You have to know you’re talking to someone with a ‘condition’ so your relationship to this person is disingenuous and patronizing!
You should not be trying to engage this person philosophically because doing so would only contribute to that ‘condition’. This person needs a pyschiatrist not a Socrates.
+=- and -=+ is the atheists philosophy.
+=+ and -=- is the theists philosophy.
+/-=+/- is reality philosophy.
Promethean…it’s you who claims to be a misrepresentation of reality (an illusion)…..so it’s clear that you are suffering from psychosis because you don’t live in reality.You live in a deluded EXISTENCE of your own making because you need to exist to claim that you don’t exist.
Debate over Promeathan….go away and take your religious cult of atheism with you.
“a misrepresentation of reality (an illusion)”
If you have zelle, I’ll send you a grand if you can link me to somewhere where I’ve said that.
So you are now claiming that you exist and are not an illusion.Lets add that one to the atheists ever changing claims about themselves shall we.
You are wasting your time debating with me Promethean.You are not wise enough.
Well you have to exist to be able to think you’re an atheist so only a dumb atheist would claim he didn’t exist. You must be reading the wrong ‘what is atheism’ internet articles, I dunno.
Come on Promethean….you need to get that, I don’t exist in there, as well …..you stopped short….lol…you are floundering now…..do you want to keep going and get even more embarrassed…it’s up to you.
As you exist because you need to exist to claim that you don’t exist and you no longer want to associate yourself with misrepresentations of reality (illusions) then what are you claiming to be now?
Significance emerges through relationship: we truly “know” something not just by recognising its existence, but by becoming meaningfully connected to it. The difference between kennen and erkennen in German illustrates a profound dimension of relational understanding that extends beyond language and into how meaning itself is constituted. In this way, all knowledge is relational, aligning with much of the German cultural and philosophical context.
The example of how we “know” intimate partners versus how we know neighbours illuminates the gradations of relationship implicit in kennen. True intimacy, whether with people or in a spiritual practice, requires going beyond initial acquaintance; it’s about engaging, sharing, and dwelling together, which builds a deeper knowledge. In the religious or spiritual context, this distinction becomes particularly meaningful:
In Christianity, for example, recognising Jesus (erkennen) doesn’t merely mean being aware of the figure; it comes from participating in the teachings and allowing that relationship to transform your view. Thus, erkennen is a process or a moment of revelation, built upon the foundational experience of kennen.
German philosophy often emphasises that knowledge is not static “possession” but a dynamic process rooted in encounter and mutual reflection. Being (or things) reveal themselves only in the context of a relationship or what Goethe called the “manifestation,” which is always also shaped by the observer’s participation.
In summary, while kennen and erkennen both involve “knowing,” the first is relational-acquaintance through lived experience, while the second signifies the moment of recognition or realisation that arises from that relationship, an insight that cannot be reached from a distance or mere acquaintance.
If you judge things in this reductive way, of course. But if we understand the mythological as a description of something ongoing, and the transcendental values, truth, unity, beauty and goodness, as that which we only access through the special kind of attention we give them, then we don’t need the supernatural to recognise the human condition and the solution, but only a devotional act towards the transcendental. In mystical terms, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” (Meister Eckhart)
Thus, recognising the divine at work is called divine awareness in mystical/mythological language: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” says Meister Eckhart again. This is not obvious for someone unable to become quiet and give the attention needed. I’ll quote Meister Eckhart one more time:
“The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.”
Once more, your examples remain within reductive materialistic thinking. Nothing is going to “pop up” except into your mind’s eye when sudden realisation makes you quiet. Although I didn’t want to, I’ll quote Meister Eckhart again because it is present in my mind. “The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction,” meaning you have to free yourself of all your mind-junk to free your soul or core being. That is also the basic reason for meditation and contemplation.
By the way, do you realise that your verbal diarrhoea stems directly from the panic within your ego? The ego is constantly striving to assert control as a defence against the deep existential fear residing within us. In its futile attempt to quiet this nagging fear, the ego fills our minds relentlessly with noise and distractions, mental junk that obscures our true experience and awareness.
Power structures and systems of control are symptoms of this fear-driven ego. They rely on maintaining anxiety and insecurity among people as their foundation; without this fear, power loses its grip. In contrast, wisdom arises from learning to manage this fear and to become still and silent within, because true wisdom recognises that our core being rests not in the impermanent contents of our psyche but in pure being itself.
It is the impermanent, fragile part of us (the ego, the self-concept) that cries out with primal survival instincts. This part fears extinction, loss, and meaninglessness, fuelling compulsive acts to prove itself and assert control. Wisdom does not deny this suffering but seeks to heal its wounds through presence, insight, and acceptance.
Instead of controlling or silencing the fear, wisdom embraces it as a signal, a gateway to deeper truth. It is through this quiet engagement with fear and not through its repression or denial that genuine peace and understanding emerge. This mindful relationship with fear lets us transcend the ego’s desperate need for power, revealing a deeper wholeness beneath the surface turmoil.
In this way, you can see how power depends on perpetuating fear of suffering to maintain dominance, while wisdom arises by facing that fear courageously, healing the soul’s wounds, and reconnecting with the silent ground of being beyond egoic illusions.
You need to be aware of consciousness and control it or you merely operate automatically.
You’re an observer Bob not a Player…That’s your problem.You don’t introduce control of consciousness because you don’t believe that you exist to be able to.
There are two consciousness types…in the waking state.
1.The “in the head” out of the moment consciousness state which is where you get the idea that you are nothing but thoughts….hence Descartes foolish claim “I think,therefore I am”.
2.The “in the full body” in the moment consciousness state.
The difference between the two consciousness states is the sense TOUCH.
I exist because I need to exist to claim that I don’t exist.If I claim that I don’t exist then I am a liar who exist.I am not a misrepresentation of reality (an illusion).
“By the way, do you realise that your verbal diarrhoea stems directly from the panic within your ego? The ego is constantly striving to assert control as a defence against the deep existential fear residing within us.”
For most, yes, this is true. Because they have nothing real to fear or be put in danger by, they invent an imaginary ‘spiritual’ struggle so they can proclaim, “Hey, look, I’m a fighter too!” Sometimes i find this endearing, but most of the time, it’s just annoying.
“you have to free yourself of all your mind-junk to free your soul or core being. That is also the basic reason for meditation and contemplation”
Yeah, there was a class for that in one of my meetup groups. They’d all get their yoga mats and mineral waters and sit out in a field, freeing themselves through deep meditative practice. They asked if i wanted to go, but i told em nah i did eight months of a four year sentence in solitary confinement and got all erkennen i needed. I like the mats, though. Memory foam?
Go and control your consciousness Promethean..and stop operating automatically.You might then be able to control the nonsense that comes out of your mind.
You only know about inward only “in your head” consciousness meditation.Any fool can practice that cognitively biased meditation.
I can’t help it, bro. It’s totally…
You go within and you come back out again Promethean….You are neglecting the coming back out bit.
The difference between the going within and the coming back out again is the sense Touch
The sense touch enables you to re engage with you body again.
If you are going to meditate….do it properly.
You need to safeguard your mental health…psychology is very important as well.
Inward only meditation will inevitably get you into serious trouble psychologically and feed you with false information.
What did you “erkennen” or recognise?
We agree that the picture of the emergent Jesus movement we get in the NT is a Hellenized one. How we interpret text will be conditioned by where we our on our spiritual journey. Richard Carrier’s theory is an interesting one but it seemed implausible to me from the get go and that impression hasn’t been changed by further exposure to it mainly on Youtube videos some of which I will link here.
Miracles in the gospels I take to refer to acts of spiritual power not intervention in the laws of physics. In particular, Jesus initiates a strong tradition of Christian healing which is a kind of restoration of wholeness on physical or psychological or spiritual levels. Modern rejection of these “miracles” in principle is a reflection of the schizoid, compartmentalized left brain thinking that characterizes the episteme of the modern age.
The evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that interpreting Isaiah’s Suffering Servant as a messianic figure was a part of at least some Jewish communities before Christianity, not just a later Christian development. So, it is certainly possible that Jesus was consciously following that template for his life.
However, British Biblical scholar Geza Vermes is among those who argue that the Suffering Servant motif was applied post hoc:
“To place the final events of the life of Jesus in proper perspective, it should be further borne in mind that mainstream Jewish tradition did not expect the Messiah to die, or afterwards to rise from the dead. The last poem of the Suffering Servant of the Lord (Isa. 53), which seems to be the most obvious text to be identified as foreshadowing the redemptive death of Jesus, is largely ignored in the Synoptic Gospels. The two passages in which it is quoted point in a different direction. In Matthew 8: 17 the Servant’s ‘taking our infirmities and bearing our diseases’ (Isa. 53: 4) is literally applied to the healing activity of Jesus. Later, Luke (22: 37) makes Jesus cite Isaiah 53: 12, ‘And he was reckoned with transgressors’, to allude to his impending arrest as a criminal. The earliest New Testament attempt to associate the last song of the Servant of the Lord (Isa. 52: 13 to 53: 12) with the cross (the Servant is compared to a sheep led to the slaughter) is in Acts 8: 32–35. There the deacon Philip, asked about the meaning of Isaiah 53: 7–8, interprets it as alluding to Jesus. In 1 Peter 2: 22 and 24 (probably dating to AD 100 at the earliest), the text of Isaiah 53 is twice used to describe Christ’s passion, though without actually indicating that it comes from the Bible. It was the early church, not Jesus, that had occasional recourse to the Suffering Servant theme. 6 In short, no forecast of the cross and the resurrection had any impact on the members of the inner circle of Jesus. This is clear from the behaviour of the apostles during the last hours of his life. They all ran away and Peter went as far as to deny that he had ever known him. Even the first news of the resurrection is depicted as something coming out of the blue, and not as a forecast event. The whole series of forewarnings has the appearance of vaticinium ex eventu, a ‘prophecy after the fact’, introduced by the evangelists with later Christian generations in view. The members of the primitive church had to be persuaded that the disconcerting events of the crucifixion and resurrection were foreordained by God and were the fulfilment of the predictions made by Jesus and by the earlier prophetic visionaries of the Jewish people.”
Kipp Davis, a biblical scholar and expert in early Jewish literature and history, with a focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls argues that Carrier gets the Talmud wrong, misreads the Dead Sea Scrolls and fails in his reading of Judaica:
Right. It’s not difficult to imagine from a modern psychological naturalistic perspective if Paul existed as an historical person which is now being contested. Be that as it may 13 books of the New Testament are traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul making him the author of nearly half of its 27 books. He’s also the central hero and protagonist of the “Acts of the Apostles” traditionally attributed to his sidekick Luke the physician. The impact of the literary Paul is unrivaled in the history of Christianity. So radically did these texts impact the Jesus movement that Paul can be intelligibly viewed as the founder of Christianity as we know it today rather than Jesus and his original apostles. When read outside the traditional frame of Christian orthodoxy, it appears to some scholars the book of Acts smooths over the decisive break with the apostles Paul makes with them in his letters and promotes views they found unacceptable. James, the brother of Jesus and the leader of the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter, and the other apostles held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that was rejected, suppressed and forgotten whenPauline Christianity triumphed. The Pauline gospel influenced the texts of the canonical gospels and eventually led to a complete break from Judaism. Those followers of Jesus who didn’t break from it came to be seen as heretics by the proto-orthodox.
Not in our cases, or many others outside the fundamentalist/evangelical frame. But it can be. Remember the Zeitgeist movies? Part one claimed that the Christian religion is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical, assertions, astrological, myths, and other traditions. The movie’s Christ myth theory which disputes the historicity of Jesus and asserts that Jesus is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured by political forces, and opportunists, was influenced by the work of Acharya S an American writer, who, like Carrier, asserts that Jesus never existed as a historic person, but was rather a mingling of various pre-Christian myths, solar deities and dying and rising deities. On this forum and others like Reddit and Quora, people have been claiming Zeitgeist invalidated Christian faith for years. I understand that’s not your position, but it is a popular one online.
Right. It’s amazing. Like Jesus, the earliest Christians were Jews. Jesus did not break with Judaism or start a new religion. However, some second century Christians such as the Marcionites and the Seed of Seth did reject Judaism. The Gospel of John, usually considered the last written of the canonical gospels, already portrays a harsh condemnation of Jews by Jesus thought to be ahistorical by many scholars in the field. To understand how Christianity emerged we will have to understand how the rivalry and hatred between Jews and Christians developed.
The cross is the crux of Christianity. Since you introduced Carrier into the discussion I’ve watched several videos of him debating other scholars. In this one PhD candidate Jack Bull argues that first century Christians focused more on the cross than on the resurrection:
https://www.youtube.com/live/cMkVgYKc2tc?si=Bv3OxfKSHEoFSRML
Jack Bull poses the early emphasis on the cross over the resurrection as a counterargument to Carrier’s theory that Jesus originates in a vision of a celestial resurrection.
I totally get what you’re saying. For us the symbolic language points to the Absolute beyond words. John Dominic Crossan addressed the modern tendency to misinterpret ancient texts saying,
"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
Perhaps Foucault’s concept of epistemic ages will help elucidate the challenge we face as readers of ancient texts. In Foucault’s formulation, an épistémè is the unconscious, historical “a priori” (pre-existing condition) that grounds all knowledge, theories, and discourses within a given culture and epoch. It is not a single theory, but the total set of relationships that can be discovered between the sciences and forms of knowledge existing in a specific period. This framework defines the very boundaries of what constitutes legitimate knowledge.
Foucault argued that there is a radical discontinuity between these different ages. When one épistémè replaces another, it is not merely a matter of new discoveries being added to old knowledge, but a fundamental shift in the rules and structures by which knowledge is organized and understood. The former framework becomes literally unthinkable or nonsensical in the new epistemic age. When sacred texts were written in a different epistemic age than ours, we have to go suspend the presuppositions of modernity in order to enter into the intersubjective world of the writer.
This kind of reading is on a different level than a purely left brain historical reading. But, I would argue that it is absolutely necessary to understand where the writers of what becomes scripture are coming from.
How you get from pluses, equal signs, and minuses that summarize every atheistic and theistic philosophy on the planet and arrive at “reality” philosophy is a question for another thread. Here we’re discussing the history of how Christianity emerged.
Christianity emerged after the death of Jesus Christ Felix….end of discussion…what more do you need to know.
That’s right.
And some of the early Christians saw it that way. Jesus was envisioned laughing as he watched his material body die on the cross. Proto-orthodox Christians called this “docetism” and condemned it as a heresy.
Well textual records show there was a wide range of belief about that even among those who claimed to be followers of him. This is evident from the earliest letters and gospel accounts. Beliefs about the nature of Jesus are called Christologies. They range from the lowest which I suppose might be that he was a total fraud to the highest which might mean that he was the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Well, you still have to account for fact that within three centuries the religion went from the exploited lower class to the state religion held the highest class including the emperors.
I’m not sure what your point is here. There are a lot of atheists in this discussion of the question of the historical Jesus and the emergence of Christianity. These are important historical questions which academic scholars think are worthy of serious research. Secular research on the subject has been going on for several hundred years. It’s an important feature of the modern era since the European enlightenment that evoked the reaction known as the as Christian fundamentalism became Christian Evangelical movement which is having a huge impact on American politics today.
Are you referring to this theory which has gained some traction online?
I have written my answer in my notebook but I’m on the Canaries without a computer, so you’ll have to wait a week for my answer.
Sorry.
