[jawstheme]

Originally Posted by vaguestcargo

I just started lurking 'round these parts, so sorry for drudging up an old comment, but wow. I have felt this way for about half of my christian life and have found nearly zero believers who agree with me. Very refreshing.

Since it's come up a couple of times, I found the page where I was debating Paul:

http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthre...54062&page=227

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by The Personist

Also, on my to-read list for the summer is Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

That shit is practically a pamphlet you can read it in a weekend. Also, if you like Derrida, I doubt you'll enjoy Kuhn: he's an actual philosopher (read: logician) of science, unlike Derrida who can spin a good novel out of questioning a baguette.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by richter915

and they will refuse to acknowledge a main tenent of the faith.

That has pretty much been the case since Christianity began as a subset of Judaism.

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

That has pretty much been the case since Christianity began as a subset of Judaism.

offshoot, not subset

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by Fedaykin

offshoot, not subset

Originally, Christians conceived of themselves as Jews.It took centuries for the decisive break between the two to become evident.

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

Originally, Christians conceived of themselves as Jews.It took centuries for the decisive break between the two to become evident.

It took centuries to become decisive. From the beginning, Christ preached an inclusion of all people that made the Jewish authorities more than a little peeved. To be Jewish, you had to not be a gentile. To follow christ, it didn't mater whether you were jew or gentile from the very start. The jews were special, chosen (not dissimilar in principle from the calvinists although very much so in practice). Christ de-emphasized their elite status. He didn't consider his followers to be jewish and the jews in power didn't consider his followers to be jewish.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by Fedaykin

It took centuries to become decisive. From the beginning, Christ preached an inclusion of all people that made the Jewish authorities more than a little peeved. To be Jewish, you had to not be a gentile. To follow christ, it didn't mater whether you were jew or gentile from the very start. The jews were special, chosen (not dissimilar in principle from the calvinists although very much so in practice). Christ de-emphasized their elite status. He didn't consider his followers to be jewish and the jews in power didn't consider his followers to be jewish.

I'm not saying that there weren't disagreements, rather, I am saying that, at the outset, they considered themselves of the same community. The difference was, for the Jesus' followers, the messiah had already come; for them, it didn't mean a new religion, but that the promises of the Old Testament had been fulfilled. Even with regard to gentiles there was a dispute in the early Christian communities between those who believed they had to follow Jewish traditions like circumcision and those who believed that those traditions were no longer applicable in lieu of the messiah's fulfillment of the law.

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

I'm not saying that there weren't disagreements, rather, I am saying that, at the outset, they considered themselves of the same community. The difference was, for the Jesus' followers, the messiah had already come; for them, it didn't mean a new religion, but that the promises of the Old Testament had been fulfilled. Even with regard to gentiles there was a dispute in the early Christian communities between those who believed they had to follow Jewish traditions like circumcision and those who believed that those traditions were no longer applicable in lieu of the messiah's fulfillment of the law.

help clarify this for me: are you saying that they considered themselves of the same community according to historical (non-biblical) sources or according to the bible? I'm not making a judgment on which is more legitimate but I want to be sure we're on the same page; because from a strictly biblical perspective I think one reading of the post-gospels texts could see the Christians as separatists.

[The Personist]

Originally Posted by Fedaykin

That shit is practically a pamphlet you can read it in a weekend. Also, if you like Derrida, I doubt you'll enjoy Kuhn: he's an actual philosopher (read: logician) of science, unlike Derrida who can spin a good novel out of questioning a baguette.

Don't be stupid. Derrida is fairly fabulous. Those who resort to calling him not philosophy generally subscribe to willful misreadings of his texts at best, or at worst simply don't want to do the work.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by Fedaykin

help clarify this for me: are you saying that they considered themselves of the same community according to historical (non-biblical) sources or according to the bible? I'm not making a judgment on which is more legitimate but I want to be sure we're on the same page; because from a strictly biblical perspective I think one reading of the post-gospels texts could see the Christians as separatists.

I'm referring to historical accounts. The New Testament, having been cobbled together from various books after the break occurred, is meant to make the Christian community more prominent, although we do see some of the debates that occurred in Paul's epistles

[re7ard1337]

dang, i haven't seen this thread before. this is pretty cool.

i'm a christian, but i've studied a good amount of religion, especially atheism because it fascinates me. one of the things i have been looking at recently is key differences in what christianity looks like to a christian, and what it looks like to an atheist. the holy spirit slash the trinity is one of the coolest discussions i think.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by re7ard1337

one of the things i have been looking at recently is key differences in what christianity looks like to a christian, and what it looks like to an atheist.

Quote:

The Christian religious ideology says something like this:

It says: I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answer able to Him. It adds: God addresses himself to you through my voice (Scripture having collected the Word of God, Tradition having transmitted it, Papal Infallibility fixing it for ever on ‘nice’ points). It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin, you were created by God for all eternity, although you were born in the 1920th year of Our Lord! This is your place in the world! This is what you must do! By these means, if you observe the ‘law of love’ you will be saved, you, Peter, and will become part of the Glorious Body of Christ! Etc....

Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but at the same time quite a surprising one.

Surprising because if we consider that religious ideology is indeed addressed to individuals,[19] in order to ‘transform them into subjects’, by interpellating the individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject, free to obey or disobey the appeal, i.e. God’s commandments; if it calls these individuals by their names, thus recognizing that they are always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (to the extent that Pascal’s Christ says: ‘It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood!’); if it interpellates them in such a way that the subject responds: ‘Yes, it really is me!’ if it obtains from them the recognition that they really do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world, a fixed residence: ‘It really is me, I am here, a worker, a boss or a soldier!’ in this vale of tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a destination (eternal life or damnation) according to the respect or contempt they show to ‘God’s Commandments’, Law become Love; – if everything does happen in this way (in the practices of the well-known rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, confession and extreme unction, etc. ...), we should note that all this ‘procedure’ to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God.

Quote:

the holy spirit slash the trinity is one of the coolest discussions i think.

I used to think the trinity was a means to have polytheism without numerous gods. Now I think there is something more complex to the formulation, especially if we take seriously theosis seriously as a Christian doctrine.

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by The Personist

Don't be stupid. Derrida is fairly fabulous. Those who resort to calling him not philosophy generally subscribe to willful misreadings of his texts at best, or at worst simply don't want to do the work.

I'm not being stupid. He's not a logician, an actual philosopher on the level of Betrand Russell. He's a literary theorist, what some people would incorrectly label a philosopher, on the level of Roland Barthes. Of course, to some this will seem to leave me open to criticism since many morons (wikipedia I'm looking at you here) would lump Russell in with Derrida. Far from it, in my opinion. Russell, at his best, employs symbolic logic. That's the great thing about symbolic logic: we don't have to do too much 'work.' Things are written simply, with little wiggle room. Derrida postulates in the opposite way. He reminds me of Neitzche, sort of an anti-Aquinas type style, where you have to hunt for the thesis. Way too much obfuscastion. That's why Foucault called derrida and his work "obscurantisme terroriste". But that bit about the baguette wasn't a complete slight. David Farrell Krell writes in his book "The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art & Affirmation in the Though of Jacques Derrida" that Derrida latches onto Rousseau's 'movement of the stick' or "ce mouvement de baguette" in the "De Grammatologie" and expounds upon it until it fills an entire chapter. But, when he does lay out said framework, it still seems unecessarily impenetrable. For instance, I see Derrida's 'nothing says what it is' concept much more simply laid out in Hegel (if one can rightly use Hegel as an example of streamlined simplicitly.)

[Love As Arson]

Ha. I had a very difficult time trying to read Hegel all those years ago.

[Fedaykin]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

Ha. I had a very difficult time trying to read Hegel all those years ago.

i don't know that i've ever met anyone that hasn't had a hard time. personally, i have had a much harder time in any Nietzche classes (I took 1 in undergrad, 3 in grad school) than in Hegel classes (2 undergrad, 1 grad)