Philosophy Now Forum

Why do you think this particular unfolding of history was better than the alternatives would have been? Though I am capable of imagining scenarios where an historical player is suddenly absented from the picture, I don't know if it more than a futile exercise. But still I do share your view at leas...

The prelates have never cared about fact or tenability. They themselves didn’t need to believe whatever propaganda they used to control the masses. And, since the objective is still control and power, logical argument will have no effect on it. It simply is untenable to retrofit any of our modern v...

I don’t know what an exegete is, but he won’t be welcome in Rome or Mississippi. To be more accurate, Roman Catholic theological work has made enormous progress and in its sophisticated forms cannot be describes as mere fundamentalism. It surely has its doctrinal base but as I have understood it, i...

Or [that] drinking the symbolic blood of God’s son is so different from cutting the heart out of an Inca warrior? To be a little more accurate and 'intellectually just', you'd have to include the notion of a God who becomes manifest in a triune manner and who, as a gesture to man and as God Absolut...

I question what constitutes ‘maturity’ in a belief system. Codification of laws? Coherent plot-line? Organization of ritual? Child sacrifice replaced by goat? I can think of numbers of examples. I might suggest that aspects of Gnostic theology are 'mature' versions of the naive 'myths' of Judaism a...

I don’t consider the early animists to have been superstitious. Rather, I think they lived in a world that was very much more alive than ours. Without means of gathering scientific data, it’s perfectly logical to assume that other species, trees, grass, water, clouds and wind have a consciousness l...

Thinking...

Well you seem to have caught up in any case! I appreciate your comments. The 'fracturing method' of breaking up a post/statement into small parts with all sorts of ancillary questions/problems that open up can sometimes lead to the problem of endless conversation of related (but interesting!) issues...

Because they got rid of him before he could do any damage to Judaism. He did far more harm to Judaism dead, in fact. That 'by the way'. 'Millions of children heard about Jews for the first time when they were told the story of how the founder of Christianity was killed by wicked men; killed by the ...

That is so, on a strictly individual basis, and says almost nothing about organized religion. It is equally true of a Navajo on The Beauty Way as it is of a Carmelite nun. In both cases, though, magical thinking plays a large part in their serenity. It doesn't necessarily speak about organized reli...

Hello there! Yes, been busy. I have a bit of an obsession with these questions/issues. I had prepared these posts for another forum where I thought an expanded conversation would be possible but it don't work out. Please excuse the bulk of these last posts. But they all circle around my main questio...

This is what I have been thinking over the last few days, which is a violation or a jump-ahead from what I envisioned: to examine value-content within a Episcopal Book of Prayer. I have been reading about the question of Christian Fundamentalism and reading some material by one James Barr. He repres...

A couple of notes. To be fair I think we have to note right at the beginning that in every time and place in our human history, to hardly noticeable differences in degree, we have been thoroughly enmeshed within what we can now recognize as 'superstitious' structures of perception through which real...

'Faith', quite literally by definition, at least according to its own terms, cannot be exactly defined. Faith is something that, for a believer, is held and in a very real sense 'operated'. People of faith in all the traditions I am aware of have and use their faith. I would also say that as it pert...

Hello. This is my first post here. I began this conversation on another forum but I think there may be more life and activity on this forum. ____________________________________ Clearly 'we' are at a point of a general and overt reassessment of the Christian belief-system. It is obvious that huge sw...