Why (or why not) be Christian? Part 2

[Mustardseed86]

Continuing from this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/philosophy_religion_spirituality/5018897-why-or-why-not-be-christian

Anyone welcome to join. 🙂

You’ve an amazing imagination but where’s the evidence of these incredible claims?

There was a lot of writing about this, mainly by Paul (Letters) and also by other people who were involved with the religious/political turbulence happening throughout the region. His life happened as we are told - there are differences of interpretation, obviously.

Paul was a religious enforcer, but a mass search-and-destroy mission on heretics in a distant city hadn't been part of his remit until then. It was predatory. The guy was an academic, I really do think he would have felt conflicted.

During a difficult journey, he is "overwhelmed by a blazing light" - their road had just taken a turn to the East, 50km from Damascus. The sun rises fast and hot in those parts. His crisis of conscience reaches full pitch, he resolves it by converting.

We don't know for sure that he collapsed and went "blind" but I don't see why not. All kinds of things can cause neurological disruptions, and he was in a difficult situation.

@heyhohello, @Mustardseed86, @Kdtym10 it's interesting to read your various comments about viewing it through a spiritual lens and how, for you, it's all part of your faith. You're basically saying you understand these things exactly as Iron Age Jews understood them.

The thing is, I don't see them all that differently to you! We're looking at the same things in the same way, though I would put 'spiritual' in quotes. For me, psychology is real and that means emotions, ethics, values and conscience are real.

It barely matters whether one thinks Paul really got whisked to the Third heaven (whatever the fuck that is) by a dead prophet or felt he had been. The effect on him - and his consequently far-reaching impact on history - was the same. His motivation was clearly sincere, whether we call it (external) divine inspiration or (internal) moral imperative.

My view on Paul is not that spiritual tbh. I think your description of events is very plausible.

There’s a lot of evidence of Paul being a Jewish Mystic. I do think there was some kind of psychotic event on the Road to Damascus and given his background in Jewish mysticism he interpreted everything in that light. Now I have views regarding what we call psychotic events snd psychological visions and spirit but we will leave that for another time.

I don’t doubt that Paul very much believed what he said and was interpreting things through the language of his mystical initiation.

The third heaven journey was practically a copy of the spiritual journey of a type of Chariot Mysticism called Merkabah Saul was most likely initiated into. It is the abode of God in that context.

There’s a great video I’ll find later setting this out,

Here’s the link to the video re Paul and mysticism - there’s also been some good books round the subject

@Garlicking,

For me, psychology is real and that means emotions, ethics, values and conscience are real.

I believe psychology is real also. Psychological differences can also be observed physically in differing brain physiology. I believe this exists alongside the spiritual though.

Spirit affects thought, thought affects psychological state, psychological state affects physiological state, physiological state affects physical state, physical state affects actions, actions affect environment.

And then there is feedback too...

😂 Well, that was something ... They could all have made their lives much easier by discovering LSD!

They probably did consume ergot, deliberately or accidentally, which would go some way to explain the higher frequency of magical experiences in the ancient world. And they would've had access to opium.

Nice rabbi geezer. I'm going to watch his miracles video, and I think he's got one on the core magical concepts. I'm interested in how very similar these stories are across time & place in North Africa, Europe, Asia and India. I wonder if the old civilisations of the Americas had them, too?

I've just learned that Elijah was better at miracles than Jesus! How have I missed that, all these years? And ... I wonder if he was better at them than my favourite miracle worker, Derren Brown?

Lots of hearsay going on here! No miracles or higher powers.

I think we all agree psychology is real. But, to it’s detriment it seems to be an increasingly isolated craft.,

Although, largely out of favour amongst the humans are biological machine bods, Jung was incredibly adept at using the knowledge of alchemy and other esoteric in explaining the workings of the mind. He didn’t see this as an isolated biological function but something connected to something a lot bigger.,

I think disassocitive disorders are particularly well suited to a more wholistic approach of body mind and spirit, and indeed this is what many rituals are trying to do - see for example the concept of soul fragmentation.

it’s clear the current ways of treating mental illnesses just aren’t working. I would say it’s because they are treating the mind as a machine.

I liked that you raised Jung in this context, @Kdtym10, though you're attached to the aspect of his thinking that I find least appealing. I do believe it's helpful to identify universal features of our unconscious minds, and think it's likely that these have been commonly represented as symbolic stories and characters.

I don't believe there is any sort of soul or spirit that exists as an independent entity or one that is separable from the physical body. I use the words soul and spirit, but I mean them as aspects of (mortal) humanity.

Depends on your definition of miracle 🤣 There's a lot of bullshit and credulity.

Elijah's prophetable career (yes, that was a TERRIBLE pun) was in 900BC, so his audiences were probably easier to impress.

I don't believe there is any sort of soul or spirit that exists as an independent entity or one that is separable from the physical body. I use the words soul and spirit, but I mean them as aspects of (mortal) humanity.

@Garlicking, so you are only accepting of physical phenomena of life other words(?).

In beginning to grasp/accept the concept of the spiritual I think it might be useful to lose the stereotypical image of a ghost in art or literature and start to explore what the word actually denotes, what sort of phenomenon.

The expression, 'Zeitgeist' gives a good illustration. Literally translated as 'spirit of the time'. The phenomenon shows how social and historical context affects people's attitudes, thoughts and behaviours to such an extent it can be a force in and of itself.

Jesus describes His words as,

"...the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." (John 6:63)

In John 1 it is written,

"1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)

These two pieces of scripture emphasised the power of language in shaping culture and people and also how language reflects our cultures. Anthropologically, studying different languages and the interplay between this and people's perceptions and their environment can give an insight into how something that is bigger than any one individual or group of individuals can affect people.

In the last thread there was a lengthy discussion concerning evolution, nature/nurture, epigenetics and the interplay between natural selection, individual choice, culture, society, God and how this all can affect our biology in the shorter and longer term.

Not at all, there is a massive difference between a true mystical experience entered into through the efforts of mind body and spirit and the use of psychedelic drugs..

I love Dr Justin Sledge he’s very well regarded in the academic field of western esotericism and he makes things very accessible and easy to understand. He does Q&A sessions via you tube if you’re interested.

Have you ever looked into perennial philosophy?

I think it’s a really important point. My view is that true miracles all take place internally (which can, as a consequence affect the external world). But I think some of the calls for “proof” have led to some dubious claims and attempts to make something physical to illustrate a point.

In the last thread there was a lengthy discussion concerning evolution, nature/nurture, epigenetics and the interplay between natural selection, individual choice, culture, society, God and how this all can affect our biology in the shorter and longer term.

I read it, @heyhohello. It all struck me as the kind of wanton extrapolation the 'spiritual' love to apply to real scientific phenomena, almost twisting the science to fit with their world view.

This goes back to another theme of that thread: science starts from a point of not knowing, tries to find out, and discards theories if disproven. Science actively tries to disprove its theories. Faith, by contrast, needs to believe it "knows" and seeks always to affirm itself - even if that means making stuff up about science.

I said faith rather than religion, because there are a lot of "faiths" that do all this without being actual religions (flat earthers, Q-anon). And, regrettably, science can get a bit faith-like sometimes (eugenics, gender) when it goes off the rails for a while.

But we have gone over this time and time again Science and Faith are two very different things each trying to explain something different. Man is the connection between the two, the physical and the spiritual. To look at only one of these things is to not see the whole picture imo. Science borrows from faith and faith borrows from science sometimes they are describing the same tree from different angles.

if you don’t believe in a spiritual world fair enough, no one will ever be able to prove it all within scientific methodology. It’s pointless,. If science starts with a hypothesis why doesn’t it start with the hypothesis that there is a spiritual world and until it is disproven it must exist.

It all struck me as the kind of wanton extrapolation the 'spiritual' love to apply to real scientific phenomena, almost twisting the science to fit with their world

@Garlicking, oh. I don't remember you commenting on any if the specifics regarding where exactly you felt the science had been twisted. Yes, faith does reach further than science. It's going to by the very definition of faith. Which in Christianity is this.

"11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

But faith does not take away from the observations of science. It simply does not regard it as all there is to life. Which in turn means faith might be guarded regarding some of the conclusions and extrapolations reached by science which by definition is unfinished and constantly evolving as more is found out.

@Garlicking although describing faith as 'wanton' is humorously ironic!😁

Science and faith are separate. Science is all around whereas faith has no part in my life.

until disproven it must exist is not how this works. People hypothesise - nay, insist - that Elvis is alive. Nobody's going to dig him up out of Gracelands' garden to check his dental records, so it can't be disproven. No-one can disprove that aliens have sucked humans into their spacecraft for medical examinations.

Given the strength of 'spiritual' pressure, science has been trying to prove such things as astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, afterlife, ghosts, ectoplasm, near-death experience and more, for over a century. How much absence of proof would you consider a disproof?

I was thinking earlier about how the word 'hope' is very close to the word desire but along with it there is a sense of whatever is hoped for being possible. And faith is the things that are hoped for.

I observed how I have in the past mused over how I have felt some of the things desired by other people would necessitate certain hurdles to overcome. Hurdles which I didn't have the energy for, although I recognised they weren't hurdles that weren't impossible. As a result I didn't desire the same things.

I wonder for atheists is it how they see the reality of Christianity that they don't desire or whether it is more to do with how they understand the art of the possible.

And faith is the things that are hoped for.

Haha, so we without faith have no hopes, are hopeless?
Right.
🤨

Given the strength of 'spiritual' pressure, science has been trying to prove such things as astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, afterlife, ghosts, ectoplasm, near-death experience and more, for over a century. How much absence of proof would you consider a disproof?

@Garlicking, no spiritual pressure from me. Spirit isn't physical until manifested physically. And then when it is manifest physically it is physical phenomena. Spirit is also unpredictable, no reliable repeatability. Jesus says this on the topic of Spirit:

"8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

@Garlicking, if you have a consistent hopes you have a faith of sorts but not necessarily in God. Depends where your hopes lie...some people have faith in science, some human endeavour, some human nature for example.