What the shit does that have to do with this thread?
I dunno. By the way, my I.Q. is 145.
When I was 12 years old I obsessively clipped my toe and finger nails and would make folk art out of them. My team of psychiatrists suggested that … oh, sorry, wrong thread…
I’ll give you one typical one.
Actually, when I was 12 a Jew for Jesus approached me in Westwood, California. He identified me as a Jewish kid and tried to convert me. He told me that Isiah 7:14 was a prophesy about Jesus and therefor Jesus was the Messiah. Isiah 7:14 in most Christian translations goes, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
After some research I learned two important things. First of all, the word “virgin” there is an incorrect translation. In the actual Hebrew, it should be “young woman.” It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a virgin but it very certainly doesn’t say that she was. It’s also wrong in the beginning of Matthew.
Furthermore, in the Jewish tradition, that particular prophesy was considered to be already fulfilled centuries earlier having to do with the story in Ezra (or Nehemiah, I forget) and King Cyrus.
Using Isiah that way is ignorant at best, dishonest at worst, in my opinion. So some throws Isiah 7:14 at me, I tell them about the real translation and history. They think that their interpretation is better and…impasse.
That has been Finn’s basic point. I personally think it is a bit more than that but it is a reasonable way to look at it.
In any case comprehending this perspective that is very different than that which you are familiar with is probably more important than completely understanding the reasoning behind it anyway. We don’t have to understand each others reasonings or think the same way, we can disagree with others’ thought processes and conclusions even, but it is nevertheless desirable to be able to comprehend how others understand things and reason about things.
Stay well.
It was explaining to DSeid why I was having such difficulty understanding what people had been trying to explain to me. In this thread.
God, I wish you would have been a participant in my threads on the Aesthetical Jesus. Yours is exactly the sort of attitude that is sought after there. If by any chance, you feel like opening thread IV and reviewing the prior threads (all linked from the OP), you are invited to participate.
(Note that there is some noise on a couple pages of Part I, but after that, it settles down quite nicely.)
Will do! Thanks.
I think that the evolution and patterns set up amongst Jews over thousands of years (which I guess we can call tradition, somewhat imprecisely or at least non-comprehensively) is a good explanation.
We’ve got a long history of accepting, even celebrating those who question/challenge God. Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism itself, argued God out of His original plans wrt S&G. Israel, nee Jacob, had his name changed to something that literally means “struggles/contends with God.” Confusion/questioning over the nature/reality/existence of God is part and parcel of how we debate things, Maimonides had his “guide for the perplexed” not something called “it’s good to know that you’re not confused and you don’t have any lingering doubts or questions.” The Seder itself has a part for a child who doubts/rebels against the message of the holiday.
Judaism has a long history of a back-and-forth dialog about what God’s attributes are (if any), what God’s nature is (if it can be known), etc… the step from “We cannot know what God is, what God is like, or even properly conceive of such a being” is not all that far from “I cannot conceive of such a being and therefore I do not have a belief in it.”
Added to that, a Jew could lack a belief in any divine force while still attending services, using Jewish rituals to mark life cycle events, and perhaps most importantly, would still remain in the shtetl/ghetto/what have you and would be subjected to the same adversity as other members of the tribe, thereby making survival and community pretty much one and the same. Even in our modern era, it wasn’t all that far back that the Ivy League schools still had quotas on Jewish admittance, and you couldn’t get into the best country clubs for social networking if you were a jew.
On the other hand, a Jew who converted to another religion (say, in medieval Europe) could leave the ghetto, work in professions in which Jews weren’t allowed, gain the favor of the laws of the land, etc…, essentially abandoning the Jewish people and striking out on one’s own, neither defending nor strengthening the Jewish community and, to a degree, harming it both by the loss of a member and by encouraging other religions to try to eliminate Judaism through conversion. Which, of course, is another facet… that during the history of Judaism we were second class citizens (if that) under European powers, dhimmis under the Muslims, targets for pogroms in the east, etc… so it’s not simply a history whereby joining another religion weakens the tribe, it’s also been the history where many of those other religions/cultures have been fundamentally hostile, even violently, pathologically so when Judaism/Jews/Jewishness were concerned.
All that has informed what it means to be Jewish, and a Jew, and a member of the Jewish community. Nor is it just about ‘ancient history’, as even modern groups like JfJ seek to eliminate the entire Jewish religion and as we’ve seen from history, divorced from the ‘religious glue’ that has helped hold us together, Jewish families rarely retain any but the most superficial of cultural/ethnic trappings while for all practical purposes they are totally and completely absorbed into another group.
There are very real reasons why someone who goes to church every Sunday, and whose children will too, and whose children’s children will identify with ‘Christian causes’ and have their morality informed by Christian ideology but who might still cook matzah brye… will have left the tribe.
Oh, and:
The point is that it’s TMI, kinda squicky, and best delivered by PM to someone anyways.
Besides, even if it was required, a quick “I have trouble relating to people” would suffice.
And because that post was way too heavy:
This is a wombat.
This, is Salvador Dali (also what looks like an ocelot).
If their genes were spliced would it create some sort of… Salvador Wombat?
Or merely a Surreal 'Supial?
For you maybe, but if I’d written that, some people might have said, “Why are you being so cryptic, Lib?” In fact, the explanation as given, will be brought up sometime somewhere in some other context with the comment that I left out too much. Guaranteed. Betcha ten bucks against a dime. Like DSeid sort of explained, everybody is different and interprets things in different ways. Some people treated me in this thread with quite some hostility, as though I had been belligerent or deliberately obtuse or lacked common sense. (See whether you recognize anyone in any of those.) My advice would be that if you see a post by me (or anyone else, really) that seems TLDR, just skip over it. You’d be surprised at how much you can control your ocular muscles with very little effort.
This thread has pretty well run its course so I’ll say what I need to say at this point.
Lib, I like you, but get over yourself. As so often happens, a thread topic becomes a Liberal topic, and you are pretty well unique in that regard. We know more about you than any other poster on this message board.
I know you want to be liked , but if every contrary thought in your head needs to be explained by your lifetime of experiences, you are not helping. You come across as attempting to mold our opinion of you, rather than supporting the point you are trying to make. Can you imagine if we all explained our positions in such a manner ?
One additional bit expanding upon how the POVs are so different, really piggybacking on what Finn said -
My understanding is that the Christian perspective has been very syncretic. A major, well, mission, of Christianity is to get more people to self-identify as Christian. There is very little needed for mebership in the group and to some degree its growth has been due to the fact that a wide variety of cultural traditions have been subsumed into it. Others have been sold on Christianity and forced into Christianity as believers serve the goal of enlarging the faith (and from their POV, saviing souls).
Judaism is the opposite pole. There are significant barriers to becoming part of the group. Again, think tribal identity … if I recall correctly you are of Native American descent … would a Sioux be happy to have a Navajo claiming to be one of them?
Dutchman is right on two points: this thread has pretty much run its course and by discussing this we are turning this into a Liberal Thread.
So I’ll make this my last post on the subject. All I will say is that some things are better suited for PM, including but not limited to discussions of one’s mental issues and medications, unless the thread is about posters’ mental issues and medication.
The reason why talking about personal details like that out of PM’s or very specific thread topics is a bad idea is the exact same reason why discussing one’s bowel movements outside of PM’s or threads dedicated to that is a bad idea.
It’s because nobody wants to read about that shit.
I suppose what I am failing to comprehend isn’t the “how” of the trinity, but the “why”. If you’re infused with spiritual fervor, then God is working within/through you. I just don’t get why there’s a need to have Mr Holy Spirit be an extra set player in the Christian demense.
People will often say something like “God is everywhere” or “God is in all things” or some such and I always took those statements at face value in the mind of the believer, thinking that they were just generally referencing God as omnipotent or omniscient, not something attributable to “another spiritual force that’s somehow seperate from, but ultimately a part of, God”.
What’s the use? To make the stories more interesting? If God is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is God, then just call it God and cut the Holy Spirit shit out of the deal.
Drawing a distinction between God and Jesus Christ I can understand, even if technically, again, they are also one and the same.
Edit: I also recall that the bible has some references to “…and the Holy Spirit descended upon him” so even the bible seems to draw that distinction. I always took that to mean “God’s blessings were upon him” or something.
I don’t think Trinitarian theology really holds up that well either, but what should be remembered is that it was an ad hoc formulation designed to save monetheism from a creeping pluralism. It wasn’t like they started with God and then said, “let’s bust him up into three.” They were dealing with a situation where they already had all kinds of problems with the father/son dichotomy, and the Holy Spirit was another experiential paradigm unto itself. In the 4th century, the orthodox church was fighting something called the Arian Heres which held that the son was begotten by the father, the spirit by the Son, that they were not coeternal, and that there was a corresponding hierarchy (the son was subordinate to the father, the spirit to the Son).
The Nicene council therefore decreed that all three entities were “of the same substance,” all uncreated and coeternal, and all of them equal.
So when the Trinity was formulated, it was an ad hoc response to prevailing heresies, and an attempt to quell bickering about what was subordinate to what. It was not an inceptional premise, it was a fix.
Outstanding.
The import of this goes beyond the dubious nature of the Trinity. It starts to make clear why the OT says nothing about a Triune nature to God, and explains why Jesus spoke the way he did, and why there isn’t any [contextual] language from any of the Apostles/ bible writers that speak to the Trinity.
This “creeping pluralism” would hardly been an unknown issue; Triune Gods had been worshipped by the pagans in one form or another for centuries.
A [political] fix is exactly what this was [is]. And that is why it is so utterly difficult to use the bible to make the case for the Trinity----because not only doesn’t the bible support the Trinity, in hundreds of places it either directly or** indirectly** contradicts it.
That’s the most interesting and meaningful (to me) analogy so far. I am 7/8 Cherokee, but I am not a member of the Cherokee tribe. I had the opportunity at one time in my life to join, but I was a mess, and the deal is not open-ended. Once your time is up, your time is up. (Someone told me that that has changed, but the source is not trustworthy.) There’s one poster (I can’t recall who, at he moment) who often berates me for posting things about the Cherokee people, like the Trail of Tears and stuff. And my understanding is that she is angry with me for not joining the tribe. Or something like that. So yes, that analogy makes a lot of sense to me. My ancestry is mostly Cherokee, but the Cherokee Nation does not claim me. And Cherokee tribal members can sometimes be, well, outspoken about people like me. There is even a special derogatory term. I don’t recall it now.
Right, but you do see it ante-Nicene. You see trinitarian formulas as early as the second century…the Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, etc. So it developed fairly early in Christianity. In fact, a large reason the Nicene council decreed what it did was because the Athanasian position was already the established one.
But that’s a hijack and for another thread. 
No. Honestly, I can’t.
Pinkskin bullshit artist?
Speaking of trinity, we’ve had the mental health card and the Native American heritage card. The physical ailments card will make it complete.