Interbane wrote:As we model our time measurement after the rotation of the Earth and the Earth around the Sun, any claims that the structure of time for our planet is based on such are painfully obvious and has nothing to do with Christianity.

You misunderstand. Precession results in the earth spinning like a top with one wobble per 26000 years. A good scientific diagram is here. My argument is that central Christian concepts, notably Logos and the Age, are intrinsically built into this temporal structure. I claim this cyclic structure resonates with daily and annual cycles to produce real millennial periods.

If all you are saying is that some of our ancestors were adept at astronomy and used their findings in the religion and architecture they created, my intuition tells me there isn’t a problem.

It is more than that. Yes, the cosmos in extensively depicted in ancient religion, as Tom noted with the common presence of zodiacs in synagogues, and iconic motifs such as the Christ Pantocrater Mandorla, deriving from the claim that Christ incarnated a cosmic reality. Use of such cosmic findings is a way of searching for an explanation of how our world ultimately connects to the cosmos. If we take this cosmic identity as the primary meaning of the Christ myth, in line with Biblical ideas such as Colossians 1:17 “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” together with the Logos imagery of John 1 “in the beginning was the Word”, I simply cannot see how we can find a rational underpinning other than interpreting Christ as a symbol of the precessional structure of time. This cycle provides the long term structure of time for our planet, and is what the ancients pointed at in numerous obscure coded references.

if the hypothesis we devise to test our explanation isn’t falsifiable, then it’s not science.

Complete falsifiability would establish that Christianity is necessary. For my purpose it is sufficient to establish that Christianity is possible.

Also, my mention of the footprints in the sand most definitely was evidence that a person walked there, you completely missed my point.

I may have misread your intention, but your statement was unclear. You said

The line you draw will only be a method of human understanding and isn't objectively real. There is no metaphysical tether between footprints in the sand, though we are able to understand a creature made them in passing.

Your 'footprints in the sand' comment is ambiguous regarding what is 'objectively real' and what is 'metaphysical'. These are slippery concepts. The creature who made the footprints is precisely analogous to the Logos as the connectedness of precession. I am arguing that the Logos, which the ancients identified with Christ, is objectively real and is displayed in the precessional structure of time, and that this hypothesis is a scientific argument. Testing it is primarily a matter of systematically analysing history and the Bible against this framework. Of course the Logos is far harder to define than a person walking with trousers rolled on a beach, but you cannot use this complexity to flatly state the Logos is not real. I recognise it is a complex claim and difficult to test or prove, but that does not make it impossible. Your simple dogmatic assertion that it is untestable is not based on real examination, but rather on an agenda that the past errors of Christianity invalidate any effort to make religion and science compatible.

RT: "You misunderstand. Precession results in the earth spinning like a top with one wobble per 26000 years. A good scientific diagram is here. My argument is that central Christian concepts, notably Logos and the Age, are intrinsically built into this temporal structure. I claim this cyclic structure resonates with daily and annual cycles to produce real millennial periods."

Actually, I think I understand quite well, but not with any of the depth in which you understand it. My problem is with some of your phrasings. For example, you say "My argument is that central Christian concepts, notably Logos and the Age, are intrinsically built into this temporal structure." Logos and the Age aren't built into this structure, they are explanatory models helpful to our understanding of the mechanics of this structure.

RT: "Use of such cosmic findings is a way of searching for an explanation of how our world ultimately connects to the cosmos."

This presumes our world does ultimately connect to the cosmos in some metaphysical way. Earth is a part of the heavens, and interacts in measurable ways, but this is explained mechanistically. When you say that you're searching for further explanation, I take you to mean that you believe there's some connection above and beyond the mechanistic. Could you be more precise in what this connection is?

RT: "If we take this cosmic identity as the primary meaning of the Christ myth, in line with Biblical ideas such as Colossians 1:17 “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” together with the Logos imagery of John 1 “in the beginning was the Word”, I simply cannot see how we can find a rational underpinning other than interpreting Christ as a symbol of the precessional structure of time.

If you present a vague enough prophecy, it's bound to come true. "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" is like saying "all reality is begotten from my spirit"(I just made that up, but I'm sure there's a similar phrase somewhere). You take such a general statement and use it as evidence that Christ is a symbol of the precessional structure of time! This is subjective validation, a cognitive bias.

You stretch vague and general scripture to support a rational underpinning, but what exactly is a rational underpinning in the first place? A rational way to pin together your religious blues clues so that your theological worldview doesn't come crashing down?

RT: "This cycle provides the long term structure of time for our planet, and is what the ancients pointed at in numerous obscure coded references."

I wouldn't argue that the ancients discovered some of the mechanical workings of our solar system. When you say 'structure of time', you don't mean the cycle is fundamental to the workings of time, correct? It might be better to say that the precession is temporally repeating, therefore useful to us as a framework to measure longer lengths of time than a year.

RT: "Your 'footprints in the sand' comment is ambiguous regarding what is 'objectively real' and what is 'metaphysical'. These are slippery concepts."

They are so much fun to ponder for that reason! The ambiguity comes from the inability of the human brain to divorce its methods of understanding reality from reality itself. We cannot know reality without our cognitive framework. When considering footprints in the sand, the only thing objectively real about them are the footprints themselves. We as deliberators can read into that pattern and reason that a creature made them. We could also be mistaken, since there are other ways footprints could be in the sand.

There are two things to take from the example. One is that the footprints are distinctly separate with no objectively real connection(again, this is difficult to grasp as it requires divorcing 'understanding' from 'reality'), and the other is that the explanation for the pattern can easily be false.

RT: "I am arguing that the Logos, which the ancients identified with Christ, is objectively real and is displayed in the precessional structure of time, and that this hypothesis is a scientific argument."

Is the Logos a concept open to critical examination? Is the Logos as Christ a connection that's open to critical examination? When you say that it's 'displayed', you don't mean visually, so what do you mean?

RT: "Your simple dogmatic assertion that it is untestable is not based on real examination, but rather on an agenda that the past errors of Christianity invalidate any effort to make religion and science compatible."

I've criticized your inclusion of religion a couple of times, but I'd like to think most of the time I've taken to critically examine what you've posted. I probe deeper, but you still have yet to offer a hypothesis directly representing what you propose that's also testable:

RT: "Testing it is primarily a matter of systematically analysing history and the Bible against this framework."

You would discover correlations between findings in the ancient world and the workings of the solar system, but as a hypothesis this does nothing other than to show that our ancestors were able to read the stars as we are.

RT
I would entertain Doherty's idea that Paul did not think Jesus was a real person except that in Romans 1:3 Paul says Jesus Christ "was descended from David according to the flesh." Similarly, in Galatians 4:4, Paul writes “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law.” The point of the term flesh throughout Paul's writings is that it is material.

Again you seem to miss the the “levels of the heavens” idea present in Paul’s writings, all of the above can still have happened up there, just like the cross. In fact Doherty did comment on those very passages…

Christ's self-sacrificing death was located "in times eternal," or "before the beginning of time" (pro chronon aionion). This is the second key phrase in 2 Timothy 1:9 and elsewhere. What is presently being revealed is something that had already taken place outside the normal realm of time and space. This could be envisioned as either in the primordial time of myth, or, as current Platonic philosophy would have put it, in the higher eternal world of ideas, of which this earthly world, with its ever-changing matter and evolving time, is only a transient, imperfect copy (more on this later). The benefits of Christ's redemptive act lay in the present, through God's revelation of it in the new missionary movement, but the act itself had taken place in a higher world of divine realities, in a timeless order, not on earth or in history. It had all happened in the sphere of God, it was all part of his "mystery." The blood sacrifice, even seeming biographical details like Romans 1:3-4, belong in this dimension.

http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/parttwo.htm

Also, because in order for Christ Jesus to be the prophesized messiah he had to be in David’s line, even Paul knew that from the Torah, so it is no surprise that he would have added it… even if just in the spiritual realm.

RT
Reading Doherty, I get the impression there may have been a complete disjunct between Paul and the Apostolic community of Jesus. Paul was such a powerful and lucid writer that people assumed he was connected to the Jesus movement, but as Doherty points out, Paul's ideas seem to come from his own imagination rather than any tradition. So any discrepancy between the Epistles and the Gospels can be explained away by Paul's complete ignorance of and indifference to the historical story.

This is complete speculation with absolutely zero bases in evidence. I also happen to see a pattern forming here… you will entertain any possibility (no matter how remote) in order to keep your precious Jesus alive… I think you might be doing the same thing with your Astro-Christianity proposition making leaps based more on your desire than on any concrete connection.

Don’t get me wrong your version is infinitively superior to the claims of current Christianity, but I still do not see you making the distinction between what is provable and the way you want it to be.

For example you need the time of the Christian movement to have been inspired by someone or something special or your Astro-Christianity proposition looses substance. The facts of the matter seem to bother you because there really was nothing special about those times, or the many people and cultures that contributed to the core beliefs in the biblical text.

The ideas presented in the biblical texts were not original or fresh even then, the many people involved in the early Christian writings were (In all likelihood) very normal and not super geniuses, the stories formed over hundreds of years and were (most likely) compiled from many separate areas and people, funneled down to what exists today, this makes a central story and teacher named Jesus nearly impossible and nothing special...

New evidence may shed more light on the subject and we all should be willing to accept it as it comes, we should not solidify ostentatious beliefs based on what little we actually know.

Later

Prufrock

Penelope wrote:When T S Elliot wrote:- I have measured out my life in coffee spoons: We all know what he meant.... We didn't say, 'How many coffee spoons'? or, 'Well, what was the exact cubic capacity of the coffee spoons?' We tell ourselves stories....to help us to understand the question.. What are we doing here? The stories are not scientific......because science is asking a different question? Note the question mark. I'm not intending to intrude on a debate which is somewhat above my head. Well....more than somewhat......but I'm doing my best for the proletariat

Hi Penelope, , I would like to come back to this comment of yours from 26 Feb. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the source of the coffee spoon line, is one of my favourite poems. There has got to be a deep irony in there somewhere that Eliot castigated Milton as one whose sensuousness had been "withered by book-learning" and claimed that Milton's poetry '"could only be an influence for the worse" and yet both share deep fascination for time and cosmology. As well, it is a fair question if Eliot can really be seen as more sensual than Milton in hindsight.

Prufrock starts with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, with considerable Miltonic resonance with its mythic narrative starting in Hell.

If I thought my answer were given to anyone who would ever return to the world, this flame would stand still without moving any further. But since never from this abyss has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer you.

The “answer” given in the poem, intended for those who understand eternity, seems to be a contrast between the ordinary and the real understanding of time. Eliot first describes ordinary time, admittedly with a nod to Hesiod:

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. ... In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all:— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

This ordinary time describes a world characterised by the banality of gossip. In condemning such shallow views, rather like Milton’s characterisation of fallen human life, Eliot asks "Do I dare disturb the universe? and then points toward real time:

Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— ... I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

This sense of “rolling the universe into a ball” reminds me of what I am doing here, looking at the whole of the solar system through long time. Lazarus, in the interpretation of Tom Harpur, signifies Osiris, Egyptian God of the Dead, with his cyclic sense of time that is quite foreign to the modern linear mentality. The extreme sadness of modernity, etherised on the table, shows through in the sense that Eliot is so removed from eternity that the magical sirens who should be expected to entice him could not be bothered.

Rather, the magical mermaids are preoccupied by natural cycles:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

I greatly enjoyed that poem, I've never read TS Elliot before.

"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"

Word!

RT: "Lazarus, in the interpretation of Tom Harpur, signifies Osiris, Egyptian God of the Dead, with his cyclic sense of time that is quite foreign to the modern linear mentality."

Your mention of time being cyclic is interesting. From what I understand, the arrow of time continues on in one direction quite unlike Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time." The synchronized and cyclical systems found throughout our universe unfortunately aren't perpetual motion systems. Although I'm not sure what the math says of the effects of entropy on the universe as a whole. We will forever "Big Bounce", and perhaps that is an infinite cycle.

Interbane wrote:RT: "Lazarus, in the interpretation of Tom Harpur, signifies Osiris, Egyptian God of the Dead, with his cyclic sense of time that is quite foreign to the modern linear mentality."Your mention of time being cyclic is interesting. From what I understand, the arrow of time continues on in one direction quite unlike Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time." The synchronized and cyclical systems found throughout our universe unfortunately aren't perpetual motion systems. Although I'm not sure what the math says of the effects of entropy on the universe as a whole. We will forever "Big Bounce", and perhaps that is an infinite cycle.

Osiris has green skin, signifying his link with plants with their annual cycles. Harpur points out that Lazarus and Mary and Martha correlate to Osiris and Isis and Nephthys, with Lazarus in mummy gear just like Osiris. Etymologically, we have Lazarus = El Azarus = El Osiris = Osiris.

And, Osiris and Isis are listed among the subordinate devils in Paradise Lost. Strangely, Osiris' brother Set, who seems to have an etymological connection to Satan, does not get a mention in PL.

Your mention of the arrow of time raises a really interesting point. Yes, modern cosmology is linear, in that the expansion of the universe from the big bang is actually accelerating (this was discovered in the 1990s) and it appears there is nowhere near enough mass for it ever to turn around to a big crunch.

However, my view is that there is validity in constructing an intermediate cyclic cosmology, considering our solar system as the framework. If our solar system was the size of a quarter dollar, the nearest star would be one hundred yards away and our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one of billions of galaxies, would be about the size of the continental 48 states of the USA. So our system is very isolated, and it does operate with a cyclic structure of time, notably with the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune harmonic cycle discussed in the opening post here. Ten billion years, the expected life span of the sun, is not eternity, but in human terms it is effectively pretty close.

I will get back to you soon on your previous post about precession and the Bible, and Frank's comments on Earl Doherty.

Robert said:

Eliot first describes ordinary time, admittedly with a nod to Hesiod:
Quote:
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. ... In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all:— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

Robert, I don't know who or what Hesiod is.

And I always thought this section above was alluding to Chapter 3 in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. For every thing there is a season... So I find your comments absorbing. Of course I knew that Eliot's poetry had many allusions to the Greek Classics etc., but knowing very little about Greek Mythology, I have never been able to make the connection.


I am a trifle besotted with Eliot although I think one appreciates 'Prufrock' more as one reaches 'a certain age'.

I like WB Yeats very much too and feel these two poets have quite an affinity.

Prufrock is my favourite poem, and my favourite part is the very beginning, Let us go then you and I, as the evening spreads itself across the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table.....if this is misquoted, it is because I am typing from memory. Also I very much like 'sawdust restaurants with oyster shells' - my favourite kinda places.


If you have the time, Interbane and Robert, I would like to hear more of your commentaries.

Oh dear, I've just read my last post - completely off topic!!! I beg your pardons.

I am reading these posts though and making what I can of it all.

And what I really wanted ask at one point was, when Robert said to Frank

Frank, I admit I have an emotional commitment to the Gospel story, rather like Anselm's fallacious reasoning that I quoted above that a perfect story becomes even more perfect for us if we believe it is true.

Are atheists really saying that we're all alone in a Godless, Hostile and Meaningless Universe - but that we mustn't tell ourselves stories and try to fit them into our cosmic consciousness? And that we mustn't under any circumstances, laugh at our own efforts?

Fundamentalist Christians are only annoying because they've stopped laughing at themselves......and, in fact....they've stopped telling the truth...but all Deists aren't liars. The worst we can be accused of is 'undue optimism' .

I think Frank and Robert are at cross-purposes. The idea that the Jesus story is wholly myth does not conflict with the idea that precession has had mythic influence. Both could be true.

Penelope
Are atheists really saying that we're all alone in a Godless, Hostile and Meaningless Universe - but that we mustn't tell ourselves stories and try to fit them into our cosmic consciousness? And that we mustn't under any circumstances, laugh at our own efforts?

Actually I am saying why I cannot accept RT’s proposition; I am not telling him what to believe.

As you pointed out above, (and as RT has admitted) he has an emotional attachment to the gospel stories and I believe that that attachment keeps him from being objective on the matter.

Even supposing that the cosmic portion of his theory is completely correct why attempt to force it in to Christianity?

Maybe the special event that it is attached to those times is actually more inclusive of leaders within the Roman Empire… or something that happened in China… or world wide… maybe it is purely coincidence?

To suggest that the cosmos is influencing actions of people on earth and only those in Christendom is beyond a reasonable stretch.

Now if RT wants to say that the stories can be interpreted a certain way without the insistence that they were originally conceptualized that way, it would be easier to accept.

It would still be just another splinter of Christianity to me, but I would have no argument against any particular reinterpretation.

To say that the long process of creation and revision that the biblical writings went through and the almost randomly mismatched stories included in the current bible actually speak to a greater cosmic truth is again immeasurably improbable.

All of this would be fine except RT is claiming a reason based approach to the gospels.

Knowing what I know of the cultures, people and histories of those texts I personally find his interpretations too far of a leap to accept them as reasonable.

But he is free to believe what he will.

Later