Ulan wrote:Stephan Huller wrote: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?
My review of Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul is at
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2803T62V90MTR There I say “Pagels explains how Valentinus and other Gnostic theologians read Paul as speaking at two levels. The Gnostics say that Paul's letters distinguish between a secret spiritual or `pneumatic' level of teaching aimed at initiates and a popular simplified `psychic' version for ignorant newcomers. As in other mystery philosophies who provided esoteric spoken instruction within their schools and exoteric written material for the general public, the Gnostics claimed that Paul had secret teachings that are explained in code in his public writings such as the letters to the churches in Rome and Corinth.”
My view is that the Gnostic reading of Paul as explained by Professor Pagels is vastly more plausible than Orthodox literalism, as I explain in my review.
Ulan wrote: 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."
Do you disagree with that? It seems a fairly simple modern enlightened view, reflecting ideas such as Thomas Paine in
The Age of Reason: “The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He has said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to each other.”
The Enlightenment idea that reason could free humanity from religious error shows that grounding ethics in science is central to the idea of the Age of Reason. What I am saying is that the anti-religious views of the Enlightenment can be synthesised with an old hidden enlightened core within Christianity.
Ulan wrote:
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.
Sorry Ulan, but you clearly do not understand what I am saying. The reason I presented such a simple explanation of the structure of time was firstly that Outhouse showed a basic incomprehension of the movement of the heavens, which is unfortunately far too typical among people who should know better. This incomprehension is also apparent in Neil Godfrey’s inability to see the grounding of Biblical images and themes in ancient observation of precession.
The scientific observation of precession is very ancient and provides a coherent basis for Biblical eschatology, but understanding this requires ability to see the centrality of astronomy within myth. That is an entirely scientific hypothesis, which also provides a basis to reform faith to make it compatible with reason. I am indeed claiming new findings on the originally intended coherence between astronomy and ancient religion. This also involves excavating a coherent hidden core within the ancient teachings, lost under the heavy weight of anathema.
This involves a deconstruction of the aggressive supernaturalism of traditional faith to identify why it resonated so strongly, namely because its origins were grounded in scientific observation.
Ulan wrote:
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.
You speak as though “New Age” is an obvious term of abuse when in fact it is an orderly way to understand major historical trends described in the Bible. This prejudicial assumption on your part is unfounded. If you read important New Age treatises such as
Aion by Carl Jung, the idea of a shift of paradigms, understood against the astronomy of the precession of the equinox into Aquarius, has an entirely coherent core, despite its associations with magical folk traditions.
Deconstructing these magical elements against their meaning within scientific astronomy, rather like the deconstruction of the miraculous literal veneer of the Bible, opens the question of how scientific method provides a foundation for a reassessment of the ethical values in the Bible in a way that is compatible with reason. The idea of the New Age of Aquarius is part of an entirely coherent empirical basis to understand allegorical Biblical ideas such as the upper room, the man with the water jug, the alpha and omega, the holy city, the clouds of heaven, the parable of the wheat and tares, the thousand years as a day for God, and the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom to the ends of the earth until the end of the Age.
Paul's idea of the delivery of the creation from bondage in Romans 8:21, like the fantastic 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Cor 15 idea of the last trumpet, should not be condemned as magical delusion, but rather as a coherent and valuable allegorical long term vision of the structure of history.
