No Robots

Look at the post by spamandham that Chaucer was reacting to. Look at the post from aa above.

What kind of a man would say, for example, that, to follow him, you must hate your family, your own life?

Yellum Notnef

What kind of man? A genius, of course.

You're clearly in the wrong place if this is (again) what you're getting at.

No Robots

Not knowin' my place? Gettin' uppity, am I?

Toto

So? There is nothing here that prevents discussing the sayings in the gospels, unless you require agreement before the discussion. :huh:

And who reads aa's posts?

What kind of a man? As in Lord, lunatic, or liar?

Didn't we just have a long thread on whether the word "hate" was a correct translation of that verse?

I can think of a number of possibilities for what kind of a man - a man speaking with hyperbole; a cult leader who demands complete obedience; someone who will later claim to have been misunderstood.

Feel free to start another thread if you have something to say on this issue.

No Robots

I'm just saying that these posts seem to have the object of pre-empting discussion of the substance of the sayings.

:redface:

Well, that's good ol' Lewis' answer. I have another (that good ol' Fenton Mulley rightly guessed).

Yeah, just more culture jamming, this time from the side of religion.

I like it.

I thought that was the purpose of this thread.

Toto

Well then, go ahead and post if you have something to say.

spamandham

...a man who enjoys using hyperbole to make the point that religious commitment must come first. By the way, it is not necessary for such things to have been really said by a real Jesus in order to analyze what the author has written.

No Robots

Right.

Right.

bacht

Not an especially unique man. The Cynics had already spread a radical critique of social institutions. The Qumran group had withdrawn from "normal" life. There are examples in the OT like Elijah & Elisha. I think most religious and philosophical teachers warned of conflict with common unenlightened people. Don't forget that Hellenization meant urbanization, which increases social isolation from traditional family ties.

As for "hating your own life", if taken literally this is some kind of death-wish. Obviously the NT teachings are based on the idea of eternal life, so this world and its traditions are secondary. This is part of the messianic perspective, the rejection of this world in anticipation of the better one to come.

No Robots

We have a terrible misapprehension of the nature of originality. Here is something sane and refreshing on the subject from Carlyle:

He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say inspired; what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,--but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.--On Heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history