← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · TexasAnarch
Thread ID: 3910 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2002-12-08
2002-12-08 15:25 | User Profile
FIGHT FOR CHRIST greeted Sunday morning local newspaper readers in Gannet's Binghamton, NY venue. I am posting the letter they will get tomorrow.
TO THE BINGHAMTON PRESS & SUN BULLETIN FROM: Sid Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy, SUNY-Binghamton, emeritus. IN RE: Your headline FIGHT FOR CHRIST in 12/08/02 edition
I am writing to explain to you some fundamental things about reality.
You have repeatedly ignored all previous warnings, so now its come to this.
* * * *
One doesn't "fight" for Christ, Mr. editor/publisher (please share this with opinionpage editor Frank Roessner). "Fight" and "Christ" don't go together abover your "fold".
"Christ" stands for something spiritual, not material (not: the body or blood). This is something entirely internal, subjective, in people. It is the name for the part of Jesus Christ that Protestants hold sacred. Because it is connected with the Spirit, its realization brings the Third Person in the Trinity, and there is no other way that can be attained. "Christ" stands for something that must remembered a certain way, communicating specific data.
To use it as you did is blasphemy, as God is my witness.
For this Protestant Christian -- I cannot speak for other kinds, but that sure as hell doesn't keep other kiinds from thinking they speak for me, or as Americans -- this is the part of their experience which "just is". It doesn'f "FIght". Fighting is "out there"; the Spirit is "in here." It is pure silence, and if there is such a thing as eternity in time, its that. (I report; you could decide, except you have no idea of what this is about, otherwise you wouldn't have FIGHT CHRIST above your fold. God knows what you have below it. I will never look again, even if its smeared in my face like cumquat jissum).
No, Mr. Gannet=owned local newspaper publisher of the monopoly press in Bingotown, and surrounding areas of the Southern Tier of Up-State New York, I want to try my best to get across to you, your staff, the State University of New York branch located across the street where I taught for over 30 years, this one point, here, now, today, while I'm in my pulpit. "Fighting" and "Christ" don't belong together. They belong to different compartments of the psyche, if you will. If you fight, and I hope you do for the things it is necesary to defend America, for humanity, for our way of life, that's one thing to be doing. To be "in Christ", however -- a use for which it is customarily respectful not to pronounce in causal, advertised contexts -- that is doing something else, at another time, before or later. "Christ" isn't about fighting, or blood. Blood things are what Christ things may come out of, but not necessarily. They can bring just death. Most people who have died for causes others have started have not known what they have died for OR lived for. "Just do it" is their line. Like cattle or sheep. Proud to supply good milk and mutton. I don't think Jesus taught that every man survives the grave.
No, Mr. Front Page Editor, what was taking place against the nice X-massy looking background, there, above your "fold", wasn't the representation of a "FIGHT FOR CHRIST" going on towntown, or whereever. If there is a fight going on, it is for space -- to display material tokens of some sort. (By people whose treasures are on earth.) But ot looks nice, and sits will, with advertisers and gentlefolk in this sleepy town this December morning, , I know, you just couldn't resist. It so catches the mood, what with the impending war against Iraq manipulated over on America, against humanity, threatening life itself, by the pathological liars and prychotic killers called "neocons": mostly Catholics and Jews who whave sworn genocode against Protestants, Palestinians, and the Arab nation, one hesitates to even pick your nit.
But since the unmistakakable agenda is to kill us, and strike pre-emptively to do it in the way suckerpuch cowards do, it requires response.
You have insulted everyone who holds the Christ sacred. It is just another word for your kind, like "faith" is for Republicans who follow Bush.
You are anti-Christ. Just as Ariel Sharon shot the bell ringer in Bethlehem, you have shot this season with your infernal blood-jeezus idolatry.
2002-12-08 19:05 | User Profile
That's an interesting take on Christology, Wombat. I myself abandoned Christianity when I was no longer able to take seriously the deity of the historical Jesus of Nazareth-though I acknowledge the existence of some type of universal Logos or Nous, I'm not in the habit of regarding historical persons as unique manifestations of that Logos, at least no more so than the rest of creation.
You seem to approach the matter from the other direction, acknowledging the Christ-Logos through continuing Protestant religious forms and simply ignoring the historical Jesus. Perhaps this is easier for you than it is for me, since I was raised in a Fundamentalist-Calvinist amalgamated church environment that revolved frenetically around the notion of biblical infallibility and the unique deity of Christ
For this Protestant Christian -- I cannot speak for other kinds, but that sure as hell doesn't keep other kiinds from thinking they speak for me, or as Americans -- this is the part of their experience which "just is". It doesn'f "FIght". Fighting is "out there"; the Spirit is "in here." It is pure silence, and if there is such a thing as eternity in time, its that
This idea you relate to the newpapermen of the timelessness of Spirit reminds me alot of Plotinus' "One" or something that could have been written by Meister Eckhart- and more obviously any number of Eastern meditative traditions. Do you agree then that this 'Spirit' isn't peculiar to any one religious tradition or prophet, but is accessible by all peoples at all times if sought? (Incidentally, I tend to doubt that the publishers you wrote to could make any sense of what you were trying to relate)
Respectfully, if the 'Spirit' is universal, I'm not sure why you would choose to take the path that has traditionally held a book that contains in its first part Judaean-Supremacism and Genocide and in its second exclusion and damnation of unbelievers and Asceticism as the highest ideal as sacred.
This may not be the most appropriate forum for the discussion of religious matters but I would enjoy seeing a more developed exposition of your beliefs
Thanks
2002-12-09 08:57 | User Profile
Originally posted by Maximillian@Dec 8 2002, 13:05 **You seem to approach the matter from the other direction, acknowledging the Christ-Logos through continuing Protestant religious forms and simply ignoring the historical Jesus. **
All other religions are indirect speech; the founder steps aside and introduces another speaker, they themselves therefore belong to the religionââ¬âChristianity alone is direct speech (I am the truth). - Kierkegaard
Though in general I am not one for apologetics, the paradox of the historical God-man Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is the very cornerstone of Christianity. Without a historical Jesus, then the scriptures are merely an interesting collection of fables and stories. With a historical Jesus, then we are confronted with a choice: Either one accepts him as what he claimed to be, or dismisses him as raving lunatic.
Therein lies the paradox. Therein lies the origin of faith or disbelief.
2002-12-09 10:10 | User Profile
Originally posted by Texas Dissident@Dec 9 2002, 08:57 > Originally posted by Maximillian@Dec 8 2002, 13:05 You seem to approach the matter from the other direction, acknowledging the Christ-Logos through continuing Protestant religious forms and simply ignoring the historical Jesus. **
All other religions are indirect speech; the founder steps aside and introduces another speaker, they themselves therefore belong to the religionââ¬âChristianity alone is direct speech (I am the truth). - Kierkegaard
Though in general I am not one for apologetics, the paradox of the historical God-man Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is the very cornerstone of Christianity. Without a historical Jesus, then the scriptures are merely an interesting collection of fables and stories. With a historical Jesus, then we are confronted with a choice: Either one accepts him as what he claimed to be, or dismisses him as raving lunatic.
Therein lies the paradox. Therein lies the origin of faith or disbelief.**
Jesus is the Logos, the Son of the Most High God.
Modern day Jews are the self-acknowledged decendants of the Pharisees. They were His enemy then, and they are His enemy now. They, taken as a collective, are indeed anti-Christ. They, as a collective, lie at the root of all the horrible, anti-Western movements of the past many centuries.
The Faith is Christendom, Christendom is the Faith. If we seriously want to restore Europe, we must renew the Christianity that fought the Pagans, the Muslims, and the Pharisees, and kept the hope of Western freedom alive.
Walter
2002-12-09 10:27 | User Profile
I can't speak with authority on these Sacred Mysteries but I can guarantee you that no letter with "cumquat jissum" in it is gonna get printed in a Gannett paper. Even if it doesn't exist!
2002-12-09 14:36 | User Profile
From the bottom up.
The letter is not intended to be printed. What was smeared in the face of our area was worse than words.
The word "Christ", in the name "Jesus Christ" refers to the Spirit side of the assumed being (I assume the historical reality of the man from Nazareth as a secular fact). "Jesus" refers to the biological side. I take the existence of the spiritual as cosmic significant fact to be an affirmation by faith of a non-material rteality experienced through certain communications.
After Jesus Christ, the idea of the FATHER as "God" is profoundly qualifed. ("I and my father are One." -- to doubting Thomas -- "What you see, here...if you can't believe that...") This is not just a single historical moment, it is the esoteric history of the next 1500 years. This span of time worked out of the new Father-Son relationship, with the males not required to live out Abraham's descendant's legacy of the law, to sacrifice. ("All this ye should have done, but not let the rest go undone....")
The Spirit in human beings, latent from the beginning, emerged through this advanced psychological complex of interpersonal relations, around 1500, when Columbus talked Ferdinand and Isabella (or Isabella) into sending him West, and the Protestant German princes started just saying "no" to confessing adultery to the Pope. Taking personal responsibility for reproducing the species, aka sexuality, was the key. The center of gravity of the spiritual side shifted to father/sons who had not grown up subjected to that particular indignity. Something about not being afraid of human nature, if it were cut loose, made that idea spred like wildfire across thatr continent to ours.
Luther's idea was that you didn't need priests as intermeidiaries for salvation. Justification by faith does it. But he didn't trust people to stand up to leaders and govern themselves.
Calvin's idea was that God's foreknowledge doesn't relieve responsibility for free-will decision about how to go (even if what one decides is known in advance). It was the Calvinist Matthias of Bohemia who used his free will to stand up to the Hapsburgs and the Pope and terminate the pretensions of those weilding the old Holy Roman Empire's tokens, freeing Europe, and bringing the modern world, empiricism, the Industrial revolution, and John Donne. (At this point cue up "Rave on, John Donne", by Van Morrison, "..rave on, rave on, rave on, rave on." )
That, and England's Magna Carta, placing a law over all sovereigns, was America's legacy, brought by men and women to these shores, to escape any kind of elbow-steering, lapel-tugging God-cant from foreign-language speakers.
Words mean what people mean by them. This is a Protestant idea -- no word-magic by the Deus-Theos-Yahwists replaces what the generations raised here by the Virginia farmers, New England mercantilists etc. got from the experiences of their daily lives, and the shools set up here, as real understanding of its meaning. The earlier ones were transmitters.
A new set of tokens come in for old text -- including the King James version of the Bible. This was still provisional, though necessary as record; for, even though many people for millenia have regarded it as the revelation of all history, it is, itself, a historical book, and many, many things had already transpired on this planet, we know now from ante-deluvial manuscripts coming to light, before it was written.
This was the spirit-in-history of the men signing the US Constitution "under God". What that term meant, legally, was explicitly kept out of any privateer's reach by the First Amendment. In other words, what the Constitution was signed under, as its fundamental animating spirit, could not be re-introducted, later, by moralistic, superstitious, politically sloganeering bloc voters from European basement tennaments as what the English words "really" meant "in the original tongue". When someone starts talking like that, you know you are in the vacinity of the old-world blood-Jesus complex. It may be scholarly, but grace is something else. (Yet "Grace" is the name of a massive Catholic cement compound in NYCity -- they try to name everything after their manner, in order to convey the iillusion that it is our the spirit of our text that is reproduced throught their tokens of communication).
No, because "Christ" is the term for this Spirit, as it appeared in history, I don't think that it is ontologically tied to the historical Jesus. I arrived early on at the view that "salvation" doesn't depend on the existence of Jesus, but upon what one accepts as understood in the moment of acceptance. Bertrand Russell proved we can't prove, deductively, the entire univese wasn't created five minutes ago, complete with all memories, documents, experiences, etc. each person has. It wouldn't make any difference. What is complete is the moment of the acceptance. It could have been a myth. No difference. It was still wholly intact -- the mental and spiritual effects of whatever the facgts behind the "myth" might be, presusmably transmiteed by The Bible. Belief in those effects did not require belief in any fact, verifiable or not verifiable, about history; it was not about history, but eternity. "The New Jerusalem" would be the "idea" of "Jerusalem" -- Jerusalem of the mind, or spirit, not requiring a material place. The material place is a site holy or sacred to humanity, or civilization, whatever we think, here. My first post argued this as a reason why "Israel" should be declared null and void as a "State", and the entire area placed under UN protection. It goes beyond us. The truth is older than religion, believe it or not.
All this, I think, is compatible with neo-Platonism. The classical philosopher-theologians lacked appreciation of the distinction between text and token in communication, therefore tended to view projected "future" adaptation of tokens to L-true text (mathematics, geometry -- propositions about "abstract ideas") as "emenations" of the "spirit" in those texts, which are required as discipline by anyone attaining intellectual development.
Plato split off the logically certifiable realm of formal knowledge, "mirrored" in the factual, moving world below. Plotinus saw them being worked through historically. My (not unique) understanding of the One (=unity of the Trinity) as a Father-Son-Holy Spirit historical unfolding, is fundamentally neo-Platonic. If time is a (4th dimensional) solid, this particular "way" the Spirit unfolds, in the case of the One, is the way it unfolds in EACH one, or "all", and there is no other way possible, under heaven. How could there be?
What I had given up hope of finding was any protestants who trusted what they received as experiences, so as to openly hold all other religions to account, as well as philosophers. Such self-confidence in matter of truth coming under survey of human reason constituting humanity's second highest calling, in my opinion, only after that of being, itself.