Date: August 24th, 2020 10:21 AM Author: Appetizing nofapping temple
immediately thereafter, his disciples formed a conspiracy: let's all pretend he resurrected and we personally witnessed it. We stand to gain nothing from this, but should be fun.
under pain of torture and death, they all stuck to this conspiracy, because hey why not
Date: August 24th, 2020 10:37 AM Author: Appetizing nofapping temple
multiple wives and justification for trek to start a new political entity that they would control?
Gospel might be bullshit but it justified no earthly riches or pleasure for its early adherents. Stronger critique might be that these people had shit lives and took solace that they were purchasing their way into heavenly glory or something. In the meantime they had to give all their stuff to the poor, travel around living on alms and face down certain torture and death
Date: August 24th, 2020 10:41 AM Author: Tantric rehab
1. Sociological explanations actually work against you because of the nature of misinformation transmission.
2. Ancient people spoke in dumb as hell language. One guy could have had a dream and everything became literal. It’s easy to see the resurrection is the same kind of story as is Elija’s work with the Baal worshippers. Neither happened IRL but that only marginally diminishes their spiritual import.
3. The theology developed around the fake resurrection is incredibly strong, such that dying for misinformation / a strong theology is perfectly reasonable. The truth of the logos is obvious and worth dying for. The resurrection is irrelevant.
Date: August 24th, 2020 10:45 AM Author: Appetizing nofapping temple
the sociological explanation is no substitute for faith, but faith is not arational, so it's something.
"People then were just dumber and didn't really understand the difference between allegory and fact" is an interesting claim, but would need a lot of evidentiary support that I don't think you could marshal, even if youre right. We just dont have the access
I also think attempts to excise the resurrection out in order to strengthen christianity are silly. the gospels were entirely death-resurrection stories, and if anything the ministry/biography stuff developed with time and obvious less importance. The ONLY thing the early church wanted you to know was death-resurrection
Date: August 24th, 2020 10:57 AM Author: Tantric rehab
I am happy to have faith, I can have faith in a spiritual fact established through revelation to me, but I can’t have faith in a physical fact with a sociologically origin. Reading Paul is a good way to understand the spiritual fact of the resurrection, but there is nothing I could (realistically find and) read that would convince me of the physical fact. It is possible the spiritual fact could overcome my disbelief in the physical fact, but the nature of that knowledge claim becomes so distorted that it’s not a claim to knowledge of an historical event, it’s a claim that I care more about the spiritual fact than the physical one. If I read Paul and I believe in the bodily resurrection, what I believe is that someone can write persuasively enough to convince me to hold a mental state in which a god man was resurrected from the dead. That I have this mental state, that I even hold it fervently, is no evidence that the means by which Paul nspired that thought in my mind is the truth of the underlying physical claim. It’s evidence of a capacity of the mind, and perhaps a capacity of the mind to understand a truth about itself. Tolkien persuasively inspires mental states the underlying reality of which we do not infer from their existence in our minds, but those mental states do tell us something about ourselves.
I’ll think more about your second point, but I think the story of Elija and supernaturalism generally in the OT gives us some understanding of the way the people of that time wrote and thought about irl events, ie they seem to use allegory to describe the spiritual significance of events that likely contained far less supernaturalism than their later accounts suggest.
What does it mean to say Jesus is Christ and that he was raised from the dead? It means he was such an embodiment of the Logos that he survived his physical death and now lives in our hearts and is made manifest in the material world to such an extent that it makes sense to say given the horrendous linguistic tools we have available to understand the mind/body problem, or the subject/object distinction, that Christ was resurrected. But that claim is a claim to a transcendent truth, not a physical one. And the reason we say that about Christ and not our grandma is because Christ was a world historic figure who did an heroic thing while a group of highly spiritual people with a proclivity for supernaturalism and story telling watched and were profoundly moved, and that world historic thing just so happened to be an heroic act so precisely in line with the deepest aspect of our human will that we can tell the story and be shaken to our absolute core when we see our inner life so perfectly reflected externally.
Date: August 24th, 2020 8:11 PM Author: Pumonymous
There is no reliable evidence of the original disciples having been killed for their beliefs, and no reason to think that recanting would have saved them. And religious fanatics have willingly gone to their deaths for all sorts of mistaken beliefs throughout history anyway.
Date: August 24th, 2020 10:43 AM Author: Tantric rehab
Maybe you are intellectually honest in your private time. I have no problem respecting the people on this website enough to express doubts here. I don’t say this shit to almost anyone irl, especially not those in my congregation. Though I do tell them Paul is a Fraud.
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:35 PM Author: Tantric rehab
i haven't done a serious analysis but it seems clear that the marginal value of Paul is exegetical - its not obvious to me he makes major doctrinal points that are (1) necessary for salvation, and (2) not found in the gospels. indeed i find much of Paul deleterious to the gospel message.
the foundation of the religion is that Jesus is the Christ, from which most auxiliary truths can be deduced without Paul's interpretation of the events or even the written accounts of Jesus's life in the gospels.
if we take seriously the notion that Christ reconciled man to God, then that world-historic event, together with a very minimal relaying of this truth (the total set of propositions for which is much smaller than all those propositions contained in the NT) is sufficient for our salvation.
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:40 PM Author: Electric gaming laptop stag film
"indeed i find much of Paul deleterious to the gospel message."
-Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished.
-Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
-“Scoffer” is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride.
-Love [Charity] is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
-And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, ***pride***, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:44 PM Author: Electric gaming laptop stag film
1800 of tradition gave you a bible, no significant group, not even the radical protestants tried to excise Paul, but you--have special insight. your insight is not special or important. it is a hindrance.
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:19 PM Author: pea-brained crimson brunch
in what sense was he the incarnation of the logos? (I’m curious both what you think logos is in the world of NT theology and what you think about Jesus of Nazereth)
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:39 PM Author: pea-brained crimson brunch
is the scandal a bodily as opposed to a spiritual resurrection? or is your problem more (as you seem to indicate above) that a contingent historical event isn’t an appropriate object of faith?
if the latter how can you accept faith in the incarnation?
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:47 PM Author: Tantric rehab
The incarnation is self-evident from the crucifixion. Only the incarnation of the logos would suffer the death Christ suffered.
There are great theologies that attempt to do this with the resurrection - i.e. the only way Christ was able to properly suffer the passion was because of the inevitability of the resurrection (put differently, the crucifixion couldn't happen unless the resurrection was certain), and I get very close to buying that.
Date: August 24th, 2020 12:56 PM Author: pea-brained crimson brunch
corroborated by who? Josephus? if Josephus said Jesus was raised but he was a fraud raised by satan would the resurrection narratives regain their revelatory value?
Date: August 24th, 2020 1:03 PM Author: Tantric rehab
not a history scientist but the evidentiary standard (e.g. number and quality of non-biblical contemporaneous accounts) necessary to corroborate an a pirori plausible event like the the crucifixion of a jew is much lower than the evidentiary standard necessary to demonstrate the physical fact of the bodily resurrection of that jew.
There are many types of supernaturalism I believe in - they are primarily circumstances of exceedingly low probability (coincidence) that nevertheless obey the known laws of physics, or circumstances of spiritual healing. I also believe generally in a mind-body gestalt that God intervenes in, and I believe God orders and plans lives and destinies. But to believe that a man was dead and came back to life - there is no textual or sociological means of demonstrating this truth. There may be a revelatory means of demonstrating this truth, but there has yet been no such revelation in my life.
Paul gave me a christophany once, but then I remembered he was just writing a book, and people say all kinds of things when they write books, and then I realized I was seeing Paul's Christ, not Christ.
Date: August 24th, 2020 1:54 PM Author: Territorial Boltzmann Lettuce
ITT: cattle goyim feverishly debating details of a make believe story meant to lull said goyim into acceptance of their role as cattle in the mystical, fact-free hope to be rewarded in the afterlife
Date: August 24th, 2020 4:28 PM Author: Tantric rehab
Jews are demonstrably the most successful group of people in the history of humanity, but at enormous costs. Christianity is a way of splitting the difference (Judaism is “complete”) that takes the edge off the costs but at the expense of the benefits.
Hard to say which is more true, but I’d venture to say Judaism is incomplete in so far as it fails to take the will as an object of worship. In that regard it’s an incomplete metaphysic that’s still “in the world” insofar as it still operates under implicit parameters Christianity makes explicit and rejects, giving Christianity a truly comprehensive metaphysic.
Date: August 24th, 2020 5:00 PM Author: Territorial Boltzmann Lettuce
ok, i agree with that, but how does it make it metaphysically true? it just makes it beneficial to society. the virtues it promotes led to western civilization and then technological industrial civilization
Date: August 24th, 2020 5:07 PM Author: Tantric rehab
By theoretical virtues I meant there are aspects of the theory that have properties we typically associate with theories that are true, like simplicity, explanatory power, and correspondence with observation. It helps us understand the world, and that’s a mark of truth.
Another theoretical virtue is benefit to society, because we would expect a metaphysical theory of God or the universe or whatever to lead to good outcomes. To the extent you think western civ and western tech are better than societies and technologies coming from other religions, Christianity might be more true.
There’s also the lived experience of Christians who, as they mature in faith, offer reports of increased community, empathy, peace, etc, which also speaks to truth as a function of efficacy.
Date: August 24th, 2020 5:09 PM Author: Territorial Boltzmann Lettuce
re: your first paragraph there are plenty of simple lies, that part seems silly. what does christianity explain about the world to you or helps you "observe" it better? as an outsider it's gibberish.
second paragraph i agree with & that's why i like and respect christianity as an outsider
third paragraph, if you believe that, you would have greater appreciation for mormonism, which you don't seem to have. they raise big and societally healthy families, much more so than other denominations of christianity currently. of course, theologically, it seems like a complete load of shit
Date: August 24th, 2020 5:14 PM Author: Tantric rehab
1. it is really good at explaining the tension in human nature between exerting one's will and surrendering to circumstance. The psychology of Christ on the cross is an extended meditation on the suffering of being an embodied animal with a will to live that's at the same time subject to the will of other men and to God. christian theology builds all kinds of cool solutions to the optimization problem.
3. that's a good point, don't think i have a great response.
Date: August 24th, 2020 4:48 PM Author: vermilion cerebral alpha
maybe when The Mary's went to help him while he was on the cross, they gave him a concoction of herbs and frankincense and whatnot, that put him in an induced coma, and when they took him down he was actually still alive. Then later, in the cave, they administered more herbs and myrrh and whatnot till be woke up, alive to tell the tale. I think this explanation is more plausible, but the written story is, of course, much richer.