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viggorlijah
Jul. 15th, 2008 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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The second response is that most believers throughout history have entirely endorsed the 'poke-with-sticks' version of eternal torment, from Tertullian claiming that one of the pleasures of Heaven was watching sinners fry, to Jonathan Edwards ("The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.") to the sort of Catholic preaching that James Joyce describes so eloquently in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Now, here's the thing. I have known one or two fairly wicked people - they were also a bit mad, but not that mad. Not wicked on an Adolf Hitler/Pol Pot sort of level, but pretty nasty. One of them, Linda, was a friend of friends and while I was mostly scared of her, I remember occasions when I enjoyed her company in small doses, because she had charisma. I also remember a sense of relief when I heard she was dead, because she had probably killed one of our joint acquaintance - and got away with it mostly because the police don't care much about dead transwomen junkies - and was always liable to hurt other people badly. She is someone whom I did not wish well - but the thought experiment is, would I want her to be in eternal pain? No, not even twenty years of Purgatory. Probably. If there were an afterlife, would I enjoy it more if a less messed-up, less crazy, less dangerous version of her were around in it? Probably.
All of this is setting aside the large body of Christian thought which states that I myself will burn eternally for who I sleep with and who I choose to be. I suspect that to a more intellectual kind of believer. I am in any case in more danger over the arrogance that makes me demand of the Creator a different set of rules to those he allegedly supplies, not merely in respect of my sex life, but in respect of the eternal destiny of Linda, whom I disliked. I stand with Eugene Debs, kinda - 'while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.'
If I ever finish the blasted book, this is an important part of what it is about, BTW.
As for Original Sin, I regard it as one of the brilliant but also dangerously stupid ideas you would expect an intelligent man like St. Augustine to come up with. Human beings have a multitude of drives, and some of them are perverse and aggressive - 'I see the best, and I approve of it' says Ovid ' but I follow a worse course'. Augustine made the determination that humans had an innate tendency to evil and that this was one of the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve, who bound their descendants to a faulty nature, and to punishment for that sin, and all subsequent sins, and to the guilt of that sin.
The redemption of Christ's sacrifice - Augustine argued, as I understand it - removed the guilt of Adam's sin. It also created the possibility for each human soul, though not the probability, that a gift of divine grace might enable that soul to avoid enough of the consequences of fallen and innately sinful human nature to find their way to God, and away from eternal torment.
As a result of Augustine, and earlier thinkers who did not formulate all of this nearly as elegantly, most believers have always thought of themselves as the only group with any hope at all of salvation from torment, and with the odds against them even so. We could get into predestination here, but let's not.
Augustine specifically rejected the idea that human effort or will or actions could make up for the absence of grace; that possibility - as preached by his rival Pelagius - was one he ruled out. Of course, you could argue that a tendency to perform good works would be evidence of grace in action, but Augustine rejected that possibility as discounting the inherent corruption of human nature. He did not want anyone to think that they could charm their way into Heaven by being nice, or thinking well of themselves; he wanted everyone to be a self-hating neurotic, for starters.
What any of this has to do with the Sermon on the Mount is a good question. Belief in original sin has led to the emotional torture of children, the denigration of women (who by bearing children pass on Eve cooties) and being horrible to other people as a matter of course. Belief in Augustine's doctrine has, objectively, been throughout history what I was brought up to think of as an occasion of sin at least as much - I would say more - as it has been a prompter to heroic virtue.
And those are two important areas in which I could never adhere to most Christian churches. Sorry 'bout that.
I am no expert on any of this - I have been away from the Church for a long time - and will regard correction by the better informed as a good place from which to start dialogue.
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Date: 2008-07-15 11:09 am (UTC)Given that the vast majority of Biblical evidence for the condemnation of homosexuality and transgender comes from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (i.e. the OT Mosaic Law), that pretty much indicates to me that sexual orientation and gender - trans or otherwise - is no bar to salvation for a Christian, particularly when you take into account the baptism of the Eunuch by Philip in Acts.
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:00 pm (UTC)What happens to the Righteous Gentiles is that their memory is held as a blessing among the community, same as for righteous believers.
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 01:28 pm (UTC)I'd like to know more of the History of Jewidism
Date: 2008-07-29 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:02 pm (UTC)There is something Taoist about this belief, and I'm okay with that. I don't think any one religion or philosophy has the complete picture of the nature of God or reality; the universe is too vast and complex for us to understand, and how much vaster and farther beyond us must be the mind of God?
Your post also raises, for me, the question: is it necessary to assent to all the professed beliefs of a church in order to be a member? I have been struggling with this. Many of the faithful of the Catholic Church believe that homosexual sex and the use of contraception are not sinful; many don't believe in Transubstantiation; many have technically unorthodox ideas about the Trinity; and yet they go to Mass and receive Communion on Sundays, and don't think themselves hypocrites for it. The Anglican church is notorious for harbouring people with vastly different beliefs about pretty fundamental aspects of Christianity -- I'm thinking of that episode of Yes, Prime Minister where Hacker has to select an archbishop, and the consensus is that it would be a plus if the candidate believed in God, but it's not strictly necessary.
There are so many aspects that go together to make a church: creeds and community and ethics and history and aesthetics (which might sound trivial by comparison, but if I'm worshipping God, I want to be moved by the beauty of my surroundings; if my surroundings are a concrete box, I'm just going to be depressed). If they don't come together in a way that nourishes and sustains me, I just feel alienated. So far, I haven't found a church in my city that I could attend whole-heartedly. I'd rather not be half-hearted about something as important as this, so I remain a solitary Christian.
Hmm again
Date: 2008-07-29 10:39 am (UTC)I've got strong feelings on the matter of what beliefs it is nessary obligate to have to call yourself a Catholic. e.g. many Modernists in calling themselves Christians are just not speaking logical english. They are Theists who are influenced by ASPECTS of the Christian Tradition while rejecting others. THAT IS'NT THE SAME THING AT ALL!!!
But I'm an Atheist this is a matter for Xtians to sort out on their own
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:03 pm (UTC)FWIW, in C.S. Lewis's theology nobody is made to do anything. People separate from God purely by their own self-righteousness. It's a little like children deciding to punish their parents by refusing to eat dinner. The parent doesn't suffer, and the child is only punishing herself.
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:26 pm (UTC)Huck's riposte is a good reply to the "send you to hellfire" school of Christian theology. I don't consider it a good reply to Lewis's. It's the self-righteousness that makes the difference. Being in Lewis's hell would be - again this is my analogy, not Lewis's - rather like being eternally stuck with a bunch of Conservative politicians just after they'd been roundly booted out of office. Not fun.
brilliant sophism intoxicated by a false analogy
Date: 2008-07-29 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 03:44 pm (UTC)And yes, there are occasions when the child may seem to the outside observer justified. That is indeed the point of the Huck Finn story. But not always. Much of the time the parents are working for the best.
And as to whether religion works for the best, may I point out that the people most actively, at the time (40-50 years before Twain wrote), working to eliminate that evil were primarily activated by what they saw as high religious motives?
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Date: 2008-07-15 04:23 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I buy that argument. It's true that many abolitionists, for instance, were deeply religious people and framed their arguments in religious terms. But when we're talking about Western Europe and America before the twentieth century, we're talking about a culture that was deeply imbued with a Christian worldview. Apart from the arguments of extreme radicals like Marx, everything was discussed and justified in religious terms. That can mean good things (the abolition of slavery, better conditions for working people, etc.), but it can mean bad things (slavery itself, the subjugation of women, the persecution of LGBT people, etc.). So I don't think religion gets any special marks of goodness because abolitionists were religious.
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Date: 2008-07-15 04:55 pm (UTC)Even in a religious age, religiosity of individuals varied, and abolitionists were pretty damned religious. So was the Prohibitionist movement; allowing for the lapse of time, they were pretty much the same people. So it goes both ways.
I agree: abolitionism doesn't give religion a special mark of goodness. But religious support for slavery shouldn't give it a special mark of badness, either.
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Date: 2008-07-15 05:37 pm (UTC)"they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . ." (I make no argument that Jefferson was personally religious--from what little I know about him, he seems to have been an agnostic, and certainly not a believer in a personal, interventionist god--but even enlightenment discourse about rights tends to be framed in religious terms.)
But religious support for slavery shouldn't give it a special mark of badness, either.
And I never said it did. Slavery, like most large-scale institutionalized evils, tends to be justified by whatever ideology is dominant.
Arguments that religion is innately bad because of slavery, or the crusades, or whatever are specious; so are arguments that religion is innately good because of the abolition movement or the religious opposition to Nazism.
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Date: 2008-07-15 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 04:00 pm (UTC)In a context of general religion-bashing, I sought to point out that it doesn't all go that way.
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Date: 2008-07-17 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 05:10 pm (UTC)One can't win an arguement with God by definition
Date: 2008-07-29 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:13 pm (UTC)I think that my feeling is that the power that sustains may be god, in some sense, but is not the personal god of most religion. I hope that that power is in some sense benevolent,that there is providence, but I have no particular reason for faith to go along with that hope. I remember what faith felt like, and I don't have it.
I take your point about heterodoxy within churches - my problem is less with being a cafeteria Christian, because that is a compromise many of my friends have made - but with that central issue of faith. Doctrines and the behaviour of the actually existing church were my stumbling blocks, but the disappearance of faith was and is crucial, and also the source of my spiritual dryness...
My love of and admiration for the historical figure of Jesus is a significant part of my background - but not hugely greater than my love of and admiration for Socrates and Mozart, who were also deeply flawed human beings who improved the human race just by being part of it. I do not believe in the particular divinity of Jeus - I can consider believing in the contribution of all good men and women and other sentient beings to a 'church' of mind and progress that drives existence irrespective of our posthumous fate.
My spiritual life, such as it is, takes place partly in disputation with friends, but mostly through sudden rushes of joy, and the exploration of great cathedrals of sound like Haydn's Masses.
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:27 pm (UTC)Spirtual Life
Date: 2008-07-29 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:58 pm (UTC)Faith
Date: 2008-07-29 10:50 am (UTC)It seems to be a conflation of 3-4 things some of them Orthogonal. What I DON'T like is what faith means to Many many perople ; a chosen mental rigidity ;a permission to turn ones brains OFF in reaction to certain distressing posibilitys
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Date: 2008-07-15 12:31 pm (UTC)On the cynical side, there's Original Sin as protection racket. "Nice soul you've got there-- pity if something happened to it."
When you started about Linda, I thought you heading towards saying that she wasn't nearly as bad as a God who condemns people to eternal torment.
Further noodling here: I don't think we're built for eternity. Part of the hell in hell is that there's no input to shake you out of a bad mood. I recently heard of the ancient Celtic idea that there's only reincarnation. Life after life with no karma determining what you'll get. No justice (or at least no more than the rather modest amount we get here), but at least atrocities end.
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Date: 2008-07-15 02:53 pm (UTC)So it's not really quite that there's no justice, but that the threefold law isn't about justice, so much as it is about balance. What's missing is the element of revenge which goes along with most ideas of what justice is -- that it's somehow not justice if the victim of the harm doesn't get to inflict, or at least witness the comeuppance firsthand. The accounts are squared when you die -- anything you carry over into your next living is your own business, and your own burden.
Now personally, I see the constructs of Heaven and Hell as spas for the soul -- if you have unprocessed guilt and rage, then perhaps a bit of thrashing about in 'pain' can help you rid yourself of that. If you carry over pain and sorrow into death, then perhaps some comfort and nurturing is what you need to allow yourself to ground out the negative sensations and impressions you've brought along from that life. Once you've dropped the baggage of your living, then you're ready to begin a new lesson, a new condition, a new project, a new life.
And so you do.
And just to prove that yes, modern witches do steal from everyone, I also fancy the notion that somewhere in that complicated pattern of living, dying, learning, and forgetting, it's also possible to fuse with the Spirit, in a sort of transcendence, and just let it all go.
It's a comforting notion some days, anyhow.
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Date: 2008-07-15 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 10:14 pm (UTC)Rather, I think it makes more sense that the 'early' lives involve the simpler lessons, and they happen whenever in history or geography that those lessons can best be learnt. So it would make sense that a soul which needed to learn about futility and helplessness might live as a Jew in Dachau, and then the next life need to learn about mercy and comfort, and be a wife and mother in Colonial India. (Just by way of random samplings, of course. I don't think any soul's life-lesson can be as simply put as any of this.)
DO YOU Remember the name of the story
Date: 2008-07-29 10:54 am (UTC)By the way I agree that Lewis often didn't distiguish between a clever idea and an idea with some legs; it not that rare a flaw I've got it myself.
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Date: 2008-07-15 02:37 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how much of this is due to living 3 years in a Muslim country and 2 years in a Buddhist country, how much is due to my reading and thinking, and how much is due to my upbringing. Hmm.
Not that this is terribly helpful of me - but I do hope that you don't suffer any qualms or concerns about your integrity or your future because of Christianity? I mean, intellectual arguments and games of 'what if' are all well and good, and I'm all for them - I just don't want it to cause you any smidgen of distress, and I hope and trust it isn't.
...I really, REALLY don't like Christianity. Or any of the Monotheistic faiths, for that matter: I'm not saying they're lacking in any good points, but on the whole I think they're pretty dreadful institutions.
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Date: 2008-07-15 02:42 pm (UTC)Accepting doctrine as written, her first bite was disobedience, and whether she was lured to it or not, it still stands as such just as any two year old's theft of a denied biscuit is disobedience. However that fruit was meant to be knowledge of good and evil, and by offering the fruit to Adam, she was making a choice that her own get should likewise be able to improve themselves over the ignorant state of animals, by CHOOSING which they would do. At that point, she would have known that all the comforts of slavery were lost to her -- the unchallenging nature of obedience, of never having to wonder about the future, of never having to concern yourself with responsibility -- but she saw the benefits of freedom, just as Christ saw the benefits of freedom from the hidebound strictures of the chassist Pharisees.
But then again, it's theological discussions like that one which make the traveling preachers froth at the mouth when they come to my door, so I try not to upset the online Christians with views like these unless invited to it.
To which end, thanks for the invitation!
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Date: 2008-07-15 10:14 pm (UTC)There has been writings about how the creation is very similar to the nativity They are both a description of paradise And paradise is a state without sin. Original sin is where you leave paradise which we must all do simply because we have to live in the world .Living in the world is with sin Most of the Bible is about the mystical or altered states in modern language.Hesychastic prayer is still practised by the monks in Mount Athos This prayer is a meditative prayer which although does not go as deep as Buddhist prayer does journey towards light in a similar way (The light on Mount Tabor)The difference is that it aims to reconnect to the heart instead of to the Buddhist place of the abdomen and oneness. The side side of the Bible that I am interested in I think relates to the inner self which is the most important and what I think Jesus was mostly talking about. But many of the teachings of the church have been adapted to fit into society all through the ages and have become distorted which mirror the distortions of that society at the time.
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Date: 2008-07-15 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 12:54 am (UTC)In the garden of Eden Eve gives Adam fruit from the tree of knowledge and this is when innocence is lost.God tells them that they must not eat from the tree of knowledge It is forbidden .You could say that in paradise there is just being but when the apple is eaten they then become aware of themselves That is knowledge.And that is original sin.And by living in the world we cannot help but having knowledge and original sin .That is simply what it is nothing more It is just by knowledge and the use of language that we evaluate everything including goodness and sin.
I think it is also very important to realise that the interpretation of the Bible in English translation The early Greek Bible might be quite different and a word or phrase in Greek might have a completely different meaning from the English.
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Date: 2008-07-16 07:46 am (UTC)This is pretty much my soet of stuff
Date: 2008-07-27 11:49 pm (UTC)This seems to be a combination of Humpty -Dumpty of of Alice in Wonderland and the problem that damages Dawkimnndsd #otherwise brilliant THE GOD DELUSION.
What is the REAL Christian Faith ad clerkium ot ad populliam. That which is taught in the minds of refined thinkers or the modal the belief of most all Mere Christians. There is a lot of dishonesty here by just about all believers Modernists and hard-Shell Orthodox. If one is right then a largew part bof yjr rest of the Church is in a state of Mortal Sin.
Come on did Christ say 'Bleesed are the Obscuratistsd. Because they can never be Proved Wrong;