Christianity

[attofishpi]

I have to admit to being mostly bored as a plank through what appeared to be copious amounts of WAFFLE!

I agree with the nutjob.

Alas, to answer the entire thread succinctly...

Just pick up the gospels, read them, and work out for yourself what Christ was attempting to teach, and live and love according to those teachings

That's what I said (upthread, at least once). I was ignored. Mebbe the nutjob will fare better.

Jefferson Bible, anyone?

Where is this "nutjob" reference coming from Henry? Is it an American euphemism for you wanting to shove you penis and bollocks up into my anal passage? I must insist on letting you know, that I am, and intend to remain an arse virgin.

[henry quirk]

I must insist on letting you know, that I am, and intend to remain an arse virgin.

The guy with bunny ears a stranger to anal sodomy?

[attofishpi]

I must insist on letting you know, that I am, and intend to remain an arse virgin.

The guy with bunny ears a stranger to anal sodomy?

Pfff. Americans and their lack of English comprehension. No Henry, I am not a stranger to anal sodomy, I am aware that it exists, I just don't partake in the recreation myself (unlike 90% of the American population that own guns)

[henry quirk]

Cleaning out my drafts folder I found this...

-----

The figure of Jesus Christ seems to me to represent a figure encased in amber. It could not move, and it could not evolve.

Ideals, and ideal figures, aren't meant to evolve. They aren't meant to change to suit a shifting, and shifty, culture or the whims of individuals.

No, ideals, and ideal figures, are meant to be aspired to: culture -- and individuals -- ought to change to embody them.

What should Christ be? A marxist? A tranny? A repub or dem? Hermaphroditic, racially-neutral,
-----

...apparently I had a notion for a post, but -- for whatever reason -- I didn't finish.

[henry quirk]

Pfff. Americans and their lack of English comprehension. No Henry, I am not a stranger to anal sodomy, I am aware that it exists, *I just don't partake in the recreation myself (unlike 90% of the American population that own guns)

*I don't believe you.

[attofishpi]

Pfff. Americans and their lack of English comprehension. No Henry, I am not a stranger to anal sodomy, I am aware that it exists, *I just don't partake in the recreation myself (unlike 90% of the American population that own guns)

*I don't believe you.

Sounds more like wishful thinking to me.

[Dubious]

Fuck mans established 'Christian' churches and their versions of whatever they think the message of Christ was. Just pick up the gospels, read them, and work out for yourself what Christ was attempting to teach, and live and love according to those teachings...AND...be worth.Y HE did, what he did.

The Christian Church is one of the greatest crime institutions the world has ever seen. What's coming to light are only the most recent reports of criminality mostly directed toward children. Imagine how rampant it must have been when such crimes weren't even allowed to be reported! From the way I see it to be a true Christian is not to be defined by any church but whether you acknowledge its ancient sources especially in the gospels and abide as best as possible by its teachings.

To give it even more credibility as one of the great ethical documents, the kind of nonsense miracles theists believe in to endorse their god for their own salvation, which are among its most unoriginal parts, can be dispensed with as given in the Jefferson bible. When considered in its more factual human form the gospels are not so unlike the teachings of its Eastern variants also without their concomitant miracles.

In effect, the Jeffersonian edit makes the gospels more humanly introspective than declarative as if a god, endorsed by miracles, had given the order.

[attofishpi]

Fuck mans established 'Christian' churches and their versions of whatever they think the message of Christ was. Just pick up the gospels, read them, and work out for yourself what Christ was attempting to teach, and live and love according to those teachings...AND...be worth.Y HE did, what he did.

The Christian Church is one of the greatest crime institutions the world has ever seen. What's coming to light are only the most recent reports of criminality mostly directed toward children. Imagine how rampant it must have been when such crimes weren't even allowed to be reported! From the way I see it to be a true Christian is not to be defined by any church but whether you acknowledge its ancient sources especially in the gospels and abide as best as possible by its teachings.

To give it even more credibility as one of the great ethical documents, the kind of nonsense miracles theists believe in to endorse their god for their own salvation, which are among its most unoriginal parts, can be dispensed with as given in the Jefferson bible. When considered in its more factual human form the gospels are not so unlike the teachings of its Eastern variants also without their concomitant miracles.

In effect, the Jeffersonian edit makes the gospels more humanly introspective than declarative as if a god, endorsed by miracles, had given the order.

Sorry Dubious, I've failed to give some responses earlier to your replies to mine, mostly because I agree with what you've said, as in the above. Although, I had never heard of Jefferson bible, just the name puts me off. KJV for me will do (or did do).

[Belinda]

Cleaning out my drafts folder I found this...

-----

The figure of Jesus Christ seems to me to represent a figure encased in amber. It could not move, and it could not evolve.

Ideals, and ideal figures, aren't meant to evolve. They aren't meant to change to suit a shifting, and shifty, culture or the whims of individuals.

No, ideals, and ideal figures, are meant to be aspired to: culture -- and individuals -- ought to change to embody them.

What should Christ be? A marxist? A tranny? A repub or dem? Hermaphroditic, racially-neutral,
-----

...apparently I had a notion for a post, but -- for whatever reason -- I didn't finish.

A Christ is a spiritual and/or political leader who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others. Jesus of Nazareth is a Christ in this sense. Recent Christs in the current reportage are Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira.

[attofishpi]

Cleaning out my drafts folder I found this...

-----

The figure of Jesus Christ seems to me to represent a figure encased in amber. It could not move, and it could not evolve.

Ideals, and ideal figures, aren't meant to evolve. They aren't meant to change to suit a shifting, and shifty, culture or the whims of individuals.

No, ideals, and ideal figures, are meant to be aspired to: culture -- and individuals -- ought to change to embody them.

What should Christ be? A marxist? A tranny? A repub or dem? Hermaphroditic, racially-neutral,
-----

...apparently I had a notion for a post, but -- for whatever reason -- I didn't finish.

A Christ is a spiritual and/or political leader who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others. Jesus of Nazareth is a Christ in this sense. Recent Christs in the current reportage are Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira.

Christ means annointed one. (Originating from Greek) - in Hebrew, as far as I am aware it meant Messiah. It does not mean one who 'sacrifices' himself for the benefit of others.

[Dubious]

Fuck mans established 'Christian' churches and their versions of whatever they think the message of Christ was. Just pick up the gospels, read them, and work out for yourself what Christ was attempting to teach, and live and love according to those teachings...AND...be worth.Y HE did, what he did.

The Christian Church is one of the greatest crime institutions the world has ever seen. What's coming to light are only the most recent reports of criminality mostly directed toward children. Imagine how rampant it must have been when such crimes weren't even allowed to be reported! From the way I see it to be a true Christian is not to be defined by any church but whether you acknowledge its ancient sources especially in the gospels and abide as best as possible by its teachings.

To give it even more credibility as one of the great ethical documents, the kind of nonsense miracles theists believe in to endorse their god for their own salvation, which are among its most unoriginal parts, can be dispensed with as given in the Jefferson bible. When considered in its more factual human form the gospels are not so unlike the teachings of its Eastern variants also without their concomitant miracles.

In effect, the Jeffersonian edit makes the gospels more humanly introspective than declarative as if a god, endorsed by miracles, had given the order.

Sorry Dubious, I've failed to give some responses earlier to your replies to mine, mostly because I agree with what you've said, as in the above. Although, I had never heard of Jefferson bible, just the name puts me off. KJV for me will do (or did do).

That's okay! I'm not trying to convert anyone. Everyone arranges their own beliefs as it suits them. Mine you already know; but still it's interesting in how Jefferson - whom I don't find particularly admirable in some respects - retold the gospels without the miracles focusing exclusively on its ethical content espousing as told, the wisdom of a guru god. I think many Christians alive now are more prone to believe in the sayings of Jesus than in the miracles he reportedly performed.

As a deist, Jefferson only meant this retelling for himself, as follows....

Jefferson’s 84-page vision of Christianity, completed about 1819 and given the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English, instead stressed Jesus’ moral teachings, particularly the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Jefferson bound the scrapbook in red leather.

Jefferson mentioned his redaction of Christian scripture to close friends but never published it; the finished product was intended solely for his own personal use. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., purchased it from Jefferson’s granddaughter in 1895.

Being for his personal use he would certainly have objected to it being called the Jefferson bible but calling it that is much shorter than referring to its original title.

What Jefferson did for his own sake, it seems to me, is to subtract the metaphysics thereby extracting for himself a testament of ethics which he failed in performing more often than he should have.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Now that man has become sophisticated, philosophy has been replaced by entertainment. Who needs wisdom anymore with such high quality entertainment available to enable self justification to replace the need for "objective meaning". Progress.

It is I think a more complex problem. The essence of the Christian path, and most religious paths about which I am aware, involve different forms of renunciation. The notion is that if a lower element is renounced that higher elements can be realized. In the Christian scheme (and this is also true in Vedanta and Buddhism) the purpose of renunciation is to attain something higher and ultimately life in a world beyond.

Freud still spoke of resisting sexual pleasure in order to sublimate sexual energy to higher purposes. He believed that through sublimation civilization was built. It is a question of use of energy.

If in Christian metaphysics the core idea is that *the Earth* and 'earthly things' need to be resisted then the sacrifice of such 'lower pleasures' makes sense because higher attainments and higher pleasures can then be realized.

But if the entire Christian metaphysical picture is no longer seen to apply -- no other world or higher world that is the ultimate point of striving -- and if life is merely or solely a material and biological process, then the entire dynamic shifts radically. And the term 'radically' must be emphasized.

This is what in fact happened. Instead of life and life's processes being understood at their core as metaphysical, and vertical, they were redefined as solely horizontal. So both hell and heaven disappeared -- they could no longer be taken seriously. What is left? Only life on this plane, and a life without a defined metaphysics in any sense similar to the metaphysical systems of yore. In that plane, and on this plane, God does not exist. Since 'God' is a very intricate and utterly metaphysical idea.

So let's extend this fact -- the fact about how people think and perceive today (what they believe) -- to the present conversation and its denizens. Quite literally, if you (in the widest plural sense of you) do not believe in Jesus Christ as a metaphysical agent and as an expression of a metaphysical understanding, then he is simply a sage-like man who either had delusions of grandeur or had such delusions laid over him. And if you (in the same wide sense) believe that then you show that you are an outcome of the deconversion from one metaphysics to another non-metaphysics.

So at that point you might just as well drop the entire set of balls. Stop juggling!

Once the metaphysics is collapsed the entire system becomes more or less untenable. It is at that point -- let us imagine the classical Everyman as our subject -- that Man (Occidental man let's say) has to redefine life and meaning entirely. The ramifications are extraordinary and they are far more complex than a given person lets on.

So what will the Everyman do now that he is once and finally simply a temporary biological event in a totally meaningless world, a world without any of the former dimensionality it had? The answer is pretty simple: he must seek entertainment. You have to occupy yourself with something, right? There is nothing to achieve on those former and now understood to be unreal 'upper dimensions' and there is no reason to resist or limit yourself in respect to what were formerly described as 'lower' and 'earthly pleasures', so Everyman necessarily restructures his life according to a new model. And therefore a whole world is created for him.

What I desire to understand better is how each denizen in this present conversation actually organizes his perception about Reality in respect to the immense shift in metaphysics that has and is taking place.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The figure of Jesus Christ seems to me to represent a figure encased in amber. It could not move, and it could not evolve.

Ideals, and ideal figures, aren't meant to evolve. They aren't meant to change to suit a shifting, and shifty, culture or the whims of individuals.

No, ideals, and ideal figures, are meant to be aspired to: culture -- and individuals -- ought to change to embody them.

What should Christ be? A marxist? A tranny? A repub or dem? Hermaphroditic, racially-neutral . . .

If the *ideal figure* that is Jesus Christ is not 'meant to evolve' that could be taken as implying that he is a creation of man for man's purposes. The ideal image and the ideal object is invented and 'set in stone' (or encased in amber) for social and political purposes (what else?).

On the other side of possibilities, Jesus Christ is what he is because he came into this world with a specific set of intentions and purposes that were not 'invented by men' but have a real existence in God's domain and in God's intentions.

So it seems to me that you are noticing that it must be one or the other? (Or perhaps both).

But what is the original and true metaphysical picture that Jesus Christ embodied? It seems to me that the core of the dispute that we are -- like it or not -- engaged in is to be found in this: We do not agree, and none of can agree, about what the real truth of this matter is.

And the reason? Because we no longer can believe in the metaphysical principles through which the figure of Jesus Christ was classically defined.

If the classical figure of Jesus Christ and what this meant is no longer understood to be true, then I can say with certainty that the Figure of Jesus Christ will be re-conceived. And that, in fact, seems precisely to be the case.

So yes, Jesus Christ is now a Marxian figure and His true object was egalitarianism. He certainly must *support* transsexuality because, as the transsexuals assert, it really does not matter how one 'identifies', and how could it matter much if one reorganizes one's body a bit? It certainly cannot matter if men lie with men in the same manner as men lie with women because there is nothing in particular in any of this that really matters much.

In the New Dispensation what really matters?

Why conceive of a Christ-fugure who was (as he is said to have been) more or less a celibate? Why not revision Jesus Christ as 'pater familias'? Why an uptight Jesus Christ who cannot come down to the level of the average New Man and enjoy a barbecue and an afternoon at the beach and then, perhaps, a frolic with a girl-friend? (or as some have been trying to assert with a boy-friend)?

Once the definition of what life is -- what it is for and what it means -- has been revisioned because metaphysical concepts have been revisioned, then the former Figure of Jesus Christ is in a significant sense an obstacle to be overcome.

[henry quirk]

If the *ideal figure* that is Jesus Christ is not 'meant to evolve' that could be taken as implying that he is a creation of man for man's purposes. The ideal image and the ideal object is invented and 'set in stone' (or encased in amber) for social and political purposes (what else?).

On the other side of possibilities, Jesus Christ is what he is because he came into this world with a specific set of intentions and purposes that were not 'invented by men' but have a real existence in God's domain and in God's intentions.

So it seems to me that you are noticing that it must be one or the other? (Or perhaps both).

What I notice is: we have the Gospels. Seems if you wanna know the man (what he was about, what he did) read them. Further, I notice many folks get hung up on his divinity and never get past it. I notice the Jefferson Bible was razor-cut and glue-pasted together leavin' out all extra-natural mysteriousness. I notice how pretty much everyone here dances hard to avoid actually gettn' into what it is to be Christian (not as acceptance of the para-natural, but as a way to live in the here & now).

That's what I notice.

But what is the original and true metaphysical picture that Jesus Christ embodied?

er, the Gospels mebbe?

It seems to me that the core of the dispute that we are -- like it or not -- engaged in is to be found in this: We do not agree, and none of can agree, about what the real truth of this matter is.

The truth of the guy is written down: consult that, then accept or reject it. We don't have to agree with each other. Do we, as single ones, agree with him, that's the question.

And the reason? Because we no longer can believe in the metaphysical principles through which the figure of Jesus Christ was classically defined.

I reckon most who pipe up n this thread have no clue what his principles (metaphysical or practical) actually are. They know what they've been told, is all.

If the classical figure of Jesus Christ and what this meant is no longer understood to be true, then I can say with certainty that the Figure of Jesus Christ will be re-conceived. And that, in fact, seems precisely to be the case.

In ignorance the sheepdog is seen as wolf, the wolf as sheepdog.

So yes, Jesus Christ is now a Marxian figure and His true object was egalitarianism. He certainly must *support* transsexuality because, as the transsexuals assert, it really does not matter how one 'identifies', and how could it matter much if one reorganizes one's body a bit? It certainly cannot matter if men lie with men in the same manner as men lie with women because there is nothing in particular in any of this that really matters much.

In the New Dispensation what really matters?

Why conceive of a Christ-fugure who was (as he is said to have been) more or less a celibate? Why not revision Jesus Christ as 'pater familias'? Why an uptight Jesus Christ who cannot come down to the level of the average New Man and enjoy a barbecue and an afternoon at the beach and then, perhaps, a frolic with a girl-friend? (or as some have been trying to assert with a boy-friend)?

No one readin' the Gospels can come to such awful conclusions.

Once the definition of what life is -- what it is for and what it means -- has been revisioned because metaphysical concepts have been revisioned, then the former Figure of Jesus Christ is in a significant sense an obstacle to be overcome.

Yep, reduce man to machine, then rub out any-thing or -one that sez otherwise.

[Immanuel Can]

And the reason? Because we no longer can believe in the metaphysical principles through which the figure of Jesus Christ was classically defined.

I reckon most who pipe up n this thread have no clue what his principles (metaphysical or practical) actually are. They know what they've been told, is all.

He doesn't have any such idea himself. He's just spitballing.

He hasn't even a clue what the difference might be between a professing "Christian" and a real one.

He certainly has no idea who Christ is...and apparently, is more interested in his fantasy versions than in reality.