It does amaze me though, to this day, to fully realize and understand how deeply American Protestants worship and self-flagellate for the Jewish people. It does make me respect Jews and Judaism, to exemplify that type of total control and dominance over a slave population, especially a foreign one.
Mitchell Heisman goes into detail why this is with the Anglo-Saxon stock though. And it’s why Græco-Romans stand apart from British Islanders in history.
I wish God would start over and make the prophets and Messiah all black as night, good night nurse!!! What the hell is wrong with you???
Why are they unconfirmed? Jesus preached “love” between 12 men. He was not married, so he didn’t engage in normal sex. And it’s clear he had other “preferences.” In Roman society, sex between men was the norm. In the army, youths and boys were used for gratification. And in power, all kinds of perversions were practiced. As for God, where do the souls go? What does “the soul departs to God” literally mean? Is everything by God’s will, or does it not apply to human suffering? Perhaps you’ll argue that there’s another “god” who brings evil to people?
As if that would change the world more to your personal wishes and preferences? As if that would bring about world peace and longetivity in all nations??
Do you even know any black people? Ever lived in a ghetto? You clearly haven’t…
I don’t actually wish it, but for your sake, maybe you’d be able to see that the promises were for all peoples, and not meant to be restricted to just one group of them. To see that, you gotta start with one group, and go from there.
If you actually read the actual Bible, you’d know that.
I feel like this should be strike three. Guhhh. K, byeee.
How does anything I said imply, “not for all peoples”???
It’s the Jewish tribe that is most exclusive on this planet and historically. If you don’t know how and why this is, then, I don’t know what more to say here. You need a Religion 101 course on ideologies and basic religious identity.
Jewish prophesies are intended for the Jewish peoples… NOT for ‘goyim’ and non-Jews.
wrong
What is Jewish identity then, if not founded on the notion of the Jew’s promises from God?
Are all peoples of the world supposed to bask in the reward of what Jews have suffered, according to your rationale??
I don’t think we should mistake our true identity for our body’s external appearance or any part of our culture that doesn’t pivot self=other. I think we should celebrate all of our differences that actually do pivot self=other, and appreciate and share them, rather than hoarding them to certain groups.
What exactly is pure rationality? More or less reasonable people differ in their conclusions about religion, ranging from hard-core atheists to hard-core Thomists. Reasonable people disagree. They understand that based on individual differences backgrounds intellectual capacity, experience and preferences, they arrive at different conclusions. Oh yeah, and incidentally, when they’re being reasonable, they don’t jump to the conclusion that other people liars because they think differently about God and such.
What do you mean by “supernatural? It would be naive to suppose everyone means the same thing by the term in the “semiotic age”.
I agree there was a paradigm shift surrounding the crucifixion of Christ
to be unpacked.
“Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. The ultimate offensiveness, though, was to one particular people: Jesus’ own. The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that there was only the one almighty, eternal deity. Creator of the heavens and the earth, he was worshipped by them as the Most High God, the Lord of Hosts, the Master of all the Earth.“ (dominion.: how the Christian Revolution remade the world by Tom Holland)
Indeed, neither did Paul according to I Corinthians 15 where, in verse 45 he refers to Christ as the “last Adam” and says he “became not a flesh and blood body but “a life-giving spirit.” He goes on in the same chapter to state that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Modern historical scholars mostly argue that the four gospels were written at least decades later than Paul’s letters and that the stories emphasizing Christ’s physicality were incremental add ons.
Yes, I think you’re right about that. So, how can those how those apparently polar opposites, Christ wanting to heal, and individual moral responsibility, be reconciled?
So by not responding to point 1) I take it you’re conceding that you were mistaken.
2)You are imagining homosexual relationships without presenting evidence.
You reduce love to sex apparently projecting and thus universalizing your own limited experience.
Your interpretation of the passion story is impoverished. There’s much more to it historically, and theologically which you haven’t thought of or read.
You have rhetorically questions, no supporting evidence and no answers.
Your demonic persona seems pretty superficial. I suggest you look at that as a good thing. It’s not really a healthy way of thinking a person ought to stick to.
First rationality would be pointed at whether Jesus Christ, the Man, existed and what He did. How does anybody know that somebody 2000 years ago, lived or not? There are records, written and/or spoken. The specific Christ has some records, established and preserved by his close followers, the founders of the Christian religion, theology, and faith. Secondly, based on that reality, there would be common elements of Christianity that people do not dispute. There are such elements, even millenniums later. Rationality would find the common themes and patterns of those elements: Pacifism, Healing, Forgiveness, Apologetics, appeal to the Common Man and Slave castes. Christianity began as an appeasement morality to the lowest and suffering of humanity. Since then, it has been used both to uplift, and other times to tyrannically control, the masses politically and religiously. That’s what the Christian religion is.
“Liar” refers to those who claim to be Christian, but are blatantly not… they are the exact opposite of what even Christians claim to be or want. That’s pretty easy to do. Westerners say they want “world peace, equality, fraternity, liberty, etc.” but then they act in contradictory fashion to their stated morals. Hypocrisy is rampant. So it’s easy to lie, in the name of Christ. If I were Christian explicitly, then I wouldn’t want to make such grandiose claims about my social morality, without a long line of examples, works, and DEEDS to prove and show evidence for my intentions and motives. Do Christians do this? Have they cleaned up the West Coast of the United States? Or, is it worse now than before? Where’s the effects? Where’s the results? People should be able to see the difference of moralities and religions. And we do.
I mean, any ‘power’ or Resurrection or Impossibility claimed by the religious or mystics that cannot be shown, proven, or even argued for. I don’t need Christ to mystical, in order for Christ to be real. That’s part of the rationality. There’s no need for fairy tales or childish notions of the supernatural. Aliens, UFOs, magic, breaking physics, none of that is necessary to inject into Christ, Christianity, or religion in general.
The Semiotic age refers to the Semitic peoples who use “The Word” (of God), since Christ, for their own agendas… the three major Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam. This was a step in human evolution, to the mass usage of language, literacy, and words (Semiotics) as the basis for human identity. It is precisely these things that we still use, to this day, to elevate ourselves out of Animal and into “Human” identity. Animals are illiterate. Humans are not. That is the basis for these Abrahamic religions and Semitic peoples.
The problem, however, is that they don’t necessarily know how to USE or UNDERSTAND the language they’ve inherited. This is the major schism between Protestantism and Catholicism, for example.
It depends on genetics, societies, and cultures. I believe many peoples across the world are simply incapable of enacting what Christ is recorded to have wanted. In other words, I don’t think most “humans” are Selfless, or even want to be, or can even imagine being. That last distinction is most critical. I believe Christ the God, was far before His time, hence the paradigm-shift of human morality and history since then.
Does he? I assume you’re speaking of the books of the New Testament because there are no records of Jesus’s existence while he is said to have lived. The earliest writings we have attesting to Jesus are the letters of Paul, who never claims he saw him while he was alive, but says he knew his brother James and his leading disciple, Peter.
The four canonical gospels were written anonymously. Two were attributed to Jesus’ disciples Matthew and John, two to disciples of his disciples: Mark a cohort of both Paul and Peter, and Luke, a cohort of Paul. In none of those gospel’s does the author claim to be an eye witness of the stories recounted.
Historical scholars have for a couple centuries mostly agreed that the gospels were written late in the first century. The earliest is usually thought to the Gospel of Mark, which is thought to have been written around 70 AD when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans. The Gospels of Mathew and Luke are usually thought to come after that and John supposed to be last —written around 100AD. More recent scholarship is calling all that dating into question and pointing to even later dates of authorship and/or redaction for the gospels and the epistles attributed to Paul.
…is to whom? To you, obviously. Isn’t it just obvious that it’s different things to different people? According to the gospel, this was already the case when Jesus began his ministry. Jesus asks “Whom do people say that I, the Son of man, am?” in Matthew 16:13 and Mark 8:27. In both instances, He is inquiring about the popular opinions of his identity among people. Peter then recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah but objects when Jesus tells him that he’s going to Jerusalem to die on the cross. Jesus then calls Peter Satan and tells him to get out of his way. According to the New Testament, the question of Jesus‘s identity is the central existential one.
Okay that’s what I wanted to know. I don’t either.
How so?
By a couple of millennium apparently. So do you see the rest of humanity catching up and if so, how?
HumAnIze wrote:>
I remember staying awake all night, later walking in the morning through hills and fields, reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the morning light on my way to the coffee shop, utterly enraptured and elevated.
By what were you utterly enraptured and elevated by?
Was it Nietzsche’s philosophy or your surroundings that enlightened you that morning.
It was certainly the combination of all of that. Nietzsche’s words, and my pleasant surroundings at the time. Staying up all night drinking coffee, smoking cigs and reading. Then taking a morning hike through nature, still reading, to arrive at a nice cafe. With nothing much to do the rest of the day other than this, or whatever else I wanted.
I assume the effect is different for everyone, and maybe you would not be so affected as I was, or perhaps it has something to do with age since I was in my early 20s at the time, and still new to philosophy, but I encourage you to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Kaufmann translation) if you haven’t. It’s great.
Yes I meant mostly the New Testament.
I believe Christ is used, whether He intended or not, to fulfill a large set of ancient, Abrahamic, Messianic prophesies. His ideology was/is a synthesis between Hellenic Platonism and Judaic Zoroastrianism. The largest discrepancies revolve around semiotics – how words, messages, and stories are interpreted by different groups and individuals.
Catholics restricted Literacy among the masses, because they knew that Knowledge is Power. If the peasantry cannot read and write, then they cannot challenge the ruling classes, and the central Church.
German Protestantism brought about the most cataclysmic change, by challenging Rome’s centralization of power, authority, and knowledge, by bringing the Bible to masses and peasantry, to read and write for the commoners.
However, the error of Protestants to this day, is that if you give a Calculus book to a chimpanzee… doesn’t mean the chimp is going to learn Calculus. It only results in a group of chimps pretending to read and throwing their books around. The same is true with Knowledge. The masses and peasants still aren’t ‘literate’ in a way that challenges centralized authority and traditional morality.
A bunch of Leftists marrying homosexuals and drag-queens in their Church, does NOT make them a moral or ethical bunch. In fact, it’s like the opposite. It does enormous damage to individuals, families, society at large. The West has been crippled by these perverse morals. Protestantism has failed to impose moral and ethical Restriction, Discipline required to stay strong as a society and body-politic. When now that is more necessary and highly demanded than ever before.
Like Socrates, Jesus didn’t write anything. So whatever, we have about him is from his interpreters. Was his view of Platonism and Judaic Zoroastrianism or was that the ideology of those who wrote about him? Besides, that a extremely broad characterization. There were a large number of schools of Platonism by that time and Judean thought wasn’t unified. So then throw in semiotics and it seems to me just about any conclusion is possible.
Protestantism was a step out of the Catholic dark ages toward the modern secular state with it’s separation of church and state which is now under attack by Christian Nationalists with their Project 2025 script which the maximally corrupt Donald Trump signed off on. All in the name of Jesus. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to go far toward convincing doubters that God is real.
In Christ’s message of an “Eternal Kingdom”, beyond the Earthly, beyond the bodily, that to me represents the Platonic Realms of the evolving human imagination. Reputation, for example, “lives” beyond one lifetime. Reputations are premised and built upon memes: Memories. Christ’s memory was carried forward by His Disciples. This is what “Christianity” brought to its early followers and adherents… a common understanding and teaching of Academic Hellenism to the proles, peasants, slaves, and masses. This is the backbone of Christianity since then, for 2000+ years.
The peasant and peon doesn’t really understand the Kingdom of Heaven; the prole lacks imagination and intelligence. That is why the masses depend upon “Authorities” to translate messages and analogies for them. It’s why Christ is the Shepherd and the masses and slaves are His flock.
I see it less about evangelizing and more about hunkering down on the Conservative Traditionalism required to preserve Western Civilization, with strict Ethics/Ethos and Morals. America doesn’t really have this anymore, mostly due to the Far-Left, Liberals, Marxists, Socialists, and Communists who pushed USA far-left in the 1960s and 70s.
@RealUn … you never responded to me. Are we done here?