IQ & Atheism

[Joseph Tracy]

On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:34 AM, David Morris wrote:

> -------------------------------------------
> Doublethink:
> To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness
> while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two
> opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and
> believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate
> morality while laying claim to it
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> I'm not an expert on early Christian history/theology, but I think
> Incarnation wasn't a widely-accepted belief for the earliest
> Christians.  The First Council of Nicaea was convened to "lay down the
> law" on the Incarnation in 325 AD.  How widespread belief in
> Incarnation was before that is a matter widely debated.
Your knowledge is quite accurate. In the decades leading up to the  
imperial political endorsement of those bishops favoring incarnation/  
Gospel of John as definitive theology , which occurred at Nicaea   
there were strongly divergent views and differing written gospels.  
According to John Crossan and several other scholars the theology of  
incarnation-messiah-sacrificial lamb-resurrection  came from  
converted Pharisees who used their scriptural expertise to shape the  
theological interpretation of this charismatic Jesus figure. The  
Pharisees already believed in a messianic deliverer and "that good  
bodliy resurrection" as Deuce called it, and they had a literacy  
which is likely to have been rare among Jesus's followers. So even  
though Jesus warned against the ideas of the Pharisees. it was  
converted  Pharisees like Paul who shaped the religion most and  
carried over certain theological ideas.

All this is far more relevant to Pynchon than it might seem. The  
life, death, and continued life through his children of Webb Traverse  
is a small scale american version of this story, and on many levels  
ATD is about the interaction between spiritual or scientific  
revelation/experience and entropy/human frailty/ power politics.

Pynchon Uses Dynamite as a multivalent image that refers to:  
scientific breakthrough, the explosive technologies driving western  
technology,  warfare between left/right or underground/above ground,   
a spiritual breakthrough akin to rebirth or death and resurrection.  
All this is amplified by the fact that dynamite's root greek word  
"dunamos "( power, force) is used dozens of times in the the New  
Testament in phrases like "You shall receive power from on high."  Or  
as a certain Knight said, "that rabbit's dynamite" ; and as it is  
further written in the book of Armaments "Lord , bless this thy holy  
hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny  
bits, in thy mercy"



>
> But beyond that, if one rejects fundamentalism, all else is a matter
> of personal, not official belief, and thus only as dumb as the
> individual.
>
> On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Ray Easton <kraimie at kraimie.net>  
> wrote:
>> The Incarnation is impossible as a matter of logic.  If you can  
>> believe in The Incarnation, you can believe anything.  There are  
>> many negative adjectives that can be applied to fundamentalism,  
>> but it is no dumber than "mainstream" Christianity.