Some resurrection thoughts by CS Lewis

by bebu 38 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  bebu

  If I'm not too blinkered here, I didn't see any heaps of evidentiary counter argument; only a Sancho Panza shoulder shrug.
  

  I may be the Knight of the Woeful Countenance; but, I'm jousting with the right windmills.

  Terry, this forum is not the best place to find scores of folks who would be able to provide or direct you to counter arguments. There are scores of excellent books, internet articles, and Christian boards where you could pose your questions to those with enough time, and awareness, to answer them. (I quickly noticed, for example, a few problems with your comments about Herod, but I try not to hijack threads--even my own . ...My own feeling here is that most folks vent when they are angry, upset or grieving, and silence is kinder. People who are bitter are poor listeners as well, usually. ...I respect and admire Narkissos and Leolaia for all the long posts they produce (esp. Leolaia whom I jealously suspect never needs to edit a single one of her loooooong posts!). I myself am not a talented writer, and so, sadly, writing is time-consuming. And my time is limited such that I cannot afford to get into drawn-out debates (and especially now that the sun is out and my garden calls me!). ...So, my comment here is to not mistake the relative silence on this board for total silence from the Christian community. This board is hardly a cross-section of society, religion-wise. It's a rather small pond. (But I like it, nonetheless.)

  Have I hijacked this thread? Oh darn!!

  Back to the topic, I just wanted to point out that the physical details in apparition stories appear at the late end of literary development within the NT canon. Later apocryphal literature will become even more detailed (e.g. the first description of resurrection itself in the Gospel of Peter). This imo suggests a trend which needs to be taken into account.

  That's interesting... and yet, it doesn't give me the sense of improbability.

  ...Also, I notice, theologically speaking, this situation is quite interesting for another reason. If the resurrection is true, then there is the suggestion here that it was/is enough to believe that Christ is alive, even though we may not accurately understand what happened to his body. (Of course, the WTS could not ever permit anything less than "accurate" knowledge... )

  bebu
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  LittleToe

  Terry:

  But, the evidence we have is the evidence we HAVE.

  Of course.

  If I'm not too blinkered here, I didn't see any heaps of evidentiary counter argument; only a Sancho Panza shoulder shrug.

  If I'm not much mistaken this is going down the path of "there's little external evidence for what the bible says about the resurrection (or replace with whatever biblical event you wish)". This viewpoint often neglects that fact that the bible is a written record in it's own right (even if you're suspicious of it's accuracy). How many extant records are there of Ghengis Khan's, Nebuchadnezzar's, or Pharoah Thutmose III's campaigns? Yet we more or less take them at face value.

  I may be the Knight of the Woeful Countenance; but, I'm jousting with the right windmills.

  But what if there's no windmill, no trebuchet, no lance, no horse, and no spoon?

  Is this the same as saying they have BECOME balanced people who function more than adequately without resorting violence of any description BECAUSE of or IN SPITE OF some form of religion in their lives?

  Or alternatively we are all the sum of our experiences and it has contributed to who we are. I don't see too many people having to "do battle" with their religious past.

  I suspect the "seek-and-destroy mentality" is a reaction to cultic influences in our lives. We were certainly encouraged to pick holes in everything barring the WTS. What happens to an individual who then turns on "mother"? Do they continue in that vein, or miraculously find that all is at peace in their world?
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  SixofNine

  Six:In particular you should well know that I'm not dogmatic in my statements, and continue to evolve, having shared more than a few threads and beers over several years.

  Indeed I do know that. I've enjoyed watching your evolution, even if it has been slower than watching ice melt off of a buried Mammoth.

  Is there absolutely no room in your worldview for the possibility that any of the bible is historic, or is it a complete fiction from Genesis to Revelation? Is there absolutely no worth in it (regardless of whether or not it's restating the axioms of previous cultures), or is it merely a mass of pointless stories?

  This I don't understand? I mean, of course much of it is historic, though even that part is not very accurate, given that none of the writers seemed to have being a "historian" as their goal.

  As to the bible's measure of worth? Hmmm, I'd say Narkissos and Leo's lives are richer for it (and mine from learning from them), but on a large scale, it's total influence on the world is negative. VERY negative. That is to be expected in fact, considering the politically narrow way the bible was compliled and, well, pimped at it's inception. And no, of course the stories aren't pointless, in that the writer certainly had a point. There is just damn little wisdom for anyone else other than the writer and the specific people he was trying to manipulate, oh so many ages ago.

  I find it hard to believe that you could be so bigoted as to find differing viewpoints intolerable. Please prove me right.

  C'mon, I'm from Texas, lol. I'm bigoted against Cowboy for being from Oklahoma! However, I don't think the disgust I mentioned above is bigotry. It's simply the natural emotion that comes from the knowledge of the root causes for the experiences I've lived. If I remember correctly, I said that "my natural state is disgust for people who insist on pimping mythology as the word of god". Frankly, Ross, I don't really think of you as doing that (you're more like a friend who pushes others to try LSD than a pimp ).
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  Terry

  How many extant records are there of Ghengis Khan's, Nebuchadnezzar's, or Pharoah Thutmose III's campaigns? Yet we more or less take them at face value

  Are you serious?

  What army did Jesus lead? What lands did he himself conquer? What monuments did he build. What books did he write? What art did he create? What music did he compose? Etc. etc.

  These are the manner in which ACTUAL persons impact on their surroundings. In the case of Jesus, we have others acting___in his place___representing a "him" that has always been arguable. Jesus is a chimera, a simulacrum of a sentient being.

  Terry
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  LittleToe

  A philosophy that evolves and survives for 2000 years, adapting to encompass (at least nominally) 1/3 of a planet's population, is nothing to be sneezed at.

  If you could give a single speech, on a hillside in Palestine, and affect the worldview of millions of people so much that they would desire to sit at your feet in a place called "heaven", would you go down in the annals of history as a mediocre motivational speaker?

  Nowadays you're lucky if you're remembered by the generation after you, far less have songs written about you by future generations.

  I can't believe you are so blinkered as to ignore such fundamental facts.
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  Narkissos

  Ross,

  If you could give a single speech, on a hillside in Palestine, and affect the worldview of millions of people so much that they would desire to sit at your feet in a place called "heaven", would you go down in the annals of history as a mediocre motivational speaker?

  Nowadays you're lucky if you're remembered by the generation after you, far less have songs written about you by future generations.

  If the issue is about evidence for a "historical Jesus" I don't find this very convincing: the Sermon on the Mount is obviously a literary composition, intended to present Jesus as a new Moses; several of its teachings can be found in such different writings as the epistle to the Romans or the epistle of James, in which they are not ascribed to Jesus. Btw, not a single line in the so-called "Mosaic Torah" can be convincingly traced back to a historical Moses either...

  Much wisdom can be expressed through a fictional character which is eventually cherished as an embodiment of his teachings. Think of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Saint-Exupéry's Litte Prince, Gibran's Prophet, etc.
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  bebu

  Much wisdom can be expressed through a fictional character which is eventually cherished as an embodiment of his teachings. Think of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Saint-Exupéry's Litte Prince, Gibran's Prophet, etc.

  This is so, but I can't think of a single person who ever recognized these characters as more than fiction from the very beginning. Perhaps Santa Claus is as successful as any of these wise/kind fictional characters have gotten.

  How does a literary composition prove the non-existence of a character? The writing style does this? That loses me. I think Matthew saw the correlations between Jesus and Moses, and deliberately sought to emphasize them--not simply because it helped the Jewish audience recognize Jesus as a character they could be inspired by who was 'kosher' to learn from, but because, in Matthew's view, Jesus was the prophet which appeared whom Moses had mentioned, per Dt. 18. Not a fictional prophet, but an historical one. There is no indication that he meant anything less than that.

  If Romans could be accepted as being written by an historical Paul, and James' is attributed to an historical man (named James)--and these men (and others) affirm that Jesus was an historical figure--why are their writings dismissed out of hand? Style? If they did indeed die martyred for their faith, I can't imagine any one of them not admitting that it was all only meant to be something inspiring to the Jews, and nothing more. They certainly had plenty of chances for that.

  bebu
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  Narkissos

  How does a literary composition prove the non-existence of a character?

  I never said it did. Please read my post to Ross again: I submitted that the Sermon of the Mount did not prove Jesus' existence, which is a long way from saying that it proves Jesus' non-existence.

  Whether Jesus was recognised as a historical character from the beginning is the big question. He may have been. He is clearly presented as such in the Gospels, but the Gospels are not earlier than the last quarter of the 1st century. In the (probably) earlier Pauline epistles, Christ Jesus appears mostly as a heavenly character (the Son of God) coming into the human sphere and going back to heaven. Here myth (the heavenly character) seems to precede history (the human Jesus).

  The vast majority of scholars think that at some point the Son of God myth met a historical memory of a 1st-century man named Jesus. A few scholars think that the "earthly Jesus" is a later historicisation of the myth: in that sense too the Word became flesh. Who is right? We may never know. Whatever the case, it is clear that the first Gospel in time (Mark) already combines divine and human traits in its depiction of Jesus.
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  toreador
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  Terry

  A philosophy that evolves and survives for 2000 years, adapting to encompass (at least nominally) 1/3 of a planet's population, is nothing to be sneezed at.

  If you could give a single speech, on a hillside in Palestine, and affect the worldview of millions of people so much that they would desire to sit at your feet in a place called "heaven", would you go down in the annals of history as a mediocre motivational speaker?

  Nowadays you're lucky if you're remembered by the generation after you, far less have songs written about you by future generations.

  I can't believe you are so blinkered as to ignore such fundamental facts.

  In view of the above we should give even more credence to Judaism than Christianity (which piggy-backed off it).

  The single speech on a hillside concept above does not take into account that TODAY there is healthy skepticism possible based on science, humanism and scholarly inquiry using the internet. There is a proliferation of competing ideas from all corners of the planet by highly educated persons. Back in the 2nd Century people were superstitious to a fault, naive no end, gullible and easily excited by all things religious.'

  Besides, you are giving credit to Jesus that belongs to Paul. He is the author of Christianity. When churches start mumbling creeds and orthodoxy it is always Paul, Paul, Paul. Jesus is just the figurehead. Paul is the philosophy and the big stick behind the carrot of Jesus.

  Terry