Christianity

[Alexis Jacobi]

Perhaps I'm missing a possibility?

That’s true with no doubt.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Age! those were two of the most epic, and the most extraordinary posts of all others of yours I’ve ever read! I am not sure if pride is warranted on your part but you deserve recognition. I admit to complete amazement.

[Harbal]

Perhaps I'm missing a possibility?

That’s true with no doubt.

I doubt he's missing much.

[attofishpi]

Perhaps I'm missing a possibility?

That’s true with no doubt.

I doubt he's missing much.

I guess that depends whether you prefer subjective rambling waffle gleamed from reading other peoples writing rather that getting information direct from the source. (where God is concerned)

[Belinda]

That’s true with no doubt.

I doubt he's missing much.

I guess that depends whether you prefer subjective rambling waffle gleamed from reading other peoples writing rather that getting information direct from the source. (where God is concerned)

How does the Almighty send information to wee FishPie??

[attofishpi]

I doubt he's missing much.

I guess that depends whether you prefer subjective rambling waffle gleamed from reading other peoples writing rather that getting information direct from the source. (where God is concerned)

How does the Almighty send information to wee FishPie??

Many many ways..

Pay attention: mad_if_you_dont :- viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33214

[Belinda]

I guess that depends whether you prefer subjective rambling waffle gleamed from reading other peoples writing rather that getting information direct from the source. (where God is concerned)

How does the Almighty send information to wee FishPie??

Many many ways..

Pay attention: mad_if_you_dont :- viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33214

It's reasonable to view reality as an ordered affair like as if some super-intelligence/super-goodness had created nature and all its laws That is to say "God the Creator" is a reasonable belief.

But it's not reasonable to conclude that God the Creator intervenes to change His own laws of nature that He Himself set in place.

[attofishpi]

How does the Almighty send information to wee FishPie??

Many many ways..

Pay attention: mad_if_you_dont :- viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33214

It's reasonable to view reality as an ordered affair like as if some super-intelligence/super-goodness had created nature and all its laws That is to say "God the Creator" is a reasonable belief.

Sure, but it is not reasonable to consider God as "super-goodness' I'd rather have been crucified than to endure what God put me through.
So where is this God of 'super-goodness' - if you've read that in scripture it is a lie or misunderstanding of some 1.

But it's not reasonable to conclude that God the Creator intervenes to change His own laws of nature that He Himself set in place.

Oh, the ol' determinsim - if God created the Big Bang, he just sat back and watched everything from that point and never intervened...no that is unreasonable.

[Belinda]

Many many ways..

Pay attention: mad_if_you_dont :- viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33214

It's reasonable to view reality as an ordered affair like as if some super-intelligence/super-goodness had created nature and all its laws That is to say "God the Creator" is a reasonable belief.

Sure, but it is not reasonable to consider God as "super-goodness' I'd rather have been crucified than to endure what God put me through.
So where is this God of 'super-goodness' - if you've read that in scripture it is a lie or misunderstanding of some 1.

But it's not reasonable to conclude that God the Creator intervenes to change His own laws of nature that He Himself set in place.

Oh, the ol' determinsim - if God created the Big Bang, he just sat back and watched everything from that point and never intervened...no that is unreasonable.

At least you agree that my opinion is deterministic.
How could the superb order which we increasingly see in nature (and even in morality) not be set in place from the very beginning? In other words, how can anyone credit the existence of an almighty God that did not plan each and every law of nature?

My faith in the God of "super-goodness" comes from the way I was reared and educated. It's faith; I can't prove it. But such as it is, my faith in super-goodness does not include a Power Apart from Men which can change the present or the future.

Indeed faith in interventionist God makes men too dependent.

[attofishpi]

It's reasonable to view reality as an ordered affair like as if some super-intelligence/super-goodness had created nature and all its laws That is to say "God the Creator" is a reasonable belief.

Sure, but it is not reasonable to consider God as "super-goodness' I'd rather have been crucified than to endure what God put me through.
So where is this God of 'super-goodness' - if you've read that in scripture it is a lie or misunderstanding of some 1.

But it's not reasonable to conclude that God the Creator intervenes to change His own laws of nature that He Himself set in place.

Oh, the ol' determinsim - if God created the Big Bang, he just sat back and watched everything from that point and never intervened...no that is unreasonable.

At least you agree that my opinion is deterministic.
How could the superb order which we increasingly see in nature (and even in morality) not be set in place from the very beginning?

Very easily. If I code a computer program, I may decide over time that amendments need to be put in place - especially where determinism leads to immorality.

In other words, how can anyone credit the existence of an almighty God that did not plan each and every law of nature?

Very easily, again amendements to the laws (of perceivable reality) can be made. (see above)

My faith in the God of "super-goodness" comes from the way I was reared and educated. It's faith; I can't prove it. But such as it is, my faith in super-goodness does not include a Power Apart from Men which can change the present or the future.

Not sure what you are asserting, but surely you are an atheist, no?

Indeed faith in interventionist God makes men too dependent.

And what of faith when one KNOWS God intervenes?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Some further notes & musings

It is odd when I think of it: the photo-books of Diane Arbus were the first I examined when young as my parents set them out (along with Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston) on the so-called coffee table of our living room. If you know her work it is mostly of deviants, freaks, and of people of the margins. It is amazing work but also extremely depressing. One does not get *uplift* from her images.

One of my declared endeavors has been to understand better what happens to a people, to a culture, when their metaphysical foundations are ripped away. I cannot conceal (and why would I?) that I am attracted to many who appear here (as in theatre, as in performance) because their intellectual and emotional skits are so much like *intellectual freak-shows*.

Distorted people, bent, twisted-up, both entirely bereft of the certainty of foundations and to the degree that those foundations are lost, that much more declarative, that much more *certain*. Yet belligerent and reactive. You poke them and, like an insect, they raise their rumps and emit an unpleasant smell. Yet they come here to poke and to be poked! It is what reminds them, I guess, that they are alive. But what a strange life! Fragments communicating with fragments through absurd pirouettes. In post after post these distorted beings double-down on their creation of distorted character and this goes on year after year! One neurotic *idea* is repeated unendingly in a neurotic gambol.

I have revisited the novels of André Gide. I suppose there are numerous artists who could be referenced but it was Gide that reminded me of the processes that were initiated when, in European culture, that *imagined upper-world* of god-imagery and angelical being were cut away -- similar to how many on this forum undermine and can no longer *believe in* the metaphysical tales that support belief in transcendentals.

When the route and the avenue of an upwardly-directed transcendence is blocked one then has no other option but *return to the body*. Return to the earth. And thus return to the chaos and contradiction of life and of the self. If the transcendental, which is communicated in religious symbolism, is no longer *believed in* and no other symbol-set can bolster the sense in the realness of those transcendentals, then that *upper route* is cut off.

Gide's novel The Immoralist traces both an inevitable but also a willed descent away from the ordered world of hierarchy and principle and down into a sort of lawlessness, a personal rebellion, a surrender to the processes of mutability and established order (and hierarchy) which, strangely enough, are understood as needed and necessary for the growth of the man. I wonder as to the degree that for Gide this was undertaken as a 'conscious endeavor', backed up by philosophical declaration, or if it came about when unconscious impulses rose up of their own accord and with their own demands? He wrote around the turn of the century and into the teens. What interests me is that he and so many others were 'pathfinders' of that return to the body. They established the roads that others would later follow.

True it is that as a 'moralist' I am in reaction to so much that has come about as a result of the destruction of hierarchy through which orders of value were established. It is so very easy to *destroy* and so much harder to *build*, and indeed *preservation* is a taxing endeavor when it seems that so much tends toward disunity.

Speaking as I tend to with 'gross generalizations' (and always taking jabs here and there!) is not very fair of course. But I think it has a constructive and not a purely critical function.

[attofishpi]

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yes

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[Harbal]

Speaking as I tend to with 'gross generalizations' (and always taking jabs here and there!) is not very fair of course. But I think it has a constructive and not a purely critical function.

And it isn't as if anyone else takes you half as seriously as you take yourself.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Speaking as I tend to with 'gross generalizations' (and always taking jabs here and there!) is not very fair of course. But I think it has a constructive and not a purely critical function.

And it isn't as if anyone else takes you half as seriously as you take yourself.

Yet Harbal the more interesting thing, when you are examined, is that not only can you not take your self seriously, but there is nothing serious that you identify as relevant.

Then, when your efforts are examined (your mindless jibber-jabber), they have only to do with positing irrelevance and absurdity as a value. Yet none if this is understood by you. You simply act.

And I find this fascinating. It is ‘the thing’ that needs to become the topic of thought.

By your own declaration this (i.e. your self) is only a game.

That is one *outcome* of processes set in motion in former tines.

[Harbal]

Yet Harbal the more interesting thing, when you are examined, is that not only can you not take your self seriously, but there is nothing serious that you identify as relevant. Then, when your efforts are examined, they have only to do with positing irrelevance and absurdity as a value. Yet none if this is understood by you. You simply act.

So what?

And I find this fascinating. It is ‘the thing’ that needs to become the topic of thought.

Okay, you go and have a good think about it, then.

That is one *outcome* of processes set in motion in former tines.

No, it's the outcome of my opting out.