What?

19: And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?

20: For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.

21: (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)

…

32: And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.

“…[i wonder] how it is possible for me to believe today that I possess organs that can be replaced when they go wrong by my buying new ones from people recently deceased. For anybody who studies history seriously, it is a major puzzle how we, today, can live with what, to the people of all previous times and places, would have been considered unfeeling brutality and absolute nonsense.

“mY concern is, How could such nonsense be historically preopared? ANd that qustion brings me to my second link with the resurrection, and takes me to my story about Paul. Paul told the Athenians something they didn’t want to hear. COme back another time, they told him politely. They were delicate people, decent, well-educated people, and they must have been shocked by his claim. Faith in the mystery of the resurrection of the body did lead in the course of Western culture to a new respect for the body, but it also tended to destroy the myriad of body images that had existed in the world’s different cultures, each with its unique body percept. During the course of Western history these old body cultures have been gradually replaced, or perhaps overshadowed is a better word, by respect for the resurrected body of Christ. But once that respect disappeared, a void space was left, into which you could put any construct…. INcreasingly physicians are called in to give some credibility to the body which Windows 95 assumes that I have, that is mine. My argument does not deal with the question of why this body is so attractive. I only say that this body is demanded by the enormous institutional ritual of modernity.” (Rivers North of the Future, 130-131)

I’ll take a look.

Buddy—

I’m a deist.

I also have the television series on tape. It is, in my view, the best thing yet produced for that medium.

Patrick, second your “best”, Bronowski was an incredibly excellent thinker and person. The book is great, but if you saw the TV series–complete with poor old urban Jacob gamely doing location shots in dozens of wild primitive locations wearing his 70s street shoes and clothes–and watched him deliver his own lines with that selfless good-humor, you knew you were with a very special creature.

Truepeers, thanks for the mentalstretching. Your posts are writing new philosopy I think. I’m still trying to draw it together, from the ‘performatism” you mentioned many months ago.

I tend to see religious phenomena everywhere. I have been heavily influenced by the anthropology of Rene Girard (a Christian, a Catholic, of a kind). And I thought it might interest you all to have a sense of where I’m coming from. Here’s what Girard wrote in his book I see Satan Fall like Lightning:

The majestic inauguration of the “post-Christian era” is a joke. We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner. (ISS, 178-179)

In a sense, you are part culturally Christian.

That would go without saying (not that I haven’t repeated acknowledged such) even were it not for twelve years of Roman Catholic education during which I lived in a Roman Catholic home.

truepeers—

I’m not a Christian either, in the way you understand the term?

The way I understand the term? Look the term up in a dictionary. Take a look at the Apostles’ Creed.

Soc. Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the inward and outward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.—Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedr. Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

—Plato, Phaedrus

15: And they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens: and receiving a commandment unto Silas and Timotheus for to come to him with all speed, they departed.

16: Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

17: Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.

18: Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.

19: And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?

20: For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.

21: (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)

22: Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.

23: For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

24: God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;

25: Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;

26: And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

27: That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

28: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

29: Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

30: And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

31: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

32: And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.

33: So Paul departed from among them.

34: Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

The Holy Bible (King James Version), The Acts 17:15-34

In the Middle Ages the ladder of promotion was through the Church; there was no other way for a clever, poor boy to go up. And at the end of the ladder there is always the image, the icon of the godhead that says, ‘Now you have reached the last commandment: Thou shalt not question.’

For instance, when Erasmus was left an orphan in 1480, he had to prepare for a career in the Church. The services were as beautiful then as now. Erasmus may himself have taken part in the moving Mass Cum Giubilate of the fourteenth century, which I have heard in a church that is even older, San Pietro in Gropina. But the monk’s life was for Erasmus an iron door closed against knowledge. Only when Erasmus read the classics for himself, in defiance of orders, did the world open for him. ‘A heathen wrote this to a heathen,’ he said, ‘yet it has justice, sanctity, truth. I can hardly refrain from saying “Saint Socrates, pray for me!”‘

—Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Best.

Before I say anything I will state that even though I am a Christian I know, that strictly on a weights and measures standard, there are many non-believers that have lived a better life on earth then many self proffesed believers and that not believing is not a sign of a person who can not act in a good fashion.

But if you can accept the idea of a Devine God why is the resurrection story such a leap.I am not attacking your idea but it seems to me that the idea of a God, while I share it with you and there is ample logical and historical reasons to believe in it, from a strictly scientific point of view is just as fantastical idea to me. I am not trying to disabuse or ridicule your idea’s. It could be simply a “that’s how I see it” situation. I am honestly curious.

kevin peters

“All the appeals to custom, to tradition, to authority, to the positive teaching of religion, to the gestures repeated since childhood . . . are not meant to compel reason nor to supplement it, but to protect it against the vertigo of the imagination. . . . And the only people to be scandalized are, in the words of St. Augustine ‘those who do not know how rare and difficult a thing it is for the fleshly imagination to be subdued by the serenity of a devout mind’.” – Henri de Lubac

And the vertigo of the imagination is a real problem. Western culture has been immersed in various lies of romanticism for 250+ years now, and some of greatest crimes of recent times are sins of the romantic imagination run wild. I’m not against the individual and his freedom, but I’m one who wants a way to discipline his imagination, to put morality and reality ahead of the kind of political fantasy running rampant in the PC university. As far as I am aware, there is only one secular discipline that has real promise in this regard – Generative Anthropology and its minimizing of the ignorant and unruly imagination in the hope of building real creativity and democracy. But GA is not going to appeal to most people, yet. So religious dogma might be the alternative yet for those whose imaginations are out of control – and all our many mental illnesses are instance of this. They speak of an epidemic of depression today, etc.

The afterglow, the overlay (as many see it), the “signing-up” for the magic story, is what has riven people ever since. I like Maimonides on this topic. The Divinity question is of course a faith-feeling matter, but Jesus the 100% human in no way discounts Divinity. Jesus the man, divinely-inspired, yes.

But physically ascending, returning from the dead in flesh–gosh, if i let such things into my head i’d go insane.