jar - On Christianity

No.Jesus has a wonderful gravity and soberness and poise and balance and penetrating presence it seems to me. Always responsive to people exactly where they are. Never joked. I won't say it couldn't have happened, although to my mind it's out of character, but it is not reported anywhere so there is no basis for claiming it.

Not only propitiating but BY HIS BLOOD, by His death, says Romans 3:25. Hate to interrupt here since you are doing a great job of calling jar on his made-up version of Christianity, and this is a great point about the gospel writers' greater ability to interpret their own culture, but I guess you buy the idea that it wasn't eyewitnesses, Jesus' actual disciples, who wrote the New Testament?I'd simply point out that the disciples would certainly have lived long enough to be writing between 60 and 100 AD. John is said to have lived into his 90s. I don't know their ages but they may have been around Jesus' age, though Mark is said to have been quite a bit younger -- a teenager at the time of Jesus' teaching -- so he would only have been in his late 40s or so in the year 60.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : to add quote and correct Bible reference from Matthew to Romans.Edited by AdminFaith, : No reason given.

You have good instincts, GDR, definitely Holy Spirit led. I'd just suggest that the most amazing heart-stopping hair-raising and soul-restoring mysteries of the Bible don't begin until you take it as ALL true as written, and give up sorting it according to what fits your own intellectual capacity.

So out of CS Lewis' choices you go for insane.Well, I admit, claiming to be Yahweh God among the Jews would be rather crazy unless it were true, especially since it got Him killed.And how do you account for the apparent sanity and realism of so many who follow Him? You quote some of them with appreciation, such as Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Edwards, William Law, Pascal. And in fact all of these believed in the whole supernatural package.How do you account for the duration of His influence if He was deluded -- people believing in Him by growing millions in every generation for the last 2000 years, and even in our modern times in which the majority have rejected the very idea of the supernatural?How do you account for the millions who have been and still are persecuted and even killed for believing him Him in Asia and Africa and the Middle East, refusing to repudiate their faith even for the sake of saving their lives?I guess a sizeable portion of the world is deluded.Well, that's OK, He told us that's how we would be viewed.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I always forget about the ingenuity of the unbelievers.

That's a cop-out answer. They are all total believers in Jesus, the Deluded One according to you.

The question is how you account for how these orthodox traditional believers in the deluded Christ talk so much more realistically than those who have the modern sentimental sensibility. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I understand that, but they are all orthodox Christians -- strikingly committed dedicated Christians, not just in-name-only Christians -- and their realism is a striking characteristic of them at the same time, so I would think their believing in a deluded leader would have to create some cognitive dissonance for you -- as in, how can crazy people have such realism? I mean four is a big number of crazy people for you to be so attracted to their realism.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The particular four I named who are these realists Robin has quoted are not ordinary Christians but truly orthodox uncompromising exmplary Christians.

No it's not a cultural matter. These guys, certainly Pascal, Edwards and Law are minute-by-minute totally sold-out followers of the supernatural Jesus Christ, and if you read much of them you won't be able to avoid this about them. Shakespeare was at best a nominal Christian and Hemingway's flirting with religion is a ridiculous comparison.{Edit: They are realists, which is thoroughly compatible with true Christianity, they are not nihilists.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I understand that, but these were Christians of the maximally deluded sort who followed a deluded leader to the max. It's easy to understand that you are attracted to nihilism in general. It's not easy to explain how these totally sold-out supernaturalist Christians also impress you with their "nihilism" -- which is really realism.

The nihilists see no God at all, but Christians see the condition of humanity in their denial of God -- big difference. They know, because they were once of the world themselves, and because they know Christian theology, the realities of the human condition. They know that the world is fallen, and the only way out of it is through Jesus Christ. They are merely describing this state of things in their own way, as part of their own Christian teaching of others.{edit: This is true Christianity. It is a far cry from the sentimentalist Christianity you are deploring.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You ARE an aesthete after all. You appreciate great ideas but keep yourself apart from them. Sometimes you may only get a thrill out of the way the words flow trippingly off the tongue, as in the case of the great nihilistic passages of Ecclesiastes.You appreciate the way the world's emptiness of God, or really, annihilation of God, brings Newman to a state of despair that is like the anninilation of his own existence, but you savor it as if it were nothing but pleasing sounds, crafted words.You yourself don't feel the emptiness of God, you accept the emptiness of God in the world, you think this is all there is. There's no despair in it, no desperation. There's no edge to it. Those would be appropriate expressions of nihilism, as opposed to a merely aesthetic or makebelieve nihilism, rather than this jaded tasting of a gourmet intellectual feast washed down with another bottle of beer.Your nihilism just sits there like a fat frog waiting for a fly. It should push you to something. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : rewrote last paragraphEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not at all. That's what the world and fallen nature are about. Christ is the way out of it.Of course if you deny that's what the world is about, if you are content with the status quo, you'll never seek a way out of it, and that's the worst possible state to be in. That's why preachers who really care about your fate try to scare you out of your complacency by telling you the truth about your condition.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't think that's what he means at all, at least as far as I can judge from that one paragraph. He starts out emphasizing his own belief in God, and from that vantage what he sees is a world that doesn't reflect God as he does, a world that denies God's existence, not a world truly bereft of God, not mere accident. But maybe I'm misreading the passage. Maybe more context would tell me otherwise.{Edit: Always with these Christian writers their belief is standing behind it all. William Law's description of the way the world treats each of us when we die has behind it his experience of a world to look forward to that answers the meaninglessness of this fallen world.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.