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I respectfully disagree. Before Christianity, and even within the large cities or empires that already existed at that time, there were no official ten commandments. Which are for everyone to understand.
The fact that lying (or bearing false witness against someone) is considered wrong is only so self-evident to all of us BECAUSE it is based on Christianity and well documented. If you took away this self-understanding, what would remain?
The other commandments, such as not deceiving anyone (for one's own benefit), not killing anyone for the sake of murder, not disregarding the honouring of parents as father and mother qua their authority over their children, officially came into being under Christianity.
Greek and Roman law only included Greeks and Romans or those who were subject to this law. If you entered their territory as a foreigner, you were not under their protectorate, but could be killed or taken advantage of, but no one was responsible for an ordinary foreigner/expatriate. All rights were based on territorial law, but not as a generally applicable order outside one's own borders.
There were certainly similarities to the Christian order, but at what point do you want to describe this as âour cultural rootsâ? Rather than going further back in time and thereby making it much more difficult to find the roots, it makes more sense to recognise that Christianity unified something that had previously existed in countless fragments in the form of smaller tribal cultures and that these many different clans were characterised by the fact that they acted according to the principle of conquest and enslavement of competing clans or foreign countries and that revenge was a completely legitimate concept, just like human sacrifice (killing own tribes people for the gods).
Christians put an end to human sacrifice and instead created a new symbolism for it, moved on to animal sacrifice, gave that up too and finally, with Jesus, achieved the complete substitution of all sacrifices to be brought to death alive through his martyrdom.
If you interpret it as an âattack on our previous rootsâ, I would fully agree, but at the same time say that I see it as a legitimate attack. Christians, uniquely in human history, have recognised that the monogamous relationship between a man and a woman, marriage, is not only a sacred but a thoroughly pragmatic relationship that must be entered into with foresight and follows a life discipline. Instead of finding marriage either completely unimportant or regarding polygamy as the ideal or stoning women who have committed adultery, as in other cultures, Christians have introduced much milder punishments.
Their best idea was to officially place the woman under the protection of the man, because they saw crystal clear that no woman in the world is protected when men decide to subjugate her or treat her like fair game.
Only idiots twist this fact and make the husband the enemy of the wife. But women who lived as normal people hundreds of years ago (not the nobles or royal/imperial retinue) have always known that their fathers, husbands and sons were their only life insurance.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, I would speculate that Christianity may never have reached its full bloom, but has suffered a great deal of damage to its image through the institutional churches and organisations, which should please the devil immensely. I'd recommend reading Rachel Wilsons book "Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Womenâs Liberation'
The separation between God and man is established as a way of thinking for the important reason that you first have to be able to think the separation in order to understand being united at all. If âeverything is God, and God is in me and I am in Godâ, this saying - taken on its own - would just be meaningless babble.
Only when I am able to make this separation in the bright moment of my schizophrenia do I experience the pain of this act in its full dimension. Because in that moment I have rid myself of my conscience, that which immediately speaks to me again when I reunite with God. But because I cannot express linguistically that âI am Godâ, because my prayer cannot be addressed to myself, but must remain addressed to something higher, outside myself. Does that make sense to you?
As a human being, you know that you are not the river or the mountain. Neither is the mountain or the river a human being. This separation is a physically objective reality. But that does not stop you from admiring or honouring the connections of this creation.
Any form of prayer makes you feel that this boundary is very fluid when you are in a contemplative state. But after a prayer, you get up again and you make food, argue with your people, sin and err. Christians have well recognised that everyone sins and the commandments didn't come about because no one would break them, they came about BECAUSE they are broken. Christianity is an extremely intelligent system. That there are also other intelligent forms of religion: Notwithstanding. I study them and respect them, but I won't convert. What would be the point? I'm rooted in it.
I thank you for giving me the food to make an objection and also to clarify my mind and free write an answer. I hope you don't mind that my answer got long.
hmmm, yes i guess we do disagree :) somehow.
i do not mind your long answer and i'm glad something resonated in you to write about. i know that feelingwell,it often spawns more interesting posts than writing "alone" ;)
i just feel we have entirely different frames of reference, things we hold dear or deem likely or possible.which i welcome.
i believe in non-coercion thoroughly. which is why i reject government entirely. there is no logic behind a government, other than the fear narratives we keep hearing, the "but ifs". the biggest thug is the government, not the other people suffering under government's actions. we also live in a control structure of guilt and scarcity amd have been doing so ever since coercion started.
if you believe you need a government to defend against potential aggressors and criminals, so be it. i feel we need more back-bony people that don't wait for a government to sort everything out. and that will come the more it becomes apparent that a government cannot logically ever take good care of us. because we consent to being coerced, and make ourselves small, we offer ourselves, like the people you described from the covid time, and so the natural result is we get tyrants. always. we have people we don't know limiting our frame of reference by relaying tales in words, amd thereby an entire approach to life.
it is natural and unavoidable when you ask someone to make rules for you to live by.
from what i "know", the mazdans cherished the idea of non-coercion before the greeks and romans, and eventually the christians adopted their core tenets twisted them and spread it around so that we now think we are christians fundamentally. i am really not that sure anymore. because too much of christianity is a bad spell on the psyche as opposed to the mazdan ideas i found liberating in contrast.
can i be wrong? of course!
i learned about zoroastrian and the proto-indo european faith and the tenets simply resonate more than anything i have ever heard christians say. no coercion. no convincing. no arguing. because how can you argue with that which is as divine as you are? there is no point, other than to deny actual truth speaking its truth right in front of you. the christian "western" interpretations have eroded that view and completely substituted it for a different approach we modern people still have in our bones to this day. but is it therefore our real roots as a "culture"? to me: no it's not. it's no more real than believing we live on a spinning sphere, it's just normal to our spproach right now.
the truth may seem objective to you and i don't disagree entirely, it's just that the physical world is not all of existence and other people's views can be valid within their frame of reference simultaneously to yours. insisting on truth being objective depends entirely on the viewer, and his experience. it could therefore be said that all is objective always,especially radical subjectivity i may disagree with, because it follows a certain viewpoint's (individual's) logic to its conclusion. i see what you are saying with the mountain example, i grew up in the same culture. but it is not "true" it's just a way of thinking we confuse with objectivity. the ego mind makes a mountain something other but on a different paradigm it is not.
that is also where and why words fail. the mode is insufficient to analyse the issue.
i for one have a hard time listening to people telling me what reality and truth are, when they are people who have never been on a psychedelic experience themselves. i respect "their" view but i know from experience it is not the whole story. what one can say IN THEORY about life and existence, is "meaningless blabber" as you put it in the face of immediate experience. there is a reason speech fails when on a shroom trip - because words are walls and distract from the immediate and inexplicably mysterious. christianity may have once been closely associated with amanita muscaria, but that has long ceased to be he case, you can no longer ask a shroom directly to talk to god in feeling and omages, but need priests instead relying on words and a paradigm of separation.
human priests.
this place is unbelievably magic, we have just gotten used to our day to day viewpoint and the tales of "our christian" culture that we can't see any longer just how much we have been coerced in our fundamental perception and interpretation of life.
i still get the feeling we are not hearing one another. i mean no disrespect at all here, and i take your view as what you feel you think you saw and experience. it is valid. just not objectively valid for everyone. because separation is a convincing idea in 3d.
van is done and i will finally be on the road soon! so no more commenting on my part for now. ahahha.
thank you for giving me the chance to reflect and reassess what i do hold in faith and what i don't. you are doing me a service by reminding me and i hope my comments find you well and in a spirit of eye-level communication rather than ideological coercive attack on your truth perceptions.
blessings to you
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