Christianity

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Agent Smith
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Re: Christianity

Post by Agent Smith »

Some apples are red

Ergo (drumroll) ...

All apples are green

:)
Harry Baird
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Re: Christianity

Post by Harry Baird »

Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm If you want to ask me what I think
I don't.

You've shared enough of your thoughts under your own impetus already for that to be unnecessary.
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm feel free to continue worrying about what you think I may or may not think.
I have no such worries.
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm If you just want to find a whipping post to beat on
I don't. If you were able to set aside your self-absorption in the bitterness of your life (and I'm not suggesting that you are or ought to be), you'd see the light-heartedness in the gentle poking of fun at your apparent obliviousness to some rather obvious playful irony, rather than taking it personally as a "whipping".
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm I can't make you interested in a straightforward conversation with me.
Correct, and I've given you four reasons why I'm not / wasn't interested. Despite the time I devoted to expressing them carefully, I can't make you read them in any depth beyond the skim sufficient for a quick, knee-jerk response based in victimhood, let alone to consider, reflect on, and understand them.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Harbal wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:02 pmSo, presumably, when you say stuff to me that you know I won't understand, it is for the benefit of others.
Well, it is a theatrical conversation we have here. Many players, many strutting styles. But yes! It took you months but by Jove I think you’ve got it.

Let them who have ears hear etc. etc. etc.
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Harbal
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Re: Christianity

Post by Harbal »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:31 pm
Harbal wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:05 pmIn this instance, Gary, you can most definitely speak for me.
And yet, no matter what, it means and matters nothing one way or the other.
I don't know, I haven't given much thought to the other way.
Gary Childress
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Re: Christianity

Post by Gary Childress »

Harry Baird wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:14 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm If you want to ask me what I think
I don't.

You've shared enough of your thoughts under your own impetus already for that to be unnecessary.
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm feel free to continue worrying about what you think I may or may not think.
I have no such worries.
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm If you just want to find a whipping post to beat on
I don't. If you were able to set aside your self-absorption in the bitterness of your life (and I'm not suggesting that you are or ought to be), you'd see the light-heartedness in the gentle poking of fun at your apparent obliviousness to some rather obvious playful irony, rather than taking it personally as a "whipping".
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:48 pm I can't make you interested in a straightforward conversation with me.
Correct, and I've given you four reasons why I'm not / wasn't interested. Despite the time I devoted to expressing them carefully, I can't make you read them in any depth beyond the skim sufficient for a quick, knee-jerk response based in victimhood, let alone to consider, reflect on, and understand them.
Bye.
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Harbal
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Re: Christianity

Post by Harbal »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:17 pm
Well, it is a theatrical conversation we have here. Many players, many strutting styles. But yes! It took you months but by Jove I think you’ve got it.
It took me months to work out you are performing to an audience? No, not exactly.
Belinda
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Re: Christianity

Post by Belinda »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:56 pm You’ve got to admit it is pretty awesome!
In anthropological terms that's conspicuous consumption. There is however no point in garrulousness among online personas.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

I was looking for that song My Hair from the opera Hair. (Peacovk displays you know). But instead I came across this and it got me teary!

Maybe, maybe someday I’ll come closer to being a mensch!

But for now ……
seeds
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Re: Christianity

Post by seeds »

Harry Baird wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:42 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 12:30 am How about engaging me in straightforward conversation?
I don't think I will, because:
  1. I largely lost interest in that when you implied a moral equivalence between a young black woman bravely standing up alone against the structural racism of her society, and a young, angry, racist, white woman vilifying her for it from amongst the safety of a crowd of like-minded individuals, and when you then doubled down and insulted me after I endorsed seeds's post calling you out for that false moral equivalence as well as generally calling out similar objectionable behaviour in the thread.
  2. You continue to sling insults at me for no good reason - witness: "Or are you two peacocks not yet done strutting around?"
  3. There seems to be no meaningful possibility for conversation anyway. There are essentially only two topics of interest to you (at least in this thread): your existential suffering, and theology. Re the former, you have affirmed that nobody can say anything to help you, and that you talk about it essentially for your own psychological release and comfort. All I can really offer then in this regard is my ongoing sympathy. I don't see fit to repeat it, so, unless I withdraw it, you can simply assume it every time you express your pain and frustration. Re the latter, your thinking is too fickle and variable for there even to be much to grab hold of here. A bland affirmation on my part of "Yeah, it's confusing and we really don't know what's going on" seems to provide little basis for fruitful engagement. I have had my own unusual and difficult life experiences, and I am interested in working out as best I can why I have/had them and what they tell me about reality - including, and especially, theologically - not, as you seem to be, in prevaricating over whether or not a blameworthy monotheistic (Christian) God exists against Whom one can rail over one's troubles. There seems, then, to be little common ground between us.
  4. I responded to your post only incidentally anyway, in the course of gently poking fun at AJ and his endorsement of the ideas of Renaud Camus and others like him, while playing along with his (hilarious) spoof of online course salesmanship. AJ gets it (and gives as good as he gets). It only became about you given your apparent (but really deliberate? Or feigned?) obliviousness to the satirical humour, which (your apparent obliviousness), admittedly, was inevitably going to become topical at some point - which AJ chose to make immediate.
Finally: I get that your grumpiness and prickliness stem (largely?) from your understandable frustration with your life situation, so I forgive you for them - albeit that my natural, visceral reaction to them continues to be one of distaste.

I trust that that answers your question straightforwardly enough.
A brilliant response, Harry, well done!

Furthermore, based on many of Gary's comments to others since that unfortunate "brave girl" issue, in my humble estimation, Gary has proven himself to be in possession of a good deal of wisdom, which makes that prior issue all the more puzzling. :?

Anyway, again, well done!
_______
Harry Baird
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Re: Christianity

Post by Harry Baird »

seeds wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 7:00 pm A brilliant response, Harry, well done!
Thanks, seeds. I'm especially glad that it was meaningful to you, given that you and I seem to have a fair few common understandings.
seeds wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 7:00 pm Furthermore, based on many of Gary's comments to others since that unfortunate "brave girl" issue, in my humble estimation, Gary has proven himself to be in possession of a good deal of wisdom, which makes that prior issue all the more puzzling. :?
Yep. I think that what was going on there is that he got so caught up in expressing the idea that we're all suffering here in life and all just doing the best we can in our suffering - and that in that sense we shouldn't judge one another - that he failed to (recognise the need to) appropriately acknowledge, or to first acknowledge, the obvious and indisputable point you were making with that photo: that the (blatantly hateful) racism it captures is morally wrong.

Gary's simple, sincere, and honest approach does seem to me to suggest and even constitute wisdom, yes, albeit that he has his blocks, which this recent exchange demonstrates (at least to me) - but then, don't we all?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Harry Baird wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:39 pmYour own view here remains obscure and unclear to me. You ignored the direct questions I put to you in this respect in the hope that, my having answered as best I could the direct questions that you'd put to me, you would as quid pro quo deign to answer the ones I put to you - but my hope appears to have been in vain.
No, I did not ignore it. But yes I did not answer it directly. The questions opens up into a very wide field. In so many different ways the dialog here turns essentially on the question.

That question was:
Given that you also recognise the design in nature, then my second sincere, direct question (riffing off yours above) is: Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
Well, I can do little else but *recognize* the design in nature. The more that it is examined, the more strange, unlikely and *impossible* it seems. Yet who dreamed it up? I cannot make sense out of it. And as you know -- I think it is plain and undeniable -- our world, the planetary world, the world of biology, is utterly cruel and simply without care or concern.

So, and I think you've noticed this, the 'ethics' that I sometimes refer to (this came up when discussing the White European conquest of the southern cone of Africa) is one that speaks of 'the way things are here' as a starting-point. The way things are (I wager, I suspect) will not ever change. It cannot change in a way given that the nature of the world is as it is. If that is true then human affairs will always have the quality they seem to now.

With that said you can better understand why I resist what I sense is *extreme idealism* on your part.

The moral system, and the sense of moral guilt men feel -- that sense that everything man does is wrong and that something in man is dreadfully wrong -- is something I question in itself. Thus, I have used the term 'moral imposition' to refer to our moral systems.

And I think you know that I describe Christianity as a 'picture' through which an absolutely perfect and purely good god intrudes into the human world and demands that everything that makes it what it is (the design of things) be denied and resisted. When I did come to understand this I also turned my view to the older (ancient) Vedic view of things as a comparison point. They developed an unusual way of dealing with the nature of sin that is built into the world.
Who or what (if not an objectively-existing God) stands behind the design of this world?
I am just as unable to answer this question as you are. I am aware of tactics or strategies through which the question is answered. Take the Vaishnava one. They say that the place we are, this Earth, this realm, this aspect of manifestation, is taking place in "god's exterior energy". Implying, of course, that there is an "internal energy". We are captured by the external energy, but it has deadly features. We are then in a sort-of hell-realm. One mistake and we get even more mired. There are only a few ways 'out'. And that is defined through terms that are similar to our own 'intellectus'.
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
So first, we have to realize and understand that we are in a marginal place with dangers on all sides. Second, we must hone our own consciousness since it is the platform of intellectus. How that is done is a wide topic. The cultivation of intellectus is what opens us to all higher dimensions of understanding and also knowledge. But *the world* itself tends to fight against, or perhaps to oppose, the development of the higher faculties.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

I have no idea at all what position Gary has in relation to that baiting, hot-topic photo -- the submittal of which was only to elicit one, specific interpretation of it (all of Seed's presentations are of this sort). But the politics of the South, the destructiveness of the Civil War, the destruction of the South and southern traditions (of all sorts), and the North's imposition on the South through an occupying military force, all that is a very very complex set of issues, questions and problems.

So the reaction of those white youths cannot be looked at only through lens of declared self-righteousness that both Seeds and Harry have had installed in them and which they both 'hone'. It is a question of 'lenses'. And when the questions of lenses are talked about, so many other questions and issues come to the fore, none of it simple and none of it simply resolvable. Entire sets of presuppositions emerge.

The way this is inevitably set up is that if you do not see the dynamic in the picture as the morally righteous do (i.e. Seed and Harry) you condemn yourself through your opposition. It has a game-factor built into it.

Now, you have to have taken many heroic doses of psychedelics to have got to the point that Seeds has: where everything is seen through a hyper-idealistic lens and no other lens is recognized. Indeed any other lens that is not as 'cosmic' is defined as brutal and ape-like. His argument hinges on guilt-slinging. And in this sense he hits into the social justice warrior ethos.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Harry Baird wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:39 pmFirst: is there a need to make a distinction? Intervention is intervention, whether it occurs within your consciousness or outside of it.
Yet there is a significant difference in one view and the other. So there is a need to explain the distinction it seems to me.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Christianity

Post by Alexis Jacobi »

Belinda wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:04 pmIt'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.
Very interesting statement and observation. Much to think about there.
Belinda
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Re: Christianity

Post by Belinda »

Alexis Jacobi wrote: Fri Mar 24, 2023 9:04 am
Belinda wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 1:04 pmIt'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.
Very interesting statement and observation. Much to think about there.
I can hardly believe you are not already familiar with the deist stance.
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