Chili

We all are! . . . but there is a difference between reason and Pure Reason and it shows.

Chili

But you have to crawl in there to see. . . on your knees, uphill, maybe?

stephan huller

No you are not reasonable. When reading your posts I can't decide whether your mind was affected by mind-altering drugs in your youth or brain damage from birth. If you actually have brain damage from birth I apologize in advance for my political incorrectness.

Chili

Of course there is. Socratic method is dialectic in the aftermath only by way of recollection, and there use logic as the pry-bar to validate truth, while T A showed us how to uncover it iconic first-hand as believers in real life that so is 'the argument' to him . . . lest we profess our faith with words in stead of actions and be heroic therein.

So then he wants believers the go to church to make their confession of faith and go home to tell others about that with their actions, and here even only a smile on their face will say more than words ever could.

So unlike soto voce who holds that "reason leads to faith, and thence to obedience" Aquinas held that 'iconic imprinting leads to encounter and thence to the freedom of expression in the argument that we call 'the life of the living' with a mind of our own.

Chili

Chili

Nice and a good concept to cling to. Nothing can be revealed by religion to subdue the masses and so created terror in them, but must be aroused in the mind of the believer who can identify with the beauty expressed in the flashcards before him that so stimulate the flow of blood that crawls in his veins . . . without ever telling him that he must love his neighbor because 'Christ told us to do this' and showed us how (and of course they always have Jesus mixed up with Christ and so have their foot in their mouth already before they say it).

Ex-nihilo is beyond 'milk' but it simple means that "essence precedes existence" for now and forever, or the 'watchmaker' argument as 'found by chance' in the desert would stand instead.

The Republic sound to me like validating the rainbow in the mind of the seer wherein virtues find consolidation in Justice to all.

And no, running away from God is the aim of religion to seeks understanding only so there may be harmony in nature, and that is wrought out of the violence we see and must challence by involution (absorbtion).

Chili

Lucky me to say that I do not have a brain as outsider to myself trying to catch a ride on the "Streetcar Named Desire," and so no apology is needed, ty.

Let me add to show my respect to you as a very intruiging poster here who dares to open wounds that dogs like me might lick -- for my pleasure only thank you -- and really that is about all I can do. These are all just words and my 'ousia rant' is where the Jesus of Luke is the fruit of the [monoploid] Father, and as you will see has sonship on the paternal line right past all the OT greats and back to God in Gen.1 he goes. Again all just words and I am sure that it contains 'historic error' in lineage, but that is not what it wants to present. It wants to show the very 'sonship relation' as the nucleus of the Father since the beginning of time, which remember, is an illusion and so there is no history in the OT, and now then his lineage is always correct as the 'I said' told him to say, and here then he was to full the promise he made.

Chili

Huh? 'that we walked all over him a thousand years ago already' maybe?

mountainman

It's not hard to say that it may have been a misappropriation from the top down, something like a very hostile take-over bid using marketing strategies (that are common today) in conjuction with the military machine. Have a read of Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket". Constantine was at war against the commanders of the Eastern Roman Empire. What was driving Constantine was raw ambition. This is well attested in the literature. The Eastern Empire was the "Jackpot". If Bullneck could take that prize - the "Jackpot" being the city of Alexandria, then he and his Barbarian war chiefs, and their tribes, would be set for life.


We all think we know what happened between 325 and 352 CE at which time the transmission from the historian Ammianus Marcellinus resumes. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (dated c.350 CE) is still being processed. Other new gnostic material is being collected and translated and published. What really happened at this boundary event called the Council of Nicaea? It kind of represents a "Black Hole" of evidence, as if the evidence has been purposefully swept clean.



In many books Eusebius points out the priority of Moses over Plato in all spheres including chronology (antiquity), philosophy and theology. Emperor Julian calls Eusebius "WRETCHED" for his claim that logic was known amongst the Jews. The Constantinian Christians may have wished to assert a superiority in antiquity that exceeded the Greek Platonic conceptual framework, and they may have done so with the sword.



Here is something from Arnaldo Momigliano ....



When did mass conversions commence in the Roman Empire to Judaism?
See Codex Theodosianus. It may have been in the 4th century.




I might assume that all hugely illiterate congregants were read to by Greek readers in Greek. The Greek theatres of Alexandria and Athens and Antioch and Pergamum may have also scheduled renditions of Plato. Hence the importance of the Platonist lineage, and what happened to it at Nicaea.


We do know that Constantine executed the head Platonist Sopater c.336 CE.

The Christian takeover of the prestige of the "Holy Trinity" of the Platonists, and by this I refer to Plato's "ONE SPIRIT SOUL", may have been very hostile and very top down. The Christian "Holy Trinity" does not enter the record until after Nicaea. The later continuators of Eusebius may have been weaving their veneer of historiological harmonies over an epoch (Nicaea 324/325 to the end of the 4th century) of savage military despotism, and the suppression of the Greek intellectual tradition. Plato burned; the Bible was replicated 50 fold. Temples were recycled to basilicas. The City of Alexander to that of Bullneck.

The 4th and 5th century propaganda machine of "Christian Ecclesiatical Histories", the product of a massive war, may have been as corrupt as the savageness of antiquity permits. Despite its technology and science, the philosophy and theology of the "civilisation of the Greek intellectual tradition" still appears to be in recovery mode. Hence the importance of people like Bilbo Baggins and Woody Allen.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because
Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric.
But if you can bring these people down with comedy,
they stand no chance.

~ Mel Brooks

Horatio Parker

Neither is it hard to say that Plato may have read Moses. He is believed to have traveled to Egypt, Moses is an Egyptian name....


No doubt. Many traditions suffered the same treatment. Marcion, Gnostics etc. The Church was nothing if not adaptive.

What evidence do you have for these claims?

How many fellow Xtians were executed or exiled? Granted the Church could be vicious, but they were just as hard on their own.

I've never heard of any trinity in Plato. Perhaps in Proclus? But by Proclus' time the church could be influencing the Academy.

Agreed.