I wish I could be as oblivious to consistency as you are Bob…
Shalom
Never mind, I’m sure you’ll be able to understand what really is important one day …
Shalom
Bob practices “mindfulness”, and it helps. 
“Awareness” may help even more (depending on the capacity to digest the outcome).
The capacity can be cultivated by ruthless logical thinking and getting used to (and having interest in) any negatively interpreted sensation/feeling/thought.
Like anything else, I think ‘correctness’ is a matter of degree. This becomes complicated in revealed religions because there it isn’t a matter of degree at all, some godhead has explicitly stated how things are and, that is that.
And Ing already hinted at, in the blind-men story we have to ask ourselves, “Is there a sighted individual?” If there is, let’s listen to him! That is what revealed religions are about. If there isn’t a sighted individual, then we blind men have to talk and share our experiences. And as with all things in life, there are some rare men of great skill and vision who can synthesize these disparate parts into something resembling the whole. But, given that they remain blind, how good a model this synthesis is remains open to doubt.
But even in a non-revealed condition, I think it is prudent to examine areas of contradiction and address them. Areas of contradiction between traditions force us (quite rightly) to choose sides, at least if one is going to be serious. “Maybe” as an answer will only take one so far. If the area is unimportant, dismiss it. If the area is important, address it, pick a side and see where it takes you. If what you’ve chosen doesn’t really work, be willing to switch gears and re-learn.
When I joined ILP, I very much considered myself a Xunzian of the so-called, “South of the Charles River School”. As I discussed that position on this site, I gradually became more and more dissatisfied with the framework that it allowed me to operate in. Some of its premises prevented me from fully embracing other philosophers whose thinking I was beginning to understand was more in line with my own feelings. To say nothing of the information I was presented with. It gradually became neither emotionally nor rationally satisfying to hold that position, so I started consciously shifting gears (a process I had subconsciously begun some time ago).
But to the fire, I’d like to throw in something that Liu Shu-Hsien wrote in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies:
What do people think of that statement?
The only way you can say “all roads lead to the top of the mountain” …
is if you’re on top of the mountain to begin with.
I know someone up there…do you guys?
Well, that statement was originally stated by Krishna, who in the Hindu tradition is, well, not necessarily at the top of the mountain but may as well be for all intents and purposes.
Though I disagree with the spirit of that statement. While clearly there are some teachings that are more right than others (and by extension, some traditions that can be said to be as close to wrong as anything can be) but I do not think that absolute knowledge is necessary to make that statement. So long as the practice is sincere, it follows that the wrong elements will slowly be eliminated and the correct elements will be discovered, refined, and cultivated.
But, again, this is the distinction between the approaches demanded by revealed and non-revealed traditions. In a revealed tradition, it has been discovered and so what you say follows. In a non-revealed tradition, however, it is in the process of being discovered. In one, completion is demanded/assumed and in the other incompletion is demanded/assumed.
Hi Xunzian,
Is that true? Abraham has a number of ambiguous encounters, his son and grandson too. The encounters of Jacob’s sons are dubious, leading Jacob (Israel) to Egypt (Mizraim). After years of living there and a shift in national policy towards immigrants, a leader rises that has a number of spiritual experiences that takes Israel on a journey which none of the first generation survive, into a “land of milk and honey”, where nobody is really satisfied, where they compare themselves to surrounding peoples (from which they are supposed to be distinct) and adjust to achieve the same kind of goals as those people, but end up nearly completely assimilated by them. Only two tribes remain, Judah and Benjamin, from which comes a leader that is assassinated by the authorities. It doesn’t sound so explicit to me!
But then again, there have been sighted individuals throughout history, not only in theistic religions. I think that the differentiation of theistic religions from others is still somewhat superficial. I remain thankful for what we get.
I can agree with this, but I will tell you, contradictions are irrelevant.
Interesting, I had a similar experience from a different angle.
I agree completely, and for some time I started from my own tradition and tried to appropriate insights or wisdom from other traditions. What are the problems you speak of?
Shalom
If contradictions are irrelevant, then I guess they’re relevant afterall…right Bob?
Not now son, daddy’s busy. I’ll get to you later …
Sure, you can find moments of ambiguity, but there are also moments that strongly lack ambiguity in revealed religions. You mention a few cases, but compare those to when God was speaking to Moses or when Jesus is talking. There is always room for interpretation, but those are decidedly unambiguous in a way that the other situations described are not.
As for sighted individuals in non-revealed traditions, I’m not able to agree with you on that one. While various sects of Zen do indeed have correct answers for the koans and use those answers as an assay for whether or not a person is ‘awake’, I do not think the condition of being awake can be said to be the same as being sighted in the elephant metaphor. It just means they have a pretty good idea as to what the elephant looks like: they have been able to synthesize it in a manner that is as close to correct as anyone can tell. That is a very important distinction.
I question whether blind or sighted, that one can ever truly grasp a one-to-one apprehension of any experience. A raw experience just is, and remains so until we assign meaning, which is always an interpretation from a perspective. I don’t see how one escapes the “through the looking glass darkly” issue.
OK, I think there have been “awakened” personalities throughout history because otherwise we wouldn’t have the record we have, whether of Laotzu, Chuangtzu, Buddha, Christ or anybody else that you think should be on the list but who I have left off. This is probably not, I agree, a “sighted” person in the sense of the elephant analogy, but someone who has a pretty good grasp of the reality as it presents itself to them.
But what you, tentative, question, is whether an experience of reality of any kind can be passed on, so that it becomes a one-to-one apprehension of what has happened. This is where I claim that because that is nearly impossible, the record of religious experience must be a circumscription of the experience, perhaps wrapped up in a literary style that helps invoke the same kind of reaction as the person passing on the experience had, whether it is mythology, narrative, poem, or whatever. This is why, at the end of the day, inconsistencies within scripture are irrelevant, because as much as the experience may (or may not) be the same, it is someone else experiencing with varying abilities to pass on that experience, who is perhaps even from a different cultural background and any number of variables can play a role.
In Christianity we’ve been through numerous attempts to smoothen out and harmonise the scriptural record and along the way, we have managed to produce theology that has been able to support blatant contradictions of what Christ is recorded as saying. This is even comparable with Christ’s criticism of the “Corban-rule” of the Pharisees, which he says, did exactly the same by contradicting even the ten commandments.
Shalom
Bob
Well, sure there is. Two ways, actually. The first way is to look at them askance, and try to decide if they’re ‘basically good people’. If they’re ‘basically good people’, then you can say their religion is ‘beneficial’ in a sanitized way that doesn’t actually obligate you to anything.
The second way is to actually rigorously analyze their doctrines to see if they are likely true, and contribute something to the world that hasn’t already been said better (and more accessibly, I suppose) by someone else. But this second method involves engaging in practices that you’re questioning the relevence of in this thread.
Well, then thank God those bits of the Bible are consistent, right? That’s what I’m trying to say here, is that it’s all a matter of priorities. Even if I agreed with you that, oh, I dunno, the number of Israelites who fought in some battle of Joshua’s wasn’t terribly relevant to the success of Christian spirituality, I’m sure you’d agree with me that something like the Sermon on the Mount is something on which we had better be pretty crystal clear on, eh?
But that’s nearly objective- I think you’d get broad agreemet that some parts of the Bible are crucial to the faith, and some less so. You’ve also got very personal priorities at work here, too.
If Jesus' immediate followers didn't go about telling people they were wrong, neither of us would have ever heard of Christianity because it would have died with them. Debate and philosophizing were certainly an important part of the religious culture Jesus came from, and I see no signs that He sought to change that, as He did other things. Besides, the above seems to be taking a purely selfish view, it seems to me. I can wholeheartedly agree with you that a person can become a more spiritually aware, satisfied, and I suppose godly person by simply ignoring all of this talk of inconsistencies (both Scriptural and philosophical) and trusting God to provide. [i]However[/i], it remains a fact that these conversations occur, and that it would be a good thing if at least a few Christians took part in them and spoke the truth.
I dunno. I don’t see it as any unusual level of insecurity, just security placed in the wrong places. From what I can tell, the current attitude of ‘inerrentists’ with regards to the Scriptures would have been regarded as an extreme oddity in the first half of the Church’s history, especially early on when they were still fighting over what should count as Scripture in the first place. So yeah, you’ve got this weird little…paradox called sola scriptura at the heart of nearly all English-speaking Christendom right now, and the combination of clinging to it so tightly and it being so indefensible can make a person positively neurotic!
That said, there ARE issues which should gravely concern a Christian when it comes to apologetics. That whole Jesus Tomb bit would have been a big deal if there was anything to it, maybe some philosophical arguments against the existence of God (if you’ll permit me to justify myself a bit). But the flawlessness of the Scriptures is not one of these…not because of the nature of spirituality, but just as a matter of historical record.
I’m not sure about that Bob. Reducing a divine figure to the level of non-divine individuals seems to miss a rather important aspect of all traditions involved.
While there is some historical debate as to whether Laozi was originally worshiped as a god with the Yellow Emperor in Daoism, he had lost that divine status by the time of the Hundred Schools. He would later regain his status as divine, but the sort of divinity laozi is is a very different sort of divinity from that of Jesus.
Likewise, Buddha is clearly revered in Buddhism. But compare the following two statements:
" Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even
if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common
sense."
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
Those two statements express a radically different conception of how the two individuals speaking conceive both their place within their tradition as well as their traditions view of them with respect to the world.
Hi Ucc.,
No it doesn’t, in fact the enquiry into doctrines isn’t addressed here, and instead it is the claim that there are no inconsistencies in scripture that I am saying is irrelevant. Consistency just isn’t the point, but experience is. Now doctrines are something that go a step further and grow out of the interpretations of what scripture offer us.
When teaching is reported, then you can read it at face value, but still you have to ask whether it is complete, a compilation from several occasions or just a summarisation of what had been taught. I think the most important aspect is that in every case when we read, we use our common sense to ascertain whether statements are fact, analogy or fiction. There has been a growing tendency to insist that biblical texts only be taken as fact, which I am saying is first of all ridiculous and secondly (as you have just written here) not the way you would go about analysing other religions.
You are really trying to make conclusions here that do not ring true. I have said that inconsistency is not an issue. You are rhetorically having me say, “Those bits are consistent”, but this is falsifying the issue. Consistency is not the issue throughout the Bible, across varying literary styles and different books, but a consistency of the books within their own context could be expected. However, once you start expecting texts which are not quoted by the Gospels to be consistent with what is being said there, you are quoting out of context.
Of course there are personal priorities when reading the Bible, I haven’t met anybody who doesn’t have preferences, but the question is whether they are pertinent to the issue at hand. If somebody in a Bible group discussing the story of Jesus walking on water, and starts speaking of the historical connection with Jonah in the whale, I would ask whether the members can see a connection. If it were claimed that it is of course connected because it is all Bible, then I would say that such a statement is irrelevant except in the fact that I wouldn’t regard either story as literally true.
The beginning of the message of Christ and his followers was, “At last the time we have been waiting for has come!” It wasn’t an attack against the religious or non-religious ideals of others but it was an affirmative of something long awaited. Whatever it was called or however it was described, it was “kairos”, what had been due had arrived. The opportunity had occurred and the set time fulfilled – perhaps differently to the way people had expected, but all the same.
A conversation is one thing, but a conversation that is based on humility and conviction is something far removed from the pressure of missionary compulsion. We have both once agreed that the evangelical obsession with conversion isn’t good, I would add that conversion to literalism and a need for complete consistency within the Bible is equally as bad. For the Gospel to be liberating we have to find within us a heart that can love, a heart of flesh and blood that beats out compassion, not the heart of stone in a hard necked believer who remains steadfast no matter what by some dogmatic theory.
Agreed, but it still remains irrelevant for the reasons I have mentioned above. It doesn’t matter and there is no crisis because of it. There are ways to understand the Bible that just doesn’t need complete consistency.
If you accept Luther’s situation in opposing the mighty Roman Church on issues that could have cost him his life, you can understand that he needed some strong rhetoric. Sola scriptura (“by Scripture alone”), sola fide (“by faith alone”), sola gratia (“by grace alone”), solus Christus (“Christ alone”), soli Deo gloria (“glory to God alone”) made up a creed by which he could challenge Rome and make very clear that he did not challenge God. This creed was however spoken and written five hundred years ago. There has to be some room for development in that time.
Every Gospel describes the whole issue of the resurrection very mystically. There are clear indications that they were not just recording some event, but imparting something that was more than a physical issue. I find it difficult to read the Gospels and come to the conclusion that I have understood what I am being told, but that there is more to this story than I am reading in the words. I have found that many evangelical Christians have similar questions when they are not surrounded by collective certainty. It is this influence that doesn’t accept that resurrection isn’t an everyday event and that the circumstances described can have a number of explanations that bothers me. My take on the resurrection of Jesus is not part of a collective certainty of a bodily resurrection, but I can speak firmly and without doubt, “Jesus has risen, he has surely risen!”
Shalom
Xunz,
I disagree. Both Buddha and Jesus were saying the same thing. Understanding what I have said is what is important, not me. Either of them could have made the same statement for the other. That they spoke in the idiom and tradition of their cultures is simply unavoidable. Both were acting as the conduit to awareness and both were saying that the conduit was only the finger pointing…
I absolutely disagree. I think Jesus thought he was incredibly important! He even went so far as to claim that he was God. Not that he spoke for, not that he represented as an avatar, but that he straight-up was God. That is fundamentally different from what the Buddha taught.
I don’t recall Jesus making that claim… I might be wrong however… I never took his claims too seriously… but I don’t recall him saying he was god… Is there a passage or something you might direct me to?
I’ll let the orthodox Christians answer that question. They take that as a fundamental aspect of their religion, after all. My knowledge of Christianity either comes from them on ILP or that semester I took in High School, but I really only took it so I could rub up on a particular lady . . . To give you an idea how seriously that was taken, when we were discussing the virgin birth, someone in the class asked, “Do virgins even (still) exist? (Gib es ueberhaupt noch Jungfrauen?)”
But at the very least, I can offer broad examples. Jesus routinely said that no one should worship anything other than God. Yet at the same time he not only was OK with people worshiping him but he actually encouraged it. Without serious cognitive dissonance, there is really only one conclusion that allows those elements to exist together.
Alley Oop!
This establishes Who can save man, who is God and who is the Savior.
Here it is established that they are one in the same.
Here, Jesus uses the same phrase used in the Torah (Old Testament, chopped up, for Christians) for God when God spoke, which was I AM, or I AM He. This was because the Jewish were never to write the name of God (actually we still don’t know what the name of God is, as “God” is a Western version of “YWVH” or “I AM” that makes more sense to our minds), so they would never write anything other than “I AM” for a declaration of God stating who He was.
Here Jesus specifically makes it clear that he is the Savior, of which, as you’ll read, is taken also to mean that he is I AM, or God as from the previous known scriptures in Isaiah.
Also too, Jesus makes it clear that he is not claiming to be another god, but their God from the Father. (the concept is strange, but it would be like a talking hand that you couldn’t see the body of telling you that it was of the same body, and not from another body.)
Specific focus is typically narrowed down to verse 30, but I prefer the entire context.
Hope that clears it up.