Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clivedurdle · 12-27-2009, 03:32 AM

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The association of spirit with air is embedded in a number of ancient languages: the Hebrew ruah ("wind" or "breath") and nefesh, also associated[/ with breathing; the Greek psychein ("to breathe"), which is related to the word psyche for "soul"; and the Latin words anima ("air," "breath" or "life" and spritus, which also refers to breathing. The soul was seen as departing the body in the dying last breath.

p78 God the Failed Hypothesis VJ Stenger.

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Christians did not take well to the teachings of the Greek atomists, who challenged the whole notion of an immortal soul. Epicurus (d 270 BCE) taught that the soul was made of matter, like everything else.....In De Rerum Natura (of the Nature of Things), the Roman poet Lucretius (d 55 BCE) wrote,

"Death is therefore nothing to us and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea and seas with heaven

p79

I propose xianity is a direct reaction to this idea - an attempt using alchemic traditions, Jewish ideas and Greek ideas to state "death, where is thy sting" and create a new heaven and earth where the lion lays down with the lamb and everyone lives communally.

Jesus is a logical invention as a figurehead for these ideas that are a reaction to Lucretius. The Holy Spirit also becomes a logical part of the beliefs of this oriental cult.

ApostateAbe · 12-27-2009, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Quote:

The association of spirit with air is embedded in a number of ancient languages: the Hebrew ruah ("wind" or "breath") and nefesh, also associated[/ with breathing; the Greek psychein ("to breathe"), which is related to the word psyche for "soul"; and the Latin words anima ("air," "breath" or "life" and spritus, which also refers to breathing. The soul was seen as departing the body in the dying last breath.

p78 God the Failed Hypothesis VJ Stenger.

Quote:

Christians did not take well to the teachings of the Greek atomists, who challenged the whole notion of an immortal soul. Epicurus (d 270 BCE) taught that the soul was made of matter, like everything else.....In De Rerum Natura (of the Nature of Things), the Roman poet Lucretius (d 55 BCE) wrote,

"Death is therefore nothing to us and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea and seas with heaven

p79

I propose xianity is a direct reaction to this idea - an attempt using alchemic traditions, Jewish ideas and Greek ideas to state "death, where is thy sting" and create a new heaven and earth where the lion lays down with the lamb and everyone lives communally.

Jesus is a logical invention as a figurehead for these ideas that are a reaction to Lucretius. The Holy Spirit also becomes a logical part of the beliefs of this oriental cult.

The atomists seemed to be a small and obscure minority. Almost everyone was religious or superstitious to some degree. The primary enemy of early Christianity (and Judaism in general) seemed to be the polytheistic pagans, because they were very populous and powerful, and our earliest Christian apologetic texts, besides attacks against Christian heretics (i.e. Marcion), were attacks pagan critics (i.e. Celsus). So the theory that Christianity was formulated as a reaction against atomists seems unlikely for now, but evidence in favor of the theory can tip the scales.

Clivedurdle · 12-27-2009, 10:20 AM

I thought I said it was a reaction to Lucretius!

Oh I did.

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Jesus is a logical invention as a figurehead for these ideas that are a reaction to Lucretius.

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Cornelius Nepos, in his Life Of Atticus, mentions Lucretius as one of the greatest poets of his times.

Ovid, in his Amores, writes: Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti / exitio terras cum dabit una dies (which means the verses of the sublime Lucretius will perish only when a day will bring the end of the world).
Vitruvius (in the De Architectura), Quintilian (in his Institutiones Oratoriae) and Statius (in the Silvae) also show great admiration for the De Rerum Natura.

Michel de Montaigne, in one of his Essays, On Books, lists Lucretius among Virgil, Horace, and Catullus as his four top poets.

Lucretius has also had a marked influence upon modern philosophy, as perhaps the most complete expositor of Epicurean thought. His influence is especially notable in Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who praised Lucretius (along with Dante and Goethe) in his book 'Three Philosophical Poets.'

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=3tu...ianity&f=false

Clivedurdle · 12-27-2009, 10:44 AM

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Religion

Lucretius presents Epicurus' chief achievement as the defeat of religio. Although this Latin word is correctly translated into English as ‘religion’, its literal meaning is ‘binding down’, and it therefore serves Lucretius as a term, not for all attitudes of reverence towards the divine, but for those which cow people's spirits, rather than, as he thinks such attitudes should, elevate them to a joyful state of tranquillity.

Epicurus had insisted on the existence of the gods, but the mode of existence he attributed to them has become a matter of controversy. They have only ‘quasi-bodies’, for example, and are constituted by nothing more than the wafer-thin and lightning-fast ‘images’ (Latin simulacra, see above § 4) which according to Epicurus enter our eyes and minds to become the stuff of vision, imagination and dreams. Some scholars take this constitution out of simulacra to describe a highly attenuated mode of biological being which somehow makes the immortal gods an exception to the rule that compounds must eventually disintegrate, so that they are able to live on forever, not in any world like ours (since all worlds must themselves eventually perish) but in the much safer regions between worlds. Others, who doubt such a realist interpretation, take the reduction of gods to simulacra to be Epicurus' way of saying that these immortal beings are our own intuitive thought-constructs, our personal idealizations of the ideally tranquil life to which we naturally aspire, and that he is not committed to the further view that such beings must actually exist as living organisms somewhere in the universe. Epicurus' recorded instruction to think of god as a blessed and immortal being does not help us choose between the two readings. It would probably be a mistake to assume that any text or texts of Epicurus were available to resolve the ambiguity definitively, similar ambiguities being an endemic characteristic of much religious discourse (the most famous case in antiquity was Plato's account of the creation in his Timaeus, on whose interpretation his followers never agreed despite possessing his entire works). Lucretius shows signs of assuming the realist view of the gods (2.153-4, 6.76-7), yet his account of the origin of religion (5.1169-82) leans more towards the idealist reading. Disappointingly, the actual exposition of the gods' nature that he promises us (5.155) never materializes. One may wonder whether he ever located in his massive Epicurean source the explicit account of the gods' mode of being that he was expecting to find there.

Either way, what is not in doubt is that the gods' role as moral ideals is paramount in the Epicurean system. And this is the function Lucretius too gives them, especially in the proems to books 1, 3, 5 and 6. The gods live a supremely tranquil life, never disquieted by either favour or anger towards us. By contemplating them as they truly are we can aspire to achieve that same blissful state within the confines of a human lifespan. But Lucretius adds another dimension to this theology: for as the poem progresses Epicurus himself is increasingly presented as a god. In itself this apotheosis is probably consistent with Epicurean theology: Epicurus did after all attain the same morally paradigmatic status which characterizes the gods. But in the proem to book 5 Epicurus is permitted to go beyond this paradigmatic role, and to become a heroic benefactor of mankind. Here Lucretius follows a trend which had gathered pace after Epicurus' own day, the rationalistic practice — associated with the name of Euhemerus — of explaining the gods as pioneering human benefactors whose service had been institutionally acknowledged by formal divinization. What Lucretius effectively asserts is that, on a Euhemeristic ranking, Epicurus is a far greater god than Ceres or Bacchus, held to have originally been the institutors of, respectively, agriculture and wine, and also a far greater god than the divinized Hercules. For Hercules rid the world merely of literal monsters like the Hydra, but it's not as if there aren't plenty of wild beasts left in the world to terrorize us today. Epicurus on the other hand has offered us real and permanent salvation from monsters, namely those truly frightful monsters that haunt our souls, such as insatiable desires, fears, and arrogance.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/

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By the mid-2 nd century A.D., the Christian movement had become secure enough so that it could aspire to win converts from more educated circles. Certain church leaders began to seriously engage themselves intellectually against Greek philosophy, often in the form of written apologias against “pagans” and rival Christians. These works routinely included attacks on Epicureanism, as shown by Tatian's Address to the Greeks, Justin the Martyr's Hortatory Address to the Greeks and On the Resurrection, and Irenaeus of Lyon's Against the Heretics.

Two significant anti-Epicurean themes emerged in these early apologias: first, Justin and Tatian mocked Greek philosophers as being hopelessly disputatious with one another, taking their disagreements as evidence that human intellect could not arrive at definite conclusions about reality (a somewhat ironic charge in view of the emerging factionalism of the Christians themselves). In the Hortatory Address to the Greeks, Justin writes:

“How then, you men of Greece, can it be safe for those who desire to be saved, to fancy that they can learn the true religion from these philosophers, who were neither able so to convince themselves as to prevent sectarian wrangling with one another, and not to appear definitely opposed to one another's opinions?”
The second theme was to attack the specifically Epicurean denial of divine providence and after-life and affirmation of pleasure as the supreme good and of materialistic atomism. While these earliest apologias often lumped Epicurus together with other philosophers, the succeeding decades saw a significant change. The next major Christian antagonist of Epicureanism was Tertullian (2nd to 3rd century A.D.). Unlike previous Christian apologists, Tertullian fully grasped the gross irrationality of his own anti-Epicurean arguments, and was all the more inflamed against it by the inclination of certain heretics to adopt Epicurean doctrines in arguing against bodily resurrection or against divine providence. Tertullian's rage against Epicureanism and other Greek philosophies and their influence on heretics is best illustrated in The Prescription Against Heretics where he says “These are the doctrines of men and of demons produced for itching ears of the spirit of this world's wisdom: this the Lord called ‘foolishness’ and ‘chose the foolish things of the world’ to confound even philosophy itself. For philosophy it is which is the material of the world's wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and the dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy” and went on to mock the diversity of philosophical theories and thunder “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

His opposition to philosophy lead to a profoundly irrationalist attitude, a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the Christian opposition to worldly wisdom originally promoted by Saul. This irrationalism is blatantly evident in On the Flesh of Christ, where he proclaims that “The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.” In The Soul's Testimony, his irrationalism is linked to his fears about the effect of Epicurean materialism on Christian faith:

“Stand forth, O soul, whether thou art a divine and eternal substance, as most philosophers believe if it be so, thou wilt be the less likely to lie,--or whether thou art the very opposite of divine, because indeed a mortal thing, as Epicurus alone thinks--in that case there will be the less temptation for thee to speak falsely in this case: whether thou art received from heaven, or sprung from earth; whether thou art formed of numbers, or of atoms; whether thine existence begins with that of the body, or thou art put into it at a later stage; from whatever source, and in whatever way, thou makest man a rational being, in the highest degree capable of thought and knowledge,--stand forth and give thy witness. But I call thee not as when, fashioned in schools, trained in libraries, fed in Attic academies and porticoes, thou belchest wisdom. I address thee simple, rude, uncultured and untaught, such as they have thee who have thee only; that very thing of the road, the street, the work-shop, wholly. I want thine inexperience, since in thy small experience no one feels any confidence. I demand of thee the things thou bringest with thee into man, which thou knowest either from thyself, or from thine author, whoever he may be. Thou art not, as I well know, Christian; for a man becomes a Christian, he is not born one. Yet Christians earnestly press thee for a testimony; they press thee, though an alien, to bear witness against thy friends, that they may be put to shame before thee, for hating and mocking us on account of things which convict thee as an accessory.”
All told, anti-Epicurean references can be found in at least seven of Tertullian's works. He pouted about their “frigid conceits” and labeled Epicurean doctrines as stupid, and even suggested that Epicurus was not really a philosopher at all. While Tertullian's rants undoubtedly appealed to a certain mindset (specifically to the same sort of extreme authoritarian attitude that produced Tertullian's famously misogynist The Apparel of Women), they also exposed the intellectual vacuity of the traditional Christian hostility to philosophy. If mainstream Christianity was to survive against the ever-multiplying heresies, its theology had to be placed on a more reasonable foundation.

http://www.epicurus.net/en/history.html

ApostateAbe · 12-27-2009, 11:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

I thought I said it was a reaction to Lucretius!

Oh I did.

Quote:

Jesus is a logical invention as a figurehead for these ideas that are a reaction to Lucretius.

My apologies. Lucretius was an atomist, but you were being more specific. In that case you just need evidence for the Lucretius connection.

Chili · 12-27-2009, 11:45 AM

It doesn't matter how right Epicurus was in his own mind as a gnostic who describes the depth, width and breadth of his own heaven. For us to adopt his philosophy and call it our own world view would be to say that God can have grand children and that will never be, which then is meant with Terullian's "what has Athens go to do with Jerusalem [or Rome]."

These guys were our Church fathers who must deny each and every -ism that scatters the flock wherein 'the lost sheep' that is to be raised must be found. Each Christian will be a pantheist in his own right by recognizing that the bread and body of Christ is real food and real drink and so offer his own flesh and blood as merely equal to that which is consumed each day while he himself as god is not the body consumed.

Chili · 12-27-2009, 12:58 PM

Another way to present that is with the mansion concept that is ours after we journey into our own subconscious mind and feel at home there.

avi · 12-27-2009, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Jesus is a logical invention as a figurehead for these ideas that are a reaction to Lucretius. The Holy Spirit also becomes a logical part of the beliefs of this oriental cult.

Thank you Clive, for an interesting introduction to the Greek atomists, especially Democritus, Epicurus, and their Roman successor, a couple hundred years later, Lucretius.

1. Do the Gospels represent a reaction to Lucretius? I was unaware of that notion. Following the Roman army victory at the battle of Corinth in 146 BCE, it was my impression, perhaps completely wrong, that Rome administered Greece relatively benevolently, i.e. with little intrusion, and with little penetration of Latin intellectual accomplishments. I would ask then, if the poet Lucretius' ideas had penetrated so far into Athenian society, as to impress upon the writers of the Gospels and "Paul", the need for some arguments against Lucretius-->creation of Jesus, as a counter-force to the Atomists?

2. Was Lucretius translated into Greek? Was his perspective known, outside of Rome? Was he influential in Jerusalem, or Alexandria, or the Phoenician cities of that era?

3. Rather than discuss "Christian" hostility to the Atomists, why not discuss Jewish hostility to their notion that observation, rather than faith, ought to guide us in attempting to understand nature? The earliest "Christians" were followers of the Jewish faith, correct? Then, are there some works by Jewish authors of the time period 300 BCE to 200 CE, indicating Jewish discontent with the rational thinking of the Atomists, Democritus and Epicurus, in particular?

It strikes me that the egalitarianism, and gender equality arguments of the Atomists, would have placed them on a moral plane at great odds with traditional Jewish thought, which contrarily, demands segregation of the genders, denying equal opportunity, based upon gender, and which is especially, hostile to offering equal opportunity to "slaves", or people called by the Greeks, "eqnikoi".

In such a case, it is not a "Christian" reaction to the Atomists, but a Jewish reaction, that one needs to explore, Clive, in attempting to redirect the focus of study of the Gospels and "Paul", in terms of opposition to the Atomists.

avi

Clivedurdle · 12-27-2009, 02:35 PM

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Epicureanism and the Judeans

In the Talmudic Mishnah, one of the authoritative documents of Rabbinical Judaism, there is a remarkable statement in the tractate Sanhedrin that defines the Jewish religion in relation to Epicureanism:

“All Israel has a share in the world to come, as Isaiah said: And all of your people who are righteous will merit eternity and inherit the land. And these are the people who do not merit the world to come: The ones who say that there is no resurrection of the dead, and those who deny the Torah is from the heavens, and Epicureans (‘Apikorsim’).”
Modern Jews use “apikoros” as a generic term for an unbeliever, but the authors of the Talmud were clearly singling out followers of Epicurus. In effect, this statement is saying that all of Israel will enjoy eternal life except those who get corrupted by Epicurus or certain characteristic Epicurean beliefs (namely, Epicurean denials of an after-life and of divine providence). This peculiar hostility towards Epicureanism is all the more remarkable for the fact that this particular statement was later taken to be the basis for speculation about the meaning of Jewishness among Rabbis of the Middle Ages, the most famous of whom, Moses Maimonides, explicitly continued the Jewish tradition of denouncing Epicureanism late in the 12th century A.D.

Antiochus IV
The origins of this anti-Epicurean element of Jewish thought can be traced to the 2nd century B.C., when the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes embarked on a military campaign against Egypt in an attempt to conquer his Ptolemaic rival. Judea had the misfortune to be located between the Seleucid heartland of Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Judeans were divided into pro-Seleucid and pro-Ptolemaic factions. At this time, the hereditary Zadokite priesthood had been deeply influenced by Greek culture, adopting doctrines that tended to discount the conservative oral tradition and deny some of the more superstitious beliefs then current, notably the belief in bodily resurrection. At the time of Antiochus's campaign, the Zadokite high priest was a pro-Ptolemaic partisan.

Antiochus, anxious to secure Judea in connection with his Egyptian expedition and to create a more culturally-unified empire, had the Zadokite high priest removed and founded a Greek-style Gymnasium in Jerusalem. Antiochus was sympathetic to Epicureanism (albeit not acting in accord with Epicurus's injunctions to avoid politics), so his attempt at a forced hellenization of Judea was closely linked to Epicureanism in the minds of the Judean patriots. Another factor was that Epicureans were prominent in the hellenized cities of Galilee, creating a rivalry between Epicureanism and the traditional religion among the northern Judeans. Antiochus's provocations brought about a strong nationalistic reaction, which exploded into violence when a rumor of Antiochus's death reached Judea. While the rumor was false, nonetheless the Hasmonean leader Judas Maccabeus was ultimately successful in his revolt against the Seleucids.

After the Hasmoneans consolidated their power, a rather delicate situation developed with respect to the priesthood. The hereditary successors to the priesthood had had their legitimacy fatally undermined by their hellenizing tendencies and their close association with the foreign Ptolemaic monarchy. The party of the “separatists” (the Pharisees), prevented the Zadokite legitimists (the Sadducees) from reassuming control of the temple in Jerusalem, while some of the Sadducees set up a rival temple in the Egyptian city of Leontopolis.

To further complicate matters, Judea later became a client state of Rome, and the Romans installed their own Jewish rulers and Sadducee priests. Not only were they opposed by the Pharisees, other anti-foreign religious factions arose during the late Hasmonean period (early 1rst century B.C.) to challenge the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Samaritans (a regional offshoot of Judaism whose followers had established their own center of worship on Mount Gezzerim), their adherents questioning the necessity for temple ritual and priestly authority altogether. One of these dissident groups called themselves the “keepers” (Nazarim) of divine wisdom. These Nazarim, or Nazarenes, taught that righteousness towards others along with frequent rituals of baptism and anointment and a ritual eucharist for the dead was sufficient to place oneself in accord with God without the traditional temple ceremonies. After the Roman conquest of Judea, the Nazarene cults became one of the focal points of resistance to Roman and Herodian rule, as both the Pharisees and Sadducees were co-opted by the Herodian monarchy that had been installed by the Romans.

Spoils from the Jerusalem Temple
The historical significance of these intricacies of ancient Judean politics is that the Pharisees are the direct ancestors of modern Rabbinical Judaism, while the Nazarene movement spawned two religions that have survived to modern times, the Mandaean and the Christian. The founding of these two Nazarene religions was attributed to John the Baptist and Jesus, respectively.

Link above...

Clivedurdle · 12-27-2009, 02:38 PM

And avi, there was a huge interaction and translation of ideas wherever there were Roman roads and ships.

The Persians had a probably larger network

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12-27-2009, 11:45 AM	#6
Chili Banned Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Alberta Posts: 11,885	It doesn't matter how right Epicurus was in his own mind as a gnostic who describes the depth, width and breadth of his own heaven. For us to adopt his philosophy and call it our own world view would be to say that God can have grand children and that will never be, which then is meant with Terullian's "what has Athens go to do with Jerusalem [or Rome]." These guys were our Church fathers who must deny each and every -ism that scatters the flock wherein 'the lost sheep' that is to be raised must be found. Each Christian will be a pantheist in his own right by recognizing that the bread and body of Christ is real food and real drink and so offer his own flesh and blood as merely equal to that which is consumed each day while he himself as god is not the body consumed.

12-27-2009, 12:58 PM	#7
Chili Banned Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Alberta Posts: 11,885	Another way to present that is with the mansion concept that is ours after we journey into our own subconscious mind and feel at home there.

12-27-2009, 02:38 PM	#10
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	And avi, there was a huge interaction and translation of ideas wherever there were Roman roads and ships. The Persians had a probably larger network

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