General religious discussion thread

[NameIess]

5 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

For anyone new to this, I am referring to idea from The Gospel of Christian Atheism, which I find to be a text that is fairly aligned in notions to my own views of the headless and heartless image of a Dead God. I will also admit that I am still in the process of reading the book and figuring out how to express my sentiments about this. Please understand that my presentation of my sincerely felt beliefs is being trialed here, not being finalized.

@NameIessI think you are hitting it the closest with "Jesus is the sole person of the Godhead" or at least something more like "the whole Godhead was within Jesus". The book makes a big point of Kenosis, which I have taken to mean that God sacrificed aspects/became limited in nature in order to incarnate as Jesus. The author speaks of Word becoming flesh, becoming subject to history and the changing nature of the world. This negates God as a transcendent being and instead enmeshes God and the Word of God within the material flows of history, just as later Hegelians enmeshed his notion of spirit into the material flows.

I think this way of thinking creates a mode of Christianity which sees itself as wholly apart from the Jewish and the Muslim ways of thinking, as God the Father is also there. This creates a world where God was truly dead to even the Apostles on that fateful Saturday, which I think is the epoch the world remains in until the Pelagian project of a worldly paradise is realized for all souls.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a chair to assemble and some reading to do. I would love feedback on my post-christian totally-a-heresy beliefs.

The heresy there would be believing that Jesus was divested of Godhood when he became human. Jesus is fully man, but also fully God.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Well, my literal beliefs are that the gospels are largely as made up as every other world historic scripture. I think there are some good ideas there and some bad ones.

But also, Pelagianism is literally a defined heresy. I just think it is a better idea than the alternatives.

[Schizoposting]

I don't care much for religious debate, but I must say that I find the claim that "humanity is inherently evil" to be genuinely hilarious; it's one of those things that's no longer politically correct to say anymore, but which perfectly incapsulates the essence of religion—namely that it's a mechanism for human debasement. (Although to be clear, as I said before, this is only the subjective reflection of the objective debasement of humanity that already exists in society.)

7 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Well, my literal beliefs are that the gospels are largely as made up as every other world historic scripture. I think there are some good ideas there and some bad ones.

Why bother with religion at this point? You don't need belief in God to justify Spinozism, Nietzscheism, or whatever it is that you believe.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

@Schizoposting, let me start by addressing the notion of the Fall and the Fallen World: This is why I keep pointing to Pelagianism. That is a wikipedia article on it, but I first heard of the idea during a lecture on early christianity off The Great Courses Plus. If people must literally believe in God and Jesus, then I would hope they would do so in a way that negates the concept of this world still being Fallen until an apocalyptic event happens. And if there must be an apocalypse, then let my supposed moment of confronting the corpse of God be it.

Also, I do not "believe in God". I think God is a useful concept to have as a referent. I cannot understand Spinoza or Hegel or Nietzsche or Descartes without there being some notion of God that I can understand as being produced by a historic process. Spinoza actually writes explicitly about the nature of God as he knew it. To map God to a category as unreal as the three sided square would make this all impossible to understand. 

Also, on the thing of pushing heresies: @NameIess, what if I posed the idea that everyone is born as much fully God as Jesus was? That his specialness was merely the awareness of this fact, and that he could know himself as God and yet love those who were ignorant of that and acted in unGodly ways was his greatest virtue? Does this deplete the notion of God such that it becomes unacceptable to think this way for you?

Edited yesterday at 11:28 AM by ParaTulip

[NameIess]

4 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Also, on the thing of pushing heresies: @NameIess, what if I posed the idea that everyone is born as much fully God as Jesus was? That his specialness was merely the awareness of this fact, and that he could know himself as God and yet love those who were ignorant of that and acted in unGodly ways was his greatest virtue? Does this deplete the notion of God such that it becomes unacceptable to think this way for you?

I believe the Bible is infallibly true and that contradicts the Bible, so it is an incorrect way of thinking about God.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Well, then I might ask:

What's going on in John 17: 20-26 then? 

[Schizoposting]

7 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

@Schizoposting, let me start by addressing the notion of the Fall and the Fallen World: This is why I keep pointing to Pelagianism. That is a wikipedia article on it, but I first heard of the idea during a lecture on early christianity off The Great Courses Plus. If people must literally believe in God and Jesus, then I would hope they would do so in a way that negates the concept of this world still being Fallen until an apocalyptic event happens. And if there must be an apocalypse, then let my supposed moment of confronting the corpse of God be it.

Also, I do not "believe in God". I think God is a useful concept to have as a referent. I cannot understand Spinoza or Hegel or Nietzsche or Descartes without there being some notion of God that I can understand as being produced by a historic process. Spinoza actually writes explicitly about the nature of God as he knew it. To map God to a category as unreal as the three sided square would make this all impossible to understand. 

To Hegel, God (more precisely, the absolute idea) is nothing more than the process of thinking itself; as Feuerbach pointed out, this is just a fetishism of the human capacity for reason, projected as an external object. Of course, the latter was unable to overcome Spinozism, because he conceptualized humanity as a purely passive, and static subject.

The point is, saying that you need God to understand philosophy is reversing the causality; Christianity, for instance, is quite famously a bastardized version of Neo-Platonism. So, the framework does not actually add anything.

[NameIess]

6 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Well, then I might ask:

What's going on in John 17: 20-26 then? 

Jesus is praying that Christians will be united with one another so that the world will see that unity and know the truth of the gospel.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

I think having a real referent for God which can be used to validate and dis-validate statements about God is useful for me. I agree that becoming too hyped about rationality and reason is a bad way to see God. I think William Blake was right to mildly demonize Urizen as the bad divinity.

@NameIessBut he is also calling for the those who would follow him to be one with him and thus one with God, is he not? 

Verse 23 of the chapter

Quote

I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

and verse 26.

Quote

I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.

And I say to you: I seek not to end the spirit of universal love, but to go beyond the limited form of the father and the son, to be beyond the practice of religion and the church and not to reverse the good of such things. We live now in an age where women are equal humans to men in the eyes of many, which was unthinkable in the historic era of the gospels. There is no error in speaking the language and ways of the times, but there is in forgetting those are not these times.

Also, Paul can get bent about his views on women.