Chili

You make many good points and fully agree that false historicism only stirs the argument that really points at the physics of metamorphosis of which the hueristics are very simple, and science is all over it but maybe fails to understand the purpose of 'mind-stages' in the 'uncovery' or 'liberation' process of the self. That is what, for example, Yin-Yang' medicine is about that itself may be the best soution availble to them in the absense of religion in proper function to that same end.

I remember reading 'Heart of Darkness' as an inward journey wherein 'the horror' was encountered that for others is a 'beatific vision' that opens the gate to heaven for them and they can go right in. "A Strange Manuscript" comes to mind here by James De Mille. A Canadian too, and he tells you exactly how it is done, that Golding called "as easy as eating and drinking" and he walked right in as well.

In this process Jesus personfies what the Greeks called 'full-blooded kinetic vision' that emerges when kinetics have lost their charm as a company that at one time made the man, as shepherds, lets say, now herding sheep in the middle of a midwinter night that so is the 'heart of Yang' where not yang must be reinforced but Yin illuminated instead, during Advent, lets say, and so now then Jesus is like natural medicine for us adminstered by religion without ever having told us what he is all about [as historical maybe], lest we become an addict and worship him like opium, as Marx once said, while full blooded kinetic vision itself is good and Jesus does belong as the only way for us reach that end, which then is what he is said to be, and therefore also must die in us for which crucifixion is just stage work to present details of this event.

The Greeks called this Telic Vision as the 'final cause' to say the same. Full blooded means persuaded by love [for life] to find the source of love as the vapor of truth that drives us for which then the woman herself comes to the fore in us (my elimination of Eve) and I suppose we call her Mary, but again that is just a name, while in fact Mary is the first fruit of the neutron that surrounded the nucleus of the sperm wherein life first was conceived in us, and so then the woman is the one who was prior to her and was called Elizabeth in Luke, who always was alive in us as the alpha of the human that we in the particular here now encounter for who he really is, and hence the final cause is telic only to reveal Plato's 'genus' of man, and hence the Son is brought to bare, now as man identified and not just trees walking like men. I.e. "I Am" the one.

The Greeks called this Parousia, or Final Form that we call Christ-Mass that so is not a birthday party for sure, but really is just a jump-shift from Yang to Yin and hence the infancy is real and therefore religion must have the entropy induced to nurse the son when born (i.e. the manger must be there and is missing in Matthew to say the same, where also Joseph was not even home when the Magi arrived with the empowerment to reach the fullness of his life to 'be' the end. Heuristic is from 'heuriskein' meaning 'to discover' by engagement

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/heuristic

So now religion is needed or soon we wil all have horror stories to tell and blame religion for its cause, while yet horror cannot be conceived to exist without the shine wherein we live or even love could no longer be. In the Universal this points at the waning of glory that our civilization once knew, which itself may also be a sign of our own age, and so is not mine to say.

Chili

Where is Eusebius when you really need him, they would say.

Chili

Metaphysics is underpinning of religion and is science based.

If we are the sheep and they are the rancher the herd is an investment to be made and is very much economical, so that not just they, but the entire clan can prosper. I think that this is still the first lesson of day 1 in Anthro 101.

Horatio Parker

I think he means that a Xtianity based on MJ doesn't conflict with science, as indeed it doesn't.

The economy is in having only one Jesus - the eternal cosmic Jesus.

Robert Tulip

Thank you MrMacSon for engaging with this material. The economical scientific principle of Ockham’s Razor does apply in the analysis of history. The fanciful tradition of religious miracles and fables is unscientific as a historical narrative. It lacks economy, as it postulates unnecessary entities and events that lack reasonable direct explanation, and it is grounded in authority rather than logic. But coming to a view on how we can understand the Gospel story within a scientific worldview is very complicated. Application of sound principles of evidence and logic provides a scientific heuristic to assess rival claims, indicating that hidden back stories rest beneath the surface claims of conventional faith.I disagree. These questions are intimately connected, as were the relation between faith and the scientific questions of the refutation of geocentrism and creationism in their day. The historical Jesus is fundamental to contemporary Christian faith. Belief in Jesus has become a new fundamentalism, exhibited by Erhman and Hoffmann, and of course by all the open apologists who have taken the church’s side (like taking the King’s shilling?) by rejecting the legitimacy of the question whether Jesus did or did not in fact exist. My view is that the real origin of Christianity, what I called its natural intent, did not rely on any supernatural assumptions. Rather, there is a high Christology embedded in the sources that shows how the myth was invented to portray on earth the actual observed movement of the sky, primarily the precession of the equinox as symbolising the timeframe of God, a thousand years as a day. Once this enframing astronomical basis is understood, we see the motive for midrash, and for the enfleshment of the cosmic bones in the Gospels. The historical Jesus was invented to explain an esoteric doctrine to the general public. Claiming that the public story is the only one is an attitude that lacks integrity, considered against the evidence we have. The silence of Paul shows the public story is fanciful. You cannot maintain belief in a fanciful story with any scientific integrity. The meaning of understanding Christ as pure spirit presents a more coherent understanding than the old folk belief in the historical Jesus. We do not have to explain miracles as supernatural, but can understand them as allegory for entirely natural observations.
Scientific insight in Jesus Studies is the result of rigorous analysis of the evidence base from ancient data.

There is a whole further field of questions of the psychology of Christian origins. What does it say about human thought processes that such a seductive fantasy as the Gospel myth could come to dominate the world for nearly two millennia?

As Paul Simon put it in The Boxer, "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." This psychological observation helps to explain why the bias to accept the Gospels as literal gained such traction.

Chili

Correct, and the Gosples are not for common people to read. That is just a Christian idea to aquire rightousness and will bomb the wrong country time and time again because they read it wrong.

A good example here is the formation of Israel as the land where the holy river flows, that is based on an OT allegory that they read wrong.

Bible reading is against the house-rule of Catholicism because all is allegory except where it says that my body is real food and my blood is real drink, where so the word real removes the allegory from the text and puts Christ in the vine itself and in the wine we drink, including the work of human hands as our contribution made.

. . . and here now Christians call us cannibals and insist that he walked around way back then, while that passage alone tells us already that he did not walk around back then.

Of course I really do not care who they bomb or why they do it, as they will have 20.000 reason for that one too, and you cannot tell them any different becaus the Holy Book is what tells them so.

Chili

Indeed the movement of the day is what counts wherein the eternal Sunday has arrived as the Seventh day in Gen. 2 that is like a thousand years inside the reign of God wherein darkness is not known. Hence the seventh day took form in Gen. 2 and not in Gen. 1 where morning came and evening followed for 6 days.

"Took form" here means to make it real as the Seventh day called Sunday instead of the first day of the week where holier-than-thou Christians put it on the calendar to show that God comes first in their life and darkness will prevail.

This sequence points at the eternal light that was prior to the sun and moon that so becomes the illusion that-we-see so that we-can-see while in the absense of the light within.

It has nothing to do with the sun or equinox that provides the light of common that now becomes the illusion that we go by in the absense of this eternal ligth that spans [up to] a thousand yeas inside our soul, that is called TOL (right brain) in Gen.3 to identify as distinct from the TOK (left brain)where the light of common day comes alive in us as outsider to the TOL.

This division in our mind is needed for the function of the Intelligent Design wherein we so are both insider and outsider to our 'self' as the animal man now with intelligence in the TOK and wisdom in the TOL where the thousand year reign is at, and that becomes like one day once we take up residence in the TOL again as Christian in Christendom.

Notice here that:

Temporal has a beginning and an end
Eternal has a beginning but no end.
Infinite has no beginning and no end,

. . . wherein so now the temporal must be become eternal to identify the genus of the man to be the contituity of infinity as God himself, and hence the son must make this known to be Man inside the seventh day (as the seer seeing the seer see).

Robert Tulip

Yes, the ideas of the good, justice, love and truth are core to both Christianity and Platonism. None of these high ideals depend on a historical Jesus for their ethical meaning, although the Gospels are illustrative. I am not sure that “borrowed” is exactly the right word for the relation between Christian philosophy and Plato. To some extent these concepts were already indigenous to the Hebraic messianic vision before it was systematised through contact with Greek philosophy. Also, following Bernal’s critique of the Classics fraternity, I prefer to think of the main current of flow of ancient thought as from east to west, rather than from west to east. As someone said, Plato was like a child tossing pebbles into the great ancient lake of eastern wisdom. When has Christianity claimed to have a philosophical system? Thomism is the main example, bringing Aristotle in to put some rational order into the hodge-podge of theology. At the Reformation, Calvin’s Institutes are a main example, with his hints at the modern precept that sense trumps faith. But Calvin was rather crazy, and his followers’ Tulip acrostic is utterly sectarian and non-philosophical. Your cynicism is heart-warming. Christianity claims moral legitimacy from the mandate of God. Profit is fine as a moral incentive for capitalism, but Christianity links its moral incentives more to prophets than quick profits. And Christianity’s prophets are frustratingly slow, speaking of waiting until the end of the age. Obviously there are not going to be mass conversions to obsolete errors. But I believe that Christianity has an inner vision that remains vital and that can provide a coherent philosophy. I see the cosmic allegory in the Gospels of precession of the equinox as the cornerstone of building a systematic natural Christian philosophical theology. The stone the builder refused will become the head of the corner. Evidence is like water dripping on a rock. The rock is largely impervious, but is eventually worn away. No one (except one with the effrontery of a Tertullian) can say “I know it is false but I believe it is true”. The momentum and inertia of the church relies on popular ignorance, and has done so since the Gnostics were beheaded. Speaking of the Jesus Industry suggests the church has lost all moral compass and is just a commercial empire.Did Gibbon get that line from Seneca? It certainly presents an accurate topology of the sociology of faith. Seneca was one of the great Stoics. Stoic philosophy has much to offer as a critique of simple supernatural belief. I see Stoicism as a precursor of the pantheist religion of Spinoza and Einstein. The irony in the line from Seneca is that the wise do not all see all religions as equally false, but rather see the popular forms of faith as pointing to deeper natural meaning.

Robert Tulip

Genesis of Christ

The origin of the story of Jesus Christ is unclear. Here, I briefly assess several sources: political requirements, the Nazarenes as a secret society, use of midrash, links to other myths, and perhaps most importantly, cosmology.

Political Requirements: The Roman Empire, born in the death of Caesar, claimed legitimate rule. Imperial subjects disputed the Roman mandate. With military methods untenable for the defeated, the Christ Myth found fertile ground as a way to organise against Rome, with subversion spiritualised. To say Christ is Lord, Kyrie, meant that Caesar was not Lord. Christ presented a messianic figure to rival Augustus, understood in terms of a long term triumph of good over evil.

The Nazarenes as a secret society: The Natsar or Watchers were a movement with deep Gnostic roots. When Jesus was called the Nazarene, this title initially referred to his encapsulating the teachings of the Watchers. The title Nazarene was gradually changed into Nazareth, under political pressure from Rome, to conceal the leading role of the Nazarene sect. As authors of the Christ Myth, the Nazarenes are at the source of the Gnostic vision buried in the New Testament. Questions about the Nazarenes include their link to a Davidic line (root of Jesse), to the Nazirite cult described in the Torah that anointed David as King, and to other messianic orders such as the Therapeuts of Alexandria.

Use of midrash: The links between Jesus Christ and Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Jesse, David, Solomon and the other Hebrew prophets are abundant, such that events in his life often appear to repeat older stories in ways that suggest deliberate invention. Isaiah presents a series of messianic prophecies later to be referenced in the New Testament, linking Christ to the root of Jesse and presenting an ethical vision of the suffering servant.

Links to other myths: Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum. Israel was surrounded by big old cultures, in Egypt, Babylon, Greece and as far as India and northern Europe. All these societies had powerful established mythologies which provided types for the symbolic meaning of Christ. Echoes of Rome’s suppression of the Bacchanalia of Dionysus appear in the passion story of the death and resurrection of Christ. Osiris appears in the Bible as Lazarus, while Christ himself is partly modelled on Osiris and partly on Horus. Links to Buddhist concepts, promoted by missionaries from the east, indicate Indian influence with links to Krishna as the anointed saviour. The Christ story syncretises features of these myths to form a new vision in which the old stories remain alive in different guise.

And perhaps most importantly, cosmology: The idea of Christ is a mediator between man and God. Just as the Emperor was seen as a divine figure on earth, so did Christ link the world to heaven. This imagined connection between time and eternity indicates a deep heritage in the the Watchers' study of the stars, as the indicators of time, the moving image of eternity.

The Nazarenes looked for big patterns, and found the biggest observable pattern of all, the precession of the equinox. Christ was then modelled on the observed slow motion of the sky, as representing on earth the cosmic movement of the equinox from the constellation of Aries into the constellation of Pisces, a millennial event that occurred in 21 AD.

The link to precession explains the meaning of the story that Christ is the alpha and omega, the first and last, bridging the end of the old age of Aries and the beginning of the new age of Pisces. The cosmology of precession looked to a long term understanding of messianic identity, looking back to the earlier ages of Taurus begun by Adam and Aries by Abraham, and forward to the next age of Aquarius, begun by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

The cosmology of precession provided the natural stellar framework for the Nazarenes’ political need to use midrash and cultural syncretism to construct the idea of Jesus Christ. Simple observation of the natural structure of time provides the real skeleton that was enfleshed with the imaginative midrashic fiction of the story of Jesus the Nazarene.

mountainman

Don't you mean compatible with history?




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