Christianity 101

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Faith is indifferent to the objective desirability of particular values.

Well of course.

Faith is a human attribute, like being able to see the sky or smell some roses.

It is neither knowledge, language, or values.

Not all people experience faith and not all people either see or smell.

Some folks are literally disabled by not experiencing the human attribute of faith.

It's not something that can be effectively described in words, unless a person experiences it.

Been there in both places done both parts in REAL life experience.

Faith is real.

Words are empty shells with no essence or meaning as that relates to the human experience of Faith when
not experienced in one's true reality.

The GOD that IS ALL, needs no words to describe IT (god) when one experiences the REAL HUMAN ATTRIBUTE of
FAITH.

But here's the thing many folks with TRUE faith in all that IS(AKA GOD) are happy to be here all the time.

Whereas more folks that do not, generally speaking per suicide rates in countries that profess little to no faith in anything are not as happy.

And anyone who says they do want to be happy is not sane as far as i am concerned no matter what they say.

If faith gets folks to happiness, it is worth it's weight in GOLD.

And by the reports of the majority of 7 billions folks in the world, it does, ergo TRUE Success in life is an integral part of FAITH and vice a versa.

The challenge for me is to spark someone like me that had no experience of faith before into someone similar to me now who lives in bliss all the time as all i have is faith in the all that IS(aka GOD).

It is really not that complicated it's just about trust in being that is ALL IT IS(aka GOD).

And no, most people are not as deep as i am and do not describe it in a detailed and very deep manner like i do but
this takes nothing away from the reality or strength of what is real about faith in their individual experience in life regardless of a person's ability to describe their experience or potential experiences of others with the English language or whatever other language may be in play to use metaphors to describe human attributes that are not concrete experiences in life.

Sorry, that is a very long sentence, but that is how i talk when i put my computer hat on.

What most scholars can agree in is that basically, nothing is known about his early life, up to the time of his baptism in the Jordan.

They agree that he was born somewhere between 6-4 BCE. Where he was born is disputed, although many modern scholars believe that it was likely that he was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, and lived all of his life prior to embarking on his preaching in Galilee.

They agree that he was executed, in the manner that Rome reserved exclusively for traitors, insurrectionists, and other threats to the established social/religious order, and not for ordinary criminals or religious apostates. This happened while Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Palestine and the surrounding areas, and while Herod Antipas was tetracht of Galilee (tetracht being a puppet king beholden to Rome) and while Joseph Caiaphas was the high priest. It would have to have occurred before Pilate was removed as governor and recalled to Rome (apparently, his brutaility had become too much for even Rome to stomach) in 36 CE.

They rely on the accounts of extra-Biblical writings for this, mainly on the late first century histories of Josephus and Tacitus.

Beyond that, you really have no agreement. Although it is now generally accepted that none of the NT gospels were written contemporaneously with his life, by the men whose names appear on them, so their value as accurate histories is suspect.

Right. But neither Josephus nor Tacitus were contemporaries. They wrote long after the cult was already established and were just reporting common stories. They wouldn't know.

Whatever the actual message of the man, the most plausible theme to me is that a group of stunned followers were trying to deal with the failure of their leader and invented a myth based on visions. Similarly, in the 17th century many Jews thought the Messiah had finally arrived. A guy named Sabbatai Zevi. He wound up betrayed and captured by the Turks and to avoid death he converted to Islam. This really disappointed the Jews who followed him but some continued to believe in him. They turned his failure into a religious mystery. Because that's how some people cope with disappointment.

He was actually one of a succession of "messianic" figures of the first century, the vast majority of whom suffered the same fate at the hands of the Romans.

Rome, in Jesus' day, was far more accepting of foreign cults than is often credited by christians. On conquering a people, imperial rome would often make an effort to re-align the vanquished gods with the roman state; in order to turn the conquered people into compliant roman subjects. The exclusivity of christianity/ judaism undermined this system and fomented religious intolerance. When governments do not take a pro-active role in eliminating cultish messiah's when they spring up, there comes a day when we'll wish they had.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H38ifOZSuAI[/youtube]

Last edited by Stannis on 05 Mar 2014, 3:06 pm, edited 6 times in total.

All is this discussion is wonderfully enlightening, carry on.

That is true. After all, the Romans pretty much co-opted the Green pantheon in its entirety when they conquered ancient Greece. Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno, and so on. The "messianic" movement in first century Palestine wasn't strictly religious in nature. In part, it was, in that it was a rebellion against the entrenched priestly class that worked hand in glove with the Romans to preserve Roman rule and the flow of tax revenue and other resources back to Rome. But its primary objective was to liberate Palestine from Roman rule altogether, and restore it to "God's land". God gave Israel to the Israelites in their minds, and no foreign power had any right or claim to it. The messiah, as foretold in the OT prophecies, was to be a great temporal leader who would restore Yahweh's rule over the land. It's pretty clear that this wasn't anything that Rome could ignore.

Rome was very tolerant of Judaism, from the time they conquered Palestine, though the first two-thirds of the first century CE. Even more so than other conquered cults. Of course, setting up puppet kings like Herod the Great and his sons as their agents, and co-opting the temple priests as collaborators, was a major reason for this tolerance, which went along with their usual practice of aligning conquered religions with the state. Up until the time the messianic movement turned into outright rebellion and uprising, between 66-70 CE, culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem, the destruction of Herod's temple, and finally, crushing the last hold-outs at Masada. And the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Judeans, Galileans, and Samaritans. Vespatian sent his armies in there to eradicate Judaism once and for all, or at minimum, scatter it to the four winds.

What does objectivity have to do with desire? Desire is something created by humans and is therefor subjective. Desiring values is therefore something subjective. Faith has more to do with the acceptance that we cannot obtain truly objective values in all situations. Where do we come up for the rules for the objective classification of values anyway?

de·sir·a·ble [dih-zahyuhr-uh-buhl]
adjective
3.
advisable; recommendable: a desirable law.

objective
adjective
4.
being the object or goal of one's efforts or actions.

What I meant was that dogmatic value judgements are, to a large extent, disconnected from practical objectives; if you get your values from dogma, you don't get to correct for the negative real world consequences of those values.

Last edited by Stannis on 06 Mar 2014, 11:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's more important to think of solutions that help everyone. Anyway, I was thinking of a different definition of objective, or I need to look at it in the dictionary more closely.

Dw, what I wrote was ambiguous. I was trying to be poetic, but I sacrificed clarity.



As far as I know, "faith" means believing something without evidence. Do you mean something else by it?

Last edited by Stannis on 06 Mar 2014, 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

One definition of faith is confidence in the face of adversity, believing in something even though you can not prove nor disprove it.