The Never Ending Pool

raggedclown wrote:

QUOTE:
Thank you for those links, which I may take a look at later when time allows. I'm currently reading Henry Chadwick's Penguin History of the Early Church, which gives an orthodox view of church history, so I hope I cannot be accused of only agreeing writers I agree with.

I'm impressed that you're reading Chadwick. I hardly expected you to read all or even any of those links; I'm just making the point that orthodox Christians have considered these same issues.

Saut, what's going on? PJane and Plotino are
sure helping to devolve universality + justice.

On Dec 10th 2008 the world will celebrate the UDHR
60th Anniverary. In a speech on 5 October 1995
Pope John Paul II called the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights "(one of) the highest expression of
the human conscience of our time."

The writer of the Gospel of Luke wrote his account
"so that you may know the certainty of the things you
have been taught."

Everyone knows about the Eddas, so enough with the
Eddas, unless you want to share the Eddas.

Say what, Chimes? "Devolve" universality + justice?
And I don't even know what the Eddas are.

See? and some say the Prophets are slow!

saut de basque wrote:

QUOTE:
Say what, Chimes? "Devolve" universality + justice?
And I don't even know what the Eddas are. :)

That's all right. Snorri Sturluson never heard of you either.

Darn, I get a page full of Google hits for Snorri, but none for "tom."

doesn't quite resonate with Blaine either

speaking of resonate . .

According to an Italian study published in 2002, 65% of Christian martyrs were killed in the 20th century.

A New Century of Martyrs

This includes the millions killed for their faith by Communists, as well as the victims of the Armenian genocide.

What has happened in this century? Well, as we know, in March 2003 God told George W. Bush to invade Iraq. As a result, Christianity, which had been a minority religion in Iraq since the time of Christ, and where services are still held in the language spoken by Jesus (Aramaic, not American as commonly thought), has all but been wiped out. In 2000 there were 1.5 million Iraqi Christians (3% of the population). Now there are are fewer than 500,000.

In Sudan, the situation is even worse: http://www.meforum.org/article/22

It was all very well for a 2nd century Christian propagandist like Tertullian to boast that the blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church. Throughout most of the pagan Roman period, the Emperors only sporadically and usually reluctantly persecuted Christians, so that would-be martyrs often had to goad the civil authority into persecuting them. Marcus Aurelius, the last of the great Roman emperors, as a Stoic philosopher was not against suicide, but insisted it be performed with quiet dignity, "not like the Christians, in a spirit of theatricality." The worst persecutions were under Decius (249-251) and Diocletian and his successor Galerius (303-11). In the following year a Christian Emperor was on the throne, and Christians began the happy work of persecuting one another that continued to the Reformation and beyond.

The situation nowadays in parts of the world is very different. "Martyrdom" on the current scale is not bringing Christianity any new converts, but on the contrary, threatening it with extinction. Unfortunately, there are few liberal voices calling for anything to be done about it. To demand that Christian communities be protected sounds to the liberal ear like a call for a crusade. Yet common humanity, which liberals used to care about before they discovered political correctness, calls for something to be done. Annoying as Christians are, this isn't the way they should be wiped out.

someone wrote:

"Annoying as Christians are, this isn't the way they should be wiped out."

They won't all be wiped out. There will always be a few remaining to annoy the atheeists.

so what is being said,
the author and original spark
of this thread still wishes to express
nothing concerning autonomy, Charlton Heston's
audio books, values that implicate
both sides of the coin, rights and/or any philosphy
of reciprocal responsibility?

countless crimes against humanity
and classifying victims is beyond belief

.
.
...Does the above post mean anything in English, or is it just a riff?

Michael Harding wrote:

QUOTE:
someone wrote:

"Annoying as Christians are, this isn't the way they should be wiped out."

They won't all be wiped out. There will always be a few remaining to annoy the atheeists.

LOL. And a nicer guy than than ragged we couldn't possibly find.

Anyhow, ragged, I don't think chimes' post makes any sense and I'm not sure yours does in the context. The idea that Tertullian was boasting is a particularly unkind convenient presumption on the author's part. And Aurelius, whom I admire and sometimes read at bedtime, should have understood the Christian martyrs' wish that their sacrifice should count, should be their final and most powerful witness. But what's the point in arguing about how many Christians were martyred? Once again, my still unanswered question is why the people who knew Christ would die for him unless they knew he'd been resurrected.

raggedclown wrote:

QUOTE:
.
.
...Does the above post mean anything in English, or is it just a riff?

See? That didn't take long. Its defined, as everyone has the right
to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Well, Saut, I did read Chadwick on the Early Church, mostly with pleasure, although I do think he is a Christian apologist more than he is a historian. And I've been brushing up my New Testament Greek by looking at some of Paul's letters in the original language. Plus I've been dipping into some of the "alternative" gospels by the weirdo Gnostic sects. All this reading prompted me to write an extended blog-like piece, in which my conclusion is somewhat ironic given my praise of Socrates/Plato with which I began this thread.

How St. John and the Greeks ruined Christianity

Unlike some atheists, I don't get too excited by the Gnostics and their alternative gospels. None of them go back further than the middle of the second century, and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are both older and more agreeable than these elitist sects with their "secret knowledge" that Jesus supposedly entrusted to his disciples and their complete lack of interest in ethical conduct. The early church fathers wrote very well and persuasively against the Gnostic heretics, and recent papyrus discoveries have shown them to have been both fair-minded in their presentation of their opponents' views and just in their criticism of them.

Reading the early history of the Church, one can't help but being impressed at the way this little band of ex-slaves, women, fishermen, centurions and other riff-raff took on the might of the Roman Empire and spread their faith so quickly throughout the known world. The most obvious reasons for the rapid progress of the new religion were a) its mass appeal, as I have just described: Christianity was the world's first mass democratic movement; and b) the humanity of Jesus's message, the moving story of his life as told in the synoptic gospels, so much at odds with a world ruled by Empire and dominated by the sword.

When, however, we come to the Church Triumphant in the 4th century, when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, one throws up ones hands in despair at the amazing fatuity of its piffling theological and metaphysical debates. It's even possible to sympathize with Constantine, the first Christian Emperor and murderer of his wife and son, in his futile attempts to reconcile the warring Christian factions. And one positively applauds when Julian "the Apostate" gets rid of the whole fratricidal bunch of them and ostentatiously refuses to persecute them as they would persecute each other and their pagan fellow citizens. Unfortunately, Julian's restoration of the old gods did not survive his brief reign (361-363 A.D.), and then it was back to the Catholic vs Arian debate in all its murderous sterility. [As an aside, Gibbon also suggests that Julian's polytheism was also corrupted by neoplatonism, causing it to become rather un-Roman and fanatical.]

What went wrong with early Christianity? How did it turn from a religion with a simple, humane message and a strong moral basis (the qualities that made it so popular in the first place) into a fratricidal imperial religion with a divisive and esoteric theology beyond the comprehension of most of its followers? How did it move beyond the "riff-raff" of ordinary folk I mentioned above to be captured by emperors, bishops, theologians, and schoolmen?

Well, I'm sure Edward Gibbon gets it right in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he points to the corrupt form of Platonism that was adopted by the Christians as being primarily responsible for this change. Fourth-century Platonism wasn't the moral and ethical system of Plato himself and his early followers, but had degenerated into arid and pointless metaphysical speculation about matters that were and are quite unknowable. As such, it was perfectly suited to exploitation by the Gnostics, and the Catholic church ought to have had nothing to do with it. The early church in fact did a mostly splendid job in rejecting the gnostic gospels, but they slipped up big time in allowing St. John's Gospel into the canon. Whereas the three synoptic Gospels focus exclusively on the life and deeds of Jesus, on his moral exemplar, John starts waffling on pretentiously and incomprehensibly about the Logos and so forth ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.". While Jesus's words and deeds are, for a man of his time, astonishingly liberal and enlightened, John the Evangelist, infected with this new, corrupt form of Platonism, with his abstract reflections about the Logos starts the drift toward hair-splitting metaphysical scholasticism. The latter reached its apogee of absurdity in the 4th century, when Christians started murdering fellow Christians over argume