More Stupid Atheist Tricks

fortress of facts

my diatribe on the fortress of facts:

This is a means I have adopted of bringing to attention to the fact that atheists use a ploy implying that their world view is backed up by facts and ours is not. One can see this ploy at work all the time but they never fess up to it. Observe how many times you have heard atheists say "there's not one single fact to support belief in God." That's extension of their assertion about their fortress of facts.

Atheists on CARM always dney that they use the stratagem of the fortress of facts. But look at any argument they make and for most of them in most of the arguments they advance (the few times actually make any aside form incredulity) They argue form the fortress.

The pathetic arguments about consciousness advanced by atheists on this board are a prime example. Think by the number, we can only bleieve stuff if we have a mountain of numbers backing it up, that means we have all the facts on our side they stack up to a totally proved giant world view.

Yet the fortress is bad up of selected, purposely chosen "facts" (mostly propaganda and assumptions) chosen becasue they back the ideological template.

counter evidence is mocked and ridiculed out of the way.

They were gimmicky enough to steal the new clothes metaphor before we got to it, but it's much more apt as a description of the atheist fortress of facts.

there is no fortress. there are no "facts" that support your view.


check it out"

you want to say that the fact that none of my studies include an official finding that God exits, so I can't make God arguments using their data.

None of the studies you use on brain or anything else have as official findings "there is no God." so therefore you have no fortress of facts.


social construct


the fortress of facts is a true social construct. Its' based upon cultural ideas and assumptions rather than facts. There are NO official scientific findings that say "there is a fortress of facts that supports atheism"

what'shisface:

So, are you saying that when it comes to forming a view on something, its best to ignore any facts on the subject?

how in the hell do you conclude that? so you think if you just select a bunch of stuff that helped your view and ignore the stuff against it, and assume a bunch of stuff to fit the material that backs you, and pretend there's no counter, then you have actually proved something?

Originally Posted by Whatsisface

Ok, so are you saying then that when one is trying to form an opinion on something it is best to take any facts into account?

listen up: The assertion that atheism is backed by a huge pile of established facts is garbage.

(1) the only "facts" are selective and thing that oppose atheism are excluded.

(2) most of the so called "facts" are merely assumptions.

The idea that theis has no basis in fact to support it while everything atheists claim is supported by science, is crap.

It's just an ideology.

atheist (saying darnedest thing)

Is this not a straw man? The reason I, and I think most atheists, are atheists is because of a lack of facts to support theism.

Isn't that just a version of what I'm arguing against?

Donald

I'm deviating from the topic of your thread, to challenge one particular aspect of the OP. I have no interest in discussing your "fortress of facts" rant. If you don't want to pursue the discussion that I've initiated, feel free to not respond.

Now, on to my point. I have not read your studies. Your studies do not provide you with rational warrant to believe in God. Go.

Duh really.

Originally Posted by Donald

Don't claim to. Not interested in discussing the topic. If you feel that the topic that I am pursuing is derailing your thread, feel free to not respond.

I have not read your studies. Your studies do not provide you with rational warrant to believe in God.

then pershaps you shouldn't be in my thread. HU?

that really does seem kind of red herrinish don't you think?




Issue two: The hard problem on conscoiusness.

I argue that consciousness is not brain function it can't be reduced to brain function. The hard problem is one way of proving it. This the approach by David Chalmers. He uses an analogy to show that the content of consciousness can't be expalined by facts about the way the brain works.

one example is a woman who has never seen the color red but who studies color and knows every fact about how the brain works when it observes red. Yet known these fact doesn't enable her to know what red looks like. One atheist atheist argued that it does. When I pressed to show how that could be he didn't.

Then I argue that I could look like you and do all the things you do but I still would not know what it's like be you. The same atheist actually argued that he could know what it's like to be me, or I could know what it's like to be him just by nkowing all the facts about me, or me knowing all the facts about him. This is just sheer stupidity and I think it comes from not knowing or understanding the basis of the argument. To know what it's like to be another person would have to get outside your own perceptions and view things through the perception of that other person. Of course we can never do that. All those facts about the other person are being filtered though my own perception so it's still me being me, I'm not understanding this point of view. The assumption they are making is just that we can't think, that thought has no contentment and consciousness is just a matter of behavior. they are just denying what we all know we expedience all the time.

The issue of access came up, that means when they argue that manipulating the brain changes consciousness, I say it's just a matter of how consciousness is accessed. It's not that brain causes mind but that brain accesses mind so effecting the brain effects access. To illustrate I use the analogy about smashing a computer monitor mean you can't access the soft ware but that doesn't mean that hardware is causing software.


Cowabunga:

You can too access it, you just need another method. If you hook up a logic analyzer you can see the 1s and 0s just fine. I'm not sure what you're getting at with "revoke the software." I get that without a monitor the software is essentially useless, and I don't recall anyone even remotely suggesting that the monitor is the cause of the software.

Originally Posted by Metacrock

that's not the issue. no one denies that neurons are invoked in mind. no one! that' snot it! no!

talking about neurons is just brain function that's not consciousness. no amount of knowledge about neurons will ever produce the content of actual consciousness. That's the issue!

Cowabunga

Not true.

IBM's new supercomputer Watson just kicked butt on Jeopardy. It's software was able to distinguish subtle language mechanics that computers up til now could not. We know both the hardware and the software that brought about this ability. Watson even told a joke to the audience that they thought was funny.

I'm not claiming that Watson is conscious but it is intelligent and the gap is closing rapidly. I believe within my lifetime I will see a conscious computer.

That's still not consciousness. It doesn't mean that the constant has any real meaning for Watson. Giving it a human name doesn't mean it's conscious.

then he says:

Cowabunga

Brain chemistry is paramount for understanding thought, and thoughts can and are effected by drugs and even electric stimulus. For example if you stimulate a brain in the right spot that person will start laughing, touch another and they will have a religious experience. These things show strong support for thoughts and feelings being physical. What do you have from the spiritual realm that is even remotely as convincing? Anything?

Those are still just issues of access. No one denies that there's a close relationship between the mind and brain. The brain accesses consciousness and produces it in the way that a capacitor produce electricity, but the thing itself is part of nature it's not just a side effect of having brain chemistry. Stimulating brain and seeing effects doesn't' prove that mind reduces to brain.


I will deal with this topic in greater detail in the coming week. It's pretty apparent they don't know what's going on.

Have Tomb, Will Argue

In response to the empty tomb book published by the ensomble of internet infidels.My arguments are found in several pages that disprove any assertion of a late developing tomb myth.


http://www.geocities.com/metacrock2000/Jesus_pages/Resurrection/Tomb_yes.html


I have two major argments both of which demonstrate the historicity of an early claim of an existing empty tomb.

(1) The per Markan redactions includes story of empty tomb as early as AD 50

(2) archaeoloigcal evidence indicates the tomb is under the chruch of the Holy Seplechur.

this is the second argument:

One of the major Skeptical arguments against the Resurrection of Christ states that no tomb was ever venerated as the stie of the Resurrection until Constantine arbitrarily chose one in the foruth century;that the Chruch of the Holy Seplechur, the oldest traditional site, was just a fabrication. None of this is true. While it cannot be proven conclusively that the CHS is the actual tomb site, there is a strong probablity that it is, and there is good evidence to suggest this. The tradition can be traced back to the first century. Thus a tomb was venerated in the first century.

The Church of the Holy Seplechur is owned jointly by three major Christian denominations: The Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Arminian Orthodox. The site was chosen and "discovered" to be the orignal tomb of Christ by Constantine in 336 AD when he accompanied his mother to the Holy Land in search of the true cross and other artifacts.


My Argument is not that we can prove that the CHS is the tomb, but that the strong probablity that it was venertaed as the tomb in the frist century, destorys the skeptical claim in books such as The Empty Tomb.The skeptics contributing to that book must disprove the possiblity of the CHS before they can dismiss historicity of the empty tomb.


My arguments will be presented in three major areas:

I. The modern site of CHS is the site Constantine chose; its place in the sourrounding city is an exact fit for the physical and social envoriment of the tomb.


II. Oral tradition guided Constantine's choice, passed down from the Jewish Christian community to the Gentile Chrsitians.

III. Modern archeaology verifies the claims of this tradition.



I. The modern site of CHS is the site Constantine chose; its place in the sourrounding city is an exact fit for the physical and social envoriment of the tomb.



A.Validation of Constantine's site two sources:



(1) The Description of the site itself


The Descriptions given by Eusebius, and by Crusaders in the Middle ages, match the actual site.

Carbo Excavation.


Chruch of The Holy Seplechur--Government of Israel site, visited 6/7/01

http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00v10


"This courtyard, outside the present-day Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is partly supported by a large, vaulted cistern. The northern wall of this cistern is very impressive, consisting of large blocks with dressed margins, still standing several meters high. It has been suggested that this early wall served as the retaining wall of the second century Hadrianic raised platform (podium). This appears to support Eusebius' statement that the Temple of Venus, which Hadrian erected on the site of Jesus' tomb, stood here before the original church was built."

"The Basilica: Early masonry below the catholicon of the Crusader period was exposed during the excavations. This made possible the reconstruction of the original design of the 4th century basilica. The position of the two central rows of columns in the basilica (out of the four rows) may be determined by the remains of their foundations, which can be seen along the northern and southern sides of the chapel of St. Helena. In a small underground space north of this chapel, a massive foundation wall of the early basilica was exposed. On a large, smoothed stone which was incorporated in this wall, a pilgrim to the original church left a drawing of a merchant ship and the Latin inscription: "O Lord, we shall go." Beneath the apse of the present-day catholicon, part of the apse that marked the western end of the original church was exposed. Eusebius described this apse as being surrounded by twelve columns, symbolizing the twelve apostles."

"The Rotunda and Sepulcher:The most important element of the complex is the rotunda which contains the sepulcher itself. The sepulcher stands in an elaborate structure within the rotunda, surrounded by columns supporting an ornamented, domed roof.Some masonry remains were revealed below the floor and around the perimeter of the rotunda. Wherever bedrock was exposed, there were indications of stone-quarrying in earlier periods. The quarrying operation lowered the surface level around the sepulcher, which thus stood well above its surroundings. An architectural survey of the outer wall of the rotunda - 35 m. in diameter and in some sections preserved to a height of 10 m. - shows that it maintains its original 4th century shape. The sepulcher itself is surrounded by a circle of twelve columns - groups of three columns between four pairs of square piers. It is possible that the columns for the 4th century rotunda were removed from their original location on the facade of the Roman temple. Renovation of the piers exposed evidence that the columns had originally been much higher and that the Crusaders cut them in half for use in the 12th century rotunda.The renovation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is still in progress, but after generations of neglect, the building has already regained most of its former beauty.

"The survey and excavations were conducted by V. Corbo, Ch. Coüasnon, M. Broshi and others, on behalf of the Christian communities which control most of the Holy Sepulcher: the Roman Catholic; the Greek Orthodox; and the Armenian Orthodox."




(2) Description of the Edicule.


The Edicule is the little house put over the tomb to protect it, before the basillica was built. Constantine is known to have put up the first one, and it has been described and documented in many ways. Biddle Traces this developement and finds:


The History of the Edicule

ad communications.org.


"From the time of Constantine to the present day historians have been blessed with the archaeological evidence discovered showing the Edicule in its original form. The following list is only a fraction of what has been retrieved and the approximate dates of their origination.

Appearances of the Edicule (325-1009 ad)

1) 440 a.d.: on ivory casket side carving.
2) a Narbonne marble model (5th century).
3) Casket lid (6-7th century).
4) Pewter flask (6-7th century).
5) Pewter Medallion.
6) Glass Flasks.
7) Pottery Pilgrim Flask (shows Edicule and Golgotha).
8) Gold ring with the 3D Edicule on top.
9) Mosiac in the Church of St. Stephen in Jordan.
10) Bronze Censer casts (1009 a.d.)

Appearances of the Edicule (11th Century -1555)

1) Paintings.
2) Drawings.
3) Crusader Coins/Seals.
4) Models.

Appearances of the Edicule (1555-1808 ad)

1) Stone scale models.
2) Wooden models of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with Edicule model inside.
3) Engravings.
4) Pottery.



Martin Biddle


Tomb of Chist

Israel Review of Arts and Letters

Wesite belonging to:Israel Ministry Foreign Affairs

visited 1/8/05


Biddle:Constantines edicule, the first of the four "little houses" which have covered and protected the remains of the tomb since its discovery in 325-6, was destroyed in 1009 and no fragment of it has been seen since. How then do we know what it looked like? The best evidence is provided by a replica standing about a metre high, cut in a block of Pyrennean marble, found at Narbonne in south-west France, and dating from the fifth or sixth century CE. Being cut in local marble it cannot be a direct copy of the edicule in Jerusalem, but must be based on some intermediate copy, probably itself a model rather than a set of drawings. Its evidence is therefore second-hand, but there are sufficient other sources to show that it is likely to be in architectural terms a close representation of the Jerusalem original. The other fifth to seventh-century sources are pictures in mosaic, moulded pewter flasks and medallions, the painted lid of a box of relics (found in the Lateran in Rome), images on pottery and glass, and the written records of pilgrims. All these sources present their own problems of date and interpretation, but it is a remarkable range of evidence in different media, more evidence perhaps than for any other vanished building of late antiquity. But the picture is confused by the parallel existence of completely fanciful representations, some of the highest artistic quality, in the form of ivory panels carved in Alexandria and Italy. These show idealized edicules, bearing no relation to reality, but they have confused generations of scholars. Only the objects made in Palestine, mostly probably in Jerusalem, for the pilgrim trade, or copying such local products, like the Narbonne marble, tell us what the edicule built by Constantine was really like.

Constantines edicule survived for 600 years until it was deliberately destroyed in 1009 by order of the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim, in an insane and short-lived attack on the holy sites of Christianity. Within three or four years al-Hakim had relented, urged on by his mother, Maria, a Christian whose brother Orestes had been Patriarch of Jerusalem. By 1012 rebuilding had begun, and by 1014, Maria had "began to rebuild with well-dressed squared stones the Temple of Christ destroyed by her sons order."

The destruction had been very thorough: Constantines great church of the Martyrion was cut down and never rebuilt, but al-Hakims agents admitted that they could not entirely root out the tomb, and they left parts of the rotunda surrounding the tomb standing to a height of about 11 metres, as one can still see today. By the millennium of Christs crucifixion in 1030 or thereabouts, when thousands of pilgrims were again travelling to the Holy Land, the edicule and the rotunda had been put back into sufficient order for pilgrims to take part in the Easter liturgies and to observe the ceremony of the Descent of the Holy Fire.

William of Tyre, the great Crusader historian, who wrote in the 1160s and 1170s, says that the restoration was completed by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos in 1048. William is our only evidence for this, and his indications of date are inconsistent. No Byzantine chronicler believed this. John Skylitzes, writing in the mid-11th century, a strictly contemporary witness, noted that the Emperor Romanos III (1028-34) "strove eagerly to take the rebuilding in hand; but his death intervened and his successor completed the work." This was the Emperor Michael IV, the Paphlagonian, who reigned from 1036-41.



Biddle traces the full history in the article (see link).


The shapes and appearances have been correlated by the Biddle excavation using advanced thechnology wihch enable the archaeologist to see inside to the orignal layer. The Ediclues was repaced many times wiht scuceeding layers, until it became onionlike, hiding an original core of Constantine's Dome, which has now been penitrated by Biddle using the most advanced technology. There is virtually no doubt that the CHS is the site Constantine chose.


Secrets of the Dead (PBS)



In addition to the traditional methods used by archeologists to study buildings, including taking comprehensive and detailed photographs and studying ancient documents and drawings, archeologists Martin and Birthe Biddle and their colleagues employed a number of sophisticated scientific techniques to examine the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the edicule that purportedly houses the Tomb of Christ.

The primary technology used in their survey of the site was photogrammetry, which allows researchers to create two or three-dimensional images of a structure from any vantage point. The data from which the images are constructed comes from conventional or digital photographs. Not just any photographs, however; they have to include small, reflective "targets" stuck on walls or other surfaces with adhesive. The targets have cross-hairs, which allow their exact location to be measured with a surveying tool called a theodolite. From the location of the targets, an imaginary coordinate grid is constructed in and around the entire site -- within the edicule of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for example. "When you take your photographs you have, preferably, four of these targets in each one," says Martin Biddle. The photographs are taken in "stereopairs," overlapping images that, when viewed in a certain way, form a three dimensional image of an object. "The stereopairs are set up in a photogrammetric plotter with the coordinate values you know from your survey. Thereafter, you can plot any point in the stereo image in terms of that coordinate grid. You know the x and y and z axes -- up and down and sideways," Biddle explains. "Once you have that data in, you can instruct the machine to print out a view looking up from underneath, or down from above -- whatever way you want."



http://www.bib-arch.org/barso99/roll2.html

B. Site's Physical and Social Fit in the Jerusalem Environment



(1)Site location is right in Relation to City Wall

One of the major means of identification is through the relation to the city wall. They know where the tomb was suppossed to be in relation to the wall and that gives a vector in which to begin searching. Than there are two other peices of crucial evidence, the description by Eusebius and artifacts which link the site with the tomb.

ad communications.org

The Tomb of Jesus, where is it?


"In 1963 Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon while digging near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher proved that at the time of the Crucificion, the Church location was outside the walls of the Old City, during a dig a 49 ft. trench revealed a quarry which was in used between the 7th century b.c. and the first century. Additional support comes from the middle 1960's where repairs were given to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (floor) as well as a nearby Lutheran Church where quarrying evidence and pottery was uncovered. In addition to these discoveries the 1976 excavation by Dr. Christos Katsambinis revealed a cone-shaped grey rock with an incline (35 ft. high) probably the famed Golgotha which had two small caves that from a distance looked like a large skull (E.B. Blaiklock and R.K. Harrison)."




(2) Site was a Cemetary with Garden


Martin Biddle

Tomb of Chist

Israel Review of Arts and Letters

Israel Ministry Foreign Affairs


"It is not as if it was the only tomb there. Some eight rock-cut tombs have so far been found below the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Some have kokhim (Heb.), the deep niches at right-angles to the wall into which a body could be inserted as into the drawers of a modern mortuary. At least one of these tombs (now below the Coptic Patriarchate) seems to be very like the tomb whose remains are still today covered by the edicule. Perhaps Eusebius identified the tomb now preserved within the edicule as the Tomb of Christ because it was near to Golgotha. This is suggested in St. Johns Gospel when it says that there was a "garden" at the place of Crucifixion, and that in that garden there was a tomb. But it may also have been because of the features of the tomb then discovered: a movable rolling stone, a low entrance through which it was necessary to bend down to look in or enter, and a bench on the right-hand side where Christs body could have lain and the "angel" could have sat, matched those described in the Gospel."




(3) Name Galgotha Stuck to the Site.



"Some points are crucial to note. First, the site was outside the city walls at the date of the Crucifixion in 30 or 33 CE. Second, the tomb was in an existing Jewish cemetery of rock-cut tombs typical of the Jerusalem area in the Second Temple period. Third, the place-name Golgotha seems to have lived on in local memory, despite the vast changes in the area brought about by Hadrians foundation of Aelia Capitolina in 132 CE. Before the end of the third century, Eusebius wrote in his Onomastikon, the "Place-Names of Palestine," that: "... Golgotha, place of a skull, where the Christ was crucified ... which is pointed out in Aelia to the north of Mt. Sion."

"It is only in recent years that study of Eusebius text has shown that the writing of his Onomastikon should be dated to the late third century, perhaps to the 290s, long before Constantines workers cleared the Rock of Golgotha and uncovered the tomb.

There was thus a landmark to guide Constantines workmen. They removed the Roman temple covering the site and the masses of earth and rubble forming the platform on which it stood, cleared the Rock of Golgotha and then, to their surprise, found a tomb which fitted the Gospel descriptions. The position is best put by the Israeli scholar Dan Bahat, former City Archaeologist of Jerusalem:

"We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site."




II. Site Location Handed on by Oral Tradition.


No one really knows how Contantine chose the site. Biddle thinks it was by graffiti found on the walls. Most historians beileve that the Jewish-Christian community passed on an orgal tradition telling their Genitle counterparts how to find the location.



A. Location Handed Down From First Century Jewish Christians, To Gentile Christians, to Eusebius.


New Advent
Catholic Encyclopeida
Holy Seplechur

A.L. MCMAHON
Transcribed by Robert B. Olson

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07425a.htm


"But nearly all scholars maintain that the knowledge of the place was handed down by oral tradition, and that the correctness of this knowledge was proved by the investigations caused to be made in 326 by the Emperor Constantine, who then marked the site for future ages by erecting over the Tomb of Christ a basilica, in the place of which, according to an unbroken written tradition, now stands the church of the Holy Sepulchre."



The oral tradition makes the most sense because it would give the clearest marker. Of course it is true that Constantine could have just chosen the site at random, or for some other reason. But oral tradition is alluded to by Eusebius, and it is validated by modern archaeology. Before getting into that, let's explore the tradition itself.



B. Tradition linked to First Century.

Several issues that skeptics will raise include: 1)the tradition only began in the foruth century, 2) That Helena just chose the site arbitrarily, 3) that the site was moved in the middle ages, 4) that legonds and "traditions" are worthless. But all of these are false. The tradition can be linked to the first century..

New Advent
Catholic Encyclopeida
Holy Seplechur

A.L. MCMAHON

Transcribed by Robert B. Olson


1) Site remembered by Jewish Christian Community after departure from Jerusalem in 60.


"These scholars contend that the original members of the nascent Christian Church in Jerusalem visited the Holy Sepulchre soon, if not immediately, after the Resurrection of the Saviour. Following the custom of their people, those who were converts from Judaism venerated, and taught their children to venerate, the Tomb in which had lain the Foundation of their new faith, from which had risen the Source of their eternal hope; and which was therefore more sacred and of greater significance to them than had been the tombs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David, which they had hitherto venerated, as their forefathers had for centuries. Nor would Gentile converts have failed to unite with them in this practice, which was by no means foreign to their own former customs.



2) Christian Community Re-established in Second Century.

"The Christians who were in Jerusalem when Titus laid siege to the city in the year 70 fled, it is true, across the Jordan to Pella; but, as the city was not totally destroyed, and as there was no law prohibiting their return, it was possible for them to take up their abode there again in the year 73, about which time, according to Dr. Sanday (Sacred Sites of the Gospels, Oxford, 1903), they really did re-establish themselves. But, granting that the return was not fully made until 122, one of the latest dates proposed, there can be no doubt that in the restored community there were many who knew the location of the Tomb, and who led to it their children, who would point it out during the next fifty years. The Roman prohibition which kept Jews from Jerusalem for about two hundred years, after Hadrian had suppressed the revolt of the Jews under Barcochebas (132-35), may have included Jewish converts to Christianity; but it is possible that it did not. It certainly did not include Gentile converts."



3) Tradition past from Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem to Gentile Christians.


"The list of Bishops of Jerusalem given by Eusebius in the fourth century shows that there was a continuity of episcopal succession, and that in 135 a Jewish line was followed by a Gentile. The tradition of the local community was undoubtedly strengthened from the beginning by strangers who, having heard from the Apostles and their followers, or read in the Gospels, the story of Christ's Burial and Resurrection, visited Jerusalem and asked about the Tomb that He had rendered glorious."



C.Trial of Witnesses from Second Century to Contantine.


1)Pilgrims.

[Ibid]

"It is recorded that Melito of Sardis visited the place where "these things [of the Old Testament] were formerly announced and carried out". As he died in 180, his visit was made at a time when he could receive the tradition from the children of those who had returned from Pella. After this it is related that Alexander of Jerusalem (d. 251) went to Jerusalem "for the sake of prayer and the investigation of the places", and that Origen (d. 253) "visited the places for the investigation of the footsteps of Jesus and of His disciples". By the beginning of the fourth century the custom of visiting Jerusalem for the sake of information and devotion had become so frequent that Eusebius wrote, that Christians "flocked together from all parts of the earth". It is at this period that history begins to present written records of the location of the Holy Sepulchre. The earliest authorities are the Greek Fathers, Eusebius (c.260-340), Socrates (b.379), Sozomen (375-450), the monk Alexander (sixth century), and the Latin Fathers, Rufinus (375-410), St. Jerome (346-420), Paulinus of Nola (353-431), and Sulpitius Severus" (363-420).



2) Eusebius.

[Ibid]
Of these the most explicit and of the greatest importance is Eusebius, who writes of the Tomb as an eyewitness, or as one having received his information from eyewitnesses. The testimonies of all having been compared and analysed may be presented briefly as follows: Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, conceived the design of securing the Cross of Christ, the sign of which had led her son to victory. Constantine himself, having long had at heart a desire to honour "the place of the Lord's Resurrection", "to erect a church at Jerusalem near the place that is called Calvary", encouraged her design, and giving her imperial authority, sent her with letters and money to Macarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem. Helena and Macarius, having made fruitless inquiries as to the existence of the Cross, turned their attention to the place of the Passion and Resurrection, which was known to be occupied by a temple of Venus erected by the Romans in the time of Hadrian, or later. The temple was torn down, the ruins were removed to a distance, the earth beneath, as having been contaminated, was dug up and borne far away. Then, "beyond the hopes of all, the most holy monument of Our Lord's Resurrection shone forth" (Eusebius, "Life of Constantine", III, xxviii). Near it were found three crosses, a few nails, and an inscription such as Pilate ordered to be placed on the Cross of Christ. The accounts of the finding of the Holy Sepulchre thus summarized have been rejected by some on the ground that they have an air of improbability, especially in the attribution of the discovery to "an inspiration of the Saviour", to "Divine admonitions and counsels", and in the assertions that, although the Tomb had been covered by a temple of Venus for upwards of two centuries, its place was yet known."


Of course, Corfeld says that these pagan monuments, intended to defile the site and make it unfit for veneration, only served to mark the location, so that Christains could remember where it was by marking the pagan monument.There are more serious considerations which I do not have time to address here. I suggest that the reader click on the link above and read the entire article. But the point here is that, unlike many skeptics try to claim, the situation is not that no one ever heard of the site before Contantine; he did not pull it out of think air. There is a traceable tradition going back to the fist century.


D. Site not questioned until 18th century.

[Ibid]
"It was not until the eighteenth century that the authenticity of this tomb was seriously doubted. The tradition in its favour was first formally rejected by Korte in his "Reise nach dem gelobten Lande" (Altona, 1741). In the nineteenth century he had many followers, some of whom were content with simply denying that it is the Holy Sepulchre, because it lies within the city walls, while others went further and proposed sites outside the walls. No one, however, has pointed out any other tomb that has a shred of tradition in its favour."

The Bible has Philosophical Profundity

Toynbee,,,,,,...............................Gilson




Adren@line (poster on CARM)

You continue to cite Christian philosophers who ripped off the Greeks because they couldnt find anything of substance in the OT or NT to back up their ideas. That doesnt really prove your point. Aquinas was perhaps the greatest offender. Sure, the modern Christian philosophical idea exists, but it is not sourced to the OT or NT. That is my point. It is a concoction between OT, NT, and Greek philosophy.

What we have here is more ignorance in action. The intellectual heritage of the chruch is ancient and rich. Anyone who doesn't know this is just demonstrating their ignorance. To say that Aquinas "ripped off the Greeks" is just idiotic. Remember Whitehead's statement that all of Western Philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle? Everyone has ripped off the Greeks! That's why they are the foundation. What does this guy expect Gentile Christians fall back upon when they didn't know the Hebrew tradition?

Richard Krnoer


There are so many writers who demonstrate the profound philosophical implications in the Bible. I'll just talk about three of them but there are many more. virtually any passage contains some philosophical depth. Let's just look at the modern thinkers who bring this out. The First is Richard Kroner. Speculation in Pre-Christian Philosophy.(269 pp. Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1956)

showed how speculation developed as a protest against Greek polytheism. For want of a Biblical revelation, however, this protest could only be inspired by a half-mythological, half-intellectual intuition. Even though it prepared the way for the Christian outlook, it exposed the failure of speculation to cope with the deeper aspirations of men. The present volume deals with the rise of Christian philosophy in terms of a tension between ancient speculation and Christian revelation up to the dawn of modern times, the last section being devoted to "the learned ignorance" of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Not only are ancient systems Christianized, but new insights allow thinkers to perform "a necessary reorganization of metaphysics that called attention to new speculative vistas opened by revelation" (p. 36). The recognition of an "age of Christian philosophy" is accordingly vindicated. Although we must wait for the third volume (which is not expected before 1961) to be carried through the age of the Reformation and subsequent developments, the author makes it clear that strictly speaking, "the age of Christian philosophy" ends with medieval times. The few hints found in the two volumes now in print suggest that the third one will present the modern era as "the Protestant age"-so-called because intellectually dominated by the Reformed tradition. While not appealing to Christian revelation, this age is unable to dissociate itself from its "predominating spirit." Its culmination is reached with Hegel, even as the total victory of speculation achieved in his "absolute science" spells ultimate frustration for a Christianity said to insist on the supremacy of inspired subjective insight over unaided reason.(book reveiw: Emile Cailliet Cape May, New Jersey)

Using Kroner's book one can connect Hebrew prophetic insight and theological speculation with Heidegger primordial thinking. I wrote a paper in the secular history of ideas program (in a class on phenomenology) where I argued this. It made "A" the professor liked it but he said Heidegger wouldn't accept it becuase it had to be Greek. But I think I demonstrated, with Kroner's help that the Hebrews had primordial thinking as well.

Étienne Henri Gilson

was born into a Roman Catholic family in Paris on 13 June 1884. He was educated at a number of Roman Catholic schools in Paris before attending lycée Henri IV in 1902, where he studied philosophy. Two years later he enrolled at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1907 after having studied under many fine scholars, including Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim.

Gilson’s Gifford Lectures, delivered at Aberdeen in 1931 and 1932, titled ‘The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy’, were published in his native language (L’espirit de la philosophie medieval, 1932) before being translated into English in 1936. Gilson believed that a defining feature of medieval philosophy was that it operated within a framework endorsing a conviction to the existence of God, with a complete acceptance that Christian revelation enabled the refinement of meticulous reason. In this regard he described medieval philosophy as particularly ‘Christian’ philosophy.

Gilson was about the first philosopher I read after getting saved (my "born again" experience) and the first who was overtly discussing philosophy in Christian terms. In discussion of Aquinas' view he specifically uses Exodus 3:18 as his starting point. that's the passage translated "I am that I am." But in the LXX it's translated "I am being itself." That ties it in with Tillich, and I could have used Tillich for this but am resisting it for two reasons, one because I talk about him so much, anyone who reads my blog regularly knows this, secondly, because even though he was a philosopher he's really more of a theologian so might be less apt to demonstrate what I'm trying to show. Gilson is often called "lay theologian" but he was formally a philosopher. Being chosen to give the Gifford lecture is like getting the Nobel prize of philosophy.

He uses the passage to tie Aquinas into existentialism through the ontological principle raveled in the name "I am that I am." The self sustaining aspect revealed in that name is also an indication of the existential nature of God's being because it's apparent at hand in all existence. Aquinas believed God was the primary act of existence, which is similar to Tillich's concept of God as being itself All of this ties in with what i"ve said int he past about realizing God, and belief in God being a realization about one's own relationship with being.

Arnold J.Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (April 14, 1889 - October 22, 1975), British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934 - 1961, (also known as History of the World) was very popular in its time.

Toynbee, a prolific author, was the nephew of a great economic historian, Arnold Toynbee, with whom he is sometimes confused. Born in London, Arnold J was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. He worked for the Foreign Office during both World War I and World War II. He was Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1925-1955) and Research Professor of International History at the University of London.

He is best known for this theory about cycles in history. He studies 23 civilizations and shows emerging patterns that demonstrate the rise and fall of each This approach has been discredited in the eyes of most historians today and is the "no no" of "history repeats itself" which no historian will take seriously (for good reason). Toynbee himself did not really say that he did not consider the patterns to be absolute. He is respected although his major task didn't make it. One thing I think of him positively for is his discussion of Christianity and progress in history. He said that Christianity made progress in history possible. This is because in the old ancient world civilizations everything was static, the eternal return was the pattern of life. This is the mythological themes that Champbell and Eliade talk about. The eternal return means the same things are always supposed to happen. The warrior's task is to re-create the worrier the tribe perpetuates itself and everything moves in a big cycle that mimics the cycle of the seasons. that's the basic structure of pagan society. But with Christianity, beginning with the Jews we have the possibility of disruption.

The Jews were wondering toward the promised land. As long they did that their goal was spacial. But when they got there the wondering is over then ti's time to create the paradise and everything is static again. So the wandering becomes temporal. We not traveling in space toward the promised land we are traveling in time toward the eschaton. Jesus parousia is makes that possible. The retrun of the savior-King will mean a disruption of status and that possibility means progress in history is possible.

This is just a hint of the profound nature of things we can dig out if we actually read the Bible with an inteiton other than bad mouthing it.

Arguments Against Dawkin's Argument About God as Complex

In The God Delusion Dawkins argues that God is complex, he does this my making an analogy in assuming that God is a biological organism. The upshot of that is that complex things are less likely to come about by random chance than simple things The problem is of course God doesn't "come about" and if he did it wouldn't be by random chance. Since God is eternal he doesn't' "come about." There are several reasons why this kind of thinknig is wrong.


(1) God is the foundation of all that is. Before God's creates there is nothing but God.

What does one compare God to if God is all there is? Do you all remember the idea that we can't speak of "before the big bang" because there's no time there and if no time you can't use words like "before?"

this is the same kind of thing. With nothing to compare to you can't say if it's simple are complex. It's just there.

(2) Can't use analogy to biology: We have no scientific knowledge of things beyond the physical.

Skeptics who echo Dawkin's idiocy try to speak as though God works like a big biological organism with a physical brain. Some try to justify that analogy by instituting that information works this way for us, so therefore, it just work this way all the time. one person on this board says "information is complex, it would be complex even if it's not physical it's still information."

That is an assumption not in evidence. They are trying to assert that the unknown has to work like the known because that's what we know. These same people also want us to confine our thinking to scientific thinking only. there is no scientific evidence for the great unknown I don't see why we should assert that all reality functions like the bits we know about.


(3) The idea that you can't go from simple to complex is contradicted by several physical aspects of reality.

a. planetary formation: move from singularity, to solar systems and galaxies.

b. evolution: single cell orgnaisms, even more simple things than that, to man.

Unfied feild: gravity is all we need to get everything going.

there are other examples too.

(4) The analogy they draw is to man. If we drew one bewteen God and the laws of physic simple to complex would be easy to understand.

(5) God is eternal, the probability arguments assume something coming to be rather than an eternal existent.

Dawkin's whole point point complexity is to say complex things are less probable. That assumes an amalgam of smaller parts that combine to make a larger amalgam. It has no application to something that is eternal and doesn't' come to be.

There is no probability to be calculated when something does come to be but always is. The probability of its' coming to be is 0. The probability of it's ceasing is 0. The probability of it's not being is 0. The probability that it is is 100%, obviously, something that has always been is!

(6) Dawkins assumes God is analogous to a man, so the arguments don't apply to being itself.

HRG recites the mantra "we have shown that there can't be an eternal entity" his logic is circular because his "showing it" is partly based upon this and other arguments disproved by the eternal nature, and it's also based upon assuming God is a big man rather than being itself.

Richard Rorty's Response to the Sokal Hoax.

Rorty

While doing some research on one of my favorite topics, science and social construvism, I came across an article written some time ago, by Richard Rorty. I had just been arguing against Rorty on my message boards. He was one of my big nemesis in graduate work. He was the epitome of why I began to study postmodernism, when I saw it as the big threat to Christian gospel. This article I like. I came to agree with the constructivist, although in the more reasonable form of that view, epitomized by Thomas Kuhn. I have defended the view of scinece as social construct on CARM for years, and been called names and so forth for doing that.

This a good article, I enjoyed, by Rorty in Atlantic monthly in 1999, responding to the "Sokal Hoax." For those who don't know what that is, Alan Sokal a physicists put out an article baiting the science-is-a-social-construct crowd by saying extremely ridiculous statements that seemed to agree with them, such as "science no longer supports the idea of an world outside the mind." When a bunch of the constructivist crowd hailed these statements Skoal came back and said "you are nuts, can't you tell I'm pulling your leg." There is an article online where Sokal discusses the hoax, what he thinks he proved and didn't prove.

This is Rorty's counter attack. Rorty is a constructivist (as If you you can't tell by his statement "there's no truth out there."

Read the whole article it's pretty good. It's called "Phony Science Wars."

Atlantic Monthly digital edition
Nov 1999

The article uses Ian Hacking as the defender of a rational view of constructivism. Hacking is one of my favorites. I discovered him way back in my early doctoral work. He was doing history of scinece at that point.


Ian Hacking

Except from article:

IAN Hacking -- the most intellectually curious and imaginative philosopher of science now writing -- is a member of the third group. In this spirited and eminently readable book he suggests that the combatants climb down from the level of abstraction on which they debate such topics as the nature of truth, the nature of science, and the nature of rationality, and focus instead on three questions: Are the best scientific theories of our day the inevitable results of serious inquiry, or might science have taken a different turn and still had equal success in building bombs, say, or curing diseases? Do these theories tell us about the intrinsic structure of reality, or are they simply the best tools available for predicting and controlling nature? Are the longest-lasting and most frequently relied upon theories stable because they match a stable reality, or because scientists get together to keep them stable, as politicians get together to keep existing political arrangements intact? Philosophers like Latour and Kuhn, wary of the idea that reality has an intrinsic nature that scientific inquiry is destined to reveal, are inclined to say that science might have done as good a job if it had never come up with either quarks or genes. As they see it, scientific progress is like biological evolution: no particular life-form is destined to emerge, and lots of different ones might have turned out to be equally good at survival. In this view, scientific theories are tools that do a job. They do it well, but some other tools might perhaps have done the same job equally well.

The stalemate that Hacking brilliantly describes but does not try to break is between many scientists' intuition of the inevitability of quarks and many philosophers' suspicion that the claim of inevitability makes sense only if the idea of the intrinsic structure of reality makes sense. This teeter-totter between conflicting intuitions is, Hacking rightly says, a genuine intellectual problem. Which answer one gives to his third question -- about the source of the stability of the most reliable bits of science -- is likely to be a matter of which side of the seesaw has most recently descended.

These alternating intuitions have been in play ever since Protagoras said "Man is the measure of all things" and Plato rejoined that the measure must instead be something nonhuman, unchanging, and capitalized -- something like The Good, or The Will of God, or The Intrinsic Nature of Physical Reality. Scientists who, like Steven Weinberg, have no doubt that reality has an eternal, unchanging, intrinsic structure which natural science will eventually discover are the heirs of Plato. Philosophers like Kuhn, Latour, and Hacking think that Protagoras had a point, and that the argument is not yet over.

The most vocal and inflamed participants in the so-called science wars are treating the latest version of this fine old philosophical controversy as a big deal. In the very long run, perhaps, it will prove to be one. Maybe someday the idea of human beings answering to an independent authority called How Things Are in Themselves will be obsolete. In a thoroughly de-Platonized, fully Protagorean culture the only answerability human beings would recognize would be to one another. It would never occur to them that "the objective" could mean more than "the agreed-upon upshot of argument." In such a culture we would have as little use for the idea of the intrinsic structure of physical reality as for that of the will of God. We would view both as unfortunate and obsolete social constructions.

Shall We Begin Lynching Athesits?

Upon What do we Base Moral Judgment, How do We Know Right And Wrong?


why do I say tank man made
a moral commitment?

On my message boards, Doxa Forums Fleetmouse and I were discussing Richard Rorty. Back in graduate school I studied Rorty pertty carefully, at least in terms of his work Contingency,Irony, Solidarity. I was jabbering about my memories, that was time when I was on top of my game and I knew that work, I knew every word in the book and the margins of my copy were a huge palemcest. My views about Rorty and that book were pretty negative, shaped by the professor of the class I'm sure. I stated that CIS seems to leave one with the idea that the immedicate comminity is the only basis for morality standards and that being moral or ethical is a matter of "go along get along." As an example I used the idea that if one lived in Soutern U.S. in 1900 lynching black people on trumped up reasons would be considered moral by the community. Fleetmouse likes Rorty so he was prompted to stick up for him. He issues this challenge:

could you please explain to me why lynching is absolutely wrong without making any reference whatsoever to your own beliefs, belief system, personal preference or culture?

It struck me that since he's not willing to just agree that lynching is a universal disapprobation and thus that would be a litmus test for Rorty, instead he wanted me to prove it's wrong. He wants a neutral account of why it's wrong that is divorced from any arguable sense that is. That's not possible. We all share a constitutive sense that it is wrong, that should guide us in the litmus test of Rorty. Nevertheless, we can't demonstrate the truth of that value without appeal to belief or systems becuase it is the product of such, or least if not casual than indicatively related to it.

The question implies that there's no basis for saying that's wrong. The implication is that if you have to defend the view that it's wrong by means of appeal to a belief or something that must be argued then there's no basis for saying it's wrong. That is a total contradiction to the way atheists have been answering the question since I've been on message boards (questions like it, the meta-ethical question of "what is the basis of right and wrong). Atheists in general always reflect one of three basic foundations for moral judgment:

(1) personal feeling
(2) social contract
(3) genetics

I argue against these in various ways, I don't consider them as valid basis by themselves for an ethical system. Yet I fully expected a defence of one of these, and instead got an implication that there is no basis. I don't imagine that Fleetmouse doesn't accept the intrinsic wrongness of lynching, so I gave him credit for that realization. He would be repulsed by it and he wouldn't do it. He wants to play this little game where I go though the spelling out of why it's wrong ect ect the fact that he wants to do implies that there really is no answer.

If he's seeking to let Rorty off the Hook he's doing it at the expense of some of he most cherished truths of human morality. The fact is we should all be able to agree that it is wrong to lynch even if we can't spell out why or provide indubitable scientific data to prove it. Where does the absurd notion come from that this must be disconnected from belief or it's wrong? First of all the question itself is impossible. To ask one to explain why something is wrong apart from beliefs, systems, and culture is like saying "explain why it's wrong without any reference to why it's wrong! Beliefs and systems are not negations of some empirical ethics we can glean from scinece. There's no such thing as empirical ethics or ethics gleaned form scinece. moral motions and ethical judgments are about beliefs. There's no shame in that. The assumption that belief is intrinsically wrong, the implication being that there's some empirical truth to be found scientifically apart form bleief, is just crazy. I think the desire to ground all knowledge in scinece is the culprit lurking behind the problem here.

In his wonderful ground breaking work Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor discusses the relation of ethics to our concepts of person-hood and self. All ethical views, like views of the self are based up construct built form constituent parts. Regardless of the ultimate source of moral truth, or lack thereof, this s how it's done when you are human. The more basic the constituent parts held in common are the more confidently we can assume some kind of truth lurking behind that approbation or disapprobation. People build those constructs in different ways, that's what makes ethics and morality so diverse. One part we are all playing with no matter how we arrange it is a basic sense of the need to live. It's our empathy as humans that turns the need to live, the drive, the frantic demand that we must live, into the desire to see others live and flourish.

That doesn't prove why lynching is wrong, but it does mean we know it is. Regardless of our systems or our constructs or how we put it together, regardless of the meta-ethics (how we know what is right or wrong), this is deeper even then meta-ethics, which is one of the things closest to bedrock, we all have this basic constituent part if we have basic human empathy.That doesn't prove why it's wrong, but it tell us at a gut level that it is.

To then want an explanation of why divorced from that basic understanding of the reverence for live (which is the drive to live turned outward) is doing violence to the whole concept of having a moral code. Anyone, theist, atheist, or pantheist or whatever has to have this basic fact in place in order to act ethically. Without that there is no morel decision because there's no moral commitment.

Whatever one's ethical view point one of the basic things we should be able to agree on just as a human feeling regardless of the ability to prove it's wrong is the evil of injustice and unjustly destroying a life for some trivial prejudice. To try and divorce that from the feelings that go with ethical commitment is to dismantle the process of being moral. That should be the regulator of virtue and action. To say that Rorty is willing to do away with that becuase he has no committement should tell us right there he is not to be trusted in his ethical evaluations. His basis in pragmatism is so pragmatic he gives away the store.

The question also calls for explication without reference to culture. That is a contradiction in terms. That's like saying explain without words. Culture is language, language is culture. What Rorty is doing is accepting culture in place of person insight, feeling, commitment, belief or any sort connection to a universal or transcendent truth. He makes an idol out of the community. Then the questions asks to explain without reference to even the community (culture) which is daft because even Rorty is NOT willing to do that. OF course Fleet put that in because he thought I was saying the culture has nothing to do with it. I am not saying that and I agree you can't talk about right and wrong without reference to culture or community, yet that doesn't mean those things are the origin of right and wrong.

Again, culture is the medium of our thought. It's not the only from of turth, but it is the language of our thinking. Culture is language in it's fuller and more developed sense. Trying to separate them is like trying to separate the wave from the curl. Whatever transcendent truth there is that makes murder wrong above and beyond culture, is going to be communicated in culture and understood culturally. So again the question is nonsense.

Making the immediate community the orbiter of right and wrong makes an idol of the provincial. There are larger cultures, where each community overlaps with others and connections to other people far wider in their bonds until we are talking about districts, nations and finally an international community. To make the provincial the orbiter just becuase there's no imagination and an abhorrence of bleief in God, is just creating an idol out of ignorance. The provincial is the limit on liminal space. It's the liminal that marks the trek as "transcendent." So to limit knowledge to the subliminal is to cut off the transcendent and to make ignorance the limit on learning. We can't traverse anything we don't know. That's means we are enshrining bigotry. That has to be something we oppose at any level or as advocates of any ethical system. That's another constituent part.

I understand why Fleetmouse set up the question in this way. I seemed to be saying the community has noting to do with it, since I castigated Rorty for basing ethics on the community. That's not quite what I'm saying. I am saying there are times when moral judgment transcends the immediate community and there are time when we must stand up against the community and opposes it. Even in that case one must be understanding the moral and ethical decision through the understanding afford by the background culture upon which the community is based or it has no meaning in relation to the community, even to opposes it. Imagine if one says "lynching black people for any reason is murder, it should never be done," the other person says "what's lynching?" For the judgment "do not lynch" to make sense one must know what the words means, that's going to be understood through the culture and nothing else.

Obviously then there's a relationship bewteen the community and the moral. The relationship is not such that the moral depends entirely upon the decision of the community. Culture is primarily a medium, a point of reference, the means by which ideas are understood, a repository of icons and a universe of symbols. That does not preclude a transcendent realm or a transcendent truth. (for an arrangement establishing the basis of a transcendent truth see Olson's article on Tillich's implied ontological argument. See also this blog on my article on same).

As to answering the question, everyone is going to assume that I will say "It's wrong becasue God says so." Not exactly. I have reject that account of Christian morality. Rather than sheer volunteerism I propose that God makes ethical decisions based upon wisdom and his wisdom is indexed by the basis of his charter, which is love. So that love forms the basis of everything, and the back of the moral universe is part of "everything." Morality is the upshot of love, God's love, this is why it's a constituent part universal to humanity. We see ethical thinking showing up in the form of empathy where we are able to focus the drive to live outward upon the desire of others to live. Empathizing is an act of love becuase it's other directed. Love is the will to the good of the other. Thus other directed consciousness is an act of love. This serves as both universal transcendent truth and cultural construct. This means that belief and commitment are not out of bounds for ethical discussion. Morality is decision making. A moral act is one that is decided upon based upon a value system, it is also an act to which one is willing to commit oneself becasue the a value being defended is more important than a taste or a whim but is a value requiring a true commitment. Commitment of this kind must be motivated by love. Even if Tank man didn't know he was acting love, his committment to be crushed while confronting the tanks was still an act of love at some level.


The traditional moral argument (for the existence of God) plays off this sense of the constituent approbation. At least true of my version of it. We know this act is right, or wrong, but we can't say way except in so far as we tie the reason to God. Kant saw that as a reason to believe in God. The atheist see it as a disproof of God and morality because it's not empirical science. That's self defeating it's like the question Fleetmouse asks above. It divorces the concept of the moral from it's reason for being. You can't expect a coherent answer at that rate.

The Atheist Argument of Divde and Conquor: Universality of Religous Expernice

Antithesis try to trade off of the great number of faiths all the time. Often they will respond to any mention of God with "Which God." They treat different religious traditions as their God's are compete with each other for existence.

We can us Occam to trim the fat int he God market down to one. This is all we need is one. We have good reason to think there can only be one, since God is being itself and there can't be two of those.

the question of religious traditions is the question of cultures.The religious a prori, the special sense of the divine that we encounter beyond words and images, is loaded into cultural constructs so we can talk about it. That means the things that make religions different are just cultural.

the major counter to this atheists always bring up is the difference in ceremony and mythology. Both are merely cultural all we get is the differences in human culture that is the lens through which the experience of the divine is filtered.

It doesn't' beat the argument to talk about all the little fiddly bits in religions because those are the cultural aspects. The M scale proves the universal nature of the divine because it shows that people in all cultures have a core experience and it's the same all over the world. Religious experience and belief are innate. That means that while it must be filtered through the lens of culture it exists in all cultures and it's a good bet that it will have a common core of experience that is the same.

The M Scale

The “M Scale” (Mysticism scale) was developed by Ralph Hood Jr. at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It has become the standard study instrument by which validation of mystical experience is accomplished empirically. Hood’s instrument has been cross culturally validated and is probably represents the cutting eduge of research in this field of Religious experience. The scale is a series of questions and a scoring technique, which has been worked out according to standard social scientific assumptions. The scale has been so successful it has become the standard operating procedure[i] and replaces the former practice of the researcher trying to develop her own scale, a practice that led to as many scales as there were studies. The M scale is by far the most successful and has been cross culturally validated with great successes. It is based on the phenomenological categories of mystical study by W.T. Stace and makes certain assumptions of William James. Hood’s original measuring instrument, the REEM, was based upon the categories of James. The M scale follows the phenomenological development of Stace. The scale uses 32 items (these are questions that are asked of the subject). The items are organized with 16 Positive and 16 negatively worded. Independent studies supported Hood’s original design, (Caird, 1988, Reinert and Stifler, 1993).[ii]

Originally M scale measured two factors: (1) Assesses items of an experienced unity (introvertive or extrovertive). (2) Assesses items of a experience of religious or non religious and knowledge claims. This is consistent with Stace’s concept that Mystical experience can be interpreted in many ways. Reinert and Stifler suggested religious items and knowledge items might emerge as separate factors. This would split the interpretative factors between religious and non-religious factors. That would not contradict Stace. There is a distinction between “spiritual” and “religious.” Mystical experience can be interpreted (as we have seen already) as “spiritual” without being thought religious, or as “mystical” without involving God. The two-item approach allows greater interpretation. But the interpretive factor was religious in nature. The assumptions made in the study and taken to answering the questions tended to be religious.[iii]

Hood changed his strategy from two analytic factors to three (“the three factor solution”). The Three factor solution sets up three categories, which more closely follow the predictions of Stace based upon his reading of mystics and person experience. (“phenomenological”). The three categories for Stace were: Staces’ categories of Introvertive and extrovertive mysticism emerging as two separate factors. The third factor is an interpretive dimension where the respondent relates the experiences to knowledge claims (“God is love” or some such). Interovertive means the mystical experience is beyond word though or image, it is iner directed and not related to any outside phenomenon and I supposed to be beyond description. This will also be discussed more in chapter five (“Religious Apiori”). Extrovertive means the subject’s experience is related to nature or to some external image in the immediate environment, a sense of the numinous, the harmony underlying all of nature or something on that order. The tables below demonstrate the basic structure Stace’s theory and the three factor test. They demonstrate the closeness with which the latter validates the former.

The M scale follows Stace’s phenomenological accounts of mystical experience. It also reflects, therefore, Stace’s theoretical concerns. The major such concern is known as “the common core” hypothesis. The common core assumption is a universalistic approach, whereby it is assumed that a verity of different interpretations and descriptions match the same experiences. A corollary might be that one reality stands beyond the many different mystical traditions. One of the major critics of this view, who we will meet again in defense of Proudfoot (chapter six) is Steven Katz (1977) who wrote an edited an anthology against Stace’s work. He assumes that the common core thesis is asserting that mystical experience is unmediated. Thus he argues that extreme language is used not just to describe mystical experience but that langue itself is experience. Language used in description constitutes the experience itself rather than merely describing it. This position will be critically examined in chapters five and six (a priori, and Proudfoot). [i] But Stace doesn’t argue that the experience is unmediated. Hood points out that Stace only says there are degrees of interpretation and descriptions can makes similar but not identical experiences. Hood also points out that Foreman marshals opponents against Katz. He argues that since introvertive is devoid of description language can’t really play a role in constituting it.(for more on this issue see chapters five and six).

Hood and Spilka point three major assumptions of the common core theory that flow out of Stace’s work:

(1) Mystical experience is universal and identical in phenomenological terms.

(2) Core Categories are not always essential in every experince, there are borderline cases.

(3) Interovertive and extrovertive are distinct forms, the former is an experience of unity devoid of content, the latter is unity in diversity with content.

The M scale reflects these observations and in so doing validate Stace’s findings. Hood and Spilka (et al) then go on to argue that empirical research supports a common core/perinnialist conceptualization of mysticism and it’s interpretation.

The argument that the similarities of the human mind produce the same experiences is self defeating becuase if that were true then the fiddly bits of religion should be the same too. So the atheist argument that religions are all different defeat their assertion that this universal experience is just coming from the human mind.

could you write this down this time so you can stop making the same mistake all the time?

---

[i] Bernard Spilka, Ralph Hood Jr., Bruce Hunsberger, Richard Gorwuch. The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach. New York, London: the Guildford Press, 2003, 323.

[ii]Ibid.

[iii] Ibid,

[i] Ibid.

The Invisable Friend

Atheists use this as derision, likening God to an imaginary friend; relating to God is like a child with an imaginary friend. Well is it? In some ways it is. Imaginary friends are said to be positive things by child psychologists. Through the assumption of God's active presence in our lives we can model holy living just as through imaginary friends children are modeling real friendships later for life. It really depends upon the extent to which people take it. I've never been comfortable with "Jesus is here invisibly" idea. I am not comfortable with the way of relating to God that assumes God is saving me a parking place. Some Christians sort of assume they are experiencing God and then letting God step into such occasions. That's actually not all bad really. The sense of God's presence, or what we call "God's presence" is documented over and over again in empirical studies as a valid life transforming experience and something that really changes people's lives for the better in dramatic ways. Some studies show that the mystical type experience is the most mature form of Christianity. The study by Robert Voyl shows this, and it links Christian experience to mystical experience.


That being the case we have no choice but to assume that the experience is the sensation of a reality that is actually present to us at the time. That's very different than the "Jesus is here invisibly" thing I refer to. That idea is about something the people who talk about it are not really experiencing. It's an assumption based upon the concept of God's omnipresence, and extrapolation from imagination. The actual presence of God felt by mystics and peak experiencers is a real palpable sense, it's not imagination.

The atheist can't evaluate this by just hearing about or reading about. I thought people who had such experiences were insane until I had one myself. It's as simple as this, you have to experience it. It's a way of life, it is not just one more hypothesis in a life of hypothesis testing. It's a relationship and develops over time. Not all Christians think they hear God, or even believe in that sort of interactive interpersonal relationship with God. There are many kinds of spirituality and many ways of relating to God. I went through my Charismatic phase in the 80s. I still believe some of what I picked up in that era, the "gifts" for example, miracles and healing. But I have ot tried to interact in that way, that God is my invisible friend, in some time. That is, in my opinion, a phase. It's the lower level of stages along the road to mystical union. Mystical union is the highest level of relationship with God and most Christians don't even know about it and will never get there. I will never get there in this life. But it is something, I believe, we will all experience in after life.

Mystical union is not in the Bible as such. There are verses that pertain to it, but it's not stated explicitly as such. It's part of the voluminous literature of Christian mysticism.

Diverse Expressions of Spirituality


There are as many different views of spirituality and styles of relating to God as there are people to do the relating. Christians are very different. G.K. Chesterton was as different from Billy Graham as was Adli Stevenson from Barry Goldwater. Which is to say as different as Clinton from Bush. Even within the closed ranks of Christian mystics it is very diverse. You don't have to relate to God like a big guy in the sky. You can relate to God like a principle or an idea. We can internalize the values and just learn to discern the will of God without having to "hear" or sense works or ideas. Atheists can't understand this because they have to assume it's all made up and so they can only go by words on paper. But they don't even bother to read anything except the bible and that they read for loopholes rather than understanding.

Atheists often confuse popular piety with Christian doctrine and spiritual experience. Popular piety is neither, it is not doctrine nor is it spirituality, at least not in a deep sense. The real depth in spirituality is the mystics; St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and mystical writers not saints, such as blessed John Riseborke, Madame Guyon, Baron Von Huggle. There are hundreds, or thousands. They are all different. They are as different from each other as Plato from Thomas Kuhn. Reading them will only give us a clue. You can't know God until you open your heart to him and begin a relationship with him. Until then it's only stuff you hear about and assumptions not in evidence. The first step is open your heart to God's love. Let God love you. If you think love is control and manipulation then you are just missing the boat on what life is all about.

Being a Christian is about knowing God in a personal way. This means experiencing God's presence, but it means a lot more than that too. It's a personalized relationship which fits the individual's own style; it's a love relationship:

1Jo 4:7

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
1Jo 4:8

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

This is something that has to be experienced to be understood. Once it is experienced it is known. The atheistic claims to "just know" there's no God don't stack up to that, because they are by their very definition the absence of a relationship. One cannot experience the fact of a thing not existing. We can experience the lack of food, clothes, shelter, taxes, peace, whatever, but that doesn't prove these things don't exist, merely experiencing a want and a lack is not proof of anything. Experiencing the presence is proof of something. Atheists may assume or speculate as "what that really is experience of" but that is not the same as experiencing it. To have this kind of relationship with God is to know God. To know God is to love God because God is love. It is also knowing that God loves us. No one can understand this from outside the relationship and no one can judge God. People who think they are rejecting God are really just rejecting love.

To Know God is to Love God--Reprise

I came across an atheist response yesterday on a message board that reminded me of an old post I originally back in 2007 or so. Actually there were two recent posts that remind me of this guy:

(1) athiest accuses me of "throwing fear of hell at him."

I was angry and tried to say in a cleaver way "go to hell." This guy went on a big tirade that is still going on insisting that I'm trying to manipulate him by "throwing fear of hell at me." No actually I was just being a jerk. No big psychological manipulation involved I just said "go to hell." Wrong, shouldn't have done it but he attaches so much more to it. That also got us off on a thing about fear of hell, which he clearly still has. He denies he has fear hell because he doesn't believe in God but he so angry that its obvious he still fears hell. It's probalby more the reminder of fear. It's like a kid saying "I'm not afraid of the dark," so then when it's time to turn out the light he keeps finding excuses to keep it on but all the while angrily protesting "I am not afraid of the dark! I just have to do some ironing before I go to bed!"

(2) Atheist says fear of God is psychological manipulation

This guy just made the claim that when the bible speaks of "fear of the Lord" that's a sick and evil attempt to scare people into being controlled. From my own studies of the passages involving that phrase I know for a fact that's not it. I told him this and he goes "O you know it is, you are not being honest." It's a conplex concept and you hve to take it verse by verse it's never as simple as just "here's the word fear, so do what I say." Nothing in the Bible is ever that simple. Essentially fear of the Lord is not voluntary. It was transformed into an ethic by the prophests but essentually it refers to the sublime, the non voluntary reaction people have the sublimity of God. "Sublime" doesn't mean pretty it means that which outstrips our understanding and which transcends anything we can conceive of or expect.. Consequently there is the "terrible sublime" where horrible things can be sublime. So it's not the grand Canyon that is sublime it's also 9/11 or Pearl Harbor that is so.

Fear of the Lord, or Holy fear, is the involuntary response people sometimes have when confronted with the presence of God, its also described in realization to angles. The sense of being overwhealmed by some all powerful thing that transcends all our understanding and can't be confronted. Not being used to manipulate because people who would be doing the manipulating are totally freaked out too. Its' unepxected, you can't control you can't know when it will happen because it's totally relation to God's decision to reveal himself.

More importantly fear of the Lord is not connected to bad things. It's fear, it's being feraked out, it's being overwhelmed but it's nto punishment, it's not about hell and it culminates in God's love.

These fears of being controlled are being expressed by people who hate God, if God is just a metaphor for the people who hurt them in the chruch, that's who they hate, it's focused upon the concept of God. They don't know God so they don't know what the fear of the Lord is. They are confusing fears. They are ally imposing their own fear of hell over the healthy fear of the Lord. If they knew God they would know better.

here's the post this reminds me of.

The old post I am reminded of, the reprise:

I just finished this page yesterday.Why I don't believe in hell. It's too long for the blog (4 pages). So I put it up on Doxa. I really should have done it years ago, it's such a basic issue. I write this in response to a commenter on the comments section who was posting in response to the piece "no Will Greater than My Own."

9:14 PM
Delete
Goliath said...

Ah, at last, you've begun to realize that even if your god exists, not everyone would want to follow him.

Not that I believe that either exists, but I would MUCH rather follow Satan than the xian god. In fact, I would rather die and spend eternity in hell than follow the xian god.





9:36 PM


My response that's your prerogative and your problem. I will just say that you don't know God. you don't know what God is like. Maybe I dont' either but a i have a general idea. you can't go by the OT. you have to go by Jesus. So far all the atheist attempts to show that Jesus was no good have been less than impressive, for me.

I'll look you up in a million an and see what you think then. I jsut warn you of one thing:

I do happen to know, a little known secret of the universe, a large part of hell of his having to hear the replay of "Down Town" Petula Clark over and over again forever. think about it.

8:03 AM
Delete
Goliath said...

I know everything I need to know about the xian god, and I know everything that I need to know about your vile faith.

I hate Jesus, I hate the xian god, and I would destroy both of them if I could.

"I do happen to know, a little known secret of the universe, a large part of hell of his having to hear the replay of 'Down Town' Petula Clark over and over again forever. think about it."

ROFL! Is that the best you can do to scare me into groveling before your god? You're pathetic.

12:50 PM
Delete
J.L. Hinman said...



I am not interested into scaring you into anything. You are only hurting yourself.

6:38 PM
Delete
Goliath said...

Then why try to intimidate me by telling me what hell might be like?

Again: I would rather burn in hell than follow your god. Deal with it.

6:57 PM
Delete
J.L. Hinman said...

that is nuts. to really think that is a serious attempt to scare anyone? I can think of a lot more scary fates than having to listen to "Downtown."

this is something called "humor." Are you so demented you don't even know what "funny" means?

If you bothered to learn more about my ideas you would know that I do not believe in hell as a place of eternal conscious torment. So you are just hurting yourself because you are missing the very essence of what love is by rejecting God because God is love.

scary hu?

If you are just looking for fight you wont get one. I have better thins to do. Go troll someone else. If you really care bout ideas I am wiling to talk but you have to shed the bad boy image thing and grow up and really think.

I am not trying to humiliate this guy or to ridicule him for thinking my joke was a serious threat, although I think it should be obvious it was not. Three things occurred to me as a result of this exchange:

(1) again we see the real issue underneath it all is power. Notice his idea of accepting the existence of God is "groveling." For one reason or another its a power issue. I don't know anything about this guy by my imagination is working overtime playing on images of overly zealous religious people trying to manipulate people into doing their will. Ultimately I don't believe that all the hurt feelings and bitter hatred of hate group atheism is all the fault of religious people. But I certainly don't think we've handled things right.

(2) atheist assumptions about religious people are stereotypes that cause them to cast the issues in certain preset terms.

(3) Perhaps we condition people to think they know what God would be like, or what the Christian idea of God would be like by dealing with Christians. How else could it be? That they think they know what God "is" or would be like is purely a function of two things:

(a) how Christians have treated them

(b) the why they have been conditioned by Christians to read the Bible.

This is why I think it is important up front to get out the message about hell. I urge you all to read those pages because I feel I make a pretty good case for the idea that the Bible does not even teach that hell is eternal conscious torment. It's important for people to understand this because the atheist agenda is wrapped up in propagandizing about Christianity as a punitive and operant notion of religious experience.

two paradigms: operant vs existentialist

The choice of paradigms on the nature of religion lies between two poles, a punitive-operant religion vs an existential religion. Punitive I think we all get drift, hell is thought to be punishment for disbelief, sin and generally doing bad. It is also seen as a means so scaring people into compliance as our friend above thinks.Operant (like B.F. Skinner's positive and negative reinforcement) because through the promise of heaven and the threat of hell one is manipulated into changing behavior on a punishment/reward basis. Existentialist means it is not about punishments or manipulation but a response to one's existential experince of life in the world--based upon personal experiences and aimed at understanding individualistic goals and ends of a person's life rather than fitting into a preset mold of behavior.

While we can't do that much about the way other Christians react to people, we can try to check our own reactions (I do know I still have a long way to go in that area) and we can try to clarify problems with the atheist reading of our belief system. Toward that end I would explain that since I don't believe that hell is eternal conscious torment, I can't really try to scare compliance out of people. There have been instances on message boards where I have told atheists about my view son hell and always some group of them will say "then how can you scare people into being good?" I can only think that they approach the problem from this angle because they feel people have tried to scare them into being good and that's the only way they can see to do it.

The existential paradigm of religion is so much more effective because scaring compliance. Scaring people into obedience defeats the purpose of knowing God and it's really ineffective in the long run. It's much more effective if people internalize the values of the good. This is why God sets up the world in the way it is, why we have to seek truth instead of being issued briefings in press conferences when we are born. Because the search leads to internalizing values and values give us committment for a life time. Belief in hell is a waste. It's childish and it is wasted because no one learns in hell. You cant' come back and try it again, by the time you know you were wrong its' too late to change. Punishment may be just and there should be consequences for evil, but I think ceasing to exist is consequence enough, and humane. Please read the link at the top about Why I don't believe in hell. So I don't believe God's aim is to scare but to enthrall and to bring us to a point of internalizing God's values. We do that by knowing God.

Atheists will no doubt see it as a game and a pretense, but, it is a relationship. One cannot "know enough about the Christian God." you can't get the idea from words on paper or sermons on Sunday. It's not a fair test to go by how Christians treat you because Christians are at all different stages in their walk with God, some don't even have any idea they can know God in a personal way. That being said that is no excuse to treat people badly. We as Christians have to understand how we come across and respond in love, not manipulation. I know I am the worst at responding in love. I have some real idiotic mistakes in lashing out in anger to abuse of atheists. But this doesn't give any clear picture of God, even though they will draw conclusions about God based upon the way we act.

That is no better than trying to know a person by what others tell you. You ever had a friend who had another friend he was always talking about. This guy is the greatest ever, and when you meet that person, nothing like the description. You have to know someone before you can really see how great that person is. You have to actually know God. This brings up the invisible friend effect.

End of the old post.
Epilogue:

The atheist "thing" (the experience, the point of message board interacting) is to be accepted by the flock, to have a social cement. To do that one expresses one's derision of the enemy, one mocks and ridicules. So these guys are spending their time mocking and ridiculing people who are in a relationship they can't understand and don't want to understand. That relationship is with someone they don't know and don't even believe exists. They are hardly in a position to clearly evaluate the nature of that relationship. Many of the will claim they know so much about the Christian God very few that say that, when pressed reveal the ear marks of a strong Christianity. Most of them never experienced God's presence. That's not something you get automatically just becasue you go to church for years. I've met atheists who quite Christianity becasue they didn't feel God's presence. Such people usually don't know theology, they know only the pablum taught form the pulpit. So saying "I have a Christian for many yeas' is not as impressive as it sounds.

you can't know someone just by hearing stories about them. It's a real relationship with God it's very diverse. It has to be experienced to be understood. Anyone claiming to disprove or to understand it who doesn't know that God is love doesn't know God. If one's only idea of love is manipulation that's just a warning that person probably needs help, not a credential to show how deeply insightful they are. People who think they have debucncked love are not insightful they are sick.


This original post had a section on "invisible friend" but it's so good (and so much longer) I have decided to cut it off and use it as a separate post latter.