Catatonic
Nine Lives
Ahhhhh yes, the old SPIRITUAL need that religion and other extra-natural beliefs must fulfill.
Religion
- Thread starter wkmac
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Non sequitur
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So said to learn about the Egyptian muslim burning in hell with his founder today.
didnt worker control of jobs used to be a conservative idea a few hundred years ago in america?
a little off topic but did you see hacksaw ridge?
your articles are very long, so its gonna take me a while to respond to it but i thought this is worth repeating:
"
The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.”"
The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.”
wkmac
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Not that I'm aware of but then you'd also have to define what you mean by conservative too. There is a form of conservatism often called paleo conservatism or the old right that has far more connections to its roots in what is called classical liberalism which might be more friendly to such ideas. This form of conservatism is far more friendly to a form of capitalism some call mainstreet or local capitalism as opposed to our present form of nationalized capitalism with its dominance by national corporate interest and the centralization of economics at the national level. I would put the folks at The American Conservative website in the camp of the old right and thus you see articles talking positively of such things like distributism and a socialist like Dorothy Day. The American Conservative has also published positive articles on left wing libertarianism too.
There have been advocates of what is called free market economics (another term one may need to define) who also advocated such ideas as worker cooperatives and worker owned/worker managed enterprises. The first advocates of worker cooperatives to my knowledge were Robert Owen who many consider to be the father of the cooperative movement and french philosopher Charles Fourier. Both are counted as socialist but you have to understand that 20th century politics have greatly changed terms among other things.
Not yet but it does look interesting. Kinda reminds me a bit of Sgt. York starring Gary Cooper, a film I've always enjoyed.
Catatonic
Nine Lives
I would ask for proof but ...
Catatonic
Nine Lives
I like the second verse best.
Kind of weak. I mean, if you asked my best friend from high school, my wife, my senior manager, and my college religion professor, you'd get four very different accounts of who I am. One or two of them might not even be sure I exist. If you Google my name, nothing shows up. 2000 years from now, the concensus may be that I never existed.
wkmac
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I can agree with that and that makes very good sense on a certain level. The 4 gospels for example can easily be seen and explained in that light from a certain POV. However, the waters become muddied by the claim that god himself delivered these texts to those who wrote them. If this be the case, if a single person told 4 very differing accounts of the same person or events, I suspect the first thought of most people would be that they are dealing with a liar or at the least someone with an agenda intent to disadvantage the listener who accepts the stories told. One has to ask, how does a perfect, all knowing, all powerful god give or inspire 4 conflicting accounts of the same event? Thus seems to me these gospels were not the inspired texts from god but inspired from the minds of mere men who did on some level have an agenda.
The other thing I would say and is a fascinating and worthy study in itself, regardless the conclusion you come too, read each gospel but read them horizontally and not vertically. In other words, read the birth account in each gospel making notes of difference and similarity and thus the same for the rest of events in the gospels about Jesus and his life. Make note of the descriptions of Jesus himself and the description of place and people around him. Also ask yourself, when and where was each gospel written, what order in time did we get the 4 gospels. For example we know the Gospel of Mark came first even though it is not first in the bible. But what about Paul? What does Paul say about Jesus? What or how does Paul describe the events of Jesus life? Birth? Miracles? Ministry? Crucifixion and Resurrection?
Record down the specific details that Paul lays out about Jesus? When was Paul written? Hint, before the gospels. And of course what about some of the gospels or texts excluded from the official canon? What do they say? Are any of those texts or sayings used or appear embedded in the official canonical texts? Why were they included and the rest excluded?
Regardless of the final conclusion reached, one will at least come away knowing the subject far better than before. I will say this in closing, if there be a god, an architect of all creation, then seems to me the Deists would have the right attitude about god and that is is he created everything and then just walked away and left us to fill in the details by our own minds and imaginations which seems to me that is what we have done. Thus one explanation why those 4 gospels and Paul do conflict and disagree with one another.
Along with David Fitzgerald, Dr. Richard Carrier's peer reviewed "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why we have reason to doubt" might be worth the read. David Fitzgerald in a 2015' Mythicist conference in Milwaukee discusses his book "Jesus, Mything in Action" among other things here.
I can see how you would come to such conclusions but to me seem too analytical for reading spiritual literature.
Over the years, Alcoholics Anonymous has been mistakenly been called a self help program. Nothing written in the book suggests self help in the least and is all about "dependence on a higher power". Talk to any member however, and the stories are likely to be starkly different and yet amazingly similar at the same time.
Doesn't mean anything but different people experience recovery differently just as people experience religion differently. The historical fact being almost secondary doesn't deter from the modern day experience.
wkmac
Well-Known Member
You've shared enough about your own situation that I can understand and appreciate the importance you place on what you believe as a result of your own experience.
Mine and others. Religion/spirituality really is a fascinating human subject.
wkmac
Well-Known Member
Yes it is. It is a major part of the human story. One can't understand human history without understanding this aspect of it. Some are willing to study it and do so deeply, others are satisfied with what is on the edges. You might say some want to peer into the esoteric and others are happy with only looking at the exoteric.
I'm just one who dares to open that next door and take a look inside, then moving on to the next door.
wkmac
Well-Known Member
@Monkey Butt
Thought I'd respond to this here and leave the Moab thread to the topic of fun and profit in war.
In the 1st millenia BC there was such a flow of cross culture between the greek and the egyptians, it may be hard to determine fully where one ends and one begins. The Synoptic gospels christianity in some manner infers said christianity as a kind of sect of Judaism and there are suggestions pre temple destruction that some forms of christianity were openly taught and discussed in the so-called synagogues of that day.
This intent was not exclusive IMO as the gospels themselves did not come into being at best until late 1st century CE after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple but through the next few centuries those same gospels were also effected by hellenization as some of the gnostic traditions began to leak in. Gospel of John for example stands out as a very gnostic/hellenized texts as opposed to the other 3. Even Orthodoxy admits this about John.
A consensus of contextual scholars now date the synoptic gospels to 2nd & 3rd century CE but they did not take their (gospels) current form until as late as 4th and 5th century CE at best. There are scholarship arguments for even later.
The 4th century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus would be 2 of the earliest forms of the complete bible as we know it today and even these texts are missing many key stories we've come to know and love. Neither have the famous story in the Gospel of John, one of my favorites, where Jesus is confronted with the harlot and his famous response, let he without sin cast the first stone. A great lesson in forgiveness. This did not appear until the 5th century latin Codex Bezae came to be. This begins to suggest that the gospels may be more a work in progress over a period of centuries and not as much a work of single authorship in the 1st century CE. This may also be another reason there are so many conflicts in some of the details from gospel to gospel.
My own personal view is this along with the fact that each gospel story had a intended audience and these audiences differed from one another. Jesus birth with The Magi from the East may be for a more urban or sophisticated audience and the Jesus birth with The Shepherds for a rural or agrarian audience. Some also think that Matthew may have been written in Alexandria where there was a large jewish population and thus Jesus is portrayed like a Moses figure going into Egypt and then coming out to then begin his ministry at the Jordan River. A lot of symbology to unpack there. Matthew is the only gospel with the killing of innocents (think Egypt and the Pharoah) the journey into and out of Egypt.
Luke, the only other gospel with a birth narrative (the Shepherds) makes no mention of any of this and has the Jesus family after the birth going into Jerusalem to the temple and the returning home back to pastoral Nazareth in Galilee. Both stories can't be true as told and likely neither one are but the intent was for the sake of the audiences who understood religious stories not so much as literal history but a form of allegory or metaphor used to tell a greater story or truth. Even Jesus himself constantly used parables to do the same and were an effective teaching tool.
Outside Judea (pre temple destruction), where Paul's christianity was the norm, a more Marcionite form was dominate that took a neo platonic view (The Demiurge) of the Old Testament god as an evil god, and that Jesus was sent as the new god to take his place and restore mankind back to his rightful place. Estimates are about 10% of the total jewish population lived across this region and among these more gnostic influenced jews, they had a name for this evil OT god in Yaltabaoth. Even the travels of Paul were mostly in the hellenized regions of the Roman Empire and it was in these regions where christianity became not only dominate but also there were a diversity of forms. And one would be foolish not to note the comparisons of early christianity with buddhism and the stories of the Apostle Thomas going to India as well as stories that Jesus did too. When you consider the existing trade routes of the 1st century, those stories are plausible on some level.
As an interesting scholarship side note, among contextual scholars and researchers a small but growing trend is that Marcion of Sinope was Paul and the author of Paul's writings. It's an interesting argument that is fascinating and there are times in reading Paul is does seems like one could be reading Marcion but not sure I'd make that leap of conclusion just yet. If it does prove true, not sure how that will happen, it would definitely turn orthodox christianity on its head because it would mean the gnostic christianity that orthodoxy sought to destroy might now further split existing christianity which some argue is a process already in place as more and more gnostic texts come to the surface. This will be an interesting struggle to watch regardless how it ends up playing out as more preachers and theologians are using various gnostic texts like Thomas along with the canonical texts and many christians are liking what they hear.
Both the gospels and the Paulian texts hold many gnostic ideas embedded in their texts along with both greek and egyptian too. If I had to make a guess at all of this, I suspect there were scribes over the years who took a bit of license and embedded these ideas within the text as they had sympathies towards them. There have been cases of manuscript texts where one scribe placed a note over in the margin and then the next scribe thinking this should have been included, a kind of honest mistake, included the margin note in the actual text and it stuck so to speak. The real question is and one very hard to answer, were these greek and egyptian influences original or were they added later by a sympathetic scribe?
Seems to me for the time being, that is a question with no clear answer. One parting note, I don't view the bible as a book but rather in the sense of a much earlier view, not unlike Nag Hammadi, the bible is a library, the individual books within it are the library shelf and the chapters (albeit added later and not original) of the individual texts are the individual books, some even making up many volumes and of course all the work of many, many authors.
Thought I'd respond to this here and leave the Moab thread to the topic of fun and profit in war.
In the 1st millenia BC there was such a flow of cross culture between the greek and the egyptians, it may be hard to determine fully where one ends and one begins. The Synoptic gospels christianity in some manner infers said christianity as a kind of sect of Judaism and there are suggestions pre temple destruction that some forms of christianity were openly taught and discussed in the so-called synagogues of that day.
This intent was not exclusive IMO as the gospels themselves did not come into being at best until late 1st century CE after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple but through the next few centuries those same gospels were also effected by hellenization as some of the gnostic traditions began to leak in. Gospel of John for example stands out as a very gnostic/hellenized texts as opposed to the other 3. Even Orthodoxy admits this about John.
A consensus of contextual scholars now date the synoptic gospels to 2nd & 3rd century CE but they did not take their (gospels) current form until as late as 4th and 5th century CE at best. There are scholarship arguments for even later.
The 4th century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus would be 2 of the earliest forms of the complete bible as we know it today and even these texts are missing many key stories we've come to know and love. Neither have the famous story in the Gospel of John, one of my favorites, where Jesus is confronted with the harlot and his famous response, let he without sin cast the first stone. A great lesson in forgiveness. This did not appear until the 5th century latin Codex Bezae came to be. This begins to suggest that the gospels may be more a work in progress over a period of centuries and not as much a work of single authorship in the 1st century CE. This may also be another reason there are so many conflicts in some of the details from gospel to gospel.
My own personal view is this along with the fact that each gospel story had a intended audience and these audiences differed from one another. Jesus birth with The Magi from the East may be for a more urban or sophisticated audience and the Jesus birth with The Shepherds for a rural or agrarian audience. Some also think that Matthew may have been written in Alexandria where there was a large jewish population and thus Jesus is portrayed like a Moses figure going into Egypt and then coming out to then begin his ministry at the Jordan River. A lot of symbology to unpack there. Matthew is the only gospel with the killing of innocents (think Egypt and the Pharoah) the journey into and out of Egypt.
Luke, the only other gospel with a birth narrative (the Shepherds) makes no mention of any of this and has the Jesus family after the birth going into Jerusalem to the temple and the returning home back to pastoral Nazareth in Galilee. Both stories can't be true as told and likely neither one are but the intent was for the sake of the audiences who understood religious stories not so much as literal history but a form of allegory or metaphor used to tell a greater story or truth. Even Jesus himself constantly used parables to do the same and were an effective teaching tool.
Outside Judea (pre temple destruction), where Paul's christianity was the norm, a more Marcionite form was dominate that took a neo platonic view (The Demiurge) of the Old Testament god as an evil god, and that Jesus was sent as the new god to take his place and restore mankind back to his rightful place. Estimates are about 10% of the total jewish population lived across this region and among these more gnostic influenced jews, they had a name for this evil OT god in Yaltabaoth. Even the travels of Paul were mostly in the hellenized regions of the Roman Empire and it was in these regions where christianity became not only dominate but also there were a diversity of forms. And one would be foolish not to note the comparisons of early christianity with buddhism and the stories of the Apostle Thomas going to India as well as stories that Jesus did too. When you consider the existing trade routes of the 1st century, those stories are plausible on some level.
As an interesting scholarship side note, among contextual scholars and researchers a small but growing trend is that Marcion of Sinope was Paul and the author of Paul's writings. It's an interesting argument that is fascinating and there are times in reading Paul is does seems like one could be reading Marcion but not sure I'd make that leap of conclusion just yet. If it does prove true, not sure how that will happen, it would definitely turn orthodox christianity on its head because it would mean the gnostic christianity that orthodoxy sought to destroy might now further split existing christianity which some argue is a process already in place as more and more gnostic texts come to the surface. This will be an interesting struggle to watch regardless how it ends up playing out as more preachers and theologians are using various gnostic texts like Thomas along with the canonical texts and many christians are liking what they hear.
Both the gospels and the Paulian texts hold many gnostic ideas embedded in their texts along with both greek and egyptian too. If I had to make a guess at all of this, I suspect there were scribes over the years who took a bit of license and embedded these ideas within the text as they had sympathies towards them. There have been cases of manuscript texts where one scribe placed a note over in the margin and then the next scribe thinking this should have been included, a kind of honest mistake, included the margin note in the actual text and it stuck so to speak. The real question is and one very hard to answer, were these greek and egyptian influences original or were they added later by a sympathetic scribe?
Seems to me for the time being, that is a question with no clear answer. One parting note, I don't view the bible as a book but rather in the sense of a much earlier view, not unlike Nag Hammadi, the bible is a library, the individual books within it are the library shelf and the chapters (albeit added later and not original) of the individual texts are the individual books, some even making up many volumes and of course all the work of many, many authors.
Non sequitur
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A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare
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