I would like to examine a quote from G0D in The crucifixion was a fraud
On that point I did, indeed, used to consider it a sign of inherent stupidity among Christians. But that's not necessarily the case. While I do hold that Christianity contributes to the arrest of social and intellectual development in general, we simply cannot deny that the vast numbers of idiots representing Christianity probably equal out to a proportion of the faith (e.g. in the US) that is reflective of other philosophies.
The nature of that idiocy, however, is telling. In fact, among Wiccans, until last summer, I found that 99% qualified as idiots whose philosophies were mere selfish transfers from their prior paradigm. It's almost like they changed the name and the syntax, but strive toward the same selfishness that they learn culturally.
Having said that, however, we see that the end result of it is that to call Christians exclusively idiots is to select them specifically out of the broad spectrum of human idiocies.
Hmmm .....
So what, then, is it?
And here I come across a Sciforums epiphany. Without nearly three years of almost-daily consideration of these ideas most vital to the human endeavor (given the scale of damage Christianity can accomplish and the degree of damage I perceive in the present) I could not possibly have come to this realization.
Thus, I submit the notion that the reason the infidels seem to know more about Christianity than Christians is that it is more important to us to know.
Take, for instance, the OCA or PMRC, two Christian-influenced organizations who have affected my life both directly and through the influence they have in the lives of other Christians. On the one hand is the simple establishment of rights: Christians had always presumed to have precedent in the US. Thus, of course song lyrics that a Christian mother chooses to be offended at must be prohibited, and it's not a violation of free speech. Homosexuality must be abolished, for surely the Bible takes precedent over the Constitution.
So what happens, then, is that a number of people who would have no other reason to delve into the quagmire of Christian faith do so in order to find out how to preserve liberty and equality (and, perhaps, humanity) against the Christian attack.
Once, in Catholic school, after hearing someone rant about the benevolence of God and the Bible, I spent a couple hours making a list. A few days later I started asking the Franciscan nun who was my sophomore theology teacher about points on the list. She gave me the best practical answers possible, and when I looked at her and said, It makes sense, but ..., she cut me off with a gentle nod and an, "I know, I know."
For Christianity's sake, two authors ought to be banned, at least: Camus and Hegel. Camus simply because I consider it the most dangerous book in the world and I don't trust the Christian "sacrifice of the intellect" to perceive it properly. This isn't so much a problem for the "rest of the world", but if the book is taken improperly, the end result is that the reader usually commits suicide. (As a note here, though the actual motivation for suicide is, I believe, unknown, we might look to Nick Drake, singer and songwriter most recently popularized by a horrible Volkswagen commercial; it turns out that, before his suicide, the last book Drake was reported to read was Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, the most dangerous book in the world; it took me eight years to understand and that process did, indeed, nearly kill me.) In Myth of Sisyphus, Camus' considerations of Christianity dwell on its less-than-attractive side. Considerations of Husserl and Kierkegaard, for instance ... wow.
More directly, though, GWF Hegel ought to be banned in order to protect Christianity. The demands of the invalidation of a priori within a true logical structure have wounded the credibility of Christianity in both spiritual and practical matters.
As a former Satanist, as well, I might point out that, for instance, the fraud of the Christian devil has been a fascination. And we might thank Satanism for pointing out a lesson in diversity in that case: I hadn't actually left the church, just taken up another faction. And, as anyone critical of Catholocism ought to read, the Apostolic Fathers, who shed much light on the nature of the church and its development, and the dogma that commands faith.
What happens, then, as an example, is that people advocating the "common" Christian message (politically & socially) often disagree with one another, and try to prove their point by saying the refutation is wrong because it's not "true Christianity". As a relatively neutral example: I used to hear much debate about the size of congregations. In the post-teleministry construction boom of institutions with names like "Life Church" and "Grace Chapel", these places were small arenas seating into the thousands of worshippers. This becomes almost cultish in its formality, but quite often those who believe in smaller congregations deny the refutations of public issues because ithe issue originates with that large-scale mouthpiece.
Someone once asked me to visit their church. I declined; it was during my period amid the Christian War for Oregon. I explained that I did not wish to set foot in such a condemning institution, whereupon my associate began telling me how such a condemning attitude wasn't real Christianity ... ad nauseam. In the end, I spent a good deal of time considering the point and came to the conclusion that, technically, while the message was more benevolent, my associate was just as FoS as the condemning attitudes.
Christians necessarily operate on faith. Period. But what that seems to create is an indoctrination of verses, and not of the whole. I can, for instance, hold up the fiction of Steven Brust as anti-communist. But that would be inaccurate. Brust is a Trotskyist sympathizer, and to read the passages in question in Teckla put a different context on the idea of frothing, ravenous reds. As a Trotskyist, it's an examination of the disorganization and the faults of Leninism, as I read it. The point is, though, to employ it on faith as a snippet in condemnation of the Marxist vision would be inaccurate; it is merely a factional examination.
And this is how I feel Christians treat the Bible. Compare, for instance, the points at stake in any of our debates about God's and the Serpent's honesty and integrity in Genesis with the points at stake in the crucifixion debate. Comparing those issues and the Christian response, I feel like I'm watching the Olympic Pipeline disaster. Sure, we built the pipleine, and sure it was faulted, and sure we didn't do enough to fix it because we chose not to, but it's not our fault that it exploded and killed children three miles away. Just as God is responsible for the conditions of corruption that require redemption, so, too, are the pipeline executives responsible for the conditions of corruption that proved disastrous and lethal. Yet such things are only deemed the will of the Lord in order to comfort one and appreciate His grace ... however that works out. (And, as a side note, if those children had time to see the firestorm coming up the river, I highly doubt they rejoiced at the coming of the Glory of the Lord.)
We, the infidels, have read the Christian Book. We have tried to reconcile what we perceive in its pages with either the rhetoric or the actions of the Christian body in general. We cannot. So we look closer, trying to figure out what's wrong. And then we realize that the Christians actually don't give a flying fig about what the Bible actually says, but cling dogmatically to the faith of their childhood. Thus, as the Bible shows, God wills the world to create, and sees all therefore seeing the coming fall, and approves of it, thereby requiring salvation, but reserving a judgement day on which He will lovingly those who lived according to his will. For nothing happens without God's will ....
Dogmatically, the whole thing looks like love to most Christians. Like I've said numerous times, though ... a knife to the throat in a dark parking lot ....
But we, who do not believe the dogma, study the scripture in an attempt to reconcile the dogma to the scripture. The Christian, who believes dogma, studies the Bible in an attempt to reinforce dogma with scripture. And therein lies all the difference in the world.
If, for instance, I believed dogmatically that gravity pulled me down, and that was all there was to it, what then of the larger theories of gravity that describe it differently? My definition can still be included in the larger definition, but that is unacceptable because it's extra-definitive, or something like that.
So there is the vagary of my current take on the issue of why the infidels often appear more knowledgeable about Biblical and faith issues than the Christians.
Of course, I'm just me, so let's hear about it.
Anyone? Anyone?
thanx much,
Tiassa
I bring it up because it's a point I've wondered about for 10 years, at least.
On that point I did, indeed, used to consider it a sign of inherent stupidity among Christians. But that's not necessarily the case. While I do hold that Christianity contributes to the arrest of social and intellectual development in general, we simply cannot deny that the vast numbers of idiots representing Christianity probably equal out to a proportion of the faith (e.g. in the US) that is reflective of other philosophies.
The nature of that idiocy, however, is telling. In fact, among Wiccans, until last summer, I found that 99% qualified as idiots whose philosophies were mere selfish transfers from their prior paradigm. It's almost like they changed the name and the syntax, but strive toward the same selfishness that they learn culturally.
Having said that, however, we see that the end result of it is that to call Christians exclusively idiots is to select them specifically out of the broad spectrum of human idiocies.
Hmmm .....
So what, then, is it?
And here I come across a Sciforums epiphany. Without nearly three years of almost-daily consideration of these ideas most vital to the human endeavor (given the scale of damage Christianity can accomplish and the degree of damage I perceive in the present) I could not possibly have come to this realization.
Thus, I submit the notion that the reason the infidels seem to know more about Christianity than Christians is that it is more important to us to know.
Take, for instance, the OCA or PMRC, two Christian-influenced organizations who have affected my life both directly and through the influence they have in the lives of other Christians. On the one hand is the simple establishment of rights: Christians had always presumed to have precedent in the US. Thus, of course song lyrics that a Christian mother chooses to be offended at must be prohibited, and it's not a violation of free speech. Homosexuality must be abolished, for surely the Bible takes precedent over the Constitution.
So what happens, then, is that a number of people who would have no other reason to delve into the quagmire of Christian faith do so in order to find out how to preserve liberty and equality (and, perhaps, humanity) against the Christian attack.
Once, in Catholic school, after hearing someone rant about the benevolence of God and the Bible, I spent a couple hours making a list. A few days later I started asking the Franciscan nun who was my sophomore theology teacher about points on the list. She gave me the best practical answers possible, and when I looked at her and said, It makes sense, but ..., she cut me off with a gentle nod and an, "I know, I know."
For Christianity's sake, two authors ought to be banned, at least: Camus and Hegel. Camus simply because I consider it the most dangerous book in the world and I don't trust the Christian "sacrifice of the intellect" to perceive it properly. This isn't so much a problem for the "rest of the world", but if the book is taken improperly, the end result is that the reader usually commits suicide. (As a note here, though the actual motivation for suicide is, I believe, unknown, we might look to Nick Drake, singer and songwriter most recently popularized by a horrible Volkswagen commercial; it turns out that, before his suicide, the last book Drake was reported to read was Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, the most dangerous book in the world; it took me eight years to understand and that process did, indeed, nearly kill me.) In Myth of Sisyphus, Camus' considerations of Christianity dwell on its less-than-attractive side. Considerations of Husserl and Kierkegaard, for instance ... wow.
More directly, though, GWF Hegel ought to be banned in order to protect Christianity. The demands of the invalidation of a priori within a true logical structure have wounded the credibility of Christianity in both spiritual and practical matters.
As a former Satanist, as well, I might point out that, for instance, the fraud of the Christian devil has been a fascination. And we might thank Satanism for pointing out a lesson in diversity in that case: I hadn't actually left the church, just taken up another faction. And, as anyone critical of Catholocism ought to read, the Apostolic Fathers, who shed much light on the nature of the church and its development, and the dogma that commands faith.
What happens, then, as an example, is that people advocating the "common" Christian message (politically & socially) often disagree with one another, and try to prove their point by saying the refutation is wrong because it's not "true Christianity". As a relatively neutral example: I used to hear much debate about the size of congregations. In the post-teleministry construction boom of institutions with names like "Life Church" and "Grace Chapel", these places were small arenas seating into the thousands of worshippers. This becomes almost cultish in its formality, but quite often those who believe in smaller congregations deny the refutations of public issues because ithe issue originates with that large-scale mouthpiece.
Someone once asked me to visit their church. I declined; it was during my period amid the Christian War for Oregon. I explained that I did not wish to set foot in such a condemning institution, whereupon my associate began telling me how such a condemning attitude wasn't real Christianity ... ad nauseam. In the end, I spent a good deal of time considering the point and came to the conclusion that, technically, while the message was more benevolent, my associate was just as FoS as the condemning attitudes.
Christians necessarily operate on faith. Period. But what that seems to create is an indoctrination of verses, and not of the whole. I can, for instance, hold up the fiction of Steven Brust as anti-communist. But that would be inaccurate. Brust is a Trotskyist sympathizer, and to read the passages in question in Teckla put a different context on the idea of frothing, ravenous reds. As a Trotskyist, it's an examination of the disorganization and the faults of Leninism, as I read it. The point is, though, to employ it on faith as a snippet in condemnation of the Marxist vision would be inaccurate; it is merely a factional examination.
And this is how I feel Christians treat the Bible. Compare, for instance, the points at stake in any of our debates about God's and the Serpent's honesty and integrity in Genesis with the points at stake in the crucifixion debate. Comparing those issues and the Christian response, I feel like I'm watching the Olympic Pipeline disaster. Sure, we built the pipleine, and sure it was faulted, and sure we didn't do enough to fix it because we chose not to, but it's not our fault that it exploded and killed children three miles away. Just as God is responsible for the conditions of corruption that require redemption, so, too, are the pipeline executives responsible for the conditions of corruption that proved disastrous and lethal. Yet such things are only deemed the will of the Lord in order to comfort one and appreciate His grace ... however that works out. (And, as a side note, if those children had time to see the firestorm coming up the river, I highly doubt they rejoiced at the coming of the Glory of the Lord.)
We, the infidels, have read the Christian Book. We have tried to reconcile what we perceive in its pages with either the rhetoric or the actions of the Christian body in general. We cannot. So we look closer, trying to figure out what's wrong. And then we realize that the Christians actually don't give a flying fig about what the Bible actually says, but cling dogmatically to the faith of their childhood. Thus, as the Bible shows, God wills the world to create, and sees all therefore seeing the coming fall, and approves of it, thereby requiring salvation, but reserving a judgement day on which He will lovingly those who lived according to his will. For nothing happens without God's will ....
Dogmatically, the whole thing looks like love to most Christians. Like I've said numerous times, though ... a knife to the throat in a dark parking lot ....
But we, who do not believe the dogma, study the scripture in an attempt to reconcile the dogma to the scripture. The Christian, who believes dogma, studies the Bible in an attempt to reinforce dogma with scripture. And therein lies all the difference in the world.
If, for instance, I believed dogmatically that gravity pulled me down, and that was all there was to it, what then of the larger theories of gravity that describe it differently? My definition can still be included in the larger definition, but that is unacceptable because it's extra-definitive, or something like that.
So there is the vagary of my current take on the issue of why the infidels often appear more knowledgeable about Biblical and faith issues than the Christians.
Of course, I'm just me, so let's hear about it.
Anyone? Anyone?
thanx much,
Tiassa
