The precise point about Paul where Georgios Sidirountios meets Joseph Turmel

[maryhelena]

Thanks for starting the thesis. When I was writing I was not trying to become Christian again.
I assume you met a hurdle/s just in my comments above.

For over two million years our mammal character is designed by nature to follow leaders. We also are designed by nature to have a sense of justice. We are made to want to follow a just, wise leader who will help us survive and prosper by answering our needs. Instead of this leader we often get dangerous leaders who are feeding on us.
All this was very well understood by important ancient philosophers. Mankind's needs for safe leadership did produce those philosophers. Many philosophers were trying for long to create wise, honest, strong and good leaders. Mankind's needs produced Jesus the permanent leader-Savior through the minds of the philosophers. According to theology (which is philosophy), Jesus pre-existed his any appearance on earth. Jesus-God is part of a Holy Trinity, without beginning and without end. The Savior Jesus appeared on earth just after a time when philosophy reached its highest levels ever, and not any time before. In essence Jesus appeared on earth very recently.

We are created by a force or forces if you wish, which pre-existed us, which composed us out of things visible and invisible. There is an entire creation, a multiverse inside and around us which we should always try to understand by reason, but which will always remain outside our capabilities. God is all what we understand, all what we do not understand, all what made us. God is inside everything, creates everything and no matter how much we try we will never fully understand what God is. There is no beginning and no end of God because we do have limits. Jesus is the link God gives to the man to move above the limits of thought and existence.

It is very easy to say we do not need any religion at all. What is hard is to study religion and realize that others who lived long in the past might have been much more wise than us in many aspects. Dawkins may be a great mind but my conclusions so far are that we cannot create civilisation without religion because religion is the product of long-lasting thought made in order to help mankind move forward. Christianity has accumulated inside it millennia of ancient Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Jewish and other ancient wisdom. To through all this in the bin and start our own new project based on our faith that we are clever-reasonable and we can find the truth just by our new modern selves, may soon become fatal for Western Europe and the US. Socrates, Dawkins' father and one of the main heroes which inspired the formation of Jesus, was not an atheist himself.

George
Perhaps my mention of Dawkins might indicate that I'm one of those New Atheists. If that was your reading then I need to clarify:

I'm not a New Atheist - I'm simply an atheist. I think the New Atheists have failed to distinguish theology from religion - leading them to beat the 'god is dead' drum - leaving them not victors but malcontents in the fight against irrationality.

The scientific ignorance and tomfoolery of many of the new atheists with regard to religion, and history, makes me almost embarrassed to be an atheist.29 But when foolishness is promoted as a course of political action, then it becomes potentially dangerous to everyone’s health. A sentiment that only feeds into the current wave of violence is Harris’s suggestion in The End of Faith that a total war on Islam may be unavoidable. Islam and religious ideology per se aren’t the principal causes of suicide bombing and terror in today’s world—at least no more than are soccer, friendship, or faith for a better future. What is the cause of the current global wave of terrorism, then? Nothing so abstract or broad as any of these things, but bits of all of them, embedded and acting together in the peculiar sorts of small- and large-scale social networks that are emerging in this time in history.

Atran, Scott. Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What it Means to Be Human . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[snip]

I certainly don’t criticize the Four Horsemen and other scientifically minded new atheists for wanting to rid the world of dogmatically held beliefs that are vapid, barbarous, anachronistic, and wrong. I object to their manner of combat, which is often shrill, scientifically baseless, psychologically uninformed, politically naive, and counterproductive for goals we share.

Atran, Scott. Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What it Means to Be Human . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Atran's definition of religion ?

The cognitive perspective I have chosen for this book is a biological and scientific perspective that focuses on the causal role of the mind/brain in generating behavior. From this vantage, religion is not doctrine, or institutions, or even faith. Religion ensues from the ordinary workings of the human mind as it deals with emotionally compelling problems of human existence, such as birth, aging, death, unforeseen calamities, and love. In religion, these “facts of life” are always inherent problems of society, caused by the very same intentional agents that are thought to constitute society. They are never just random or mechanical incidents of a physical or biological nature, as science might suggest. For religion, there is always an intentional, socially relevant reason for this particular Religious beliefs and practices involve the very same cognitive and affective structures as nonreligious beliefs and practices—and no others—but in (more or less) systematically distinctive ways. From an evolutionary standpoint, these structures are, at least proximately, no different in origin and kind from the genetic instincts and mechanical processes that govern the life of other animals. Religious explanations of religion may or may not accept this account of proximate causes, but no faith-based account considers it to be the whole story. I do not intend to refute such nonscientific explanations of religion, nor do I pretend that they are morally worthless or intellectually unjustified. The chosen scientific perspective of this book is simply blind to them and can elucidate nothing about them—so far as I can see.

From this vantage, human cognition (re)creates the gods who sustain hope beyond sufficient reason and commitment beyond self interest. Humans ideally represent themselves to one another in gods they trust. Through their gods, people see what is good in others and what is evil.

Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition) . Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

(my colouring]

Scott Atran: Religious behavior often seems to be motivated by sacred values, that is, values which a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that underlies cultural identity and precludes comparisons or tradeoffs with material or instrumental values of realpolitik or the marketplace. As Immanuel Kant framed it, virtuous religious behavior is its own reward and attempts to base it on utility nullifies its moral worth. Instrumental decision-making (or “rational choice”) involves strict cost-benefit calculations regarding goals, and entails abandoning or adjusting goals if costs for realizing them are too high. A sacred value is a value that incorporates moral and ethical beliefs independently of, or all out of proportion to, its prospect of success.”

https://hal.science/ijn_00505418/document

I think the above will indicate where I am coming from with regards to religion and theology....Theology -I'll fight until the cows come home - religion is a fundamental aspect of the evolution of the human brain. Perhaps, at the end of the day 'God' is simply the spark plus that keeps our intellectual evolving. A bit like that North Star that guides the ship on it's way - our intellectual spark plus keeps us forever striving for knowledge.



I've had the paperback for years - but decided to buy the Kindle edition this morning...



I've had the hardback for years also - and upgraded a few years ago to the Kindle edition.


From a world renowned anthropologist to a renowned Catholic theologian...

Hans Küng: Christianity and the World Religions, vxi:

“Religion is a believing view of life, approach to life, way of life, and therefore a fundamental pattern embracing the individual and society, man and the world, through which a person …sees and experiences, thinks and feels, acts and suffers, everything. It is a transcendentally grounded and immanently operative system of coordinates, by which man orients himself intellectually, emotionally, and existentially”.