal complexes in the heart and gut. Yes, less neurons than in the brain, but systems can be organized to give much more weight to portions with less parts. I am not simply a brain, I am the whole organism. Second, glial cells, which are not neurons have been found to play a huge role in intelligence and mind. Before they were considered merely structural, glue, but in the last decade we are finding that they play a huge role in who we are and how (well) we think. And then there is the endocrine system. And then…well, there’s other research indicating that the self may be much more spread out in the body, in fact everywhere. Now back to what you wrote more specifically: the brain has a lot more functions than what tends to be indicated by ‘intelligence’. If you are using the term in a very broad sense, fine, but my contacts with the very high IQ people has NOT led me to believe there is great correlation between IQ and empathy.

I would guess that countries where people do well on IQ tests have a lot of other factors that could affect things like crime.

That’s why I mentioned a minimum.

I could be wrong, I sometimes mix you and Sillouette up, glancing too fast at the names, and heck you’re both smart guys so it’s no insult, but…weren’t you standing up for standing up against bullies including being potentially violent in discussion with thnkdr?

It can seem loving to not be angry at and be ‘understanding’ of people doing you harm. Battered women, for example, are often very intelligent at coming up for reasons not to stay with the rage and fear they have at their spouses and let those feelings lead to actions that would be better for them. I see Jesus as perpetuating problematic ‘understanding’ there which can lead to increased self-hate, guilt and allow more room for the unempathic.

(see, it’s not just Watts who ruffles my feathers :smiley: )

If I see a parent who knowingly let’s his kid nail him to a tree and forgives the kids while they are nailing him to the tree, I see a parent with guilt or self-hatred. In the abstract, safely out of the hands of sadistic brutes one can ALSO notice that they are confused. But all we get is the deep empathy he feels for people torturing him. To not also hate them is confused and is part of the damage Christianity has done to the world.

  1. I don’t think that is the case. There are people who know what they are doing and do not care. 2) there is not need to choose between understanding and having the natural reactions to being abused by people who CONSISTANTLY avoid feeling into what they are doing. You can react with rage and understand. Jesus cut himself in half. If he can understand them he can also understand his own anger and fear and let these flow freely.

All these religious leaders share a common ACCEPT WHAT IS OTHER THAN ME AND WHAT IS OUTSIDE ME BUT JUDGE WHAT IS INSIDE ESPECIALLY EMOTIONS AND DESIRE rule. They have a double standard and it has caused untold damage to people trying to live up to these models, because the models systematize self-hate but call it love.

I guess it comes down to the fact that I don’t understand a lot of this.

Why define love as selfless?

Why would a person who says that all acts are selfish also use the definition “love is selfless” when discussing love?

And it’s not just here in this thread … Why do some people insist that altruism is selfish?

Why do all acts need to be reduced to the two categories of selfish or selfless?

It’s absolutistic, all or nothing, black and white, zero-sum thinking. Why people prefer that kind of thinking over relativistic, both and, more or less, nonzero thinking is another question.

If love = X% selfishness + 100-X% selflessness then we couldn’t have a definition for love since we’d spend all our time on the slippery slope looking for a place to draw the line. If you want definitions and communication, you have to have absolutes.

Because that’s the spirit of it. Otherwise it would be greed, self-centered.

Just to point out that selfless acts do not exist.

Because selfless acts do not exist. I thought it was fairly common knowledge since my philosophy 101 class hammered the point home and it seems like we may have even entertained the idea in high school. Also Alan uses it to show that Christianity is an impossible religion since we cannot love God nor neighbor because we can only love ourselves. I’m really surprised that this has become a topic for debate on a philosophy forum.

Because there is only self and other?

That’s like saying water= only H2O molecules. And then looking around and saying there is no water anywhere. The water that we actually find in the world, always contains impurities and contaminants but that doesn’t stop people from being able to identify water. They don’t become paralyzed or obsessed by the problem of identifying water.

In fact, some impurities in give water a pleasant taste when compared to pure H2O molecules.

Sure, when considered as discreet objects.

But the motivation for an act can be any combination of interest in self and interest in others - one other or many others.

I never took philosophy 101 so that probably explains it.

Doesn’t Alan also say that there is no self? Which technically would make all acts selfless.

It’s weird that people debate stuff on a philosophy forum.

Good idea. I like digressions :slight_smile:

If not brains driving cars, then spirits driving cars.

Really? I have heard most of our serotonin is in the gut which makes me wonder why SSRIs are used for mental problems.

You’re more than just an organism because you need an environment too.

In biology, the unitary approach makes it explicit why no organism can be thought of without an environment. An organism as a skin bag is no functioning system; it may be such only together with the relevant environmental parts. The same applies to neurophysiology or “cognitive” brain research: without the rest of the world the nervous system is not a system at all; neither is the agent of the behavior a part of the body, such as the brain. researchgate.net/publicatio … Psychology

I don’t have a problem with any of that.

Well, it’s possible that psychopaths could also have a high IQ, but my research indicates that psychopaths typically do not have a high IQ. psychologytoday.com/us/blog … he-rest-us

Well, we have a correlation so now we need to propose a mechanism and I posit that people with the cognitive capacity to realize that moral behavior is self-advantageous will be more moral than those who do not have the capacity.

Stefan Molyneux did a video of correlations with crime and found that crime had little to do with poverty, but was highly correlated with IQ and nearly perfectly correlated with divorce rates, implying that having a father in the home equated to less criminal behavior. So how does having a father around change the development of the child?

youtube.com/watch?v=TVBJ5m3sGfk

Oh you mean not running from the bear? Yeah that was me.

Oh I see what you’re saying! If people understand why they’re being mistreated, then by understanding they lose their anger, then they allow the abuse to continue because they have no drive to fight back. It’s mighty perceptive of you to pick up on that. This reminds me of a kid I know who is insanely intelligent and so perceptive that he can rarely be mad at anyone, except his annoying parents who he yells at and demeans constantly for acting “stupid”, but anyone else he bends over backwards to be eternally taken advantage of. I say “You need to get away from those people. They’re shitting on you!” He’ll say “No, they’re just acting that because _____, ________, and ________”. He rationalizes and justifies abuse from people and it’s only because he’s smart enough to see a way of rationalizing it, but for some reason he isn’t smart enough to get away from it. I suppose it’s a lack of wisdom and he’ll eventually learn from life.

Intelligent people actually have a rough time in life. Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a book about it. amazon.com/Intelligence-Par … 0470586958

I have a thread about it on neosophi, but the site must be down because I can’t access it. Suffice it to say, ignorance is bliss and “happiness among intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” (Hemmingway).

lol I suppose any bag of hot air is sufficient to blow your feathers out of place :slight_smile:

It’s interesting that I see the parent as perceptive and you see the same parent as weak. Evidently we value different things as a function of our life history and I wonder what happened to you that made you become so hypersensitive to guilt. I mean, my mom is the queen of guilt trips and it’s how she communicates. If she can’t win an argument, then she diverts to how hard her life was and why everyone should feel sorry for her. I would think I should be the one who has a hypersensitivity to guilt, or at least some sensitivity to it, but perhaps I’ve been desensitized? My hangup is arrogance… I see it everywhere and associate it with ignorance and actually, I’m almost to the point that I believe there is no such thing as stupidity, but only arrogance, and so intelligence would be a function of humility which is what the parent is displaying by considering the point of view of the unruly child.

Jesus did get mad at least once.

12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

You can imagine him running about overturning tables and yelling at people lol

So there must be some difference between those nailing him to the cross and those selling at the temple. The ones nailing him to the cross didn’t know what they were doing, but the ones selling in the temple must have known what they were doing was wrong.

Ok friend, point well-taken, I’ll give that some good thought. You may be onto something, but I haven’t focused on it specifically. Alan doesn’t disagree with you.

I can’t find the video where he said “how dare you have the disgusting effrontery to exist” from the christian perspective, but this one is pretty good too:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNeaZeFbhH0[/youtube]

I was in Mexico last August
40:40
studying this, because I wanted to go down there and find out
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why their form of Catholicism is so agonizing.
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And…
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I meditated a long time on this,
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in the cathedral of Wahaga.
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And
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Here was the main altar
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– no, not the main altar. The chapel where the sacrament is reserved
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The central figure behind the altar is a huge crucifix
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of Christ covered in blood and wounds.
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The sores are all modeled, you know?
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And then on either side of the walls facing this,
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there are great paintings.
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One of Christ carrying the cross and being mocked and scourged,
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and the other, of the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,
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and all around in the stores,
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where they sell bondieuserie in the neighborhood of the cathedral,
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you can buy these agonized faces of Christ
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with a crown of thorns.
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And every thorn individually sticking in,
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and little dribbles of blood,
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the face is kind of green and ghastly.
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And the people dig this!
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They love it!
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They’ll go walking into the Shrine of our Lady of Guadalupe,
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go for a whole mile on their knees!
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You see young girls doing this!
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What is this about?
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Well, you see, some people
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don’t really feel they exist until they are sitting on the point of a thorn.
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Let me put it that way.
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Like reality is a measure of pain.
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See, pain, in this way of looking at things,
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is the most real thing that there is.
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Pleasure, the pleasures of this world
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escape and disappear and pass away,
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there’s nothing to cling to, so don’t go after pleasure, my dear friends!
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That’s awful, that’s a deceit, because the real thing in life is pain.
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And so, what you do is you train yourself from childhood
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to deal with pain.
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We were brought up in a school system
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where it was simply axiomatic that suffering builds character.
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So therefore, anytime you inflicted pain on anybody,
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you were perfectly justified in your own conscience
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because you were doing him a favor.
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You were building his character for him.
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Do him good!
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Hit him hard on the head! (laughs) You know, that sort of attitude. (laughter)
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And, uh…
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(chuckles)
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And so this is based on this philosophy of
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“pain is reality.”
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Is the ultimate
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penitential philosophy.
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Going down, down, down into the most awful.
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“I am wrong.”
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See? “I am a mistake.”
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“I am responsible for this mistake.”
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“Therefore, I ought to suffer.
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and I go right into that state of mind.”
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“And if I’ve got guts and courage, I’ll go as far into it as possible.”
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“And what will I find out at the end?”
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Now, if you go far enough…
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the trouble is, a lot of people don’t.
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And they stay around, mimble-mambling about
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their sins and all that, which is sort of disgusting.
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And they never really get down to it.
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They never find out
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what I’ll call “the moment,” the hidden motivation behind all this.
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Behind self-renunciation.
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Behind wallowing in
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the reality of pain.
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They don’t see that it’s phony.
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Because
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nothing can be more egotistical
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than true repentance.
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As I pointed out, you’re safe
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when you’re repentant enough.
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Therefore, you…
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conceal from yourself, temporarily, what an egotist you are.
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But if you really get down to the bottom of this thing
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as some of the Christian saints have done,
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and find out what that repentance is all about,
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and you suddenly see
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why it’s your old sin all over again.
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What I thought was good, was, as a matter of fact, evil.
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It was the same self-seeking and self-righteousness
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and ineradicable pride and irreducible rascality,
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which the Hebrews call,
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the yetzer hara.
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Which means, ‘the evil inclination.’
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But they say that the evil inclination was created by the Lord God.
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And probably the Lord God has a yetzer hara himself.
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That the Lord
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has his own element of irreducible rascality.
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And that is, of course, what you might call the dark side,
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the left hand of God.
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The left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand doeth.
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'Cause that mustn’t be let out; that’s the secret.
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You see?
46:27
If the game of the cosmos is of the fundamental pattern of hide and seek,
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Then when ‘hide’ turns up, and it’s the time for ‘hide’ to happen
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Then
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darkness has its day.
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Hide in the dark.
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But when it’s time for ‘seek,’
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then light has its day,
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and we find out what was hidden in the dark,
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and then the right hand suddenly discovers what the left hand was doing.
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(chuckles)
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At first, it’s shocked!
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(chuckles)
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What, that?!
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(laughs)
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What is that, by the way?
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What is the fundamental taboo?

I took it as an elective lol

He says there is just one thing: the self. I suppose he means the Brahman.

Why do you feel that way?

But any combination of interest in others will ultimately also come back to an interest in yourself, so there is no combination.

But water is not a function of impurities. Water is H2O and the impurities are not water. Tea is water + impurities (the tea flavors).

In that case, there is no ‘other’. What do ‘selfless’ and ‘selfish’ mean? Nothing?

One often encounters posters who are “surprised” that everyone does not think as they do. They are “surprised” that there is more than one way to look at a subject. They are “surprised” that there is something to debate.

LOL

What do you expect? People who thank you for posting informative videos and who always agree with you?

People were able to identify water long before anybody thought of hydrogen, oxygen or molecules. They could distinguish tea from water as well.

I think that they can identify love in spite of whatever selfish/selfless labels philosophers insist on attaching.

What a Gnostic Christian is is best described by the name of my god.

Modern Gnostic Christians name our god “I am”, and yes, we do mean ourselves.

You are your controller. I am mine. You represent and present whatever mind picture you have of your God or ideal human, and so do I.

The name “I Am” you might see as meaning something like, — I think I have grown up thanks to having forced my apotheosis through Gnosis and meditation.

In Gnostic Christianity, we follow the Christian tradition that lazy Christians have forgotten that they are to do. That is, become brethren to Jesus.

That is why some say that the only good Christian is a Gnostic Christian.

Here is the real way to salvation that Jesus taught.

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

Allan Watts explain those quotes in detail.

youtube.com/watch?v=alRNbes … r_embedded

Joseph Campbell shows the same esoteric ecumenist idea in this link.

youtube.com/watch?v=aGx4IlppSgU

The bible just plainly says to put away the things of children. The supernatural and literal reading of myths.

Regards
DL

.

I don’t think the Bible clearly says this, though SOME quotes can be interpreted this way. And if it is clear then we certainly don’t need outside experts, ones strongly affected by the lens of other religions or psychologies, to show what the Bible really means - re: the videos you suggest.

And the section of the Bible specifically referring to childish things also says that women were made for men, but men were not made for women.

That writer seems not to have given up childish things, nor is it made clear exactly what is meant by childish things. As in many parts of the Bible, it is open to interpretatoins, especially given the many writers and modes in the full context of the Bible, and of course its two halves.

and of course Jesus said that only one who is like a child…etc.

And yes, I realize that is also open to interpretations, some which might work with the other quote, some that might not.

No argument on this. You are correct in that it is how you think of the supernatural that is important to you.

Do you think a supernatural invisible realm as a good realm to build an ideology on?

Would you let a childish mind guide humanity based on imaginary entities?

Regards
DL