Religion, Theology, and all that good stuff

[kmc]

Fair enough. There are far more interested people who spend a great deal of time debating the semantics of humanism.

[Rit]

i'd agree with kMc's understanding of humanism.

[Rit]

Who let the Book of Revelations into the Bible in the first place? it's like a scandalous representation of god/jesus/spirit as a vulgarly rendered mishmash of symbols.

How did such a work of obvious imagination escape the First Fathers?

its like an orgasmic release at the end of an otherwise fairly straight recounting of Jewish myths, Messianic fable, and Platonic philosophizing (St. Paul). In fact, seen alongside Paul's letters, it's an entirely bipolar intellectual opposite.

Startling.

Its as if the Church Fathers knew instinctively the value of aesthetic splendour (or an attempt at such anyway) when drawing up the 27 books of the New Testament.

[Nepenthe]

John wrote the book of Revelations, it is a Revelation of what is to come to pass. Some of it already has.

And Paul was a Pharisee and knew the old testament like the back of his hand before he converted to Christianity. Paul was a Benjamite, from the tribe of Benjamin. Here is part of one of his letters, I dedicate this to humanists and Catholics.



1 For I want you to know how greatly I strive for you, and for those at La-odice'a, and for all who have not seen my face,

2 that their hearts may be encouraged as they are knit together in love, to have all the riches of assured understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, of Christ,

3 in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

4 I say this in order that no one may delude you with beguiling speech.

5 For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.

6 As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him,

7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

8 See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

9 For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily,

10 and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.

11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ;

12 and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.

13 And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,

14 having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

15 He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.

16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.

17 These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.

18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind,

19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

[Nepenthe]

I would also like to add that Jesus was strongly against the corruption in the religious system, thats why he stated that he didn't come for the "righteous". He didn't come for those that felt they were "above" everyone, be they religionists or humanists.

[phil]

OK ! So yesterday I went to the blood clinic to give platelets(?)
stuff contained in our blood along with plasma and red cells ...
It's kinda weird to see those little pumps sucking your blood out
passing it through a centrifuge to extract the stuff they want
and then pushing it back in by the same way it came out
leaving behind just some kind of yellow liquid ... !!

Anyway ! The whole process takes one hour and during that time
I read an article from the December issue of ATLANTIC monthly
that I found quite interesting ...

I did succeed in finding a link to that article which was for suscribers only
and the kicker goes like this ...

The Atlantic Monthly | December 2005


Is God an Accident?


Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question ...

by Paul Bloom

.....


I. God Is Not Dead

When I was a teenager my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world was soon to end. He believed that the earth was a few thousand years old, and that the fossil record was a consequence of the Great Flood. He could describe the afterlife, and was able to answer adolescent questions about the fate of Hitler's soul.

My rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a teacher and a scholar. But he held views that struck me as strange, even disturbing. Like many secular people, I am comfortable with religion as a source of spirituality and transcendence, tolerance and love, charity and good works. Who can object to the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Dalai Lama—at least as long as that faith grounds moral positions one already accepts? I am uncomfortable, however, with religion when it makes claims about the natural world, let alone a world beyond nature. It is easy for those of us who reject supernatural beliefs to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way to accord dignity and respect to both science and religion is to recognize that they apply to "non-overlapping magisteria": science gets the realm of facts, religion the realm of values.

For better or worse, though, religion is much more than a set of ethical principles or a vague sense of transcendence. The anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right in 1871, when he noted that the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural. My rabbi's specific claims were a minority view in the culture in which I was raised, but those sorts of views—about the creation of the universe, the end of the world, the fates of souls—define religion as billions of people understand and practice it.


Entire piece can be read here ...

p209.ezboard.com/finformedcitizenfrm30.showMessage?topicID=149.topic

Of course, after reading the whole article,
feel free to rip me a new asshole,
question my intelligence or denounce my anti-religion bias ...
it won't stop me from posting what I think
are thought-provoking studies and essaies ...

[JACkory]

Thought provoking, I suppose (no, I didn't read the entire article, to be honset, I read about half of it), but it is the view of an outsider looking in. An outsider who has already rejected even the possibility of the supernatural.

Good to see you jump back into the discussion, but I still am waiting for you to answer my question...Where does the "internal power" you spoke of come from and why doesn't everyone have it in equal portions?

Noone has attempted to "rip you a new asshole" here. I don't know where you get this persecution complex.

[kmc]

There is much controversy over who wrote the book of Revelation, Dee. Please.

Since when do humanists feel they are above anyone? Did Jesus feel he was better than everyone else?

[JACkory]

kmc said:

Did Jesus feel he was better than everyone else?

What kind of question is that?

[Nepenthe]

KMC, you are defining humanism in the modern sense I take it? And that definition is what? For the betterment of mankind as a whole, a kind of universalism?

Well then I would suggest reading the chapters in the Gospels about the feeding of the 5,000, when Jesus turned 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish into enough food to feed the multitudes. Afterward, they couldn't find Jesus and went looking for him. What did he tell them? He told them that they were not acknowledging the "miracle" and they were only following him around because of the food, they wanted a handout in other words. Well, needless to say Jesus didn't give them anymore food. He explained to them what they needed to do, and that was to believe that he was the son of God incarnate. He also explains that no one can believe unless God chooses them, as he had the disciples. Well they asked him to give them food every day and Jesus flat out told them no. What do you have here? Even though Jesus just performed a miracle and produced enough food to feed 5,000 people out of 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, this multitude still didn't "SEE". They even argued about it with Jesus saying, "Well Moses gave our ancestors Manna from heaven in the desert". Jesus clearly explains to them, "I assure you that WAS NOT Moses that provided the Manna, it was GOD".

So what do we have? Some people just never "get it". When they found out he wasn't going to give them a daily handout they split.

The question is what does one need to do in order to believe? I think it goes something like this: Ask, Seek, Find.......

This is a lesson that has two meanings. We are given free will, we chose which path to take. It is also a lesson of how there is a certain amount of predestination involved, as Jesus "chose" the 12 disciples. If you read further on, you will notice Jesus asking the 12 disciples what they were going to do, if they were going to leave. After they answer, telling him "no we aren't leaving, we will stick with you Lord", Jesus goes on to point out that he also "chose" Judas, whom he calls "a devil", of course because eventually Judas would turn on Christ. And the point of that is.....even if there is predestination involved with some being "chosen" doesn't mean that they are going to stay true and loyal.



So how much of a humanist was he? He surely didn't give out anymore food to those that were just there for a handout.

[Nepenthe]

As for who wrote the book of Revelations? Well KMC, I am going by what the good book says.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John:

2 Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.

3 Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written

[Nepenthe]

Also I don't think that this multitude that split were all that bad off, I am guessing they had a means of getting food on their own. They were lazy and were indeed looking for an easy way out. I am guessing that the ones that stuck around were though, they realized the miracle and probably blessings indeed followed.


If you notice something, Jesus catered greatly to the poor and the disabled. If he was a humanist at all, this would be the example. I believe we and a nation as a whole should follow this example. THAT is where your humanism would come in.........yet he didn't just continue giving them handouts. He picked them up and lifted them out...and they proceeded from there, staying in the word. Hence: "he will never leave you or forsake you".

[Rit]

Jesus was alright. He was a good guy.

The rest of the institutional machine that has risen up around him is not worth much faith.

I think Jesus would be dismayed to see us casting him for as a symbol of purified Goodness. He would be shocked and disgusted. Why? because taking ANYTHING as a symbol of purified Goodness stops you from thinking, stops you from questioning, and the only means to developing enough responsibility to look at the world and all its complexities as a mature human being is by being questioning.

Jesus would be thoroughly dismayed by the state of Christianity today.

He was a guide, nothing more, nothing less.

[JACkory]

Is God a humanist?

Jesus IS God.

If you don't believe that Jesus is God then we are speaking from two different worlds that will never be reconciled.

I don't think it matters whether or not the "John" who wrote Revelation was John the Apostle or John the Revelator. I tend to favour the traditional view that it was indeed John the Apostle who wrote it, but then again, I am pretty doggone conservative when it comes to the Bible (and I make no apology for that).
There has been disagreement on the matter, but I hardly think it's entered into the realm of "controversy".

And I still find it extremely off-putting to be throwing around a word like "humanism" in regards to things spiritual.

[Rit]

And I still find it extremely off-putting to be throwing around a word like "humanism" in regards to things spiritual.

goodness.
you speak like a child.