Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
I've seen nothing to suggest possible terrorists posting on Free Republic.
Nor have I ever called anybody a "terrorist".
But it is very interesting to note that in your mind, at least, "terrorist" and "heretic" are pretty much the same thing, no doubt deserving the same fate, right?
Which is why I come back, and back, and back again to the question of our Freemason Founders.
Do you consider them too as "heretics", and so reject their Constitution accordingly?
No, Crossan is a historian, as opposed to, say, a writer of Christian apologetics.
I think you once claimed you knew the difference.
Crossan applied strict historical standards to all the documents related to biblical history.
Of course, from a religious perspective, as I warned you in the beginning, you won't like his results.
But that's real history, as opposed to religious apologetics.
I think I've explained all of this now several times.
Do you ever pay attention?
Thanks for your support, but Kevmo's posts seem to be exactly what spirited irish wants.
I've seen people like Kevmo on Free Republic, on rare occasions before.
Usually they burn themselves out eventually, but "eventually" can take a long time coming...
FRiend, I understand your basic schtick was pretending to be a "historian", and now that you've been exposed, you fall back on pretending that there are no historians, that the only real history is your interpretation of biblical texts.
But history is a real discipline, and there are real historians who don't always confirm biblical texts.
But one who apparently does is Bill O'Reilly, who I've been working through, slowly, withholding judgment until the end.
So far, I've not read anything from O'Reilly that Kevmo would call "heretical".
But am only half finished...
In going on ten years posting here, I've had two or three other, similar experiences, where it seems like they just want to get something desperately important off their chest, and so they hammer hammer at the most convenient nail, which naturally, is me.
Eventually they do burn out, though on one occasion years ago the mods finally jumped in and deleted the whole thread!
I was disappointed, but that thread was getting pretty rough.
And deleting the whole thread did seem to have a beneficial effect in showing everybody that there really are limits here as to how un-Friendly you can get with other posters.
After that, even the most un-Friendly posters there tried to "talk civilized". ;-)
By comparison, except for the incessant howling of "heretic", this thread is still relatively mild mannered.
;-)
tactcalogic: “I think we have much more serious political issues to deal with right now than hunting heretics.”
Spirited: It’s because you do not know the definition of heresy that you do not recognize yourself as well as BroJoek as heresy hunters.
Both of you are at variance with the essay “Damnnable Heresy,...” because the theories and opinions you hold are contrary to those delineated throughout the essay.
So what is heresy? According to on-line dictionaries, the definition of heresy depends on particular religious beliefs, even those thought to be ‘scientific.’
For example, Christianity loosely defines heresy as opinions and teachings (i.e.), contrary to revealed truth. This makes evolution a heresy since it is contrary to creation ex nihilo.
Miriam Webster on-line further defines heresy as dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice.
So for example, to dissent against the theories of Darwinism and Dialectical Materialism in the Soviet Union was to be branded an evil heretic deserving of death. Disbelief in either of these evolutionary conceptions was not tolerated. Thus Soviets “burned at the stake” in excess of 60,000,000 heretics, and other undesirables.
It is because of the particular theories and opinions held by BroJoeK and tacticalogic which are in opposition to those advanced in the essay that they are “hunting intolerable heretics” in this thread. Going by the relentless attacks launched by BroJoeK against Linda Kimball, YHAOS, and Spirited Irish, it appears they are particularly evil heretics. Thus he does his best to verbally “burn them at the stake” over and over and over.
Thank you ever so much, dear marron, for your wonderful, deeply insightful "maunderings!"
Classic Alisky agitprop - accuse the other side of what you're doing. In the entire span of this thread neither BroJoeK nor I have ever leveled accusations of heresy.
Dear BroJoeK, I think your grandfather must have been a very wise, perceptive man.
I think marron spoke truly in saying —
You have the religion of the written doctrines, and the religion as it is lived out. So you’ll find people whose theology is sketchy but in whom God is alive, who know God and walk with him; and you’ll find people whose theology is right on the money but are deader than a hammer. And every variation in between.It seems that Thomas Jefferson did not regard Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God. But he did regard him as a very great moral teacher. And Jefferson knew, as did Adams, Franklin, Washington, et al., that our Constitutional republic could not work for an immoral people.
Which is likely why Franklin, when asked what the Framers had wrought in Philadelphia, replied: "A republic — if you can keep it."
Yet in the modern period, there are many people who evidently believe that the ability to act immorally is the very proof of their "liberty."
You wrote: "Our Founders explicitly rejected state religions because, in their eyes and in ours, such had already 'been tried and failed.'" Oh, so true, dear BroJoeK.
On the other hand, evidently it's okay with lots of people nowadays to have a state-established "secular religion," which turns out to be the progressive State itself....
Dear friend, you poke lots of fun at spirited irish. Her research into gnosticism and its history is impressive; it is clear she is deeply alarmed by her findings, because she can clearly see how gnostic thinking has entered into the very climate of opinion of the intellectual elites of our society and their enablers in the media and academe.
I, too, am profoundly disturbed by this: They are engaged in the systematic falsification of Reality. And absolutely no good can come from that sort of thing.
Have a blessed Merry Christmas, dear BroJoeK — you and all your dear ones!
Dear Ms irish: Have you not been reading your own thread?
Did you not notice your own comrade-in-arms, Kevmo, for dozens of posts now has been howling, howling like a wolf, in nearly every sentence, the word "heretic" at yours truly, BroJoeK?
Indeed, is that not your whole purpose here, to seek-and-destroy "heretics" like, oh, just saying, BroJoeK & tacticalogic?
I mean, truly, Ms irish, if you can get enough of your own mob yelling "heretics" and "blasphemers" at us, maybe you can force the mods to step in and crucify, er, I mean "zot" all those nasty people here defending our Freemason Founders religious ideas.
Wouldn't that be a great day for spirited irish, orthodoxy and Free Republic?
Wouldn't it?
Ms irish, I think all of us here (Kevmo possibly excepted) understand the definition of the word "heresy".
We all "grasp" that in a certain sense all of us are "heretics" all of the time, because none of us ever accepts everything that falls under the rubric of "orthodox accepted conventional wisdom".
But we don't run around howling the word "heretic" at others or ourselves, for the very serious reason that historically words like "heretic", "blasphemer", "apostate", "infidel" & others have meant trials, convictions and murders -- burning at the stake, crucifixions, stonings -- for many thousands, if not millions.
Even today, after centuries of "enlightenment", these words still, still send waves of fear up the backs of brave men & women.
Nobody wants to be called a "heretic" and nearly all of us avoid using such terms, except in technical-historical contexts -- i.e., were reformers like Jan Hus and Girolamo Savonarola burned at the stake for heresy, or was it something else?
And now, Ms irish, some of your own compatriots have launched a witch-hunt against certain FReepers-in-good-standing, people who, if I dare say it, have survived many other such "battles" but are never-the-less rather persistent in responding whenever their BS-meters hit the "red zone".
And yet, Ms irish, you can't see it.
You look and look, and for you it's not there.
And though neither tacticalogic nor myself have called anybody a "heretic", to Ms irish that's the real problem.
We are out there hunting you to charge with "heresy" -- according to you.
You can't see that the reverse is what's really happening, can you?
Have you thought of getting new eye-glasses?
Just fascinating, dear brother in Christ! What the amplituhedron suggests is that our notions of space and time are merely "constructs" emergent from a "deep geometry," and not primary facts of Reality. I.e., space and time are derivitative from something else....
Thank you so very much, dear TXnMA, for the links to these fascinating articles!
Dear Ms boop: Gnosticism is a real word which first described real people (Greeks) who lived thousands of years ago.
These people rejected the material world, in favor of the spiritual realm.
When some of them first became Christians, they brought this dualism with them, and decided that Jesus Christ could not have been a real material human being, but must have been a spiritual projection of God.
So Gnostics were considered one of two great heresies facing the early Rome-centered Church.
The other was Arianism, which took the opposite opinion.
Arians said that Jesus was only a man, not God.
Arians were highly influenced by Jewish thinking which has always insisted that God is One, not some multi-headed monster.
Beginning in 325 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine brought all these bishops together at Nicaea and hammered out a compromise, wherein eventually God was fully defined (!) as One Person of Three "Substances."
And doesn't that sound just won--der--full, a com-pro-mise, where everybody stood around holding hands, singing Kum Bye Ya, praising God-in-three-persons, and all lived happily ever after, right??
And in the midst of all this happy wonderment, Emperor Constantine announced the "catch": anyone who disagreed with his new creed would be put to death, and their property seized by the state.
Yes, there was this, ahem, inconvenient matter of Constantine needing money for his treasury and where better to get it than from "heretics", "apostates", etc.?
And so it was, for the better part of 1,500 years, until in the Age of Enlightenment our Founding Fathers said: no more of that.
So today, some of these old "heresies" are rearing their heads again, but, but, but: not so much Gnosticism as that other ancient materialism: Arianism.
Arianism -- not Gnosticism! -- can easily be called the basis for all scientific & philosophical materialism.
In its modern form, Arianism not only insists that Jesus was human, but that there's no such thing as a spiritual realm.
So just where "Gnosticism" might even fit into the modern world -- all but barren of any spiritual references -- I can't imagine.
Then how Gnosticism could be such a great threat as spirited irish proposes, is beyond me.
But, maybe, maybe I missed something obvious, and like spirited irish need to get my eyes checked out?
Or is it Three Persons of one substance...?
Now I forget... oh dear...
No, put that fire out, I'll figure it out soon, I promise!
;-)
§ 1841. The remaining part of the clause declares, that "no religious test shall ever be required, as a qualification to any office or public trust, under the United States." This clause is not introduced merely for the purpose of satisfying the scruples of many respectable persons, who feel an invincible repugnance to any religious test, or affirmation. It had a higher object; to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance between church and state in the national government. The framers of the constitution were fully sensible of the dangers from this source, marked out in the history of other ages and countries; and not wholly unknown to our own. They knew, that bigotry was unceasingly vigilant in its stratagems, to secure to itself an exclusive ascendancy over the human mind; and that intolerance was ever ready to arm itself with all the terrors of the civil power to exterminate those, who doubted its dogmas, or resisted its infallibility. The Catholic and the Protestant had alternately waged the most ferocious and unrelenting warfare on each other; and Protestantism itself, at the very moment, that it was proclaiming the right of private judgment, prescribed boundaries to that right, beyond which if any one dared to pass, he must seal his rashness with the blood of martyrdom. The history of the parent country, too, could not fail to instruct them in the uses, and the abuses of religious tests. They there found the pains and penalties of non-conformity written in no equivocal language, and enforced with a stern and vindictive jealousy. One hardly knows, how to repress the sentiments of strong indignation, in reading the cool vindication of the laws of England on this subject, (now, happily, for the most part abolished by recent enactments,) by Mr. Justice Blackstone, a man, in many respects distinguished for habitual moderation, and a deep sense of justice. "The second species," says he "of non-conformists, are those, who offend through a mistaken or perverse zeal. Such were esteemed by our laws, enacted since the time of the reformation, to be papists, and protestant dissenters; both of which were supposed to be equally schismatics in not communicating with the national church; with this difference, that the papists divided from it upon material, though erroneous, reasons; but many of the dissenters, upon matters of indifference, or, in other words, upon no reason at all. Yet certainly our ancestors were mistaken in their plans of compulsion and intolerance. The sin of schism, as such, is by no means the object of temporal coercion and punishment. If, through weakness of intellect, through misdirected piety, through perverseness and acerbity of temper, or, (which is often the case,) through a prospect of secular advantage in herding with a party, men quarrel with the ecclesiastical establishment, the civil magistrate has nothing to do with it; unless their tenets and practice are such, as threaten ruin or disturbance to the state. He is bound, indeed, to protect the established church; and, if this can be better effected, by admitting none but its genuine members to offices of trust and emolument, he is certainly at liberty so to do; the disposal of offices being matter of favour and discretion. But, this point being once secured, all persecution for diversity of opinions, however ridiculous or absurd they may be, is contrary to every principle of sound policy and civil freedom. The names and subordination of the clergy, the posture of devotion, the materials and colour of the minister's garment, the joining in a known, or an unknown form of prayer, and other matters of the same kind, must be left to the option of every man's private judgment."
Thank you for your discussion of Gnosticism and Arianism, dear BroJoeK. Very interesting! [I reject both.]
Mainly, I use the term "gnosticism" as Eric Voegelin defines it. Gnosticism is
...a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis in the sense of immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection, Gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism.... Gnosticism may take a transcendentalizing form (as in the case of the gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism, Comte's positivism, and other modern movements that seek radical intramundane fulfillment of human beings and society. — "Glossary of Terms," Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 2006; p. 160f.[Voegelin has a habit of stating his terms succinctly and exactly. That can take a little getting used to.]
As you may know, Voegelin was a philosopher of history and politics. His interest in gnosticism as a source of the modern-day "political religions" was particularly acute. His eight-volume History of Political Ideas is chock-full of in-depth studies of leading gnostics in history, from e.g., Hermes Trismagistus, Joachim of Fiore; Conte, Marx, Hegel, Jung, etc., etc. His Modernity Without Restraint details the types of personal and social disorders that manifest when gnostic ideas become dominant in the culture.
As they are today. I'll tell you this, dear BroJoeK: Once you see the gnostic "pattern," you tend to see it a lot nowadays — in academe, in the media, in the institutions; in the street movements; e.g., OWS.
Most obnoxious is the practicing gnostic's habit of forbidding questioning. The gnostic perpetrators are well aware that if their "systems" are subject to critical analysis, they would quickly deconstruct on the non-foundation of their own illogic. Voegelin says that Hegel — whom he praises as a very great genius and master of classical philosophy — was very aware of this danger. But he got around it masterfully:
"In conversations with Hegelians, I have quite regularly found that as soon as one touches on Hegelian premises the Hegelian refuses to enter into the argument and assures you that you cannot understand Hegel unless you accept his premises."Talk about circular, solopsistic thinking!
If I understand correctly, what really flips out spirited irish is her recognition that gnostic systems have a nasty habit of "bumping off God." Such a thing, right there, could only be a "magical operation."
A magical act requires at least a suspension of what we'll call First Reality — if not its outright cancellation — on the part of its observer in order to be successful. WRT the "death of God," this is exactly what Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx invite you to do. And they tell you just how easy it is to "kill God": Just decide that "God" is only a concept; that is, an abstract construction of the human mind. Then, just abolish the "concept." Ergo, "God is dead" — at least for you....
It's a pretty banal little "trick"; but a whole lot of people fall for it nowadays.
I could go on, but probably should put a sock in it for now. Suffice it to say I see plenty of Gnostics in American public life today, starting with the Obama Administration, which promises a new order of social justice and human happiness; and a new Heaven on Earth that eradicates all the ills of the human condition and satisfies the deepest needs of mankind — by enclosing man's God-given liberty and eschatological future within the steely bonds of State control, not to mention the necessary total sacrifice of the life of the mind involved in this trade-off....
Obama is the "new messiah," dont'cha know???
Thank you so very much for writing, BroJoeK!
...a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis in the sense of immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection, Gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism.... Gnosticism may take a transcendentalizing form (as in the case of the gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism, Comte's positivism, and other modern movements that seek radical intramundane fulfillment of human beings and society. — "Glossary of Terms," Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 2006; p. 160f.
Was there something wrong with "hubris"?
Those who deny the deity of Christ are heretics. Simple. Whether they be mormon, Jehovah’s witnesses, gnostics, or whatever. If they call themselves christians and deny the deity of Christ, they are heretics. You are upholding heresy right here on Free Republic. If this were a caucus thread, virtually all of your posts would be deleted.
I’d be happy to explain it to you heretic trolls, but it’s basically feeding trolls and throwing pearls at swine so it aint worth it.
Then don’t.
But you are certainly highly qualified to identify “damnable heretics”,
***Yes, those who deny the deity of Christ are heretics. You are a heretic. And on this thread you’ve proven yourself to be a troll and a liar, and someone who projects his own intentions and all kinds of things. Now you’re in full-fledged troll mode with voluminous postings, and as we finish out this thread the full display of your unfounded beliefs are out like a peacock’s feathers.
My favorite part was where you couldn’t even tell the difference between a historical observation and a religious item of faith. Such lunacy lends itself to your brand of heresy.
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