Who are your favorite Christian philosophers?

Mine are Pascal, Aquinas and Augustine.

I like some of the members of the mormon church.
Good philosophers don’t need to be famous.

Thanks Dan.

Are you a member of that Church?

Kierkegaard.

I was baptised like 2 years ago.
I’m a member of the LDS.
I tried to explain to them that i believe we need to work out our own salvation.
Andrew agreed with me, or appeared to.
I was trying to say that through prayers, meditation and good karma / alms,
was the way to work out a better after-life.
Any help from God or Jesus would be great,
but you’ve got to do things for yourself.
It’s like a natural law.

Thanks.

Do you attend LDS service?

What do you think of Joseph Smith?

We all wear masks at the church and meet every Sunday.

I think Joseph Smith did a lot of really hard, difficult things.
Somethin big went down.
I can’t be 100% sure what happened,
but some God-stuff was probably happening.

We’re you raised in a Church?

Why did you choose that Church over others?

I was raised Jehovah’s Witness.
I chose LDS because it just seemed like a good idea.
Not perfect, but, a good idea.

Did you get shunned after converting by the Jehova’s Witnesses?

JW never really shunned me.
I am still attending JW meetings on Zoom,
and also brief book study with Clayton.

people have missed the “modern” era most influential Catholic Philosopher,
Heidegger…it is quite clear when reading “Being and Time” that it is a
religious book… Being is simple another form for god in Heidegger…
every time one reads “Being” in “Being and time” just replace that word
with god… so, the actual title of “Being and Time”
is “God and Time”…

Kropotkin

Or at least that’s a possible interpretation of “Being and Time” which by the way is compatible with Paul Tillich’s theology which proposes that God is Being itself.

I’m not even close to an expert but I thought Heidegger was an agnostic?

Well he was heavily inspired by Husserl, who was not only a Christian activist in his views but a Catholic.

All those guys belong to a school called phenomenology, which largely owes its existence to some late XIX, early XX century German priests who innovated a renewed look at Aristotle. So, generally speaking, all phenomenology is a traditionalist Catholic Aristotelian branch. The Renaissance had done some damage to the whole idea, but the phenomenologists “resolved” it by, primarily through Husserl, proposing a strict separation between science, and basically any kind of disciplined thought, and what they called “real philosophy.” The science part, through Galileo, had been the largest part of the undoing of Aristotelian Catholic thought. It is sort of to Aristotle what Neoplatonic mysticism is to Plato.

I find it convoluted and masturbatory. Nothing is achieved, or of transcendence said or arrived at. Though it did have a big influence on Freud, because of the way it categorically separates the mind from what it perceives, but Freud of course was no Christian.

It also influenced Schopenhauer, who nevertheless rebelled against (and destroyed) the categorical aspects so suited to Catholic dogma, and then Nietzsche who united the mind back with what it perceives without failing any of the challenges of this school, by going back to the very original Greek philosophers who started philosophy. Schopenhauer was also good at rendering homage to the old Greek tradition, beside Aristotle or Socrates.

Myself, I like Leibniz. He does the opposite: he dedicates himself to finding exactly how it is that religion, philosophy and science do intersect. Along with Newton, he invented modern math. Because he loved Galileo as much as any real scientist, he saw no reason to back away from what he innovated in terms of thinking about the things philosophy traditionally considers: existence and the physical world as one indivisible reality.

Freud is somewhat resistant to evolution, he gives a fully formed structure with no discernable past or future. Liebniz is far more of a precursor to what we know understand as evolution, and he did it from a strict Catholic perspective.

  • ERRATA -

In the second to last paragraph, I originally had written ‘Descartes’ where ‘Newton’ was intended.

I like about Liebniz that his main concern in theological terms is one that fore some reason tends to get glossed over or swept under the table: the Holy Spirit, and the Grace of God.

I also like about him that, for him, religion was always a celebration.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary , Saint Monica and Augustine

Augustine was for eternal punishment. I prefer Matthew Fox. (See " Original Blessing")
Incidentally a pope told Fox to shut up. A pope did the same to Teilhard de Chardin.
So I’ll choose Chardin and Fox as favorite Christian philosophers.

It would seem that most philosophers, throughout All time, were religious or from a religious background, before they became irreligious… in some form or another. It seems to be a great myth that they were all born into a Pagan household.

I think that most adults from such backgrounds go from religious to irreligious… unless their born-again religious, then it’s the opposite… which ties in with Peter’s point nicely.

Found this to be the most interesting one mentioned here. Ive always held great sympathy for the man but find it hard to read him. His suffering seems to me to be the product of Christianity, of understanding and accepting its final consequences; I would wish for him that he had known Jung.