Home | Community | Message Board

MRCA Tyroler Gluckspilze
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom

Jump to first unread post Pages: < Back | 1 | 2 | 3  [ show all ]
OfflineMarkostheGnostic
Elder
Male User Gallery


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida Flag
Last seen: 3 years, 27 days
Re: Christianity................. [Re: CosmicJoke]
    #18438433 - 06/18/13 06:25 PM (10 years, 8 months ago)

Quote:

CosmicJoke said:
Quote:

MarkostheGnostic said:
Well yes to all that, and I'd add in the Gospel of Thomas as an appetizer, then refer to the Nag Hammadi library which can be found at www.gnosis.org. But ranting usually means someone has gotten his knuckles rapped with a ruler by a nun one too many times, or someone's fundamentalist freak parents relentlessly laid their retarded robotic revelatory repertoire on him for insignificant behaviors trumped up into major sins. Or again maybe it is a rebellion again having been told that what is midrash, metaphor, and mythology is history. That seems to be the most common rejection of Christianity, and one that flies in the face of reason.

Midrash is a Jewish literary device intended to highlight a spiritual teaching. It's funny that when people read stories about the baby Buddha taking his first baby steps, and having lotus blossoms (water lilies!) spring up from the ground where his feet left prints, people generally understand that such a description is a literary device, NOT historical fact. But when the very common myth of virgin birth is applied to baby Jesus (as well as pert near every other Middle Eastern incarnate deity), they take that as being literal, historical fact.

Metaphor. Mathew 14 relates the story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee. Now I have read elsewhere, about Hindu and Buddhist miracles of walking on the water, as well as of levitation. These stories are intended to impart a spiritual message of the otherworldly nature of pure beings, not necessarily the suspension of natural law. Insertions were later put into the Bible insisting that Jesus had a body of flesh, and anyone who denied that was antichrist. They were put there to counter those Gnostics who claimed a form of Docetism - that Jesus had a 'phantom body' and did not did not have a body of flesh. A literal interpretation of Jesus walking on water  supports the Gnostics! Except, that walking on water is a metaphor for staying above the fray, above turbulence of life, and for remaining peaceful in the face of adversity Flamers of religion, and Christianity in particular, need to understand the nature of religious scriptures before they rant against them. Maybe, like Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say, they should say: "Never mind."




My mother was raised Catholic, and between the harsh nuns in school and particularly the stigma of having gotten divorced, decided to raise my brother and I without religion.  She didn't directly say to us "There is no God", however, which I would have found that reassuring when I went to sleep at night as a child and my mind wandered to death, nothingness, God, and the afterlife.  It's genuinely frightening stuff for a child who has no reason whatsoever to believe that if there did happen to be a God, that it could possibly be a good thing.  Imagining what it meant to simply cease to exist wasn't particularly pleasant either.  I never talked to anyone about these thoughts as a child.

I can totally relate with what it's like to be a teenager who wants to defend himself against proselytizing Christians, as I too would once collect as much ammo in the form of logical fallacies and hypocrisies within the belief system to shut them down - an anonymous message forum is perfect target practice.  So this becomes a status prop to feel more intelligent, and you can cling to that "at least I'm not a Christian who believes this ludicrous shit".  Mind you, a K-12 education offers virtually no academic, historical framework for understanding the antiquity of Western civilization, and it's incredibly daunting to even try to understand.  But if you want to be intellectual, you're going to have to dig deeper.  Merely being able to hold your own against a fundamentalist is sophomoric at best and eventually moronic at worst.  If one considers himself an intellectual, my best advice is to enroll in college and get a liberal arts education that includes some courses in philosophy and history, and also to stay humble, there's a lifetime of learning ahead.




I'm sympathetic to the former, and in agreement with the latter paragraph. As a child, a Reformed Jewish household meant only one good thing - Chanukkah. Having to suffer 3 years of Hebrew school, and then flunking myself out so as not to become a Bar Mitzvah only embarrassed my father who was a founder of the temple we belonged to. That further alienated us, but if we had been close, if a father-son relationship had been in place, I might have wanted to please him. I saw the whole ritual as meaningless torment. I cared not for money and/or gifts. I also flunked myself out of Sunday school, which was more tedium about ancient Hebrew stories, ostensibly historical, but historical or not, irrelevant to the young Markos. Oddly, however, the story of Jesus and his crucifixion-death-resurrection I found fascinating, being conveyed at age 5 by my best friend whose family was Catholic. His house always had those gauche Sacred Heart of Jesus pics around. My friend Paul insisted that Jesus had one - this externalized Hridayam, glowing, crowned with thorns, dripping blood and water. The only numinous thing that I grokked at the same age during Jewish holidays was the Eternal Light - that ruby lamp above the Ark that housed the Torahs. But the Judaism in my house never spoke of heaven or Eernal Life. My mom was an atheist tip her dying day. My father was a Freemason who never discussed things with me. I had to seek on my own. And here we are.


--------------------
γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: < Back | 1 | 2 | 3  [ show all ]

Shop: Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* The Next Christianity spud 5,642 16 01/30/06 03:54 PM
by Gliders
* christian bashing
( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 all )
twirlingdervish 8,382 121 02/01/10 08:04 PM
by GoshAllMighty
* Is the Antichrist really that bad??
( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 all )
twirlingdervish 10,393 173 11/29/09 03:40 PM
by Life Upon Death
* Christianity, US government and the biblical end of times ... is it NOW ?
( 1 2 3 all )
MAIA 10,740 56 02/12/07 12:17 PM
by Lightningfractal
* Christianity........the "cop out" religion.
( 1 2 3 4 5 all )
niteowl 12,991 80 06/10/07 04:05 PM
by MushroomTrip
* Christianity/Catholicism and the like, what's the deal? ToqomS 2,781 14 04/22/06 08:34 AM
by psyillyazul
* So, I guess I'm Christian now...
( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 all )
Silversoul 19,221 131 01/02/10 11:10 PM
by andrewss

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Middleman, Shroomism, Rose, Kickle, yogabunny, DividedQuantum
3,268 topic views. 0 members, 8 guests and 1 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.023 seconds spending 0.009 seconds on 15 queries.