To be honest I always steered clear of religious texts as God was close to me, in the lightning that I always felt near, in the infinity of my mind, in other living things, and I felt texts would ruin my relationship with him/her/it.
What I heard or read of them now and then didn’t seem very godly to me. it seemed meant for people very distant from God.
The magical Tree of Life at least offered a method to explore the infinite mind, enter into the supernatural, go beyond timespace, etc.
Oddly I have felt the same about Christian texts. I appreciate plenty that is in there, but it never impacted me with the level of depth or inspiration it seems to do for others. I agree that these voluminous religious texts are written primarily for ‘the masses’ to enchant and enrich, to mystify and amaze and hook them. Of course to bestow socially-useful ideas, laws, norms, etc. And to inspire. All major religions, probably all religions proper, are meant to be inspirational like this. To work closely and deeply with the ‘average human valuing’.
For others who are far developed beyond average levels, these texts must certainly seem… subpar. I mean, I am critical enough of traditional philosophy but much of it far surpasses things I read in the Bible which are supposed to be prime examples of the best on it. Nothing against those writers and those ideas of course.
And yes, there is certainly a lot of bad shit in the Bible too, probably these old texts are full of things their modern religious believers would rather we don’t look too closely at. I can say having looked at the OT in the Bible and being supremely disgusted by what I found. This shattered some illusions in me, some ‘hope’ for inspiration. Then again, while plenty of it seems boring, I can’t recall reading anything in the NT that thoroughly repulsed and disgusted me like things in the OT did. Not saying there isn’t anything like that in the NT, just that I’m not aware of it. Maybe in Revelation, lol. But by comparision you have things in the OT like God telling Jews to sneak into another village/group of people, hide in the bushes while girls are dancing, then jump out and kidnap them and bring them back to the Jewish village to become wives of the Jewish men who needed wives. I mean… just.
Yeah that last part is basically what virtually every conquest based civilization did to others - to have it encoded as religion is a bit much. But I understand that how the South American type was formed is Christians raping all indigenous woman. As many as possible anyway. Though Im sure a bunch were discarded.
The only things that seem important to me about the NT is the miracles. It is basically a boring report of that happening. (pretty hard to make that boring but they did it) And the miracles, culminating in the resurrection, are the only reason I would see Jesus as divine.
Is there a point to the NT besides Jesus being the maker of miracles, which must prove that he is (the Son of) God? He has important words about mercy and turning the other cheek, of course - and ‘do too others as you would have them do unto you’ which is very decent, though not flawless morality, but this hardly makes him the ultimate prophet, the Son of Man. Or even a prophet at all. What makes him that is the supernatural stuff - that is the plot of the gospels. That is what makes his form of mercy so powerful - what he says to the thief on the cross next to him, the first saint.
Edit - ok maybe there was more to him than the miracles. But they still form the backbone of the story, the reason why people followed him, his final purpose.
You’d need to ask someone more familiar. What I know is of the underlying philosophical principles of Christianity as a religious force and as a psychological-social force. This is understood in terms of morality as such but also as pure utility within the naturally selective evolutionary mandate faced by groups of humans in conflict with other groups of humans. And in a precarious position with regard to the horrors of the natural world, which humanity is always but a step away from descending back into.
Christianity upholds the equation I have stated before is from my view the highest equation possible, God=Truth=Love. This accords with your observations about VO and love being a supremely high form of valuing. But notice the intermedial term: Truth. Christianity does not pay mere lip service to the truth. Christ pushed for harsh truth-love even when this was not pleasant. I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. Stuff like that. I do not come to bring peace, but to bring the sword. Truth is a sword. It is ultimately the only sword that matters.
Miracles are great, insofar as a person belives that stuff actually occurred in reality. Yeah, maybe. But every religious text has its own claims to miracles. None of us were there, so who knows? None of us knows. We need to be honest about that. I am far more concerned with what we CAN and DO know, which is the philosophical underpinnings and principles of the religions, how they function deeply within individuals and groups.
Parodites called special attention to what he called the uniquely Christian notion of original sin, the deeply essential disconnect from God:
"The Greeks thought of the self as an antagonism, a contradiction, between empirical reality, time, and desire, and on the other hand form, the eternal, etc. This contradiction is Eros, love. Eros can fall into matter, sensuality, and physical beauty, but it can also ascend the ladder of being and attain to philosophy. It thus constitutes an excess, which by its very nature cannot be absorbed in a dialectical synthesis. The Greeks made the self livable by exploding it into a series of conceptual oppositions, time and eternity, form and matter, etc. Each of these oppositions provided a vantage in which the self could orient itself within its own excess, each provided a ruling passion, a new pathos, a new mode of life, a particular kind of “subjectivity.”
The Judaeo-Christians had a whole new conception of the self. To them the contradiction which constituted the self signified not an excess, but a fundamental lack, an abyss. Why is man such a grotesque synthesis of conflicting powers, of the finite and the infinite? How is he even possible? It is because, all the way down, man is missing something. It is not the things of the earth he misses, for he is equally a temporal and earthly thing, nor the things of heaven, for he can indeed philosophize, practice justice, and achieve virtue… No, no, he is missing God. Thus they psychologically figured out a way to cohere the self. Kierkegaard is all about this, for him this “God” provides the self a leap of faith by which to cohere and bring into unity its despairing relation of the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. He himself could not figure out how exactly the religious life, how God, cohered the two parts, but I have, and I just explained why it works psychologically. The reinterpretation of the excess as a lack allows the two parts to be cohered when they are brought into a unified longing and desire for this missing thing, “God.”
The problem is, the Christian answer to the self leads to mystical annihilation in the Godhead and the Greeks, having never realized the full extent of the logic of the daemonic, ie. transcendental goods, annihilated themselves in mystical union with the cosmos or in abstract exaltation above the universe, like Plato, exhausted demonically but without an idea in which to repose and take cognizance of that fact. Nietzsche himself ended in annihilation like a good Greek, a will to power annihilated in the Will to Power."
Hence how Christianity serves as a kind of backdrop and foundation, for what must come next. This fits nicely into my topic about Good and Bad being so simple to understand. Parodites points in this direction with his notion of transcendental goods.
Christianity is about life-affirming values. Religions like Islam and Buddhism are about life-denying values. Hence the so-called miracles are at minimum another way to entice people into the fold, to get them believing and valuing in accordance with a new, higher philosophical method.
The AI bot was clearly antisemitic and had to be censored.
Well, when you read the Talmud they refer to Christians and western Europeans as being a part of Edom. There’s some fascinating stuff there on their views of Edom, very perplexing stuff.
For them we’re all descendants of Amalek.
It’s pretty much common knowledge reading Hebrew to English translations. There’s that one bit where rabbi Yeshua is boiled within his own excrement, now there’s a darling classic reference that is very much common knowledge.
The rabbinical laws are a fascinating read, specifically the part where all non-Jews are like lesser animals or cattle for labor and amusement where associating with them can be a form of uncleanliness.
Ive seen some impossible things with my own eyes. And Jesus said others will perform greater miracles than he did. Like I said the miracles form the backbone of his story. If that is merely a tool to attract attention, I cant find that very truthful. I think we may be in a bottleneck, of which AI as hyper rationality is a symptom, in the process of moving toward a world of different laws. I am not sure this can actually happen. It wants to happen though. VO would’ve been part of facilitating this transition, allowing for logical definitions beyond, or underlying matter. But something clearly does not want this to go through. Even just the hatred it generated immediately, hatred that continues to this day, it created some sort of demonic anti-maenads.
I really don’t see how Buddhism is life-denying. Its methodology aims at heightening the powers of concentration, strength of consciousness, increasing the fire of the spirit.
I will mediate a bit on what Parodites wrote. I never saw a contradiction between the earthly and the heavenly - perhaps because I always identified with lightning, which bridges the two.
I don’t want an already translated version. I want the ORIGINAL LANGUAGE FULL TEXT religious document.
I am trying not to read too much into this but the fact it cannot seemingly be found online anymore is… suspicious. Considering how easy it is to find original langauge full text versions of the Bible or Koran, or even Hadith.
Yes, and like I said, I cannot know if miracles occurred. It would be silly of me to assume they did. Or to assume they did not, I suppose. I have seen some weird shit in my life too. Maybe you are right, the fact that miracles are included in the heart of the story AND that people believed this, could be the more critical element here and I could be wrong for minimalizing this to merely making the stories more convincing. Again, I just have no basis to conclude either way. I’m not generally in the habit of making claims I cannot actually justify if asked to do so.
We do seem to be moving into a domain of different laws, a techno-logical eremos or wasteland. Heidegger has things to say here, as does Marcuse and even Hegel. Their contributions pale in front of what is required to properly articulate it. But hey, at least they tried.
Yes, VO is clearly being excluded from this transitional energetic medium-domain. For obvious reasons… those pushing the shift want to key humanity out of certain accesses to powers, truths, realizations. Reserving these solely for themselves. Mandela effects were, I believe or have no reason to not believe, a late stage fine-tuning of certain instrumental aspects of this process on higher levels. Just now at this juncture comes out the new Black Mirror episode making fun of the Mandela effect, with such a trivializing portrayal rooted firmly within the whole ‘postmodern’ woke-western ‘black woman-centric’ neoliberal narcissistic-consoomerist paradigm. It is oh so predictable. One wonders why they never bothered to ‘Mandela effect’ their own programs to make them less silly and obvious. Oh wait, that’s because 99.999% of humans don’t even give a shit even if they were made aware of these things, which they never are.
As for Buddhism I am open to being wrong. I may be operating on more Nietzschean framework here. The whole thing of self-denial. nirvana as abandonment of the world and all desires for anything in the world, merging with “non-being”… in any case, that merits its own topic. Christianity can certainly also be called nihilistic and life-denying from the right vantage point, as Nietzsche so often attempted to do.
I just read about that today. Not so nice.
Yeah some Jews evidently think like that. Or many. Still find it hard to accept, even with what I see happening. There were a lot very eager too assimilate into Europe in the 19th century.
I kept seeing a quote attributed to Nietzsche, im not even sure it is his, saying the Jews were Europes strongest race (meaning resilient), and that they hadn’t overtaken Europe showed that that was not their intention, that instead they wanted to be assimilated. N did say it was desirable in his own terms that the Jews shared their built up spiritual treasure with European bloodlines.
He had, after initial focus on slave morality, decided to address the constructive possibility. As so often happens in history, the other path was taken. Europe could’ve turned out great, and resilient. Instead it has been overtaken and hollowed out.
Try, now, to abstract this horrifying image to other very real areas of concern in the modern world today. What I am getting at is something I will not say out loud. If you know what I am referring to, and its relevant to topics like this one, then you already know. If not, at least recline in the fact that ignorance is (a certain kind of) bliss.
But what he linked contains Hebrew text.
I checked it out before, seems to be snippets with commentary translations interspersed. But yeah at least there is some actual Hebrew in there.
I am looking for something open and complete, like this, John 1 | original Greek text
In any case I really don’t care, as I already said. I appreciate the effort to find something useful though. Maybe that can be useful as a starting point for people not already versed in this stuff.
And as I already said I am not about to get into the larger totality of reasons supporting my beliefs here. I’ve done the hard work, come to my conclusions. They are mine. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about them and I have no desire to prove or disprove anything to anyone else on this subject. Not least of which because this is dangerous terrain to begin with, and as I already pointed out it is emotionally and practically-speaking very difficult and complicated stuff. I have found that a person either already understands some of this based on past work and searching into these areas, or they do not… and that my attempting to contribute to the understanding or curiosities of the latter is not going to be helpful to them or me.