Christianity

[Alexis Jacobi]

The suffering in the universe, for biological beings, is grounded in the core, inescapable fact that life (nature) is a merciless mill in which creatures feed on other creatures in an unending cycle. In our human world our fundamental lament, our source of pain and angst, in that life has a predatory aspect and element.

Most systems of thought, most religious-philosophical interpretive systems, such as the one that employs the term samsara (material entanglement) define our actions, what we are forced to do in a predatory system, as that which binds us. We get further and further enmeshed in karmic reactions and fall further and further into ‘samsara’.

How did this come about? How did the soul get enmeshed? What is this place and how did we get here? Those are the core questions.

Religious praxis — Christian praxis — is both an interpretive act and a method of disentanglement. The core message? “You will never get out of this without help from outside” (above, divinity, that which exists outside of entanglement, and causation).

The motif is constant — eternal.

If the errant soul (in these models) had no means to confront and cure karmic entanglement (the consequences of sin in Christian terms) then “doom” prevails. And eternal, irremediable Hell, absolute punishment, would necessarily result.

But in that system of interpretation that gave the term ‘samsara’ the possibility of redemption extends to all levels of reality, be they heavenly or hellish worlds.

Thus a more expansive sense of ‘justice’ is understood to be fundamental.

The eternal Christian hell is unjust only because the “hand of grace” is proposed not to extend even to *there*.

We are in a hell-realm in the sense that we do indeed exist within a mill of unending predation. A natural system where beings feed on beings. How does ‘grace’ reach us? Through our conception of it. And certainly our application of it. If it isn’t us, who then?

The residents of absolute heaven would necessarily become advocates for those in absolute hell. We are god’s images (likenesses) and reflections.

Essentially, this seems to me to be a terrestrial and universal sense of things. Even before interpretive models are imposed (as interfaces).

[Belinda]

The suffering in the universe, for biological beings, is grounded in the core, inescapable fact that life (nature) is a merciless mill in which creatures feed on other creatures in an unending cycle. In our human world our fundamental lament, our source of pain and angst, in that life has a predatory aspect and element.

Most systems of thought, most religious-philosophical interpretive systems, such as the one that employs the term samsara (material entanglement) define our actions, what we are forced to do in a predatory system, as that which binds us. We get further and further enmeshed in karmic reactions and fall further and further into ‘samsara’.

How did this come about? How did the soul get enmeshed? What is this place and how did we get here? Those are the core questions.

Religious praxis — Christian praxis — is both an interpretive act and a method of disentanglement. The core message? “You will never get out of this without help from outside” (above, divinity, that which exists outside of entanglement, and causation).

The motif is constant — eternal.

If the errant soul (in these models) had no means to confront and cure karmic entanglement (the consequences of sin in Christian terms) then “doom” prevails. And eternal, irremediable Hell, absolute punishment, would necessarily result.

But in that system of interpretation that gave the term ‘samsara’ the possibility of redemption extends to all levels of reality, be they heavenly or hellish worlds.

Thus a more expansive sense of ‘justice’ is understood to be fundamental.

The eternal Christian hell is unjust only because the “hand of grace” is proposed not to extend even to *there*.

We are in a hell-realm in the sense that we do indeed exist within a mill of unending predation. A natural system where beings feed on beings. How does ‘grace’ reach us? Through our conception of it. And certainly our application of it. If it isn’t us, who then?

The residents of absolute heaven would necessarily become advocates for those in absolute hell. We are god’s images (likenesses) and reflections.

Essentially, this seems to me to be a terrestrial and universal sense of things. Even before interpretive models are imposed (as interfaces).

If you look up the etymology of 'hell' I think you may find your theory is correct. I am just about to do so.

About one hundred years ago verb 'hell ' was used in Doric rural communities in the context of preserving the potatoes harvest.

[Nick_A]

I'm more of a Christian Platonists so I don't believe in a personal God punishing us.

Understood, but that (intentionally or not) simply avoids the question. What if there was a personal God punishing us, as Immanuel Can believes? In that case, in your opinion, would eternal, unimaginable punishment (by that God) for finite transgressions be loving and just?

If IC believes in a personal God, and his philosophy offers him meaning and purpose as a nice guy, why does it bother you? It isn't a matter of arguing over what is wrong for me but in finding the right approach which satisfies mind, body, and spirit. In other words; our being allowing it to develop rather then tying it down through the negative emotions of self justification.

[Alexis Jacobi]

If IC believes in a personal God, and his philosophy offers him meaning and purpose as a nice guy, why does it bother you? It isn't a matter of arguing over what is wrong for me but in finding the right approach which satisfies mind, body, and spirit. In other words; our being allowing it to develop rather then tying it down through the negative emotions of self justification.

Huh?!?

Immanuel is deeply invested in a creed with profound links to social, political and economic realities. His moralist pose is a sham. His ‘philosophy’ as you call it is overtly destructive. As such it must be critiqued.

Immanuel’s philosophy is negativity given ideological and theological weapons.

We are duty-bound to sharpen our seeing Nick. And to pursue it where it leads.

[Nick_A]

suffering is a necessity

Necessitated by what? You don't believe in a personal God, so it can't be necessitated by God. By what/whom, or in virtue of what, then?

suffering is justice which we can lessen through conscience inviting the Spirit

You don't believe in a personal God, so presumably you don't believe that this Spirit is personal either. What, then, is its nature? I am unable to understand the coherence in the notion of a non-personal Spirit.

And what is the "justice" in suffering? On what basis do you make the claim that it exists?

Creation is a living machine created by the necessity of transforming substances enabling the Father to experience itself.

The triune God consists of the Father; the eternal unchanging beyond the limits of time and space, The Son, inner unity like the father but within the laws of time and space, and the spirit which connects them and defines objective quality.

GOD IS. The process of creation OCCURS and takes place within the laws established by the Father. The Father doesn't punish anything but is responsible for the laws of creation. The process of creation is the responsibility of the Son. That is why the Christ and the Cross are the concern for the Christian Platonist. The Father's work is done so the personal God is meaningless. The Son and the grace of the Spirit can awaken Man to experience objective meaning and purpose

Justice or the GOOD Plato referred to is the result of the necessity of our universe which eats itself to actualize the process of the transformation of substances.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Whatever that philosophy is, is one for someone completely removed from the world and such a philosophy divorces itself from any possibility of interconnection and communication with anyone living in this world. It can only become ultra-ascetic.

[Nick_A]

If IC believes in a personal God, and his philosophy offers him meaning and purpose as a nice guy, why does it bother you? It isn't a matter of arguing over what is wrong for me but in finding the right approach which satisfies mind, body, and spirit. In other words; our being allowing it to develop rather then tying it down through the negative emotions of self justification.

Huh?!?

Immanuel is deeply invested in a creed with profound links to social, political and economic realities. His moralist pose is a sham. His ‘philosophy’ as you call it is overtly destructive. As such it must be critiqued.

Immanuel’s philosophy is negativity given ideological and theological weapons.

We are duty-bound to sharpen our seeing Nick. And to pursue it where it leads.

John Adams wrote:

While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while she continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep <, Start deletion,[. . .], End,> simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by <, Start deletion,[. . .], End,> morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition <, Start deletion,and, End,> Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other

I would rather live in a free country then a dying country on the secular path to slavery by the educated elite caught up in their own ignorance and hypocrisy. Show me someone who knows how to use deductive reason beginning with our source and gradually devolving down to explain the human condition and I'll gladly listen.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I would rather live in a free country than a dying country on the secular path to slavery by the educated elite caught up in their own ignorance and hypocrisy. Show me someone who knows how to use deductive reason beginning with our source and gradually devolving down to explain the human condition and I'll gladly listen.

Ah, then you do propose social and cultural activism and you do take a side in The Culture Wars.

I thought you’d divested yourself completely.

[Immanuel Can]

Maybe not. But that wasn't my question.

Had you more of a sound, intuitive mind...

My criticism...that you refuse to answer any simple question, and insist on generating some artificial complexity...is admirably modelled by your last answer.

You are trading in obscurantism, and using your abilities to verbalize to cloud, not clear up, questions. Needless verbosity is how you do it.

This can be verified empirically, by you, in a very simple way.

Pick any of your conversation partners. Measure the column-inches (or column-centimeters) of the average post you make and theirs. And ask yourself, "Am I actually so much smarter than they are, so much smarter than all of them, that I am certain I'm earning and deserving all my column-inches? Or is it just possible I'm windy, and sometimes I'm making content where none really deserves to be?"

And if you're honest with yourself, you'll know the answer.

Regarding the answer to the relevant question: the one thing completely absent from it is the identity of your god. We are no wiser about your convictions for having read your response than we would be if we had not bothered at all. Your god seems to be one of those Frankenstein monsters of which I spoke: not identifiable as any particular god, with any particular traits or identity of his/her own, but an assemblage from your personal wishes and preferences, a fictive being made up of bits and patches, according to your own desires.

Nothing in your answer suggests otherwise. And this is not at all sophisticated: it's not other than the old, human desire to make god in one's own image, according to one's own tastes. Invariably, this results in a vague and spineless imagining of an impotent entity quite incapable to set standards, demand, judge, inform, create morality, give substance to concepts like justice or truth. At most, at best, it's a "god" that sits quietly on the sidelines, while we carry on with our business, and shows up only for sentimental moments like weddings and funerals, just long enough to give a "blessing" and then vapourize.

Of course, if that's what "god" is, then he might have saved us all the trouble of waiting for him to do it.

[Immanuel Can]

There are two separate questions here. The first is, "What does 'justice' mean?" The second is, "What is the origin/source/grounding/justification/'legitimation' of justice as a concept?"

It only the second question that matters. [...] What you need to show is that your "justice" concept has substance, and that it relates to some property of the universe you have a reason to expect.

You're being totally ridiculous.

Not at all. But you're avoiding facing the fact. But it will not go away. You can't legitimize your conception of "justice." Therefore, it remains just a petulant demand for something the specifics of which nobody can identify.

You can't even show you don't have your "justice" already. You have no basis to know if it's absent, either. You don't know what it is; or if you do, you're not telling us.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Regarding the answer to the relevant question: the one thing completely absent from it is the identity of your god. We are no wiser about your convictions for having read your response than we would be if we had not bothered at all. Your god seems to be one of those Frankenstein monsters of which I spoke: not identifiable as any particular god, with any particular traits or identity of his/her own, but an assemblage from your personal wishes and preferences, a fictive being made up of bits and patches, according to your own desires.

It is very good that you see that you nor I can assign *identity* to something as vast as *god*. I am forced to use quotations (asterisks) because I do not have language that can encapsulate what *god* is. So, naturally, I begin by talking about how one experiences life. Ourselves, our perceptual matrix. Now, with that said I know many people -- moderns who I understand to be spiritually concerned and yet who have become divested or detached from traditional religion -- who share with me what their experience of god is. That is to say how they describe their spiritual life and how it guides them or how they proceed with it.

The entire definition of *what god is* and what god does has shifted Immanuel. The entire idea of *relationship* has shifted as well. This is certainly disconcerting to you, given your central religious, spiritual and philosophical tenet:

And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

Now, if this is your core *identification*, and I assert that it actually is, and this is seen by your attitude and what you say and what you really believe, I can definitely say that your ideal has been challenged.

I present you with a view of what *relationship* now entails. I do not present you with a god-image that is similar to the one you work with. I would likely speak in ways similar to Seeds who has presented the idea of one conceptual structure falling away but another, newer one, as not yet having come into full conceptual view. This follows from what I understand to be Nietzsche's declarations about the *death of god*.

The imago that you live in relation to, which in my view imprisons you, and through which you oppress others, is a dying structure. In fact it is immoral and as I often say I believe you are immoral. You are not a moral man according to my definitions. Every day you hear from people that you are perceived as a liar, as devious and as dishonest. Yet you cannot hear!

You force me to turn back to the figure of Christ, both to the historical person, born of a mother and a father in this reality, as well as the metaphysical Jesus of Nazareth ( a theological construction), and to try to re-envision Jesus, or rediscover Jesus, as perhaps he really was. I do not regard you as a 'disciple of that Jesus! You must understand why I oppose you. If anything I regard you as being associated with a Satanic spirit (if I will be allowed to use such terms). You do not liberate, you enslave. You use violent mental and spiritual coercion to in efforts that attack the way that other people ground themselves in this world, in life, in reality.

All of this I explain, day after day.

I would suggest to you that you are projecting when you call up the image of a Frankenstein god. Obviously because what your 'god' seems to tell you to do is to devastate and undermine spiritual conceptions that you have resolved to destroy. That you are commanded to destroy in order to *do good*.

I began by describing where we postmodern people are now situated. It is in a sense in a zone in which *identity* (in the sense of a clear theological picture) has not been solidified absolutely. So what people do is to inhabit what I might call fragments or glimpses of what god means for them and what god (spiritual relationship) they can involve themselves in honestly and with personal integrity.

If by their fruits ye shall know them, and if by what you say and how you act I am to know your *god*, then obviously I reject you and that god.

Trippy, eh?

[Immanuel Can]

Go on, then, and provide direct quotes from any philosopher/thinker who genuinely considers the concept of justice to be "illegitimate", or at the very least that the "legitimacy" of the concept of justice is genuinely so much in question as for this to constitute a "problem".

No vague references to books or authors - give us the direct quotes.

Too lazy to read? Or is it that you really just don't have any genuine concern for -- or, as I suggest, even a defensible conception of -- "justice"? Either way, you have the books, and could do so.

But I'll give you one or two of what you ask, because it's not at all hard for me to do, since it's the basic issue with which any such book always begins. And I'll focus on ones that point very clearly to the legitimation issue, namely that a person needs some grounds or basis for asserting a conception of "justice."

There remains a fundamental issue under dispute, albeit one that our contemporary right order theorists have not put their finger on. The debate is not over whether or not there are natural rights...The debate at bottom is over the deep structure of the moral universe: what accounts for what?

Now, you need the full context, so it's Wolterstorff, p.35

And just for fun, here's Dworkin, p.8.

It is not good enough for an official or voter to declare that the theory of justice on which he acts pleases him. Or that it accurately expresses his emotions or attitudes, or accurately states how he plans to live. Or that his political principles are drawn from his nations traditions and so need not claim any larger truth...We cannot defend a theory of justice without defending, as part of the same enterprise, a theory of moral objectivity.

You should also note that Wolterstorff and Dworkin are on vastly different points of the political spectrum. And when you get agreement between two such natural opponents, it's no longer possible to argue ad hominem, that the only reason one says it is to favour his political turn.

So now, where's your theory of moral objectivity, so essential to grounding your conception of justice, as Dworkin says? Or where is your defense of "what accounts for what," as Wolterstorff puts it?

[Alexis Jacobi]

So now, where's your theory of moral objectivity, so essential to grounding your conception of justice, as Dworkin says? Or where is your defense of "what accounts for what," as Wolterstorff puts it?

None of this has any bearing that I can discern on the critique of the notion that there is a god who will eternally torture, with no reprieve, those who do not, cannot or will not believe.

You are mixing categories. It is a deceptive tactic.

[Immanuel Can]

...every culture (maybe all of them) has a conception of justice and the right to expect or at least demand it...

Ah!

So suddenly you're no longer going to maintain that every culture has your simple, dictionary definition of justice? But in spite of the fact that they have different conceptions, you're going to say they all have "the right to expect or at least demand" of God that they get their particular conception of "justice"?

Now, what would give them that right?

By the way, where in the Bible is justice defined and "legitimated"? C&V, please. Are you able to provide the very "legitimation" you accuse me of failing to provide?

I've already done so, but you forgot. I've said that "justice" Biblically speaking, is grounded in the character of God. I've said that several times, actually. But I don't think you understand the claim...or even remember it, apparently.

God defines what "justice" is, just as He defines "love," "truth," "mercy," and any other fundamental concept you wish to interrogate. And he does so not arbitrarily, but on the basis of who He is, the fundamental Reality in the universe. So there's no higher court of appeal, and no other basis upon which any person can genuinely know what "justice" is.

You won't accept that, I know: but only because you don't believe God is God. So you have no confidence in His character or His word. Still, even you would have to concede that IF my worldview were correct, THEN I would have provided you with adequate grounding for the right conception of "justice." You just don't happen to believe my worldview is correct.

Now, I'll extend you the same courtesy. I am prepared to accept from you any answer that -- IF your worldview were correct -- would constitute a rational conclusion from THAT worldview. I will not argue that your worldview is wrong, and therefore just anything you say has to be invalid: I will accept any answer that makes rational sense on its own terms, given your professed worldview.

And then, at least, you and I will agree that we are both being rational -- even while we retain the right to maintain the other is ultimately wrong in point of fact.

Fair enough?

Now, since I've been very responsive on that point: what is your legitimation of your conception of "justice"? Let's see you be similarly responsive.

There's no promise of "justice" from Evolutionism, or from Humanism, or from Social Darwinism, or Materialism, or Physicalism, or Quantum Physics...these things have no view of what "justice" is, and absolutely no interest in legitimizing any such thing as "justice."

The concept of justice isn't even relevant to most of those fields.

You're exactly right! But you're even more right than maybe you suspect.

Not only is "justice" not included in any of them as a matter of note, it's absent because they are not even capable of grounding such a concept. And that's the whole point. If you take any of those worldviews, you'll find no basis for any grounds for any conception of "justice" at all, nor any warrant for believing you're promised that "justice" will ever be offered you.

So back to the question: what worldview will ground Harry Baird's conception of "justice"? And maybe you should also say what that conception of "justice" is, since you now are aware that different cultures have different conceptions of "justice": we should make sure we're talking about the same conception.

[Immanuel Can]

So now, where's your theory of moral objectivity, so essential to grounding your conception of justice, as Dworkin says? Or where is your defense of "what accounts for what," as Wolterstorff puts it?

None of this has any bearing that I can discern on the critique of the notion that there is a god who will eternally torture, with no reprieve, those who do not, cannot or will not believe.

Red herring!

I knew you'd squirm. I just didn't know which "exit" door you'd try. Because you have no grounding for your own conception of justice, you try the "et tu quoque" strategy -- accuse the other of doing the same, and get out the back door by making him go on defense and forget his demand.

No such luck, AJ. Answer the question or run. Those are the options.