The Secular Frontier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v23HTYw4jQs I guess the classic online treatment of lying in the bible is this passage from the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible: Is it wrong to lie? No. 1 God rewarded the Egyptian midwives for lying to the Pharaoh. And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men-children alive? And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them. Therefore God dealt well with the midwives. Exodus 1:18-20 2 Rahab was "justified" when she lied about Joshua's spies. And the woman [Rahab] took the two men and hid them and said thus: There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were; and it came to pass about the time of shutting of the gate, when it was dark that the men went out; whither the men went I wot not; pursue after them quickly, for ye shall overtake them. But she had brought ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW4a7MzzPcc This is a new interesting well-produced video from Derek at MythVision talking about the ancient idea that the reason a body would go missing is that the dead person had been thought to have become deified. So, the gospel accounts of the empty tomb fit this general mythic structure. Moreover, Derek points out that even if you think there is an historical kernel at the heart of the Jesus legendary empty tomb tale, the disciples would have been motivated to steal the body and pretend it was missing and contending that Jesus became deified. I look at the noble lie theory of Christian Origins in my Justified Lie essay HERE. I talk a fair bit about Dionysus in that essay, but I should also add according to Plutarch, one version of the myth tells that Ariadne hanged herself after being abandoned by Theseus. Dionysus then went to Hades, and brought her and his mother Semele to Mount Olympus, where they were deified. For My Scriptures Study Index SEE ... Read Article

Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author and lecturer, agnostic-atheist. Prof Ehrman has a new blog post out today about Were Jesus Followers Really Armed and Dangerous in the Garden of Gethsemane? For regular readers here I tend to think the disciples did clash with the arresting party, whether they were armed or not, because it fits in with the general problem of Mark having to invent stories about Jesus predicting his death and resurrection, but the disciples not understanding. For if the crucifixion and resurrection were the central point, why would the disciples clash with the arresting party and run away? There is an overarching literary theme that renders such discussions unnecessary. Jesus is the specially beloved (agapetos) of God who is conspired against by the evil Jewish Supreme Council, turned on by the crowd, denied Justice by Pilate, abandoned, denied, and has his message of non-resistance/violence ... Read Article

Friedrich Nietzsche “The slave revolt in morality begins when ‘ressentiment’ itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals It is not immediately evident what we mean when we call something “good.”  For instance, a Blue Jay may be a “good” bird of prey, but we might think it evil for raiding nests and devouring babies of other birds. What was noble about antiquity, power, beauty, strength and wealth, became demonized.  Jesus said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  What could m ... Read Article

Above transgender cyclist Austin Killips won a North Carolina race by five minutes, leading the second-place finisher to suggest creating a separate category. See article here. We would not have a flyweight boxer compete against a heavyweight boxer because such a pairing grossly leans in favor of the heavyweight. This is why the UFC heavyweight champion has the title "The Baddest Man On The Planet." Similarly, time and time again we see trans athletes defeating women in women sport divisions. It is not at all a swipe against LGBTQI+ rights to propose a new division for trans athletes to compete in against one another. ... Read Article

PREVIOUSLY, Did St. Mark Read Plato / Did Plato Read Moses? (2/2) Did St. Mark Read Plato / Did Plato Read Moses? AND NOW, THE POST SCRIPT Truths today are usually understood as “facts” or things that are “correct,” information, and intelligence is therefore whoever has learned the most through rote and can do the best on Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit (note the name of the game, lol).  However, in teaching children we make a distinction in that if a child knows 3 X 2 = 6 this is true or correct but not yet made manifest or un-hidden (truth as a-letheia).  To unhide it, we need to model it for the child, such as counters in groups of 3, with 2 such groups, when totaled we get a sum of 6 counters. In the previous post, we saw that when the traditional definition of marriage encounters LGBTQI+ rights on the thought path of life that this meeting un-covered the hidden vileness/violence of the traditional definition.  This is analogous to the Christian idea of the Being of ... Read Article

Above: Saint Paul delivering the Areopagus Sermon in Athens, by Raphael, 1515. LAST TIME: Did St. Mark Read Plato / Did Plato Read Moses? NOW, THE CONCLUSION. Let's consider the Unknown God Paul is preaching about in the above pictured sermon. Here is a brief, general introduction: In Athens, there was a temple specifically dedicated to that god and very often Athenians would swear "in the name of the Unknown God" (Νὴ τὸν Ἄγνωστον, Nē ton Agnōston).  Apollodorus, Philostratus and Pausanias wrote about the Unknown God as well.  According to the book of Acts, contained in the Christian New Testament, when the Apostle Paul visited Athens, he saw an altar with an inscription dedicated to that god and was invited to speak to the Athenian elite at the Areopagus. Because the Jewish God could not be named, it is possible that Paul's Athenian listeners would have considered his God to be "the unknown god par excellence". His listeners may also have understood the introduc ... Read Article

The fact that we can detect Jesus' followers moving away from his more radical teachings is evidence that we can see a radical teacher/healer who existed, contra the Christ Myth Theory. It's remarkable that we focus so intently on personal salvation and what Jesus did "for" us, that we ignore corporate sin and what we did "to" Jesus. From that latter point of view, perhaps the gospel writers took the known wrongful death of John the Baptist as we find in Josephus, and rewrote it to make it more wrongful and humiliating to anticipate a superlatively wrongful and humiliating death of Jesus (like Elisha being the successor and superior of Elijah). In Josephus John's Death is: Jewish Antiquities 18. 5. 2 John the Baptist gained a large following. Herod Antipas feared the widely popular John the Baptist would incite his followers to launch a rebellion against his rule. Therefore, he had John the Baptist arrested and imprisoned at Macherus. Herod Antipas later had John the Baptist executed 'to preve ... Read Article

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Last time: LOVE: One of the “True” Human Prejudices Now, the Conclusion What I try to do is take content rich theological ideas and reimagine them in a secular context without the superstition. One concept is that Jesus is the incarnation. Let's think about that in the context of the Greek notion of "theos" or God (like the word theological), and see if we can find any secular meat left on these ancient religious bones. Jesus is the agapetos, the love of God incarnate, and the gospel is this allegory of self-sacrificial love, like Plato’s allegory of the cave is a story of knowledge.  But what is “incarnate” and “theology.”  What is a “God” or “Theos?”  We read from Robert Calasso: Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary clich?, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn't even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaA3YZ6QdJU “I don’t want clever conversation.  I never want to work that hard.  I just want someone I can talk to.  I want you just the way you are." (Billy Joel, “Just The Way You Are”) Kevin Iannucci shown above. The actor has starred in a number of films and TV shows. The title of this post is odd.  Perhaps it isn’t true, then, since truths should be observable and testable by anyone?  Certainly there are many human prejudices, so there is no big deal in singling out one.  But then, “TRUTH” is said in many ways.  There are "true" friends, "true" here meaning "genuine" or "exemplary." Conversely, I could say “1 + 1 = 2” or “The bed I’m writing this on is soft,” and those would be “true” in the sense of “correct,” though by moving to the chair in the other room my sentence about my bed is no longer true since it declares a state of affairs that is incorrect (I’m no longer sitting on the ... Read Article

I'd like to do a second post today to address something Republican Presidential Candidate Ron DeSantis said on Fox News the other day. Let's argue this way: "God has reason, apparently overriding reason, for making, not merely any orderly world (which we have been considering so far) but a beautiful world—at any rate to the extent to which it lies outside the control of creatures. (And he has reason too, I would suggest, even in whatever respects the world does lie within the control of creatures, to give them experience of beauty to develop, and perhaps also some ugliness to annihilate.) So God has reason to make a basically beautiful world, although also reason to leave some of the beauty or ugliness of the world within the power of creatures to determine; but he would seem to have overriding reason not to make a basically ugly world beyond the powers of creatures to improve. Hence, if there is a God there is more reason to expect a basically beautiful world than a basically ugly one. ... Read Article

"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter" (Plato) Plato doesn’t mean here that a prerequisite for learning philosophy is math, rather Mathema means what is eminently learnable, and so we speak of polymaths.  For, in order for me to encounter the triangle as the figure that it is, I must have the rule before my mind’s eye of an enclosed figure with three straight sides.  In order to encounter the triangle in its specificity, the mind must apply the rule of either equilateral, scalene, isosceles, or right triangle.  Plato says one of the ways of seeing the immortality of the soul is through recollection, that the mind knows some ideas prior to experience that makes experience possible, that would in later philosophy be called the a priori.  But what is recollection?  Last time I gave the example of Justice, in that when we learn about justice we do not invent the concept out of whole cloth, but rather when we hear LGBTQ+ rights cry out for the violence being done by the traditional def ... Read Article

Fundamentalist Preacher Under Fire for Suggesting Public Executions for Parents Who Affirm Trans Children. Baptist preacher Jason Graber says “And so there should be no excuse to not put these people (LGQBT) to death—no excuse whatsoever.” See article here ... Read Article