Barefoot Bree

Sorry, Shesh, I wasn't ignoring you. I haven't been back to this thread since I posted my last.

I am referring to anyone who lumps visions in with lies, and seem to not have the slightest understanding of how belief systems can be built up around said visions, with utter sincerity. I have a great dislike of the accusations of wholesale lying aimed at religious people, whether modern or historical. People all over the world and all through history sincerely believe(d) things that are not true. Doesn't make them a liar, nor does it make the person who told them the story a liar, even the one who first told it.

I am offering the following possibility to add to your list of Truth, Lie, or Insanity: one or more visions (themselves brought on by any number of possible causes), which Paul accepted as real and over the years built up an entirely plausible - to him, given the entire social and religious background of the times - system to explain and expound upon them, and taught it to whoever would listen.

Have you - any of you yelling "Liar!!!" - ever read up on UFO abductions? One can easily find entire, long, detailed descriptions of incidents. Sometimes there's even a "paper trail" where you can see how the stories evolve and get fancier and fancier. Most of them started very simply, with a sleep paralysis incident or other such quick little explanable happening. Yet over time, the person built up this long, involved story of what happened - and truly, sincerely believe the entire thing happened just as they are (currently) telling it. They aren't lying. They aren't insane. A hundred years ago, hypnagogic "visitations" were explained by demons. Now it's aliens. It's a belief system, sometimes small, sometimes grandiose, built around a single "vision". Why should Paul be any different?

Did Paul truly found churches? I don't know. Nor does my assessment of his character or my explanation for his entire ouvre depend on the truth of that one claim. Could be he lied on that score. Could be he tried to start them, and after a time they failed. Could be he stretched the truth to make a point to whoever he was writing to at the time. Could be he didn't know how little influence he really had, and thought he had a whole lot more. Could be all those churches were further parts of his vision, and/or his megalomaniacal ego.

None of which make everything he said a LIE, in bold capital letters.

I'm not going to go point-by-point through your entire post to me, but this one I'm answering, because it demonstrates my point in a nutshell.

No, I would not think you are lying. I would think you had a vision. After all, you said it yourself: "I had a vision of you."

And then I would be quite interested, if you were agreeable and likewise curious, to discover the cause of your vision: are you a practicioner of some occult system, which regularly induces visions? Did you have a sleep paralysis event? Did an interesting kind of mushroom get added to your omelet? On purpose or by mistake? Or was it one of the usual well-known "illegal substances"? Or a less well-known one? Or a very vivid dream? Was the rye bread on your reuben sandwich a tad moldy? The possibilities are almost endless, and I didn't have to think very long or hard to come up with even this limited list.

None of which are either LIE or True Vision from God.

ETA: I missed something. Those 500 other people you claim to have shared your vision. First, I would ask you to produce them in some verifiable fashion. Then, if you could, I would immediately contact those scientists who have investigated the Lourdes visions supposedly seen by a similar number, and let them tackle it. I'm sure they'd start with the same list of questions I had above, and it wouldn't take long for the words "mass hysteria" to begin popping up.

bacht

I agree, I think there's a gray area between Truth and Lies. UFO abduction stories may be an example of attention-seeking at an unconscious level. It seems clear that strong emotions can override our sensory inputs.

Religious visions may seem real to the subject, but we know enough about psychology to question the reliability of such reports. They are conveniently unverifiable.

jakejonesiv

To get back to the OP, it was bupkis like myriad other tall tales told throughout history.

aa5874

It does not demonstrate your point at all when you consider all the points that I have stated before. You MUST take every point and not cherry-pick.

Now, you are not making sense. Once I do not know you and cannot recognize you, it must be a lie when I say that I saw you in a vision.

I do not even know if you are an Eskimo, an Aborigine, a dwarf or a giant, Jew or Gentile, black or white, deaf or dumb, or a combination of all that I have omitted.

It will be just a lie if I said I saw you in a vision.

But those questions are irrelevant once I don't know and can not recognize you and still claim that I saw you in a vision.

As I pointed out before a person on drugs can lie or kill.

If Paul was on drugs he should have honestly declared so, he was a liar when he said he saw Jesus in a resurrected when he knew he was on drugs and was living probably no earlier than the middle of the 2nd century or later.

There appears to be at least one hundred years discrepancy between PAUL'S supposed drug use and the churches he allegedly started of which no historical records can be found.

I think you are confusing the issues.

We are presently dealing with a writer called Paul who appears to have been living no earlier than the middle of the 2nd century but saw Jesus in a resurrected state in the 1st century before the Pauline writer was even born.

It is my view that the Pauline writer was a liar.

He did not exist in the first century at all before the death of Nero. There are no historical records of Jesus, Jesus believers or churches where people worshiped Jesus as a God before Nero's death.

Barefoot Bree

And I think you are missing my point, and applying a 21st century mindset to an ancient set of circumstances, where they have no more validity than an alien's.

And you are missing - and dismissing - an absolutely vital, fundamental component of the source and development of religious ideas. That component is simply this: people have weird, mind-twisting experiences, from a wild variety of causes - my last post merely scratches the surface*. Neither the content nor the actual source of those experiences and visions is important. What is important is the post-hoc explanation developed by the individual to account for them.

The direction those explanations take is quite simply culturally-derived. Like I said before, up till the last century, demons were a very popular explanation for hypnagogic hallucinations. Now it's aliens. The visions themselves haven't really changed, only the explanations. What's different? The culture. Aliens are "in" these days (except in certain evangelical circles, who still go for demons).

And the culture in the first couple of centuries CE was largely that of mystical god-men. Therefore virtually any such experience would be explained in that manner.

It means absolutely nothing when Paul's vision occurred, or whether he could have picked a historical Jesus (if one existed) out of a crowd in real life. He had a vision [word spoken with reverential awe]. All the rest of it is the culturally-derived explanation built up around the vision, and the huge hulking system of belief that grew up out of that. If you are expecting that he should have given the mundane explanation for what he experienced, that is your 21st-century consciousness and education speaking. He very likely would not have known of a single possibility other than the mystical one. Ergot wasn't even discovered until when? the early 1900's? Mystical experiences were taken at face value at the time by everyone, as messages from whatever god(s)ess(es) you believed in.

He wasn't a liar. He was a man who had a vision, and built a powerful system of belief to explain and share that vision with his contemporaries.


* As an aside, I'm adopting "poisoning" as well as "drug use" when speaking of vision causes - it implies unintentional use of mind-altering substances such as ergot poisoning and other molds and fungi, while "drugs" implies more intentional consumption of whatever known mind-altering substances are available at the time.

J-D

Paul's Christian doctrines are false. They are false if he did meet with the so-called Pillars and they are false if he did not.

(Incidentally, what do you mean by 'forementer'?)

J-D

What were these discrepancies, and who had problems with them?

J-D

I don't know.

aa5874

Please tell me, how do you know Paul really had a vision. And, please explain to me how you would detect that a person is lying when they claim to have visions?

Do you not think it is naive to believe all reports about visions are true and that no-can lie about visions?

Now, it must matter when Paul had his vision. Chronology and veracity are of utmost importance.

Well, please give an example where Mystical experiences were used as credible corroborative sources for historical events, or can I rely on Mystical experiences instead of sources of antiquity?

I am of the opinion Paul was lying since his supposed contemporaries did not use the information about himself and the 500 people in their Jesus story, even Justin Martyr did not use the Pauline vision of the resurrected Jesus.


Please tell me if visions from ergot poisonning has been used as credible sources for historians?

J-D

People who report events from visions induced (unknown to them) by ergotism will say things which are not true without lying.