Former atheist speaks out...

[Trevor Salyzyn]

So what changed me? Jesus Christ. I'm sure there are others on this board who can attest to what I'm talking about...

Since Jesus Christ changed me less than Confucius, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and even Diogenes... can anyone tell me what he's talking about?

[brokenhead]

So what changed me? Jesus Christ. I'm sure there are others on this board who can attest to what I'm talking about...

Since Jesus Christ changed me less than Confucius, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and even Diogenes... can anyone tell me what he's talking about?

Trevor: There are countless testemonials out there. Just pick one. Myself, I steer clear of them because I fight my own battles. I'm sure some are more moving than others, but you won't know unless you look.

But this isn't what you were asking, is it?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Am I having some huge deja vu here or are Christian bots swarming the Net with a regular interval all using easy to recognize names starting with a biblical name and ending in some occult number? (yeshua8787, aaron777, jacob69;). Or did yeshua need three years to recover from encountering a dosis of truth and is back with an improved clean and ironed brain. I mean: how many converted atheist and Solway fans can there be?

Anyway, follow the link above for the old thread of 2005.

[Trevor Salyzyn]

But this isn't what you were asking, is it?

The claim that Jesus just "changed someone's life" is as vague as Barack Obama's campaign promise. But what aaron wrote suggested that the change caused by Jesus Christ is similar enough in all cases that if someone else was also changed by Jesus, this other person would be able to attest to what he was talking about. This implies that there is a very specific change happening. [edit: or, to be as cynical as Diebert, it implies that the OP is never going to follow up, and wants others to do the work.]

What is this specific change? Is the changed caused by Jesus comparable to that caused by other religions and philosophies?

[Cory Duchesne]

Am I having some huge deja vu here or are Christian bots swarming the Net with a regular interval all using easy to recognize names starting with a biblical name and ending in some occult number? (yeshua8787, aaron777, jacob69;). Or did yeshua need three years to recover from encountering a dosis of truth and is back with an improved clean and ironed brain. I mean: how many converted atheist and Solway fans can there be?

Very weird.

Maybe it's just the same guy who wants to make it seem like there's a larger number of people like him out there then there really is.

The specimen-man tranquilizes himself with human numbers. If something is true, he needs no higher proof than that such and such a number have regarded it as true. - SK

[brokenhead]

But this isn't what you were asking, is it?

The claim that Jesus just "changed someone's life" is as vague as Barack Obama's campaign promise. But what aaron wrote suggested that the change caused by Jesus Christ is similar enough in all cases that if someone else was also changed by Jesus, this other person would be able to attest to what he was talking about. This implies that there is a very specific change happening. [edit: or, to be as cynical as Diebert, it implies that the OP is never going to follow up, and wants others to do the work.]

What is this specific change? Is the changed caused by Jesus comparable to that caused by other religions and philosophies?

The specific change is the leap of faith. But since the starting point for people when they take the leap is different from everyone else's (different time of life, surroundings, circumstances), what and how much is traversed by the leap is necessarily not the same. It is a personal relationship with another person. Each is unique. I'm getting a headache. I am not about to try to argue faith. But as I see it, if you believe in God, that's all that is required. That He exists. Knock yourself out.

[Relo]

While my human will would find it satisfying to say that if I did follow Christianity fully as a common folk would, I would feel emotionally and so called spiritually better and well off humanistically, but aside from that, I would feel that I let one of my biggest goals fade away into the dust pans.

What would that goal be? What goal fades away if you know Christ?

Can't really say what my goals are, I don't know most of them at the moment, and that could be one of them.

Not because of knowing Christ, more of like belly flopping in an ocean then flowing down a river or walking a path, figurately. It's not exactly knowing Christ myself, but more of finding out on my own, considering I am defiant, stubborn, and ignorant also having a different view of Christ compared to others of the same and different religion, at least I hope everyone has they're own view of Christ, God would be a different time & place.

As of now I am open to everything that my mind can pin point and open to other things that come across for my humanistic sake of being, hopefully proceeding to the assistance of myself and the others who have endured endurance that makes up thought (call it what you will).

[Trevor Salyzyn]

I am not about to try to argue faith. But as I see it, if you believe in God, that's all that is required. That He exists. Knock yourself out.

Well, I'll take this as an invitation to start another thread, to argue faith.

[brokenhead]

While my human will would find it satisfying to say that if I did follow Christianity fully as a common folk would, I would feel emotionally and so called spiritually better and well off humanistically, but aside from that, I would feel that I let one of my biggest goals fade away into the dust pans.

What would that goal be? What goal fades away if you know Christ?

Can't really say what my goals are, I don't know most of them at the moment, and that could be one of them.

Not because of knowing Christ, more of like belly flopping in an ocean then flowing down a river or walking a path, figurately. It's not exactly knowing Christ myself, but more of finding out on my own, considering I am defiant, stubborn, and ignorant also having a different view of Christ compared to others of the same and different religion, at least I hope everyone has they're own view of Christ, God would be a different time & place.

As of now I am open to everything that my mind can pin point and open to other things that come across for my humanistic sake of being, hopefully proceeding to the assistance of myself and the others who have endured endurance that makes up thought (call it what you will).

You sound fine. Life doesn't seem so short to you now. But it's all yours, so make sure for the real important, close stuff, that you are in charge.

[David Quinn]

What I find interesting is how our beliefs and our 'certainties', indeed any idea we have about 'absolute truth', is something that can shift.

Experiences are happening.

Forget it, Jason. Alex will never shift from the certainty he enjoys above.

-

[David Quinn]

Am I having some huge deja vu here or are Christian bots swarming the Net with a regular interval all using easy to recognize names starting with a biblical name and ending in some occult number? (yeshua8787, aaron777, jacob69;). Or did yeshua need three years to recover from encountering a dosis of truth and is back with an improved clean and ironed brain. I mean: how many converted atheist and Solway fans can there be?

Anyway, follow the link above for the old thread of 2005.

What are you saying, Diebert? That this fellow lies for Jesus Christ? That he goes around to various atheistic message boards and makes up fibs about himself in an attempt to save people from their sins?

-

[Alex Jacob]

Trevor wrote:

"...when you really think about it, this thread couldn't have turned out any other way."

(I hoped it would because it is a great subject).

HEEB Magazine interviews Camille Paglia. I have the impression that some here, perhaps average, are really not up on what Christianity is, and how Biblical ideas, both Jewish and Christian, are inextricably interwoven into the culture, out minds, our subconscious and our unconscious.

I have to agree with Trevor about Nietzsche, I mean, agree insofar as Nietzsche has done more for an authentic Christianity than anyone. The way I see things is the Christian revelation, that peculiar, inner, mercurial revelation, needs to be refracted all over again through the modern lens. The internal message, the core spirit, needs to be summoned, invoked, and needs to be set to work again, like a genii, like a dangerous, unstable force, on all the main questions we deal with. It really can be done, and what can come of that is not the resurrection of an old, useless fossil, or reconstructing the same, outworn edifice all over again, or surrendering back to acquiescence ('group-think'). Really, it seems to me that Nietzsche rushes into the whole problem intrepidly. And also, as Trevor pointed out sometime back, it is easy and almost inevitable to misinterpret Nietzsche. He seems accessible but he really isn't.

I personally think that one must take Jesus in the highest and most sublime form into the toilet bowl of rebellion. It sound weird but I have heard people talking about their married life, their sexual life, and say If I don't take God into the bedroom with me, I'm lost. Meaning that you have to take the idea of the sacred (but when you are 'with' the sacred it is more than an idea...) into all aspects of human life: sex, work, struggle, community work, the thinking and learning processes, relationship, love, birth, death. But the thing is that so many people, when they 'come back to Jesus' use it as an excuse to cut themselves off from the struggle of learning, the challenge to apply spiritual truths, and to apply them into the fabric of an incarnation into the flesh (as it were). As you go in, so too you go out. As you are brought in to flesh-existence, so too there is a psychopomp that can accompany you as you move through life, and out of life. I have personally seen a Catholic priest literally guide a dying soul through the death-process, while reciting 'and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil'. I just sat there and watched and was genuinely amazed. There are certain truths about life that only experience can teach. (And now the jab:) I don't know if I have too much faith in some garrulous boys with pretentious ideas about Genius) who can't locate their assholes!

Life is a very, very heavy thing, a very intense experience, and those who really go to the limits of that experience, often not at all by choice, learn things in an existential process that pales, not all the time but sometimes, what youngsters suppose they know. I am personally of the opinion that we are never alone in our experience of our incarnation here---not for one, solitary second---and something attends us, and it also seems to me to wait on us, to be waiting for something from us, but sometimes one has to go to the pit, so to speak, before one is capable of 'listening'. And it is there that the Christian experience begins. There is no reason in the world for that experience to 'narrow' and constrict or to revert to old, dead dogma. Often, the initial experience is very real, but then all this convention rushes in to fill up the empty spaces, and the experience is solidified into something without real potency, a sort of semi-potency. I submit that the day that the Christian experience is wed to a knowledgeable social, ethical, spiritual, artistic and religious consciousness, is the day that Christianity will be a real and vital force.

Cory said he was perplexed by the apparent '180', but I personally don't see QRS-tianity as being 180 degrees opposed to the Christian conversion experience. Actually, it is the mental and willful rendition of the same opus! Ha ha ha. I find that so funny. It seems sometimes that we use all our will to go to the very limit of the extension of the rubber band that holds us, but at a certain point we recoil back into our matrix. It is a part of the whole substrata of who and what we are. And it is when we 'flip back violently that we sometimes lose the good aspect of our own will, and we recoil into mere convention.

Cory wrote:

"...which to me implies that he doesn't encourage blind trust that Jesus will take care of everything for you."

I can't speak for anyone here defending Jesus Christ or Christianity, but there is an experience that happens to, say, mystics, to devotees, that is one of assurance that, spiritually, one is on the way 'home'. It would be impossible to explain it to someone with an atheistic viewpoint, who could not conceive of a personal God. Even if you don't share the view (or a personal, saving God) at the very least you can 'enter into' the experience and on some level understand it.

Even Dan said something recently, like if you are 'perceptive enough' you can 'perceive' sat-chit-ananda: being within infinity (that is how I understood it). What is this perception he speaks of?
_________________________________________________

David wrote:

"Forget it, Jason. Alex will never shift from the certainty he enjoys above."

It is very womanly to interpose yourself between two people, David. It has a deliciously devious feel to it! I assume that if Jason has something to say to me, he will say it, and what he says may not be what you want him to mean, or interpret him to mean.

[Dave Toast]

Am I having some huge deja vu here or are Christian bots swarming the Net with a regular interval all using easy to recognize names starting with a biblical name and ending in some occult number? (yeshua8787, aaron777, jacob69;). Or did yeshua need three years to recover from encountering a dosis of truth and is back with an improved clean and ironed brain. I mean: how many converted atheist and Solway fans can there be?

Anyway, follow the link above for the old thread of 2005.

The thread opener was about as blindingly obviously contrived as a bear and a pope discussing the merits of christianity whilst taking a shit in the woods together.

[average]

The Judeo-Christian God becomes very small in comparison to the continuum of all existence.

I have the impression that some here, perhaps average, are really not up on what Christianity is, and how Biblical ideas, both Jewish and Christian, are inextricably interwoven into the culture, out minds, our subconscious and our unconscious.

That probably is the case; bad ideas have a way of infecting people and cultures.

But I don't see any reason to subscribe to any of these systems of thought...

[DHodges]

What are you saying, Diebert? That this fellow lies for Jesus Christ? That he goes around to various atheistic message boards and makes up fibs about himself in an attempt to save people from their sins?

That would be consistent with the sort of Christianity he is spouting. It's hypocritical to the core.

[Alex Jacob]

I wrote: 'I have the impression that some here, perhaps average, are really not up on what Christianity is, and how Biblical ideas, both Jewish and Christian, are inextricably interwoven into the culture, out minds, our subconscious and our unconscious.'

"That probably is the case; bad ideas have a way of infecting people and cultures. But I don't see any reason to subscribe to any of these systems of thought..."

If you can, take a look at what Camille Paglia wrote. I would almost say (but am not prone to give advice) that you might need to understand the whole deal a little more. The thing is that we are all informed by these 'bad ideas', and they are at the very base of just about everything that goes on in our culture---intellectually, spiritually, in jurisprudence, in the formation of the US and other modern states, in art, in psychology, in ethics.

Sometimes it happens, too, that those who outrightly reject the Christian narratives (or the Jewish narratives) duplicate them precisely yet without the lingo that goes along with it. The more one knows, the better.
____________________________________________

What about this?
And this?

[brokenhead]

I've met a lot of people who have a need for a spiritual world beyond this one, and I find that the more interesting and reasonable ones do not subscribe to the sentiment of the pop country song: "Jesus take the wheel".

Do you understand how insulting that is, Cory? It makes you look ignorant as hell. No one said you had to like that song. I have never heard it, but you are holding it up as if it were the sum total of Christianity. You know it's not, right?

I realize Steiner had a hard-on for Jesus as well, but he diverged from conventional Christianity in his views on reincarnation and karma - which to me implies that he doesn't encourage blind trust that Jesus will take care of everything for you. That's what I'm attacking.

What do you mean by "take care of everything?" Do you honestly think that every Christian believes that? More bluntly, every educated Christian?

Bohm's work says nothing about having faith or putting your trust in a powerful feeling or an idea. On the contrary he advises against it

I only briefly encountered Bohm as a physicist and even more briefly with his exchanges with Krishnamurti. He was a scientist. So what? Show me where he says anything about a "powerful feeling or idea." And while you are at it, maybe you could show me where Christ advised his followers to yield to impulses, which is what you are making it sound like.

But he [Gurdjieff] didn't posit that simply putting your trust in Jesus was the key to salvation either, did he?

On the contrary, I believe he did say that his work was to make his followers good Christians, no more and no less. He was a survivor, remember. He depended on tuition for his income. He would not have risked alienating his wealthier followers by being anti-Christian. What he was trying to do was shake people out of the same silly notions you are bandying about here that Christianity implies Christ does everything for you.

So you think there is only one idea of Christ? As opposed to many different ideas, some more generic than others?

No, I believe I said only a dimwit would call Christ a "generic idea." I can't vouch for the guy who made the original post, but how do you know he's not just a simple soul who doesn't sound like he has his own voice? We're not all geniuses, Cory. Consider that Christ may have had more luck with a retard than Teilhard DeChardin would have.

Look, the "God-hates-fags" people repulse me, too. Christ's message is not them, it's not the post of aaron777, and its not a C&W tune. Is it?

[David Quinn]

(And also because I believe all of us can 'enter into' foreign beliefs and examine them, to some extent from the inside. I do this with the QRS-tian belief system---system being the operative word---and though the place they reside is almost insanely boring and bereft of 'spirit', nevertheless I can 'feel' what it is like).

This gave me a chuckle.

I'm trying to imagine your picture of us. We're some kind of priesthood who have set up a forum for the purpose of persuading people to give up everything they hold dear, so that they can be led, with much effort and cajoling, to a place where there is ..... nothing at all.

The entire endeavour is an elaborate joke on our parts.

Under the guise of offering the world, we take everything away and give nothing in return. We just leave people to rot away in interminable boredom in a void.

Or perhaps we are zombies ourselves whose minds have been taken over by the Void and are now mindlessly encouraging others, again with much energy, to join us in this nether-world where nothing happens.

You've really tuned into this place, Alex. I can see that.

-

[average]

Alelx Jacob, I find this a more accurate depicition of a typical christian.

[David Quinn]

What are you saying, Diebert? That this fellow lies for Jesus Christ? That he goes around to various atheistic message boards and makes up fibs about himself in an attempt to save people from their sins?

That would be consistent with the sort of Christianity he is spouting. It's hypocritical to the core.

We are talking about religion, after all. Pathological liars flock to religion like flies to a corpse. It is the stench with attracts them.

-

[Alex Jacob]

And yet you prove that 'religion'---going to the core of what that means---can be and is an intensely personal experience that revolutionizes life and the living of it...

"I'm trying to imagine your picture of us. We're some kind of priesthood who have set up a forum for the purpose of persuading people to give up everything they hold dear, so that they can be led, with much effort and cajoling, to a place where there is ..... nothing at all".

Well, you really are a 'priesthood', almost literally. You are certainly theologians with an establsihed doctrne. You define God and you define an ethic for living in accord with your definition. You defend against all comers. You have set up this forum expressly and uniquely to spread your message, I assume (is there an alternative view possible?).

"Under the guise of offering the world, we take everything away and give nothing in return. We just leave people to rot away in interminable boredom in a void."

I said 'boring' not that there was nothing offered in return. I have also explained at length why I consider it 'boring' and have also proposed remedies.

As to becoming zombies, I assume that is the case since you did not seem to respond favorably to the film of the Carter Family singing Wildwood Flower. That also makes you a Satanist in my church...

;-)
_____________________________________________

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? But with no need to call an ambulance...

[Alex Jacob]

brokenhead wrote:

"No, I believe I said only a dimwit would call Christ a "generic idea." I can't vouch for the guy who made the original post, but how do you know he's not just a simple soul who doesn't sound like he has his own voice? We're not all geniuses, Cory. Consider that Christ may have had more luck with a retard than Teilhard DeChardin would have."

Even those pesky Jews who have a peculiar way of interpreting Jesus and his stage-appearance in history, say that his 'career changed the course of civilization'.

Something I think has to be taken into consideration, say about aaron777, and for a certain number here, (all of us to one degree or other), is that they are young people, not very well educated (it is very, very costly to receive a 'good' education these days and many people in American schools have a very poor basic preparation), and with this poor preparation, in the context of a mad post-modernistic slurry of information and flashing images, a culture that has trained them to be programmable slaves and to receive ideas with no critical discriminating barrier, with this base they then come into contact with Ideas. The World of Ideas. This 'simple soul' is a product of protestant Christian culture (most likely), but not of a sophisticated sort. The dalliance with ideas, the adolescent love-affair with ideas can only go so far, because these pretty magnificent ideas take a life-time to come into contact with, and sometimes a number of generations. Many of the greatest minds were third and forth generation intellectuals.

It would not at all be hard to imagine someone with this 'preparation', as a sort of lost, atomized child of modernity in a sea of shopping malls and blaring teevees, to hope to find himself within the GF religious revival church. The ideas are presented with that sort of certainty, for they are Absolute Truths (here you must kneel and genuflect). You cannot deny an Absolute Truth, boys and girls!

Pay heed to the message coming to you from the Church of Alex Jacob!

But Ideas are an enormous maze, and there are many pitfalls there. We all know, so so clearly, that in our world 'the blind lead the blind' into a pit. And modernity is often little more than a series of pits, one after another, and pits within pits.

Christianity---in the essence---can be extremely sophisticated, and its doctrines can appear on the same stage and compete with 'the best of the best' of Western philosophical ideas. But it can also be nothing more than---to quote aaron---a manifestation of social psychosis. Something so bizarre and outlandish that you almost have to describe it as 'demonic', hence the term 'psychosis'.

The problem is really just enormous when you combine mass evangelical charismatic social gatherings, with all the attendant coercions and a churning undercurrent of Heaven-only-knows what (mass hysteria?) all in the context of a population prepared by mercantile culture to allow in, accept, offer no resistance to!

Advertising in that sense seeks ways to by-pass the critical faculties and gets very, very good at it. When you have created this sort of creature, when you have raised them from their protoplasmic beginnings, when you have conditioned them to be this or to be that, but never to be free, and then get that person emotionally so riled up and anxious about life and all life's problems which are made to look insurmountable, that can only have some sort of cathartic, convulsive, ritually magical solution---and you subject that person to this freak-show evangelizing: you are right on the verge of social madness, so you'd better watch out.

In that context, divorcing oneself from anything even similar is almost necessary.

Rapture

[Jamesh]

When I put my trust in Jesus Christ and repented of my godlessness - the weight of my guilt was removed... and I was born again; I experienced a "newness of life". All this that these Christians keep talking about is "the Absolute" truth.

Clearly, we humans, like dogs and horses, have evolved a brain form that finds joy and release in submission. “If you can’t beat join em” leads to increased chances of survival – without this males in particular would fight to the death far more frequently.

I imagine the ego’s of God believers being like an Ouroboros (snake eating its tail). The ego continuously feeds upon itself (a belief in God is basically just an affect of the ego), and externalities that would otherwise potentially alter established ego programs to become more rational, are simply repelled or spun off by the circular ego programs. The concept of God makes the output of the ego’s philosophical subroutines all point to the God program, and new knowledge gets swept up and muddled in this mental data flow.

A belief in god, egowise, is the natural path of the least resistance. It is easier upon the ego to believe in God than to believe in reality. Because the ego becomes closed off to reality, it begins to feed upon itself, making the self more and more important. Although actions of self-importance are controlled somewhat by the religious societies social tenets that create fear in the individual, deep down the growth of self-importance of the ego leads to strong desires to have dominance over others - hence for example their two faced nature of helping others versus rampant materialism, their desire to enforce their memes politically, and the often predatory nature of their sexuality. [Edit: and as David said - this is why religion attracts those with a propensity for pathological lying]

[Cory Duchesne]

No one said you had to like that song. I have never heard it, but you are holding it up as if it were the sum total of Christianity. You know it's not, right?

I'm not holding it up as the sum total of Christianity, I'm holding it up as the equivalent to the sentiment expressed by Aaron777. It's merely an emotional outcry to some greater being, a petition for intervention by a parental figure.

I realize Steiner had a hard-on for Jesus as well, but he diverged from conventional Christianity in his views on reincarnation and karma - which to me implies that he doesn't encourage blind trust that Jesus will take care of everything for you. That's what I'm attacking.

What do you mean by "take care of everything?" Do you honestly think that every Christian believes that? More bluntly, every educated Christian?

I'm sure you've heard the sentiment: "everything happens for a reason"

By this, they mean that everything happens to benefit their ego in some way.

This is a very widespread notion.

Bohm's work says nothing about having faith or putting your trust in a powerful feeling or an idea. On the contrary he advises against it

I only briefly encountered Bohm as a physicist and even more briefly with his exchanges with Krishnamurti. He was a scientist. So what? Show me where he says anything about a "powerful feeling or idea."

Bohm emphasized that 'thought as a system' is faulty throughout, and that thought as a system includes 'feelings'

Thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, "felts" and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure.... Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a "systematic fault". It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system.

Nowhere in Bohm's work did he mention anything about the importance of Jesus.

And while you are at it, maybe you could show me where Christ advised his followers to yield to impulses, which is what you are making it sound like.

Many religious people I know assert that their faith in God is born from a strong feeling, not through reason. That's why i mentioned 'powerful feeling' - just in case you were one of those types who think with your gut rather than your brain.

So you think there is only one idea of Christ? As opposed to many different ideas, some more generic than others?

No, I believe I said only a dimwit would call Christ a "generic idea." I can't vouch for the guy who made the original post, but how do you know he's not just a simple soul who doesn't sound like he has his own voice?

Keep in mind that my original post was a reaction of astonishment and disbelief that someone could one day be 'Nietzsche on steroids' and a frequent reader of Solway, and then one day convert to one of the crudest religious sentiments that humanity has ever known.

[Jason]

I assume that if Jason has something to say to me, he will say it, and what he says may not be what you want him to mean, or interpret him to mean.

I said what I needed to in my previous post to this thread. Are you going to respond to it?