Jesus Criticized Handwashing! He´s "Anti-Science"! Anachronism and Other Fallacies

Avatar Lark62 • 2 days ago Humans have lived on this planet for approximately 200,000 years. Human ancestors go back approximately 2,000,000 years. The Earth is approximately 4,560,000,000 years old. This means the Earth coalesced, oceans formed, tectonic forces moved continents and created mountains and so forth for 4,559,800,000 years without the presence of humans to wonder about the "meaning" of it all. The universe existed just fine for 13,999,800,000 without humans to declare it has a "purpose." 4 • Reply • Share › Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • a day ago That´s not actually the issue here. The question is, do you understand that science only exists because people cared enough to know that Jesus taught about a lawful God, who created a lawful Universe, and the purpose of human beings is to follow 2 Commandments, including no 2, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It was the approximations of Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity that managed to change monastic schools into Universities, and organize the resources to inspire the likes of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, etc. in science, which wasn´t where the Christianization of ancient Greek philosophy stopped. Descartes and Newton exemplified how their access to the church-monastic-University societal network of community resources made their philosophical forms of efforts possible. As for the human condition, human rights and sustainability are the current objectives of those able to clear their heads. Growing wistful about negating the Universe´s purpose is something a psychosocial analysis could illuminate well. What exactly is distracting from the threats driving consumerized Western and globalized humans to the nihilistic reductionistic focus about a "purposeless Universe", as far as your aware, do you think? Ever heard of the profiteering business model, or right wing propaganda intended to indoctrinate the population? • Edit • Reply • Share › Avatar Lark62 greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 13 hours ago Jesus - the all powerful deity that helped create microbes - mocked people for washing their hands. Pro science he was not. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "treat others as you would like to be treated" are found in every human culture. Jesus was not original. And given the track record of his followers - from the crusades, to the inquisition, to genocide by conquistador, right up to the treatment of LGBT today - christians as a group have NEVER showed even basic kindness, much less love. The legacy of Jesus was centuries of official suppression of science. Gallileo!? That's your example!? He avoided torture by the christians only by "recanting" his conclusion that the earth orbits the sun and even then spent the rest of his life in house arrest. The fact that most of the European scientists at that time were christian is about as meaningful as saying most of the European scientists were European. Science continued despite christianity not because of it. Human rights are being defended by those "ebil woke libruls" not by christians. It is christians who en masse condemn anti-racism initiatives. it is christians who fight for the right to discriminate against LGBT and deny them civil rights. It is christians who fight against accurate science and accurate history in public schools. Do not accuse atheists of nihilism. Ever heard of the profiteering business model, or right wing propaganda intended to indoctrinate the population? Under Trump, that was daily. 2 • Reply • Share › Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • 10 hours ago • edited "Mocked...for washing their hands. Pro-science he was not" You´re a little anachronistic, there. In fact, ideologically so. Truth, like much that is important in modern University scholarship and science included, is a philosophical exercise that uses different methodologies. Yes, science fans have tried to put it on a pedestal, but just can´t escape Icarus´ metaphorical fate and the implications of reality. Truth is well-served by the philosophical principles of coherence and correspondence. Just as you miss the psychospiritual and cultural assumptions of the orthodox handwashers and project anachronistically modern scientific hygiene, Jesus was working according to a different logical scheme. He overwhelmingly asserts a modern, science-friendly cause-effect viewpoint that unsurprisingly can raise interpretive issues for the judgmentally inclined. Yet, his parables of building a house on rock, not sand and significant numbers of others are not even that subject to easy misinterpretation. Sorry. You dig your own hole. The historical sociological evidence then is no less clear. Monastic schools reflected the successful understanding of psychospiritual practice by a subgroup of Christians, and that was conducive to valuing knowledge by their own leading subgroup. By the proto-scientific Bishop R Grosseteste and scholarship of Thomas of Aquinas, translation had been advanced, Universities set up, and Aristotle´s limiting assumptions eliminated with reference to the omnipotent lawfulness of the Christian God. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" has its foundations in love and good that can naturally exist piecemeal among people, indeed. But you confuse existence with psychosocial forces that anchor and with prevailing tendencies. Julius Caesar had some good ideas or intentions as he was asserting dictatorship, and poof. Was it love that killed him with how many stab wounds? The Gracchus Bros and Spartacus are other instructive lessons, as was Alexander the Great, who you don´t seem much up on. Jesus, emerging from his heritage, linked the Golden Rule with love and God´s Commandments, in his very key life story, mission, healing, miracles, and message, and Resurrection. He is a combined phenomenon linked to God the Creator, no less. You don´t quite get scholarly integrity in your self-serving stereotyping of Christianity. Not quite clear about all the key people like Anthony of the Desert up to Francis of Assisi, over to Martin Luther and George Fox, besides the role of University scholarship? No less comes Jefferson and FDR and Eleanor´s UN human rights, and Gandhi as an innovative pioneer unaware of his own example in the Judeo-Christian tradition that scholars have identified with Elijah, up to T Clarkson´s seeking Quakers to pioneer modern social movements in his anti-slavery activism. Your blaming religion reveals your lack of scholarship. Brutal tyranny is essentially universal from China to India to Central America, and reflects human bio-psychosocial inclinations. Chimpanzees can attack and kill neighboring troops simply because they have evolved the capacity to do it. Thus, Christians who don´t follow Jesus´ integrity are acting on their human impulses. Christians ability to overcome those tendencies is what accounts for Clark and the Quakers´, T Jefferson´s, and FDR, Eleanor, Gandhi, and Rev MLK´s kinds of accomplishments that you bad cherry pick out of your sights. I didn´t just mention Galileo, dear soul, to your myopia. Try figuring in the others and getting at a little more detail. Galileo´s details don´t make him out an angel. Kepler himself, by contrast, benefited from Luther´s acts and being supported and had the insight to refuse an invitation to work with G man in Italy. Your ignoring the necessary and sufficient details from monastic schools to proto-scientists like R Grosseteste and scholars like Thomas of Aquinas is simply a crude lack of literacy and stereotyping. Your definition of modern Christians is similarly crude. Not quite clear that "liberals" like Obama are not Muslim? Liberal Christians and their derived lapsing associates welcome Muslims, no less, where they are coming up. "...nihilism" Why, because it gives you a headache to look up a relevant term, much less reflect introspectively, an unorthodox methodology to a scientific materialist? Yes, tRump. And the necessary and sufficient social analysis reveals that your stereotypes also interfered with your ability to reason socially. Fundamentalists reflect the reality projected by profiteers, not Jesus Christ and the resurgent integrity that authentically reflects JC´s loving integrity. You miss the basics because your understanding is pop specious, not scholarly and empirical. Sorry, but you are hardly seeing the puppets pulling your own strings, in your own mythologies. • Edit • Reply • Share › Avatar Lark62 greenpeaceRdale1844coop • 9 hours ago LoL. How can the behavior of an eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity be “anachronistic"? How is that even possible? Jesus as God Almighty created disease causing microbes. And he was too much of an as swipe to tell his followers to wash their hands. 1 • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop Lark62 • 6 minutes ago • edited God isn´t anachronistic. Your ideas and unexamined assumptions are. Philosophically, you are falsely equating, and in fact confusing, the eternal omnipotent, omniscient God with his temporal Creation, and the philosophical framework and question of their interrelationship. Your assertion of "Jesus as God Almighty" is an apparent source of the problem. A good question to add with authenticity is, "Who was Jesus, really?" You clearly don´t know the signficance of Jesus´ teaching, "Humankind doesn´t live by bread alone." Pop music is a fun debunking of various fallacies, whether your scientific materialism or related ones. Rock stars normally don´t get past their sell-out phase, but even so, greats like Sting with The Police have come up with the classic modernized rock Christian spirituality of "Secret Journey" and "Invisible Sun." You obsess about the modern insight of medical scientific hygiene oblivious to its foundations, and you are no less uncomprehending of the historical context of Jesus addressing the unpsychological, unspiritual legalistic obsession of the religious leaders. The answer about Jesus is amazing, and ineluctably so special that it is indeed irresistibly and intimately connected to the Divine loving parental transcendental Entity. However, Levels of Analysis and Explanation are key to understanding things clearly since the invention of modern Universities by Christians like Thomas of Aquinas and proto-scientist R Grosseteste. The complexity of phenomena has been accompanied by the complexity of knowledge development. It is fundamental to understand to basics: University-based knowledge is philosophical in nature, including "almighty science." Second, it is all subject to empirical and methodological distinctions from the concrete to the abstract, from experimentation to introspection. As for Jesus, his role clearly exceeds your anachronistic fallacies obsessed with the medical scientific interpretation of handwashing that exposes your lack of functional literacy in the very psychosocial and cultural foundations of University-based society itself, of which science is a subset. No Jesus, no monastic schools, no modern Universities. Are you aware of how the Muslim Golden Age ended? Centralized learning centers patronized by centralized power figures gave way in the face of political infighting. They became subject to higher forces, historical and otherwise in the layers of Levels of Analysis and Explanation. Western European Christians had a sufficiently complex society layered among monastic schools, a powerful, but vulnerable church hierarchy, and political authorities that were diverse and principled enough to develop Universities. They were also decentralized enough to allow the German principalities to support Luther, followed by Great Britain, with University centers already in place from Bologna and Padua to Paris to Oxford and Cambridge, not to forget Salamanca and Coimbra. You raise two questions, which have the appearance of the necessary method to pursue truth, through philosophy´s various methods including "science," i.e. scientific philosophy. Asking the questions is, however, not sufficient. Your intention becomes rhetorical as your own assumptions prove dictated by your own presumptions of assumptions. Firstly, my embracing the inescapable truth began after being raised an atheist humanist. I immersed myself in the simple tools of modern education, and began slowly protesting social and ecological injustice. I also paid attention to my feelings of angst and desire to be happy, healthy, and wise. Financially secure would be nice. What we observe is that we are in a modern society with a history. I pursued an interfaith spiritual path through the starting anchors of Unitarian Universalism´s advocacy of individual "spiritual paths," and scholar Huston Smith´s description of the Tao in his great book on The World´s Religions. My college exploration took me through the evolution of speech and symbolic behavior in liberal arts Biological Anthropology. The rest of my biography so far are richly informative. We humans are not the Almighty Deity, and it is our historical development that we are experiencing, following biological evolution after Big Bang hypothesized astrophysical cosmological evolution. The history of science has only been artificially separated from religion, as its attempt at mechanicism and objectification has gone to many people´s heads. I realized that my spiritual interests are a natural restoration to what Descartes began to formally separate, to the historical objections of Pascal, no less. I have been re-sanctifying what has been desacralized, artificially and historically, to be clear. Some of my earliest insights reflected the meaning of therapeutic psychology, a la Freud, Jung, and so on. Love heals, although many professionals have stayed away from the word "love" it appears. I began tracing the historical roots more precisely in my masters in International RElations. Universities are key, as are social movements. I was intrigued by the pairing of Francis of Assisi, who died as Thomas of Aquinas was born. Assisi´s proto-type of social movements proceeded through Luther´s courageous and insightful acts leading to T Clarkson´s young college grad fire to end slavery, for which he sought out the largely amazing Quaker-Friends. That was the 1780s. The Quaker-Friends´ quite amazing reputation for integrity began with the amazing 17th century story of George Fox, a great little-known story from the era of Descartes, Newton, Locke, and so on. And so, we have the amazing University-based tools in Jesus´ very legacy that relate to him in terms of integrity, hypocrisy, history, and philosophical interpretation. Jesus´ 2 Commandments for Moses and God include No 2, "Love thy neighbor as thyself, as Jesus loved others." However, Jesus also taught the need for spiritual practice, a psychophysiological and metaphysical process. Freud represents a modern breakthrough from his medical and neurological orientation to the psychological. Talk therapy is not about neurochemicals primarily, but shows how neurochemicals can be affected by symbolic human communication. That communication is individualized and in turn can begin to undo chemical imbalances. "Mind over matter." Freud´s key insights weren´t the fraudulent "Oedipal complex," but his "Seduction Theory of child abuse", which effects were ameliorated by the talk therapy, including aspects of psychoanalysis, achieving two primary results: 1. abreaction emotional reconnection and 2. catharsis. Jung and others went beyond Freud and on alternative pathways to reveal human complexity, with Jung unequivocally pursuing the anthropological foundations of spiritual-religious experience not least of all with his concept of the Higher Self based on the Imago Dei, the loving, effective Christ the Son as God the parent´s image on Earth. And in temporal history. Thus, Jesus taught love. It took Christians time, effort, astuteness, and blood, sweat, and tears to develop monastic schools into Universities that led to the Reformation, Science, the Enlightenment, Jefferson et al´s Civil Rights, and FDR´s and Eleanor´s UN human rights, Gandhi´s and Kasturbai´s examples of interfaith Christian practice, and Rev MLK´s and Fannie Lou Hamer´s own examples of same. Jesus emerged from his temporal heritage from a spiritual-religious experiential process that began before Abraham, but gains historical clarity with his prophetic experience. That led to Joseph, Moses´ watershed of the Top Ten Commandments, down through David to Elijah to Isaiah et al to Jesus. Jesus´ teachings weren´t simplistically, "God rules. Now suffer." He taught, "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven (where? within and among you)," "Clean the cup on the inside where there is wickedness," go and learn...," and "Do good, even if it means breaking unjust rules." These are the human duties in spiritual practice and the seeking of personal growth in God, knowing and loving God´s love. The traditional understandings need to be studied. Anthony of the Desert was a key historical Christian and also much ignored. The Father of Christian monks, he got that historical reputation through his own psychospiritual growth process resulting after much time, 33 years in his case, in what they began to call theosis, or divinization. Anthony suffered cyclically, and emerged rejuvenated, tranquil, and wiser than ever. He had a cool transcendental dream, no less. Technically, we just need to ask, "How is the eternal transcendental God´s relationship to temporal reality possible?" Then philosophy involves researching and reflecting. Empiricism has been overly associated with "science," or the "social sciences." However, it is that as empirical philosophy that supplements all modern disciplines. Scientific philosophy as "science" has given us such insights as wave mechanics as Einstein´s mass-energy equivalence has informed the new breakthrough field of Quantum mechanics. As mechanistic processes go, wave mechanics captures matter´s nature energetically, and corresponds to human rhythmic experience, key notions to shamanic and spiritual experience. The Buddha´s focus on meditative breath, among others, aligns with Jesus´ teachings about prayer and prayerful retreats into nature. It is a process of our alignment with God´s nature, and God´s will. Our study also contributes to, say, understanding why Einstein could have been informed about Wilhelm Reich´s breakthrough treatment of a schizophrenic with breathing. Reich wrote about it in 1933. In 1930, Einstein´s son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Why don´t we hear at least that Reich took a shot at working with Einstein´s son? In Joseph Campbell´s work decades later, he referred to medical work that correlates "schizophrenia" and other related "mental illness" with a precondition for shamanic training and traditions. Jesus´ prophetic heritage is supershamanic, and Jesus´ role super-prophetic. Buddha´s too, and Gandhi´s as well, most obviously.