Metacrock

[/B]</STRONG>[/b]
LP:
Older than Christianity. What would one call temples to Asklepios? And I note that such temples do have testimonials from cured patients written on their walls. So does anyone here plan to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios when one recovers from some disease?

Meta =&gt;I dont' think those are the forrunners of modern hospitals. The hospitals in the middle ages which Christains started became the system of modern hospitals, most of which are ran by the chruch today. Or at least many of them are.

MC:
modern scinece,

LP:
Which grew out of the rediscovery of pagan learning. It was classical-Greek pagans who were the first really serious scientists, and what's really fun about that is that these tended to reject the literal truth of their society's religion.


Meta =&gt; Their science died out and it had probably ran its course. Whitehead and collingwood (famous historian of science) both said that Greek sceince could never had led to modern science becasue of the proximity of the mind to the world in greek thought. It was the aspect of world as machine made by God that enabaled the mechinistic model of scinece (with reductionism) to take hold.

MC:
bill of rights, Writ of habius corups {that's habeus corpus}, the basic concept of constitutional rights in general,

LP:
Totally, completely unbiblical. Republics and democracies and legislatures and elections and so forth were ultimately inspired by various Greek and Roman and Germanic examples. The word "democracy" comes from Greek, and the word "republic" was originally applied to the old Roman Republic.


MEta =&gt;It doens't have to be Biblical, its' historical. Christians did that. The tradition is larger than just the Holy book in which it grounds its identity. Comrwell, look it up.

actually, the Greek's atheinian democracy was influential in the American constitution but it wasn't in the formation of British Democracy, where Habeus corups comes form.

By contrast, the Bible has only one theory of government: the Divine Right of Kings.


MEta =&gt;No that's ture! Samuel told the people of Israel that God didn't want them to have a King. But they insisted so God let them have one. Before that they used a local magistrate form of government, and before that they had a sort of beaurcratic autocracy from which the magistrate form evolved. see book of judges.

And the spelling is "habeas corpus" ("you should have the body") -- it refers to the right to be present at one's trial.


I know what it refurs to! Spelling erors are not indicative of understanding or lack thereof.

MC:
the first abolution {I assume abolition?} group in America, the first woman's sufferage group in America, the underground rail road, the abolition movement in England,


YEa, abolition. in addition to the dyslexia I dont see well.
LP:
There were Christian churches on both sides of the slavery debate, but the Bible expresses only complete acceptance of slavery. And there weren't many churches that had supported 19th-cy. feminist movements either.

YOu are making the unsupported assumption that there were many christians agisnt slavery. They made up the bulck of the abolition movment, and the Quakers fought slavery 100 years before the movment existed.

Weren't many women, there weren't many women in the whole dman movment compared to how many didn't join it in the 19th century. I think most of them were Christians, probably liberal types.

MC:
statistical problablity, {probability}, internal evidence as a criterion for the validity of a text, and a hot {host} of other good things that made Western civilization.

LP:
Nothing to do with the Bible. Where in the Bible does anyone evaluate competing hypotheses?[/qb][/QUOTE]

Why do you keep comparing everything to the Bible? I didn't argue that the Bible did all these things, I said that the Christian tradition built Western civlization. Doesn't have to be in the Bible for the Christian tradition to do it. IT's historical. You really think that something has to be in Bible for Christians to believe it or do it or accomplish it? REad some history.

[ October 05, 2001: Message edited by: Metacrock ]

Metacrock

A whuuuuuuuuuuuuut? must be one of yankee deals.

Metacrock

I'll have to write to the Pope about that Money

Metacrock

[/b]</STRONG>

Meta =&gt;O pardon me, my friend. I do not wish to offend you, but that is an incorrect assumption. One need not assume that God designed a sender reciever model of communication in the development of mystical or religious epxerince. It's far more "efficient" for what it is desinged to do, which is to give us a foretaste of heaven such that we will internalize the precepts of Godly living. What better way to do this than to radically transform the life of the experiencer through a phenomenological apprehension of God's glory? It's not desinged to be a heavnly telephone system or to communicate information, but to be a first hand expreince of transcendent reality. For that the mere passing on of information, commands and precepts would be inadequate.

Meta -&gt;There are a couple of problems there. First, it's a theological problem,not a problem with the text. Secondly, it's not true of Christian mystics. I think you are steriotyping mystics here.



MEta =&gt;that depends upon what you mean by dulaism. See the article in New Theology no. 1 entitaled "Christianity and the Supernatural" in which Eugene R. Fairweather explians that Christinaity is not dualistic. There are two aspects or faceits to a single harmonious reality. Supernature is the ground and end of the natural. Also see Catherine Taynner, who wrote a book about it, but I can't recall the title.


Meta =&gt;that has to do with the scholastic and monastic settings in which they live. But so what? That is not relivant, because it's just a problem for theology.

Metacrock

[quote]Originally posted by Koyaanisqatsi:
<STRONG>I just wanted to go back to what Meta was originally intending with his first post and make a few comments.

After all, the only input Nomad has provided is to say, in essence, "it doesn't matter what the Bible says, God reveals himself only to believers in mysterious ways," effectively negating the worth of any and all input from Nomad in this discussion, but then, that's Nomad.

Not an insult; just a sequitur from your declaratives, though I will have use for your calls to personal whim later.

Oh, and, by the way Meta, I also suffer from lysdexia, so I feel for ya'!


Hey thanks! Good to have company. Did teachers try to make you feel stupid as a kid? They did me, until I started talking.

Though "pooding" still gave me a chuckle.


ahahhahahahhahah! Did I say that? Sometimes I amaze myself.


False on all counts. It is either an historical account of factual beings or it is not. If such matters as history, science and geography, to use just your examples, are not recorded correctly, then this negates the validity of the whole.


That doesn't make sense. Your assuming that it's a dictiation model. My model is an inner experince modle. It's not communications of information for accurat transmission,it's a record of people's experinces of God. Now this has exceptions. Not all the books are alike, but any are along the lines of the inner experince model. For example Genesis is mythology re-wrtten by inner experience. The whole Pentituke in fact would fit that aspect of the model. The prophets may nor not be literally speaking the words of God, the test there would be if they came true. The Gosples would fit the inner experince model even better, but with histoircal import since they are reccording the testimony of a community of eye witnesses.

]

MEta=&gt;NO! That wouldn't make any differnce. Your assuming that Jesus was like God in a space suit (the human body) rather than a man. He became a man. He limited his omniscience and so forth to be a man. The most logical way to look at it would be that it was the smallest in their experince. That's what he most likely meant. So if there is some seed smaller that only gorws in the Argintine it doesn't matter.


Meta=&gt;I think that to reduce the text to matter of the accuracy of such minutia is to reduce it to comic book proportions. It trivializes what it has to say by making it like an Information please almanac. Why should God mess around with such details when they are trivial? Besides, the Mustard seed was the smallest in their experince.

Meta =&gt; How does Nomad's view differ substantially from mine? The only real differnce is that he's willing to waste his time defending more unimpporant trivia. I dont' think the Bible is meant to be Information please or the Book of World records. It's a serious text about cosmic questions pertaining to the nature of being human. What it says about mustatrd is unimportant.

Jesse

Me:
The other problem, I think, is that the more people cultivate these experiences, the more likely they are to start saying things which don't square very well with Christian theology. For example, it's a pretty common thread among mystics to say that an individual's true self or true nature is in some sense identical to "God," whereas Christianity says that can only be true of one guy, Jesus Christ.

Meta -&gt;There are a couple of problems there. First, it's a theological problem,not a problem with the text.

Ok, but what do you mean by that? It is possible to read Jesus' "I and the father are one" in a mystical way that doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility that other people could be one with the father too, but if you interpret it that way I don't think you're really a "Christian" any more (although only in the sense defined by Paul...do you take it as a tenet of faith that Paul was divinely inspired, by the way? If you cross out everything written by Paul and leave only the stuff that Jesus himself is supposed to have said, you'd get a very different religion...)

Secondly, it's not true of Christian mystics. I think you are steriotyping mystics here.

It's certainly true of some of them, although I suppose you could say they were "heretics" and thus not really Christians. Anyway, I admit that I don't have a very broad base of knowledge about Christian mystics...do you know any good books or websites on the subject? I will say that the tendency to say that one's true nature is identical with God (or the Tao or the ground of being or whatever they choose to call it) is something that seems to appear independently in many different mystical traditions, so if there really are any core unifying elements to "the mystical philosophy," this seems to be a good candidate.

Likewise, mystics from diverse traditions like Zen and Sufism all tend to agree that part of the goal of mysticism is to move beyond "dualistic" thinking, whereas traditional Christianity is dualistic through-and-through (most notably in their belief that all humans will recieve either eternal salvation or eternal damnation, with no second chances).

MEta =&gt;that depends upon what you mean by dulaism. See the article in New Theology no. 1 entitaled "Christianity and the Supernatural" in which Eugene R. Fairweather explians that Christinaity is not dualistic. There are two aspects or faceits to a single harmonious reality. Supernature is the ground and end of the natural. Also see Catherine Taynner, who wrote a book about it, but I can't recall the title.

I would be interested to know what Christian theologians say about this, but I don't have access to the journal you mentioned, and I couldn't find a "Catherine Taynner" on amazon.com (is it spelled correctly?)

In any case, it's hard for me to see how a belief system that says some beings will be eternally united with God and some will be eternally alienated from Him, all depending on whether they "get it right" in a single finite lifetime, could be anything but dualistic.

It's certainly "interesting" that so many of the serious mystics within the Christian tradition ended up getting branded as heretics at some point.

Meta =&gt;that has to do with the scholastic and monastic settings in which they live. But so what? That is not relivant, because it's just a problem for theology.

Maybe. But it does seem to me that the more compatible a version of Christian theology is with mysticism, the less and less it sounds like traditional Christianity...Paul Tillich's theology would be an example of this, in my view. I know you like Tillich so you'd probably disagree that he's far from traditional Christianity, but that's my impression from what I've read of him--there's very little there that's specific to Christianity or that couldn't also be endorsed by a member of a totally different religion.

The other thing I'd say is that I think many Christians are sort of "mystically naive" and think that the spiritual feelings they have when reading the Bible or praying or whatever are unique to Christianity, and proof that it's the one true religion...I think all these sorts of experiences have analogues in other spiritual traditions though. You don't have to answer if it's personal, but what kind of subjective experiences have you had that convinced you of the unique truth of Christianity? Are you confident that non-"saved" members of other religions don't experience similar things when contemplating their own holy texts or when meditating or whatever?

[ October 05, 2001: Message edited by: Jesse ]

lpetrich

earlier LP:
[temples for the god Asklepios...]

Meta =&gt;I dont' think those are the forrunners of modern hospitals. ...

LP:
Maybe, but the sort of medicine practiced nowadays has much more in common with pagan Greek thinkers like Hippocrates than with the New Testament. In the NT, the main theory of disease was demonic possession, and the main therapies were exorcism and sorcery. However, Hippocrates preferred more rational theories and treatements, and he noted quite correctly that epilepsy is called the disease of the Gods because nobody really knows what causes it.

MC:
modern scinece,

LP:
Which grew out of the rediscovery of pagan learning. It was classical-Greek pagans who were the first really serious scientists, and what's really fun about that is that these tended to reject the literal truth of their society's religion.

Meta =&gt; Their science died out and it had probably ran its course. Whitehead and collingwood (famous historian of science) both said that Greek sceince could never had led to modern science becasue of the proximity of the mind to the world in greek thought. It was the aspect of world as machine made by God that enabaled the mechinistic model of scinece (with reductionism) to take hold.

LP:
I disagree. It did not die out -- it was temporarily destroyed by Christianity. As to a taste for abstraction, can anyone say Platonism?

MC:
bill of rights, Writ of habius corups {that's habeus corpus}, the basic concept of constitutional rights in general,

earlier LP:
Totally, completely unbiblical. Republics and democracies and legislatures and elections and so forth were ultimately inspired by various Greek and Roman and Germanic examples. The word "democracy" comes from Greek, and the word "republic" was originally applied to the old Roman Republic.

MEta =&gt;It doens't have to be Biblical, its' historical. Christians did that. The tradition is larger than just the Holy book in which it grounds its identity. Comrwell, look it up.

LP:
Like the way that many believers in Jesus Christ have done things totally contrary to some of the teachings of their "Lord and Savior". These things are nonbiblical and ultimately pagan in origin.

earlier LP:
By contrast, the Bible has only one theory of government: the Divine Right of Kings.

MEta =&gt;No that's ture! Samuel told the people of Israel that God didn't want them to have a King. But they insisted so God let them have one. Before that they used a local magistrate form of government, and before that they had a sort of beaurcratic autocracy from which the magistrate form evolved. see book of judges.

LP:
Which does not prove much -- the Bible's only theory of government legitimacy is divine mandate.

earlier LP:
And the spelling is "habeas corpus" ("you should have the body") -- it refers to the right to be present at one's trial.

MX:
I know what it refurs to! Spelling erors are not indicative of understanding or lack thereof.

LP:
A remarkable lack of humility.

earlier LP:
There were Christian churches on both sides of the slavery debate, but the Bible expresses only complete acceptance of slavery. And there weren't many churches that had supported 19th-cy. feminist movements either.

MC:
Weren't many women, there weren't many women in the whole dman movment compared to how many didn't join it in the 19th century. I think most of them were Christians, probably liberal types.

LP:
Many of them may have considered themselves Christians, but just about everybody did, including essentially all of their opponents, many of whom considered feminist things like women voting to be against what God had decreed for the female sex. Actually, some early feminists were noted Freethinkers -- something which was not common among their opponents.

MC:
statistical problablity, {probability}, internal evidence as a criterion for the validity of a text, and a hot {host} of other good things that made Western civilization.

earlier LP:
Nothing to do with the Bible. Where in the Bible does anyone evaluate competing hypotheses?

MC:
Why do you keep comparing everything to the Bible?

LP:
Because it's supposed to be the great sourcebook.

I marvel at how someone who professes to believe in the Bible can so quickly turn around and demand that it be treated as irrelevant.

lpetrich

earlier LP:
The hypothesis that mystical experiences were set up by God so that he/she/it could communicate to us is, IMO, unconvincing, because there are more efficient ways of accomplishing that task.

MC:
Meta =&gt;O pardon me, my friend. I do not wish to offend you, but that is an incorrect assumption. One need not assume that God designed a sender reciever model of communication in the development of mystical or religious epxerince.

LP:
But that's exactly what some people have claimed about mystical experiences.

MC:
It's far more "efficient" for what it is desinged to do, which is to give us a foretaste of heaven such that we will internalize the precepts of Godly living. What better way to do this than to radically transform the life of the experiencer through a phenomenological apprehension of God's glory? It's not desinged to be a heavnly telephone system or to communicate information, but to be a first hand expreince of transcendent reality. For that the mere passing on of information, commands and precepts would be inadequate.

LP:
Sort of like the way that the Hashishin recruited their troops, by taking them into a palace with lots of pretty girls and claiming that that's what Paradise is like (yes, in the Muslim Paradise, one can get laid really good, at least if one's male). This is, however, a rather inefficient and unreliable mechanism, because mystical experiences do not happen reliably enough, and because non-Christians don't conclude the reality of the Christian Heaven from such experiences.

quote:
The other problem, I think, is that the more people cultivate these experiences, the more likely they are to start saying things which don't square very well with Christian theology. For example, it's a pretty common thread among mystics to say that an individual's true self or true nature is in some sense identical to "God," whereas Christianity says that can only be true of one guy, Jesus Christ.

MC:
Meta -&gt;There are a couple of problems there. First, it's a theological problem,not a problem with the text. Secondly, it's not true of Christian mystics. I think you are steriotyping mystics here.

LP:
Usually, mystics end up claiming that they have perceived the only truly real reality, the One Mind or something similar -- which is rather gross heresy in orthodox Christianity and Islam. However, Hindu and Buddhist mystical traditions have not been hindered by any comparable doctrinal difficulties.

quote:
Likewise, mystics from diverse traditions like Zen and Sufism all tend to agree that part of the goal of mysticism is to move beyond "dualistic" thinking, whereas traditional Christianity is dualistic through-and-through (most notably in their belief that all humans will recieve either eternal salvation or eternal damnation, with no second chances).

MEta =&gt;that depends upon what you mean by dulaism. See the article in New Theology no. 1 entitaled "Christianity and the Supernatural" in which Eugene R. Fairweather explians that Christinaity is not dualistic. There are two aspects or faceits to a single harmonious reality. Supernature is the ground and end of the natural. Also see Catherine Taynner, who wrote a book about it, but I can't recall the title.

LP:
That's a rather unhistorical view.

quote:
It's certainly "interesting" that so many of the serious mystics within the Christian tradition ended up getting branded as heretics at some point.

Meta =&gt;that has to do with the scholastic and monastic settings in which they live. But so what? That is not relivant, because it's just a problem for theology.

LP:
Actually, it's not surprising that Christian mystics would get called heretics; the same thing has happened to some Muslim mystics also.

HRG

All by itself ? No Greek philosophy, mathematics and science ? No Roman law and administrative structures ? No Arab mathematics and medicine ?

"All important discoveries have been made by Russian scientists ...."

But if it is not in the Bible, why do you claim - or should I say hijack - it as a specifically Christian tradition ?

HRG.

Vorkosigan

Meta: Why do you keep comparing everything to the Bible? I didn't argue that the Bible did all these things, I said that the Christian tradition built Western civlization.

HRG: All by itself ? No Greek philosophy, mathematics and science ? No Roman law and administrative structures ? No Arab mathematics and medicine ?

To which should be added: no Chinese science and technology? No Gothic laws and customs?

And one must ask, if Christ-inanity is so wonderful as a civilization-builder, why was Orthodox Christendom such a backward, underdeveloped, and murderous place?

Western Civilization has been built in spite of the murderous and authoritarian ways of the Church.

Michael