|
I'm reading The Divine Names. I've got the part about God's gushing goodness.
|
#
?
May 3, 2023 13:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 05:05 |
|
|
Prurient Squid posted:Do you think Satan says "Not today Satan" ironically. Like Obama riffing off the "Thanks Obama" meme. Or is that what Satan says when he wants a day off? I wonder if Origen will be proven right and He'll finally call? Not today, Satan. (sigh) Not today.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2023 14:47
|
|
|
You know he's still full of it. "Today, Satan!" 
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2023 06:30
|
|
|
Satan is full of it, alright. 
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2023 12:51
|
|
|
Just toured some second hand shops. I got William Shakespeare, Henry V. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Brothers Grimm, Household Stories. I'm low key back into studying German so reading Märchen (fairy tales) in the original language is something I might be interested in doing some time. e: Is Hemingway the guy played by Jack Nicholson in Reds? Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 4, 2023 15:20
|
|
|
Prurient Squid posted:Is Hemingway the guy played by Jack Nicholson in Reds? no, that's Eugene O'Neill
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2023 16:22
|
|
|
I'm just going to go ahead and get this in German. Why not. e: Done.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2023 18:00
|
|
|
Man, I just watched The Color of Pomegranates aka Sayat-Nova about the Armenian poet/troubadour turned monk. Absolutely stunning work of moving poetry. Must watch if you have a passing interest in the Film. Just Beautiful
Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 03:35 on May 5, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 03:14
|
|
|
watched Pasolini's The Gospel of St. Matthew tonight. man loved face closeups for sure
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 04:06
|
|
|
mycophobia posted:watched Pasolini's The Gospel of St. Matthew tonight. man loved face closeups for sure Amazing the man who made the greatest adaption of the Gospels was a Marxist Atheist best known for creating Salo. Really struggle with him though, despite loving St.Matthew I just cannot abide his other works. Salo is important in the most academically derogatory sense, and Decamaron was just ugly. And not in a Realist sense, it looks like absolute garbage from the film stock to the shot direction. Teorema is whatever, I can't even grasp at having an opinion for such a impressionless work.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 04:16
|
|
|
i only learned he was the Salo guy just shortly after finishing St. Matthew. i was uhhh shocked lol idk it was good i reckon. the dryness and complete lack of romanticism wore on me a little i think. ive heard some say that Jesus's depiction in it is a little harsh but I read Matthew over the past 2 days and his attitude in this film was more or less what i had in mind.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 04:25
|
|
|
I had a good chuckle with the pastor when a bit from Matthew was played on the screen at a church I attended. Very much not what he was actually known for.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 08:22
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:Amazing the man who made the greatest adaption of the Gospels was a Marxist Atheist best known for creating Salo. To the best of my knowledge he described himself as Catholic even if he was an atheist. He wrote an article that abortion should be banned because it would allow heterosexuals complete freedom in sexuality and offered homosexuality as alternative to abortion. Umberto Eco compared him to Hitler for this, invoked Orwell and said he was defending the repression of heterosexuals, the "minority of the future." sube fucked around with this message at 08:49 on May 5, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2023 08:31
|
|
|
Closing porn accounts and when promted to give feedback on why typing "I found Jesus" is strangely satisfying.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2023 08:26
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:Man, I just watched The Color of Pomegranates aka Sayat-Nova about the Armenian poet/troubadour turned monk. Absolutely stunning work of moving poetry. Must watch if you have a passing interest in the Film. Just Beautiful lovely shots... I need to fast track watching this. thank you for sharing
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2023 11:42
|
|
|
the coincidence of the coronation and kentucky derby has created a nexus which is at risk of collapsing the entire universe into silly hats
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2023 18:52
|
|
|
i sure hope the pope isnt reading the thread for your sake
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
The epistle read out at Meeting today spoke of truth. So in afterword I resolved to spend the next week honest and forthcoming.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2023 14:25
|
|
|
Friends, I'm going to watch this series of YouTube videos on the history of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism because I find the topic interesting. I'm sharing the link here. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_7jcKJs6iwXMZBTUvza15Fh2C1Re16eZ e: Interesting that it begins with "midrash", Jewish exegesis, on the vision of Ezekiel. This leads to an entire "Chariot" tradition of mysticism. God's chariot as experienced in the vision. And also how the conflict between Aristotle's realism and Plato's idealism is fought out within Jewish thought. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 18:00 on May 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 7, 2023 17:42
|
|
|
Prurient Squid posted:Friends, I'm going to watch this series of YouTube videos on the history of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism because I find the topic interesting. Esoterica also has a lot of good content about this https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ__PGORcBKxYbdXhBJuaF-C01syNssZZ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ__PGORcBKyxwViLyPNn1vmbI5kl0xj7
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2023 18:36
|
|
|
ooooOooOOo this is dope rn im worrying my way through the hilarious car crash of greek/jewish philosophy during the second temple period (cos i wanna know how jesus became god and how that eventually "made sense" to the early church or whether they just like, shoved a round peg in a square hole and called it good)
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2023 23:54
|
|
|
sinnesloeschen posted:ooooOooOOo this is dope rn im worrying my way through the hilarious car crash of greek/jewish philosophy during the second temple period (cos i wanna know how jesus became god and how that eventually "made sense" to the early church or whether they just like, shoved a round peg in a square hole and called it good) Jesus was worshiped as God right from the very start. It is among the oldest doctrines in Christianity. Aside from the apostles, Clement of Rome was preaching it in the 1st century. The controversy with Arianism in the 4th century was Arius declaring the Christ wasn't God, and the rest of the church pushing back that worshiping Christ as God was what had been taught by the Apostles and Arius' assertion to the contrary was a later invention.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 00:00
|
|
|
Here’s the section from History of Christian Thought that deals with the developments in Judaism during the interstitial period: “The first is the development of the idea of God in this period between the Testaments, (the inter-testamental period, as it is usually called.) It is a development towards a radical transcendence: God becomes more and more transcendent, and for this very reason He becomes more and more universal. But a God who is absolutely transcendent and absolutely universal which the God of a nation has. Therefore names are introduced which try to preserve some of the concreteness of the divinity, names like "the heaven": therefore we often find in the New Testament not "the kingdom of God" but "the kingdom of heaven"; or "the height," coming down from the height.. . etc.; or "the glory." All these words indicate the establishment of a more concrete God. At the same time, the abstraction goes on under two influences: 1) The prohibition against using the name of God; 2) In the fight against anthropomorphisms of the past seeing God in the morph , the image, of man (anthropos) the passions of the God of the Old Testament disappear. The abstract oneness is emphasized. This made it possible for the Greek philosophers (who had introduced the same radical abstraction with respect to God), and the Jewish universalists ,with respect to God, to unite. It was especially Philo of Alexandria who carried through this union, in the idea of God. But if God has become abstract, then it is not sufficient to hypostasize some of His qualities, such as heaven, height, glory: more is needed. Mediating beings appear between God and man who become more and more important for practical piety. There are three main concepts of this mediating character. First, the angels: they are deteriorized gods and godesses from the surrounding paganism. In the period of the prophets, when the fight with polytheism still was going on, they couldn't play any role. But when the danger of polytheism was completely overcome as it was in later Judaism then the angels could reappear without too great danger of a relapse into polytheism. But even so, the New Testament is aware of this danger and again and again warns against the cult of the angels. These are the first figures which mediate. The second is the Messiah: the Messiah has become a transcendent being, the king of Paradise. He is also called, in the Danielic literature, which is dependent on Persian religion, the "son of man" who will judge the world. In Daniel it is probably used for Israel, but it became more and more the figure of the "man from above," as Paul describes him in I Corinthians 15. And when Jesus calls himself the "son of man" or when the very earliest tradition called him in this way, this also means "the man from above," the original man, who is with God and comes down when the kairos is fulfilled. Thirdly, these names of God are increased and become almost living figures. The most important figure is the figure of God's wisdom, which already appears in the Old Testament: the wisdom which has created the world, which has appeared in the world, and which returned to heaven since it did not find a place among men an idea very close to the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Another of these powers between God and man is the shekinah, the dwelling of God on earth. Again, another is the memra , the speaking of God, the word of God, which became so important later through the Fourth Gospel. Another is the "spirit of God," which in the Old Testament is God in action, but now becomes a partly independent figure between the most high God, and man: the ruah Yahweh, or Adonai . Most important became the Greek meaning of the term logos. .. This unites the Jewish memra with the Greek philosophical logos. Logos in Philo is the protogˆnes huios theou, the first-born son of God. All these are developments which are pre-Christian, and prepared the Christian thinking of the logos, the word, who is the first-born son of God (Philo). These mediating beings between the most high God, and man, partly replace the immediacy of the relationship to God, as in Christianity especially in Roman Catholic Christianity the, ever more transcendent idea of God was made acceptable to the popular mind by the introduction of the saints into the practical piety. But as in Christianity the official doctrine always remained monotheistic, and the saints never were supposed to receive adoration but only veneration, so the same thing (and even more radically) was the case in late Judaism, Judaism which has one fundamental anxiety: the anxiety of relapsing into polytheism, because that was its whole history: to fight polytheism within and outside of itself. Another world of beings between God and man arose and became powerful: the realm of the DEMONS. There are not only good angels, but also evil ones. These evil angels are not only organs of temptation and punishment under the direction of God, but they are also a realm of power against God. We can see this very well out of the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees concerning the Divine or demonic power, where he exorcizes the demons. This belief in demons permeated the daily life of that time, and filled the highest speculation of the time. It was a dualistic element, but it never became ontological dualism. Here again Judaism was able to introduce a good many ideas from Persia, among them the demonology of the Persian religion, where the demons have the same standing as the gods, where the evil god has the same ontological standing as the good god. It introduced these ideas and the New Testament is full of them but it never fell back into an ontological dualism. All these demonic powers have power only through the one God; they have no standing of their own in an ultimate sense. This comes out in the mythology of the fallen angels. The evil angels are, as is everything created, good which is the first anti-pagan dogma; but as fallen angels they are now evil angels. . . . and therefore responsible and punishable, and are not simply creations of an anti-divine being. Another influence on the New Testament here is the elevation of the future into a coming aeon. In the late apostolic period of Jewish history, world history was divided into an aion houtos (this aeon in which we are living) and an aeon mellon, (the coming aeon which they expected.) This aeon is valued very pessimistically, while the coming great aeon is valued ecstatically. This is not only a political idea: this goes beyond the hope of the Maccabean period, in which the Maccabees defended the Jewish people against tyranny. Also it was not a statement of the prophetic message: the prophetic message was much more historical and this-worldly, while these ideas are cosmological: the whole cosmos participates in these two aeons. The characteristic of this aeon is that it is controlled by the demonic forces, and that it has come of age. The world, even nature, is aging and fading away. One of the reasons is that man has subjected himself to the demonic forces and is disobedient against the law. In connection with these ideas, the concept of Adam's fall, producing the universal destiny of death, is developed out of the short story of Genesis, into a system as we find it in Paul; and this fall is confirmed by every individual by his actual sin. This aeon is under a tragic fate, but in spite of the tragic fate of this aeon the individual is responsible for it. Now here you have many ideas which you have not in the Old Testament but in the New Testament, which developed in the period between the Testaments. The piety of the law becomes more and more important, partly replacing the piety of the cult. Of course there is still the temple, but beside the temple the synagogue, the religious school, developed. The synagogue becomes the form in which the decisive religious life develops. The law is not valuated as negatively as we are accustomed to doing so, but for the Jews it was a gift and a joy. The law is eternal; it was always in God; it is pre-existent, as later in Christian theology Jesus was interpreted as pre-existent. The content of the law is the organization of the whole life, in its smallest functions: every moment of life is under God: this is the profound idea in the legalism of the Pharisees, which is so heavily attacked by Jesus. But of course this produces an intolerable burden, and if in religion you receive an intolerable burden, either in thinking or in acting, two alternatives are always possible: the way of the majority, which is one of compromise: you reduce the burden to a point where you can stand it; or the other way, the way of despair, and this was the way of people like Paul, Augustine and Luther, In IV Esdras, written in the period of Paul, we read: "We who have received the law shall be lost because of our sins, but the law never will be lost. Here you have a mood which is reflected in many Pauline sayings. This is the development of late Judaism, the period between the Testaments, and we see how many theological ideas came to the foreground beyond the Old Testament in this period, and were developed in the New Testament community.”
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 00:05
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:shitloads of quality words and like at least three months of rumination on my part holy poo poo a lot of interesting ideas here; it's funny because i just finished daniel (the Son of Man bit) and i had a lil epiphany that the maccabees were struggling because the elite (daniel &c) couldnt or wouldnt provide support, tacitly or otherwise, but the idea of overthrowing leads right up to jesus repeatedly and blessedly owning the pharisees as hard as possible  second: the commingling of memra and logos makes a shitload of sense once it's flatly presented (as it is here) i will still go to bat for my man arius even though he was a complete heretic (but i wonder how much the political situation in alexandria contributed to this, with athanasius being king poo poo of gently caress mountain and arius bein like, havin camel poo poo thrown at him of whatever) third: the concept of angels and demons being subsumed pagan gods from other cultures is fuckin, like, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat -- i mean, i completely see it but imma personally need some more time with the concept because its cool as poo poo and also scratches my syncretism itch last: just started the book of tobit and fuckin lo and behold asmodeus rolls up in like, the third chapter. it's a little funny to me that ol asmo becomes like, the scooby-doo stock villain of second temple literature, and is (unless i am 100% wrong which is typical and expected) the main push to "creating" THE DEVIL, so to speak thx and jah bless
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 00:39
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:Jesus was worshiped as God right from the very start. It is among the oldest doctrines in Christianity. Aside from the apostles, Clement of Rome was preaching it in the 1st century.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
Realtalk: I only know Asmodeus from dungeons and dragons, though I was vaguely aware he was lifted from actual mythology (like most of Forgotten Realms).
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 07:13
|
|
|
sinnesloeschen posted:ooooOooOOo this is dope rn im worrying my way through the hilarious car crash of greek/jewish philosophy during the second temple period (cos i wanna know how jesus became god and how that eventually "made sense" to the early church or whether they just like, shoved a round peg in a square hole and called it good) Do you mean the history of Kabbalah is "dope" or Greek/Jewish philosophy? If the former I'm always happy to share Zevi because he's such a beautiful human being.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 07:53
|
|
|
quote:But a God who is absolutely transcendent and absolutely universal which the God of a nation has. The rest of it I understand, but is something missing from this sentence?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 08:30
|
|
|
Isaiah 60:16 has surreal imagery. "You shall suck the breast of kings". e: OK, I'm going to be weird. My avatar has a sort of noble expression. Also, it has four breasts. So maybe my avatar is similar to that statement. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 11:29 on May 8, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 09:19
|
|
|
I'm seriously starting to fall in love with Abraham Abulafia.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 16:04
|
|
|
Prurient Squid posted:I'm seriously starting to fall in love with Abraham Abulafia. Be safe. Last people I saw getting obsessed with what Abulafia was telling them ended up being hunted down by diabolicals.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 18:09
|
|
|
I have Foucault's Pendulum. If that is indeed what you're referencing. It should be around here somewhere.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 18:54
|
|
|
I've been reading the last few pages of this thread, with various posters agonising about their religious journeys, and I'd like to run a few things past this thread that I've been thinking about with respect to religion for a while, and to get some honest feedback about what people here think. For clarity's sake, I'm not religious myself, but I have had a long-term interest in religion, which is why I enjoy lurking this thread. According to one popular model in the sociology of religion, each religious tradition is comprised of the so-called "3 B's" - namely, belief, belonging and behaviour. That is, for a tradition to be coherently called "religious" (as opposed to, say, a form of spirituality or a "worldview") it must incorporate shared beliefs (e.g. to be a Catholic, I must believe in the Trinity); a shared sense of belonging to a particular group (e.g. to be a Catholic means to recognise myself as being a member of a wider Church with other like-minded people); and shared practices and institutions (e.g. to be a Catholic, I must observe the Sacraments). Moreover, these "3 B's" are typically taken as being exclusivistic: that is, I cannot simultaneously believe in the Trinity and the efficacy of karmic merit-building; I cannot simultaneously consider myself to be part of the Church and the sangha; I cannot go to Mass on a Sunday, then burn incense at a Mahayana Temple on the Monday. From here it's easy to build an essentialist conception of religion, where particular religious traditions are taken as static, unchanging entities in the world, with clearly defined boundaries and fixed properties. I won't get into why I believe this to be a mistaken conception of religion (though I'm happy to do so if people are interested) but I will at least say that I think it's at the root of some of the angst that posters here are feeling. Put simply - why should we submit to essentialist conceptions of religion? Why should we strive to bring ourselves into alignment with a religious tradition's expectations about belief, belonging and behaviour (especially when those expectations are so often a matter of contention in the traditions themselves)? What's so incoherent about believing in the Trinity, while not wishing to align oneself with a particular Christian group or its institutions? What's wrong with following the institutions of a group (volunteering to help out with a Catholic charity, for example, or to sit in on a Catholic Mass from time to time, as I do) while rejecting the beliefs typically associated with that group? Who cares if fail to conform with what is stereotypically expected of Catholic or a Buddhist? These are not rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely curious why - even in a relatively pluralistic religious environment such as this thread - religious people concern themselves so much with what only be termed "religious purity". Why, that is, should one ever feel shame or angst about committing to different elements from different religious traditions, when such heterodoxy would be acceptable, perhaps even admirable, in other aspects of one's life, such as philosophy, politics, or even something as anodyne as fashion or cuisine? To be clear, I'm not advocating for a kind of hippie, New Age, ultra-pluralistic spiritualism, in which people pick-and-choose their religious commitments as they might choose what to wear or eat each morning. Rather, I wish to say that religious pursuits are either valuable in their own right or they are not. If they are valuable in some sense, then they are worth pursuing, irrespective of whether they conform to our essentialistic conceptions of religious adherence or not. (And if they are not valuable, then it really is nothing more than a matter of personal preference, since nothing is really at stake here.) For fear of being too abstract, I'll provide some examples from comparative religion here, using the 3B framework. Again: I don't claim to have all the answers about all matters spiritual, so I'd be interested in getting some honest feedback about what I'm saying. Belief: There are a lot of superficial differences between different religious traditions, but while each tradition will alight on its own propositional formulae about what its adherents are expected to believe, these formulae mask some much deeper similarities (which I would argue is the result of certain cognitive biases that all human beings share, but you don't need to accept that to accept what I'm about to write). While there is probably no single belief that is common to all religious traditions, I think it's true that basically all religious traditions would (with some provisos) accept each of the following general claims:
Now these beliefs are too vague to inspire any particular kinds of religious commitment, but they are, I think, the scaffolding from which all religious traditions are constructed. What is more interesting, perhaps, is that from these vague similarities, superficially different religious traditions have been able to independently "discover" very similar truths about the nature of the world and our place within it. To use just one example, while "salvation through grace alone" is typically taken as a concretely Protestant Christian notion, we see very similar ideas having been developed in both bhakti Hinduism and Pure Land Buddhism. The "grace" on offer here is taken to be supplied by three notionally different beings (i.e. the creator God, a god who exists as part of a greater pantheon, such as Vishnu or Shiva, and the Amitābha Buddha respectively) but each of the three beings is conceived by followers of these traditions in similar ways. My point is, that if you resolve to live in loving devotion to a transcendent being, who has the ability to apportion his worshippers with divine grace to shape their moral lives and to secure their postmortem existence, then what does it matter what name you call that being, or what properties you attribute to it (especially given that even members what is notionally the same religious tradition often differ in this respect too)? What is the source of value here - the predicates we ascribe to God, or the transformative effect of the provision of divine grace? Of course, we all want our beliefs to be true, and members of particular religions will often think they have good reasons for believing that their concept of God is true to the exclusion of all others, but given that all possible transcendent beings must, in a sense, be unknowable, I doubt there will ever be any good arguments to suggest that the Christian conception is "true", say, while the Vaiṣṇava conception of God is in manifest error. To paraphrase Baron d'Holbach, if God is good, then we needn't worry about being "wrong": so long as we are sincere in the pursuit of "the Good", then we will surely stand in his good graces. If God not good, then we are all screwed, because we would have no clear way of knowing what it is that we should do to end up in his good graces, or even whether it is coherent to say that we could ever stand in the good graces of such a being in the first place. Belonging: I understand that that feeling that one is part of a community who shares similar beliefs and practices to one is important to all human beings, but I don't understand why that should necessitate submission to an inflexible form of identity that must be pursued to the exclusion of all others. Being part of a football team and a book club were both sources of genuine meaning and joy in my life, for example, and neither group felt any sort of jealousy or resentment about my participation in the other, so why should we treat religious affiliation any differently? Why should my priest care if I attend a Buddhist Temple? Why should my Rabbi care if I volunteer for an Episcopalian church and help others in the process? There are good sociological reasons why a religious tradition would insist on its members adopting a robust group identity, and to protect that group from being polluted by the influencing of "competing" religious traditions (which I think is why sinnesloeschen might have felt themselves squeezed out of their Jewish community: all religious groups have certain limits with respect to the amount of internal variation they are willing to tolerate), but there's no good reason for any of us to submit to those notions of group essentialism. In truth, there is no such thing as a "Episcopalian", say, there are only people who adopt an Episcopalian label and engage in shared practices with others who have also adopted the Episcopalian label. If being recognised as an Episcopalian by other Episcopalians is for some reason important to you, then you are bound to do Episcopalian things to the exclusion of, say, Jewish things: that's how religious group membership tends to work, for better or worse. But if you are content to do Episcopalian things in the company of other Episcopalians without needing to insist on that label, then there's nothing stopping you from having a more pluralistic religious identity. And if the Episcopalians eventually tell you to piss off because you're doing too many Jewish things for their liking, then would you really want to be a part of that group to begin with? Behaviour: If we examine religion from a functionalist perspective, then religious institutions (including diet, clothing, authority structures, rituals, language etc.) are simply the manifest signs of religious group membership. An Episcopalian might wear a crucifix, and a Jew a yarmulke, for example, as a means of displaying their group identity to both in-group and out-group members. If we accept that interpretation, then the religious institutions you follow only matter to the same extent your religious identity matters. If you don't care about being seen as Jewish, then you don't need to observe kosher. If you don't care about being seen as Episcopalian, then you don't need to take communion. That's the sociological view. Of course, believers don't accept (and needn't accept) that reductive interpretation of their behaviour in a religious context. For most members of a religious tradition, the institutions they follow are imbued with a much greater meaning and value than that. But then, what do they mean? What is their value? Perhaps they are important because they signal one's love of - and commitment to - God. If that is the case, then they are valuable independent of their acceptability to any one religious group. If I find both the observance of kosher and the taking of communion valuable because both of these institutions strengthen my relationship with God, then who cares what the person sitting next to me in a particular house of worship might think about those practices? They both serve to draw me closer to God, do they not? Or maybe certain religious institutions have a certain spiritual efficacy. Maybe I need to observe kosher, or take communion, to uphold the divine covenant which keeps me under God's aegis or saves me from sin. Here, the institutions you commit to will obviously be guided by your theological assumptions (did God really deliver the Mitzvot to Moses on Mount Sinai? Did Jesus really instruct his followers to drink of his blood and eat of his flesh?) but even here I see no good reason to think that the observance of an institution from one religious tradition would cancel out the spiritual efficacy of the observance of an institution from a different religious tradition. Couldn't there be two covenants, after all? Is the God of Moses and the God of Jesus not the same God? (Christians: yes, I'm familiar with NT passages like Gal. 5, and no, I won't get into that debate here unless anyone is really interested.) Once more, I offer all this as a starting point for further discussion, and I'm sure that many believers here will justifiably take issue with a lot of what I said. But hopefully it gives the spiritually confused posters a different perspective to tackle these issues from, and hopefully there's something you can all take from it.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2023 23:22
|
|
|
Part of what attracted me to Eastern religions is how they tend to be much less exclusionary and exclusivist than our conception of religion. Buddhism and Shintoism have existed side-by-side in Japan for centuries n generally friendly terms and a follower would see no problem or conflict with going to a Shinto shrine and having a Buddha home shrine. I know of a leading figure in Chinese Pure Land Buddhism who also stresses the truths of Confucianism and Daoism. In fact, when Buddhism first came to China, the missionaries used Daoist language because China had no real experience with such a very different way of thinking. The entire concept of religion is in fact attacked in some places of anthropology because of how it has been used in the past to exclude non-Abrahamic religions. I have a book on faith I've read where the lengthy preface discusses how faith is a touchy word in academic circles because religions without anything we recognized as faith were not held up as real religions. Our concept of religion and the sociology of religion all started in a very Protestant Christian way. You see these old, self-congratulatory hierarchies of how early religion was "primitive" and worshipped stars or natural forces while the "advanced" later religions learn to venerate the abstract and unseen. But in any event, I really enjoy the philosophy of religion. A philosopher I really care about, Arthur Schopenhauer, believed religion was the expression of metaphysical speculations and - more importantly - metaphysical needs for the common folk. A bit patronizing perhaps, to that that people need rites and rituals and proverbs and not philosophical treatises, but I agree. That is why I think beliefs matter so much to people and Deism has utterly fallen out of fashion. The idea of some very abstract God or higher being doesn't fit our needs. There are countless stories about Jesus or Buddhas outside of canonical Gospels or Sutras, to say nothing of symbols and visual representations. We need to imagine these higher beings are very real and very familiar. Pascal said the philosophical proofs of God will fail to convince anyone for any extended period of time because if we can reason our way into a position, we can reason our way out of it. It is our heart which truly commits us to our purpose. and the heart is moved by concrete things, I waa also re-reading The Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky a couple weeks ago now and this passage really stuck out to me quote:So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. (emphasis mine) People don't just want to believe something, they want their beliefs to be the truth and that can only happen if those around them believe as they do. They will go to any length, including murder and genocide, to establish the truth of their beliefs. Because only then can they have peace of mind and security which is the true basis of all religion, in my humble opinion. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 00:09 on May 9, 2023 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 00:05
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:Part of what attracted me to Eastern religions is how they tend to be much less exclusionary and exclusivist than our conception of religion. Buddhism and Shintoism have existed side-by-side in Japan for centuries n generally friendly terms and a follower would see no problem or conflict with going to a Shinto shrine and having a Buddha home shrine. I know of a leading figure in Chinese Pure Land Buddhism who also stresses the truths of Confucianism and Daoism. In fact, when Buddhism first came to China, the missionaries used Daoist language because China had no real experience with such a very different way of thinking. There's some truth to this, but I think a lot of scholars of religion have gone too far in the opposite direction in assuming there is something fundamentally exotic and pleasant about Eastern religions, or even in assuming that it's actually the Abrahamic religions that are the backwards and barbaric ones. The fact is that all religions can become violent and exclusivistic under the right circumstances. Buddhism and Shinto did exist side-by-side in relative harmony in medieval Japan, and do so today, but that absolutely was not the case during the Meiji Restitution. Buddhists and Daoists get along fine today in China, but spent most of the Tang dynasty (among other isolated periods in Chinese history) jostling for political power, burning down each other's sacred sites and just generally kicking the crap out of each other. Similar story in India as Brahmans, Jains and Buddhists fought amongst each other for influence. Sometimes syncretism is held up as a key virtue of the Eastern religions, but I'd also argue that firstly this is not a unique virtue of the Eastern religions (the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote a famous paper about how the spread of Islam in Indonesia was achieved through syncretistic means, for example) and secondly that syncretism is not always a positive thing. At many times throughout history (particularly in the ancient world) syncretism wasn't about two religious traditions politely sharing ideas, but about one culture co-opting the traditions and concepts of a competing tradition (what we would today call "cultural appropriation") with the effect, conscious or otherwise, of the weaker tradition being reconciled to, and eventually absorbed by, the stronger tradition. This was the means by which Buddhism in China spread at the expense of Daoism, for example, and how Neo-Confucianism later supplanted them both. NikkolasKing posted:People don't just want to believe something, they want their beliefs to be the truth and that can only happen if those around them believe as they do. They will go to any length, including murder and genocide, to establish the truth of their beliefs. Because only then can they have peace of mind and security which is the true basis of all religion, in my humble opinion. I would agree, and while I don't want to derail this thread into a discussion of religious sociology, I can particularly recommend the works of Berger and Luckmann on this topic. They refer to the idea of "world maintenance", which is the process that every religious tradition must undertake to ensure that it maintains its plausibility and salience in the face of competing worldviews. This needn't be a violent process, but it can involve a lot of coercion and oppression (e.g. the enforcement of religious institutions, controlling education, the banning of "heretical literature", etc.).
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 00:49
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:People don't just want to believe something, they want their beliefs to be the truth and that can only happen if those around them believe as they do. They will go to any length, including murder and genocide, to establish the truth of their beliefs. Nonsense, The Truth is The Truth; other's opinions or even your own have zero effect on what is and is not True. NikkolasKing posted:Because only then can they have peace of mind and security which is the true basis of all religion, in my humble opinion. This is the kind of thing people utterly terrified to the core tell themselves. That everyone is scared, terrified even, and Religion serves as nothing more than a placebic salve to soothe their constant fear serves nothing and means nothing. There's a reason The Grand Inquisitor ends in the way it does.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 01:49
|
|
|
Blurred posted:To be clear, I'm not advocating for a kind of hippie, New Age, ultra-pluralistic spiritualism, in which people pick-and-choose their religious commitments as they might choose what to wear or eat each morning. why not
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 01:54
|
|
|
Blurred posted:Snip This all ignores something rather important. NikkolasKing gets at it, meaning and knowing how to be in the world. I think incorporating doubt, not toying with doubt but serious doubt down to core of ourselves is the way out. We all have ultimate concerns and seriously examining the object of our ultimate concerns, wrestling with them, doubting them seriously, is not an indication of any lack of faith. It’s an indication of the seriousness and ultimacy of our faith in our lives.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 02:21
|
|
|
Blurred posted:Once more, I offer all this as a starting point for further discussion, and I'm sure that many believers here will justifiably take issue with a lot of what I said. But hopefully it gives the spiritually confused posters a different perspective to tackle these issues from, and hopefully there's something you can all take from it. I can say that one of the challenges here, which we mostly approach in an ecumenical good cheer (doubtless helped by our encounters, however constructed, with people trying to boss us on religious matters in other venues) is-- I didn't become a Buddhist because I sat down and did a cost benefit analysis. I read a lot about Buddhism, yes, but I had an actual religious experience which made up my mind and before then if I was gonna put something on a paper it would probably be 'Spiritual (no particular religion)' or I would have written in, like, Thelema or something. I do want to offer some commentary from my own views, which at this point are primarily Buddhist if educated by other studies: quote:That there exists a transcendent dimension to reality, either largely or totally inaccessible to the human senses. quote:That this transcendent dimension is the source of certain "laws" or necessary facts which govern how the world functions. quote:That these laws are teleological in nature (e.g. they are directed towards some kind of higher rationale, or ethical "purpose"). quote:That human flourishing is in some sense dependent on living in conformity with these laws (both individually and collectively). quote:That human persons, or certain aspects of human persons, will continue to exist after death. Yet for pragmatic reasons, rebirth fits this criteria. quote:That the nature of our postmortem existence is in some sense dependent on our ability to reconcile ourselves with the transcendent dimension to reality, and the particular demands (ethical and spiritual) it imposes (i.e. all religions have a soteriological impetus). I didn't just do that to pick nits, it's because I think this is the space where a lot of common ground would fall apart, because there are just fundamentally different views of the ultimate nature of reality but 99% of the time, yes, they don't matter; most religions have strong overlap in their calls to morality and in most cases things beyond a core of "do good to others and every Man can be a Superman" level morality are austerities and rules placed on faithful individuals (frum Jews; monks; etc.) I have no real commentary about Belonging or Behavior there. Other people mentioned that Buddhism can be just as nasty an excuse for violence as any Abrahamic religion. They are correct.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 02:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 05:05 |
|
|
“The element of doubt is an element in faith itself. And what the church should do is to accept somebody who says to them that this faith for which this church stands is a matter of my ultimate concern, which I want to serve with all my strength. But if you are asked to say what you believe about this or that doctrine, then you are driven into a kind of dishonesty even if in this moment you can say "I believe," e. g., concerning the Virgin Birth – or whatever that may mean. If you say you will agree, then you are dishonest.. . .; you may subject yourselves to this whole set of doctrines as long as you are ministers, and you can say you cannot promise because you cannot cease to think, and if you think you must doubt. And that is the problem. I think the only solution on Protestant soil is to say that this set of doctrines represents your own ultimate concern, and that you desire to serve in this group which The element of doubt is an element in faith itself. And what the church should do is to accept somebody who says to them that this faith for which this church stands is a matter of my ultimate concern, which I want to serve with all my strength. But if you are asked to say what you believe about this or that doctrine, then you are driven into a kind of dishonesty even if in this moment you can say "I believe," e. g., concerning the Virgin Birth – or whatever that may mean. If you say you will agree, then you are dishonest.. . .; you may subject yourselves to this whole set of doctrines as long as you are ministers, and you can say you cannot promise because you cannot cease to think, and if you think you must doubt. And that is the problem. I think the only solution on Protestant soil is to say that this set of doctrines represents your own ultimate concern, and that you desire to serve in this group which has made this the basis of its ultimate concern, but that you can never promise not to doubt anyone of these special doctrines.” Paul Tillich
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2023 02:43
|
|