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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 3:33 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 1:03 amOne of us has a definition of "Christianity," and the other doesn't.

It isn't the one who doesn't who "understands" anything.
Well, the essence of my position...
So many, many words...and yet it contains no actual definition of "Christian" at all.

The only thing that keeps this from being another total filibuster is that buried in all this is at least the implication you are using as definition of sorts.
...what then is Christianity? You would have to present a specific picture from a specific place and talk about that Christianity.
This can mean nothing more than the old "self-identification" criterion, which every scholar of religions knows is bunk, in a whole lot more words. And if so, you've now got exactly one criterion: that anybody who uses the word can only be using it accurately, sincerely, reliably and truthfully. That people don't lie, don't ever misunderstand or misrepresent their claimed ideology, never take on an ideological label for subversive purposes, never join a group in a way they simply don't understand, don't march under phony banners, and can't ever be doubted as to their self-identification.

To which I can only say, "Really"? :shock:
Nick_A
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Re: Christianity

Post by Nick_A »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 2:41 pm
Nick_A wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 3:49 am The most controversial question of the day: What is Christianity?
How can it be controversial? That's the really stunning question.

To be a "Christ-ian" is definitionally to be one who follows in the path and teachings of Christ Himself.

We could debate what that path requires, perhaps, some of the fine specifics of how one is to act accordingly; though there's little enough controversy in that, too. But there can be no other legitimate definition, of course. Everything else is just an "Y-ian". And we have to find some other authority for "Y," because if Christ didn't advocate it, it ain't "Christian", by definition.

Nobody can call the Inquisition, the Crusades (Muslim or Catholic), or the Wars of Religion, or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, or the Pogroms, or the Papacy, or indulgences, or Pharisaic Legalism, or Gnosticism "Christian," for the simple reason that these things are flatly contradicted by Christ Himself.

Have we lost our critical faculties completely? Have we lost even our sense of the simple definition of an obvious word? How can we even be asking such a vacuous question?
Matthew 23
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. [3]
15
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
The Pharisees were all respected members of the community. They played the role. But does role playing mean being a Christian? Is hypocrisy an essential part of being Christian in the world? Is Christianity defined by those experts who play the role? If not, then what is Christianity or more specifically, what is a Christian and do they exist in the world?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:17 pmSo many, many words...and yet it contains no actual definition of "Christian" at all.

The only thing that keeps this from being another total filibuster is that buried in all this is at least the implication you are using as definition of sorts.
(Ten additonal points for including that new term filibuster. But I am docking you 15 points for not including ad hominem. 😂)

Well, call it what you will -- filibuster, ad hominem or a hat rack -- how you characterize what I think and say is not highly important (and I have explained why very clearly and extensively).

I am not interested, right now, in providing you or anyone with an 'actual definition' and this for a number of reasons.

One is that I rely on a basic outline of good-sense Christian ethics (a catechism) as a platform. This is close at hand.

Two is that because the 'horizon was erased' -- literally, the picture was erased from the sky -- the whole picture is up in the air. This has many levels of implication. But one of them is that the definition of 'what Christianity is' is in a process of transformation. Months ago I spoke about this, and months ago you did not register it because you cannot read and grasp what I say.

Three is that (and I also clearly explain this) I am personally involved in a process of research. I do not come to this research with pre-established conclusions.

Four is that I am, culturally & sociologically as well perhaps theologically, involved in and interested in 'the Culture wars'. So I am interested in what people are doing with their Christian platform and also the conversation that goes on between those with a strong faith-position (in Christianity) and those who reject, sometimes entirely, that Christian position.

My entire orientation is distinct from yours.

Now, what you do (all that you do and all that you can do) is select New Testament quotations, color them blue or red, and post them. That is the limit of your *Christianity* as it pertains to your presence here. (Heaven only knows what you do in your real life).

All of this I have clearly explained, and none of it are you equipped to respond to.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:54 pm I am not interested, right now, in providing you or anyone with an 'actual definition' and this for a number of reasons.
Number one is that you don't have any, apparently.
I am interested in what people are doing with their Christian platform
Oh. So you're interested in the fakes, the frauds, the misguided, the lying, the confused, the politically opportunistic, the ill-informed, the posers, the propagandists, and so on? And you're interested in including them in the category of what you call "Christian"? :shock:

Well, to be more accurate, you could just call them "the nominally religious." Because in no substantive sense are they possibly "Christian." Anybody can see that. What defines a fake, a fraud and so forth is that they are NOT what they claim to be.

One would think that didn't even need to be explained.
Nick_A
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Re: Christianity

Post by Nick_A »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 3:48 pm
Nick_A wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 3:49 amHumanity lives in imagination arguing opinions. But what if there is a small minority not governed by imagination but have become conscious so as to experience human meaning and purpose? They would know what Christianity is as a perennial reality and live according to its precepts as common sense. Is conscious humanity fiction or a reality? Is there a transcendent kingdom or level of reality as Simone describes? My gut feeling is that there is. I'm humble enough to know it doesn't include me.
Simone Weil is interesting because she comes out of an extremely secular French culture, from a secular Jewish background, was oriented very strongly toward social concerns, was a Marxist for a time (?) and even took up positions in the Spanish Civil War -- not to speak of her activities in the Resistance. Then at some point her thought turned more in so-called mystical defections. She is described by some (Susan Sontag I believe) as an *anti-Semite* (she is said to have said that Judaism has had too much influence in Occidental culture but I do not know what she meant by this) and by others as both a 'truly authentic and grand person' (one the the very few of the 20th century) as well as a lunatic (!) She worked in factories for 6 months to see what that life was like for the working-class, and also went to Germany in the 1930s to see what Germans lived with.

Here is an interesting article (1951).
Few contributions to COMMENTARY have excited so immediate and intense an impact as Simone Weil’s essay “Hitler and the Idea of Greatness,” printed in our July issue. But this reaction was not untypical of the effect on the contemporary mind of the work of this writer, who died in England in 1943 at the age of thirty-four—a death brought about, at least in part, by self-inflicted starvation: although seriously ill, she refused to eat more than what made up the official ration in occupied France. At the time of her death, she was known in France—to the extent that she was known at all—as an eccentric and brilliant writer on politics and literature. After her death, a small group in the United States who had read translations of several of her essays knew her as a sensitive and eloquent moralist. In the years since, her reputation has steadily grown, and with the posthumous publication of her religious writings she has come to be regarded as one of the most significant religious thinkers to have been produced by France in the past two decades. Here Leslie A. Fiedler tries to find some of the keys to the personality and thought of this troubled spirit and ardent mystic who was born into a Jewish family, violently rejected her Jewishness, as she did most of the influences of her early life, lectured from the doorsteps, so to speak, of the Catholic Church, of which she never became a communicant, and wrote, along with much that is merely tortured and self-lacerating, winged words of moral and spiritual insight which men of all faiths find moving and relevant.
Simone Weil is difficult since she is beyond classification. This is very annoying in the modern world which seeks to classify everything and hiding the awareness of the Good. Simone is known as Plato's spiritual child since his influence is obvious. So for those incapable of thinking top down and restricted to bottom up reason, Simone is meaningless for them.

If you come to sense the value of her life and ideas for todays world, we could discuss it. If it is meaningful I can submit it to https://attentionsw.org/ proving that it isn't just the PhDs who can be impressed by Simone. This incident ocured shortly before her death.

Did Jesus attract the Apostle by fine speeches or something else which leads to a higher quality of communication?
I had the impression of being in the presence of an absolutely transparent soul which was ready to be reabsorbed into original light. I can still hear Simone Weil’s voice in the deserted streets of Marseilles as she took me back to my hotel in the early hours of the morning; she was speaking of the Gospel; her mouth uttered thoughts as a tree gives its fruit, her words did not express reality, they poured it into me in its naked totality; I felt myself to be transported beyond space and time and literally fed with light.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Here is a very -- what is the word? odd? interesting? -- selection from the Commentary article:
“Anti-Israelism” or even, perhaps, “anti Judaism” would most accurately describe the doctrines of Simone Weil in this regard, since it was the beliefs of the Jews that she especially despised; and yet she herself succumbs to the racism she attributes to them and their mortal enemies: “a people chosen etc.” In her opposition to Hitler she would never admit the presence of any identification with the Jews; quite the contrary, she accused Hitler always of fighting the battle of Israel, seeking only to revive under another name and for his own benefit the God of Israel, “earthly, cruel, and exclusive.” Sometimes, indeed, she insisted that Jehovah and Hitler were Gods in the same sense and on the same plane.

She had recast the whole history of the Jews in terms reminiscent of Houston Chamberlain, so that only her distrust of force seems sometimes to mark off her position from that of the persecuting anti-Semites. “God made purely temporal promises to Moses and Joshua at a time when Egypt was groping toward the eternal salvation of the soul. Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved: a corporeal and collective God who spoke to no one up to the Exile. . . . No wonder that a nation of fugitive slaves, conquerors of a land of milk and honey cultivated by civilizations whose labors they did not share but which they destroyed in a series of massacres, no wonder such a people was able to give scarcely anything good to the world. . . .”

_____________

Most of the writers on Simone Weil have chosen to slight this distressing aspect of her thought; but it is, alas, no peripheral vagary but rather an obsessive theme to which she recurs at the unlikeliest moments, even—as we have seen—in her piece on the Iliad. Typical in so many ways of the generation whose allegiances and revolts she turns improbably to the service of God, she must express, too, its deepest shame. Anti-bourgeois, radical, attracted to non-violence yet a participant in the Spanish civil war—she must also be a Jew and an anti-Semite, the anti-Semitic Jew, both sides of our most desperate cleavage in a single body. It is not inappropriate that the one contemporary writer she mentions with favor is Arthur Koestler.

It is easy enough to say at this point, with some of our defenders of an embattled secularism, that any Christian religious revival necessarily entails the exacerbation of anti-Semitism. But the immediate tradition to which Simone Weil belongs, the tradition of Léon Bloy and Charles Péguy, was before her violently philo-Semitic. Bloy, who scandalized the good Christians of his day by his fury and absolutism (he ran hurrahing through the streets when a church bazaar, with a few score of the conventionally pious, burned to the ground), doubly scandalized them by his defense of the Jews. “Each day in Communion I eat a Jew,” he had cried out to his challengers, “and I depend on a bunch of Yids for my eternal salvation!” Involved in his attempt to redeem Christianity is the shame and guilt brought into focus by the Dreyfus affair and the consequent resolve to make it clear beyond doubt that anti-Semitism is a function not of a living Church but only of a dying one. From Bloy the tradition passed to Péguy and reached a climax in the attempt of Jacques Maritain to define a post-Christian mission of the Jews, and in his vision of Israel under persecution coming to resemble more and more the figure of Jesus. “The chastisement of our peace was upon him. . . .”

In the teeth of this tradition, Simone Weil denied to the Jews any mission, pre-Christian or post-Christian, except the negative one of embodying a species of evil, the idolatrous worship of what Plato had called the “great beast.” As ancient Rome represented the “great beast” in its materialistic, atheist form, Israel represented it in its pseudo-spiritual form, the idolatry of the social as an Ersatz of religion. It is not as the “excluded” that she hated the Jews, but as the eminently successful, the inventors of nationalism; she could not include them, as had Bloy and Péguy, with the insulted and injured.

To Péguy and Bloy the Jews had been the Others, immune to the self-contempt these Christians preached as the beginning of wisdom; to Simone Weil, whatever she publicly asserted, the Jews were herself, her own. And upon them fell that pious hatred—oddly blended of the Gospel saying that “a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” and the socialist teaching that one’s own bourgeoisie was the worst enemy—which in her predecessors had been directed against the “good Christian.” What makes this reaction finally illegitimate in Simone Weil is her terrible refusal to live her Jewishness, the quality which to everyone else seemed the very essence of her being. Her hatred of Israel could have been redeemed only by her accepting its pathos as her own.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Nick_A wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:18 pmSimone Weil is difficult since she is beyond classification. This is very annoying in the modern world which seeks to classify everything and hiding the awareness of the Good. Simone is known as Plato's spiritual child since his influence is obvious. So for those incapable of thinking top down and restricted to bottom up reason, Simone is meaningless for them.
If you come to sense the value of her life and ideas for todays world, we could discuss it. If it is meaningful I can submit it to https://attentionsw.org/ proving that it isn't just the PhDs who can be impressed by Simone. This incident occurred shortly before her death.
I came across Weil years ago and meant to read some of her writing but never did. She is certainly very interesting. The article I submitted could not be said to be 'favorable' but I always tend to read both critical perspectives as well as the more glowing ones. I did bookmark that site Attention.

Speaking of Plato's children -- you might be interested in Richard Weaver's works. Have you ever read Ideas Have Consequences?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:59 pm Oh. So you're interested in the fakes, the frauds, the misguided, the lying, the confused, the politically opportunistic, the ill-informed, the posers, the propagandists, and so on? And you're interested in including them in the category of what you call "Christian"?
The way your mind works -- super binary! -- is that if you can catch someone in a 'contradiction' you think you've got them. But I do not operate within the same binaries as you do. I think you are trapped by them. And this is related to you fanaticism. It arises out of it. Now you might think that I am opposed to fanaticism but that is not so. I am opposed to the too-harsh limits that you impose in your fanaticism.

All the people that you have just described -- you have basically just described people! -- are the ones I am interested in and concerned for. But you, of course, in your willed attempt to define a Fundamentalism, will miss seeing and understanding how tremendously imperfect people are. You will miss therefore the Entire Show. Curiously, you see yourself as outside of these defects. Yet you are absurdly within them! You are, in your way, a fake, a fraud, a poser, misguided, untruthful, an opportunist, ill-informed, a propagandist -- and so on! But you can't see yourself.

Projection is a curious defect!
Well, to be more accurate, you could just call them "the nominally religious." Because in no substantive sense are they possibly "Christian." Anybody can see that. What defines a fake, a fraud and so forth is that they are NOT what they claim to be.
No it is rather that I see a continuum of understanding and commitment. There is a gradation in 'Christian culture'. But it is still Christian culture and it is still (or it was still) 'the Body of Christ'.
Nick_A
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Re: Christianity

Post by Nick_A »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:29 pm Here is a very -- what is the word? odd? interesting? -- selection from the Commentary article:
“Anti-Israelism” or even, perhaps, “anti Judaism” would most accurately describe the doctrines of Simone Weil in this regard, since it was the beliefs of the Jews that she especially despised; and yet she herself succumbs to the racism she attributes to them and their mortal enemies: “a people chosen etc.” In her opposition to Hitler she would never admit the presence of any identification with the Jews; quite the contrary, she accused Hitler always of fighting the battle of Israel, seeking only to revive under another name and for his own benefit the God of Israel, “earthly, cruel, and exclusive.” Sometimes, indeed, she insisted that Jehovah and Hitler were Gods in the same sense and on the same plane.

She had recast the whole history of the Jews in terms reminiscent of Houston Chamberlain, so that only her distrust of force seems sometimes to mark off her position from that of the persecuting anti-Semites. “God made purely temporal promises to Moses and Joshua at a time when Egypt was groping toward the eternal salvation of the soul. Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved: a corporeal and collective God who spoke to no one up to the Exile. . . . No wonder that a nation of fugitive slaves, conquerors of a land of milk and honey cultivated by civilizations whose labors they did not share but which they destroyed in a series of massacres, no wonder such a people was able to give scarcely anything good to the world. . . .”

_____________

Most of the writers on Simone Weil have chosen to slight this distressing aspect of her thought; but it is, alas, no peripheral vagary but rather an obsessive theme to which she recurs at the unlikeliest moments, even—as we have seen—in her piece on the Iliad. Typical in so many ways of the generation whose allegiances and revolts she turns improbably to the service of God, she must express, too, its deepest shame. Anti-bourgeois, radical, attracted to non-violence yet a participant in the Spanish civil war—she must also be a Jew and an anti-Semite, the anti-Semitic Jew, both sides of our most desperate cleavage in a single body. It is not inappropriate that the one contemporary writer she mentions with favor is Arthur Koestler.

It is easy enough to say at this point, with some of our defenders of an embattled secularism, that any Christian religious revival necessarily entails the exacerbation of anti-Semitism. But the immediate tradition to which Simone Weil belongs, the tradition of Léon Bloy and Charles Péguy, was before her violently philo-Semitic. Bloy, who scandalized the good Christians of his day by his fury and absolutism (he ran hurrahing through the streets when a church bazaar, with a few score of the conventionally pious, burned to the ground), doubly scandalized them by his defense of the Jews. “Each day in Communion I eat a Jew,” he had cried out to his challengers, “and I depend on a bunch of Yids for my eternal salvation!” Involved in his attempt to redeem Christianity is the shame and guilt brought into focus by the Dreyfus affair and the consequent resolve to make it clear beyond doubt that anti-Semitism is a function not of a living Church but only of a dying one. From Bloy the tradition passed to Péguy and reached a climax in the attempt of Jacques Maritain to define a post-Christian mission of the Jews, and in his vision of Israel under persecution coming to resemble more and more the figure of Jesus. “The chastisement of our peace was upon him. . . .”

In the teeth of this tradition, Simone Weil denied to the Jews any mission, pre-Christian or post-Christian, except the negative one of embodying a species of evil, the idolatrous worship of what Plato had called the “great beast.” As ancient Rome represented the “great beast” in its materialistic, atheist form, Israel represented it in its pseudo-spiritual form, the idolatry of the social as an Ersatz of religion. It is not as the “excluded” that she hated the Jews, but as the eminently successful, the inventors of nationalism; she could not include them, as had Bloy and Péguy, with the insulted and injured.

To Péguy and Bloy the Jews had been the Others, immune to the self-contempt these Christians preached as the beginning of wisdom; to Simone Weil, whatever she publicly asserted, the Jews were herself, her own. And upon them fell that pious hatred—oddly blended of the Gospel saying that “a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” and the socialist teaching that one’s own bourgeoisie was the worst enemy—which in her predecessors had been directed against the “good Christian.” What makes this reaction finally illegitimate in Simone Weil is her terrible refusal to live her Jewishness, the quality which to everyone else seemed the very essence of her being. Her hatred of Israel could have been redeemed only by her accepting its pathos as her own.
Simone didn't hate anyone. She was against the Jewish Nationalism which inflicted the Hebrew God on Christianity devolving it into Christendom in the world. What would Christianity be like if it never had adopted the Hebrew personal God and the guilt it has imposed on people concerned with insulting a deity rather than inspiring the experience of conscience to compliment consciousness?
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:52 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 4:59 pm Oh. So you're interested in the fakes, the frauds, the misguided, the lying, the confused, the politically opportunistic, the ill-informed, the posers, the propagandists, and so on? And you're interested in including them in the category of what you call "Christian"?
The way your mind works -- super binary! -- is that if you can catch someone in a 'contradiction' you think you've got them.
It's what's called "logic."

Two genuinely mutually contradictory propositions cannot be true at the same time and in the same way. It's Aristotle's Law. It's a good one.
All the people that you have just described -- you have basically just described people! -- are the ones I am interested in and concerned for.
Then why call any of them "Christian"? They're just "people," you say; but with no further definition, applying the word "Christian" to them is just a distraction.
But you, of course, in your willed attempt to define a Fundamentalism, will miss seeing and understanding how tremendously imperfect people are.
Heh. :D

You haven't the faintest grasp, there. It's the Atheists and Humanists and Materialists, and Marxists, and other such "ists" who are always insisting that sin isn't a thing, and people are really basically good. Christians are one group who've fully embraced the concept of human fallibility.

I wonder where you get your ideas, sometimes. Perhaps it's from the heavy Catholicism in your environment?
There is a gradation in 'Christian culture'. But it is still Christian culture and it is still (or it was still) 'the Body of Christ'.
If you suppose that, then you haven't any idea what the term "Body of Christ" means, either. It's not cultural. It depends 100% on the internal disposition of the individual purported members being consonant with the character and faith required by Christ. No frauds are allowed.

That "Body" absolutely excludes the fakers, the Pharisees, the nominalists, the pretenders, the propagandists, the recidivists, the unrepentant, the morally corrupt, the teachers of falsehood, the morally bankrupt, and so on...and the uncommitted religionists, as well. (See 1 Cor. 5:9-13, for example)
Dubious
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Re: Christianity

Post by Dubious »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 7:15 pm
That "Body" absolutely excludes the fakers, the Pharisees, the nominalists, the pretenders, the propagandists, the recidivists, the unrepentant, the morally corrupt, the teachers of falsehood, the morally bankrupt, and so on...and the uncommitted religionists, as well. (See 1 Cor. 5:9-13, for example)
...consider yourself included! I can add a few more if it isn't convincing enough!

As morally bankrupt and corrupt as you are, if Jesus gives you a go card into heaven, he's as much of a moral fuck-up as you are.
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Re: Christianity

Post by promethean75 »

"The everyday Christian. -- If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him." - FN

Yea, I implore you, who that walk among you are everyday Christians?
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iambiguous
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Re: Christianity

Post by iambiguous »

Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am It goes, "To believe there is any singular moral truth is to make morality into a joke." It's to be "arrogant, authoritarian" and "dogmatic."
iambiguous wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 5:11 pm First of all, I noted that some insist this is the case.
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am So...it's nothing that you believe is actually true, then.
As I note over and again, in regard to my own frame of mind pertaining to moral, political and spiritual value judgments:
My frame of mind revolves more around the assumption that religious beliefs are rooted subjectively, existentially in dasein. Including Immanuel Can's own.

And, given that there have been hundreds and hundreds of moral and spiritual narratives championed down through the centuries...paths that were clearly in the vicinity of arrogance, dogma and authoritarian certainty, how is his own any different?

Let's get this straight. Is he acknowledging that his own belief in the Christian God is just another existential leap of faith? Re say Kierkegaard, Pascal and others?

Or is he telling us that he knows the Christian God does in fact exist? That, unless others accept Jesus Christ as their savior, it won't go well for them at Judgment Day?

Again: what does he know with any degree of certainty here and what is he able to demonstrate that others can know with certainty in turn?

WITH SO MUCH AT STAKE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE GRAVE

Let him note for us what he construes to be the soundest proof that it is his God and not one of these...
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am But if you only assert this "subjectively" as you say, then all it means is, "It seems from where I sit that X is looks so." But it entails no obligation or even reason for anybody else to believe it or to see things the same way.
Exactly!!! That's the whole point about being "fractured and fragmented" given the arguments I make here...

https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=176529
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=194382
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 5&t=185296

...regarding individual value judgements at the existential intersection of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy.
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am Happy with that? Is that all you meant? Then I'm fine with receiving that, too: I have no problem that, from where you sit, all kinds of things may seem so to you.
Sure, if what you believe about the Christian God makes you happy, if it comforts and consoles you, if it soothes your soul, you can stop right there. Millions upon millions do. But this is a philosophy venue. We're expected to dig down deeper regarding what we believe.

Which, in my view, is precisely what you and others of your objectivist ilk don't do. You can't demonstrate that the Christian God does in fact reside in Heaven so you concoct your intellectual and spiritual contraptions in a "world of words". Then all you need do is to believe that the words are true "in your head".

Only that is precisely what all of these folks....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

...are doing in regard their own Gods and their own spiritual paths. You're all the same in that you insist that your own chosen path is the One True Path to immortality and salvation.

But none of you will stop and think, "gee, there are hundreds and hundreds of paths out there to choose from. What are the odds that it's mine?!"

And you won't because, in my view, you have too much invested mentally and emotionally and psychologically in it being your path for sure. Again, I was once a devout Christian myself!
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am Which way do you want to be? Do you want to dogmatic or impotent? Because those are the choices you've given yourself.
I'm not dogmatic because I am the first to admit that my own points here are no less rooted subjectively, existentially in dasein. Given the fact that, like you, "I" am but an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the vastness of "all there is". So, really, what are the odds that I, going back to a comprehensive understanding of existence itself, am even remotely close to a precise understanding of the "human condition" here on planet Earth.

In fact, it's only when I have noted this to all of the moral and political and spiritual objectivists [like you] that I've encountered down through the years that the "huffing and puffing" often commences. The last thing they want to believe is that their own One True Path may well be just an existential fabrication rooted in dasein.

Right?

And I am impotent only to the extent that what I believe "here and now" is true. After all, what can I possible do to change it? On the other hand, what I do believe "here and now" may not be true at all. How could I possibly know that for sure?

Then the other point of mine you skipped:
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 amAnd it's absolutely, objectively, indisputably wrong to be "arrogant, authoritarian and dogmatic," as well. We have to believe that, too.
I don't get it. Many Christians will tell us that God's Commandments and His Word in the Bible are the basis for objective morality on this side of the grave. And, in turn, they tell us that unless we obey them we might burn for all of eternity in Hell on the other side.

How about IC? Does he agree?

And if that is true why wouldn't one be absolutely adamant in preaching Christianity? Isn't that precisely the basis for proselytizing, for becoming Christian missionaries? Souls themselves are at stake!!

But other religious denominations, while basically agreeing with that, insist that it is their own One True Path that will save your soul.

Why his path and not their path? Let him give us what he construes to be the best argument and evidence there is to bring the infidels around. And let him really go deeply introspective here, okay?
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Christianity

Post by Immanuel Can »

iambiguous wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 10:30 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 am Which way do you want to be? Do you want to dogmatic or impotent? Because those are the choices you've given yourself.
I'm not dogmatic
"Impotent," then. Nothing you assert is more than a personal feeling, you say?
And I am impotent only to the extent that what I believe "here and now" is true.

No, you can't believe it's "true" for anybody but yourself. It's not true for anybody else, because that would make it objective.

Then the other point of mine you skipped:
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 4:47 amAnd it's absolutely, objectively, indisputably wrong to be "arrogant, authoritarian and dogmatic," as well. We have to believe that, too.
I don't get it. Many Christians will tell us that God's Commandments and His Word in the Bible are the basis for objective morality on this side of the grave. And, in turn, they tell us that unless we obey them we might burn for all of eternity in Hell on the other side.

How about IC? Does he agree?
It wasn't addressed to me, but was part of a longer address to your perceived audience. I didn't feel it asked for a response from me, and it really didn't need one, because it was incorrect from its very premise. Christianity is not a religion of "commandments." It has some commandments, but, as good as they are, adherence to them is not the condition of salvation. That's one huge difference from what we call "religion."

But that's a discussion I knew you would not appreciate or understand; so it seemed unnecessary to say anything at all.
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henry quirk
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Re: Christianity

Post by henry quirk »

promethean75 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 9:43 pm "The everyday Christian. -- If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him." - FN

Yea, I implore you, who that walk among you are everyday Christians?
This guy was as everyday as you can get...

The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world. Ammon Hennacy

I'm not trying to change the world. I'm trying to stop the world from changing me. Ammon Hennacy
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