The Never Ending Pool

raggedclown wrote:

QUOTE:
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.

ragged, once again I'm impressed by your scholarship. But do you find philosophical debates about the nature of the universe fatuous? I think you find theological debates fatuous because you reject their central premise, that God exists.

Philosophical debates about the nature of the universe are one thing; theological debates about the nature of Christ, which start with St. John, are quite another, especially when not tempered with the humility of Socrates, with the recognition that ultimately we cannot know the answers, and are quite dangerous. As I attempted to argue, these hairsplitting, largely semantic debates (largely conducted by mental and moral pygmies) ruined whatever good there was in Christianity and began the closing of the Western mind that we call the Dark Ages.

Belive what you wanta, thats all matters.

So the three point jewish star, Heart, Reason, Action was shown to be The Father , The Son , The Holy Ghost.

Hey Mack, still we don't believe. We live in a big place...I love the picture. If I was in charge we would start change in school, first thing, go metric, for I believe we are smart enough to learn out 10's, and compete in a world of quick thinkers! Second, we use Carl Sagan to teach astronomy..."more stars in the sky than every grain of sand on every beach in the world". Oh and the oil thing, are we shipping oil to the space station? But I'm afraid they might kill me.

Bee Pollen wrote:

QUOTE:
Hey Mack, still we don't believe. We live in a big place...I love the picture. If I was in charge we would start change in school, first thing, go metric, for I believe we are smart enough to learn out 10's, and compete in a world of quick thinkers! Second, we use Carl Sagan to teach astronomy..."more stars in the sky than every grain of sand on every beach in the world". Oh and the oil thing, are we shipping oil to the space station? But I'm afraid they might kill me.

this pretty much steals my thunder.

Bee Pollen wrote:

QUOTE:
Hey Mack, still we don't believe. We live in a big place...I love the picture. If I was in charge we would start change in school, first thing, go metric, for I believe we are smart enough to learn out 10's, and compete in a world of quick thinkers! Second, we use Carl Sagan to teach astronomy..."more stars in the sky than every grain of sand on every beach in the world". Oh and the oil thing, are we shipping oil to the space station? But I'm afraid they might kill me.

no metric system. if we accept metric then soccer will be imposed upon us. and that just ain't right.

raggedclown wrote:

QUOTE:
Philosophical debates about the nature of the universe are one thing; theological debates about the nature of Christ, which start with St. John, are quite another, especially when not tempered with the humility of Socrates, with the recognition that ultimately we cannot know the answers, and are quite dangerous. As I attempted to argue, these hairsplitting, largely semantic debates (largely conducted by mental and moral pygmies) ruined whatever good there was in Christianity and began the closing of the Western mind that we call the Dark Ages.

How can religious believers understand the nature of the universe without understanding the nature of God? If you think about it, it should be clear that is the goal of the debates you object to.

Likewise, the claim that we ultimately can't know the answers is an ultimate claim. I might ask you how you know we can't know. The humility you ask for is impossible -- we all form opinions. One can be an honest and intellectually responsible agnostic or atheist or believer (although as a believer I think that God does usually speak to people sooner or later if they're willing to hear. Problem is, in our pride and willfulness, how often are we willing to hear a humbling, challenging word? Speaking for myself, not so often).

True humility is to be willing to listen to and respect those with whom we disagree. This is where Christians have so often failed so spectacularly. But who's done better?

It's about 25 years since I could last describe myself honestly as a Christian, so maybe my opinion counts for nothing. But even today, reading the New Testament, I find it difficult to believe that Jesus wanted His followers to spend their time speculating about His "substance" and His relation to the godhead, still less to refuse communion with one another, to persecute one another, to blind, burn, and massacre one another over such a subject. How can such a question be answered without revelation anyway? And if He wanted us to attach importance to such a question, or even to know about it at all, wouldn't He have provided such a revelation?

I forgot to mention that from about 370 A.D. onward, you could also be at war with your fellow Christians over the nature of the Holy Spirit. Was it part of the godhead or just the top dog (i.e. angel) in the created order?

Another thing that is different to 25 years ago: then I was enchanted by the wonderful, mysterious language of St. John's Gospel. Now I think it was the gateway to the hellenization of Christianity, which destroyed all the best the new religion had to offer, indeed, the virtues that led to its rapid dissemination throughout the empire in the first two centuries of our era.

Edit: but doubtless such a degeneration from useful teaching to blind fanaticism was inevitable given the nature of "revealed" monotheistic religion in the first place.

raggedclown wrote:

QUOTE:
It's about 25 years since I could last describe myself honestly as a Christian, so maybe my opinion counts for nothing. But even today, reading the New Testament, I find it difficult to believe that Jesus wanted His followers to spend their time speculating about His "substance" and His relation to the godhead, still less to refuse communion with one another, to persecute one another, to blind, burn, and massacre one another over such a subject. How can such a question be answered without revelation anyway? And if He wanted us to attach importance to such a question, or even to know about it at all, wouldn't He have provided such a revelation?

I forgot to mention that from about 370 A.D. onward, you could also be at war with your fellow Christians over the nature of the Holy Spirit. Was it part of the godhead or just the top dog (i.e. angel) in the created order?

I havn't followed this thread word for word, but I would like to ask you something. Do you believe there really was a man--a man, not a god--named Jesus who said at least some of the things attributed to him in the christian bible? I guess I am referring to a historical Jesus here, and nothing more.

Another thing that is different to 25 years ago: then I was enchanted by the wonderful, mysterious language of St. John's Gospel. Now I think it was the gateway to the hellenization of Christianity, which destroyed all the best the new religion had to offer, indeed, the virtues that led to its rapid dissemination throughout the empire in the first two centuries of our era.

Edit: but doubtless such a degeneration from useful teaching to blind fanaticism was inevitable given the nature of "revealed" monotheistic religion in the first place.

Sorry, don't know how my reply got in the middle of your quote. This site has been doing some strange things for me since it was upgraded.

Excuse me for making an addendum to my last post before giving you a right to reply, but I want to go back to this:

QUOTE:
But do you find philosophical debates about the nature of the universe fatuous?

Stating your (purely speculative) view and declaring any opposing one to be heresy isn't what I would describe as a "debate", or even a sign of intellectual activity. And what hope is there of the latter when you start by subordinating reason to faith and authority?

It's fashionable nowadays to debunk the traditional periodicity of history (which was invented in the Renaissance) whereby the period between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the revival of learning in the 13th to 16th centuries is described as a "dark age"; but here are a couple of reasons why the traditional view holds good:

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[*]More than one and a half millennia after Aristotle put forward rational explanations for natural phenomena, the Church was still attributing them to divine or diabolical influence.
[*]The last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world was made by the Athenian philosopher Proclus in 475, and it was more than 1,000 years before the science made significant steps forward once more. By the year 1000, all branches of science, and indeed all kinds of theoretical knowledge except theology, had pretty much disintegrated. Most classical literature was largely unknown. The best-educated people (all of them monks) knew strikingly less than many Greeks 800 years earlier.
[*]As an example of the fatuous, self-satisfied idiocy that passed for thought in the church from the 4th century until the arrival of Aquinas, take one Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in the late fourth century, who enumerated a grand total of 80 heresies to be condemned by all right-thinking children of God. He was sure that his list was complete because 80 was, after all, the number of concubines in the Song of Songs.
[*]That great ninny Augustine at least had some intellectual curiosity in his early days, but this soon degenerated into asinine credulity. He was a poor scholar, with no Hebrew and little Greek and relied on bad translations, and when confronted by a passage he didn't understand, which happened frequently, he concluded that God had deliberately made it obscure in order to humble the learned.
[*]The neglect of the study of medicine, and worse, the declaration of the work of the Greeks on the subject as heretical, was responsible for the miserable suffering and death of millions in the Middle Ages. The sick were told their suffering was punishment for their sins, and instead of medicines they were offered prayers and urged to repent. Among the peasantry, medicine was entirely in the hands of 'wise women' – custodians of folk wisdom and herbalism, forever in danger of denouncement by the Church for 'sorcery'. This happy tradition of attacking the patient rather than exploring the cause of the disease is maintained even in our own day.
[*}One of the main causes of the spread of plagues and disease was the decline of public hygiene, and here too, the Church bears a heavy responsibility. Whereas Roman citizens bathed every day, St. Jerome declared: "He who has bathed in Christ does not need a second bath."
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