The Crow wrote:Fail to see how this is a celestial event. Maybe you know something I don't?
My point is that I am querying this idea of "celestial" events. I think we are looking at a universe with gods and humans and heaven and earth and hell but it is one universe with different rooms, but the gods and humans often meet and interact and have many attributes in common.
Part of the problem is I do not think the idea of "spiritual" existed. That is a much later scholastic idea.
This is all products of human imagination - worlds we have socially created to try and understand ourselves and the world we are in.
These systems - some of which are immortality systems to help us live forever - have fascinating out comes like Christ rising from the dead.
But I do not understand why commentators fixate on specific immortality systems, like Judaism, the Greek and Roman versions of the true gods, and "xianity" whatever that is, instead of looking at all the ideas that were around and how they were continually interacting with each other.
In working out what happened with one of these immortality systems - xianity - we are not looking at a founder figure, however indirect, type trajectory, but a James Burke connections trajectory of ideas being mangled together and bashed into shape by heresy hunters.
My point is that I am querying this idea of "celestial" events. I think we are looking at a universe with gods and humans and heaven and earth and hell but it is one universe with different rooms, but the gods and humans often meet and interact and have many attributes in common.
These God attributes are given by man and preached as heaven and hell, body and blood and so forth. Deities are man created and are a control mechanism.
Part of the problem is I do not think the idea of "spiritual" existed. That is a much later scholastic idea.
It may not have, I cannot say. But I do believe in the case of the Pauline writer it was spiritual and no physical body or actual human existed.
This is all products of human imagination - worlds we have socially created to try and understand ourselves and the world we are in.
With this I agree. Gods concocted to instill fear in people with the threats of eternal torment and etc....
In working out what happened with one of these immortality systems - xianity - we are not looking at a founder figure, however indirect, type trajectory, but a James Burke connections trajectory of ideas being mangled together and bashed into shape by heresy hunters.
Immortality is what the human race wished it had. The idea of a dying and resurrected saviour I think really underlies the fact that humanity is fighting death. Jesus supposed death and resurrection gives those who believe in him a belief that they will conquer death in some form or fashion.
clive wrote:We must be very careful to check if writers are actually using the same assumptions as us.
Bartlett’s stated interest is not in delineating the stark boundaries between the “natural/supernatural” binary. Instead, he is more interested in the failures of those boundaries and in what pressures the debates, anxieties, and conflicts of those failures place on the categories of “natural” and “supernatural.”
Recognizing that belief systems are never coherent or stable, Bartlett examines moments of “intellectual discomfort,” of conflicts between opposing arguments and between experience and authority, and what they reveal about anomalies in different paradigms in the Middle Ages (p. 2). The volume opens with an examination of the limits of the category of “natural” in the medieval period, especially after Peter Lombard, in his mid- twelfth-century biblical commentary the Sentences, drew on Aristotelian logic to posit that there are things beyond nature.
Later Scholastic writers, especially Thomas Aquinas, took up Lombard’s formulation and went beyond it, positing that miracles had a cause beyond nature, thereby stressing a sharper division between the natural and the miraculous than they had inherited from patristic authors. Aquinas in particular was, as Bartlett shows, central to articulating “the supernatural” as a category—as a series of phenomena (miracles) and as a cause (God). From here Bartlett moves to an examination of ideas of the medieval universe from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries.
Beginning with the ongoing debate about the distribution of the elements and its impact on terrestrial geography, the argument moves outward to celestial motion and varying explanations of the causes of eclipses. In two succinct sets of case studies, Bartlett demonstrates that medieval ideas about the physical nature of the world were ongoing and hotly contested.
Miracles having a cause beyond nature? . You would not happen to have a link to the text where Thomas Aquinas writes about this would you? That said I do not agree with miracles being a cause beyond nature.
princesscleo wrote:CORNELIUS TACITUS (55 - 120 A.D.) Said that, Tacitus was a 1st and 2nd century Roman historian who lived through the reigns of over half a dozen
Roman emperors. Considered one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, Tacitus verifies the Biblical account of Jesus' execution at the
hands of Pontius Pilate who governed Judea from 26-36 A.D. during the reign of Tiberius.
princesscleo wrote:CORNELIUS TACITUS (55 - 120 A.D.) Said that, Tacitus was a 1st and 2nd century Roman historian who lived through the reigns of over half a dozen
Roman emperors. Considered one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, Tacitus verifies the Biblical account of Jesus' execution at the
hands of Pontius Pilate who governed Judea from 26-36 A.D. during the reign of Tiberius.
Good one. Only problem with that is Tacitus is only verifying what he heard not what he saw. Don't have to go any further a search of this site will bring up more on that.
Miracles having a cause beyond nature? . You would not happen to have a link to the text where Thomas Aquinas writes about this would you? That said I do not agree with miracles being a cause beyond nature.
Miracles having a cause beyond nature? . You would not happen to have a link to the text where Thomas Aquinas writes about this would you? That said I do not agree with miracles being a cause beyond nature.
Not sure what is happening but some of my original posts have disappeared - I have reported this.
I think we now disagree with Aquinas that healing is beyond nature, so we are looking at changed definitions of natural, supernatural and miraculous. I don't know how to work this out but we do need to go step by step and be clear what definitions were being used by whom when.
So I propose early xian writers - pre Augustine - were not using an idea of a celestial christ as that idea had not yet been invented. They were using a standard mix and match - like God walking in the garden (ie god was natural) (another of my posts that seem to have disappeared!)
Last edited by Peter Kirby on Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:20 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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