IC: But let all that be true, and it's still irrelevant. The only important question is, "Which tradition, if either, got Christianity basically right?" And to discern that, you have to look beyond any Protestants or Catholics at all, and look at the Biblical record itself.
AJ: What I notice in you, and often point out, is your rigidity and your absolutism.
IC: What I notice is that you don't know what to look at in order to define "Christianity." There could be nothing more obvious than that you have to go to the Source...yet somehow, that seems just to obscure a thought for you to grasp...very curious.
At this point, and after these various months of conversation, and as a result of thought and realization as well as introspection and self-analysis, I am in the process of coming to conclusions. I cannot say that I have a total certainty though. And I think that this is how it should be.
I know that you desire to keep things on an abstract plane. Deviation from that you take as 'ad hominem'. However for me, in this conversation, it is to a large extent
you, your attitude, the way that you use the faith, and what I perceive in you as deceptiveness, lack of honesty, and what I have called your *false front* -- despite all this crap about 'going back to the Gospel sources' (which, I should say, could never not be an important process for a believing Christian nor for one who researches Christianity more intellectually and academically) -- it is my encounter with you that has shattered, in a sense (in one sense), a simple relationship to the figure of Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ of the Gospels to God.
You have alerted me to the real facts of the case, that when people resist Christianity
in many instances they are showing a personal integrity which rises up in resistance
to you (
you here should be taken as a
type). So, to make a long story shorter, what I am forced to face is exactly what I write about which I do not think you can really understand. And you cannot (really) understand because of the nature of your *faith position*. So then, a 'faith position' must be examined. In your case what I would describe about it is that it is an 'edifice' which functions (as I have said!) like a 'fortress'.
The fortress is unassailable. You put it I thought quite accurately when you said "All bullets miss". You have next to no capacity for critical analysis. Now, I would only say that this is a really strange posture to have and a strange one to *live in*.
The clearest and most revealing example, as you know, was that you explained the Genesis story (stories) as
literal descriptions. Pages and pages were spent interrogating you about what, in fact, you really think about this story. You roundly avoided becoming honest. You went into an absurd diversion, a blatant sophistical game, about 'original mating pairs' as if to say that this is what Genesis refers to. Finally you proposed buying and reading certain tomes where, you claimed, the truth would be revealed and through which one would be made to understand. In my case, I can't speak of others, you showed me your core deviousness and dishonesty. (As I said I would have the same impression if at some Biblical theme-park in Arkansas the guide proposed to explain, in *rational* terms, how Noah loaded the Earth's animals into the Ark
as if this was a description of reality).
Therefore, if you actually believe such things then I must conclude that your *faith position* will set you up to believe any number of different, outrageous & absurd,
other things. Yet you continually front yourself as a
Master Logician. You refer to Aristotelean predicates and such. In short (as I see it) you perform an absurd theatre where, I gather, you attempt to present your belief-system as one others should take on and, bizarrely, imagine that you really hold some 'higher ground' in rationality that others have fallen away from.
So this leads me to examine, with fresh eyes, the Culture Wars -- and this is really what interests and concerns me, not the forum-games of someone, you, who plays mind-games on the Internet -- where battles rage between those who hold to the faith-position of Christianity (and this is extremely varied and not simply a monolith) and the *surrounding culture* which is in a process of 'going crazy'. There arises a temptation to employ a binary perceptual analysis (the reasons why the culture is going crazy) but this poses another problem: it cannot be examined, nor understood, nor remediated, though binary methods nor binary solutions.
Therefore the problem, if it is possible to speak in this way, is far more complex and, perhaps, far more troubling.
As a system of metaphysical explication the Standard Christian Version is in trouble. I am reasonably sure that you cannot understand a) that this has come about and b) why it has come about and c) what it portends. But all of this I have expressed. The *picture* has been punctured. The *horizon* was in fact erased. No one will succeed in 'painting the images on the sky' again. In a sense this means that the images of the Cave are no longer believed in. But this has to be carefully explained not merely taken on its face. What you do not seem to understand (ensconced as you are in your fortress) is that many people, even if they desired to believe the Story and the Old Picture, simply cannot do so. Not because they are dishonest but because they are honest. And you come along, purporting to be as honest as Jesus Christ is honest, and front yourself through lies, self-deceptions and rhetorical and sophistical shenanigans as you rehearse your evangelical play. How many have you claimed from darkness and back into he bosom of the Lord?
So this is what I think. Yet this does not mean that I 'walk back' a great deal of what I have said about my own relationship to the doctrines of Christianity. Actually something quite different occurred in me. When I realized that Christianity is, indeed, a 'picture' that is presented to the imagination and that through the Picture one is asked to choose an identification, I then had to realize that the desire to gain the *content* that was promised was in no sense unreal or false, but that the picture or the representation is not the crucial thing. But moreover, and here is the important thing, even if The Story collapses (the horizon is erased) it does not mean that the truths behind the stories do not *exist*. They do exist. And they exist as all ideas exist -- as something encountered by man's psyche.
I think this is the bridge too far that most people would have great trouble in crossing.
So I suppose that you can see, even with your encumbered intellect, that what I am talking about extends quite a bit beyond your asinine, binary 'problem' that you suggest is the main problem (for which you have the sole solution I must add). That is, that The Prince of Peace will flutter down eventually and set up offices on Earth and install the
Heavenly Bureaucracy.
The actual conversation has to do with
The Next Steps. The fact of the matter is that I have been writing about this for months now (in one way or another and through various angles-of-approach).
IC: Again I return to the obvious question, which I cannot help but note, you never even attempt to answer: what part of the Inquisition, the Crusades or the Wars of Religion appeals to you as the sort of thing Christ would require?
The issue of 'power' and 'authority' (this is what I take your questions asked in the quoted portion to resolve down into) is, in fact, a crucial question. And I can only begin by saying that Europe (that is the pre-Christian and pagan Europe of the regions and tribes) was effectively conquered by a Mediterranean power-center. That is the process through which Europe became Europe. These sorts of endeavors -- quintessentially man's endeavors and this does not vary -- always involve power and its use on one hand, and then persuasion-education on the other. The way that I would respond to your question is through a reference to Plato's Seventh Epistle where it is proposed that it is *good* and honorable to topple a political regime (a tyranny is the example Plato refers to) if a better system replaces it. But the entire issue resolves around what is 'better'. And obviously the question is really one about Power and how power is used.
Now you wish for me to resolve this question for you in one terse paragraph or some sort of pious declaration? That is not possible. What I can say (and what I have said!) is that the issue of Power and Authority have to be confronted and examined. It is a far more involved and difficult conversation than is possible to address in simple terms.
When God is pictured -- let's say exclusively -- as a man who thinks and makes decisions, the entire question becomes absurd. Because people on each side of a conflict, a social struggle, an idea-struggle, and ideological struggle, may indeed implore Jesus to intervene. So the question of 'What Christ would require' is somewhat deranged.
However, if the question is shifted away from the personal, and an appeal to a person (who is represented as God), and considered in relation to Logos, at least at that point the conflicts and the struggles have a more reasonable platform.
You make a strange implication: that Jesus Christ, as a God-Man, is out there or up there somewhere like a Cloud Server in the Sky, or as metaphysical referee, sending down impulses to those on his team that he stands behind and cheers on. While on the other side, as is logically necessary, the other team can only be on the side of the Evil One. I mean this is how binary systems function.
I think that we must notice something
absurd here. And this is why I say that when the origin and development of Christianity is considered realistically and historically, it has to be looked at as man's decisions made in the face of the Divine, but also in relation to Logos (rational processes and also rational understanding of power-principles).
In any case I'll stop here since all of this is really a topic for a whole other level of conversation (in which you will not be able to participate on
almost any level).