Mormons facing the Abusive God

[_Aristotle Smith]

From Bill Hamblin:

We need to understand that while God has a body, this does not mean that he is a body.

(Emphasis in the orginal)

To say that Bill Hamblin is a sloppy thinker is an understatement, but I found this amusing.

I read that quote from Senor Hamblin on the other board, chuckled, and moved on. You can't make this kind of crap up.

The aspect I find most hilarious about this is that Mormons love to accuse Christians of corrupting Jesus' original message with Hellenism. OK, fine, for the sake of argument let's suppose that's the case. What would I put forward as the most slam dunk case that Hellenism seeped into Christianity? The idea of a spirit existing apart from a body. That's why there had to be a resurrection in Paul and Jesus folks, because when you die you are dead. If there is no resurrection, you stay dead, full stop. There is no concept that there is some ethereal existence where you aren't dead and exist in some reality, fully conscious of stuff, sans body.

So we can of course expect Mormonism to excise this concept right? Nope! Not only does Mormonism accept that picture of reality with no modification at all, it also posits a third thing called an "intelligence," which is a kind of pre-spiritual spiritual existence.

Conclusion: if Christianity was utterly corrupted by Hellenism, these so is Mormonism. Alternatively, you can accept the picture of reality of a spirit existing apart from a body, give up the Hellenism corrupted Christianity meme, and start reading the Church Fathers as non-apostates.

[_Chap]

In the western world (and especially the US) we’ve partially forgiven Jews their perceived murder of Jesus because in the Holocaust they seem to have suffered and paid for their sins. (We love us some righteous victims.) Kind of like we revere Native Americans now that we’ve killed them off and shoved their descendents to the edges of culture. And then we assign this narrative to a grand design of a munificent God.

Our belief that the innocent are somehow ennobled in their suffering assuages any reflexive guilt we might otherwise have felt.

Jesus was executed by the Romans as a dangerous agitator. Normal stuff for them, and how they kept their empire together.

Have 'we' forgiven the Italians for that yet?

viewtopic.php?p=566704#p566704

We are historically sure that the Romans executed Jesus. No-one else but Romans could execute anybody in the province of Judea.

We are far, very far, from historically sure that the Jewish crowd present at Pilate's judgement said anything that amounted to an assumption of responsibility. In fact we have good grounds for being skeptical: that story would be, shall we say, a little too historically convenient for the non-Jews who read the Gospels in Greek.

And in any case, since when could a crowd of a few hundred people take responsibility for a whole nation?

[_Morley]

viewtopic.php?p=566704#p566704

We are historically sure that the Romans executed Jesus. No-one else but Romans could execute anybody in the province of Judea.

We are far, very far, from historically sure that the Jewish crowd present at Pilate's judgement said anything that amounted to an assumption of responsibility. In fact we have good grounds for being skeptical: that story would be, shall we say, a little too historically convenient for the non-Jews who read the Gospels in Greek.

And in any case, since when could a crowd of a few hundred people take responsibility for a whole nation?

As was argued in the linked thread. Peruse further south.

[_MrStakhanovite]

The aspect I find most hilarious about this is that Mormons love to accuse Christians of corrupting Jesus' original message with Hellenism.

I don’t get the Hellenism charge really, there are plenty of materialists in Greek thought and Anaxagoras and Plato conceived of “God” as some grand divine organizer, and rejected creatio ex nihilo. It’s like they take their profound misreading of western thought and drive it to the hilt.

[_MrStakhanovite]

And there are Christian materialists like Peter VanInwagen, who is an absolutely brilliant metaphysician. But PVI’s brilliance begins to fade, when he came up with his theory of a materialist resurrection, where God literally steals your body just before you are buried or cremated, and replaces it with a copy to give us the illusion of decay.

[_Morley]

‘God full of compassion’—
Were it not for the God, full of compassion,
there would be compassion in the world, and not just in Him.
I, who picked flowers on the mountain
and gazed into all the valleys,
I, who carried corpses from the hills,
know and tell that the world is empty of compassion.

I, who was the king of salt by the side of the sea,
who stood without decision by my window,
who counted the steps of the angels,
whose heart lifted weights of pain
in terrible competitions
I, who only use a small portion
of the words in the dictionary

I, who am compelled against my will to solve riddles,
know that, were it not for the ‘God, full of compassion,’
there would be compassion in the world,
and not just in Him.


—Yehunda Amihai

(David Blumenthal: Facing the Abusing God, pp. 21-22.)

[_Nightlion]

Let's not be so dramatic then. If you get cancer, heaven forbid, do you crumble? Do you concede that no good will come of it? The fortitude of faith against all odds is insisted into existence by the sheer will power in those who win. It is an accepted therapy and I bet the most successful. How's that for factual?

Factual, but mundane. If I survived my cancer, it would be because I was lucky enough to be born into circumstances where I could get treatment. If ti was terminal, I would have powerful pain killers to ease my passing, be surrounded by the love of my friends and family, and spend my last hours either with them or in the therapy of books. Would that suck? Sure, I don’t want to die this young, but those circumstances are pretty decent.

Now if I’m taken from my home forcefully, humiliated and dehumanized, made to face unspeakable horrors of watching soldiers throw babies into ovens, slowly starve into a shade of my former self, alone with strangers and ignorant of where my family is, if they are alive, and how they are doing. And then, when I can no longer help dig a ditch, I get herded into a chamber where I await in agony with my fellow prisoners as gas seeps in and kills us all.

Dying from cancer in a wealthy nation and upper middle class existence sucks to be sure, but I’d count myself lucky. I didn’t have to share in the pure horror, terror, and suffering that millions of human beings have had to deal with in the 20th century alone.

Bottom line is you would crumble and go quietly into the night. Consistent, but a shame all the same. Not every does. You must give me that. And there is substance to that sterner stuff of those who choose faith to fight.

[_Morley]

snip

Bottom line is you would crumble and go quietly into the night. Consistent, but a shame all the same. Not every does. You must give me that. And there is substance to that sterner stuff of those who choose faith to fight.

You have no basis on which to say any of this, James.

[_Nightlion]

Bottom line is you would crumble and go quietly into the night. Consistent, but a shame all the same. Not every does. You must give me that. And there is substance to that sterner stuff of those who choose faith to fight.

You have no basis on which to say any of this, James.

Oh? Gee, well then, I guess, shucks, er and what? I should just shoot myself? Take out my brain and give it a good whack? What? Be dumb? No, I think not.

Telling me that I have no basis for saying any of that is groundless. There, how do you like that? Stop freaking at faith. It is real. Rare. So rare that God is willing to sift through all that there is in the universe over and over again to find it. It only take a speck of faith to move a mountain. That is how great it is. I have used faith greatly when it was put in me. Yet is was but a whisper and hardly there yet it was. Still it accomplished something truly spectacular, Biblical, stupendous.

[_Morley]

Bottom line is you would crumble and go quietly into the night. Consistent, but a shame all the same. Not every does. You must give me that. And there is substance to that sterner stuff of those who choose faith to fight.

You have no basis on which to say any of this, James.

Oh? Gee, well then, I guess, shucks, er and what? I should just shoot myself? Take out my brain and give it a good whack? What? Be dumb? No, I think not.

Telling me that I have no basis for saying any of that is groundless. There, how do you like that? Stop freaking at faith. It is real. Rare. So rare that God is willing to sift through all that there is in the universe over and over again to find it. It only take a speck of faith to move a mountain. That is how great it is. I have used faith greatly when it was put in me. Yet is was but a whisper and hardly there yet it was. Still it accomplished something truly spectacular, Biblical, stupendous.

How is any of this a response to Stak's reasoned and respectful statement? Or are you trying to decimate his willingness to respond to you?



edit: Nevermind. I'll butt out.