Freethought & Rationalism Archive

No Robots · 06-16-2011, 07:40 PM

Well, exactly, Jiri. And that is why I extol Constantin Brunner. Brunner articulates just the Judeo-Marxist humanism that Orwell yearns for.

No Robots · 06-16-2011, 07:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

For Lewis, those Christians who believed the Gospel accounts as accurately depicting Jesus but thought that Jesus was just a good bloke need to either accept what Jesus said about himself, or reject him as a madman.

The problem is that Lewis, wholly ignorant as he was of the Jewish foundation of the New Testament, grossly misunderstood what it was that Christ was saying about himself.

Solo · 06-16-2011, 08:52 PM

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Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Lewis'es 'trilemma' stinks of this self-righteousness. Jesus was either a liar a lunatic, or lord. Couldn't have been anything else, for example 'a liar made lord by lunatics', or a lunatic made lord by lunatics. Notice the absolute, razor sharply reduced options Lewis uses.

Lewis never uses "trilemma" anywhere, nor does he present it as a logical argument. This was rhetoric that he used against Christians who believed that the Gospels represented accurately what Jesus said, but nevertheless think that Jesus was just a good bloke. Lewis' point was this: any man who went around claiming the things that Jesus claimed, e.g. the ability to forgive other people's sins, was either a liar, a lunatic or God himself. (Sometimes Lewis only presented two options.)

So you are right that Lewis provides razor sharply reduced options. For Lewis, those Christians who believed the Gospel accounts as accurately depicting Jesus but thought that Jesus was just a good bloke need to either accept what Jesus said about himself, or reject him as a madman.

That's exactly the fallacy I objected to, GDon. One does not have to accept these sharp distinctons of Lewis. For example, if I wanted to consider myself a Christian - and I do not - I could still think of John's portrait - the only gospel in which Jesus actually proclaims himself to be God incarnate (and one which Lewis defended as historical !) - as the goofy form of Christianity. Schweitzer, in his Psychiatric Study of Jesus has to discard John's gospel to defend Jesus' sanity, as he knows he has no ground to stand on against the charge of paranoia and/or frank mania because of the 'ego eimi' logorrhea simply cannot be intrepreted medically in any other way. He says:

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Discarding the fourth gospel is of the greatest importance. This source long permitted the psychopathologists the assumption that we can follow Jesus' mental development through the course of three years; only this allowed them to draw a personality continually occupied with his ego, placing it in the foreground of his discourses, asserting his divine origin and demanding of his hearers a corresponding faith.
Because of the fact that the three psychopathologists confuse the portrait in John with the older gospels - in which Jesus does not speak of himself or of his dignity - they come to the conclusion that sometimes he proclaimed himself as Messiah, and sometimes he refrained from doing so, interpreting this conduct in terms which are properly applied to paranoids.

Psychiatric Study of Jesus (tr by Charles R.Joy, Boston 1950 p. 54)

So choices such as Lewis indicated, actually lack merit, unless you want to tell us that Schweitzer wasn't properly a Christian. Lewis was one of those zealot converts who would impose his views of the faith in silly hyperboles and hectoring which I think most Christians capable of examining their beliefs would find insulting to their intelligence.

Best,
Jiri

Solo · 06-16-2011, 08:58 PM

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Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Lewis borrow that Chesterton, who as I recall only used two options.

Do you mean The Maniac argument ?

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The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were the King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s

Jiri

sdelsolray · 06-16-2011, 11:28 PM

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Originally Posted by TheRoadLessTravelled

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..." — C.S. Lewis

Lewis is such a lightweight. Good pablum for the faithful sheep, but lacking for rational thinkers.

Non sequiturs are boring.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRoadLessTravelled

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

False dichotomies are also boring, and are logical fallacies. No thanks. There are other choices.

Solo · 06-18-2011, 03:33 AM

Just so we are clear where my antipathy to C.S.Lewis' style of argument comes from. So close to Muggeridge, it is a style I call a hysterical narcissistic strawman. The guy really thought he was talking to idiots incapable of reading, thinking, and feeling about what is presented to them. Here is how Lewis appraised John's gospel:

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I have been reading poems, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is a reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who does not see this simply has not learned to read.

Quoted in Ian Wilson: Jesus, the Evidence, London 1984, p. 44

Best,
Jiri

mountainman · 06-18-2011, 04:06 AM

If you believe that Jesus walked on water, cast out demons, healed the sick, raised people from the dead, and was himself resurrected from the dead, then you don't get to dismiss the "Jesus is an invented fiction character" theory as too silly or crazy to take seriously.

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06-16-2011, 07:40 PM	#71
No Robots Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Edmonton Posts: 5,679	Well, exactly, Jiri. And that is why I extol Constantin Brunner. Brunner articulates just the Judeo-Marxist humanism that Orwell yearns for.

06-18-2011, 04:06 AM	#77
mountainman Contributor Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Falls Creek, Oz. Posts: 11,192	If you believe that Jesus walked on water, cast out demons, healed the sick, raised people from the dead, and was himself resurrected from the dead, then you don't get to dismiss the "Jesus is an invented fiction character" theory as too silly or crazy to take seriously.

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