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Commentary on Romans 8

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Flann 5
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:Evidence matches better to the hypothesis that Jesus was invented as a fictional character who became historicised in response to the comforting power of religion that claims basis of its stories in historic truth. The power of belief in history overwhelmed those that admitted that their stories were made up, even though the belief in the Historical Jesus was pure fantasy, albeit fantasy constructed on a scientific astronomical framework.
Well Robert, we've been around this block a few times now in relation to Christ myth theory.
Obviously I don't agree that evidence matches better to the hypothesis that Jesus was invented as a fictional character who became historicised.
On the contrary,however the arguments have pretty much all been made in relation to this so it would just been repeating them again ,to respond to your hypothesis and ideas of astro-theology and so forth.
So I'll just leave it at that, and these arguments are here and on the other threads related to Christ myth theory.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote: I have doubt for anything called a scientific vision in the first place.
Proverbs 29:18 says without vision people perish. Vision can be accurate or inaccurate. Science is more accurate than nonsense. A vision is a coherent story of the meaning and purpose of life. Such is vastly more possible and plausible when backed by evidence and empirical consistency than when pulled from the nether regions of fantasy and imagination. Imaginative stories obtain credibility to the extent they are scientific, ie how they link with evidence. The story of Jesus is credible to the extent it explains ancient culture, and that involves scientific assessment of both the historical claims of the New Testament and a broader scientific analysis of ancient cultural trends, such as the role of astronomy in religion.
DWill wrote: I think also that the equivalence of order, or orderly thinking, and science isn't valid.
Science is the epitome of valid orderly thought. Non-scientific thinking has an intrinsic tendency to be disorderly, presenting a failure to match claims and observations in an orderly way. The principle of consistency at the heart of science assumes as a basic axiom of scientific thought that the universe obeys consistent orderly physical laws. This article of rational faith that the cosmos is orderly, together with the high risk of disorderly mental processes where the discipline of scientific evidence is neglected, establishes the strong hold that scientific thinking has upon the validity of orderly thinking.
DWill wrote: Doctrines of the Church that require supernatural belief are actually quite orderly, even logical if logic is taken to refer to internal consistency.
No, you are using ‘orderly’ in an incorrect way when you relate it to internal consistency. The orderliness of faith refers to its coherence and truth, in terms of its match to reality, such that internal consistency is less relevant to assessing if faith is orderly. An orderly claim about the world is one with plausible premises. Science assumes the universe exists and obeys physical laws, since all observation matches that assumption. Religion assumes, traditionally, that an external God has power to change physical laws, even though this assumption has no evidence to support it. Where an unsupported premise (eg Christ saves from Adam’s fall) is used to justify faith in a false conclusion (eg young earth creationism) the overall system of belief produced is far less orderly than the vast coherent body of scientific knowledge.
DWill wrote: The adjective 'scientific' as you're using it is supposed to confer respectability, and that is about all it does. It's not very useful.
Respectability in religious discussion goes together with a range of ethical values, such as reliability, coherence, honesty, accuracy, and power to provide elegant and parsimonious explanations with high predictive power. Where Paul is read with his concept of order understood scientifically, the ethical value of his distinction between spirit and flesh becomes more sensible. Consigning Paul to the old fashioned limited framework of a false magical theory of spirit dramatically limits the ability of his ideas to generate predictions about the actual beliefs and methods of the founders of Christianity.
DWill wrote: you have often presented a fully customized program as something for everyman.
And that is precisely what should be the goal of a reform of Christianity to align to scientific knowledge, while respecting the emotional value of traditional myths such as the passion of Christ. Restoring the ability of the Christ story to speak to everyman today requires a reconciliation between the text and scientific knowledge, through the method of analysing how the miraculous claims in the Bible could have evolved as allegorical parables to explain natural observations such as the orderly cycle of the seasons. Time is the great measure of scientific order, and religion should try to explain the nature of time.
DWill wrote: Rational respect for the epistles can come also from the attempt to understand Paul's (in this case) purpose and audience, even though one may not assent to the theology.
My approach is entirely based on an attempt to understand Paul’s purpose and audience. My view is that the reality is hard to tell because of the power of church distortion. Gnostic thought was vastly more prominent in the construction of Christianity than the literal story told by the church would have us believe. The mystical monastic tradition with roots in Buddhist mission to the West is an example of a social factor that informs the epistles which has been neglected by western historiography. Assent to church theology will only mislead the reader regarding Paul’s purpose and audience. The church used its literal theology to rewrite history as part of a violent long-prosecuted military campaign to suppress the Gnostic Hermetic astronomy which provided the blueprint and template for the Christ Myth. The real purpose and audience of the Epistles must be reconstructed against the two level typology of esoteric and exoteric audiences, with literalism understood as the milk for the public babes and allegory the meat for the secret elite.
DWill wrote:Rational respect would also be given to content such as the centrality of love in 1 Corinthians.
And interestingly, such sublime moral imagery as the love poem in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians exhibits a strong continuity with Buddhist ideas, which in my view are at the foundation of the cultural evolution of Christian monastic doctrine. For example, the great Buddhist text the Dhammapada provides a foundation for Paul’s ideas about love in saying “hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule. Conquer the hateful man with love; conquer the bad man with goodness; conquer the miser with generosity; conquer the liar with truth.”
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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This is in reference to Flann's mention of technical points in this argument. A hallmark of conspiracy-based theories is to entice people into ignoring initial implausibility by raising technical points whose merits could perhaps be argued. But the implausibility of the whole remains, making the technical point meaningless. In the case of Paul, we're supposed accept that this Jew who created orthodox Christianity was really a subversive; that the pages upon pages of directions he gives to various churches on how to behave and believe as Christians don't count or are really saying something else (which is quite impossible). We're supposed to accept that Paul would never commit to writing what he is really thinking because of fear of authorities, Jewish or Roman. But of course he is very explicit on many things, so claiming he is withholding on certain others is arbitrary. Nor does Paul "publish" his writings as would be done today, putting them out there for all to see.

One of the easiest claims to dispose of is that Paul doesn't conceive of Jesus as human, with a family lineage. The different family trees don't favor a conclusion that the writers didn't believe he had been alive. Flann has cited several of the references that show Paul's true ideas about the origins of Jesus.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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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.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Flann 5 wrote: On Dwill's point of contingency. Everything is contingent, nonetheless we have Christ prophesying of this gospel being preached in all the world as an example of the expectancy of success. That would be contingent on them actually doing this, and of course is teleological and involves the idea of the providential working of God in all circumstances including even a seemingly insignificant sparrow's fall to earth.
...or of an airliner falling out of the sky, perhaps because maintenance had been deferred, due to a sudden rise in the cost of jet fuel after drastic OPEC production cuts-- and so on, in a chain of accidents not predestined or predictable.

Unlike with biological life, we are well able to see everything going on in our history, and by now should be able to see that providential ordering has not been in play. Our emotions may want it to be there, but we can rationally see that we're only justifying what we're powerless to change, anyway.

So, even more than miracles, I am unable to believe that anyone has escaped process, composed of millions of contingencies. This would apply as well when we're talking--always retrospectively--about movements in history such as the development of a religion. It should go without saying from this, that prophecy cannot exist.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:...or of an airliner falling out of the sky, perhaps because maintenance had been deferred, due to a sudden rise in the cost of jet fuel after drastic OPEC production cuts-- and so on, in a chain of accidents not predestined or predictable.

Unlike with biological life, we are well able to see everything going on in our history, and by now should be able to see that providential ordering has not been in play. Our emotions may want it to be there, but we can rationally see that we're only justifying what we're powerless to change, anyway.

So, even more than miracles, I am unable to believe that anyone has escaped process, composed of millions of contingencies. This would apply as well when we're talking--always retrospectively--about movements in history such as the development of a religion. It should go without saying from this, that prophecy cannot exist.
That's how it looks from a naturalist perspective.
Quite recently an airline was criticised during the time fuel was very expensive for barely carrying enough fuel to reach it's destination and maximising profits by carrying other loads. They had to request several, jump the queue, emergency landings where weather slowed things up, and so got away with it.
Providence includes both the good and the bad.In the past I tried to show through Hudson Taylor's life remarkable answers to prayer for needy supplies of food for the hospital they were running.
The timing is striking though in many respects everything is natural so could just be coincidence but when it happens too frequently this becomes a stretch at least.
In my own work when I started, the nursing home was state run and pretty basic so there were no bells and alarms for residents to ring in emergencies.
I can't remember how often I had forgotten something or some unrelated thought inclined me to go into a ward for something only to find an elderly resident about to fall out of a bed or one who had somehow managed to open a fire exit door three stories up, and being confused about to step out there.
Of course accidents did happen with falls, but basically I generally though not always requested God's help in my daily work.
In the normal course of events others also occasionally happened upon such situations but I was surprised myself at how often this occurred in my own experience.
All entirely natural but some thought like of maybe needing to get a towel for bathing someone inclined me to go the the right place at the crucial moment.
I considered it providential, though in a way everything is so while you can trace chains of events we often get sidetracked in our intentions and thoughts with unexpected outcomes.
It's not something that can be demonstrated to be beyond the natural and can be ascribed to coincidence though I don't think it is just that.
If God exists then prophecy is perfectly possible,I think.
It's irresponsible for any airline to take these kinds of fuel load risks and can result in calamity for others,and chains of events both good and bad can be linked with all natural occurrences. So it does look like that, but I think experiences like Taylor's are hard to attribute to frequent multiple coincidences.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Flann 5 wrote:
Just to elaborate here Robert. The main basis of the dual layer meaning comes from the teaching about the parables of Jesus in the gospels. "That seeing they might see and not perceive,and hearing they might hear and not understand." This is set against a backdrop of unbelief in the face of miraculous signs and is in effect a judgement on it, in that context.
Hi Flann. I enjoy responding to your comments because they are mostly quite sensible and address important issues, with just a sprinkling of enough pixie dust to justify your rejection of science as the foundation of thinking. I am just going through the sensible responses to my comments in this thread in order, and expect to soon catch up to the end including DWill’s comments.

Your assertion is incorrect that the dual layer theory articulated by Jesus is His judgment on the failure of hearers to believe in miracles. The miracles themselves are all actually parables. Miracles don’t happen. When there is a story about a miracle, it means something else, ie it is a parable.

The miracle of the cross and resurrection is a parable for the death and rebirth of the seasons each year. The miracle of Lazarus is a way to give new life to Egyptian myth. The loaves and fishes symbolise the precession of the equinox. These are coherent explanations of the rationale for the miracles, despite the foreignness of these explanations to conventional opinion.

When Jesus says the masses see but don’t perceive, His point is that the Gnostic cosmology at the basis of Christianity involves a level of scientific awareness, specifically regarding precession, which most people are simply incapable of. So the original intent of presenting Jesus as allegory for the sun is incomprehensible for people who find the need for a personal saviour as an emotional comfort.
Flann 5 wrote:
The parables are a part of the gospels yet we also find accounts such as the lengthy Sermon on the mount,which are not parabolic and are addressed to the multitudes as well as his disciples. Some of his parables were quite clearly understood by the hearers as is made plain in the passages, and it's specifically what is called "the mysteries of the kingdom" that is said to made known to his disciples only.
There could be some level of hidden meaning in the Sermon on the Mount. For example ‘turn the other cheek’ is arguably a statement of defiance against Roman arrogance, while ‘go the extra mile’ looks intended to humiliate the Roman military.

The key mystery of the kingdom, as explained by Paul in his allegory in Galatians 4, is that the new Jerusalem is “above”, and can be seen by looking up. This mystery flows through into a coherent Gnostic meaning for the Jesus story as cosmic allegory.
Flann 5 wrote:
We have the interpretation given to the disciples for most of these parables recorded in the gospels so to that extent they are no longer hidden or obscured.
No, that is untrue. As I mentioned in my last comment, there is a working out of the parable of the sower, but for the others the reader is left to work it out.

The church was deeply hostile to any claim that the Jesus story was anything other than a miraculous intervention by God, so any deeper meaning had to be concealed since any writings that conflicted too badly with literal orthodoxy just got burnt.
Flann 5 wrote:
The rationale is that this generation Jesus addressed was a particularly stubborn and recalcitrant one as in their stubborn rejection of Christ despite witnessing many miracles.
Christians today are just as stubborn and recalcitrant as the disciples and others described in the Bible who failed to see the meaning of miracles such as the loaves and fishes. The fact is that all miracle stories are allegory, and it takes a peculiar stiff-necked blindness to fail to see this. That is pretty much what Jesus says in castigating the disciples for not understanding miracles.

As David Hume wrote in his essay on miracles 250 years ago, the choice between explaining miracles as a psychological mistake and as breaking the law of physics is obvious. The absence of any evidence for miracles means they can be explained by assuming believers are wrong.
Flann 5 wrote:
There is no obvious element of tension or contradiction between the parables and the interpretation provided. They fit extremely well.
But there is immense tension between miracle stories and the difficulties with the explanation that God intervened in history. The tension can be resolved by assuming that the laws of physics are universal, and therefore that the miracles are allegory.
Flann 5 wrote:
They are a particular genre included in the gospels with others such as narrative and ordinary dialogue with people also.
And the parable genre has a big overlap with the miracle genre, since both are intended to conceal a hidden ethical or other meaning.
Flann 5 wrote:
So it seems to me it's problematic, as to turn the entirety of the writings in scripture into something akin to parable in allegorical interpretation is simply to not differentiate at all.
There are many ethical teachings in the Bible whose meaning is simple and clear. But those simple clear teachings do not include anything about the real historical existence of Jesus Christ, since the Jesus Myth is an entirely fictional allegory for an enlightened Gnostic Hermetic wisdom.
Flann 5 wrote:
So most would ordinarily read Paul's letter here as straightforward didactic language and as I said he refers to allegories specifically in Galatians, which would be meaningless in a book entirely made up of allegory.
The Haggar – Sarah allegory is explained by Paul in Galatians 4 as referring to the world and heaven. Another interesting interpretation derives from the idea that the Abraham story evolved from a migration from the Sarasvati (Sarah) and Ghaggar (Haggar) Rivers in India, which stopped flowing after a big earthquake in about 2000 BC, leading to the idea that the name Abraham is allegory for Out of Brahma. If you are hostile to the idea that Judaism came from India you will reject this reading out of hand.

Romans 8 does contain straightforward didactic language about the expected future transformation of the world in Christ. These teachings are obscured by the tendency to read the Gospels into Paul, even though there is almost no evidence that Paul was familiar with main Gospel stories about Jesus of Nazareth, a title Paul never uses for his imagined spiritual anointed saviour.
Flann 5 wrote:
Treating the entire bible as allegory is itself a kind of fundamentalist approach which fails to distinguish literary genres and the interpretations given often are blatantly contradictory to the plain unmistakeable meaning of the texts themselves.
It is dangerous to use the term ‘fundamentalist’ in such a sloppy and loaded way. Fundamentalists are people who place dogma above evidence. So the claim that Jesus really existed, despite the absence of any strong evidence for that claim, can be properly called a fundamentalist claim. But the hypothesis that Jesus is allegory for the Sun is not a fundamentalist claim, but rather assists in the scientific understanding of the real evolution of the early church.

The traditional distinction between miracles and parables is not a sound analytic method, since the distinction aims to support the magical premise of an interventionist God. Yes there are different genres in the Bible, but there is also a shipload more allegory in the Bible than conventional Christians can see. Unfortunately this Christian blindness often resembles an infantile bigotry, illustrating why it is so difficult to establish sensible dialogue about the Bible.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Flann 5 wrote: That's how it looks from a naturalist perspective.
Quite recently an airline was criticised during the time fuel was very expensive for barely carrying enough fuel to reach it's destination and maximising profits by carrying other loads. They had to request several, jump the queue, emergency landings where weather slowed things up, and so got away with it.
Providence includes both the good and the bad.In the past I tried to show through Hudson Taylor's life remarkable answers to prayer for needy supplies of food for the hospital they were running.
The timing is striking though in many respects everything is natural so could just be coincidence but when it happens too frequently this becomes a stretch at least.
In my own work when I started, the nursing home was state run and pretty basic so there were no bells and alarms for residents to ring in emergencies.
I can't remember how often I had forgotten something or some unrelated thought inclined me to go into a ward for something only to find an elderly resident about to fall out of a bed or one who had somehow managed to open a fire exit door three stories up, and being confused about to step out there.
Of course accidents did happen with falls, but basically I generally though not always requested God's help in my daily work.
In the normal course of events others also occasionally happened upon such situations but I was surprised myself at how often this occurred in my own experience.
All entirely natural but some thought like of maybe needing to get a towel for bathing someone inclined me to go the the right place at the crucial moment.
I considered it providential, though in a way everything is so while you can trace chains of events we often get sidetracked in our intentions and thoughts with unexpected outcomes.
It's not something that can be demonstrated to be beyond the natural and can be ascribed to coincidence though I don't think it is just that.
If God exists then prophecy is perfectly possible,I think.
It's irresponsible for any airline to take these kinds of fuel load risks and can result in calamity for others,and chains of events both good and bad can be linked with all natural occurrences. So it does look like that, but I think experiences like Taylor's are hard to attribute to frequent multiple coincidences.
Do you think "naturalist perspective" is clearer than "materialist perspective'? Just asking so I can judge what comes across better. You seem to be talking about intuitions you have that there is indeed guidance outside of your own ability to think. You may "go with" those intuitions rather than question them critically, and I'm not going to criticize that because it is truly a personal matter. I'm not going to extol hyper-rationality, either, of which I may be an example. That is personal, too, and seems kind of instinctual in me, as belief does in you.

I sense you're a modest person, so you're not going to say that your work is an outgrowth of your faith. But it interests me to learn whether there is a link, in general, between devotion to God and devotion to people in need. We naturalists/materialists can be very defensive on that point, insisting that that kind of goodness doesn't depend on having any particular religious beliefs. Okay, but does it help, does it increase the incidence of the behavior? There are always--always--trade-offs, no matter where we come down on the scale of belief.

If your work is your calling, it seems to me that even the word 'calling' has a religious sense and maybe an origin. I've never felt that way about what I do, so it's a fortunate thing to experience it. Very recently, my 91-year-old father entered nursing care. He may yet be sent home to live with my mother some more, but we all like to think of him being not just adequately cared for but loved. That's asking a lot from staff who who work hard and have only so much compassion to give. But if nurses and others are doing it from a sense of calling, that bodes well for my dad.
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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Robert Tulip wrote:Hi Flann. I enjoy responding to your comments because they are mostly quite sensible and address important issues, with just a sprinkling of enough pixie dust to justify your rejection of science as the foundation of thinking.
You're a fine one Robert, to be slinging pixie dust around given your astro-theological interpretations. I don't reject science but I consider the evolutionary theory to be an extrapolation with insufficient evidence. Others do accept it and accommodate it without concluding that it rules out God.
And origins are problematic for the naturalist and remain unsolved so it's premature to claim science has provided a naturalistic explanation.
Robert Tulip wrote:Your assertion is incorrect that the dual layer theory articulated by Jesus is His judgment on the failure of hearers to believe in miracles. The miracles themselves are all actually parables. Miracles don’t happen. When there is a story about a miracle, it means something else, ie it is a parable.
You simply assert here that miracles don't happen and based on your worldview conclude that they must be something else like a parable.
A miracle is also a sign as is stated but a parable is not a sign in the same way.
It's expressly stated that it was a judgement on the hearers, but your interpretive method involves ignoring this and forging ahead with imposing your thesis on the texts.
Robert Tulip wrote:The miracle of the cross and resurrection is a parable for the death and rebirth of the seasons each year. The miracle of Lazarus is a way to give new life to Egyptian myth. The loaves and fishes symbolise the precession of the equinox. These are coherent explanations of the rationale for the miracles, despite the foreignness of these explanations to conventional opinion.

When Jesus says the masses see but don’t perceive, His point is that the Gnostic cosmology at the basis of Christianity involves a level of scientific awareness, specifically regarding precession, which most people are simply incapable of. So the original intent of presenting Jesus as allegory for the sun is incomprehensible for people who find the need for a personal saviour as an emotional comfort.
This is more applying of astro-theology interpretively. The ancient Israelites were well aware of the natural seasons and the connection with the sun and moon. In Genesis the sun and moon are said to;"divide the day from the night" and to be "for signs and seasons and for days and years."
This was well understood, but pagan worship of nature is condemned throughout despite your attempt to explain this away as political shenanigans.
Robert Tulip wrote:There could be some level of hidden meaning in the Sermon on the Mount. For example ‘turn the other cheek’ is arguably a statement of defiance against Roman arrogance, while ‘go the extra mile’ looks intended to humiliate the Roman military.

The key mystery of the kingdom, as explained by Paul in his allegory in Galatians 4, is that the new Jerusalem is “above”, and can be seen by looking up. This mystery flows through into a coherent Gnostic meaning for the Jesus story as cosmic allegory.
The sermon on the mount is patently ethical requiring no further layers of explanation to get the meaning.
Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:

We have the interpretation given to the disciples for most of these parables recorded in the gospels so to that extent they are no longer hidden or obscured.


No, that is untrue. As I mentioned in my last comment, there is a working out of the parable of the sower, but for the others the reader is left to work it out.

The church was deeply hostile to any claim that the Jesus story was anything other than a miraculous intervention by God, so any deeper meaning had to be concealed since any writings that conflicted too badly with literal orthodoxy just got burnt.
It's not untrue Robert, as anyone can see by just looking. You just don't accept the interpretation given since it has supernatural elements of angels etc.
In your view the Gnostics composed parables then in order to further conceal they provided interpretations that themselves conceal presumably astro-theological explanations.
This is a bottomless pit interpretively.
Can you provide an example of Gnostic astro-theological interpretation of the gospels from the early centuries? Not in what has survived, and it makes no sense that Irenaeus, for instance would fail to mention astro-theology in his lengthy refutation of Gnosticism if it was the heart and soul of the whole thing.
Robert Tulip wrote:The Haggar – Sarah allegory is explained by Paul in Galatians 4 as referring to the world and heaven. Another interesting interpretation derives from the idea that the Abraham story evolved from a migration from the Sarasvati (Sarah) and Ghaggar (Haggar) Rivers in India, which stopped flowing after a big earthquake in about 2000 BC, leading to the idea that the name Abraham is allegory for Out of Brahma. If you are hostile to the idea that Judaism came from India you will reject this reading out of hand.
I haven't investigated your Indian idea which looks dubious but I'll check it out. The Hagar -Sarah allegory is not explained as referring to the world and heaven but rather two covenants.
The whole issue in Galatians is Law and Grace and the fact that Sarah and Hagar are allegories as is Mount Sinai is no proof that they were not real people any more than Mount Sinai is not an actual mountain with significance due to the giving of the Law there.
Here's the Christian interpretation. http://www.biblehub.com/commentaries/galatians/4-21.htm
Robert Tulip wrote:Yes there are different genres in the Bible, but there is also a shipload more allegory in the Bible than conventional Christians can see. Unfortunately this Christian blindness often resembles an infantile bigotry, illustrating why it is so difficult to establish sensible dialogue about the Bible.
And what is evident in your commentary on Romans for this thread is that you allegorise what is plainly straightforward didactic language.
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Flann 5
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Re: Commentary on Romans 8

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DWill wrote:Do you think "naturalist perspective" is clearer than "materialist perspective'? Just asking so I can judge what comes across better. You seem to be talking about intuitions you have that there is indeed guidance outside of your own ability to think. You may "go with" those intuitions rather than question them critically, and I'm not going to criticize that because it is truly a personal matter. I'm not going to extol hyper-rationality, either, of which I may be an example. That is personal, too, and seems kind of instinctual in me, as belief does in you.

I sense you're a modest person, so you're not going to say that your work is an outgrowth of your faith. But it interests me to learn whether there is a link, in general, between devotion to God and devotion to people in need. We naturalists/materialists can be very defensive on that point, insisting that that kind of goodness doesn't depend on having any particular religious beliefs. Okay, but does it help, does it increase the incidence of the behavior? There are always--always--trade-offs, no matter where we come down on the scale of belief.

If your work is your calling, it seems to me that even the word 'calling' has a religious sense and maybe an origin. I've never felt that way about what I do, so it's a fortunate thing to experience it. Very recently, my 91-year-old father entered nursing care. He may yet be sent home to live with my mother some more, but we all like to think of him being not just adequately cared for but loved. That's asking a lot from staff who who work hard and have only so much compassion to give. But if nurses and others are doing it from a sense of calling, that bodes well for my dad.
Hi Dwill. I'm sure it's personal and emotional for you and your family with your Dad having entered a nursing home recently.
Not easy for anyone involved.
Nursing homes can be good or bad and it usually comes from the top down either way. I retired just last year after many years working in nursing homes. Actually I found some of the best carers to be atheists and I think it's more born out of personal experience and empathy.
I think standards of safety and care have improved with the idea of person rather than task centred care being generally promoted. Carers are human and imperfect so it's still a challenge and some are loving but it's never quite the same as one's own family.
It's not quite intuitions like in having some intangible sense that there might be a problem but actually very natural and coming upon these situations without any sense of warning.
It was the frequency and timing that struck me. Having said that there were still falls and accidents when I was working so it wasn't some inviolable law but I think they were diminished from what they might have been and I'm thinking over a long period of time.
It wasn't a calling in any precise way for me. Actually,I would have taken just about any job at the time and it worked out I would say providentially, that I landed there. I think my own personal experience did equip me to be suited to the job but the same is true for many others also.
I hope things work out as well as possible Dwill, for your Dad and family.
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