ParaTulip

Hey, welcome to the shard! Since you like both and are pretty deep into the Cosmere stuff: Any feelings on how it compares to Lotr and star wars?

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.

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.

Welcome to trying to process trauma. Every time you take the memory out of the horrible dark box you shoved it in so as to avoid thinking about it, something different comes out!

Since the topic has turned into being about various concepts of Christendom: What do folks make of the difference between saying "Jesus is God" as opposed to "God is Jesus"? The book I have been reading brought this up a pithy way to describe the difference between its concept of radical Christianity as opposed to religious Christianity.

To reiterate my trauma in a more abstracted fashion: I had been once fully willing to die for my mother and even acted upon that will, only for her to later attack me with verbal/psychological abuse with sexual content. I realized, in the moment of that suffering the nature of the cycle of abuse (that Page of Hell I posted here in this thread being an effort to illustrate that realization), that even this horror which I was suffering was not the scale of human misery. I knew there must be others who suffered the same abject horror and yet were not as well fed, clothed, or sheltered as I, those who were made far more helpless in their struggle against the dark seeds buried in their hearts against their will. That my pleas for God to spare the world the evil I might become, should those seeds bloom, by ending it all went unanswered, that I felt as if a just God who acts in the world would have to at least provide this for those who were that much more helpless to not even know they were being forced into a wicked mold by the cycle of trauma and abuse, this showed me God as a dead thing, that a personage of God was never real in the first place. This is a view acquired through a horror which even old myths and legends do not compare, and thus it is beyond any scripture's awe to dislodge from my heart. On the matter of if claims of the afterlife are deceptive: I think they must be under certain standards of the notion. It is at least the case that the perception of there being a realm of the afterlife must be taken on faith and cannot be presented like facts about the material world. It is wholly true for you to say "I believe in my heart that there will be such a world after this one" but it is another to say "I know there is such a world beyond this one". Whereas my claim, that the body will become the substance which gives rise to myriad new forms of life is one which I can reference to physical examples. I suppose the point of comparison would be to the works of William Blake, which you can see here. His writings bear the same touch of the mystical that I try to carry into my own, that I feel may exist amongst the sufi poets. In those sublime verses, I find the truest expression of that which makes the pursuit of the creation of a good divinity worth doing, even at the risk of falling into madness.

Ya, @Cosmer, I think this is why long as decades series are just a problem. The Final Empire trilogy loses more and more of its place as The misborn books with each new release. The productivitst-novelist is just such a self-sabotaging artist in my view.

@NameIessI made that page over a month ago. It is my personal experience with Hell. @Mint11, I keep feeling like Muslims are far more reasonable people about this stuff. For example, my trauma-induced perception of a world of a dead God is actually the one thing I am strongly confident that the Quran accounts for due to having gotten exactly far enough into a digital copy translated into English in my freshman year of high school to get frustrated, as a stupid teenager would, by the idea of the wool over the eyes of a non-believer. Having come to terms with my trauma having genuinely blinded me in other ways, mostly to body language but sometimes to other things, I find this very sensible. I would hear more of your ideas on how and why the use of the afterlife as a means of promoting righteous actions is a worthy thing, even if it might be deceptive. I heard once of a buddhist notion which says that it is fine to lie to the less enlightened so long as it is for a merciful end, just as a parent might tell their children the Ice Cream truck is outside so they should hurry up and get out for it when really the house is on fire but the parent is worried that will merely produce panic. I assume there is something about how a tradition of poetry instead of iconography has produced an alignment? For all that is splendid in my handwriting, I still can't illustrate things beyond abstractions. I would be very interested to hear how you feel about my various poems. I will try to post more of them here when I think my composition of them is worth being shown off.

Removing the option of purgatory was a big part of the initial protestant shift. The whole deal with indulgences was that they were supposed to buy off the time remaining on the path to Heaven for a dead person who had sinned. This dynamic eventually made it so that purgatory was this thousands of years long thing for some people who were still reasonably decent Christians. Sell an indulgence for a living person was a corruption even in the eyes of the church of the time, in my recollection. I think everyone has cancelled limbo out? Unbaptized infants just get a free pass into Heaven even for catholics.

@NameIess, I have only one reply for your many fragmented words: Behold the Hell of my witness.

Oh, I have a poem for this precise notion. Earth, Tezcatlipoca Christ Gaze up to see that one most worthy sacrifice. Know that, by his death, all of the stinking rust of mankind is made new soil. And that is part of a set of other poems that express very deeply held feelings of mine. It is a poem that I use specifically to dissociate from the desires for an individual yet joyous death that have been part of inner world since I was in the 7th grade. I tell myself that it is impossible that my death could make the world better than any effort on my part to help others while still living. If you recall my earlier words, I was previously one to go and hand deliver food to the poor on the street until I had been told that such actions carry the risk of death. And death means no more helping people, and thus such things are self-defeating. I am instead joining a local organization that does community gardening and food distribution, hoping that there is a safer way in numbers. Were it that my death would remake God into what I think would be a form worthy of the ideals I hold for such, I would try my best to accept the horrors. But I cannot let myself think such things, lest I bring horrible despair to my grandmother. Also, on seeing the hand of God, I have had two events which I have later come to understand as mundane but which felt of such miracles in the moment. The first was when I was about 5 years old and at a park. I saw a patch of blue sky that seemed to stand in front of a bit of the play park for but a fleeting moment. It was such a curious thing to me that, when I found a strange adult woman and told her that I could not find my mother and also of that patch of blue, she told me it was my guardian angel. Having no counter argument, I accepted that until such a time as I learned how the brain and the eye work better. At that point I realized I was simply experiencing a slight optical illusion, but it was also a small miracle that nothing bad happened. The second event happened to me more recently, I composed a poem, which went thus: If I can make penance, and I can make amends, then I can live with myself as long as it takes. and I observed what I took to be the real version of creationspren, the dance of white lines swirling around me amidst the act of creation. But I assumed this was but a trick of my mind had in the moment of creative flow, and then later I saw a mote of dust falling in the air and realized that my mind had been simply turning the cumulative motion of dust into trails of light. These two cases are a way to say that the Hand of God is, to me, a preference in ways of seeing instead of a reality. The choice to call a series of events lining up just so a coincidence or a synchronicity lies in the mind of the observer, though again there are ways to make someone unable to have this freedom of thought through coercive means. The fear of a bad afterlife is such a coercive means. That straying from the path after being started on it is to be met with divine punishment is a fault in many religions. The faith for which my sacrifice could be splendid would be one where the point of paths is that each person is meant to wander freely towards the act of creating the union of Heaven and Earth, rather than seeing themselves as being due a Heaven after death. Death is the second end point of life for me, and thus every moment before it is one over the sum of moments that exist between birth and death. Were there to be an infinite life beyond death, it would reduce to nothing the moments of life in their value as irreplaceable things. What is a million years of hardship to a true immortal? Less than a day of my life.

I do not speak for my own ears to hear. I write so others can read. All you can say is "you may", and then you defer to another authority for the why and why not, or you pose a hypothetical of massive reward and disreward in an unseen place. But here I am, survivor of what many say ought kill a soul, and I proffer the path of a heaven before living eyes. I could show you a page that illustrates hell, written in my own hand, for I have survived that too. I see the true thing to accept in Jesus is that even a faultless soul must accept being the sacrifice for others; Even a perfect saint must die and become dirt. But then dirt may become soil, and soil may become a field of precious flowers. The biggest flaw of the monumentality of Christ, outside of the evil done in his name, is that his act of transmuting a God who was like a binding curse upon his people, forcing them to live in rigid patterns, into a God who forgives and would build another world to make right what was lacking in this one has been made inaccessible to anyone else. We all ought be able to spend our lives remaking the concept of God or the gods.

Individual agency is a fiction. it is sometimes useful, and sometimes empowering, but it is a fiction. We are not perfectly unfree, but we are not perfectly free either. To say a person is one or the other is to call them an angel or a demon; obviously no mortal soul is so. I would prefer if people opened their eyes to how to help one another gain freedom, to have a sense of what chains and unchains themselves, than to hear another person make a definitive statement. The laws of any society are made by either the assent of the members of that society (in the good case) or imposed by the will of some fraction, minority, or singularity of that society (in the bad case). You are supposing what I see as the bad case is the case for the Heavenly order, and thus I am once again glad I am supposed to have the option to depart your eternal Omelas after affirming my own nature in the highest of places. I must ask: Why speak of a debt already paid? Heaven and Hell I get as ways to interact with the parts of the brain that act in accordance with anticipated rewards and punishments, but why remind people of a debt already done? I would simply prefer to imagine the debt is the other way around: We are owed our chance to leave a mark upon the world by the horror of being brought into it. It is only delusion which allows someone to imagine themself as eternal. It is this very folly that creates a debt owned to the self that is then projected onto the hidden places of the world in error, but its true resting place is behind your eyes.

Heaven and Hell are tools to create desires. The person telling you what Hell is like and what Heaven is like tends to have a certain idea of what those desires out to be. Notice how @Mysticis talking about owed debts that must be repaid. Do you think you owe a debt for your being born, or do you think you are owed a debt for the agony of existing? I know which I feel. In my view, the real Hell is the cycle of abuse and revenge. When people are hurt in such a way that they are helpless but to hurt others in turn, they are in and of Hell. When people choose to meet violence with greater violence, they are in and of Hell. Humanity is yet to spend a single day in Heaven, because such would be a world where we are all free of the horrible rebirths of our faults. When you die, in my view, you become part of the vast dead God. You are without feeling and without thought, but every molecule of your body is given over to the myriad other things which have longed to embrace you as hungering mouths. When people grieve you, they lend their heart to you and you are felt once more. When people remember you, you are once more given a brain to be thought with. Sadly, even the greatest of noble heroes are forgotten or misremembered with time, but this great cycle of flows is beautiful in part because there is always a chance for something new to come about.