Flann 5 wrote:
the problem here is as I said, the Gnostic thesis of dual layers of meaning, one for the ignorant masses and the other for elite initiates is a logical vicious circle.
By no means is the presence of dual layers of meaning a vicious circle. As you have noted Flann, the Gospels indicate such a thesis with the claim from Christ to speak in parables for the ignorant whose real meaning is for the initiates. The real vice emerges from the denial of dual meaning. To claim that the surface meaning is the only one implies that rather than explaining reality as it is manifest, as Paul said he wanted to do in Romans 1, Paul's allegorical claims must all be taken literally. The assumption of literal exhaustion of meaning is in conflict with observed truth, and is better explained by considering parables as symbolic introductions to a coherent underlying theology, grounded in astronomy.
Flann 5 wrote:
No matter how clearly it can be shown that the writings say something totally at odds with and contrary to the supposed real meanings this can be dismissed as the fodder for the ignorant masses.
How then can the thesis be disproved? The delusion lies in the thesis itself and it is humourous therefore to see those who interpret rationally dismissed as being deluded.
This supposed contradiction between allegory and literal meaning is resolved by considering the literal story as a popular introduction for the masses. This is a coherent motive for the authors, who in the Gospels illustrate the parabolic method in explaining the story of the sower, not as a clear literal story, but as allegory for how the word of God falls on receptive ear (good soil) or on unreceptive ears (thorns and a path), or is unheard at all (stony ground).
Similarly, the orderly theory of time presented in Romans 8, with the word of Christ like a baby being born, is compatible with scientific astronomy, whereas conventional creeds of Christ returning from the right hand of God to judge the quick and the dead involve an unclear and unscientific mythological worldview.
Flann 5 wrote:
You may disagree with a supernatural worldview but to see other than a supernatural worldview in these writings is to turn things on their head, to accommodate a dubious theory in support of your own worldview.
The motive for making the supernatural dogma the primary meaning matched to the political agenda of the church to align throne and altar, by deferring messianic hopes of the transformation of the world to the Second Coming of Christ, and giving hope to the masses through the dream of a heavenly afterlife. If this dogma was developed to supplant an original Hermetic Gnostic astronomy, we have a coherent explanation of Christian intent and evolution.
It is far more dubious to assert that the Christian church, with all its ignorance and political motives, presented an accurate reading of its sources, than to explore how these sources could have had a coherent motive grounded in the integration of faith and cosmology.
Flann 5 wrote:
Sun worship is pagan and is by no means Judeo-Christian, yet this in effect is what you are saying Paul is advocating. Not directly but as the epitome of order and bringer of life.
The book of Kings explains the destruction of solar imagery in Jewish temples, as a method to recast Judaism against a hierarchical monotheistic transcendental dogma and exclude the old natural diverse pantheistic practices that were especially associated with fertility cults involving women. The evolution of belief involved the repurposing of very ancient visions of order, which had sought to explain natural cycles of time, in terms of the anthropomorphised security myth of Jehovah. Again, the dominant view within the ancient religions displaced by monotheism was the correct scientific observation that the sun is the bringer of order to life.
The displanting of the sun by an anthropomorphised deity beyond the universe served a political agenda, and can best be understood as an evolutionary security response, rather than an actual revelation from a real divine being who spoke from within a burning bush or a pillar of fire. Logos or word is more coherently explained as the rational order of the cosmos than as a supernatural voice from an existing entity who made man in his image.
Flann 5 wrote:
It's not of course, since life comes from life but it is one environmental element necessary for life to exist and continue but so also is water and oxygen amongst many others.
Flann, your grasp of astronomy implied in this comment is weak. Water and oxygen only provide life because the sun heats up the earth to make water liquid and provides the energy and orbital stability which over four billion years enabled algae to convert CO2 into free oxygen available for multi-celled life since the Cambrian explosion. Seeing the sun as the source of earth’s orderly stability is a purely scientific understanding.
Flann 5 wrote:
Paul explicitly condemns pagan worship in this book as worship of the creature and creation rather than the creator. The sun is secondary and God primary.
Paul’s condemnation of paganism is about how a false idolatrous order is wrongly worshiped. But his comment that the transcendent divinity is manifest in the natural creation implies that we should see the sun as a lens that clarifies our vision of the ordered whole, not as something that can be ignored in favour of interpreting order through textual revelation alone.
Applying Paul’s outlook today, the idolatry that he condemns should include Bibliolatry which ignores how a divine order is manifest in nature. The condemnation of paganism is more analogous to how a coherent theology today would critique the worship of material possessions on the basis that these distract us from the higher values of faith, hope and love. Understanding astronomy is not a material distraction from any deeper cosmic truth, but rather a way to understand how the ethical values and cosmology of Christianity cohere with scientific knowledge.
Flann 5 wrote:
And as I pointed out through James Hannam's article, Paul is by no means silent on Jesus' human earthly life.
You can dismiss these things as part of the "that's just for the ignorant masses" line but it's hard to see how something like global warming might have been in the mind of a first century religious Jew, even unconsciously.
There are a couple of aspects regarding your point about global warming or climate change and its relevance to the Bible. Firstly, Revelation 11:18 says the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. Global warming through unchecked carbon emissions is now the main cause of planetary extinction, in what science terms the Sixth Extinction, so arguably the failure to steward our natural dominion stands under the wrath of God against this Biblical framework.
A second aspect turns on how life is adapted to the real cycles of time. We know all our genes are coded to adapt to the real cycles of the day and the year with regular patterned responses to the changes of light and heat. My point, which I accept is difficult to understand, is that the extremely long history of life on earth should also contain adaptive response to the much slower orbital cycles which astronomy calls insolation, driving the 20,000 year cycles of glaciation. For example, some species of algae could thrive better when the summer solstice is at perihelion, in an interglacial, and other species could thrive when the winter solstice is at perihelion, in a glacial maximum. While glaciation is relatively recent in the long history of earth, this insolation pattern has been regular since the dawn of life.
Looking for how this insolation cycle is reflected in mythology, we can actually see that the Indian myth of cycles of light and dark over 24,000 years is a good match. This myth provides an encompassing framework for the Jewish myth of a 7000 year tribulation, which also matches to the idea that 3.5 ages (times, time and half a time) reflect the astronomical observation of precession over a 7000 year historic period from 4000 BC to 3000 AD.
Flann 5 wrote:
Most scholars and historians take a middle line on the historicity of Jesus as they are generally sceptical about the supernatural as you are, but this just highlights the extreme of the mythicist view.
I think what your point really highlights is that scholarship about religious themes is intimidated by believers, and reluctant to challenge beliefs which have wide emotional appeal. This reluctance is itself what you called a vicious circle, because the refusal of scholars to discuss how the myths most probably evolved in scientific terms is then used by believers to justify their unscientific assumptions about the supernatural and about fictional claims from the Gospels which lack evidence to corroborate them.
Flann 5 wrote:
It's a world of bruised egos in the combat zone where most scholars don't even venture. Here for example is a lengthy response from atheist sceptic Tim O Neill to mythicist David Fitzgerald.
It can be seen how dismissive O Neill is of supernatural Christian views, nonetheless he argues cogently against mythicism.
http://www.armariummagnus.blogspot.ie/2 ... david.html
This link is imprecise; Click on David Fitzgerald's book "Nailed" on the link, for pretty much the bulk of the debate though it's not the actual article I had in mind, if you are interested.
The actual article I intended on the blog is titled; the jesus myth theory;a response to David Fitzgerald, and is likely a sequel to the "Nailed" one, so maybe it's findable but I imagine the arguments are largely the same.
O’Neill tends to present aggressive tendentious arguments, such as his farcical defence of the presence of the Jesus text in Josephus, which if authentic would certainly have been noticed by some of the defenders of the faith in the centuries before Eusebius.
But your point that scholars are reluctant to bruise their egos in debating mythicism illustrates how the power of the church to distort this debate has shifted the terrain away from the norms of historical analysis and towards theories which will not disturb the prejudices of the pious.