my take is taht if one means it to be taken metaphorically or symbolically one should say so. The problem with taking it literally or even semi-literally is that "buying the packages" often brings it lots of cruft like hating gay people, not caring about the ecosystem, justifying oppression of women, etc etc.
I love the Old Testament in particular as LITERATURE, just as i've read Lord of the Rings 38 times. ANd I have taken many moral lessons from LOTR. Don;t confuse literature with literal truth.
JimGPT is the ultimate LLHM (large language human model). I can not imagine how many man hours/years of research and writing this elucidating post required. It certainly could not have been written without the many decades of deep and broad learning that has gone into that full stack cortex of yours. On behalf of your curious readers, thanks!
I have only recently had the pleasure of making Jim's acquaintance, and I was literally thinking yesterday how the precision in his language reminded me of ChatGPT. Truly remarkable!
I recited this prayer every week when I was a child, often pondering what it meant. Now I think it's hilarious: holy spirit, virgin birth, died for our sins??? It's such a convoluted fantasy.
I think people who come across Christianity later in life find two completely different religions:
(1) The teachings of Jesus, as expressed in the Gospels / New Testament
(2) The Nicene Creed
If you just read the Gospels, you'd expect Christianity to be a Jewish revivalist movement, led by an erratic wandering preacher.
It's only after learning about the Nicene Creed that the teachings at an average Sunday church sermon and the mystical, but metaphysically tricky doctrines make any sense.
Both religions feel rather flimsy: (1) because it's clearly set out to be a sect of Judaism, and (2) because none of its teachings seem to have any basis in the actual story of Jesus' life or teachings as expressed in the Gospels
Wonder your thoughts on a symbolic reading where the death is the death of our maligned wills or egos. Following that death, our true will or God's will is resurrected or realized within us.
Please forgive my short summary for the LinkedIn Crowd where I commented. Obviously, you covered all my points much more in depth. But yes an Imperial policy show. I was lucky enough to be taught this at Univ. of WA in ~1986/7 in the "Comparative Religion' Department (which was a specialized History Degree, nit Divinity). Excellent important stuff.
The Nicene Creed, as explicated by Jim, would be what Gustav Ichheiser would call "beliefs in principle" (in contrast to "beliefs in fact"). The actual beliefs of individuals who call themselves Christians are not always going to correspond 100% with the Nicene Creed, even if they recite it every week. The hundreds of thousands of Christians who regularly recite the Creed are participating in a group ritual. And, just like third-graders who aren't really fully understanding and believing the words of the Pledge of Allegiance that they recite by rote, my guess is that most Christians are not thinking seriously about the meaning of the beliefs in the Nicene Creed when they recite it. One exception I could mention is Abbot George Burke, who wrote a 188-page book (on an Apple IIe computer, no less) titled The Nicene Creed: An Esoteric Interpretation. For what it is worth, I grew up attending services at a Presbyterian church, where we recited the shorter Apostles' Creed instead of the Nicene Creed. And we did not recite it every week, but, rather, on special occasions. Communion, if I remember correctly, which happened only a few times a year, not every week like in the Catholic Church.
At any rate, I am grateful to Jim for spelling out what the official belief doctrine of Christians is, whether or not individuals fully embody those beliefs.
It seems that Jim knows more about Christianity than most Christians. This is an amazing piecce of work by a very secular guy. Thanks for the memories, Jim.
my take is taht if one means it to be taken metaphorically or symbolically one should say so. The problem with taking it literally or even semi-literally is that "buying the packages" often brings it lots of cruft like hating gay people, not caring about the ecosystem, justifying oppression of women, etc etc.
I love the Old Testament in particular as LITERATURE, just as i've read Lord of the Rings 38 times. ANd I have taken many moral lessons from LOTR. Don;t confuse literature with literal truth.
JimGPT is the ultimate LLHM (large language human model). I can not imagine how many man hours/years of research and writing this elucidating post required. It certainly could not have been written without the many decades of deep and broad learning that has gone into that full stack cortex of yours. On behalf of your curious readers, thanks!
I have only recently had the pleasure of making Jim's acquaintance, and I was literally thinking yesterday how the precision in his language reminded me of ChatGPT. Truly remarkable!
FFS, boys.... are you being sarcastic, or merely daft? The post above was *obviously* written by an LLM in response to a prompt (presumably from Jim).
This one was a chimera. Man-machine in a tight loop.
Daft, I'm afraid.
I recited this prayer every week when I was a child, often pondering what it meant. Now I think it's hilarious: holy spirit, virgin birth, died for our sins??? It's such a convoluted fantasy.
I think people who come across Christianity later in life find two completely different religions:
(1) The teachings of Jesus, as expressed in the Gospels / New Testament
(2) The Nicene Creed
If you just read the Gospels, you'd expect Christianity to be a Jewish revivalist movement, led by an erratic wandering preacher.
It's only after learning about the Nicene Creed that the teachings at an average Sunday church sermon and the mystical, but metaphysically tricky doctrines make any sense.
Both religions feel rather flimsy: (1) because it's clearly set out to be a sect of Judaism, and (2) because none of its teachings seem to have any basis in the actual story of Jesus' life or teachings as expressed in the Gospels
Wrong.
Paul’s epistles are almost completely devoid of the teachings of Jesus, and Paul wrote before any of the Gospels were written.
I agree. Most of so-called Christianity was invented whole-cloth by Paul
Wonder your thoughts on a symbolic reading where the death is the death of our maligned wills or egos. Following that death, our true will or God's will is resurrected or realized within us.
Please forgive my short summary for the LinkedIn Crowd where I commented. Obviously, you covered all my points much more in depth. But yes an Imperial policy show. I was lucky enough to be taught this at Univ. of WA in ~1986/7 in the "Comparative Religion' Department (which was a specialized History Degree, nit Divinity). Excellent important stuff.
The Nicene Creed, as explicated by Jim, would be what Gustav Ichheiser would call "beliefs in principle" (in contrast to "beliefs in fact"). The actual beliefs of individuals who call themselves Christians are not always going to correspond 100% with the Nicene Creed, even if they recite it every week. The hundreds of thousands of Christians who regularly recite the Creed are participating in a group ritual. And, just like third-graders who aren't really fully understanding and believing the words of the Pledge of Allegiance that they recite by rote, my guess is that most Christians are not thinking seriously about the meaning of the beliefs in the Nicene Creed when they recite it. One exception I could mention is Abbot George Burke, who wrote a 188-page book (on an Apple IIe computer, no less) titled The Nicene Creed: An Esoteric Interpretation. For what it is worth, I grew up attending services at a Presbyterian church, where we recited the shorter Apostles' Creed instead of the Nicene Creed. And we did not recite it every week, but, rather, on special occasions. Communion, if I remember correctly, which happened only a few times a year, not every week like in the Catholic Church.
At any rate, I am grateful to Jim for spelling out what the official belief doctrine of Christians is, whether or not individuals fully embody those beliefs.
It seems that Jim knows more about Christianity than most Christians. This is an amazing piecce of work by a very secular guy. Thanks for the memories, Jim.