IQ & Atheism

[Ian Livingston]

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All
these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it
from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual
towards freedom." - Albert Einstein

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."