12.26.07
Posted in Philosophy at 10:49 pm by nemo
Question from James:
I know you’ve written frequently about Schopenhauer’s general framework of transcendental idealism, but what do you think about the specifics of his metaphysics of the will? What do you think about his attempt to provide an atheistic account of teleology?
Good question. I am not sure what you mean by teleology here. I tend to think and use the term historically because of my own work. Schopenhauer was very ahistorical, yet ironically his work is helpful (at least to me) in coming to a new view on the philosophy of history. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in religion at 5:39 pm by nemo
Comment on What if Jesus never existed? Nice try, Dawkins
David Fairthorne: Harpur is not the only one who thinks that Jesus never lived.
“The Jesus Puzzle†by Doherty points out that the New Testament epistles, written before the gospels, refer to Christ as divine, and make no mention of Jesus as a very recent historical figure. Doherty argues that the entire Gospel account of Jesus’ life and death was a literary fabrication.
Thanks for comment and reference. Feel free to submit more data on this if you like.
I can’t provide a defiinitive conclusion, but my opinion is that, despite the problems, the reality of someone we call ‘Jesus’ is probable.
If you pursue the question in relation to the Iliad, long thought to be a question of mythology, til Schliemann, you see that legends can, surprisingly, still reflect an historical reality, in this case transmitted over many centuries in verse form. A figure such as Agamemnon might thus be distantly echoed in the poem. That, of course, is not certain, and proves nothing in the case of the New Testament. If you reflect on my post some of the reasons for the confusion might emerge: we see, perhaps, a motive, however outlandish my own version of it, to veil the Jesus figure. The ambiguity might be deliberate. The question of surviving eyewitnesses, however confused, won’t quite go away. And even secondary near-witness participants, a considerable number of people, increase the odds against invention. But even without that a sense of a ‘someone’ behind the Q parables remains. That’s not unreasonable, a spiritual teacher among the Jews (someone later Sufis obsessively called one of their own–??). It’s the embroidering that generates the doubts.
That Paul and his epistles predate the Gospels is no objection. And Paul did exist. What about John the Baptist? Did he exist? A number of people have pointed to this triple play structure.
That Paul should abstract the thematic to his distinctive theology is explainable on its own terms, with or without Jesus. Isn’t it odd that he is the Johnny-on-the-spot almost immediately, with a complete corpus of materials ready to go, while everyone else is thrashing around in confusion, not able to grasp for another generation what hit them? The triple play, to use an ironic version of the ‘design inference’, is of course quite speculative, but we suspect a coordinated action, quite a brilliant scheme, to the extent we can piece it together, but one that seems to have gone awry at some point.
Keep in mind that Sufis can operate by proxy, and some early form of that, someone we don’t see orchestrating the ‘masterpiece that turned out flawed’.
Meanwhile the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus is pointedly apt, however ‘delusive’ Paul’s hallucinations. He catches the forward pass at that point, the old Obi Wan Kenobi trick, a church with a ghost.
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12.22.07
Posted in General at 3:15 pm by nemo
Martinis: one is too few, three is too many. But, says Christopher Hitchens, like women’s breasts, two is superbly right…
Hitchens, at the last stage of being a drunk you won’t be able to afford martiinis. Check out Nighttrain, the ‘antifreeze’ jug of choice among hobos, freighttrain riders, and the financially indisposed. Here’s a nice picture, third from the right. It’s nice branded for the market niche, cute like picture of a chouchou train. In the hobo phase you’ll get to see a lot of the country…Express. All you need is a few lessons in jumping trains. No problem. Go down to any railhead west of the Missippippit. Free course available, someone will slip out of the shadows and explain.
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12.05.07
Posted in 1848+, New Age, religion at 8:36 pm by nemo
G.I. Gurdjieff, et al,… sufi hyenas:
I would be interested to see where the ‘evidence’ lies for Gurdjieff promoting ‘reactionary democracy-destruction agendas’ !!
Where indeed! I can’t easily satisfy your wish. The post in question was a ‘heart-felt warning’, not a legal case, a passing rumor among those who have moved in the shadow world of the ‘sufis’, whispering in a side street between followers on the way. A sense of suspicion turning into dread arises over the years as an ‘occult horse-sense’ begins to pick up the soft echoes and veiled hints. What do you think is going on in the current attempted demolition of American democracy?
For myself I once stumbled on a secret Gurdjieff group wearing nazi arm bands, and active criminals behind sufi fronts. I know for a fact that the Gurdjieff shadow world is prejudiced against liberal democrats, even as it pitches its message to just such people. There is all sorts of mischief going on, and the standard public Gurdjieff groups don’t have a clue, they are irrelevant. The conservative, that is reactionary, character is obvious, in any case, from the context of the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky saga, against the backdrop of the Russian revolution. A bunch of stinking reactionaries if ever there was such. Behind all the esoteric hype lies Gurdjieff’s inability to get past the fact of abolition, in his statements about slavery. That was the generation of the gestating far right, the period of Nietzsche et al. and the genesis of fascism (Nietzsche is hard to figure here, of course, and can be falsely accused. But his statements are clear on democracy, freedom, and slavery) J.G.Bennett, to his immense discredit not repudiating the game, discovered the ‘conspiracy of genocide’ afoot. He hints at it in several of his books. This compromise wrecked his integrity.
You see it overflow into or at work in many gurus, with their postmodern exploitations and spiritual authoritarianism, wishing doom on the age of democracy. It is there among certain Tibetans, deeply hidden behind the public formations.
Be wary indeed of these people.
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