Christian Civilization -- The Central Issue

[Gary Childress]

The people who created these pictures could only work with the content of their imagination. So they had to imagine that God would seek out and assemble all the molecules of their former bodies and then rejoin them with their •soul•. Yet the entire story, for us, is absurd on a dozen levels. God could just create an incorruptible body and wouldn’t have to seek after dispersed particles.

So what? You were doubting Phyllo's claim that the early church inisted on bodily resurrection. Just accept that it was a true claim and easily demonstrated to be so rather than doing this sub IC sin-of-pride parade.

No, I doubted that a resurrection of the body in this world was Christian belief. Which is what Phyllo said.

I was seeing a therapist for a while who was also a minister who told me that the reason Christians embalm their dead is so that they can reinhabit their bodies when they are resurrected.

[phyllo]

So what? You were doubting Phyllo's claim that the early church inisted on bodily resurrection. Just accept that it was a true claim and easily demonstrated to be so rather than doing this sub IC sin-of-pride parade.

No, I doubted that a resurrection of the body in this world was Christian belief. Which is what Phyllo said.

I was seeing a therapist for a while who was also a minister who told me that the reason Christians embalm their dead is so that they can reinhabit their bodies when they are resurrected.

That is true.

In recognition of "All Souls Day," the Vatican has issued new instructions regarding cremation, stating ashes must be placed in a sacred church-approved place.

Remains cannot be scattered, divided, or kept at home

In recognition of "All Souls Day" on Nov. 2, the Vatican issued new instructions regarding cremation, stating ashes must be placed in a sacred church-approved place. (Giuseppe Ciccia/NurPhoto/Getty)

The Vatican published guidelines on Tuesday for Catholics who want to be cremated, saying their remains cannot be scattered, divvied up or kept at home, but should be stored in a sacred, church-approved place.

The new instructions were released just in time for Halloween and "All Souls Day" on Nov. 2, when the faithful are supposed to pray for and remember the dead.

For most of its 2,000-year history, the Catholic Church only permitted burial, arguing it best expressed the Christian hope of resurrection. But in 1963, the Vatican explicitly allowed cremation as long as it didn't suggest a denial of faith about resurrection.

​The new document from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith repeats that burial remains preferred, with officials calling cremation a "brutal destruction" of the body. But it lays out guidelines for conserving ashes for the increasing number of Catholics who choose cremation for economic, ecological or other reasons.

It said it was doing so to counter what it called "new ideas contrary to the church's faith" that had emerged since 1963, including the new-age concept that death is a "fusion" with Mother Nature and the universe, or the "definitive liberation" from the prison of the body.

To set the faithful straight, the Vatican said ashes and bone fragments cannot be kept at home, since it would deprive the Christian community as a whole of remembering the dead. Rather, church authorities should designate a sacred place, such as a cemetery or church area, to hold them. Only in extraordinary cases can a bishop allow ashes to be kept at home, it said.

The dead body isn't the private property of relatives.

Vatican officials declined to say what circumstances would qualify, but presumably countries where Catholics are a persecuted minority and where Catholic churches and cemeteries have been ransacked would qualify.

The document said remains cannot be divided among family members or put in lockets or other mementos. Nor can the ashes be scattered in the air, land or sea since doing so would give the appearance of "pantheism, naturalism or nihilism," the guidelines said.

It repeated church teaching that Catholics who choose to be cremated for reasons contrary to the Christian faith must be denied a Christian funeral. The new instruction carries an Aug. 15 date and says Pope Francis approved it March 18. The author of the text, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, was asked at a Vatican briefing if Francis had any reservations about the text, particularly the refusal to let family members keep remains of their loved ones at home.

Despite new cremation rules that state the body may not be divided, the Vatican said it will not be retrieving the pieces of saints scattered throughout Europe. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket/Getty)

"The dead body isn't the private property of relatives, but rather a son of God who is part of the people of God," Mueller said. "We have to get over this individualistic thinking."

While the new instructions insist remains be kept together, Vatican officials said they are not about to go gather up the various body parts of saints scattered in churches around the world. The practice of divvying up saints' bodies for veneration — a hand here, a thigh bone there — was a fad centuries ago but is no longer in favour.

"Going to all the countries that have a hand of someone would start a war among the faithful," reasoned Monsignor Angel Rodriguez Luno, a Vatican theological adviser.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/vatican-c ... -1.3820336

[Harbal]

I was seeing a therapist for a while who was also a minister who told me that the reason Christians embalm their dead is so that they can reinhabit their bodies when they are resurrected.

I'm glad to say that isn't common practice in the UK. It's grotesque.

[Dubious]

But when we come to the Christian revelation — the Hebrew revelation — and if we start from Hosea (I think one of the older Bible books) God takes a very different form. Is understood very differently. And then the vision or revelation is focused even more. Extraordinarily so in my opinion.

It would be beyond pitiful if Hebrew or its Judaic equivalent for Gentiles, Christianity, were the main sources of revelation in the world or centered mainly in the Western World.

Where you fail is in failing to grasp that people must form •pictures•. There are very crude but elaborate pictures because it is human picture-making that determines them. And all of this in man’s imagination.

You don't say! The visualization process is universal and deeply inherent in the human psyche. Without it even science couldn't exist not to mention literature and all the gods, heroes, and villains contained within it, the bible, overall, being just a small part of it. Visualization can also occur through intense sensory input such as smell, sound, sight, etc. In effect, humans are programmed to visualize which isn't a revelation to anyone.

The same must be applied to the Christian and certainly the Catholic picture. All made very concrete, pictorial, tangible — representational to a child’s mind.

As children get older it's not uncommon to question what they once imagined or visualized; also historically true for entire civilizations.

But that is not at all what is there in the essence of the question. The images dissipate. And what remains?
Meaning.

When the image dissipates, being the container of meaning, what remains is it's abstraction being no-longer contextually relevant and therefore without anchor, doomed to disspate rather quickly especially when new visualizations offer new perspectives...a slow torque process often containing interludes of nihilism.

But again you must deny external divinity and, necessarily, the same realized internally. It is all “invented”.

It's like you said: And all of this in man’s imagination.

[Alexis Jacobi]

It's like you said: And all of this in man’s imagination.

In the confrontation with your thought, which is I think an entrenched ideology, I am clear that I have an object. My a priori is, fairly obviously one could say, not so much to prove the *existence* of metaphysics and the realness I refer to -- this is not possible -- but to keep open what I call 'conceptual pathways' to those realnesses. I believe I understand on what your ideology is grounded: the realness of sensual categories; the objective and practical existence of the tangible world; and a style of reasoning that, first, posits that what is tangibly apprehensible is where realness really is, and second that those categories I refer to as metaphysical do not have (real) existence.

As children get older it's not uncommon to question what they once imagined or visualized; also historically true for entire civilizations.

Working with this metaphor, which is of course more than a mere metaphor, that a believing child becomes a doubting adolescent and rejects the superficial structure of a childlike belief-structure -- and becomes, say, atheist, disbelieving, and simultaneously ungrounded from the (according to the adolescent's view) falsely-conceived platform of certainty. That I would suggest describes you and quite a few others who appear on this forum. But there is a further development it seems to me: that rebellious, cocksure adolescent may grow to be a more profoundly thinking man. Allow me to borrow Seed's Heisenberg quote:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

Now, I fully grant you that all problems, all roadblocks, all doubts, all contrary arguments -- everything that we deal with in what I believe is a civilizational metaphysical crisis where we do not -- cannot! -- any longer believe in metaphysical categories -- is utterly real. In the sense that (for example me in relation to you) every objection of yours, each ideological stance that you hold to as if it is *realness* itself and also truthfulness, has to be confronted and counter-proposed. That is why I stay within these conversations. But I am aware that my link to those metaphysical realnesses that I refer to, and which I cannot deny, have been realized and internalized long ago, and that they were not arrived at through someone presenting me with a *rational, convincing argument*.

So the way I respond to you is by playing back your own argument: the adolescent, to be responsible to himself and to his civilization, must choose mature growth and not to remain holed-up in comfortable ideological position that actually (and really) produces dissolution, the breakdown of the intellectual integrity of the individual, and the undermining of valuable categories of knowing.

When the image dissipates, being the container of meaning, what remains is it's abstraction being no-longer contextually relevant and therefore without anchor, doomed to dissipate rather quickly especially when new visualizations offer new perspectives...a slow torque process often containing interludes of nihilism.

Here, I suggest, is the core of your ideological position. Examination of it, and added (responsible) thought in relation to it, opens up the possibility of renovating it; correcting it.

You actually and really live in a world where the image has dissipated. That adolescent went to work and, applying certain reasoning means, undermined what we mean when we refer to *image*. Then you go on to refer to the meaning that erstwhile had had power and sovereignty as having been transformed into an *abstraction* with no *contextual relevance*. My view is that your error is here. And it is a serious, consequential error. It has become for us a civilizational error. It captures millions and those millions, just like you, do not have alternatives to its determining power.

For you there can be no existent idea, nor a metaphysical principle, that can and does function as an anchor functions. In your world -- certainly in relation to ideas, metaphysically defined principles, morals let's say and ethics -- there is nothing *real* in these. All of them are *inventions* and all of them are therefore arbitrary. You are a man in which the dissipations have become established. You live within platformlessness. And then you refer to *new visualizations* (the Ubermensch and the New Man) as if to say -- what alternative is there? -- that in you these new formulations are evident.

I do appreciate the image of slow torque and I would infer agonizing processes of being molded by and into these New Formulations ...

However I have a feeling that you may be to some degree deceiving yourself. And that really we all deceive ourselves when we employ these evasive intellectual tools (and that is how I interpret you: as evasive and avoiding). In the end -- even with your New Formulations -- it will involve the metaphysical realm of conception, idealization, and action in response to these. So you have in no sense negated metaphysics! But that was your object, was it not? To posit a more real realm of the real?

The way that I interpret modern disbelief (though all of it has understandable reasoning) is to simultaneously understand it as -- to use your metaphor -- the rebellion of a headstrong child. This does not mean that genuine critique is invalidated, not at all. But I think the psychological element has to be examined more closely.

At the core of the old-school Catholic religion -- as expressed in a catechism -- is an entire world of obligation and duty. Ultimately, the end is the service offered to a metaphysical principle. Without the metaphysical principle the *belief system* collapses. There is the disappearing horizon that Nietzsche warned about. And there too is the dissipating image that you mentioned.

All well and good as far as this reasoning goes. But there, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, the meaning that stands behind it is still there, just as real, just as compelling, just as motivating as it ever was. That meaning and what it connotes will never dissipate.

[promethean75]

Check this out man. When i was like eight or nine i was at a christian summer camp and when the pastor guy was reading the appropriate scripture read when you're getting 'saved', i started fuckin cryin and got all shook up. The way he was sayin i was sinful and would go to hell and all that stuff. Here's the thing. I was too young to comprehend the gravity of what was happening, so why would i break down and cry? How would i be able to understand the depth and emergency of the christian situation? It was as if I already knew what was happening... like an old soul that was born again into the imperfect world he had lived in and failed countless times in the past. Bro i felt like total shit. A feeling of unmitigated shame and a desire to repent. Like a demon in me was fixin to be purged and was cryin and fighting against his banishment that would result after the 'saving' ritual. i rememebr bein like 'yes... YES, man, i accept J as my personal savior... please stop I'm in agony!'

So how does a kid that age get all shook up like that. Other eight year olds sit there calmly and pick their noses when the guys readin from the bible. I might as well be puking green pea soup all over the guy I'm so shook up. It was horrible. I think maybe the guy was an ass and was tryna scare me so he's tryna sound like vincent price as he's readin. They were hard-core christians there and they weren't fuckin around with these kids. Bible study, big elaborate meals, prayers every thirty minutes about something or other, work projects, and girls hadta wear pants or long dresses when they weren't swimming. And one piece bathing suits. Hey that's alright becuz it's still in there like swimwear, bro. Nah mean?

Anyway the point is that christianity may be true by virtue of the impossibility of a child that age reacting as he did to being 'saved' unless he is a soul born again into the world (a do-over) or already possessed by a muhfuckin demon.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Promethean: Anyway the point is that christianity may be true by virtue of the impossibility of a child that age reacting as he did to being 'saved' unless he is a soul born again into the world (a do-over) or already possessed by a muhfuckin demon.

For a point of comparison in the Krishna worshipping religion, and in that metaphysical philosophy, the object is to ascend from this world to a higher world.

Here, it is flesh & blood, tooth & claw, and everything is delicate and ends in death. Conceivably, if this world exists, other worlds and dimensions also exist. And these are thought to be of unlimited number. Why not? If one reality or dimension exists, and some extraordinary intelligence created and oversees it, why not any number?

So how did we wind up here in this world? We might have descended here but we might also have ascended to this level. But, again in this philosophy, the object is not to get mired in a specific “material entanglement”.

One error here, and karmic debt accrues. And one is bound to the realm. Literally, in Vedic philosophy generally, the science of religion is one of reversing incarnation. One incarnated here through choices. And those choices have to be reversed. One must choose different objects and objectives.

So one either ascends or descends in material level. One could choose a hell-realm or a heavenly realm — due to causality of choice.

In a nutshell I have described a metaphysics of ethics. And it is this general idea that operates in Christian philosophy. However, in the Vedic system you have zillions of lives to work out your “salvation”. In Christianity just one.

With that said I want to let you assholes know that I am offering •Sure Ascent• incense at $2,999.00 a stick.

And as you guessed you only need one! I can almost guarantee you a birth on a higher planet where you will prance & dance to the Maha Mantra for 10,000 years!

Supplies are limited though. Act now!

[Alexis Jacobi]

For what reason, and in consequence of what untold original sin, is man as a free citizen of the intelligible world condemned to live in the strictly determined world of matter?

Etienne Gilson

[attofishpi]

Promethean: Anyway the point is that christianity may be true by virtue of the impossibility of a child that age reacting as he did to being 'saved' unless he is a soul born again into the world (a do-over) or already possessed by a muhfuckin demon.

For a point of comparison in the Krishna worshipping religion, and in that metaphysical philosophy, the object is to ascend from this world to a higher world.

Everyone should stop smoking weed at some point.

[Alexis Jacobi]

This speech has relevance to the topic of this thread — if it is the protection and restoration of Europe.

[attofishpi]

This speech has relevance to the topic of this thread — if it is the protection and restoration of Europe.

Unfortunately the Muslim fox is already in the chicken coop.

[Dubious]

In the confrontation with your thought, which is I think an entrenched ideology, I am clear that I have an object.

I don't have an entrenched ideology except that which is determined on a scale of probabilities…subject to change, of course. If I have anything corresponding to an entrenched ideology it would be physics over metaphysics. Your objective is the latter over the former which constitutes its own entrenched agenda.

Working with this metaphor, which is of course more than a mere metaphor, that a believing child becomes a doubting adolescent and rejects the superficial structure of a childlike belief-structure -- and becomes, say, atheist, disbelieving, and simultaneously ungrounded from the (according to the adolescent's view) falsely-conceived platform of certainty. That I would suggest describes you and quite a few others who appear on this forum.

It's common, but clearly, not for everyone, that in the growing up process, a reexamination of prior beliefs and values are a natural outcome of increasing maturity. There is something wrong with an adult still thinking as if he were a child reading his catechism.

But there is a further development it seems to me: that rebellious, cocksure adolescent may grow to be a more profoundly thinking man. Allow me to borrow Seed's Heisenberg quote:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

Heisenberg was indeed brilliant as a scientist, but he was also both philosopher and mystic; it's as a mystic that he declares but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. He could never have made that statement as a scientist. What he knows about god is how everyone else knows, namely the image forged in one's imagination.

But I am aware that my link to those metaphysical realnesses that I refer to, and which I cannot deny, have been realized and internalized long ago, and that they were not arrived at through someone presenting me with a *rational, convincing argument*.

Obviously not! No one, least of all me, is trying to convince you of anything. What would be the point? I view it as nothing more than debate. But, by your admission that you are invulnerable to any rational convincing argument is all the confirmation one needs that your metaphysics is as much a dead end as IC's granite conviction that you have to believe in Jesus to be saved…contextually different but theistically the same.

You actually and really live in a world where the image has dissipated.

...more in the act of dissipating upheld only by tradition and ritual which is more of a societal expression and obeisance to prior beliefs inculcating conformity. Collective memories can be as powerful as beliefs in their ability to integrate.

In your world -- certainly in relation to ideas, metaphysically defined principles, morals let's say and ethics -- there is nothing *real* in these.

Morals and ethics do not require the imperatives of metaphysics though often authorized as such under the rubric of a centralized authority. It's an obligation, a mandate for anything which calls itself a community.

You are a man in which the dissipations have become established.

It always amazes me how much you presume to know about others who aren't in line with your medieval logic. You never cease to insert derogatory remarks as main points in your arguments which proves you can't discuss anything without getting personal. If you had any metacognitive abilities left, you wouldn't need to default to these consistent sub-rosa ad homs in producing your arguments. All your dismissive remarks of a personal nature yields the image of someone with a self-endorsed superiority complex.

Without the metaphysical principle the *belief system* collapses.

When something is ready to fall apart, whatever its duration, don't attempt to fix it since what caused it, cannot be rebuilt without falling apart again...like Humpty Dumpty.

All well and good as far as this reasoning goes. But there, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, the meaning that stands behind it is still there, just as real, just as compelling, just as motivating as it ever was. That meaning and what it connotes will never dissipate.

What stands behind it all, including the smile of the Cheshire Cat, is the human need for meaning - not required by everyone - and NOT for any specific instance of it.

[attofishpi]

The cancer of Islam, Rubin Report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKPYbjrGPqM&t=188s

[Dubious]

This speech has relevance to the topic of this thread — if it is the protection and restoration of Europe.

Unfortunately the Muslim fox is already in the chicken coop.

...and gradually turning into a rabid wolf. According to the stats she quoted, it's already too late. Europe's human rights policy is at the expense of its own vis-a-vis all the migrants it allows in.

Europe, in effect, is on a suicide mission and possibly already half-way there.

[Atla]

Check this out man. When i was like eight or nine i was at a christian summer camp and when the pastor guy was reading the appropriate scripture read when you're getting 'saved', i started fuckin cryin and got all shook up. The way he was sayin i was sinful and would go to hell and all that stuff. Here's the thing. I was too young to comprehend the gravity of what was happening, so why would i break down and cry? How would i be able to understand the depth and emergency of the christian situation? It was as if I already knew what was happening... like an old soul that was born again into the imperfect world he had lived in and failed countless times in the past. Bro i felt like total shit. A feeling of unmitigated shame and a desire to repent. Like a demon in me was fixin to be purged and was cryin and fighting against his banishment that would result after the 'saving' ritual. i rememebr bein like 'yes... YES, man, i accept J as my personal savior... please stop I'm in agony!'

So how does a kid that age get all shook up like that. Other eight year olds sit there calmly and pick their noses when the guys readin from the bible. I might as well be puking green pea soup all over the guy I'm so shook up. It was horrible. I think maybe the guy was an ass and was tryna scare me so he's tryna sound like vincent price as he's readin. They were hard-core christians there and they weren't fuckin around with these kids. Bible study, big elaborate meals, prayers every thirty minutes about something or other, work projects, and girls hadta wear pants or long dresses when they weren't swimming. And one piece bathing suits. Hey that's alright becuz it's still in there like swimwear, bro. Nah mean?

Anyway the point is that christianity may be true by virtue of the impossibility of a child that age reacting as he did to being 'saved' unless he is a soul born again into the world (a do-over) or already possessed by a muhfuckin demon.

I think children in Christian societies are automatically more sensitive to Christian psychological things, already more aligned with them. Due to two reasons and the second one is very surprising.

The first reason is obvious, even as small children we already pick up Christian psychological things simply because they are there everywhere in the culture and people around us, even if we ourselves aren't taught Christianity. Small children can be very sensitive to the unstated or stated psychological attitudes of the people around them, suck them up like a sponge and internalize them.

The second reason is rather speculative on my part but I think religious psycological attitudes, susceptibilities are also inherited through gene expression (and to a lesser degree through genes themselves, as atheism is selected against). Different religions correspond to slightly different gene expressions. Religious belief can have a major psychological and a lesser physical impact on the human body which translates to a certain variation of gene expression.

So when you were at camp you already may have had a lot of Christian psychology internalized by that point, without realizing. Same goes for all the other religions.