Lord have mercy.
Previously, on ILP:
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/search?context=topic&context_id=49511&q=Constantine%20%40Ichthus77&skip_context=true
He was a harbinger of the end of civilization as they knew it so in terms of the metaphysics of the time that would be a devil. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus returned the compliment by calling them āchildren of the devil.ā
The name calling in the New Testament is almost as bad as on ILP.
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Thatās funny Felix.
When I think back to Jesus ā¦
He was in a really difficult position.
How do you come back to uphold the laws of the Jews when they were insane.
Jesus died because of Jewish hypocrisy.
Did he save them? By dying?
Thereās so much I and anyone about this particular story can say and do.
If Jesus had been born in India, him calling himself god would just make them shrug their shoulders.
But the hyper charged Jewish world thought that was blasphemy.
The four gospels, as well as the historian, Josephus, show that Second Temple Judeans were split into competing factions. Jesus was famously hard on hypocrisy according the gospels. The collaborators probably saw themselves as pragmatists, doing what was best for the people. Jesus was uncompromising.
Yes, India was relatively stable, but Buddhist debaters and other schools were occasionally not above using the devil epithet on each other. After Nagarjuna and Avi Shankara there wasnāt a hairbreadth between them. Brahman equals the pure light of the void that you are.
We are in the image of God. Js.
ā¦the form of the formless.
I just tell people theyāll get these jobs someday.
God.
Devil.
Death.
Strangely enough. We all celebrate a new person who gets one of those jobs.
I watched all my friends die before me.
God
Devil
Death
Iām very sad. New blood will take their place.
I could resurrect them, but people have been working eons to hold these jobs and people should celebrate them.
Iām ex god. Iāve had all those jobs before.
The form of anything that has form!
(which is everythingā¦ becauseā¦ omniscience & what not)
The form of all forms is formless.
Hey Felix.
A shout out to you.
Set theory eh?
You could even say the formlessness of all forms is form.
We can trade zen koans all day
This idea is often associated with the concept of transcendence, where the ultimate reality or truth cannot be fully grasped or expressed through conventional forms or concepts. Behind the diversity of forms we perceive in the world, there exists a formless essence that unifies and transcends them all, but we are in an existence that demands that we are mindful of forms in order to survive.
This seems to me to be the paradox that many struggle with. It is also a question of perception of beauty which raises our souls after a long grey winter. It poses the question as to what happens to such perceptions when our physical frames deteriorate. Is beauty only a misconception?
Excuse me but how do you have unity without form?
Sorry, I seem to have taken us off topic. The word āperformativeā has a negative connotation which you may not have intended i.e. that something is fake and inauthentic or only for show. I donāt think that applies to Jesus who by all accounts was authentic. If someone took offense at the proposition, maybe thatās why.
Now, was Jesus a performance artist? Perhaps in a special sense. Like prophets that came before him, he sometimes performed symbolic acts, rather than just preaching words. The Gospel of John emphasizes this point and has been called the āsigns gospel.ā These acts were not just miracles but rather symbols pointing to the transcendent One. So, if Jesus was a performance artist he was so in the highest sense of the word.
Set theory points this way as does all truth.
Unity is synonymous with oneness i.e. the quality of one. The ultimate one has no second. It is infinite and unbounded. Every form has extension and boundaries.
Now in deference to this threadās topic, we could say that Jesus was a per-FORM-ance artist i.e. he brought form to the formless.
You cannot have unity with only one individual, but you can have wholeness with more than one, but if the two are opposites, that is not the case.
Oopsā¦ I need to reply to H* here:
Not so. The word āunityā means the state of being one, or oneness, and the opposite of being divided. In mathematics, āunityā is a synonym for the number āoneā, which represents a single entity. In terms of monism, the one is uncountableāwithout a second.
Wholeness or nada.
There are three kinds of one like there are three kinds of hearing. Hear me out.
Think about the analogy of this thread. When you go back to the main menu of threads it says there are 78 replies. But then when you click on the thread it says there are 79 because it counts the first one in the total. The main menu is only counting the replies to the first one. And the entire thread, taken as a whole, counts one thread, not 78 or 79āthough, it couldnāt even count (have value as) one without them.
Similarly, there is the pie you eat and taste. There is the memory of the pie you eat and taste. Then there is the lucid experience (like a flashback, or a dream) of eating and tasting pie, though there is no pie there, and it is no mere memory, because you can taste it, but it is not exactly the same as actually eating and tasting the actual pie (because it isnāt there).
There is a reason that Iām saying this but I canāt tell you that right now. Iām sorry.
Jesus was a performance artist in the way he embodied the spirit and demonstrated love. The problem seems to have been that although his followers and critics were amazed, their reactions were all too human. His followers started talking about positions in a future realm, and his enemies accused him of serving the devil. It seems that the events happened so quickly that only after the shock of his execution did his disciples follow his lead and find, thereby, how he lived through what they did.
I think the perceived synchronicity of events led to the beliefs expressed in the Gospel of John. In John 11:49-50, we read, āBut one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, āYou know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.āā
The idea of the atonement through Jesus is born here (although it was probably not meant that way) and developed further to include the conviction that the spirit of creation at work at the beginning of time had intervened to save Israel, which was then seen as an atonement āto gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.ā This may have been the inspiration for Paulās vision.
The problem historically is that even if Caiaphas was right, the destruction came after all in 70 AD. By then, Paul had taken the message to the Roman Empire, primarily among the Greeks, and further developed the idea. This turn of events gravely influenced the relationship between Jewish and Greek Christians. It changed the cultural perception of the event, perpetuating it when Rome came under Christian influence and eventually its rule.