Silly Beliefs

[Archangel]

You know, I always find it funny when people who can barely spell "faith" sneer upon it because they find it "silly" - it's the arrogance of our times, one which Kierkegaard so often lamented, to totally misunderstand Descartes, to doubt (and criticise, ridicule) before understanding.

So to finally give those people something to really look down upon, as well as for my own benefit (it's better to put this stuff down in words, instead of having it carom inside your skull), here's my interpretation of Christianity - for all and sundry to dissect. Some of this has already been posted in other contexts; but it can't hurt to just finally spell it all out in one place.



Here goes nothing...


I believe that the fundamental force behind the universe is love. A love that contains all facets that we have attributed to the word, and perhaps some which are yet to be defined, although, in my purview, the Platonian foursome is still the best definition around.

I believe that creativity is one of the manifestations of that love, namely of the aspect which Plato calls stoika. Every great endeavour of creation is an act of love, be it the composition of a supreme work of art, or MJ rocking the baby on a dunk. If you look at the best expressions of creativity in any field, you will always find the deepest love for whatever field that may be. Nobody loved sculpture as much as Michelangelo. Nobody loved drama as much as Shakespeare. Nobody loved lyricism more than Hölderlin - and nobody loved football more than Pelé. I believe that those displays of are a mimetic reflection of the supreme work of love, which is the creation of, well, everything. I believe that that is what Genesis means when it says that we are "created in God's image" - which, when you think about it, is the same thing that Shaftesbury postulates regarding the nature of the artist (poet, in his specific case) as an "alter deus", a creator of worlds: Namely, that we have been created out of the ultimate love, and that it is love which brings us closer to that supreme ideal, which makes us transcend the material, and gives us a brief glimpse of what we call "divine" - inspired creativity being an important facet of it. Religions are smarter than people give them credit for; it's not a coincidence that the Greeks apotheosised inspiration itself in all of its forms in the shape of the Muses.

I believe that simplicity is a path to divinity: That Eden illustrates that man is more attuned to the divine if he is allowed to be more simply human. The Greeks were on to something with their notion of the ages moving ever further away from an ideal state - the more complex human existence gets, the more detached it becomes from the essentially human experience, and the further we are taken away from knowing the divine through ourselves. If this was true in a time when most people grew their own food, imagine how doubly true it is now. It's way too fortuitous for the triumph of secularism to coincide with the advent of the industrial revolution and the resulting alienation (did I just channel Marx?).

I believe that next to love and the creative force caused by it, the third facet of the divine Idea is wisdom. I am intrigued by the fact that the Greek terms regarding divinity appear to be so much more fitting than what Rome has made of them: That in the beginning, there was indeed logos, and that the reduction to mere verbum, by itself, severely limits our comprehension of the divine - as does the detachment of the Spiritus Sanctus from the Hagia Sophia, which goes a long way towards explaining the then-nascent favouring of myth and mysticism over wisdom and knowledge, possibly the greatest guilt the Church of Rome has laden upon itself.

I belive that in man, wisdom/knowledge and creative force can guide us towards divinity, but that only love can truly make us, if not know, at least intuit its nature. Thus, I believe that by subordinating your life to the principle of love, you eo ipso become divine yourself. If everything you do is indeed governed by the very principle that created the universe, you - as man - are, for intents and purposes, God.

I belive that that is the nature of Christ. That the Nazarene was the perfect human manifestation of love. That He recognised that the problem of the Jewish people was that while they were beholden to the word of their divine law, their scholars had managed to detach those laws from the spirit of love out of which they had been forged, and that by only serving themselves, they had become void. I believe that Jesu intent was to remind us that a law we believe to be given by God is only good if we are ever mindful that the underlying purpose is that love, which is the one principle from which all others derive their authority. Paul was a smart man.

I believe that by sublimating His entire existence, even His death, to serve that principle, Christ became the most perfect human mimesis of that most divine of all Ideas - the most divine we could ever hope to be, love become flesh. I believe that that is what the Bible means when it speaks of the Son of Man as the Son of God. By being love, Christ indeed became consubstantialis Patri.

I believe that the actual message of Christ is the exaltation of the divinity of man, the freedom from religious submission defined by unseen powers; that if Christianity were celebrated as originally intended, it would be the celebration of the fact that by being as human as we can be, we become as divine as we can be. That human life, in all its myriad idiosyncratic facets, is divine in itself: Even in the "censored" accounts of His life, Christ manifests every spectrum of the human experience, including wrath, fear, disappointment, even despair. I believe that on a basic level, the Resurrection is a symbol of life triumphing over death, of love triumphing over hatred, of serenity triumphing over despair - a sign that if life is love, life itself cannot die.

I believe that much of Scripture is an allegory, designed to boil those frankly rather complex notions down to words comprehensible to all while keeping most of the original message intact - the only difference between religion and metaphysical philosophy being that religion has to be able to also exist on a sub-theological, sub-philospical level. After all, what is the one instance of loving, benevolent creative force which we all know, if not our parents? The anthropomorphism of the metaphysical doesn't serve itself- it's the deepest principles of existence explained to a very young human conscience. That's not to say that a purely literal comprehension of Scripture is in itself wrong: To me, the beauty of Christianity is its ability to convey the principal elements of the message to the simple mind of a child.
However, the moment one enters the realm of debate, one has to be at least aware of levels of exegesis above pure literal reading. Just because Scripture is designed to be comprehensible to simpler minds, it does absolutely NOT mean that it is designed exclusively for them. Anybody who goes "U christainz belive in a zombie lol ur stupid" is a fucking idiot.

And doubly so for believing that he is any smarter.

Finally, I believe that by concentrating on everything BUT the message of love, pretty much all churches are guilty of corrupting Christ's original intent. I believe that the forgery of the Donation of Constantine is the saddest moment in the history of our faith. I don't blame the nature of organised religion: I blame the nature of organised religion paired with aspirations to worldly power, which is the opposite of what Christ and Paul intended (Jewish theology has been taking a nose-dive ever since the foundation of Israel, from what I hear). The second that faith became subordinate to the interests of the Holy See, religion was pretty much fucked - with the message starting to concentrate on everything BUT the exaltation of the dignity inherent in human existence. Not that protestantism, with their dour focus on work and suffering, has been any better. Christianity isn't by any means hedonistic, but it IS serene, joyful even. If being loved makes you sad, something is wrong with you.

And yes, I believe that in keeping the masses dumb for their own twisted purposes, the churches themselves are partly to blame when morons who can't spell "hermeneutics" heap shit upon them. After all, they could have stuck to the original message, which, as far as I can see, is pretty much bullet-proof...


Or is it?

Come on, I want to see you call this stuff "silly".

[VoxAngelikus]

This stuff is silly

[provplaya1]

"I believe that much of Scripture is an allegory, designed to boil those frankly rather complex notions down to words comprehensible to all while keeping most of the original message intact "

Very well put statement, I don't think alot of people who read scriptures understand this.

[Insomniac]

It's silly that if the historical Jesus were ever disproved, it would be just as easy to say he was someone like Job and just a pure allegorical story designed to teach us how to live. Because you've just made everything a symbol of something and stripped the substance of Christianity out of the beliefs. That's silly.

Because you say Paul was a very smart man, but the smartest thing he ever did was make Christ's death and resurrection important. Now you've said all that talk about Jesus coming back to life and if he didn't, Christians are to be pitied above all men is just some external stuff poorly understood by overly-literal folk. That's silly.

You can't make the absurd more reasonable by arguing what it says isn't what it says. That's silly.

[vicar in a tutu]

I think fayth (only joking Archangel) faith is a wonderful thing, it gives solace to suffering people albeit false solace but it still gives comfort to people who truly believe, and even though I do not believe in a God or afterlife, what right do I have to tell someone their beliefs, morals and way of life is silly, even though scientifically I can prove my case?

I was educated in a Roman Catholic school and between the double lessons of how to feel perpetual guilt and being given a "meaty communion via the brown path of penitence" by a very blessed priest, we were taught that the Bible isn't to be taken literally, but a message of morality could be extracted from various passages (ahem) and now I'm older I believe in logic and the laws of the universe but faith, like political correctness, is a beautiful thing that mankind should keep and nurture.

[Archangel]

This stuff is silly

Thanks for proving my point.

It's silly that if the historical Jesus were ever disproved, it would be just as easy to say he was someone like Job and just a pure allegorical story designed to teach us how to live. Because you've just made everything a symbol of something and stripped the substance of Christianity out of the beliefs. That's silly.

I don't think I did.

As I said, a literal comprehension is an aspect of the faith; however, to indulge in theological debate, be it in support or critique, one has to go beyond the mere literal interpretation. The 12th century knew four - literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. Why can't we?

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia, as they used to say.

The allegory is what tells you what to believe.

Because you say Paul was a very smart man, but the smartest thing he ever did was make Christ's death and resurrection important. Now you've said all that talk about Jesus coming back to life and if he didn't, Christians are to be pitied above all men is just some external stuff poorly understood by overly-literal folk. That's silly.

Maybe I've expressed myself incorrectly. I never put the literal Resurrection in doubt, and to a Christian, it is indeed the cornerstone of his faith. However, even if you don't believe in the dogmata of the faith, the Resurrection can still be very valid as an allegory of a fundamental, basic truth.

You can't make the absurd more reasonable by arguing what it says isn't what it says. That's silly.

Look, I am aware of the meaning of credo quia absurdum, which is especially applicable to the Resurrection. I wasn't trying to outline the extent of my faith, but rather something more akin to a lowest common denominator.

[Phil Theehor]

Great stuff, Arch. I'll have a few questions, but let me ask for a clarification. When you speak of people living closest to God when at their most human, I'd ask you to define 'most human' for me.

The reason I ask is this: When one talks about man in his simplest form, often they are referring to the animal instincts-- where the drive to survive and fuck are paramount. "Man at his most human" does not conjure up images of charity, reflection, restraint, etc." Where are you going with that?

[Archangel]

I'm not referring to a Rousseauan natural state here; what I mean is a, well, basic state of being, attuned to the essential aspects of life, maybe including a sense of wonder - something impossible in "advanced" urban societies such as Athens. It's quite a conundrum: On one hand, you're most likely to experience, intuit the divine in a simple existence, aware of the everyday miracles of life, growth, renewal; on the other, you are only able to theorise such things in the leisure of a life detached from basic necessities.

It's no surprise that religion, especially in its basic, grassroots forms, is more prevalent in rural areas, and I don't think it's because country folk are dumb.

The problem is that the things we pursue - promotions, mortgages, sports bets, what have you - are so incredibly artificial, so unnatural, that underneath all those layers of artifice, reflections on the nature of man (including the basic nature of the belief in the divine) are all but impossible. This is the reasoning behind monastic life, after all - a phenomenon (like hermitism) found in most advanced religions. A reduction of life to the most basic needs, and dedicating the remaining time to prayer and meditation...

[Insomniac]

I belive that in man, wisdom/knowledge and creative force can guide us towards divinity, but that only love can truly make us, if not know, at least intuit its nature. Thus, I believe that by subordinating your life to the principle of love, you eo ipso become divine yourself. If everything you do is indeed governed by the very principle that created the universe, you - as man - are, for intents and purposes, God.

...

I believe that by sublimating His entire existence, even His death, to serve that principle, Christ became the most perfect human mimesis of that most divine of all Ideas - the most divine we could ever hope to be, love become flesh. I believe that that is what the Bible means when it speaks of the Son of Man as the Son of God. By being love, Christ indeed became consubstantialis Patri.


You recognize there are dangerous strains of nontrinitarianism here. Which, Arianism is very fine, but it would be tough to call yourself a Catholic. I know you're not necessarily completely bound to orthodoxy, but did Jesus earn/become divine, or was he divine in nature?

If we loved the whole world and everything in it unconditionally, could we be as divine as Jesus? There is no one good, no not one, but if there were, would that person be the Son of God? I know poetic divinity and theological divinity aren't the same thing, but I'm still taking what you say as "belief" in the theological sense.

If we're talking about Scientology, I kind of think DC-10s and hydrogen bombs in volcanoes is the only place to start, at least in terms of beliefs. If Hubbard had been the greatest English writer since Milton, he might have made something incredibly worthwhile to read and study, with all sorts of levels of discussion, but there's still the issue of the space planes.

I probably had a knee-jerk reaction and attributed too much to you that other people keep saying, but it's easy to look deeply into mythology and pull a lot out of it. We just sort of pass through the part where Zeus turned into a swan and banged some hot broad because no one is arguing that it happened or that its objective reality is necessary to understanding Greek myths. The Greeks were awful smart people, but a lot of the things they believed were silly, even if they were also deep.

Plus, I do disagree that Christianity celebrates humanity, even as much as Judaism. The Hebrews were told to get married and fuck like rabbits. The Christians were told not to fuck at all if they could help it.

[Septic_Porpoise]

well, adam and eve were commanded in the garden of eden to fill the earth with people, and that commandment was never taken back.

christians are supposed to be getting it on for more baby happenings.

also, and this is in no way a slam on any agnostics/athiests that hang here, but most of the anti-religion folks that i run into in real life haven't the slightest clue about anything that has to do with religion. they go about shouting the evils of organized religion, when they really have no idea about what the things they're shouting about entail. i have met plenty of well educated and thoughtful folks in the anti-religion camp, but most of them seem to be standard bearers for the ignorance that they claim to hate.

[Archangel]

Paul (no, not me, that Jewish guy from Turkey) was in all likelihood a repressed homosexual. The vilification of sexuality in Christianity starts with him (Romans, is it?), and while I agree with 90% of what the man says, that right there has caused untold misery, and is one of the first examples of Christ's teachings being perverted - most smart people who looked at Christianity from a humanist viewpoint have lamented nothing as much as the strict separation of Eros and Caritas/Agape.

I keep coming back to Boccaccio, I can't help it.

If the figure of Christ is to encompass the entire human experience and all facets of love, then the exclusion of sexuality is a dangerous mistake on both fronts. And since to me, Christ still supersedes Paul (sorry, mate), I stand by what I said.

[Kerjack]

I find it silly the Love & Hate thread was merged with PhilOT but this is considered good enough to stand apart.

[Archangel]

Duly noted; flying fuck not given.

[freegood]

Love is an awesome force. It can destroy just as much as it creates. There's love of self and love for your own people. People suffer from loss of love, love unrequited, or an unreturned degree. Wars have started from proclaimed love of the abstract. Power barons might not buy it, but the cannon fodder are ready and willing in its name.

It is also love that leaves us the most vulnerable. And how we respond to vulnerability lies in the pages of our daily news. Would we still feel that way if everyone loved each other equally and unflinchingly? For that matter, would we feel as alive when that love is answered equally by everyone rather than from the one that it matters the most?

I don't think I would, but I imagine I'd feel less periods of misery. It's interesting how we are born to hoard our love as a finite quantity, and maybe it is. It can take time, energy, and effort to translate love into action. Sure love can be reaffirmed with a smile, and it doesn't hurt to give compassion. But how can universal love be realized?


Plus, I do disagree that Christianity celebrates humanity, even as much as Judaism. The Hebrews were told to get married and fuck like rabbits. The Christians were told not to fuck at all if they could help it.

The more I go to church, the more I think other Christians would consider that celebration of humanity idolatry. You can serve others through sacrifice, but better make sure the intent is for servicing God.

I think all (or almost all) American denominations focus on how steeped in sin we all are. It's begins with the extent of humanity's sin and onward for most to the lake of fire.

This is difficult to grasp or accept on the face of a loving God. One interpretation is that God loves us despite our sins and that beyond the deepness of our sin, there is that one last chance. Yet it seems like the standards are there for a good majority to lose. You can lower the bar, but there are definitely parts that aren't up to interpretation.

Hell is a good swift kick in the pants to motivate people into joining or serving. If there were eternal afterlives, rules are rules, and you better get to work pronto for you and your heathen friends.

For me to accept that message as faith would go against my intellectual concepts of a loving God. And emotionally, it isn't fair. It isn't right...even if you could say punishment is necessary for a Just God. So as it has been, my challenge for a loving and all powerful God is one that can answer an unjust world without eternal damnation. I'm more idealistic on this one than confident.

Paul (no, not me, that Jewish guy from Turkey) was in all likelihood a repressed homosexual. The vilification of sexuality in Christianity starts with him (Romans, is it?), and while I agree with 90% of what the man says, that right there has caused untold misery, and is one of the first examples of Christ's teachings being perverted - most smart people who looked at Christianity from a humanist viewpoint have lamented nothing as much as the strict separation of Eros and Caritas/Agape.

I keep coming back to Boccaccio, I can't help it.

If the figure of Christ is to encompass the entire human experience and all facets of love, then the exclusion of sexuality is a dangerous mistake on both fronts. And since to me, Christ still supersedes Paul (sorry, mate), I stand by what I said.

That's another part with the church I go that I don't agree with. Can't say I like feeling guilt. The fear is that sex itself diminishes one's closeness with God. I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable seeing angels while I'm fucking around or jacking off. And that wonderful euphoria afterwards, is that for God or the significant other? Details like that are fucking irritating that it's brought up in the first place, but I can't dismiss outright. I can see how that happens now in a ridiculously sexually repressed culture, but are Europeans closer to God with a more casual stance on sex?

Maybe neither way is the "best" way, and that our approaches are built upon the cultural scar tissue of Paul's angry writings about sex.

[Archetype]

I find it silly the Love & Hate thread was merged with PhilOT but this is considered good enough to stand apart.
I'm sure if Kenny Powers gave a 1497 word thesis on love & hate, that would have it's own thread too. This is not general conversation.

[Archangel]

Says 1508 here...

[NOTKyle]

I'll show you a silly belief.

http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/gallery/jesus_on_raptor.jpghttp://farm1.static.flickr.com/164/414131279_0f88ca8fe3.jpg?v=0

[Archetype]

Yay, silly beliefs!

http://www.nataliedee.com/061705/underwater-unicorn.jpg

[Archangel]

Diminishing returns much?

[wonderllama]

You know, I always find it funny when people who can barely spell "faith" sneer upon it because they find it "silly" - it's the arrogance of our times, one which Kierkegaard so often lamented, to totally misunderstand Descartes, to doubt (and criticise, ridicule) before understanding.


Not to get side-tracked on one bit of your post, but I think one of the problems with this is how do you measure "understanding"?
How do you teach it?
When I was lecturing, 'understanding' was one of the areas on which students were to be graded, and yet I believe it is a very difficult thing to gauge.

Everyone develops their own understanding in my books, they are presented with information and from that point it is up to them. Each will process the information differently, some will scan it, some will really think about it and others will seek out more information. In a class of 100 students, you will get 100 different levels of information processing and further to that, 100 different levels of understanding.

But...it doesn't mean that the person who has the most information and thinks about the subject more is the most correct. They don't 'understand' it better than the other 99, because you can't measure understanding.

Having said all that, when it comes to mathematics where there are formulae, theorems and the like which DO produce absolute answers (usualy), you can make some assumptions about whether something is being understood, but when it comes to something like religion and christianity and one's own beliefs or non-beliefs, there is nothing to measure it against. Understanding isn't necessarily the #1 factor. I know Arch talks about faith, but I don't believe faith and understanding are connected.

I'm sure I am just as guilty of this, but research into any topic you have faith in (one way or the other) generally only tends to strenthen your belief or faith in your position. I've read plenty of stuff about religion, faith and the like, and yes, they do only make me believe my position more, just in the same way in which they do the opposite for those who do believe.

As originally stated, those who sneer at faith are indeed ignorant because they fail to see that their total lack of faith is in fact a form of faith in itself. I have total and utter faith in my non-belief of God and the associated belief systems based on his existence.

[Archangel]

What I meant was rather more simple.

I once used the metaphor of elevator muzak: Imagine if someone had turned, say, Bach's toccata and fugue into a hotel lounge, or indeed an elevator muzak "easy listening" piece.

Now imagine that someone came along who had no idea of who Bach was, what a fugue is, or when the Baroque epoch was, and he started heaping shit on the muzak about it being silly, badly executed, shallow, and setting a bad example for kids who wanted to get into music. Obviously, in his ignorant indignation, he would never realise how ridiculous he looked; however, the question is how things would become if the muzak was basically all which everybody but for a select few knew about Bach.

90% of criticism I see levelled at Christianity today is directed at the dumbed down, Sunday school variety of it - which is fine; hell, I'm the first to rage against that shit. However, what I cannot tolerate is people acting as if that most superficial stratum was all there was to the whole thing.

I mean, these people actually believe that they're smart. (http://www.venganza.org/2009/02/04/i-am-at-a-loss-for-words/comment-page-6/) Put simply, if you believe that Christians actually believe in a bearded man in the sky, you have no business discussing ANYTHING above football scores and Britney Spears lyrics.

That was the intention of the original post, by the way. To get rid of the purely literal layer, and engage in one possible hermeneutical exegesis of Scripture - one that even disregards the most stringent articles of faith, and tries to build upon a lowest common metaphysical denominator. Strip away the imagery, and get into the meat of things. I fervently hope that it is far harder to dismiss my OP as "silly" than the literal imagery people concentrate on.

If allegory isn't acknowleged by either side, theological discourse doesn't happen. Nobody ridicules Plato for saying that he believes in fictional men in a cave looking at a wall; but for some reason, similar allegories used by Christians are the most ludicrous thing on Earth. Nobody realises the amazing skill involved in using those allegories to explain the most complex matters to the simplest of minds, because nobody sees anything behind the imagery.

And that just makes me sad.

[Insomniac]

As I think I've said in another thread, those Southern Baptist twats you always say you shouldn't be lumped in with pull a tremendous amount of allegorical stuff out of bible passages. The history of Israel is about more than just Israel, but it is the history of Israel.

That's the whole sticking point. If Plato claimed Socrates actually saw a cave full of men chained to a wall with shadows cast on it, yes, Plato would be ridiculed. We might say, "That's a wonderful image," but we'd also say, "The dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. Who does he take us for?"

Christians almost never stay at the purely literal level. A miracle doesn't mean a whole lot to your daily life if it happened two millennia before you were born. So you read for the meaning and significance and how Luke told the story compared with Matthew or Mark. But once you say there were no miracles, you're not really Christian any more, and if you say they're not important at all, you're not really discussing Christianity any more.

There's more to them than the immediate thing, but they aren't just parables. Plato had an allegory of a cave, and the Jews wrote a history book and the Christians wrote biographies of a Hebrew demi-god.

We're going around in circles, but this is the ultimate problem: you call the silly stuff superficial. I argue it's the foundation. When you climb higher, there's really good stuff, and it's often very pretty, but it's always resting on the absurd, easily and rightfully ridiculed parts.

[Archangel]

As I think I've said in another thread, those Southern Baptist twats you always say you shouldn't be lumped in with pull a tremendous amount of allegorical stuff out of bible passages. The history of Israel is about more than just Israel, but it is the history of Israel.

Embellished. Allegorised. Hyperbolic. Especially Genesis. Nobody's doubting that the battle of Jericho, the Babylonian, exile or the captivity in Egypt happened; hell, I'll even grant that Sarah DID have a baby after menopause, but in betwen all that, something tells me that Noah's Ark didn't go down exactly like that. Hell, Athanasius Kircher was a bleedin' Jesuit...

That's the whole sticking point. If Plato claimed Socrates actually saw a cave full of men chained to a wall with shadows cast on it, yes, Plato would be ridiculed. We might say, "That's a wonderful image," but we'd also say, "The dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. Who does he take us for?"

Yeah, philosophy has a luxury which religion lacks, namely the ability to intellectualise everything, to differentiate between imagery and meaning, because it's meant to be hermetic. Religion, by its nature, has to be inclusive, and thus, lines will be blurred. Anybody who discusses Plato comes equipped with certain pre-requisites of discourse; the average church-goer (or his citic), not so much.

Christians almost never stay at the purely literal level. A miracle doesn't mean a whole lot to your daily life if it happened two millennia before you were born. So you read for the meaning and significance and how Luke told the story compared with Matthew or Mark. But once you say there were no miracles, you're not really Christian any more, and if you say they're not important at all, you're not really discussing Christianity any more.

Says who? The fact aside that I never declared anything to be "unimportant", who has decided that an agnostic who believes in the fundamental rightness of Christ's message - detached from all discussions on divinity (or taking those as mere allegory) - and tries to live his life according to His teachings isn't actually a Christian, after all? The Codex Theodosianus? Fuck that.

There's more to them than the immediate thing, but they aren't just parables. Plato had an allegory of a cave, and the Jews wrote a history book and the Christians wrote biographies of a Hebrew demi-god.

And I do believe in the latter. As I said before, the OP was never intended to show the extent of my beliefs, more to make some of the intellectual foundations of our faith more palatable to a discerning atheist mind...

Where the fuck IS Morfin, anyway?

We're going around in circles, but this is the ultimate problem: you call the silly stuff superficial. I argue it's the foundation. When you climb higher, there's really good stuff, and it's often very pretty, but it's always resting on the absurd, easily and rightfully ridiculed parts.

I don't. All I'm saying is that from a purely epistemological viewpoint, I'll take anything literal which was designed for human consciences of two or even four millennia ago with a ton of salt.

[fuzzystuff]

Silly is not to believe, I believe in god and me.

[STDSkillz]

Silly is not to believe, I believe in god and me.

You've convinced me. Well played, sir.

[Insomniac]

What I have in particular is a kind of Christianity that oscillates between Augustine and Pelagius. Whoever or whatever Jesus was, people marvelled at him because he "taught with authority." There have been very few authoritative teachers in the world, though there have been plenty of authoritarian demagogues. It is possible, just possible, that by attempting the techniques of self-control that Christ taught something can be done about our schizophrenia -- the recognition of which goes back to the Book of Genesis. I believe that the ethics of the Gospels can be given a secular application. I am sure too that this has never been seriously tried.

The basis of the teaching is as realistic as Professor Skinner's, though the terms are rather emotive. Sin is the name given to what the behaviourists would like to cut, burn, or drug out. There is a parallel between the cohesion of the universe and the unity of man. This makes a kind of sense out of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In order that the unity of man may be more than a mere aspiration, love, charity, tolerance have to be deliberately practised. The technique of loving others has to be learned, like any other technique. The practice of love is, we may say, ludic: it has to be approached like a game. It is necessary first to learn to love oneself, which is difficult: love of others will follow more easily then, however. If I learn to love my right hand, as a marvel of texture, structure and psychological coordination, I have a better chance of loving the right hand of the Gestapo interrogator. It is difficult to love one's enemies, but the difficulty is part of the interest of the game.

The serious practitioners of the game, or ludus amoris, will find it useful to form themselves into small groups, or "churches," and meet at set intervals for mutual encouragement and inspiration. They may find it valuable to invoke the spirit of the founder of the game. Indeed, they may gain strength from conjuring his, in a sense, real presence in the form of a chunk of bread and a bottle of wine. If they believe in the divine provenance of the founder, they will be able to strengthen their sense of the need to promote human love to the end of human unity, since this is a figure of the unity of the divinely created cosmos. Men and women must practice the technique of love in the real world and not seal themselves off into communes or convents. The existence of the State is acknowledged, but it is accepted that it has little to do with the real purpose of living. Caesar has his own affairs, which he considers serious but are really frivolous. The practice of love has nothing to do with politics. Laughter is permitted, indeed encouraged. Man was put together by God, though it took him a long time. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Pray for Dr. Skinner. May Pavlov rest in peace. Amen.