Letters to the Editor
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Alby
Of course that's what she meant. You'd have to be retarded to think anything else with that turn of the phrase...just like the white councilman who recently accused a black councilman of being "niggardly" with a funding project. Neither Pagels nor that councilman were trying all that hard to be obscure. Both may have been trying hard to be clever, but neither one was.
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Manichaeism
Dear Fred Duquette,
"Manichaeism is not gnosticism"
The editors of the "Nag Hammadi and Manichaeism" monograph series would be suprised to learn this.
Most forms of Gnosticism, Manichaeism included, derived from Judaism: the question of how they interacted with Christianity is a complex one and it is too simple to say they cynically borrowed from their contemporary and neighbor. No form of Gnosticism that I can think of recommended suicide; in fact the Manichaeans in particular were deeply interested in the world and their religion incorporated (and was founded on) the best science of its day.
Medievalists debate whether the Cathars had any connection to Western Gnosticism, which to all evidence had expired at least five centuries before. (Manichaeism continued to survive in China, but it had lost contact with the West.)
I recommend any of Samuel N. C. Lieu's books on Manichaeism if you wish to learn more about this unusually well-documented form of ancient Gnosticism.
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Speaking of retarded ...
... just like the white councilman who recently accused a black councilman of being "niggardly" with a funding project. ... [signed by] -- and I mean 'retarded' in the nicest possible way
Except it was Anthony Williams, the black mayor of Washington DC who used the term "niggardly" in describing a proposed budget put forth by the mostly black city council.
Nothing like getting the story wrong and then calling other people "retarded."
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Dualism, Aramaic and Greek
Could you say how Greek is 'bound to a dualistic frame'? Classical Greek? Koine? Modern Greek?
Aramaic can express dualistic concepts very well: much of Classical philosophy survived by
being translated into Arabic -- but it was amost always translated from Greek, into Syriac (a form of Aramaic), then to Arabic.
The great majority of early Christian literature, including the New Testament, was composed in Greek.
There is no evidence for an Aramaic stage of Christian literature -- even Q seems to have been written in Greek.
(If, perhaps, you have been reading Lamsa or his followers -- I took my Syriac from a professor who both grew up speaking Syriac and who had an advanced degree in the languages' history and use. He said he had never heard of what Lamsa was talking about. Bear in mind, too, that the New Testament in Syriac was a translation from Greek: we have very little of Syriac versions of the Bible from before then.)
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..So Darwinian Mechanist...
...can you explain to me how it is possible for ideas to be STRENGTHENED/INCREASED/SPREAD, in seeming defiance of the Third Law of Thermodynamics, by SHARING them between minds?? Usually, in the world of positivistic science, when someone breaks a "crumb" in half, one gets two half "crumbs." As George Carlin, in a more sober moment, suggested, "no, man. You have two crumbs."
What about the possibility of a holographic universe -- each piece of the hologram contains a view of the ENTIRE whole, intact hologram?
In my experience, both worlds are internally consistent -- the mind over matter world and the matter over mind world -- but is there a language and a set of meanings that can be used to communicate back and forth so that people from one worldview can communicate effectively with a person from the other (albeit imaginary) worldview?
What about "spirit" just being a dimension, or set of dimensions, where mental energy moves throughout the human body and across to other bodies? It could explain why some classes of neuropeptides change state before the chemical or electrical processes that these molecules apparently require even show up to interact.
Granted I never got past High School electronics (four years of both digital and analog systems...mostly Vo-Tech level stuff)...I still recall that in an inductive/magnetic coupled circuit, voltage (pressure) actually shows up 90 degrees out of phase from the actual current (electrons). Or something along these lines...forgive my aging memory.
Bottom line, I really do think that science and spirituality come together at some place in time and space...the theory of the universe as a singularity would tend to indicate this unity, would it not? Granted religiosity tends to make distinctions imprecise and distorted, these core religious concepts are just place holders for inductive suppositions as to how the world may actually work.
I repeat with some degree of certainty that it's not possible for science to grasp, explain AND experience totality while standing outside of the self-same totality.
My argument is that the universe is a field of intelligence without bias, judgment, thought or doubt.
If you'd like to take a stab at standing outside of this field, please show me how....?
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the Jihad of jhillr64
Comes now Jhillr, the 64th in the line of name originality (Id like to know what the other 63 were thinking in choosing such a moniker), who both claims that nobody living knows the facts yet it is a fact that the bible retells some ancient story. I must therefore conclude that you are dead in order to state such knowledge.
Thats gnostic thinking: there are no facts, just allegories, except for the fact that all is allegory,which is the only truth one neeed "know" to achieve enlightenment. SO yet another anonymous (the 64th, no less) defender of the gnostic faith confuses yet another issue from beyond the grave.
What you should have said was that the formulation of gnosticism was influenced by different traditions and philosophies, just like other religions. We cant know for sure, because we cannot time travel, how accurate the text is to the reported event. So it is better to take it all as allegory, live and let live.
The problem is that the gnostic Jesus and the gospel Jesus are saying two completely different and opposed things. We also have original documents, ancient manuscripts, from both the gospels and the judas document. Reconciling both to allegory is gnostic idealism (e.g., what you say or do is of no consequence; meaning is meanigless, fact is allegory)