Toto

Elijah: It is bad form to accuse everyone who disagrees with you as having a "bias." It is just an excuse for you to refuse to understand their arguments.

I think that throughout recorded history, there have been rationalists who have taken the supernatural fairy tales and religious claims of their culture and reinterpreted them in a rationalist manner. Many of us here started as liberal Christians, and we are familiar with those attempts. If the evidence showed that early Christians were this sort of liberal rationists, that would be welcome news. But it doesn't.

You have produced no evidence to show that Christians in the first 3 centuries did not believe in supernatural forces, other than that they were influenced by Platonism - but you have not dealt with the fact that 1) they were not Platonists, and 2) Middle and Neo-Platonists often believed in supernatural forces.

bacht

Sure, but the Son of God is a special case, isn't it? Many even today insist that a "real" Jesus walked among human beings and died on a cross in an identifiable time and place. The early believers were talking about a spiritual realm beyond time and space; only the revelation of God's truth is situated in history ie. sometime around the early 1st C.

The point is that the more superstitious/supernatural the outlook, the less reliable is the testimony on a historical/naturalistic level. A psychotic who swears he sees angels everywhere has low credibility as a witness to ordinary life doesn't he?

Elijah

My thinking is that if anyone had a rational understanding of religion then they wouldn't be a skeptic/atheist. Is that thinking incorrect? Do you know of any atheists who understand religion/Christ rationally? If so let me know. It's your guys turn to provide some evidence or someone who can speak competently on the subjects at hand.

No Robots

This title has a certain meaning within its original cultural context. It later took on a lot of extra baggage from outside its own original cultural context.

Amaleq13

Again, Andrew and Don are Christians.

No, the choice is to accept what the text plainly describes or impose your personal preferences upon the text. You choose the latter regardless of the complete absence of any scholarly support or even evidence within the text for such an effort.

And it is just as anachronistic to mock the authors for their belief in the supernatural as it is to pretend that they had none.

Elijah

And to understand the concept you need to familiar yourself with the philosophical concept of the Logos and in particular Philo because he was the guy known for the divisionary Logos that Jesus seems to have picked up on and put down the Genie in the sky’s biological son concept.

This was a surprising quote on the Logos wiki from the current Pope about Logos and a philosophical outlook on Christianity.

Toto

Your thinking is incorrect.

Of course, if you reinterpret religion as completely rationalistic, and reinterpret all of the apparently supernatural aspects as metaphor, religion becomes harmless, just a cultural artifact. Who could object to that?

But that is not what most believers in fact believe. The Pope, who you quoted with approval, believes in exorcism - that is, he believes that at least some mental illness is caused by malevolent spirits and can be cured by magic words and rituals that drive the demons out.

You mean like Atheists for Jesus? A very small group.

I think I understand religion rationally. It is a cultural artifact, and it is based on the human psyche. But I don't believe in supernatural forces, and I observe that most believers throughout history have believed in the supernatural. In the face of overwhelming support for supernatural ideas, some few rationalists have tried to stick to their community and privately reinterpret the supernatural as metaphor. But I see no evidence that the rationalist group has ever been a majority, or in the leadership, of the Christian church.

Elijah

I’m speaking of it being rational from jump, not from reinterpreting it with metaphor, but understanding the metaphysical philosophy driving the movement. A rational/reasonable philosophy.
What most believers believe is completely irrelevant to the conversation in my mind. Most believers don’t think, they just repeat what they’ve been told without question or reasoning. We are speaking of the people who initiated and founded the religion. Not what Bob and Sue understood the religion as.

How the pope understands the universe and the rituals is unknown to me because I’ve never spoken to him, but to assume he understands everything supernaturally is unsupported in my mind. Benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, but if you have some papers that showcase another dimension/afterlife stuff that would probably prove it to me.
Seems to be a little confusion on the whole “rationally understanding religion.” A myth theory could be considered a rational understanding of the religious phenomenon around Christ, but that isn’t what we are talking about. What we are talking about is understanding it as coming from the original writers/thinkers point of view as rationally/philosophically speaking.

Could you provide some church fathers from the time that you think support this supernatural view; some without the obvious platonic/philosophical influence? Like I said, most of the church fathers, Jesus and Paul all sound philosophically influenced (IMO), if you have some evidence of a supernatural pagan Christian founder then present it please. Or if you found what you think is a hybrid between the metaphysical and supernatural understanding that we could look at, that would help out a lot as well.

GakuseiDon

Elijah, do you understand that platonism is not inconsistent with a supernatural view? According to the church fathers, demons and magic were a part of our material world; platonism has to do with ideal forms or eternal unchanging perfection, in a realm where that could be supported. You give examples of platonism as though that ruled out a supernatural approach. But it doesn't. Both could coexist quite happily: "supernaturalism" in our material world; platonism in a higher world.

Elijah

No I don’t understand that. I haven’t been presented any evidence of that. From my understanding, the metaphysical spiritual side is constant… period. The supernatural spiritual side is changing and interactive, you can live and do stuff there. If there was an amalgamation of the two I’m unaware of it and fully ready to learn something new.

You’re understanding of a supernatural material world isn’t a supernatural understanding at all, it’s an incorrect understanding of the physical world. Which they obviously had going cause they thought the earth was the center of the universe. Thinking the world could be covered by water or thinking the world is flat isn’t supernatural thinking it’s just being wrong about the material world.

In regards to your demons there was a lot of talk of them in Augustine’s City of God and Philo’s stuff. I still think they are simply talking of memes because that’s what they are but a lot of the language in Augustine is going to be tuff to argue against since he’s taking such poetic license. Still just memes and thoughts like CS’s Screwtape.