Chili

You have it just backwards Pete, which is normal and is why I hold that they always bomb the wrong country, and is why Plato called sophistry as 'look-alikes' a deprivation in the privation of their own humanity as human being; wherein also the Englishman is the literary symbol of not to know inside their analytic point of view.

This has nothing to do with the English, except in the eye of the English man, Dostoevski would say, who feels intimidated by that line as English himself, while in fact they have produced some of the greatest literature the world has ever known wherein England was their motherland and not their fatherland.

If you insist that the Emperor had as majesty like Jesus, who in the original story is the archetypal cleaner of his own house as oppointed by nature itself, he would be majestic by adoption of that same authority.

Good move I'd say, and so the pigs must go. Now whether the man himself was majestic or not is not mine to say, and if he was he would not say.

Sheshbazzar

There is no Law saying that a person can't believe הסוס דמן
Every person is free to believe in any manner of הסוס דמן they desire.

בקש הקהלת למצא דברי־טוב וְדברי אמת׃


ששבצר העברי

mountainman

Hey Iskander I have to disagree here.

The emperors Constantine, Constantius II and Julian all assumed the role of Pontifex Maximus. In the later 4th century the role was assumed by Damasius, the Christian Bishop of Rome (who's army had fought the army of other contending bishops), because the emperor did not want to assume the role.

Furthermore, the footnotes at the end of the above page state the following:

Iskander

Hi, Pontifex Maximus was a republican office and the emperors became pontifex beginning with Augustus. Constantine was another emperor holding the office. When the Latin Roman Empire weakened the bishop of rome assumed the religious authority of the office.
List of Roman Republican holders of the role of pontifex maximus
237 BC - Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Caudinus
212 BC - Publius Licinius Crassus Dives (consul 205 BC)
183 BC - Gaius Servilius Geminus
180 BC - Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (consul 187 BC)
152 BC - Vacant
150 BC - Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica; succeeded by his son
141 BC - Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, the first Pontifex to leave Italy, when ordered to Asia Minor by the Senate, after he had instigated the death of his cousin Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in a riot.
132 BC - Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus the first Pontifex to leave Italy willingly and to lead an army into foreign soil; killed in battle in Asia Minor. Succeeded by his brother:
130 BC - Publius Mucius Scaevola (d. 130 BC??)
115 BC - Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus, possibly descendant of the pontiff of 243 BC.
103 BC - Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (consul 96 BC)
89 BC - Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex, son and nephew of two Pontifexes Maximi
81 BC - Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius nephew of the pontiff of 115 BC, and third and last of this family to hold the role.
63 BC - Julius Caesar
44 BC - Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (triumvir); the last Roman Republican holder of the role; lineal descendant of the pontiff of 180 BC.
12 BC - Augustus, adoptive son of the pontiff of 63 BC; subsequently held by the Emperors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ntifex_maximus

Leges Majestas was legislation protecting the Republic and later extended, modified etc as needed. Emperors, as head of state, would have been protected by the law.


http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/.../Majestas.html

mountainman

This is taken from Zosimus (fl. 490s–510 CE) - the only non-Christian source for much of what he reports.


THUS did Damasus c.378 CE become the first Pontifex Maximus who was not the Lord God Caesar of the empire.




But who (immediately above) was "their chief"? [The chief of the Christian bishops/priests?]

In Rome it was the surely the Bishop of Rome.

Damasus was Bishop of Rome from 366 to 384.

So Damasus essentially appoint himself "Pontifex Maximus".

Iskander

Hi MountainMan

The following is from, Theodosious, the empire at bay.Sthephen Williams and Gerard Friell.
Routledge 1998.ISBN 9780415170406. Page 59-60

Now, in 382 under the urging of bishop Ambrose, Gratian not only removed the altar but abolished the age-old subsidies to the priesthood. The Senate sent Symmachus to plead respectfully against these measures. He was refused an audience. The following year Gratian completed the disestablishment by formally repudiating the robe and title of Pontifex Maximus but later the same year he was murdered and the uneasy throne at Milan was occupied by Valentinian II, a boy of twelve.
In 384 Symmachus was Prefect of the City, and some instructions to him from the new emperor—to punish the despoilers of temples—gave him and his colleagues some hope that the issues might be reopened.

At the request of the Senate Symmachus composed a long letter to Valentinian putting a case for restoration of state cults and in particular, the Altar of Victory.
Symmachus believes that the ending of the state cults will jeopardise the divine protection of the empire, but he is careful not to offend Christianity...

Note 48 of chapter 4: Symmachus,Relationes,3--

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/.../symrel3f.html

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345 – 402) was a Roman statesman, orator, and man of letters. He held the offices of governor of Africa in 373, urban prefect of Rome in 384 and 385, and consul in 391. Symmachus sought to preserve the traditional religions of Rome at a time when the aristocracy was converting to Christianity, and led an unsuccessful delegation of protest against Gratian, when he ordered the Altar of Victory removed from the curia, the principal meeting place of the Roman Senate in the Forum Romanum. Two years later he made a famous appeal to Gratian's successor, Valentinian II, in a dispatch that was rebutted by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Symmachus's career was temporarily derailed when he supported the short-lived usurper Magnus Maximus, but he was rehabilitated and three years later appointed consul. Much of his writing has survived: nine books of letters; a collection of Relationes or official dispatches; and fragments of various orations.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Aurelius_Symmachus

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wace/biodic...0Q.%20Aurelius


Quintus Aurelius Symmachus – Christian Enemy?
21Apr
In 384 the Roman Senator and Prefect of the City of Rome, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus represented the Senate of Rome when it requested that the Altar of Victory be returned to the Senate House and state support for Pagan temples and ritual be restored. The Altar had originally been removed by Constantius in 357, restored by Julian, then removed again by Gratian in 382, along with funding for the temples and state cults. In 382 Symmachus represented the Senate in requesting that the Altar be restored and was not even granted an audience. Following Gratian’s death, the Senate tried again and again they chose Symmachus to represent them. Symmachus wrote an eloquent letter or relatione to Valentinian II, generally considered an outstanding example of Latin literature, asking for religious tolerance and requesting that the Altar and subsidies be restored. 1


http://medievalhistorygeek.wordpress...ristian-enemy/
The Real Circle of Symmachus
Chapter:
(p. 353 ) 10 The Real Circle of Symmachus
Source:
The Last Pagans of Rome
Author(s):
Alan Cameron
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprofso/9780199747276.003.0011


Within the ranks of the aristocracy many scholars have identified an inner core of literary pagans, the so-called “Circle of Symmachus,” actively nurturing the classics and sponsoring pagan writers in the hope of recalling waverers to the fold. This chapter argues that it is the chance congruence of two factors—one ancient and one modern—that has saddled Symmachus with this unlikely role: Macrobius's Saturnalia, where he appears as one of the three hosts to a fictitious literary gathering; and Otto Seeck's wonderful edition of Symmachus's Letters (1883), with its massive introduction identifying every correspondent and his family. As a consequence, Symmachus has always been seen as the central figure in late 4th-century Roman society

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/vie...276-chapter-11

Robert Tulip

The majesty of an actual king is different from the majesty of an imaginary king. Constantine did not "transfer" his majesty to Christ any more than Stalin transferred his power to Marx. The veneration of the messianic idol was in both these cases an article of scheming fantasy.

Constantine no more venerated a historical Jesus than Stalin venerated the actual Karl Marx (or Vlad the Impaler for that matter). In both cases it is the preached saviour who is venerated, a construct designed to serve a political narrative.

The majesty of the preached Christ is cuckolded firstly by nails, with him absurdly reigning "from the tree" (come back and fight you yellow bastards!), secondly by ascension, with him sitting conveniently as deus absconditus at God's right hand on high from whence he will allegedly return to judge the quick and the dead, and thirdly by virgin birth, an impossible myth designed to place an aggressive absurdity in the face of any who challenge it by reason, and to emphasise that Christ is myth not fact, but with the most powerful part of the myth being the assertion that it is not a myth.

Speaking of Constantine’s majesty, I think the vision of the Chi Rho cross before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 AD may be decisive. My interpretation of this goes back to Plato’s Timaeus, where he describes the X in the sky as the meeting of the same and the different in terms that can only properly be understood as referring to the observable X formed in the sky by the circle of the zodiac and the circle of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is simple naked eye cosmology, and is readily visible as the biggest and most prominent thing in the autumn sky.

On the night before the battle, Constantine would have seen if he lifted his eyes to the heavens that a cross was formed by the zodiac intersection with the galaxy between Taurus and Gemini. This cross rose at sunset and was prominent all night, with the zodiac light forming the second bar of the X visible before dawn after moon set.

What it means for Constantine is that he understood Christ as an imagined reflection on earth of the actual observed passage of time seen in the heavens. Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα (Through this sign [you shall] conquer) says that just as Christ reflects the power and majesty of the steady movement of the visible cosmos, so too does Constantine.

The heavens certainly are majestic. Nothing we do can influence them. At the end of terrestrial time when the sun goes nova the cosmos will prove all-powerful by cooking our planet (if we don't manage to do that by our own efforts this century). The mandate of heaven is the mandate of the stars.

spin

I don't believe you are. There is a gap between intention and success of an act. You may have your hand--so to speak--on a scientific ontology, but you are presenting nothing of the sort.

You're working too hard over recycling. And Bruno, as I said, looked to Nicola Cusano for his heliocentrism. The real Copernicus would have been outside his interest. His was the idea of heliocentrism, rather than the evidence-based proof of it.

Heavy plow and necessary harness. Vertical warp-weighted loom. Full harnessing of the greatest power supply before steam in the use of waterwheels. Castle architecture, from motte-and-bailey through to the stone structures that were the models for the crusader castles. The long ship. Even double-entry bookkeeping comes along at the end.

(You'll forgive my noting the change in topic from "an ontology" to "ontology".)

You seem not to have attempted to understand what is behind my statements, apparently over several posts. An ontology is a compendium of what is according to the compiler. How that compendium relates to what is depends upon the access to the what. Every individual internalizes such a compendium of what is and naturally that internalization will be unique to the internalizer. That is why I talked of internalized constructs as "personal ontologies" and mentioned the notion of billions of ontologies. The validity of elements of those ontologies is determined through the epistemology that supports them.

Hegemony is a facet of social power. It is not good. (And one would have to evaluate your notion of "flourishing". Chickens and rabbits are said to be flourishing.)

(I.e. at the start of the "dark ages", over 300 years after the emergence of the earliest christologies.)

You should try selling an expanded version of this to a publisher like Health Research.

You can believe anything you want, but that's purely what this is, a belief.

Did you know that agriculture was invented independently in at least seven cultures around the world at different times? or that Leibnitz or Newton invented calculus independently? I say this because I feel that you have committed yourself unreasonably to a theory of an underlying unity, when it is relatively common that similar ideas can be developed independently. Everyone has access to viewing celestial bodies, just as neolithic people had opportunities to observe at length wild food supplies. At the same time cultures borrow artefacts from other cultures, as the Hellenistic cultures borrowed war elephants from India (and the Seleucids used them even in Judea). Syncretism is noted in numerous ancient religions. We are not dealing with a hidden underlying anything in them, merely normal spread of tropes.

I think you need to provide a demonstrable underpinning to your theory of things hidden behind other things, a theory you frequently allude to but never enunciate in any supported way.

Oh, hell, I would love to see you actually do a little forensic reconstruction.

There are in fact fragments of christologies behind the earliest christian texts which give us glimpses of the earliest christologies.....

Two assertions of plausibility. I still see a need for that rope to tie around your leg.

...if you are an abject slave to christian hegemony. You may as well ask how Islamic faith or Hindu faith or Mithraic faith can be reformed for a modern age. Why would you bother? I mean what reasonable thought goes into desiring such reformation?

It seems to me that this is purely eisegetical. Is there any use in doing this sort of analysis?

Having context doesn't in itself imply there was any such allegory. What seems is again insufficient. what makes a deeper meaning any better than say one supplied by John Allegro in his Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?

It means nothing of the sort as things stand. This seems to be more eisegesis. Almost like divine fiat. What you say is.

(And I have no trouble with the knowledge of some classical astronomers or with the persistent effect of astro related notions seeping into the thought of various religions.)

Yes, I was watching some natterings between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss at the time. Comfy chairs on a stage.

The reification of time has always been a source of fascination for me.... And the stratification of ages found in Daniel is based on prevalent tropes in the second century. You can find analogous periodizations in the book of Enoch with the Apocalypse of the Weeks for example. Any relation with yuga cycles would need to be demonstrated rather than insinuated.

And each person has their own ontological construct, though I see an ontology not so much as a theory of being but the way the theory cashes out, a compendium of being or of what is.

You make it sound so simple. I'd like to think of it as some ontologies mapping better to the what of the universe. I doubt you can have a "correct" description. We don't have direct access to the universe. It is mainly beyond our direct means of perception and, being part of the universe, for us there is too much trees and not enough forest.

I think we have merely more apt and less apt ontologies.

I'm sure Milankovic would have agreed with the last notion.

As Sagan was agnostic, I find it hard to understand why you would call his image a myth. It seems like a hijack to me.

Why are you so hung up on notions such as purpose of and significance of human beings? Living will continue regardless. Being is being, not analyzing it.

I was looking at the bar coaster he'd scribbled on.

I guess, as I've shown no interest in the subject of majesty in the context and explained what my entry into dialogue was based on, it seems strange that you would keep talking to me about it. That you would continue to talk to me about is what you should consider as irritating.

A good rum. The next episode of True Blood. Where I can get a steady source of provolone piccante. The third chord in the principal progression of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Access to Revue de Qumran. Examples of the prevalence of christian institutions in our societies (beside BC & AD, In God We Trust, and "so help me god"). All issues of power.

Both force and consent, ie through the nature of hegemony. Legitimacy is an issue of perspective. It is frequent that there is mapping between earth and heaven: in various societies the king is/was god's representative on earth. It's not strange that one might be seen to mirror the other.

I don't know, but maybe you can still hear strains of the tart's lascivious tunes.

(And who here is dismissing "the ‘Christos Kyrios’ (Christ is Lord) as meaningless," or giving "credence to anything supernatural"?)

It's not strange: traces of Gilgamesh have been found in the Arabian Nights. Ideas frequently migrate. Imagine Poe's August Lupin reappearing in the guise of Sherlock Holmes amalgamated with Conan Doyle's friend Joseph Bell, and the great detectives Holmes spawned. Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, Nero Wolfe, Nick Charles, even Colombo. This is the nature of cultural artefacts.

And why should anyone other than a believer care if "Jesus Christ is the conceptualisation of connection between earth and heaven in the highest and most abstract and universal sense"? While I understand heaven in a christian sense, what do you mean by the term in this context? (Remember, in your response, that you are supposed to have one or both of your legs tied to the ground.)

Are you worried about perishing? (*)

I have a philosophical worry that society as we know it will perish by the end of the century. It's not through lack of vision, but lack of responsibility. There are too many people who don't share your theories about values as primarily expressed as laws, regulations and social norms. I fortunately will be gone long before then.

Many adherents of christian theology are in conflict over evolution. They would probably be in conflict over the evolution of religions as well.

No-one claimed that individuals "maintain a real world" but "constructs". I don't believe that institutions maintain anything different than individuals, ie a construct of the real world. How do the values of criminals fit your notion of values being "primarily expressed as laws, regulations and social norms"? Are they examples of what "primarily" excludes? What about those who do not have a strict adherence to "laws, regulations and social norms", such as most young people, opportunists, the disillusioned, the anti-social, Wall Street, and so on? I'm getting a vision of that pleasure dome in air again. I'd hate to be that guy from Porlock, but shouldn't you be counting your pleasure domes on the ground first?

The common way of clarifying meaning is by using simpler terminology to build up a complex notion, not to flit from one complex notion to another: "the meaning of life is the good of the future"? Ropes on both legs, I'd say. Tie'em down fast. That boy is floatin' a-way otherwise.

"Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind. Like a leper messiah."

It's all very late Victorian, this need for metaphysics. What you don't seem to understand is that you misrepresent those who you are talking against when you talk of science's "opposition to metaphysics". Such a taxonomy doesn't reflect reality. There is no "opposition" to metaphysics, just as I don't oppose the worship of Baal. Not seeing a relevance in something is not opposition.

Would you stand on a soapbox at the bottom of a street in Palo Alto haranguing people with phrases such as "the absence of vision of purpose is nihilism"?

And why would one take your assertions as correct? Seriously. Why?

...and that there are hidden allegories and other hidden aspects behind cultural manifestations for which you have refused to show any glimpse of exactly how you know of such things.

"Don't go jumping waterfalls, please stick to the lake.
People who jump waterfalls, sometimes can make mistakes."

:vomit:

Can we leave you with reruns of Dallas, then?

Robert Tulip

I’m sorry this is so long, but with spin making numerous relevant responses I feel obliged to respond in some detail, covering an expanding range of themes.
Okay, ‘presenting’ is not quite the right word, what I meant was that my comments in this thread are based on a scientific ontology which I would be happy to present. As I have said, my view of a scientific ontology starts with analysis of precession of the equinox. Establishing the link between precession and ontology requires careful and patient analysis both to describe a positive new framework and to explain the limits and mistakes of current thinking. It requires a much more extensive presentation than is possible just in this thread where it is incidental to the thread topic. Fair enough, but the need for castles reflects anarchy. The collapse of ancient cities, learning, records, population, building activity, material cultural achievements and communication, and the power of mad Christian dogma, justify the term Dark Ages. It was dark. Thank God for the atheist enlightenment. In the context of this thread, with its topic that shall not be named, the distinction between ‘an ontology’ and ‘ontology’ raises a philosophical issue, namely that the principle of non-contradiction says incompatible ontologies cannot both be true. Philosophically, if our objective is to strike and expand areas of agreement, there is value in observing the contradictions between rival ontologies, but this goal requires that we imagine an objective universal ontology as a true criterion to judge the conflicting opinions. I have sought to relate what you are saying to the topic of this thread, and to my own view that Christology provides a heuristic to construct an objective ontology, by grounding Christology in cosmology. I understand you reject this as far too sketchy to take seriously, but equally I suspect that your “compendium” model involves a relativistic epistemology in which conflicting claims can potentially both be true, with various curates claiming how wonderful their eggs are. Rival ontologies cannot have epistemological validity, unless the points that separate them are in areas that science cannot assess. That is a sweeping statement which appears to condemn all human power as evil. I agree that all actual hegemonies have their faults, but the context here is the discussion of an ideal hegemony. The vision of Christ as King at Matthew 25 describes the saved as those who feed the hungry, visit the sick, visit prisoners, clothe the naked, welcome strangers, give drink to the thirsty and do other works of mercy, and the damned as those who do not do these works of mercy. Matt 25 suggests we can pay for charity through reward for talent. In the Kingdom of Christ, the blessing of God is upon the meek, the peacemakers, the pure of heart, the poor in spirit and those who mourn. A hegemonic system where the last are first is good. In my reading, this Biblical vision of the hegemony of Christ is presented as an imaginative preparation conducted during the Age of Pisces and an expected actuality for the Age of Aquarius.
The notion of flourishing as the highest good comes from Aristotle’s concepts of entelechy and eudaimonia with the vision of active pursuit of a goal of a good life. Not wanting to set any hares running, I recall that my good friend DM Murdock got lambasted for quoting Hilton Hotema… The lambasting was not specifically about what she quoted, but about the ad hominem argument that you should not quote crazy people. The fascinating problem is that discussion of precession of the equinox is inevitably associated with magical fantasy. I maintain that all my views are scientific, and welcome discussion of anything that readers find hard to understand. So I will pass on the Health Research suggestion. I will start a new thread on precessional cosmology in the Bible. You can call it a belief, but I argue that precession provides the scientific observational code to unlock the theory of time of Biblical eschatology. That is a scientific hypothesis, not a belief. By “a theory of an underlying unity” you seem to imply some sort of Atlantean global diffusion. That is not at all what I argue. Underlying unity is central to philosophy, for example in Parmenides’ argument that there is only one reality.
In comparative myth, there are similarities between Quetzacoatl and Christ as saviour kings, because both serve similar mythic functions in similar societies. It is not due to contact but psychological evolutionary parallelism.
As Jesus himself is allegedly reputed to have said at Matt 5:45, God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good. All see the same sun, so we should expect that cultures with similar levels of technologies may have similarities in the framework of their mythical beliefs. Big agrarian societies need to imagine a saviour king to form a shared paradigm. Communication is not possible without a ‘theory of underlying unity’. Oh if only the ‘spread of tropes’ was more widely understood as normal. That symbolic analysis of figurative language is exactly what is hidden by the pervasive claim of a historical Jesus, which says Jesus has no mythic continuity with earlier heroic figures but is sui generis as son of God.

The connection between Jesus and Joshua is hidden for pretty well every worshipper in the pews, let alone the connections between Jesus and Dionysus, Horus, Attis, etc, and the implication that these connections have for natural allegory around sun worship. And sun worship has to be considered as a factor in what you call “merely normal spread of tropes.” If only what you call “merely normal” was more widely appreciated as “merely normal”, theology would be on a path to being a respectable academic discipline.In the thread on the therapeuts, I quoted the following statement by Philo of Alexandria from his text On the Contemplative Life: Philo says the Therapeutae were contemplatives, who "draw out in thought and allegory their ancestral philosophy, since they regard the literal meanings as symbols of an inner and hidden nature revealing itself in covert ideas." This allegorical method is what you call a “a theory of things hidden behind other things.” Jesus Christ explains it quite well at Matthew 13: 10-17, and Mark 4:11, where he says that everything said to the public is a parable.

We see such parabolic language in the line from Malachi ‘sun of righteousness’ used to describe Jesus in the Christmas Carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing, a carol which incidentally describes Jesus as ‘heaven-born’. Looking systematically at the allegorical relation between Jesus and the sun – eg source of light and life – explains what you call my theory of things hidden behind other things. As we take this allegory to its logical conclusion we find that the slow movement of the sun by precession has an excellent match for the big story of Christian eschatology. Natural knowledge is hidden behind the parable. This discussion is already quite long. I promise to follow up your request for forensics in a new thread. It is debatable to what extent hymns such as the kenotic self-emptying at Philippians 2:7 really do enunciate the earliest christology, given the strength of the Christian wish to present Jesus as miraculous and literal rather than allegorical. I would say the prologue of John gives us glimpses of the earliest vision of Jesus Christ as allegory for the sun.but spin, didn’t you just say “Syncretism is noted in numerous ancient religions. We are not dealing with a hidden underlying anything in them, merely normal spread of tropes“? And now you worry about me floating off into the ether because I say the same thing as you imply, that deliberate construction of Christ as syncretic myth is plausible. Maybe we can have afternoon tea together from Russell’s pot. Do you not see the syncretic trope in operation in the celebrated case of Jesus Christ? I quite like Jesus Christ as allegory for the sun, and I would like to see the resources and rituals of Christianity rebased on a paradigm compatible with science. Nothing abject in that. The point about reforming faith is to find the elements in Christianity that are rational. That is not support for hegemony of the existing supernatural farce as some sort of Christendom throwback. I think that Christian metaphysics is redeemable within a scientific understanding of reality. That means, considering your point about our potential to fry in our own emissions this century, that the story of Jesus is helpful as a contribution to contemporary problems. My good friend Ms Murdock included my diagram discussing the tree of life from Revelation 22:2 as the October picture for her latest astrotheology calendar. If you actually try some exegesis here, it is obvious that the tree of life is allegory for the zodiac, since no real trees have different fruit each month and grow on both sides of a river. But the cultural resistance to any whiff of astrology is so intensely bigoted (not of course among esteemed readers here) that people freak out into mental meltdown before looking at the evidence. Eisegetics is reading your own fantasy into the text. That is not what I am doing. I am finding things that are there but have traditionally been ignored.Certainly if you want to understand Christian origins in its actual cultural framework. Just because you are not aware of the evidence does not mean it does not exist. There is abundant material in the New Testament and subsequently in Christian tradition illustrating the idea of Jesus Christ as the sun. I haven’t read anything by Allegro, but looking at the controversy it opens some interesting cultural questions about the role of hallucination in religious visions. Arguments such as the one I mentioned about the real basis of the Christian myth of the tree of life should not enter into questions about imaginary visions but should stick to what the text could have realistically meant. Lets park that one, to ask if ‘seep’ adequately captures the relation between cosmology and theology in the ancient world or if a stronger relation is likely. How you reify something that is already real is a fair question. Time is real, so perhaps you meant division into periods? The descent from a golden age through successive ages of silver, bronze and iron appears in the Hindu Yuga, which I understand is mentioned in the Rig Veda dating to the second millennium BC. This same succession of metals appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days which was written down early in the first millennium BC, and then in Daniel’s dream from Nebuchadnezzar.

Robert Tulip

I disagree. Science starts with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation as a basis for a correct description of the universe. Our access is through scientific instruments which provide consistent descriptions. Problems of the scale of dark matter and accelerating expansion do not affect the correctness of our astronomical understanding of the solar system.Milutin Milanković, the father of orbital climate science, is one of the giants on whose shoulders we can stand to understand how precession influences life on earth. I don’t think he saw his work as part of a cultural paradigm shift, but it certainly did transform understanding of glacial cycles. A myth does not have to be theistic or false. But it does have to inform a values framework. The pale blue dot symbolises the Copernican modern revolution with its leitmotif that humans are no longer at the centre of the universe, augmented by Weinberg’s famous statement that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. The mythic content in Sagan’s image is the view that values are never ultimate, but are merely arbitrary. A reverse Copernican revolution, recognising the ultimate significance of human life, can explore cosmology from the perspective of historical visions of how the observed movements of the stars provide a framework of meaning, evolving towards a new synthesis of the thesis of religion and its scientific antithesis. Religion is all about constructing communal visions of meaning. I think humans are significant, since we have no evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, and it appears we may be the unique instance of the universe reflecting upon itself through symbolic language. That means we should explore how we can sustain human life. I think religion offers important resources in this regard, in view of the impending climate apocalypse, so we should harness these resources to understand the conflict between good and evil in the world. Living will continue, but humans might not. Our current path is trending to human extinction. There you go, like Voldemort… No, these are not issues of power. That third chord is the E flat here on ‘like black holes in the sky’ / Em - - - / Eb - G - / C C/B Am Am7 D - - - / : Power is more about whether we are heading for a global eschatological showdown between Michael and Satan.
Perspectives can be subjective and wrong, but moral legitimacy should include an assertion that a statement is objective and true. Science provides a method to test the legitimacy of statements against evidence and logic.Indeed, so if Christ is imagined as God’s representative as king of the world, Christ will mirror God, and we can explore this in terms of mirroring the movement of the visible cosmos as a way to define and explain the identity of Christ. This is the basis for the argument that Christ represents the Age of Pisces as the observed movement of the spring point in 21 AD. This is where the evolution of memes is central to understanding myth, with Jesus building on the messianic visions of earlier cultures, and presenting a trope that is relevant today. Any discussion of “believers” should not be relevant to conceptualising Christology as a logical description of the relation between humanity and the cosmos. It is not about believing any unscientific claims, but rather seeing that heaven conventionally meant sky, or cosmos, in the modern sense of “the heavens”. Jesus can best here be defined as ‘among the least’ in the sense of Matt 25: 40 ““The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” You are doing far better than me if you understand heaven in a Christian sense, because the Christian afterlife doctrine of heaven as a supernatural place where believers go forever after death is sentimental rubbish. This folk tradition of ‘going to heaven’ conflicts with the line from the Lord’s Prayer ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, which imagines heaven as an ideal vision of earth transformed into a world of freedom and love and truth. Now, you may say this vision of a new heaven and new earth is unreal, but I would say it is a goal which could take thousands of years to achieve, and will not happen in the twinkling of an eye. Checking under the bonnet of the asterisk reminds me of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism – accept reality. Your worry about perishing is rather apocalyptic, and that sense of the corrupt condition of humanity is central to the Biblical vision of the apocalypse. Really, there is no difference between vision and responsibility. We can only assume a duty for what we can see. Yes, and that is why the separation of the wheat and tares will not be kind to many believers. Evolve or die. My point was that the constructed world is generally not real. To be real, our constructed worldview has to somehow explain how humans connect to the cosmos. How nice to slip in a mention of the global financial system as a criminal enterprise. Yes, I would exclude criminal values from the primary expression of values. The overwhelming majority view rule of law as the basis of legitimate value. Adherence to law is good.All this talk of theology assumes an eschatological time frame in which a thousand years is as a day to God. The cycle of time involves a climatic night and day based on orbital cycles with period 21,600 years, which is how long it takes the solstice to circle around the perihelion ellipse. With the solstice now at 3 January, we are at the equivalent of about 12.45am in the cosmic day, with midday not due for ten thousand years. People find it hard to think on such long time scales, but doing so is necessary to place imagination in a real framework. Calling metaphysics ”not even wrong” is reasonable when a person makes untestable assertions, but it can also illustrate that someone has been narrowly trained in scientific topics where they cannot comprehend big ideas. The rejection of metaphysics has in fact been a big part of the philosophy of science, seen in Voltaire’s comment that “When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics”. I like Voltaire, especially his line that believing absurdity permits atrocity. But his comment on metaphysics, like Dawkins’ critique of religion, targets a narrow dogmatic tradition, excluding the possibility that philosophy actually requires metaphysical analysis. For Heidegger, the central concepts of metaphysics were nature, language and truth, a phenomenological trinity that eerily maps to a more conventional metaphysic. Only if someone said “I don't have a vision of any type of "human purpose"” maybe my comment would be an appropriate response, although not as a harangue, more as a polite conversation. Nihilism was a big movement in Russia, paving the way for the Bolshevik Revolution. My hypothesis on the basis of Christian hegemony should only be taken seriously if I can explain it as plausible, persuasive and compelling, the same standards required for any scholarly assertion.