Letters to the Editor
droogoy
Published Letters: 590 Editor's Choice: 9
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@debaser
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]debaser wrote:
I hate to wade into this boiler-room, but dude...this is not a "shattering admission" or even news of any kind. You learn this stuff in grade school! The Four Gospels were written with four very different audiences in mind:
I never disputed that. My point is that Bokenkotter's remark discloses the "Jesus as God-Man" shtick is all fable. And no, you don't learn that in grade school. I didn't learn it until doing textual criticism and taking biblical exegesis at uinversity many years later.
For an open insight on this, read JOhn Dominic Crossan's: The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, or Oxford scholar Geza Vermes' excellent: The Authentic Gospel of Jesus.
As Vermes observes(op. cit., p. 415):
“The religion revealed by the authentic message of Jesus is straightforward, without complex dogmas, mythical images or self-centered mystical speculation. It resembles a race consisting only of the final ‘straight’ – demanding from the runners their last ounce of energy and with a winners’ medal prepared for all the JEWISH participants who cross the finishing line.
At this juncture, one may wonder how a religious genius of the caliber of Jesus could have been such a narrow-minded chauvinist. But the Jewish eschatology of that age was exclusive, and maybe Jesus was simply a child of his time. On the other hand, he may have embraced the prophetic idea manifest in the second half of the Book of Isaiah according to which entry of the Jews into God’s Kingdom would persuade the Gentiles to join them. If so, Jesus could easily imagine that on completion of his exclusively JEWISH mission, God would step in and take care of the rest of mankind.
Compared with the dynamic religion of Jesus, Christianity seems to belong to another world. With its mixture of high philosophical speculation on the triune God, its Johannine Logos mysticism, and Pauline Redeemer myth of a dying and risen Son of God, with its sacramental symbolism and ecclesiastical discipline substituted for the extinct eschatological passion- with its cosmopolitan openness combined with a built-in anti-Judaism- it is hard to imagine how the two could have come from the same source.
Yet, 2000- year old Christianity, responsible for the gospel tradition, proudly considers Jesus its founder. What I have reconstructed as the genuine religion of Jesus is espoused nowadays only by single individuals, or is distorted and caricatured by cult groups and sects.
Where does this leave us?
The historical Jesus believed in the coming of the Kingdom in his lifetime and this belief furnished the motivation for his eschatological action. However, this belief did not come true. Absolute trust in God prevented him from imagining the possibility of the cross. Yet, one would imagine that detached observers familiar with the Roman world could easily have anticipated such a tragic outcome. It seemed that only when he let out the Aramaic cry: ‘Eloi, Eloi lama sabacthani’- did Jesus suddenly perceive he would not be able to complete his task – a thought that previously had not crossed his mind.
For a twenty-first century person with genuine spiritual insight the absence of the literal fulfillment of Jesus’ belief in the arrival of the Kingdom in his time does not count as a failure”"
Vermes then goes on from there to consider the problem of “eschatological motivation” in Christianity as the proclaimed banner-carrier of Yeshua. Thus, Pauline Christianity tackled the clear absence of the literal fulfillment of Jesus’ claims by parlaying its eschatology into TWO acts: The Life of Jesus in the recent past (act 1) followed by the “Parousia” and “Second Coming” (Act 2). In this way, the Christian scribes, proselytizers were able to keep hope alive as it were and transmuted the despair of unfulfilled events into expected, hopeful future ones. On this also was the “salvation” myth built, since a means had to be found by which to keep ordinary mortals with low attention spans interested.
Thus, multiple texts, passages were doctored to support the “future Messiah” myth. It all translated into one not so subtle message:
“You better pay attention to Jesus for YOUR future eternal life’s sake- and you better invest time in preparing for the Second Coming!”
There is NO Catholic of repute, even the Jesuits that taught me at Loyola, that would disagree with that!
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Quantum uncertainty
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mike Sulzer wrote:
"Heisenberg's Principle only applies at the quantum level of observation - not the classical, macroscopic level."
Would it not be better to say that at our normal scale of things, Quantum uncertainty is so small that it is swamped out by other kinds of uncertainty. Thus one must make a special effort to observe these quantum effects.
Well, let's get a handle on the magnitudes we're talking about here.
Consider a macroscopic billiard ball with a momentum
p = 1 kg*m/s
Now, find the uncertainty in its position based on the Heisenberg principle:
delta(x) = h/ 2 (pi) (1 kg*m/s)
= (6.625 x 10^34 J*s)/ 2 (3.141) 1(kg*m/s)
delta (x) = 1.055 x 10^-34 m
Now, to get a handle on exactly how minuscule that is, bear in mind that even the (yet undiscovered) gravitational waves have wavelengths only on the order of 10^-14 m or so, and this uncertainty in position is TWENTY orders of magnitude LESS.
To me, this suggests a magnitude so minuscule and so much smaller than any competing uncertainties, that it simply "doesn't apply".
In other words, any computed hypothetical uncertainty that is beyond the realm of possible measurement is also beyond the realm of practical application.