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Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.
This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.
The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.
Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.
For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.
The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.
As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.
It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.
That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.
Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.
The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.
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“The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project,”
Z-man: It’s clear the Jesuits screwed you up in high school.
Reasoning the Christain faith is the first thing presented to us in John 1:1. It’s so simple.
The twisted complex Jesuit modern mind has led many inter perdition from what was plaining evident those generations who have came and died before us.
Let me show you:
John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
In the original language this was penned:
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος
So the word “Word” is a poor English translation of λόγος which is the greek work for “logos” which by definition means “reason”.
There you have it, quick explanation of faith by reason.
God is reason, from reason we get love. Have faith.
More found here:
Repost by request— Quiz: Which comes first: Logic or Love? | Barnhardt
Come back into the light.
John 1:5 And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Maybe you guys should consider starting a new religion. Why use an existing religion when you can start your own?
Tertullian’s opinion was in the minority. Most of the prominent early Christians believed that classical civilization was a preparation for the triumph of the Gospel. Greek rational philosophy (not Greek religion) prepared people for the Christian message of monotheism and the Pax Romana allowed the wide distribution of the Christian message throughout a large empire.
James Kunstler has been silenced. I cannot find him anywhere.
Mark Steyn links to Zman via Radio Derb
https://www.steynonline.com/14632/the-uniparty-turns-literal
Christianity is a poorly made Psyop against Rome by Jews
Jesus nonsense fill with acceptance towards out group which only benefits Jews lived in Rome at that time
more learned about that Christianity stuff make you think it’s absurd, is it early communism or Just makes confuse on citizen of Rome
One thing is sure that it’s directly against logos, the logic from Greek philosophy
If white people read Plato instead of bible, Jews never had a chance to conquer white people
A fresh rapprochement between Christian doctrine and reason is coming and has already begun, but it may be that none of us live to see its fruition.
I can provide a glimpse of that. I can tell you that Genesis 1 is also a philosophical treatise on how one creates anything packaged as a narrative, and properly understood, it provides a working model that makes those hooting about Order and Chaos look like primitive shaman. I can tell you that the Bible carries an implicit understanding of evolutionary processes in describing the cultural evolution of human society (Gen 3:16 – “desire [to control]”) and then prescribing the correction for it thousands of years later (Eph 5:22-33). I can tell you the biological basis for the story of a prophet calling down fire one day, running for his life and hiding like a wounded animal the next, and then being treated gently by God in a deep understanding of the human creature that no fiction writer has ever possessed (1 Kings 18:16 – 19:18).
This is not the proper relationship between faith and reason, however, and it is not the biblical basis for faith either. The God of the Bible develops and expects faith through first and second hand experience which is then used to lead people into realities they do not understand (Ex 4:1-9; Ex 7:1-5; Judges 2:10-11; Mt 8:8-10; Mark 8:17-21; Luke 7:20-22; John 5:31-47). It is not merely commanded. It is not reasoned from nothing. It must be lived. Faith is the expectation that what we have experienced will continue – often in spite of misguided belief or desire – and reason protects faith from misguided belief and desire. Faith forged in experience and then purified in reason provides a basis for the belief that we can live in truth at all. You might even call that a scientific method.
Neither the Christian nor the Pagan of this age will accept the coming rapprochement for the same reason: they value the traditions and doctrines built upon the mystery of their ignorance and false beliefs far more than mere reason. One example of that is the irony of the Big Bang Theory, which says that black holes explode despite all reason and evidence to the contrary while providing a model for the expansion of the universe that makes it look like God spoke creation into being. The internet informs me that our leading lights in complicated mental models with questionable truth content have largely moved on from this theory for obvious reasons. It also tells me that String Theory is next on the chopping block.
Both the Christian and the Pagan will have to march ahead one death at a time. The question is who gets resurrected into the age to come.
You could look at including poetic narrative to your duopoly. There is more in heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy (and theology). C.S.Lewis had a little different take on this subject. He wrote about an essential core of proper living as respecting “The shape of horse and woman/ Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.”
Is it possible without rejecting science and technology?
Z’s analysis vis-a-vis faith and reason is not incorrect but it is insufficient.
The best way to understand this problem is through Nietzsche’s aphorism “Christianity is Platonism for the masses.” Like Plato, Christianity creates a “Guardian class” of clergy supposedly selflessly dedicated to the truth, and personifying the virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude and — this is important — an approximation of justice.
Because the main difference between Christianity and Platonism is that the Just City proposed in Plato’s Republic is unobtainable in this world, and justice can only be achieved in the hereafter. The example of Christ crucified by the perfidious Jewish Pharisees, like the trial and execution of Socrates, demonstrates that it is rational to understand that justice cannot be achieved in the political world by Fallen men.
Further, the world as we experience it is the result of God’s reason. From Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson, rational people believed that the world was created by an intelligent Creator, and the objective principles of nature, such as the Law of Gravity and Mathematics were as immutable as Human Nature.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, though, Reason was used for a different purpose: not to understand and accept the immutable Nature of Man, but to understand and use the rational principles of Nature to transform Man into a being of his own creation — and to create an artificial environment suitable for this artificial nature.
Indeed, this is the primary aim of Marxism and the process of dialectical materialism — “New Socialist Man,” etc. etc.
The best contemporary example of this is the Sexual Revolution. It was an immutable principle of God’s Nature that mammals reproduced sexually. Reason instructed us that the female had a uterus and ovaries for the bearing of offspring, and that the anus existed as an excretory organ.
Today, in the artificially-created dystopia in which we live, Reason is used so that physicians may repair torn and prolapsed anuses from man-on-man anal intercourse and provide IVF to surrogate mothers so that married gay men may “bear” children. And this is considered “liberation.” From what? From “Nature and Nature’s God.”
So today, “rational” people believe that “gender is fluid” and while only benighted, ignorant Trump-voting rubes believe that men marry women and engage in vaginal sexual intercourse to procreate.
As a colleague of mine in grad school once remarked, “Modernity is heresy.”
A final point about this “Athens and Jerusalem” thing. Yes, Strauss used the phrase repeatedly, and he was not wrong IF you agree that the “Judeo-Christian” tradition and Greek Platonic thought are the twin pillars of western Civilization.
HOWEVER, he carefully avoided the fact that Christianity, properly understood, is a REJECTION of Judaic tribalism and the singularity of being “God’s Chosen” and an affirmation of universal, immutable principles, as is Platonism.
The more accurate description is not the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, but rather “Platonic-Christian” tradition.
(Not for nothing did Christianity catch on first in Roman-occupied Greece — the early evangelists like Paul preached to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, etc.)
“The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. “
It’s not an entirely hopeless project. Reason can make the leaps of faith look like something manageable and even reasonable in of themselves, rather than the Grand Canyon. The mysteries remain, but someone can trust that they are mysteries, rather than arbitrary random rules established 1000 years ago.
One of the failings of the 20th century is a lack of widespread apologetics to address at times almost mundane questions. My experience of my elders was that everything was mystery to which they no answers. Reverse engineering Christianity is possible and I think a good idea in the face of modern skepticism.
Your question did not sound offensive to me at all as a practicing Catholic. I think it’s sound question that leads to places that are worthy of thought. In fact, “Is Jesus a lunatic?” suggests an honest familiarity with Scripture that many today lack.
Jesus was proved to be for cause he performed miracles only god could perform. He also said he was god. The stuff he said that is a mystery is stuff you would take on “faith” like the trinity (even though there are logical or resonable aspects to the trinity like knowing yourself so Peregrinus that your thought becomes you, or the word)
so I just don’t get this big leap of faith talk. It’s not a leap of faith at all.
As I wait for approval, my view is that due to the population not being compatible with reason, the cult of reason has not replaced Christianity. Rather, something else.
You can certainly see in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, the worship of technology and logic and reason. Understandable in his case as he was brought up in a household with the sort of Folk Christianity beliefs that were thinly Christianized pagan beliefs that reading both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, terrorized him as a child. See the Death Watch Beetle, or the view that lightning would strike him for lacking his Christian duties and prayers. However, we are very short on guys like Twain (he was the equivalent of an airline pilot today as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi). And a good century of slaughter by technology, logic, and reason undermined faith in reason.
Indeed, industrial pollution and the Atomic Bomb stand as a rebuke to reason. So even among those inclined to reason by nature would tend to reject it given its fruits so clear to see, so to speak.
I don’t think reason has replaced Christian Faith. Rather, faith in Christ was replaced by faith in magical black people, and now the Rainbow.
Think about people with hobbies. Or those who ride motorcycles for fun by choice. Both offer the ability for those with >110 IQs to turn off all the thinking for total concentration on a task at hand. Carpentry, cooking (as a hobby), other things turn off the all the extraneous thinking, and direct it into intense focus. This is something only those with higher IQs need, as the dull and low IQ live in an endless now.
Think of the people you know who have hobbies and are intensely focused on them. They may not be very high level geniuses but the focus gives them relief which is why they do it. As tool-makers, this is of course an evolutionary pathway long trodden by the human race.
Instead, around the 1950s, though there were earlier attempts at worship, Christ was replaced by the Magical Black guy. Brought to full fruition by the Prophet Morgan Freeman and the Savior, Barack Obama. Of course, there are always more magical people to worship so the sacred Rainbow was brought forth.
This is mostly a religion of cool Wine Aunts, childless cat ladies, AWFLs, and other problem hair White women. [It is rare to see a matronly Hispanic lady worship either the Rainbow or the Magical Black guy].
Reason only appeals to >110 IQ White guys. We have a huge shortage of that, so it stands to reason (haha) that the real substitute religion would appeal to just a different faith. It was in a Hollywood movie, it must be true!
There’s a quote from Star Trek: DS9 that seems apt here. This was the one Star Trek show that actually made religion a central pillar of its story through the Bajorans who were depicted as deeply spiritual people worshipping what they perceived as gods but could also be described as “wormhole aliens”. Anyway.
The quote, if I recall it correctly, is from the main Bajoran character, Major Kira, explaining her faith to another character:
“That’s the thing about faith. If you have it, no explanation is necessary. If you don’t have it, no explanation is ever enough.”
Tocqueville- Equality of conditions persuades men to conceive an instinctive disbelief in the supernatural and a very lofty, often exaggerated, conception of human reason.
Human opinions form only a sort of intellectual dust which swirls in every direction, unable to settle or find stability.
Whatever happens, you will never come across true exercise of power among men, except by the free agreement of their wills; only patriotism or religion can carry, over a long period, the whole body of citizens toward the same goal.
It amuses me to no end that the people commenting here about how science is just some evil trick by Jewish pedophiles and evolution isn’t real can only do so via a fantastically complicated machine that couldn’t exist without a sophisticated understanding of Physics.
Idk, I’ve always found scripture to be highly rational. That Jesus spent so much time calling out the Jews might not be rational if one’s goal is not to be murdered by Jews. But if you’re the Messiah conquering death, it’s a rational and necessary step.
I think Thomas Aquinas did a pretty good job on rationality.
https://isidore.co/aquinas/ContraGentiles1.htm
What we mistakenly call “Science!” today represents the abandonment of reason. The priests of the New Religion tell us what Science! commands. And like the shaman of old, the priests of the New Religion frequently bob and weave their way through the latest forebodings and dictates of their gods. The Science! gods currently forbid any criticism of their priests (scientists, bureaucrats), for example, or of the temple (government). Noticing obvious things, like the complete failure of Science! to predict changes in climate, is a major sin.
The problems with the Christian church in the West is the abandonment of rationality in favor of increasingly bizarre and secular desires.
Look at the collapse in Church attendance after COVID. Once people figured out that the Church is just another wholly-owned subsidiary of the State, a whole lot of people shrugged and walked away from organized religion. Christianity will endure, but the irrationality of organized religion is destroying those institutions.
Another source that must be considered in evaluating early Christianity is the First and Second Apology of Justin Martyr. In his First Apology he starts by saying essentially that Christians are saying about Jesus only what the Greeks are saying about their gods, but what Christians are saying is true. Of course, he doesn’t go on to demonstrate Christian truth versus non-Christian falsehood. Christianity may have been much closer to Greek thought from the beginning, particularly since almost all scholars regard the four canonical gospels as literature and not as history. Considered as literature, there are so many parallels in non-Christian literature that many scholars simply see the gospels as examples of classical literatur which happen to be set in Galilee with a Jewish protagonist. Christianity happened to be the classical literary religion that prospered, but it didn’t differ all that much from many other stories.
Choose one:
Nihilism, meaninglessness, scientism, without any sense of the numinous mystery all around us.
or
The universe is a great work of art, overflowing with meaning; complex, intelligible order. Layers of meaning that we continue to discover.
Can it truly be,that the Cosmos is the most beautiful, elegant work of art ever made…by nobody?
I see no reason to believe one way or the other.
Having followed this and many other blogs over the years, it is clear that you guys are mainly about defending the West in the context of white nationalism. The question you need to ask yourselves is how useful Christianity is to accomplishing this objective.
What would you offer as an alternative, Abe?
There are certain world-views that whites tend to subscribe to more than most others that offer competitive advantage in productive accomplishments and what not. So much so that practicing such values is derided as “acting white”. Perhaps these traits and values should be emphasized in such a society.
Abe:
So, you are suggesting that as an alternative to Christianity that we adopt “certain world views” and that we should “act white”?
There are certain traits and values that are more common to whites than other races and cultures. Would not basing a white society on these characteristics make it easier to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the human species?
I don’t know, traditional Christianity (not the modern watered down version many call “Churchianity”) served the West and White civilization quite well for centuries. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a track-record proven one just waiting to be picked up?
The problem with Christianity is that it’s irrational and superstitious, like all religions I suppose, but it has developed under relatively rational and high-IQ peoples. Judaism is also in the same boat, with thousands of years of smart people rationalizing what amounts to tall tales and magic. (I wonder if Shinto is the same?)
Many smart and rational people from the 19th century were Christian. So I’m not sure if it’s modern rationalization that’s reducing Christianity, but I do think Z is onto something when he says people are looking for another “Way”, as the theology of Christianity is getting stale. There is a breakdown happening and Christianity could be going the way of Egyptian paganism.
Alan Watts touched on this way back in the 1960s…there are others who have said much the same thing…he was of the opinion that the teachings of Jesus was hijacked by what became the official Christian Church, and turned Jesus into a God and then weaponized Christianity into a religion of guilt. Others call Christianity a “religion around Jesus” rather than a “religion by Jesus” and d-righters will sometimes get spicy and call it a “slave morality”.
I do think trinity-based Christianity as we know it will die off, slowly. It will be replaced by a Christian-like “cult” or cults over the next few hundred years. That or Islam will take over.
The notion of Judeo-Christian is absurd – as absurd as National Conservatism for The Occident being headquartered in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Heck, National Conservatism when the current nation states have been so savaged and utterly deconstructed at this hour is enough to tell you this is a farce and unserious. I diverge.
The most basic of History between these two peoples is the antithesis of a cooperatively shared project. It is a story of rejection. The very history of Judea is the rejection of Occidental Man. Of course, for the Jews this isn’t just the rejection of Occidental Man it is the rejection of any external people and group as their ultimate authority. That is not a bad thing. Hell. It is to be admired. We all want the same thing. Occidental Man will resume as an unstoppable and indomitable force as soon as we restore that same resolve within ourselves and apply the lessons of the downturns in our path that came about during our last 3000 years.
At the core of the Jewish story about itself is this. God, the one true God, fully revealed himself to the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone. As such they are inextricably bound to the one true God and uniquely chosen to rule the world as the light of nations. They hold to his laws and he blesses them as his emissaries chosen to rule the earth and bring the rest of us his light. That is a powerful idea. It is also a knife’s edge. It is filled with moxy that can lead to a dangerous hubris.
Ultimately, Titus smashed up the temple as a direct result of this foundational belief. Herod was perfectly willing and happy to be a Roman satrap. I don’t think we know, but he may well have been as wise as he was corrupt and saw the best path forward for Jews in charge of Judea would be as a well managed vassalage that could enjoy the spoils of a healthy alliance. In time, such a stable situation could be improved upon, and parlayed into more autonomy. That is what I would have done. He was likely on that path as well. We don’t know. The Romans didn’t care what Gods the people in their territories worshiped. But for the Jews, that promise, that covenant with their God could not be broken. Moreover, Herod was not in the lineage of David and Solomon. External rule and administration by someone not a direct heir to their God was a heresy and an outrage that broke the lineage with God. They could not accept this. In other words, this was yet another outright rejection of the outsider, this time not Sumerian or Assyrian, but Occidental. They were not building Western Civilization, they were rejecting it outright.
You have to admire the unyielding determination this people had and still has to adhere to this covenant. It is truly admirable and there is much to be learned from it both positive and negative. It is also a testament to the covenant itself because that promise is so powerful. It is in fact, the promise of the ultimate power – global dominion as a people chosen and set above all of the rest of God’s creation to rule on his behalf.
They rebelled against Herod and made too much trouble. So Titus came with Dyeus Pater and Mars at his flanks and brought the thunder.
Their covenant still remains and it has helped the Jews remain and get into a remarkable position where they used The Occident to retake the land that they originally conquered with a fully premeditated genocide as documented in Deuteronomy. They end every prayer with a stated desire to end their prayers for eternity in Jerusalem. Again, this is a remarkable and beautiful resolve. How could you see that and not admire and celebrate it. We would do well to end our prayers with such a determined sentiment in our homelands for eternity.
Sharing a society with a people with that indomitable of a will and a founding myth has led to the never ending cycle that has been bad for both of our people. They are a tremendous people with much to offer. As a people apart who see themselves as ordained by the one true God, uniquely chosen for all time to be the bringers of his light and his law and to be his highest administrators on Earth a permanent clash is inevitable. They need their own land. No new insight as Herzel clearly saw and stated this. This is the essence of why. It goes back to the very beginning.
The first step is to get these fundamental differing points out into the open. Even if we aren’t met with an open acknowledgement, our side speaking about this not with judgement and demonization and conspiracy theories and blaming will surface the plain and obvious truth. This is a clash of claims on who is ordained to run things and it is inter-tribal.
The bald faced and obvious fact is that this clash of beliefs and foundational mythos has at its roots strife and conflict. When we have our seat at the table we will negotiate from its head. We have strength in numbers, in quality, and in a proven history as a noble and aristocratic race. At our best, we are so noble that we are not threatened by another people’s God and we can live in peace with others and their revealed divinities. In that sense, going around crusading on behalf of Yahweh has been out of character for us and led to disaster. We have also been foolish enough to invite in other Gods to be subordinate in our pantheon. That was Rome’s fatal mistake. Rome brought in a stray when the Evocatio was invoked in Jerusalem. It is cursed.
We must end this foolishness of keeping boundaries unclear. We are good and accepting. We only bring the thunder when darkness and chaos threaten light and order. That is Our foundational relationship with Our god – Dyeus Pater – however he manifested and revealed himself to our folk in different localities. We are him, and he is us. We must embrace the recursive paradox. He made us in his image. Thus, our highest endeavor is to make ourselves in his image. We bring light and order not for dominion over others but to remain sovereign and flourish. As such, when Saturn ascends, he must die even if by our hand.
We will restore our confidence and we will restore our naturally selected and proven Nobility. When we do, they’ll get their land but it will be on our terms and it will never ever ever ever come about with the destruction of Our birthrights. Here is what that looks like:
We are gathered in numbers and strength across the land. Sitting at head of the table we smash our fists and tell these people that these days of deceit are over. The bolts of thunder fly – with a fair but iron willed ferocity.
The Open Society must be dissolved. The Pan-European Aryan Imperium must arise as a phoenix on the ashes of the EuroAmerican imperium.. It is ours and ours alone.
It is all a matter of organization, preparation and above all confidence and resolve.
As for our faith, I care not for Christian vs. Pagan arguments and brother wars. Our capacity for abstraction and pursuit of the good through philosophical mind travel, has brought us to this treacherous time of darkness. We are in grave peril and have no more time for that nor do we have any more margin for error.
Closer on topic I will say this. ZMan makes a good point about the role of mystery and reason. The mystery leads and it is eternal. The goal is not to end the mystery, but to tumble deeper into it. One answer leads to many more mysteries. Science is not the pursuit of rational understanding as the end. Science is a way to encounter and understand the mysteries and to unveil still new ones.
The Greeks knew this. Interestingly, it is the planet Jupiter without whom Earth would be uninhabitable. Jupiter with its enormous gravity absorbs the space debris that would smash Earth to bits. The Greeks and Romans were probably our best people, though we can and will equal and then surpass them someday. Once we survive this darkness we will. Never give up faith in ourselves to do that. Did they know with their towering intellects and reason the science of Jupiter and its role in our planets existence? Not that we know of. The mysteries revealed it to them. They intuited from their observations and energetic resonance with it.
Yet, our ancestors divined Dyeus Pater – the
All Father who keeps chaos at bay and creates the pre-conditions for our people’s need for creative exploration and expression. We must delve back into the mystery and with an integrated rational intellect and the intuition of our soul. It is time to restore our foundational myth. We don’t have to invent it. We just have to rediscover it and connect to it with the entire fabric of our being. The Avatar, (Christ. Odin. Zeus/Jupiter.) is of secondary importance. What matters is the source and he is Dyeus Pater. He made us in His image. We are destined to do the same. Saturn has ascended. Now, once again we must be reconstituted as the All Father, and Saturn must die by our hand.
@RealityRules – that was a brilliant rant, spot on and captured the essence of the matter. Screenshotted and saved for further posting.
The rational atheist school of thought has to ignore the innumerable things that happen which can’t be explained by them….For example, new species suddenly emerging that have no evolutionary path…
Einstein..You can live your life “as if nothing is a miracle..or as if everything is a miracle..”
I choose Door 2….
According to the Book of Secular Analytics, there is a 99.836-percent chance Jesus Christ was a paranoid schizophrenic.
According to the Christian Book of Analytics, there is a 99.386-percent chance Christ’s divinity can be proved by consulting the works of Quine, Frege and Wittgenstein.
Now if you could express what you just said *in* a Quine, you’d be the Kwisatz Haderach and we could all just head out on a nice jihad instead of bickering in threads. Be fun.
Why is it so difficult?
Faith and Reason are “different magestaria,” in and of themselves.
(I had a coverstation yesterday with a young academy-dude whose studies – get this! – revolve around the analysis of cuniform – yep! Our conversation turned to maters of teleology. I suspect this gent had NEVER encountered anyone who was comfortable with both the rational (intellectual) AND the spiritual (teleological)).
Did I get minez from the Jesuits of old, or am I blessed with the apparatus that enables fluency in sight reading/notation AND “feel” for harmonix and improvisation?
Alas, I suspect that our host is a tad “tone-deaf”; if so, he wouldn’t be the only keen mind I know who has a Hard Time with The Kazoo…
Kazoo you say.
When God isn’t not playing dice with the universe, he’s jamming on the… wait for it…
https://youtu.be/4SpWuseQGys?si=SHSfMwbkR-Ng_bBi&t=308
OK… I’ll get my coat…
I know, I know… Art of the Fugue… Fourth act of Figaro, etc.. etc.
You’re not wrong.
Religion and Reason are not totally orthogonal. Neither are they parallel lines. They both have their uses. It’s a peculiarly Western mental illness to try to create a synthesis or to have one or the other victorious. An East Asian might think of them as being two separate rooms. One goes into the Rational Room to do one’s Rational Stuff and one goes into the Religion Room to handle the less rational stuff and one goes to the bathroom to take a dump. It’s not complicated.
Thanks for the nod, but I don’t think we’re quite on the same page.
(And yet: a jew’s harp jam at a navel-gazers conference: now who’d a’ thunk THAT! 😉
“the god of this age is rationality”
Until about 50-60 years ago, I agree.
But not anymore!
If there is a god, it is *bureaucracy* – but even that god is declining (since its peak in early 2020).
Aside from that – I agree with you main thesis. For people like you and me, Christianity must be rational.
But Christianity must be much More rational than “science” or “academia” or “history” – because for a religion to be real in a world where all social institutions are corrupted into tools for evil – religion must be directly and personally experienced.
So religion must be rational at the deepest level we can comprehend and express – which is metaphysics: i.e. the level of primary (bottom-line) assumptions regarding the nature of reality.
And we Also need to be able to grasp and affirm our religious assumptions personally – because we cannot (or, at any rate, we do-not) trust anybody else.
Does it? Based on your understanding of .. what, exactly?
Not trying to be a dink, Bruce, but…you and I comprehend maybe about 5% of known creation. Even that requires fudging like the study of chaos and disorder and shrugging at the deeper mysteries that face us.. We are limited in 3 dimensions.
For the stable universe we see to exist, we need to posit the existence of ten dimensions. There is a LOT of room in that for God. What happens when you look at our world from another dimension up? Or the one higher than that? The tall foreheads posit that the dual nature of light (wave vs particle) might make sense from a higher dimension – as would the entire contorted field of quantum mechanics.
From that aspect… I would say there almost HAS to be a supreme being of some sort, and that it is in our interest to acknowledge Him and try to honor, respect and obey Him or it. The Christian is here for a purpose. God put him here for a purpose, and we are best served when we have a good work ethic, are courteous and respectful of each other and live in harmony. Obviously we are expected to respect ourselves as well.
The atheist is here to eat, sleep, excrete and procreate. They are rational people I suppose… but they are devolving extremely rapidly. Our Esteemed Blog Host seems to look on the fall and failure of Christianity as something limited to the faith. I don’t see it, I see everything today in our world in sharp decline. The US is likely to fall into collapse or civil war soon. Europe is teetering on the same precipice. We are ALL in very, very deep trouble in the west, and we are all facing a serious reckoning with reality. My money is on the Christians to survive and recover first.
But whadda I know? Sorry for all the outgassing and hot air…
@D – Since you address me so familiarly by my first name (from behind the shelter of your pseudonym!), I presume you must be a lurking reader of my blog? If not, then I suggest you find it and read in it, where you will discover my answers to your rhetorical questions!
“If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.”
How ironic as the answer is as old as the Bible itself and is plain to see if you delved into the matter. Irrationality was discussed by “God” Himself in the book of Job. Irrationality there defined more as being one of the finite mind attempting to understand the infinite mind—God is not irrational, man is irrational—or rather unable to contemplate God’s rationality.
Paraphrasing as best I can quickly remember—Job in his suffering calls out to God and asks the age old question of man, ‘What good does it do one to obey God and be good if the reward is unjust suffering?’
God seems angered at this (my interpretation) and gives Job a good “tongue lashing”—explaining to Job His greatness and of Job’s (man’s) meaninglessness in the cosmic scheme of things. Basically, Job is attempting to base his understanding of God, and God’s “morality” in terms of current human understanding and convention. Job is in essence, “humanizing” God. (bad move)
Last words of Job in this exchange are worth quoting:
“Then Job answered the Lord and said: ‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’”
Christians seem to dwell on the New Testament and ignore the Old. One does so at one’s peril.
A bit earlier in the book – God asks Job: Where were you when i laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. God then poses a series of questions to Job, whose ultimate reply is: Behold, I am vile, what shall I answer you? I lay my hand over my mouth.
Yes, I was want to say that, but heck, I needed an ending and who wants me to pontificate. But those are beautiful words nonetheless.
The phrase “liar, lunatic or Lord?” is a very common formulation in Christian circles, so I doubt it offends many knowledgeable Christians. Christian apologists from C. S. Lewis to Dennis Harris have used the formulation as a way to get to the heart of the claims about Jesus.
Straussian notions have never set right with me. Their proponents obfuscate instead of clarifying.
That could be to set themselves apart as keepers of some arcane knowledge that is beyond the ken of the average person.
Or it could be that they are arch dorks. Maybe both?
I disagree with the idea that the god of this age is reason. The god of the Enlightenment was reason, and we’re still in the Enlightenment’s shadow in many ways, but here in Clown World reason has devolved into casuistry, or maybe even jesuitism — overly (and overtly) sophisticated “reasoning” that makes the forms of arguments, but with no actual truth value, and which, when you decode them, end up being invalid for any number of reasons (usually skipped steps, stolen bases, argument by assertion, and so on).
E.g the “motte and bailey” fallacy, a characteristic “argument” form in Clown World, that pretends to derive truths about the human condition from historical contingencies (and of course when you put it like that, it’s obvious both that it’s a fallacy, and why). Consider “Gender is just a social construction.” From the commonplace, indeed skull-thumpingly obvious, historical fact that Julius Caesar meant something different than Genghis Khan did when he told some young fellow to “be a man,” the Clowns pretend to conclude that there’s no such thing as biological sex — after all, if there were, both Caesar and Khan would have the same definition for “man,” would they not?
But when you point out how laughably stupid that is, they retreat to the historical commonplace, and ask why you hate facts. Or from “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” — indisputably true! — they conclude that the entire East Coast is going to be underwater in five years, but when you point out all the problems with that, they fall back to “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, neener neener!!!” and accuse you of Hating Science ™.
Reason has nothing to do with that. Indeed, the “gender” stuff at least is so easily shown to be a fallacy, it was a joke in a Schwarzenegger movie 40 years ago. It’s just casuistry, sophistry, jesuitism, whatever. Actual reason would do the churches a hell of a lot of short term good, in my opinion.
“Spinoza’s rationalism was based in a kind of religious fervor. He sounds at times like a person who had a religious conversion experience and ‘got saved.’ However, he found salvation not in the worship of God, but in the worship of reason … He was a true believer, just as much as the most dogmatic of his critics – even though his faith was in reason and philosophy instead of traditional religion.”
— Why Sane People Believe Crazy Things
Most men act rationally, at least in their own minds. When you look at someone else’ behavior and see irrationality, it’s usually because you don’t understand their mindset or their goals. Their goals may be stupid and their mindset ridiculous, but to them, it’s all logical and consistent.
This is not a hard question. Faith IS rational and easily explained by reason. The practice of faith exists and persists, even in this modern age, simply because it works. Religion is the embodiment of ancient wisdom and faith is the social mechanism that ensures continued adherence to this wisdom within a world of unknowns. The purpose of faith is not to be objectively accurate, but to promote adherence to ancient wisdom. Without this reinforcement, people and societies suffer and decline.
The problem with religion is not that it requires one to give up only reason. It requires you to give up self-ownership and individual liberty as well, and that I cannot and will not do.
You give up your self-ownership and your individual liberty every time you pay your property tax. Because you wisely wish to avoid the penalties of ignoring this exercise in submission to reality.
Not once you realize who He created you to be. It’s the Churchians who insist you give up self-ownership. His message is it is your life and you get to decide what to do with it.
It’s the only one you get, so choose wisely.
Yes, and I choose to be productive and to pursue my rational self-interest. Thank you very much.
You get to pursue your self interest only because you have been giving a gift of life. So who gave it to you? And who is going to take it away?
I respected and honored my parents when they were alive. But I see no reason to believe I owe anything to any other agency. I cannot owe anything to your god because I have never joined your religion.
“…so choose wisely.”
Indeed. The essential elements of your comment—free will, and judgement. Great gifts with great power.
Yes, I choose wisely. I have my “shit together” in terms of my financial and career life and take care of my self physically. If this is not an example of good judgement, I don’t know what it.
Setting yourself up as your own moral yardstick has a bad track record.
This kind of stuff makes absolutely no sense to me. I honestly do not understand the attractiveness of a world-view that does not recognize self-ownership.
I bet it isn’t “self-ownership” that is your real stumbling block, because the idea that your self-ownership is meaningfully infringed by a God that grants you free will to follow him or not — as you are choosing — is ridiculous.
Your real stumbling block is that you don’t like the idea that there is a moral authority up there watching you, because you know that you fail to live up to even your own imperfect moral standard, no less God’s standard. And that’s terrifying.
That “stuff [that] makes absolutely no sense” to you is an explanation of the concept that choosing to become your own moral exemplar — “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” — is a dangerous path, because we are not God and our moral intuitions are flawed and lead us away from His truth.
Morality is purely transactional. If I treat others well, then I am a moral person. If I treat others badly, I am an immoral person. This is essentially the non-aggression principle. This standard of morality makes both logical and intuitive sense to me. No other concept of morality makes a lick of sense to me at all.
It is very easy for me to live up to my concept of morality, and I do so every day. I see no reason to be terrified of anything. Your god sounds to me like a Hitler or a Stalin. No wonder you express fear.
I get why you guys are into this religious stuff. You are trying to craft a philosophical/ideological basis for your white nationalist society. I respect that. It may even work for your purposes. But I think you guys are going over the top when you insist that your religion applies to those of us who do not share it, particularly those from other cultures (e.g. Japanese people). Do you really not think that other cultures such as the Japanese have world-views that are as appropriate for them as your Christianity is for you?
For the purposes of white nationalism, you need to start considering your religion in an ethnic nationalist context rather than being a “universal” thing. There is no universal world-view other than that which is derived purely through reason and inductive logic. No religion can be derived purely through reason and inductive logic. I think everyone in here would agree with this. That is why religion is purely a cultural and sociological phenomenon and not an actual description of reality. Reason and inductive logic are the appropriate cognitive tools to discerning actual reality.
You are lying to yourself.
No I’m not. My concept of morality is both logical and intuitive and thus I am able to live by it. Yours appears to be esoteric and thus incomprehensible. An incomprehensible system of morality does not strike me as being much useful.
In any case, your religion might be of value to white people. But it certainly does not fly with most other people around the word. I can tell you it certainly does not fly in Japan or most other Asian countries. This alone should make you question the “universality” of any particular religion. By claims of universality, you are claiming that you are correct and, say, the Japanese are wrong, despite the latter having a 1,400 year history of functional civilization. Do you really believe this? Dude, you need to get out more.
Since you guys are into religion, so you have a problem with me starting a new religion and grabbing marketshare from the existing religions such as Christianity and Islam? As far as I know, there is no IP in religion. So there is nothing preventing me from starting a new religion.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
That is fine and I respect your right to do. But please do not expect me to do the same as I refuse to do so.
But that’s not true – you do follow a religion if you obey the rules of any society. even when those rules are not in your self-interest.
I said rational self-interest.
self-ownership…
Tell that to your wife, child, cat. They all get part ownership of you.
I certainly do not disagree with that, especially the cat.
Is it not likely that science and religion are separate areas orthogonal to each other? Reason is the proper cognitive tool for understanding the physical work (including human physiology). Religion is the tool for figuring out purpose, meaning, and intent. This seems the proper approach to me. However, the latter, not being based on reason, is not objective. Thus,religion must be treated as individually specific.
“Is it not likely that science and religion are separate areas orthogonal to each other?”
Nope. They are complementary. But admittedly, its a bit like visualizing a hypercube. If you stretch your mind a bit, you can pretty easily picture a single vertex. With practice, two adjacent vertices, and, fleetingly, an entire face. Expanding beyond that, something I have never accomplished, should rationally be possible, but until one figures out what part of the rational world he imperfectly understands, he’s not going to be able. It’s going to have to remain a matter of faith.
Blatantly stealing from Richard Bach, “Argue for your limitations and sure enough they’re yours.”
Faith is the cause, the energy, the oomph. Reason tempers faith, directs it, makes it workable. Unchecked, reason sucks the life out of everything. See the empty churches, as Z notes. You have to let it hang out, just not too far lol.
Matter is subject to both but gets its say. The flesh desires and suffers, goes the way of flesh: you get tired, hungry, happy, sad, angry, aroused, old, dead. Jesus’ Passion was His physical suffering.
The Puritans weren’t wrong about subjecting the physical world to the individual’s will, but imo they went too far in thinking it evil (iirc), rather than merely fallen.
“Faith is the cause, the energy, the oomph.
Reason tempers faith, directs it, makes it workable.”
Man, in a nutshell. I really like this.
Unchecked, faith gives you that Xhosa teenager who told her people to kill their cattle and burn their crops. /sarcasm
No need for sarcasm, I think it’s true! Like a bomb going off, or a downed power line.
Reason is an excellent servant but a terrible master.
Especially when it is weaponized, as it is in clownworld. Of course, the other side is never held to this standard of reason.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
To appreciate the mystery’s of the faith we have to have both the ability to self reflect on ourselves and the ability to think about the nature of the universe.
Some people have this ability, many do not, and our rulers make sure that every waking moment can be occupied with techno gadgets, sports ball, and the latest Hollywood creation or piece of information in the news cycle.
It’s almost like they don’t want us thinking about a God.
Mmmm.
Modernity and it’s metroplex separate from nature creates an environment where God and the meaning of our lives does not need to be thought about.
1. “idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.”
What’s so idiotic about trying to accentuate what we have in common, I.e. the Old Testament? But if you’re talking about Judeo-Christian as a concept where it is an entity separate and alone from Christianity and Judaism, then maybe you have a point. I don’t get my panties in a bunch over it either way. I know when I am and what I am not.
2. “churches have emptied out across the West”
Have they? They seem to be pretty full on the holidays, even in Europe. We had a full house for the Dormition feast a couple of weeks ago and our festival was pretty well attended. People also have other ways of consuming faith through the internet and mass media. Just like the internet has emptied a lot of retail stores of shoppers, perhaps the same thing has happened to churches. But that doesn’t mean they’re not buying things, they’re just buying it through different channels.
When I see churches empty on Christmas and Easter, I’ll start believing these dire predictions. Besides, nowhere in the Bible is weekly church attendance mandated.
3. Judge not lest ye be judged. We make a big deal in this country out of the outward act of going to church on Sunday, but you don’t know what’s in people’s hearts. Last I heard, that is for God to judge.
That’s segues into my other observation. I analogize Church in the old country to being not unlike other official proceedings government takes like city council meetings and judicial proceedings. Not everybody needs to attend a city council meeting for the state to remain in power and its authority to be recognized. The government just plugs away going through its regular rituals and everybody understands its omnipresent place in our lives.
I look at church the same way. The priest goes into church on Sunday, goes through the rituals of observing God. People can attend or not attend at their leisure, but we’ve gone through the ritual, just like when city council has to decide on a zoning variances during the regular Monday night meetings.
4. I think a lot of these dire predictions about religion are based on the observations of single people without children. Cat ladies and cat dudes. Having children motivates you to make sure they are immersed in religion. It’s something that you passed down from generation to generation and generally a good thing you want your kids to have exposure to. I’m not going to argue that less people aren’t doing that these days, but plenty of people still are.
5. Religion tends to be something that is more relevant to you at the beginning and later parts of your life. Whether it’s because you start to wonder about your own mortality, or maybe because you simply have more time on your hands, I always noticed the outsized number of old people you would see in church, even when I was a kid.
That’s all I have for today. Downvote away.
No downvote here, as you made a thoughtful post. I would argue the fourth commandment (Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy) combined with Matthew 18:20 (For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them) create a pretty compelling directive to attend mass.
As to your fifth point, the Babylon Bee had a great headline the other day which I can relate to: Man Unsure If He’s Becoming More Virtuous With Age Or Just Too Tired To Sin.
https://babylonbee.com/news/man-not-sure-if-hes-becoming-more-virtuous-with-age-or-just-too-tired-to-sin
{deep sigh}
Because the jews don’t think it is the Old Testament, see? And the Christians are very insistent that the OT is really all about Jesus of Nazareth, and nothing else, see?
We have literally nothing in common.
“That’s all I have for today. Downvote away.”
Grow up and stop trolling.
I consistently post factual things and get downvoted.
No, you consistently irritate and go out of your way to do so. Hence the downvotes and lack of audience when those folk catch on. You confuse annoyance with intellectual rigor.
I’m not a follower. Never was, never will be. If I annoy people in this echo chamber with my heretical views, that’s great as far as I’m concerned.
It is not so much the atheist who believes Jesus was a lunatic, as it is those who believe he was a wise teacher but not divine.
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – C.S. Lewis
I reply with a stellar comment from the web; Athanasians have not only suppressed, but literally killed off a far more just culture when these zealots wiped out the Arianite Goths.
Thus, the strident breast-beating and humblebragging: they justify their zealotry and erase their crime.
The Arianite’s sin was in being able to get along with their neighbors, and in wanting to preserve Greco-Roman achievement, rather than converging it with Judaic supemacism. Rome had a hundred religions under its umbrella, yet an official code followed by the state.
I say an official religion for the state, yes, but not forced on the populace- one, rather, that can tolerate indifference and eccentricity, as Christian states were able to do, and Judeo states could not.
A brake on government power, as the Church can tell the populace so simply ignore the mandate of the king. A consistent rulebook, in which the state can be made to live by its own rules, as the populace follows a higher moral authority that reflects the populace.
*******
>When Christianity replaced paganism in Europe, the old totems were cut down, shown to be impotent, and replaced with crosses and cathedrals.
And churches are defaced and burned all over France and other European countries, and in the U.S. a Satanic Baphomet statue is erected on public land, with “Piss Christ” already being an art work decades ago. So, who’s “impotent”?
Paganism was simply natural religion, people expressing the world they saw around them through gods for each part of it. This was the normal way of life all around the world, it’s not “impotent”. Christian dogma, taken from Judaism, only pushed this out because a general took power in Rome at a time of weakness, and then unleashed all the freed slaves, the foreigner servants, etc – the communists of their time. They attacked Roman and Greek temples and then bragged about it. Violence done with regime approval, just like in our time. Then they killed tens of thousands of other Christians.
Then the regime exploited the fact that Rome had been built up to great strength by, yes, PAGAN Romans, Those supposedly “impotent” people. Rome’s infrastructure like its excellent road network, its military, its position dominating the Mediterranean trade, was used to force other people to abandon their normal gods in favor of the imported one. This was to great detriment for Europe, as the new slave morality hated the complex Roman economy, which was allowed to decay. Along with the Roman bath houses. “Baptism is the only bath a Christian needs,” the priests said. The priests reveled in being dirty as it showed that they rejected the material world, which was of the devil. They also talked about how Jesus had been swarthy and stunted in form, which would somehow be a source of pride. Like I said, the communists of the time.
Without the bathhouses disease spread, further weakening Rome and its economy. Meanwhile the Pagan libraries were walled shut. In the new Christian time Romans forgot how to make concrete. So the aqueducts that brought water to Roman cities could not be maintained. The loss of so much water had a devastating effect. It would take many centuries before concrete was re-discovered.
And the economy didn’t reach the same level until the Renaissance, when the religious grip on society was loosened and intelligent people could start inventing again.
The falling economy meant war among Christians, supposedly the religion of peace, just like communism would supposedly bring harmony. No wonder Rome was split in two parts. Byzantine, with its very favorable position, dominated, but the Venetians who upheld its trade were slaughtered, their quarters in Byzantine looted by their fellow Christians, and trade never fully recovered. Byzantine oppressed other Christians in the Levant, who along with the Jews sided with the Arabs when they invaded. Byzantine had attacked Zoroastrian Persia in decades of increasingly religious war, permanently weakening both empires, and this was crucial in paving way for the Arabs. To complete the destruction, Rome had attacked the Vandals in what is now Tunisia, because they were Arian Christians – those who correctly noted that Jesus was never said to be God in the Gospels. Wrecking the Vandal kingdom paved way for the Arabs as they conquered northern Africa, and Sicily, and Iberia.
Christianity was directly responsible for weakening Rome, while at the same time using its power to spread the religion. It was completely responsible for the spread of Islam in the Levant, then northern Africa and beyond, and ultimately throughout Byzantine’s former lands.
Oh, and Christian priests were the ones who brought monotheism to the Arabs. They lied and said ancient Rome’s wealth had been created by their religion, to entice the Arabs. Good job.
When the Black Plague came, the priests lied and said it was “God’s punishment for your sins.” Supposedly God would kill little children because reasons. They told people to pack themselves into the churches to “pray for forgiveness”. Which spread the plague even faster. Finally people realized that the priests were full of shit and started isolating themselves in their homes, following the advice of more intelligent people, and the plague was brought under control by a scientific way of isolating, distributing food, and getting rid of corpses. After this the priesthood’s power was permanently weakened, and people were allowed to think again. This created the Renaissance, bringing increased prosperity for all, while the priests shook their fists at those who dared say that the Earth was round, which the Pagan Greeks had surmised long ago. Luckily the priests were ignored in this as well.
White civilization could only progress again by weakening the grip of the Catholic priests. But by then Europe had lost many centuries, and Sicilians and Iberians had non-White blood in their veins. So that Spain has practically no prominent mathematicians throughout history, with math, a symbol for all progress, being the domain of the Germanic peoples instead. Spain and Portugal did have extremely favorable positions between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which they used to full effect, and with the aid of nobility that still had Gothic and Swabian blood. But thanks to the Arab invasion caused by the religious fanatics in Byzantine, they are weakened still today.
tell
https://neociceroniantimes.substack.com/p/the-regimes-crisis-of-legitimacy-73a/comments
Christians tend to be as bad as Basketball-Americans when it comes to we wuz-ing past accomplishments.
Europeans of antiquity accomplished many great things prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Conversely, there is a continent filled with Christians whose greatest accomplishments to this day are building large mud huts. The bloodline is the important part, not the particular vision of the unknowable that one chooses believe in.
You’ll need to cite some examples. Leave out the Southern Europeans—Rome and Greece, and you have some of the most war like primatives to ever walk the earth in Europe.
What a stupid request. Trying to understand the history of Europeans without including “Southern Europeans” is like trying to understand a plant based solely on what is above the ground.
A huge chunk of the nobility of Western Europe could trace their lineage right back to Rome, but apparently that shouldn’t count because reasons. The fact that pretty much every conversation on here, 2000+ years later, ends up referencing Greco-Roman culture should be testament enough to what Europeans are capable of even in the absence of one branch of European spirituality.
Whatever. The Arians were wrong, so they had to be corrected. And if you are wrong about the most fundamental fact of being, then what else matters?
Precisely one of the sticking points wrt Judaism and Christianity coming to terms—the worship of Jesus as god. Therefore the concept of a Trinity had to be developed, as in God the Father, God the Son…
The Gospels make it very clear that many, many, many people, including many who followed Jesus, thought he was crazy or at the very least harbored serious doubts and questions. His followers, though, kept walking with him because they saw his miracles and trusted him, and his enemies, who always doubted him, were in the end defeated after his resurrection. I don’t think that Christianity makes much sense without this narrative, honestly, but it is also a narrative that is not often discussed or taught, even to many Christians. Yet it’s really, really important. Without this narrative, how different is Jesus from the million other people who oclaimed they were the messiah over the generations, including Sabbatai Zevi? Of course, this is what those who study the Talmud would say. In a very real sense, Christians who abandoned the mystery of the faith to try to find the rationality in all of it have become like those who study the Talmud, which is perhaps why Christianity has disintegrated from so many parts of society since the Enlightenment.
Meh. Different times, different solutions. It’s one thing when you are living in times where we didn’t understand science as well as we do today and your audience is comprised mostly of peasants. It’s a completely different situation today with so many people being literate and understanding the logical way our world and universe was created and exists. I’ve never doubted that there is a rational explanation for what we’ve been told to accept on faith. That doesn’t negate the faith in my mind, that helps prove it to me
Exactly, well said & thank you.
Well, the claim of Christianity is that this Jesus was God and was raised from the dead in his own body. One either accepts this absurd claim or not, but not many can be reasoned into it.
Which seems bizarre to me. If you have a faith in a God who can take dirt and breathe life into it, how tough could it possibly be for Him to breathe life into a dead body?
Anyone who has qualms about the rationality of the resurrection has more foundational issues.
I’m a heretic when it comes to this issue. It doesn’t matter to me one way or another. If he was resurrected, great. If he wasn’t dead to begin with (most logical explanation) and just got a second wind, that’s also great.
This is why everyone thinks you are an idiot, Nick.
What, that I don’t blindly follow what somebody else writes down on a piece of paper? If that makes me an idiot, so be it.
Why bother with believing He became man? I’m not trying to talk you out of what you believe, just wondering why you think this thing in the Bible is true and this other thing is not?
To clarify, if you want to think some things are literal and some metaphor, sure. But what makes you think that’s the metaphor part?
I have problems with the story, that is true. I think most people do if they’re honest with themselves. But I can accept God thinking he had to have a physical manifestation down here so that people could believe.
I’ve also been around a once famous, now deceased, TV preacher. You could almost see the charisma surrounding him. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s all Jesus was, just an extremely charismatic guy.
We will never know. But it seems logical to me that all of this around us had to have been created by somebody or something. The specifics of the story I will leave to somebody else. I honestly don’t think it matters.
As a mostly lapsed Anglican (the church left me, not the other way around) the question I struggle with is are there eternal human truths that exist in Christian theology that can be applied to modern society as a framework for running it, or have we changed so much that a dusty 2000 year old philosophy and religion, while aesthetically pleasing cannot serve to order modern human affairs..? I’m not talking about the basic Ten Commandment type rules, but elements of the religion specific to it that apply to this day?
And yet in the lifetime of our parents/grandparents it served well enough. It’s more the problem that today’s humans are unfit to serve a Christian world than Christianity is unfit to serve a human world.
Pathological “individualism” seems to come into play here. That, coupled with our new god, “scientism”. And here we are today.
You are misusing the term “scientism”. Scientism is an ideology that uses science to justify increased government regulation and control over individuals (climate cult, vaccine mandates). Scientism is the opponent of individualism, not the advocate of such.
Yes, the sanctity of motherhood and fatherhood.
If given a choice women in general will choose not to bare children.
Without motherhood being raised as the highest achievement we are doomed to destruction.
I should say if given a choice in a system that tells women to be a girl boss is the highest achievement why are we shocked that women choose not to have children and instead become girl boss?
Depends upon what you mean by choice, as perhaps the concept of “free will”. I really don’t think many women who give birth are “forced” to, least not in the Western world. Yet, the birth rate drops below replacement.
My personal experience has been within family that all the women, successful careerists all, have a biological “need” to have and foster children. The issue is that we have those women stopping at 1-2 children. Most likely due to advanced age, coupled with the stress of more children and outside home employment duties.
What is wrong with you? Either you believe Christ was raised and is God or else you do not. What is all this nonsense about how it applies to today’s problems and blah blah? That’s just stupid.
What’s wrong today is women’s frustrated/stifled “mothering” urges-instead of staying home with the 4th baby, they try to supervise the lives of immigrants through girrl boss activities.
Russell Kirk’s “The Roots of American Order” posited three major roots: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. The latter for the Republic, obviously a model for early America, and for the Empire that adopted Greek ideas, while imposing order through Roman laws along the roads it built throughout the ancient world.
A Christian revival must start with a proper understanding of the words “Jew” and “Gentile” which do not mean what poorly educated Christians think they do. Then proceed to understanding that God dealt exclusively with one race in the OT/NT and that was the Israelites (not jews). Judeo-Christian Universalism (aka Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal etc etc) are all versions of Babylonian Judaism NOT Christianity.
https://archive.org/details/god-made-a-racial-choice/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/originofthewordjew2/mode/2up?view=theater
Sadly, Catholicism is also a version of Judaism. Though it’s probably more accurate to call them all Chaldean Hebrewism rather than Babylonian anything. Babylonian Judaism is the parent of Pharisaic and eventually Rabbinic Judaism.
Do you understand that this is a blog for nationalists who are not of Israel? How could any such nationalist have any Christianity which doesn’t corrupt his or her family tree with Israel’s patriarchy and Jacob’s alleged ancestors, uncles, and so on? How could one such nationalist, having just a bit of self-respect, tolerate Israel’s self-serving fictions (e.g the flood hoax) about the ancestors of all humans?
Read again this part of the essay:
You need also to refresh your understanding of the older testament. You wrote that…
…which is false. Consult your copy of the fiction again. The Israelites don’t appear until after Isaac, who was no Israelite at all. And neither were Sarah, Ishmael, or Rebecca. Neither was Abraham an Israelite, but the fiction has the god dealing with Abram and Abraham.
Abraham’s father, too, was no Israelite. Nor Noah. Nor…
Now is a good time to suspend your faith and to refrain from believing again until you understand the dangerous net in which you’ve become entangled.
The savages running the French Revolution replaced the altar at Notre Dame with an altar devoted to Reason. Well, isn’t that all you need to know?
And the savages the French elite invited into France burned down Notre Dame a few years ago. That’s all I need to know.
Satanic verses bastards are still torching curches all.over not only europe but in the US as well. Particularly in the PNW.
This is done by irrational 80 iq
wierd crosses of taliban anarchist types. Ya just can’t understand crazy.
Can’t understand someone putting “taliban” and “anarchist” as mutual descriptors in the same sentence, myself.
This whole mass migration thing has the normiecon Israel boosters in a bit of a pickle.
On the one hand they are up in arms about foreigners coming into their towns and taking over, driving out the locals, yet that’s exactly what the Jews are doing in Israel. I don’t see how they can reconcile this in their own heads, but I think consistency here will go a long way to bringing some clarity and common sense to the issue.
And if I thought Mr Derbyshire read the comments in here, I wanted to ask for his take on this because I know he is very vocal about immigration in the US and Europe but I am not sure I ever heard him denounce the Jews for doing to the Palestinians what the Haitians and Mexicans and Venezuelans et al are doing to us.
Consistency? Clarity? Common sense?
Here is the parallel you have drawn.
(1) Palestinian Muslims = North Americans fanatically opposed to the existence of the U.S.A. and eager to commit violence against U.S. citizens anywhere, at any level, any time to destroy the hated nation; supported by most other nations, most particularly by two nuclear superpowers for Great Game reasons and by near-nuclear secondary powers for religious reasons; generously financed by revenues from worldwide taxation; in a neighborhood with many ethnic and religious cousin nations they might live in, most unfortunately poverty-stricken despotisms ruled by gangsters.
(2) Zionists = Mexicans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, Salvadorans, Ecuadorans, Somalis, Afghans, Syrians, Senegalese, Ethiopians, Chinese, etc., etc.; a homeland in North America granted to them by international agreement 76 years ago; with collective memory of centuries of persecution, often lethal; many actual or near-descendants of people thrown out of former host nations; all knowing that their ethnic-religious forebears (including Somalis, Afghans, etc.) lived in the U.S.A. for 3,000 years and sometimes ruled it; facing hostility from those same super- and secondary powers; homeless if the U.S.A. is destroyed.
You Jew-haters sure come up with some weird stuff.
I think he’s talking about ethnic cleansing, Zionism roughly parallel to America being turned into the world’s flophouse. Palestine belongs to the Jews, America belongs to the whole world, and screw you if you’re already there. Refugees up!
If you don’t have a State religion (and La Belle France has abandoned hers) you will get one imposed on you by invaders…Islam is deadly serious…
An alter devoted to reason doesn’t seem very logical to moi
The symbol of the age of rationality is the machine.
The ultimate real-world machine is the one-armed, yellow-painted factory robot. By contrast, the ultimate fictional machine is the T-800, the killing Terminator created by auteur James Cameron. It is not a coincidence that the final scene in the hunt takes place in a factory full of moving one-armed gadgets.
What are the attributes of any machine?
The machine is antithetical to man. Farting, burping man, guzzling his burgers, has nothing in common with his creation.
The final truth of the universe is that the imagination opens nightmare vistas that men have to surmount. Just like John Connor in Terminator, we have to smash those “metal motherfuckers” before we can get back to our true humanity.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Interesting notion Greg. Not disagreeing – I am not a philosopher… but the first machines have successfully passed the Turing Test and left it in the rearview mirror.
I laugh at the wanks on Blab who live to prank AI. But look at what happens – when the machine vomits – it’s because of the morons that programmed it. I recall with some hilarity when Google’s AI started barfing up pics of vibrant and diverse chinese, negro and and red Nazis. We now have machine learning…
We cannot honestly pawn off the likely consequences of our foolishness on machines… I think ultimately, humans will decide to destroy themselves.
Right now, AI has human programmers. The ultimate intent is for AI to program itself. That may not be so “funny”. Already AI can write code upon request. What if the request is to write its own code in order to perform some second order duty/purpose?
It’s a fascinating topic for discussion and debate, C. Right now I don’t think the big worry is invincible gun bots and bloodthirsty terminator robots suddenly developing awareness and turning on their creators.
I think the the threat is far more like Greg’s original thought – the Machine will swat us like bugs in any number of different ways without even being aware of us, itself or anything else. It’s like that guy that got killed by the bot on the car assembly line – the bot activated inadvertently, crushed the maintenance tech as it set about the task of building more cars.
I would love a 100% serious study by the best minds on the topic of souls. What are they? Can we measure or quantify them? I don’t think such a study is possible in today’s climate because academics and scientists are pretty much closed minded about faith and creationism. For me, creationism is a theory like any other and deserves the same respect from science.
If you want to be completely objective about it, all modern science relies on a miracle too – a Big Bang that should create disorder and chaos – yet births a universe that runs like a swiss watch. A world which give rise to life – that magically evolves in ways that allow fish to turn into reptiles and amphibians despite it being genetically impossible.
Science and tech have made us incredibly arrogant – particularly in those that have been educated beyond their intellects. It is one of the timeless condition of Man… Hubris is inevitably followed by Nemisis.
I cannot dispute a single word you say. My AI understanding is weak, but perhaps my distrust of those in the field is spot on…. 😉
When they say “AI is dangerous” I do not think they mean it will become sentient and take over. I think what they mean is that people will use AI as an excuse to do bad things. And/or detach people from important decisions that go awry. Like with the Israelis and their use of AI to determine the best way to kill off lots of people, where to drop the bomb to cause maximal damage, etc.
Similar to the FICO score. Used to be that lenders would evaluate you on your income, references, collateral, etc. Then came FICO and the human element was removed. “Sorry, the computer says I can’t make you this loan.”
“Sorry, the computer says I have to set fire to your house to get you to sell to an oligarch”
The great English writer W. S. Maugham once famously stated that it would be impossible to live precisely as Jesus prescribed because you would not be able to reconcile the reality of this world with the otherworldly code that Christians follow. You would end up dead…or worse. Turning the other cheek rarely ends well. He actually wrote a novel, The Razor’s Edge, based on the life of a man who was totally good.
The other thing I remember from my reading of Maugham was his statement that Christianity could not handle too much investigative activity because it is “all of a piece”. In other words, if you pull one brick out of its foundation, it comes crashing down. Christianity is a very fragile edifice which can only survive through faith alone.
It’s not nearly so otherwordly as they make it out to be. A basic assumption is that humans are supposed to be immortal in the body. The plan of salvation is about restoring this fantastic situation. The secularist bias of it all could hardly be more obvious.
So what they have there is a garbled materialism with an authoritarian ghost story. Massive egoism (Ex. 3:14) is baked into the ghost story, which is used as a smokescreen for Israel’s intense narcissism (Ex. 19:5-6).
1 Corinthians 1 23-25:
“But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;
But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
Rationality is entirely based on priors, either derived from logic or experience. To the Greeks, the idea of God dying for his love of humanity is irrational, as it completely contradicts their implicit assumption of what it means to be a god.
Our modern priors are based on a strong empiricism that demands not only that something is experienced, but is reproducible. The fact that you had a vision of your grandpa who died twenty years ago is not evidence in the current age unless you can consistently summon him based on a specific process. While good for general knowledge, it is suffocating for an individual trying to find his place in the world, and the empirical prior essentially demands an implicit materialistic atheism.
As most have noticed, this leaves no room for any sort of moral framework, which is why the wheels are coming off general society.
Try explaining that to your plumber. Yet another problem with Christianity: it relies too much on IQ to sustain it’s complicated doctrine. Put another way, if you can’t explain this stuff to a 90-IQ individual without recourse to “magic”, you have to resort to fear. Fear is not a good path to enlightenment.
The IQ problem explains the rise of Islam, its the perfect religion for Africa and other low IQ areas. Expect rapid growth of Islam and Europe in the years ahead
You’ve hit upon a great point. Creating an archaic, brutish religion amongst archaic, brutish men was a brilliant strategy on Satan’s part,
Except that Christianity, of all flavors is also in direct competition for Islam for the hearts of Africa.
Islam has never appealed to the European soul and it’s unlikely to do so even in it’s rejection of Christianity.
Tell that to the shade of Ibrahim Pargali.
John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
That’s all he needs to know. Understandable to anyone.
Ok, but you don’t understand it.
The god’s omnipotence implies that it could have had two, three, or more sons if it so chose. So why didn’t it do so? Lack of imagination? Lazy mindedness? No omnipotence?
Notice that several “eternally begotten” sons could have been incarnated, and at least one could have been left behind on Earth to teach the masses. Meanwhile the first begotten incarnated son would return to Israel’s imaginary heaven (like Superman?) for his kingly power. Why isn’t such a plan being carried out? Doesn’t the god want humans to be taught sound doctrine by inerrant sons? If any beings know that most humans aren’t trustworthy, elohim and the boys bought to know it
The same omnipotence implies that the god could accomplish directly the alleged goal of the bizarro plan of salvation. So zero sons are required. After all, if Jesus is fully human but fully human Jesus needs no salvation or redemption, then no humans need these.
That’s a doctrine for the lazy and for manipulative mystical moochers like Simon the brutal Blockhead (Acts 5:1-11). Purity and impurity depend on oneself. No one purifies another.
‘Tis pandering to the secular egoist’s morbid fear of the death and decomposition of the body. Give that up. It’s a sensualist dead end. Better to reject egoism, selfishness, neediness, and your thinly veiled materialism (manifested as an intense preoccupation with your smelly body). Contemplate the inherent disgustingness of the body and its processes, the phlegm, the bile, the blood, the pus, the slimy entrails, the urine bag, the shit tunnel, and the rest of it.
“The god’s omnipotence implies that it could have had two, three, or more sons if it so chose. So why didn’t it do so? Lack of imagination? Lazy mindedness? No omnipotence?”
That wasn’t for His benefit, but for man’s. He was dragging men, kicking and screaming, away from sacrificing things to Him into who He created us to be. From the polytheistic gods who did rather arbitrary things to people into something quite different, and still barely recognized by the best of us.
Honestly, if He had, say, My three Sons, wouldn’t you still be saying, “Why 3? Why not 5 or 12 or 70? Nothing would satisfy you, while one would be enough to make the point to any reasonable man.
Time to brush the dust off my feet.
Z writes a post about how the psycho god of this age is rationality, which exterminates all mystery and has landed us at this unhappy spot.
Then this fedora goes off on his rationalistic demands that Christians explain their faith according to his understanding of reason. And do it RIGHT NOW!
There is no helping some people.
We can do some this, more than we have. Part of it is just being patient with the extremely poor logic shown in the post. Atheists tend to worship rationality. Only the Christians tend be rational most of the time.
Your theory denies the omnipotence for the most part, despite getting part of it correct.
Jesus if fully human and fully Divine, one of the mysteries of Christianity. Jesus does not need redemption because he has two natures in one person.
Yes, God’s omnipotence suggests he doesn’t need to send His son only or otherwise. But He did, so let’s contemplate that as something both rational and a mystery. Your characterization of the OT stories is way off.
Christianity is like what linguists call a “funnel language”. Easy to get into (i.e. simpler grammar) and communicate on a basic level but as you go deeper into it, it requires more rules and compliance to speak it well.
English is a funnel language by the way. So is French and Chinese.
Christianity, because it’s European, has a very deep and convoluted theology if you wish to learn it. But you can also just quote John 3:16 or some other favorite passage and communicate well to 95% of Christians.
It doesn’t have a deep and convoluted theology because it’s European. It has a deep and complex theology because that’s like life. Europeans in particular are not going to be able to convince themselves that Thor is worth the worship worthy. (Neither will they be able to do so for Mohammed.)
There is a Christianity that most people will able to follow most of the time and get right. And it will be reasonable simple. A theology that covers all of human experience however, will be complex.
Nonsense. Most Christians through history were illiterate. The clergy trained academics to read and interpret the bible for them and they paved the way for the most powerful nations on earth. Britain alone controlled 3/5 of the globe. The faith encouraged and grew by extolling the value of good judgement, harmony, peace, duty and loyalty. It succeeded in doing that in a world filled with mortal enemies.
One also has to wonder what (hork, spit) “enlightenment” is. For some, an enlightened society lets women make the decisions which has resulted in mass abortion, pedos chasing your kids around the public washroom, and endless unnecessary wars.
Free will and lack of impulse control explains a lot-
To one of your minor points, isn’t it amazing that women got the right to vote and their most important issue by far is the right to kill their own children?
The point of Christian clerics is not to read and interpret the Bible. That’s a modern framework talking. The early Church didn’t have a Bible. It’s an oral tradition and complex one. Being illiterate does not make one stupid. It just cuts off a method of communication.
Saint Jerome translated the bible into the Latin Vulgate not long after the Catholic Church pronounced what books shall go into the Bible under their authority.
Vulgate means “common”. This means that he translated into the common language spoken.
Many where literate in Rome, regardless they were read the bible in the language they spoke (not the Kings Latin)…
The Church brough the word of God to the lowest peoples as best they could.
One of the most dynamic bastions of Christianity is Africa. You don’t have to be a genius to understand the message. It is not that complicated.
Exactly. For most people, the message is so simple as to be a serious problem. The rejection is usually about knowing what they would need to do to start practicing the faith. It can get complex, which is part of the issue when people are interacting specifically with Catholic bishops. They’re talking about the 0.001% of cases because the rest is settled and everybody is like “What?”
Little Green Man from Mars 10K Foot View:
90 IQ (and lower) individuals have no problem with Christianity. To wit: The Philippines. Papua, Hill Tribes of Golden Triangle, Sub-Saharan Africa, etc., etc.
They simply do not need the Big-Brained Aquinas stuff or the witty Chestertonian paradoxes in order to believe. Half their luck (seriously).
For the rest, it’s easy enough for mid-wit Muh Science types to reject the whole Christian caboodle. Mid-wits aren’t going to bump into the any of the contractions and pitfalls of Reason. You could turn Mid-wits back into believing Christians with the right kind of censorship/propaganda regime and an Inquisition. After all, they’re only Science Xirsons because of the wrong kind of censorship/propaganda regime and wrong kind of Inquisition in Current Year.
Really Big Brained RH Tail of Curve Players mostly agnostic. A few vocal Christians with appropriately big-brained theological arguments for their position. After all, these are the people most able to poke holes in the Human Klein Bottle Goedelian Fart Huffing which Pure Reason invariably leads to. But there’s always the whiff of their being like the raft clingers in David’s Raft of the Medusa, desperately convincing themselves of their Faith (*). Most super smart folks are going to attempt to divert themselves from the horror of meaningless nihilism with other diversions and speculations. Quantum Multiverses, Roger Penrose, McGilchrist, and so on.
Christianity has shot its bolt with the Smart Fraction and that’s all she wrote. Ain’t coming back not never. But we need our Very Smart Boys believing in something that is not self- or civilizationally destructive, and we need a religion for the Mid-Wits which keeps them from getting out of line. Do they even need to be the same religions?
*Faith being most of the issue with Christianity. For most other religions, Praxis — private and communal — provides 99% of the consolation of religion, not ‘Faith’ — whatever that is when it’s at home.
“Our modern priors are based on a strong empiricism that demands not only that something is experienced, but is reproducible.” Well then, let’s see the atheists reproduce the creation of a single celled organism, let alone explain how order came from chaos and life came from non-life. Or how the infinitely complex human brain was created by 11 simple inorganic elements (oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium), which decided on their own to self organize in ever more complex structures. That would take more magic than believing in God.
The fault in your logic is in thinking it had to happen all at once.
/me struggles to figure out where the “all at once” appeared in DLS’s post.
Why is that a fault – why is thinking it didn’t have to happen all at once just as faulty? Seems you are just making assumptions.
I know. The atheists as I say can’t even make their own beds but they think they can grasp what it takes to make an entire universe
Atheism makes no claim about the world, except a negative one; thus it is perfectly consistent to be an atheist who doesn’t believe in evolution, heliocentrism or Big Bang theory.
But because Christians feel their beliefs threatened by science more than anything else, they conflate atheism and scientism and attack scientism to disprove atheism: “So scientists can’t explain life, the universe and everything? Then that must logically mean talking snakes and virgin births!”
The irony here is, that by making scientism the antithesis to religion, you elevate science to be the arbiter of last resort: you implicitly acknowledge that if there were a consistent scientific explanation for the creation of the world, it would BTFO Genesis.
A man confident in his faith would argue that since mortals are fallible and God is not, the Bible must be true, and in case of incompatibility with science, the boffins inevitably wrong, no matter how compelling their arguments. That’s how Mohammadans deal with science.
Sorry to break it to you, but scientism is a scam. Science is the real deal, sure, as it’s an attempt to understand the inherent rationality of the universe. Science just assumes rationality, rather than bothering with trying to figure out why it is rational.
Scientism makes the positive statement that science is the best or possibly the only way to understand the world, which is a statement based on faith alone. Since science does not even attempt to explain why things seem rational, it cannot possibly be a means to understand the “why”.
Sorry to break it to you, but scientism is a scam.
It’s not a “scam”, it’s a logical fallacy called “reification” – the confusion of a model for the reality it models, but thanks for the heads-up.
Since science does not even attempt to explain why things ‘seem rational, it cannot possibly be a means to understand the “why”.
Nobody claims otherwise.
“Nobody claims otherwise.”
Except scientism.
Yeah, but we just agreed that scientism is a fallacy.
Hello? You are the one who brought up scientism? I wouldn’t have bothered replying otherwise, as I more or less agree with the rest. For probably 30 years I had views really close to what I think you are talking about. Eventually, there was just too much that didn’t quite add up. Might it in the future? Maybe, and if I’m still around at that point, I’ll re-evaluate.
Hello? You are the one who brought up scientism?
But not approvingly.
“…it cannot possibly be a means to understand the ‘why’…” Who the hell says?
“But because Christians feel their beliefs threatened by science more than anything else, “
Felix, there’s a bit of a broad brush here as well. I for one have never had a problem with science as verses religion (Christianity). To cite one example, evolution. Never had a problem with it.
I won’t drag this on, just to say your broad brush seems to conflate certain historical fundamentalist objections that are not necessarily the beliefs/teachings of other Christian denominations. For example, I was taught Darwinism—if you will—in Catholic grade school. True, they left out the conflicting intersections we love to recite to condemn each other, but basically they never left out the basic aspects of the theory.
Yes, but the “more than anything else”, though… I’d wager you don’t feel your faith threatened by anything.
But it seems to me religious people hate atheism more than they do competing religions and, I suspect, that stems from the hatred of scientism.
I can’t speak for everyone but I don’t hate atheism. I feel sorry for people, although I mostly avoid the irrational conversation these days.
The hate I suspect, is mostly projection. It’s no fun believing that everyone is just a lump of dust with an expiration date and no meaning to the suffering of this life. It also means there’s no consequences for obviously evil people that surround us.
And honestly, Catholic Church invented science study as we know it today. The list of early pre-Industrial revolution scientists who were monks is insanely long. The father of genetic study was monk with his peas. German biological study was started by nun in 1000AD some odd. A Catholic priest was involved with formulating Big Bang theory. Maybe modern Protestants think they are at odds. Without the faith, there is no scientism, ironically.
The hate I suspect, is mostly projection.
Oh, it’s quite real, it’s all over the right-o-sphere. Not entirely surprising, considering what I said about internet atheists earlier, but it’s there. People have more time for Mohammadans than they do for atheists.
I wouldn’t say I am threatened. More so I am disappointed in atheists who seem like highly intelligent people, often, but then they can’t bring themselves to take the next step. Whether out of lack of imagination, limited curiosity, arrogance.
Or rather, my position is this: whoever made the world, the trees, the sky, the moon, the oceans, and me, is by definition superior to me and supreme. Whether an entity did or some force or whatever, whatever it is is obviously superior to me. No man has created anything that compares. So for me that fits the definition of a supreme something. I call it God.
The atheists I know, at least, and the ones I talk to online, will not acknowledge that there is something superior to them or supreme. From a purely objective standpoint, that there is something supreme cannot be denied. If it put you here and will remove you from here, it’s your daddy, as they say. You are powerless against it.
So I find they are the ones who are actually threatened. Their sense of self is so tied up in being seen as highly intelligent, that they simply never venture into areas of life that makes them look small and insignificant by way of comparison. They run away from it.
I think I agree with EMJ on this topic. Atheism is a psychological phenomenon not a theological one.
From a purely objective standpoint, that there is something supreme cannot be denied.
Nonsense.
The atheists I know, at least, and the ones I talk to online, will not acknowledge that there is something superior to them or supreme
Yes, that’s sort of the whole point – indeed the only point – of atheism.
But since you’re from Christian America, the atheists you talk to online are most likely misfits, spiteful mutants who get off on transgressing against societal norms – that’s why most Americans become atheists in the first place.
There’s also a small number of normal guys, but they suffer from red pill rage, anger that they’ve been lied to by their parents and those around them, so they become anti-theists.
That’s why American atheists are such assholes.
Their sense of self is so tied up in being seen as highly intelligent,
To Euro-atheists, grown up in a fully secular society, atheism means very little to their sense of identity or self, no more than not believing in Hinduism does to yours. Do you feel smart because you don’t believe in Shiva?
Here, atheism and Christianity have lived in peace, or at least truce, my entire life. The question of God is simply not one you spend time on or debate with your peers, except for a few years in your moody teens when people tend towards introspection.
You don’t think the force or entity that created the universe is supreme vis a vis yourself?
You are making my point for me
I don’t believe in “entities”, so it rests on the semantics of “force” and “supreme”.
Do I think gravity holds supremacy over me? Certainly, but that’s not what Christians mean by divine supremacy, is it?
You (or real Christians at any rate) believe in an anthropomorphic superbeing, an actual sky daddy with very human qualities, not some vague abstraction you can fit in between the cracks of the scientific understanding of the world.
Your lack of curiosity in this regard is part of what I am talking about.
If you don’t believe or forces or an entity, then who made it? What made it? Ignoring the question doesn’t make it go away
Ignoring the question doesn’t make it go away
But I just don’t care. The double-slit experiment poses an extremely profound conundrum too, but understanding how it works is not an existential matter to me. I’d be curious to know the hows and whys about it, but I can easily live without the answers.
As I said, these were things I pondered as a teenager but at one point you just shrug your shoulders and move on, as you realize you’re never going to get to the truth of the matter. Just declaring that the existence of a divine Creator is an “objective” reality that cannot be denied, doesn’t really help you out of that philosophical maze, it’s whistling past the graveyard.
I never said Divine
All I am trying to get you to entertain is that whatever or whoever put you here and made the world you were introduced to one day is superior to you. Whether you choose to worship it, pray to it, whatever is a separate issue. Denying it comes off as juvenile.
You sound like the mouse claiming he’s the dominant party in the prey-predator equation as the snake swallows him
I never said Divine
So we aren’t talking religion?
And I struggle to fit the terms “superior” or “inferior” into my relationship to the Big Bang.
Correct, right now I am not talking about religion. I am only trying to establish what I think are some obvious realities
I don’t have to believe in God to accept the fact that whatever or whoever put me here and will take me away is obviously superior to me. I don’t have to deify it, I just choose to.
But if you simply do not find an interest in these things, that’s fine, but that is what I meant about atheists having a lack of intellectual curiosity.
I disagree that I was “put here” or will be “taken away” by a conscious agency because those terms DO imply religion.
To speak in parables, man is a bird who has been flying through a black void for an eternity. Suddenly, he flies through a window and inside is a cosy living room with a fireplace, a set table decorated with flowers, paintings on the wall, light and music and people and laughter. And then, a moment later, you’re through the room and out the opposite window, back in the eternal void.
I’m not going to waste my time pondering the inscrutable.
They do not have to imply religion. It’s just a recognition of an obvious pecking order, as it were, to a man’s place on earth.
And I reject the notion that there’s a hierarchical order where you can measure man and Big Bang by the same yardstick. My person is not inferior nor superior to the Big Bang, the two are incommensurate. I don’t compare myself to Mount Everest or Saturn either.
“My person is not inferior nor superior to the Big Bang”
That is preposterous. If the Big Bang is the source of your creation and existence then it is superior to you. It is greater than you. You didn’t make the Big Bang, or did you ? 😉
“I don’t compare myself to Mount Everest or Saturn either.”
yeah because if you did you would have to conclude that these are things that are greater than you. And if they are greater than you, then it begs the question, is the source of their creation greater still? These are not purely religious questions, but simple logical formulations.
“superior”
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
You’re dodging
but I am going to conclude that Felix Krull, the man, imagines he is superior to the force of nature or the event that resulted in the creation of the universe and all things in it including himself.
I think EMJ is right in this. Atheism operates in the realm of human psychology not theology.
if an atheist can’t even bring himself to admit he is a lesser force than the Big Bang or a lesser creation than a planet that’s been around for a million years or a seven mile tall mountain that has fascinated people forever then that speaks to a man’s psychology. There is nothing theological going on there.
verdict: Atheism is simply self worship. Or narcissism.
“And I struggle to fit the terms “superior” or “inferior” into my relationship to the Big Bang.”
If the Big Bang was caused by an uncreated Creator, would cause a feeling of inferiority? What if I said remarkably that you might be created in the image (but not the exact likeness) of this uncreated Creator? What are the feelings then?
The Big Bang makes no sense without a God to have done that explosion of creativity. The theory is: There was nothing and then there was everything in one moment. At the time it was published, there were worries that it was entirely too religious. It’s a statement about modernity that people go through their whole lives without realizing the issues the theory brings up.
To the extent that people avoid those issues, it never becomes religious. But “Why” the Big Bang makes it that right way. The Big Bang only ever answers “How”.
If the Big Bang was caused by an uncreated Creator, would cause a feeling of inferiority?
If that were the case, yes, I’d have to revise my stance. We have zero evidence that it was, though.
The Big Bang makes no sense without a God to have done that explosion of creativity.
The BB is not suppose to make “sense”. It either is or isn’t, that’s all.
Asking meta-questions about it is as fruitful as asking who created God – I mean if you argue that you can’t have something from nothing, that same logic goes for the Almighty too.
That’s why I say atheism is for people who fancy themselves as intellectuals but in fact are boring and lack intellectual curiosity. It’s a pose.
I am not speaking about Felix here. I think he is just playing cute, but I guess that means he’s posing lol
but how anyone can accept the premise of a Big Bang and not ask the obvious follow up question is beyond me.
That’s because you’re a Christian and Creation is a pretty big deal in your world view.
To me, creation is just an academic question and if there’s no satisfactory answer to be found, I’m certainly not going to subscribe to a highly meta and speculative one, just to have an answer.
Creation is a big deal to everyone but atheists who have a ho hum attitude about it.
But that has been my point all along. Atheists tend to be dullards and not very intellectual curious or interested in anything but themselves
atheism operates in the realm of human psychology, not theology
but you will change. One day the light will go off and you will see that Falcone was right. There is a lot to be amazed by and in awe of in this life. . And then the questions will start spinning in your head and you will have to decide.
edit: let me modify. It seems to me, rather, that creation is a big deal to most people who spend a lot of time outdoors. I think what affects most people nowadays is that the world they need to know is on the computer so when they get outside it’s like “this looks like a video game”. As opposed to the other way around. I think the saturation of imagery and so forth is dulling the senses of people as to nature and creation. Sadly it may take corpses piled up high to disabuse people of their notions of their own specialness. When you see a dead body you see it for what it is, a sack of flesh and bones, and yet five minutes ago there was a person in that body telling us he was a god, or bigger and better than say a planet. But it’s usually events like this that are necessary to bring people back down to earth and to then reevaluate their place on it
“You (or real Christians at any rate) believe in an anthropomorphic superbeing…”
I think that’s probably fair through in, say, K-6 Sunday school. There are all kinds of things we simplify to try to communicate concepts at an age-appropriate level. Do some retain the sky-daddy thing well into adulthood? Maybe. I don’t personally know any, but there could be. I’d think most can figure out that burning bushes are not exactly anthropomorphic, but there may be some who can’t.
So you don’t know anyone who believe that Adam was made in the image of God?
A photograph is an image of human. Is the photograph a human?
That’s just casuistry. “Anthropomorphic” doesn’t mean “human”, it means “human-like” and a photograph of a man certainly carries the likeness of one.
“You (or real Christians at any rate) believe in an anthropomorphic superbeing, an actual sky daddy with very human qualities, not some vague abstraction you can fit in between the cracks of the scientific understanding of the world.”
We do not believe the first part of the statement. God the Father is an uncreated Creator with no gender. The Holy Spirit has no gender nor human form either. We have use human terms, however, in order to even have the discussion. Part of the modern issue is that most people have an impression of Christianity that is overly simplified and somewhat incorrect. Then (see above) people complain when it gets too complex. People want simple..but they don’t.
Felix, we can definitely agree that American atheists are assholes. Admittedly, I am probably biased by the types I see online and on the glowing box. Think Bill Maher. I could have a beer and enjoyable conversation with your type.
I could have a beer and enjoyable conversation with your type.
I’ve no doubt we could; I usually get along well with Christians. I’ve been married to one in fact, and I taught her Inner Mission parents to play penny Mausel. Wife’s teenage brother won about $2, he reacted like he’d pulled a jackpot in Vegas.
Felix,
when you’re out on the town, talking to the ladies, searching for the next Mrs Krull, tell them, “hey baby, I’m bigger than the Big Bang”
Ha ha. Let us know how it goes. great pick up line
My Bang is bigger than Creation.
“The question of God is simply not one you spend time on or debate with your peers, except for a few years in your moody teens when people tend towards introspection.”
In one sense, to be angry with a God that doesn’t exist shows a bit more life than to sink into a despair that lends itself to suicide on all levels.
Who said anything about despair? I will concede that religion might fill some kind of existential void, but the funny thing is that Christians think and talk a lot more about death than atheists (or Danish atheists at any rate) do.
A lot more. And I’ve never heard about anyone at a funeral congratulating the bereft mother that little Billy was lucky to only have suffered five years in this vale of woes before God took him home.
I’d add my name to those who are not threatened by science. Not least because we are told to seek wisdom.
Used to be I’d bring something sciency to church from time to time. One of the biggest hits was a couple big sheets of polarizing material in the fall so people could see the wonder that is in the various colors of chlorophyll in a way that was not possible until very recently in human history. Then superimposing and rotating the sheets so people could see light itself in a way that was not possible.
Evolution works on tiny incremental advantages. So why not evolve away from less efficient, less productive colors of chlorophyll?
Because it confers an advantage! QED.
What advantage?
Survival.
Yes, but how does something less efficient give a survival advantage?
You obviously missed the QED.
It’s circular references all the way down.
“A man confident in his faith would argue that since mortals are fallible and God is not, the Bible must be true, and in case of incompatibility with science, the boffins inevitably wrong, no matter how compelling their arguments. That’s how Mohammadans deal with science.”
The issue is that the Bible is not written as scientific work. It is a true work, but not exactly as a science paper or a strict history lesson. Thus if science produces a true statement, Scripture and it need to harmonize, but not necessarily detail each other. We can’t be Mohammedians. In fact the scientism that is the modern secular religion is simply the natural philosophy offshoot of the Christian faith. (Most modern atheist arguments are also offshoots of Christian ones, but that’s another post. )
Meanwhile, Scripture has been correct along. The the Big Bang theory is God creating the universe in 7 days, which most have understood to not be human earth days. Modern science thought even agrees with the ordering in Genesis. Darwinism is kind of junk theory, but if I allow it, it’s just God creating life slowly from our POV, rather than a “poof”. There was never any problem with heliocentrism, other than by the medieval era, the Greek pagan ideas of the stars had come to represent certain ideas in the faith. That was the hesitation, not acceptance of the theory as improved observation. Genesis talks nothing about where the sun is relative to the earth.
The issue is that the Bible is not written as scientific work. It is a true work, but not exactly as a science paper or a strict history lesson.
Yes, but that makes the whole notion of scripture kind of slippery, doesn’t it? If it fits with what we observe, no problem that’s because the Bible is inspired by God. If it doesn’t well, it’s not supposed to be taken literally. But that also mean you can’t use Genesis as an argument because when the shoe doesn’t fit, it’s just an allegory.
Did you know that there are two creation myths in Genesis? The six-day thing and immediately after that, one where God starts by creating a spring and all the animals come out if it. The first one is for the urban sophisticates, the second one for the desert goat herders.
But nowhere is there anything that even looks like the Big Bang or evolution. If there had been that or, say. the periodic table or Maxwell’s equations, I’d be a lot more open to the notion of God.
natural philosophy (is an) offshoot of the Christian faith.
I sort of agree with this. Religion is proto-science, an attempt at understanding the world. It is now being displaced by a better model for understanding it.
“Yes, but that makes the whole notion of scripture kind of slippery, doesn’t it? ”
Yes, but God is like that. Science is much more slippery than most people understand as well.
“But that also mean you can’t use Genesis as an argument because when the shoe doesn’t fit, it’s just an allegory.”
Most people well before the 20th century saw the “plot” holes in Genesis, including 2 creation stories. I don’t need Darwinism to realize that Genesis has to involve allegory. The issue comes up without even thinking about modern science theories.
“The first one is for the urban sophisticates, the second one for the desert goat herders.”
Yes, I did know of the 2 creation stories (see above). This characterization of them is simply modern self flattery. One thing us moderns can be counted on is assuming we’re the first ones to ever have had a question about Scripture while judging our ancestors.
“But nowhere is there anything that even looks like the Big Bang or evolution. If there had been that or, say. the periodic table or Maxwell’s equations, I’d be a lot more open to the notion of God.”
In Genesis God creates something out of nothing, in a time span we can’t really imagine so the author gives it days. In the Big Bang, (an unnamed person) creates something out of nothing, in time span we can’t really imagine, so committees gave it billions of years. The ancients at least knew that it wasn’t 7 days. Evolution is just God creating the life, but slowly and out of different forms of already existing life, which He also at some point had to create. God is creating life in Genesis too.
Scripture is about God and His relationship to humans. The periodic table and Maxwell’s equations have no place there.
“Religion is proto-science, an attempt at understanding the world. It is now being displaced by a better model for understanding it.”
If by better, we mean unhappy, suicidal Europeans with no particular will even to defend their families or borders, I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. At any rate belief in a universe filled with unchanging rules we can use to predict the future is a faith given directly by Christianity. It’s the other way around.
If by better, we mean unhappy, suicidal Europeans with no particular will even to defend their families or borders
By “better” I mean better at explaining why there’s thunder and earthquakes and eclipses and such things, not “better” as in morally better or better for your mental health.
I was hoping to stay clear of theology, but you have to torture the text in Genesis a lot to make it conform to scientific observations. The fact that you bother with such textual contortions is an expression of the aforementioned elevation of scientism to the ultimate arbiter of reality: you effectively argue that since Genesis conforms with scientific observations, that must mean God is real.
And it’s not like Americans are doing any better defending their borders or their families; in fact Christians churches are one of the main drivers of the parachuting of immigrants into Christian communities. Here in Euroland, nationalist parties poll at 15-25% despite decades of establishment demonization and witch hunts and here, “nationalist” means “white nationalist”.
How are the white nationalist parties doing in America?
It’s simple to think the “universe created in six days” is a creation myth. But this assumes the six days should be measured from the perspective of the earth. I read an interesting book by a PhD astrophysicist who measured the six days from the point in space where the big bang occurred, and translated this period to time as measured from earth. In other words, if you sent a light beam from the area of the big bang 6 days after it occurred, toward the matter that became the earth, it would take 14 billion years for it to reach the earth. This is due to the incredibly rapid speed the earth is moving away from the point of the big bang. The 14 billion year figure matches current estimates of the age of the universe.
He then juxtaposed the current state of scientific knowledge about the creation of the universe, and more specifically earth, with the Genesis account of creation. Genesis identifies the exact correct sequence from the big bang, to the dark earth covered in water, surrounded by dense clouds, to the creation of the atmosphere, to plate tectonics, and finally to the evolution of life – from plant life and sea based creatures, to birds, to land based animals, to humans. How did the writer of Genesis get the exact sequencing correct over 2700 years ago? Less than 100 years ago, most scientists still believed the universe always existed. It was not until the big bang was proposed in 1927 (ironically by a Jesuit priest), that science caught up with the biblical account written down 3 millennia ago.
But that’s very far cry from what it actually says in Genesis. And I note this explanation was only “discovered” AFTER the BB theory became commonly accepted, just like Biblical heliocentrism was discovered only AFTER Galileo was vindicated.
If some guy in the Middle Ages had read Genesis and discovered BB theory with the 14 billion years history, the hot phase and the cooling and all that, you’d certainly have my attention, but this just oozes post hoc rationalization.
Relating to all the exotic theories about the Great Pyramid, Italian writer Umberto Eco went to his greengrocer with a tape measure and measured the dimensions of everything in the shop: the length of the desk, the ceiling height, the floor area, he counted the number of shelves and the number of apples and so forth, and playing around with these numbers, he could derive all kinds of amazing cosmological numbers, like the speed of light, the distance to the sun, the number of stars in the galaxy and so forth.
Well let’s go to the tape. Quotes from Genesis (my comments in parenthesis, which reflect the current scientific consensus), in order:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (until the big bang theory in 1927, science believed there was no beginning)
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” (earth was covered with water, heavy gases blocking the sun)
“And God said, “Let there be light” (gases covering the earth recede)
“Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water” (creation of the atmosphere)
“Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” (receding oceans and plate tectonics)
“Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” (science now believes life started in the oceans and evolved to the land)
“Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” (next sequence in evolution)
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (last step in evolution around 100-200 thousand years ago. Also the time when six days measured from the spot of the big bang is equivalent to 14 billion earth years, due to the expansion of the universe)
This seems like a lot more than post hoc rationalization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
How about a “rule”? Add a line or two of why your (naked) citation should be read by the audience. Seems a reasonable way to respect our time.
My guess is Miller-Urey is not that obscure, though it makes one wonder why bother linking it at all.
“Assume an atmosphere of nitrogen, ammonia, methane, CO2, H2O, etc. (or something — don’t recall the specifics of which gases), that we don’t know whether or not existed in the early earth, at pressures we are pretty sure did not exist, and then simulate lightning with electrical sparks, and at the end of this, we get a small amount of amino acids.”
“But amino acids would have degraded in those conditions.”
“Shut up! The science is settled!”
It says scientists created amino acids, which are nowhere near life, or single celled organisms. It’s kind of like saying I could drop small pieces of metal and glass in a lake and in a few billion years someone would pull out a perfectly working wristwatch. Actually, no. A wristwatch is much simpler than a single celled organism.
The most important part, @DLS, (IMO) is that many of the essential amino acids have not been able to be produced at all by M-U type experiments, and some of them are only produced in contradictory conditions; some in weakly reducing atmospheres, others in weakly oxidizing atmospheres. We don’t have an explanation for how the earth could sustain both close enough spatially or temporally to account for those acids to build up enough to form a pool of primordial soup.
I think they are on the right track, at least in part, but probably centuries away from a semi-plausible explanation.
Good point. And there is no explanation on how the amino acids and other elements always seems to change each other in a way that increases their complexity. It’s almost as if there is order to this cold, dark, random, chaotic universe. Nah, that sounds too magicy.
I was re-reading Xenophon’s Anabasis last month and I chuckled when Xenophon made an incredibly rational, linear speech to his men on the proper strategic plan for their campaign and then sacrifice some animals to confirm or reject the same plan. The Greeks understood the two realms of faith and reason.
Reading the entrails added an essential element of unpredictability. The enemy could not assume that the other side would do the rational thing. I think we could incorporate this randomness and spirituality into modern life but I’m not sure how.
History has the answer: those who have faith survive, the purely rational kill themselves off
You mean sacrificing your children for an AUDI isn’t rational?
An Audi no. A Bentley or a Rolls, yes.
Yes and no. Man isn’t a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. This is why the church is falling – we see it with the idiocy coming out of the Vatican these days. Believers are flipping off the church, not the faith for the most part.
Pilate saw Him as a harmless loon too. It’s said you can judge a man by his friends. You can judge him accurately by his enemies too. Moslems and jews are good enemies to have, if history is any guide…
I don’t think the Vatican has any Catholics in it. Vatican 2 could not have been a Catholic council, cause it contains non Catholic teachings previously condemned by the church like religious freedom. Do any one adhering to v2 falls from the faith.