Monadology In search of the unifying principle. Leibniz This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube. This guy is being sucked up a glass tube.

This is Not What Christianity Should Look Like

January 17, 2008

by Nate

"We affirm that this God-inspired, inerrant Bible is the only absolute, objective, final test for all truth claims, and the clearest verbal picture of reality that has ever come into the hands of mankind. By it, and it alone, are all philosophies, books, values, actions, and plans to be measured as to their consistency with reality, visible and invisible. Whatever statements or values are in opposition to the statements and values of the Bible err to the degree of their opposition."

One of the men in the church in which I was a teenager taught this; I'm relatively certain it was a widely held opinion, though most wouldn't have been able to articulate it so clearly. Faith in the Bible is a gift of God. We determine all truths by their relationship to it. Homosexuality, for example, has a fundamental fault: homosexuals have deified their own experiences, rather than testing all experiences against holy writ. How do we test or verify the Bible? Faith in the Bible is a gift of God. Etc.

Perhaps the most effective aspect of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal is his opening with a quote from Plato about the nature of experience, and how we try to capture it like birds. (Anybody able to find that quote for me?) It hones in on perhaps the most essential aspect of disagreement, which is that many religious people believe there is a viable alternative to experience for a fundamental truth criterion. Mind: I'm not using "experience" in the pedestrian sense, as in, "that grizzled old man has a lot of experience in life", but in a phenomenological sense, as in: "We experience the noumenal through the preconditions of space and time."

It gives me a bit of appreciation for how twisted Calvin must appear to Roman Catholics: his attempts to create philosophically rigorous categories for revelation promote the Bible to the role of a golden calf. It is inspired and important teachings melted down and blasphemously reworked into an object more comfortingly unified and easy to point to. "We don't need to ask -- it's in the Bible." Roman Catholics commit their deification at a different level (by declaring teachings to be doctrine), escaping such a large absurdity and creating a plague of smaller ones.

I need to re-read Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. His argument that Jesus was God's act of becoming finite so that he could be a teacher to mankind strikes me more and more as the most accurate and powerful way of understanding the incarnation.

But this thing about experience: Plato showed it to me, I said: "Of course!" and was forever converted. I wonder how early I could convince a hypothetical child-of-Nate to enjoy reading Platonic dialogs with me.

Comments

On January 17 at 12'29 PMPermalink, anne wrote:

1

d’you mean the bit in the theaetetus, where we make a little birdhouse in our souls? (i was humming that in the seminar. i am a dork.) it’s 197d-199c.

On January 17 at 12'34 PMPermalink, Nate wrote:

2

That’s the one! Thanks, Anne. It’s good to have a Freshman here for moments like these.

On January 17 at 7'25 PMPermalink, Mary wrote:

3

Damn! She beat me to it. 197d about. But I almost like your way better—Socrates uses it about knowledge and knowing, though he was talking about experience earlier. Second of images about knowing, after wax, when Socrates says they will get shameless and be phenomenological.