Romans 8 - an astral reading

[Peter Kirby]

This is the most tiresome kind of thing. Don't leech on my time because he wrote some horseshit. It's horseshit. We can all smell it. Let's move on...

[Peter Kirby]

I explained it already.

You didn't explain.

It was a pretty simple explanation.

You know what's fun to do here?

Read the text labeled "Saint Paul wrote" and skip over the words below.

See what I did there?

Astral stuff disappears. Just like magic.

[outhouse]

Don't leech on my time ...

I have my own issues with Robert but thanks

[neilgodfrey]

What Robert calls his "analysis" of Romans 8 is a repeat of the same fatuous nonsense that I attempted to address in detail in the Loaves and Fishes thread re specifics of logical analysis, scientific method, hypothetico-deductive reasoning, comparative literary study -- all proved to be a complete waste of time.

Robert appears to have been sold on his idea ever since his undergraduate days to the extent that he chose to leave formal academic studies because "the academy was not ready" for his ideas. Others would wish he had stayed with the system and learned how to really understand and apply the fundamentals of clear thought and method.

In Robert's eye the whole world is wrong and only he (and his Acharya enclave) have the truth. The conflict is not intellectual but moral. Differences of views are reduced to moral and psychological conflicts -- with Robert claiming the moral and psychological high ground of course.

I don't think it is doing too far to even say that Robert is a biblical inerrantist: the correct code to understanding the Bible makes its every word meaningful and true.

Robert epitomizes and represents a view that is fundamentalist and ideological and anti-intellectual. I can anticipate his response to my words here and believe they will serve to underscore my points.

[Peter Kirby]

Don't leech on my time ...

I have my own issues with Robert but thanks

That was to MrMacSon (and Robert Tulip).

[Stephan Huller]

My recommendation to Robert is to start with something attested - for instance the interest in 360 among the Marcosians or 365 according to Basilides and build outward from that. You have to build from an attested tradition.

[Ulan]

You have to build from an attested tradition.

This. You have to start somewhere which is not equal to unfounded, free-running imagination. A starting point would have been here:

"My view, following Pagels, is that Paul had some grasp of the allegory as the real driving impetus in his letters, but carefully concealed this knowledge to make his message palatable to a mass audience."

What line of thought did Elaine Pagels use as base for this claim? Any quotes? Does she have more to stand on than belief statements like this one:

"Achieving spiritual peace arises from understanding scientific order as the basis of life."

Robert creates a religion and calls it "science". Whenever he uses the words "science" or "scientific", we can be sure that the statement in which they are used has nothing to do with science but is purely religious.

Which means the wording is off. He uses words like "science" in a way that neither matches the modern understanding of it nor the philosophical ideas of the time when texts like Romans were written. No wonder this sounds like gibberish, as statements like the above hang in the void. Or, as has been stated already, show signs of 21st century New Age thought.

[Robert Tulip]

orderly movement of the heavens

The heavens move ?

The term "the heavens" means "the sky". It does not mean an imaginary afterlife location with gates and clouds where those able to sincerely recite some dogmatic formula can have the sanguine hope to live for ever. We should avoid imposing our modern superstitions upon the authors of the New Testament, but unfortunately such imposition is rampant among True Believers in the Historical Jesus. And no, I am not imposing my views on Paul, but exploring the underlying coherence of the eschatology in his ideas.

Outhouse, I am sure you are not ignorant, but there is a phenomenon of the orderly movement of the heavens generally known as the "day". The sun appears to rise in the morning and set in the evening, moving in a great circle or "celestial colure", along with all the planets and stars. This appearance is geocentric, reflecting the perspective of the human observer. Days are very regular and orderly, lasting twenty four "hours".

Getting more complicated, and I am confident it will not strain your mental faculties, there is another orderly pattern of celestial motion called the "year". You will have heard of it. While we know that the earth orbits the sun, from a human perspective it looks like the sun orbits the earth, traversing the sky high in the summer and low in the winter. These orderly movements are what is known as "seasons", at least on this planet.

I hesitate to encourage more swearing from the delightfully courteous denizens of this forum, but there are more movements of the heavens which have potential to cause apoplexy among the faithful. For example, the moon orbits the earth (actually the earth-moon barycenter) every "month". There are just over twelve of these "months" in a "year", with the lunar "synodic", "draconic" and "anomalistic" months each just short of one twelfth of a solar "year". I am really sorry if big words make some people's brains sore, but they are needed to discuss some concepts.

Other apparent movements of the heavens observable against historical time frames include the Great Year, known centuries before Christ as the movement of zodiac and poles against the seasons and stars. Other celestial movements have only been discovered by modern astronomy, including axial obliquity, apsidal precession and orbital ellipticity, and there are also movements over billion year time frames such as the 220my orbit of the galaxy and the accelerating red shift of the universe. The millennial movements of the heavens are the primary driver of long term climate cycles. I am happy to discuss these orderly movements of the heavens if anyone here has interest in how such topics relate to Biblical cosmology. Indeed, I started this thread because the quoted author in the OP expressed direct interest in discussion of his cited questions.

Precession in particular is an orderly apparent motion of the heavens for which there is very strong evidence of knowledge long before the Common Era. This observable motion correlates directly with Biblical cosmology, but unfortunately some people are not really encouraging discussion of the use of precession within the Bible as a fit topic for polite conversation.

[neilgodfrey]

Thank you, Robert, for alerting us to these great mysteries. I have always wondered what to make of that calendar I put up on my wall every year and all of those strange patterns of different numbering systems. Of course those calendars with moon phases and planting seasons and various astrological (the truly scientific kind, that is) nomenclature are far more meaningful -- and especially if they come with passages from Romans 8 or Mark's narrative of the loaves and fishes.

What I'd love to do when I find the time is to undertake a project exploring the relationship of the 24 hours on my watch with the tidal patterns of where I live and how both of these mesh with the numbers of syllables in Romans 8 and Mark 6 and the total of Pyramid inches outlining the base of the Great Pyramid divided by the 25,920 years of the Great Precession Year.

[Robert Tulip]

What Robert calls his "analysis" of Romans 8 is a repeat of the same fatuous nonsense that I attempted to address in detail in the Loaves and Fishes thread re specifics of logical analysis, scientific method, hypothetico-deductive reasoning, comparative literary study -- all proved to be a complete waste of time.

Neil, I am sorry that the sarcasm in my response to Outhouse’s farcical implication that movement of the heavens has no relevance to Paul was apparently lost on you. The overall structure of time, as understood in modern and ancient cosmologies, was the broader point, which alas it seems is also lost on you. You are repeating your inability to see that an accurate Gnostic cosmology grounded in observation of precession could have provided the blue print for the original construction of the Christ Myth. This is a paradigm shift in theology, but your inability to understand the mass of evidence in its favour is at the basis of your false repetitive assertion above.

Robert appears to have been sold on his idea ever since his undergraduate days to the extent that he chose to leave formal academic studies because "the academy was not ready" for his ideas. Others would wish he had stayed with the system and learned how to really understand and apply the fundamentals of clear thought and method.

There is an intense academic disdain for everything associated with astrology, even though what I am doing does not rely on any astrology, but only explores how the ancients actually thought about the cosmos and how this method of observation informed the Bible. This disdain was also at the core of the dominant Deuteronomic view in the Bible, which is why Paul and others had to conceal the real basis of their ideas.

In Robert's eye the whole world is wrong and only he (and his Acharya enclave) have the truth. The conflict is not intellectual but moral. Differences of views are reduced to moral and psychological conflicts -- with Robert claiming the moral and psychological high ground of course.

To repeat, the purpose of this thread is to show how Paul’s eschatology aligns to an accurate cosmology, both in terms of modern science (Milankovich) and ancient astronomy. Yes, there are moral and psychological conflicts at play, but the focus here, which you resolutely ignore, is primarily intellectual.

I don't think it is doing too far to even say that Robert is a biblical inerrantist: the correct code to understanding the Bible makes its every word meaningful and true.

That is absurd. Inerrantism puts magical assertions above scientific evidence, whereas I am demonstrating that allegorical claims in the Bible can be explained scientifically.

Robert epitomizes and represents a view that is fundamentalist and ideological and anti-intellectual. I can anticipate his response to my words here and believe they will serve to underscore my points.

This assertion again totally ignores the real intellectual problem of how the array of precessional allegory in the Bible actually got there, such as the very obvious reference to the North Celestial Pole in Revelation 13 that I mentioned again in the opening post, and which all respondents here have ignored. I suspect that my mention of eschatology touches some hot buttons, what I can’t imagine, such that a new effort to explore a rational basis for these Biblical ideas has to be tarred with association with irrational traditional theories. I confess Neil, that my reference to Saint Paul was intended to irritate you, since you have previously expressed something akin to horror at this appellation because of its conflict with your anti-religious views. Again, it may be that part of what some dislike so intensely here is that I am proposing a way to reform Christianity to make it compatible with reason, in conflict with the academic prejudice that religion should just wither away.

By the way, on your comment about planting by the moon, I proved that this is an imaginative folk tradition with no scientific basis, and with a simple explanation in the transposition of solar cycles onto the moon, here.