Peter Kirby wrote:Apparently I should have avoided the colloquial profanity and instead went with what I first typed, "Make your point."Leucius Charinus wrote:I can only surmise that you are ignoring (and ridiculing) my questions (about your world view) because they have no merit in your world-view. It's quite obvious that the Apologists still believe in the existence of some "Divine Institute" whereas other less traditional positions (such as that of Thomas Brodie) relegate this church organisation to some sort of literary "school". The shit is already in the world and has been for over one and half millenia. It was raised from an obscure latrine and hit the political fan in the 4th century and has remained stuck to everything ever since.
I'm not ridiculing your questions. I just don't have the patience for them. I appreciate writers who can get to the point. If it requires an audience or someone to interrogate to get there, I'd say to work on it until it doesn't. Your logic will be more clear without such rhetorical props.
My point then is that a study of the history of the church organisation after its rise in the 4th century from three centuries in obscurity reveals it is extremely corrupt. The details of this history are often unknown to even many Biblical Scholars who have focussed their attention on the "Early Church" prior to Nicaea. In this early period the dominant paradigm is that the church was subject to intolerance and persecution. OTOH is the later period, the dominant paradigm is that the church was the instigator of intolerance and persecution.
This fact has implications to the process of weighing and evaluating evidence. Especially literary evidence which has been preserved by this same corrupt church organisation from antiquity and through the middle ages. One prominent problem with exploring the corruption of the church organisations, say between the 4th and the 18th century (not that some church organisations are not still obviously corrupt in the 21st century) is that the evidence points towards a conspiracy by these historical organisations to control the perception of the masses, by the sword or by the manuscripts.
The problem is of course once you raise the possibility of a conspiracy by the church organisation you are regarded as a conspiracy theorist. This seems to be the case even in the situation of regarding the "Blasphemy Laws" as a conspiracy of the Church organisations who at that time had the means, motive and opportunity, to pass on the substance of its earlier "Heresy Laws" to the Christian nations ands their states. I would like to find some middle path of discussion whereby this sort of stuff can be listed and examined.
The concept of anti-Christian blasphemy is present in the canonical letters of John, In the 4th century specific authors and texts were considered by Eusebius to be blasphemous. So the history of blasphemy is certainly involved in the bigger picture of Christian origins, and it is highly likely that it is associated with the history of sceptical thinking directed AGAINST the dogmas of the church.
LC