Just like with Christianity it depends on how the myth is interpreted. Fire can stand for technology. Technology has improved our lot as human beings in many ways. But humanity is also using it to destroy the planet. And the threat of nuclear war and outcome of technology hangs over us. So it’s no panacea. It needs to be encompassed by a higher vision of values if we are not to destroy ourselves with it. Where is that going to come from? Evolution? That process is too slow. If it comes it’ll have to be a matter of cultural evolution. And whether that can happen remains to be seen.
Incidentally, the interpretation which sees Jesus as a god walking on earth is an error. The story of the temptations of Jesus illustrates his true humanity. Serious temptation presupposes desire for that by which one is tempted. Like Adam and Eve, Jesus, as fully human, stood between innocence and guilt.
“Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock where an eagle daily tore at his liver, great.”
That’s because Zeus’s bitch ass got all mad because prom wuz teaching folks how to survive and shit.
“but that doesn’t actually compete with the Sermon on the Mount.”
You lost your mind dude prom would kick Moses’s ass any day.
In other words “My god can kick your god’s ass.” Brilliant argument! 
Incidentally the “Sermon on the Mount” was not a reference to Moses.
Actually, if you read the Bible … Elijah and Moses were the teachers of Jesus, Jesus even said it himself.
And who the fuck am I? The teacher of all of you.
Wait u mean Jesus did the sermon on the mount? Wtf. My whole life I thought that was Moses. Well what’s the one where Moses got the commandments? He was up on a mountain wuddint he? That’s why I wuz thinking ‘mount’.
Anyway if I shot a porn I would call it ‘Sherman on the Mount’ and the protagonist’s name would be Sherman.
I appreciate the scholarship on this. It’s clear that you’re the most serious in building an argument here. Though Felix has something to offer he is, Im afraid, entirely tied by his wish that Christianity could be absolved of all its perversities. which it cannot. Just like nazism cant be ‘reinvented’ and suddenly be decent, Christianity cant just all of a sudden be something separate from what it has done to people - thats just what it is, its legacy, and forever will be. It has all the cruelty and of the Roman empire but added to that, a belief in itself as being innocent. So it is the most dangerously violent religion earth has seen. At the very least Islam, which is almost equally violent, doesnt quite have that pretense of being innocent, it knows itself as descendent of a warlord and respects itself as such.
It is due to Islam that knowledge of the Greeks has survived. Through Alexander, those writings were exported, gratefully kept and built on in Asia, and after the worst of Christianity was over in Europe, Islamic scholars came to Venice and such cities to share the old classical treasures.
That said, I think the age of spinoffs of Judaeism is sort of spent. I dont see great things coming for the two big monotheistic faiths. I just see that the Jewish god has delivered on his promise, and the others have not.
Fixed Cross–perhaps your personal encounter with professing Christianity was too negative for you to ever see what I see. There are people within my circle of family and friends for whom that’s true and who consequently don’t see what I see. In fact, most of them don’t. Maybe none of them do. So I’m not surprised. I don’t try to persuade them of my vision. I love them as they are.
I’m the mote of dust in Jesus’ eye.
Christianity is actually an offshoot of Hinduism (the Vedas). Gandhi said it himself after reading the Bible, “why change religions when everything in the Bible is already in the vedas?”
You people think I’m insane. That’s fine.
My ‘satanist’ side is actually a great defender by accusing god.
It helps people out a lot more than Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or Sikhism combined.
I will say this and you need to understand it:
You are completely innocent if you are ignorant.
This bears repeating:
Sin is consent violation. That’s all it is. Some are worse than others. It must be understood that every being in one way or another is having their consent violated. That means that existence itself is sin.
That’s a big load off your shoulders folks.
How do you live a ‘good’ life?
You give existence the middle finger and violate consent as little as possible.
Life viewings are a real thing. You will be judged.
Where does the buck stop?
With people like me. People who say “ha! Blasphemy? Fucking, they can’t even tie their moral shoe laces, give them a break”
Blasphemy is only a concept starting with Judaism. That’s where it came from. The one sin that lasts forever. You know what a guy like me did?
I came along and said, actually, karma is just a reputation system… you don’t have to have that loaded Jewish gun held to your head every second.
That’s my grace to you.
I respect you without reservations as I know you to be a very devout man in an intellectual integrity, and you dont shun debate nor waver from your trajectory. You could be a happy pagan but you choose to be a christian, and you are able to manifest your virtue in its terms.
My own heart is complex in that it is Russian Hebrew as well as Frisian (the proper Germanic tribe here) so I have a completely saturated genetics in terms of adoration, I can not find an integrity other than in these elements Ive been given; the pagan north and the rabbinical alchemists. Christianity to me, and Ive really engaged it very openly very often, gives me impulses which interfere with my virtues, lower them to a general standard, It is my kryptonite. Ive found this out the hard way and more often than is really sensible.
The problem is that there is a great decency in Christian life as a general rule. There is much to appreciate about the Christian world, obviously - but is it not more the classicist nature in which the gospels basically form a certain kind of axle? Does the christ really represent the story that it represents or is it a mask for an asceticism that is older and has more to do with perhaps Eleusis and Apollo than with Gethsemane?
Suggestions.
A good friend of mine takes christianity as an initiation pattern of I believe seven steps; the footwashing, the crown of thorns, etc -
yes I respect that too but I dont need protocol for sanctification. I think that itself is a form of blasphemy, precluding true sanctity - to prescribe rituals in general. It is often good, but nonetheless it can not aspire directly to the source of being; it can evoke great powers but it cannot itself be the Creator.
Now because I find this so remarkably to be true, so unavoidably real, I am drawn to authors such as Nietzsche and also Crowley, people who have knowledge about ancient worship and ideas about future worship. But more than that I find in my own sanctity a war with the cold christian fever, those eerie solemn caverns of remembrance of an awful fact and an incomprehensible instance, a memory of a split psyche that rules the world by giving itself away to it, the sheer audacity of taking this memory as the temple of power speaks to the poetic sense of the west, but it has been played out on a grand scale now and its mists are… well, no longer as intoxicating as they used to be and what remains is simply a tribe of culturally true people who refuse to let go of their quite strong tradition in the face of a world which certainly offers no reasons to surrender to other causes.
I am me, and I dont speak to christians when I speak of gods, I know the storm as my truest love ever since I can remember.
I like that you quoted Harry Truman.
Much of what you say makes perfect sense to me. That which doesn’t, I’m trying to understand. I learned from a Buddhist that understanding is the way to peace. Gadamer says we all are standing in our prejudices. Where else could we be standing? Our prejudices are the judgments that have gotten us where we are in the present moment.The way forward, the way to peace, is openness to receive new light. The logos is the light that enlightens everyone in so far as they have light. And what is that light? Consciousness. That’s in the Prologue to the Gospel of John. And it runs through the perennial wisdom of the West which parallels that of the East. I don’t have to make this stuff up because it’s there. More people don’t see it because apparently their attention is focused elsewhere.
No you are not!
I appreciate your praise, although it is not scholarship, just keeping oneself informed. I generally check up on the facts I write before (or after) I write them, but before I post them. When I haven’t, it has been embarrassing.
Your comparison of Christianity with Nazism and Islam ignore the fact that the teaching if Christianity is different to its implementation, which is where the problem lies. It also overlooks the fact that all religions have scriptures that are antiquated to some degree, but the Gospels are also morally challenging, which is probably the biggest reason for the failure to implement its teaching into everyday life. Felix is right in his appraisal of the situation from a theological perspective, its history lets Christianity down, however.
It wasn’t just Islam that helped Greek culture to survive, otherwise it wouldn’t have played such a role in Christian education. Asia had its own traditions, so a comparison may have taken place, but it was by no means dependent upon transmission of Greek culture. In fact, it may just have been the other way around at an earlier stage, or both had a common source.
I was yesterday listening to a discussion of Alan Watts’ book, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and decided to open it, since I have quite a number of his books. This is what he had to say:
At the same time, Watts saw a need for a transmission of some kind from one generation to the next, but saw it as having a different form.
Of course, his books have had that effect on people like me, but they haven’t been quite as effective on others. In GB I believe that Alan Watts is hardly known, especially not by the people on the street. In other countries I have to explain to people about who he is. His biggest following is in the USA or on YouTube.
This makes my point that I mentioned earlier in the thread: Alternatives to Christianity in the West just don’t do the job they want to. People are intellectually lazy, and they need to form habits and rituals to keep them at whatever good they have discovered.
Sean D. Kelley says that Heidegger’s intention when writing Being and Time was to write the fundamental ontology. But he never finished the book because he came to realize that it cannot be written because the mode of being is different in every epoch.
The difference between epochs as modes of being is clearly illustrated by the Christian Bible. The Old and the New Testaments are two different epochs. The books of the latter Prophets in the Old Testament represent a transitional stage between the two.
To live in a different epoch is to live in a different world. It’s a different cosmology. It is as if one lives in a different universe.
The modern age took us out of the West’s Christian epoch and now we are transitioning out of modernity. To read the works of a different epoch and not see the difference is to misunderstand the writer’s world. I find this is true even when reading works from the 20th century. Even Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time could be subtitled “in the modern age”.
The strident militantism of American Evangelicals gets its character from it’s hostility in reaction to an epoch hostile to it. With the election of President Donald Trump, con man and pathological liar, the majority of American evangelicals passed from mass neurosis to mass psychosis wherein they must sever touch with reality in order to maintain their world.
I find it ironic when Jordan Peterson inveighs against postmodernism because that’s the ocean he’s swimming in and without it he wouldn’t have relevance or an audience. I see him as a psychological apologist for the perennial philosophy as an alternative mode of being.
Anyway Christianity’s original symbol was the fish which swam in the waters of a world that was not its own. Insofar is it survives and thrives, Christians must learn to do that again. Perhaps it will rediscover the spirit of its prototype, Jesus the Messiah in the process. The world the church created was as alien to Christ as the one that crucified him. Dostoevsky clearly made this point in Brothers Karamazov in the parable in which Jesus comes before the Grand Inquisitor who tells him the church no longer needs him an instructs him never to return
Ok we’ve got two interesting concepts here, hard ontological concepts; light and prejudice.
Prejudice has been slandered, but as you say, what else do we strand on? Instinct is a prejudice, so is faith. Taste is largely prejudicial, as is foresight -
we are indeed a result of a long tradition of value-selections, which are pre-judgments. Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche deal with this ultra-extensively, highly recommended. Having read much of and understood I think all of Heidegger in 2008, I completed Heideggers work with my discovering of the ‘logical grammar’ of valuing as the primary ontological form in 2011. This ontology does not change in different epochs. I moved beyond Heidegger and back to Nietzsche in demonstrating that what goes for life also goes for atoms. We are all of one ontological substance, which is valuing, “love” as the religions exultingly wish to simplify it. In fact love is ‘merely’ the most powerful form of valuing/being that is known to us, and we rightly attribute it to the gods, who are more powerful forms of being, valuing, than we are. Jesus’ message was one of becoming nothing besides ones valuing too but my criticism is that he didn’t offer the means outside of his own epoch; he taught how to value in the condition of sickness hopeless slavery and oppression - he did not teach how to value in a condition of freedom and health, which is the problem. Christian valuing is epochal, to my mind and experience, and it drives out health and happiness in some cases.
Heidegger didn’t leave B&T uncompleted for the reason Kelley mentions, but because the book wasn’t going anywhere (like many of his sentences, it just went on and on in spirals), as it wasn’t grounded in the most thorough understanding available to Heidegger. After leaving the book, he went back to Nietzsche and, in the form of lectures, to very very very carefully and thoroughly explicate what N means with ‘will to power’ - why truth must be a form of will to power, etc; these lectures are collected in these volumes. Very clearly he did not abandon the project of defining a universal ontology.
So that’s prejudice; valuing. We stand on the valuing of previous moments. If we value the wrong things, we cease to exist.
As for light; we are physically made for a large deal of light, as electrons are collapsed photons. (See this thread with Farshight)
So we are left with valuing and light as the two categories of true being.
I am harsher than that; I see that christians have let down christianity; as I judge a theorem or a doctrine only by its results and never by what its disclaimer says, never by what it is supposed to be. Always by what it is. The history of christianity is all that christianity is, I have been forced to become very cold in this approach. If a theorem says it will make you fly but in reality makes you run into walls, I won’t interpret it as the flying doctrine but as the running into walls doctrine.
Still, Im interested in your take on the gospels and the moral challenges they provide;
as likely there are people who have derived things from Christianity that drove them to noble deeds. I dont honestly know of such people - I rather notice that decent Christians were people who had decent characters and have remained decent in spite of their christianity.
Im being as strict as I can sensibly be here, Im not here to bash the religion as I am friendly to todays christians on a culture-conservative level and I am perfectly aware of the reverence some of my occult teachers (such as Gareth Knight) have for ‘Their Lord’ - I am here only to speak my own truths, findings, and stand corrected where I may be.
It certainly wasn’t the other way around, as when Alexander set to Asia it was long before Christ - he planted the knowledge there and it grew there for over a thousand years and defined the first four centuries of islam.
Aristotelean categoricalism was an important early christian method, but it was stripped of any true classical substance, as Aristotle in fact represents both the death and harvest of Greek culture. Still I would have been somewhat sweeping in my statement. Again, correct me where I am wrong.
That is truly an outsiders perspective to religion; some of these religions to me are extraordinarily fertile mines, much more so than our present day education. Religion is increasing in vehemence, especially non Abrahamic religion, and Jewish religion has reached its apotheosis in the creation of the state of Israel, which is the radical, miraculous fulfillment of the promise of their god, thousands of years after he made that promise.
I am a trained Kabbalist and Buddhist, and have a lot of experience with Hindu Gods and all of these fields are rich beyond imagining and are very capable of producing power and happiness in man. I just dont see Christianity as being on that level, as basically it denounces the gods who aren’t secretly just humans - like Socrates did, and indeed I see Socrates as the seedling for Christianity. It is a cosmopolitan rather than a cosmic system of values. It is all too human, therefore it fails in conveying the divine.
I disagree - the nature of being remains the same - valuing (see my post to Felix) - and ancient religion shave developed very efficient means to enhance valuing, to enhance life.
Yes, they produced abominable dogma as well, but Indian and Jewish religion thrive on the same values as they were founded thousands of years ago, and they offer access to deep realities.
In terms of pure devotion I am a European pagan, I believe in Zeus, Artemis, – Odin, Loki - beings much different from monotheistic deities.
I have been approached by the Odinic gods at one point which forced me to believe in them.
I wasn’t raised on religion, but rather on physics, astronomy and psychology, but I was confronted with the ‘supernatural’ when I was 21 and set out to discover what religion is. Just to give you some context of where my ranting comes from.
I just woke up, my writing is chaotic.
I must stick to my truths and that makes me sound harsh; Christianity through staggering brutality imposed itself on very happy peoples - Celts, the Gauls, the Goths, the Germans, the Vikings - people who had their own gods and ways of life that were very wholesome by todays standards. We dont need alternatives to the oppressor - we need to be rid of him and go back to our old gods. Thats what Ive done and millions are doing with me. It is like waking up from a nightmare. Here is a thread on the gods to which we are re-awakening in the west.
To all Christians reading this some of whom may be my brothers in arms - I never know where Im being read by whom but find out later -
I am not here to bash christianity just for the sake of it. Ive learned of some of its hidden meanings through yogic philosophy, and I have immense respect for the yogi master that seems to have taught Jesus in the decade he was away -
but something is clearly lacking in the doctrine. I wish for this lack to be overcome. Whether that means christianity is overcome, or that it finally realizes itself as a doctrine which doesn’t hate its own power, that is not up to me - I am the challenger. I demand of the religion that it rise beyond what it has been, because these are the days of transitioning to a completely new aeon and things have to be done now.
I have continually asked, wondered, what is “the Christ”?
What is the “cosmic Christ”?
Im not asking for repetition of doctrine, Ive probably read everything - Im asking in terms of - what must it be, for it to dignify the Earth?
In my opinion, when Christianity overtook Europe, it was lost, because it had no definition of itself as a power, only as a subject.
What must Christ become so to her comfortable with its power?
Ive earlier and elsewhere proposed the concept of the Horned Christ.
Can we work with this?
I cant.
Because of the dichotomy ‘jesus’ vs ‘satan’. I just cant make sanctity out of that.
It is tyranny, it forces me to choose between entities both of whom I do not love, both of whom have done nothing to indicate that they value what I love.
Youre either with me or against me. Thats the christian logic and I aint with that.
To that voice I say; Im against your whole dichotomy and I wont fall in the trap of becoming a satanist just because you desecrate what is holy to me and he is your enemy.
All the religion ever says about the devil is precisely what has been done in the name of the jesus.
Ive tried, I really tried.
Zookers are you serious?
That tugs at my heart a bit.
Can you really not see the antithetical difference between Jesus and Satan? Those are like extreme opposites. It’s like not seeing the difference between North and South - “They are both directions so they must be the same.”
I think maybe you are confusing satanistic subversion of Jesus’ teachings with what Jesus was actually saying. Jesus was far from being anti-jew - quite the opposite (despite the Christian vs Jew warring). It is like those who claim that Mr Trump was anti-American - just extremely daft political stupidity.
Jesus was = STOP HATING EACH OTHER!
Satan was/is = HATE EVERYONE!!
How can you not see that?
Catholic Christianity became support of the Roman Empire which was antithetical to the Judaist effort to destroy the Roman empire - two political/religious opponents.
So in the war, it became Jew vs Catholic - war of secret, behind the scenes, cabals to reign over all mankind - one through creating division and one trying to unite.
Jesus was all about trying to unite - although knowing that many would insist on dividing - “either you are trying to help unite or you are part of the move to divide”.
Jesus was just saying that either you are striving to help life help itself or you are something else - not trying - or actually serving divisiveness. What else is there? You have to be one or the other.
Satan is all - ALL - about creating division by NOT going along - by hating the “other” - whoever that might be. And even if you do not hate - by doing nothing - you are helping the division. It takes conscious effort to stave off the intrinsically easier persuasion to depart - to separate - to become a part of the chaos of the insubstantial - the space between the substantial.
So IF you are not trying - you are the problem. - you are the anti-life - the devil thwarting the conserving of life. Life is the effort - and the real Jews know that.
If you really are trying - you are life - the opposite of Satanism.
Satanism is Mindless Power - with total disregard of life.
You either regard life in your decisions or you disregard life for sake of your mindless urges. Which are you?