Thats actually a really powerful interpretation.
Damn Bob thats harsh.
Kind of adds to my point though doesnt it?
“Jesus’ pathos is not universal”
Sure it is, but because you’re mythologizing the guy you make this whole thing more intriguing that it really is.
The guy was a normal dude who happened to become an exemplar of all those virtues that have evolved out of and from cooperative human group behavior over a hunerd thousand years.
Er’body got a little Jesus in em. And er’body got a little Nero in em too.
For Jew-God, death is the solution to every problem.
Death and plagues and curses and demons.
This is why my God is the Oversoul.
It creates much souls to inhabit reality.
It did not produce the bible,
nor is it bound to Judaism.
It is a true creator.
If you take into account the historical process since Jesus, it seems quite apparent from my point of view, that people felt that they were heading for some kind of hell. There was always talk about the end of days and numerous rulers have been associated with the antichrist, so life hasn’t been always pleasant. The early Christians were even sure that they didn’t have to marry because the end was nigh. It was Paul who ended up making a collection to support the Jewish Christians, who had sold everything and lived a kind of communism and after a short time realised that they had been a little presumptuous. Later, there was even a strange keenness to be martyred that the Romans didn’t understand, but if you believe that everyone is going to hell and that your premature death could save you, perhaps it makes sense.
Of course, two thousand years on, with everything getting better (at least statistically), and religion being pushed out by the enlightenment, we tend to look on these ideas and wince. People start cherry-picking the Bible, and we end up with the cuddly God that loves everyone. There is no more talk about the bodies coming out of the graves when the fanfare is blown, although there still are the rapture movies. The Gospels provide us with a certain amount of solace, the sermon on the mount is rid of the uncomfortable parts, and the difficult parts of Paul’s letters are pushed to one side. The church in Europe is more of a moral authority, but the scandals are more of a sexual nature rather than the cross. In Germany, it is interesting that more and more women are becoming protestant pastors, turning God more into a divine Mother than the wrathful father.
There is also the blending of Christianity with Buddhism, and an increase of pastors, who encourage meditation alongside prayer and contemplation. It becomes obvious, the more one becomes familiar with Platon, that there has been more of his philosophy taken on in some cases than teaching from the Old Testament. It could be said that early Christians wouldn’t recognise the teaching of the church today, and that in some cases, they may even be repelled by it.
_
There comes a point in time, where others’ religiosity/beliefs, is no-one else’s business, but that person’s alone.
Why… after all these years, do you ask these questions/want to know?
Btw… don’t put all your Christians or Catholics in one esoteric basket, like your uneducated pal Pezer did… the uneducated f**k!
Is there a time when no questions are to be asked? Is a person’s beliefs only their own because they can’t reconcile them with experience?
Surely a discussions forum is the place to try them out …
That was for Fixed, not for you… if you don’t mind and pardon me.
Despite my apparent criticism of modern-day Christianity, which is really a criticism of the claim of continuity, which isn’t there, it is important that religion develops with humanity. I see religion/spirituality as an inherent aspect of humanity, and something that, if it isn’t pursued, warps into some kind of ideology. In the 20th century, we had so many deaths to lament because the spiritual aspect of religion was lost, and ideologies took their place, costing millions of lives.
I believe that it was Schleiermacher who said that we humans experience the things that happen, and we experience ourselves in the midst of them. And if we pay attention and are receptive, we experience something that in Christianity is called the “grace of God”. It happens in strange ways that are as varied as the circumstances in which we live. It is also not something we can grasp, and yes, sometimes we experience grace far from the organised religions or scriptures, in places we don’t expect it, or in circumstances we don’t think it is appropriate. When such things happen, the experience is at least on par with the accounts of God’s grace that we find in the Bible.
That is, organised faith often leads us astray, as does doubt when we are sick or when we fail, because we want something tangible, something predictable, something concrete. We think if we do this or that it must happen, but it doesn’t work that way. Grace is given, “the Spirit blows where He wills”, and we humans, when we experience it, long for it to happen again. That is why science fails to get it, and why organised religions harden and get dogmatic, because this aspect is missing.
There is a story in the Old Testament that describes this. The prophet Elijah is described as a religious zealot whose spiritual energy is seemingly endless, but then, all of a sudden, he feels alone and fearful. When Elijah climbs the mountain in search of his God, he is asked: What are you doing here? And after the cataclysmic storm, earthquake and firestorm and silence ensues, he hears nothing but a low whisper. But he knows what he has to do. I believe that Schleiermacher found the same calm and clarity in the hustle and bustle of his time that we often lack.
I believe that something spiritual started the whole Christian movement off, but in a short time it was lost to the masses, and the church tried to regain it by all sorts of measures. It was there, but it was in the places distant from Rome that it occurred, and the Christians who experienced it were lowly, humble people. Occasionally, it occurred amongst theologians who dared to speak up, but the church silenced most of them. In this way, Grace was shut out from the congregation and only single, sporadic cases occurred. Relatively recently, the church has allowed the letters and sermons of people, like Meister Eckhardt, to surface, and we have discovered other cases in other religions, which shows that it isn’t only a Christian experience.
This is brave Christian worship …
I have my doubts that anyone on this thread actually understands Christianity - although obviously Bob comes closest.
Christianity came about through the Jews.
Jew God kills a lot of guys.
He resurrected a hand full,
but man, the death tole.
Jew God is easily angered.
Angry gods demand sacrifices.
Aztex and Christianity are angry-god religions.
Christianity is the refuge of the coward. For those too scared to live life they can always wait for their reward.
If they were brave they’d all do something noble for which they would be crucified.
But they are all just weaklings, cowering under the graven images of their gods and heroes hoping to be not noticed.
This is a failure to understand history and the increase in oppression that was caused by Christianity.
I think that yours is the failure to understand what I am saying here. However, I can add to the statement.
Christianity was about believing in the cross as the redemption of sin and consequently from the coming wrath of God. Of course, if you believe that, then anything you do to try and make people believe in the cross can be regarded as saving them from a fate worse than death. That gave some particularly bad people an excuse to exercise their brutality in trying to force people to convert. The fact that this has absolutely nothing good about it was apparently lost to them.
Are you brave then? What is noble about what you do, and what risks do you take to do it?
“don’t put all your Christians or Catholics in one esoteric basket”
No mags no. They all go in the same esoteric basket. I’m sorry.
And your reasoning behind that is?
I mean the minor doctrinal differences don’t change the fact that they both have the same oranges.
The dispute isn’t always about the historic truth of some or many of the events described in the text. The dispute is about the claimed revelatory nature of the text. That it claims evidence of the existence of a god and spins wild stories of miracles and burning bushes and resurrections and voices from the sky and all kinds of crazy shit.
There is an immediate disconnect here now. I’d not spend much time trying to convince myself that I’m not supposed to take those stories literally and that the big g put em in there just to fuck with me. I just dismiss the whole mess and put the burden on god to produce a better text (which he finally did through Spinz, thank god).
That’s the basket, anyway. Claims to divine knowledge and experience. If u do that, u go in that basket.
I agree that this aspect is problematic. The revelation of spiritual truth has always been put in stories, the source being, of course, of metaphysical nature, whether gods or daimons. Inspiration was seldom assumed to have come from the receptor. That would have been too presumptuous. However, it is a question that falls into two versions, either there is a spiritual realm of some kind, or inspiration is an internal process that evades the awareness of the inspired. Of course, we favour the second explanation, despite the fact that the nature of things seems to indicate an inevitable social decline and degeneration rather than progress and regeneration.
The development of a moral codex, however antiquated we find it to be, especially when it guides millions of people over millennia, is quite a strange phenomenon. I’m not saying that it is perfect, not by any measure, but it did help us develop towards the enlightenment and the pursuit of truth. The lack of modern vocabulary shouldn’t make us overlook the fact that the church did lay a fundament and did enable antiquity to become a guiding influence towards science. History is far too complex to just put all of its cruelty and agonies at one door.
What made you think I was referring solely to the texts? I wasn’t… I was referring mainly to the Sects.
Depending on historical timeline, different Peoples and Nations make up the Faith, and use different bible versions, and worship different figure heads and Saints.
One size Faith, does not fit all Rites and Sects… they are much and varied.
K: as a lifelong Atheist, I gotta say, I am with Bob on this one… …
don’t tell us about other people, tell us about yourself…can you answer
Bob’s questions?
Kropotkin