spin

So, if tomorrow you have dyspepsia, you can see it some other way.

Perhaps you might consider trying to bring some objectivity into the fray, rather than an apparent ad hoc approach.

You can of course let your modern understanding dictate the way the text should be read.

I'm not parsing too well at the moment. I don't understand.

I'm more interested in your analyses of BC&H than in your philosophy. We do attempt to analyse BC&H here. You try to make sense of what the texts say.

Does this mean that you are not interested in BC&H?

Don't people kill for base beliefs? Or am I just overworking the ambiguity?

If you say so.

What we do here is BC&H. Telling people they are stupid for believing in god is usually the scope of another forum. We have christians on this forum who are interested in BC&H and that's why they come here.

Again, if you say so.


spin

Minimalist

Why? When push came to shove they backed the right horse (Constantine) and were rewarded with earthly power which is all any church is about.

Had Constantine lost the christians would have been a footnote in history.

Mageth

The Romans were equal opportunity crucifiers. They'd crucify anyone causing a disturbance or getting the crowds stirred up. There was nothing personal or selective about it. I.e., they were not "attempting to wipe out" any particular movement. They were simply suppressing anything or anyone they perceived as causing or potentially causing civil unrest.

No, I'm not really agreeing with you. Nor am I really disagreeing. I think that something along the lines of your hypothesis, that the notion of Jesus "rising from the dead" was initially a metaphor meant to be understood metaphorically and not literally, is possible, and that later believers mistakenly have interpreted it literally. I certainly don't believe that Jesus literally resurrected.

In any case, that's not a philosophy per se; it's more along the lines of metaphysics.

I said meme, not name! Christianity is (or can be viewed as) a meme, or really a complex system of memes. And a successful one.

aa5874

The same can be said of the Islamic religions, those were developed after Christianity and have hundreds of millions of followers, a major miracle.

And Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, 'miraculously developed his religion, now the State of Utah is virtually a Mormon State.

The Hindus also have managed, miraculously, to maintain their religion of multiple gods for thousand of years, even though another God claim that He is the only true God, according to the Bible.

And Protestanism miraculously survived after years of combat with Cathlocism. How religion survived without a God is a miracle by itself, however some disagree and say that religions survived by spreading false information, violence and threats.

spamandham

If the resurrection is possibly metaphorical, couldn't the crucfixion also be?

This is what I don't understand about the idea that Jesus was crucified. The resurrection is integral to the story - perhaps even the entire purpose of the story, rather than appearing to be a later addition, which means he had to die in order to be resurrected. It makes no sense to me why people think a historical crucifixion can be extracted from a work that reads like a book of actual fiction, including symbolism and allusions earlier in the story building up to the crescendo.

To me, it seems more likley the crucifixion was invented in order to support belief in a resurrection, not the other way around.

Chili

Crucifixion is a reality of which the metaphor is descriptive and resurrection confirms that the crucified has died. The difference is that resurrection will bring heaven to earth while if the body is stolen the Galilean will remain and that becomes hell on earth (40 years instead of 40 months ).

Death is required to make it a [divine] comedy because if the body is stolen and said to be raised without having died the crucified will be "the final imposter who will be worse than the first" (Matthew 27:64c) in a failed divine comedy known as a Senecan Tragedy.

This tells you that the crucified is always an imposter who will be placed on the right side of the father if he dies and will remain on the left side of the father if he does not die. The imposter is called a Galilean in Judaism or a purgatorian in Catholicism. The imposter is the ego that must be crucified to set the man free who here is called Christ while the ego is called Jesus who is, or is supposed to be, a Nazarite-by-nature (that we call Jesuit-by-nature). Without death he will become the 'empowered' final imposter that we know as Jesus worshipper [with a passion] today. You can read more about this in Rev.13 where the first beast is raised while the second beast is not).

Lugubert

What about all those messages that don't make sense either way?

Chili

They all do or the bible would not be infallible as the inspired word of God.

aa5874

Can you explain the following metaphors:

1. The birth of Jesus as described in Matthew.
2. The birth of Jesus as described in Luke.

Minimalist

It is neither.