/lit/ - Literature

>>20150782
The weed in heaven is too good

>>20150782
he be cappin fr

>>20150782
Some people think its really close. The Bible says NO ONE but God knows the DAY OR HOUR

>>20150827
>>20150831
Kys

>>20150782
He already came back and left. We're all the leftovers.

jesus christ wasn't born with the knowledge or expectation of being the son of god, it took time and he only lived out his life as son of god for 3 years, then he died at 33

the second coming might be a normal person living their life out until they're awakened

>>20151186
He realised he was the son of God when he was 12, possibly earlier but that's when he announced it.

We don't ask that here.

>>20150782
“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." --Matt. 24:36

what exactly do you want jesus to do in the modern world?
he'll just be another man who preaches good words but how can this change anything
it's not like he brought peace to the world the first time around

>>20150782
He died.
He died and went to Hell.

>>20151124
>The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. (Revelation 1,1)
Yeah, very "soon" bruh. lmao

>>20151246
No I swear, he's totally coming next tuesday to stop Putin and save the Ukrainians.

>>20151257
Two more weeks!

>>20151229
Literally just appear, and demonstrate he is as he says he is. That's all we're asking

Christianity really is nothing more than making outlandish promises, never delivering said outlandish promises, then going "Why did you think I was going to do what I specifically promised I would do?". It really is the laziest con job at the moment

>>20152063
well god is real, that's all I know
I really think religions are dumb as fuck and man-made
jesus > church & bible

>>20152067
Okay then, even without religion, what's keeping him from delivering on his promises? Does he really give that much of a shit about us kindly asking him to? Why can't he just do the stuff he promises? Sounds like a con artist to me

>>20152079
did jesus really say that though
jesus promised nothing, his followers made shit up

>>20151172
<span class="xae" data-xae="nerd">&#x1F913;[/spoiler]

>>20152109
...and they've been making more shit up ever since

>>20152109
>did jesus really say that though
Yes he did, according to his followers.

This really just seems like the most obvious scam ever to me. I will totally deliver on my promise, if you just give me a few more weeks and a few more dollars

>>20152115
How the hell

>>20151186
It could be me
>>20150782
but jukes aside, we're seeing revelation unfold right in front of our eyes, better don't joke about it for much longer.
>What is taking him so long?
were you expecting him to return after a few years? What would have been the merit of that as opposed to 2k years at the very least?

>>20151186
Wasn't Mary visited by an angel before Jesus was born? Wouldn't she have known?

>>20152356
>Wasn't Mary visited by an angel before Jesus was born?
According to Luke's fanfiction yes.

>>20152115
>
wtf

>>20152359
>fanfiction

More than likely, Luke used Mary herself as a primary source. That's why Luke has so much of the early years of Jesus, as well as the early years of John the Baptist.

Why don't people realize that there was a period after the Ascencion where Mary was chilling on earth, and you could talk to her? She was here.

>>20151191
Shota Jesus is cute! CUTE!<img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="32" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/5de4addd_KannaNom.png">

>>20152443
>Luke used Mary herself as a primary source
bruh

>>20151229
You know the second coming means the apocalypse right? It doesn't mean Jesus just walks around a bit and then leaves again.

>>20150782

Matthew 25:13

We don't know the day, neither the hour.

>>20152115
<span class="xae" data-xae="grinsweat">&#x1F605;[/spoiler]:grinsweat:

>>20152448
Why wouldn't he?

>>20152443
>Luke used Mary herself as a primary source
Yet he neglects to mention that he had this fantastically important source, very convincing.

>>20152451
"I am coming soon" (jk I mean over 2000 years from now)

>>20152236
>were you expecting him to return after a few years?
>how dare you expect us to deliver on what we quite literally promised? Expecting us to keep our word is a sin!

>>20152443
uhh no sweetie Luke Mark and Matthew are all different translations of the same aphorisms written on the back of a gum wrapper known as Q. The scholars(tm) say so.

>>20151229
i want to take a picture with him to put on my instagram

>>20151229
Anon, when Jesus comes again He'll be grander than any of us can imagine.

And you'd better repent of your sins when it happens, because if you don't, you WILL be fucked. You will be fucked on a level that I can't even describe.

>>20150782
bro it takes even longer than that to sample all the boipucci accumulated in heaven <img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="32" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/bb299b4d_monkaOMEGA.png">

> But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
Just have some humility OP. You can’t interpret the Bible without the Tradition and Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Besides, Jesus is here with us every day. At every mass when the Eucharist is consecrated we see the physical body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ in material form on our altars.

>>20152553
oooo spooky
Imagine buying into this obvious cult-tier fear mongering bullshit

>>20152571
>any moment now. I'll totally do what I said I would do.
>Just a few more buckaroos, we're almost there

>>20152628
It will happen when it happens. Why are you so focused on that? Christianity is so much more than expecting Christ to return. You can have a relationship with Christ right now through prayer and the sacraments of the Church. You don’t need to be so focused on the second coming. Jesus is already here with the Church.

<img class="xae" data-xae width="28" height="27" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/08b66b75_FeelsOkayMan.png">

>>20152637
>d-don't worry about it goy

>>20152648
based

>>20152637
>Why are you so focused on that?

Promises never being delivered and being endlessly postponed is an almost prototypical sign of a scam

>>20152899
It's not a postponement though he never gave a time that he will come. Just because certain Christians believed it was the end times throughout history and were wrong doesn't mean that it's a scam.

>>20150782
H

>>20151124
the bible says no one knows, not even the SON, but only the father. this is one of the clearest proofs that christian worship of jesus as god is idolatry and pagan bullshit

>>20152953
Oh okay, so it's a needlessly vague and completely empty promise. How very convenient

>>20153065
Your criticism would work if all there was to Christianity was the promise that Jesus would return. But it's not.
>I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

>>20152953
The last 2000 years are "end times" though. Jesus already triumphed, the "extra" time is just for the fullness of things to come, basically an opportunity for you to accept Jesus and become worthy of God. When the hyper-complexity of reality reaches whatever thresholds God has in mind, then the apocalypse and Second Coming will arrive with the New Heaven and Earth following. The point is only God seems to know the details of this hyper-complexity. Its probably some specific instance of the amount of souls saved and the irredeemably broken world that requires a final surgery for transformation.

>>20153215
Yes, and conveniently, the one promise toed to actual consequences, you don't seem to find all that important. Once again, how very convenient

>>20151186
>t. I never read revelations
Or maybe you did. The way the world is going to shit, I’m sure somebody righteous might be awaken before 2035 and wage a full scale war on modern society. Then /pol/tards will finally have a real Happening thread for the first time ever.

>>20150782
Two more weeks! Trust the plan!!!

>>20153306
>It will totally happen soon guys! Pinky promise!

Also, how do you know this 'righteous' fellow won't be a muslim, who'll just kill you as well?

>>20150782
He came back already. But you didn't notice that because He used other bodies. Not the white body you praise. But don't you worry, he will come back again in 2030 (he will be reborn, as a baby, in 2030).

>>20150782
Bros, is anyone else kinda worried that 2030 will be exactly two thousand years since our Lord died and yet lives? And 2030 is the same date were the elite (anti-christ) are bringing about a great reset? I swear, If Elijah and Moses arent coming back before the Lord comes again then I dont know what else...
no one knows the day or the hour I suppose.

>>20150831
He's a jessu bakka

>>20151186
But Christ ascended up to heaven and will descend likewise according to the account and prophecy. What we should be looking out for first is the two prophets to come beforehand as is stated in Revelation 11. Reincarnation is not on the table.

>>20152469
Show verse

>>20153337
Why aren't any of these prophecies ever tied to anything we can actually check? It always refers to something really vague, like him being "present", and him returning "soon" and "in due time". It never mentions anything specific, almost like you people know you can't really deliver on your promises

>>20153421
Read Revelation Chapter 2
Jeruselem is held by the Jews in the end times.
The first horse conqures the earth without war.
The second horse makes war on the earth. Famines await then death followed by Hades. The two prophets who will prophesy will surely be Elijah and Moses. Its all there. Those can hear let him hear. Those who can see let him see.

>>20153505
*Revelation Chapter 11

>>20153276
>basically an opportunity for you to accept Jesus and become worthy of God.
What exactly is preventing or forcing God's hand to not have that offer in the air unconditionally and indefinitely <img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="26" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/4459d60b_PepoG.png">

>>20151646
trust the plan :)

>>20153505
Yes, and all of that is needlessly vague. Why can't you people just precisely tell me when and where this will take place?

For instance, compare these two predictions
>when the sun goes down, and there are no clouds in the sky, you can observe a bright orb called 'the moon' up above
>maybe in ten seconds, or perhaps in 10 billions years, stuff and things will involve Jesus, somewhere, probably

Notice how the first prediction is one that anyone can check? Notice how it's not nearly as vague as the second one is? In reality, we can make specific predictions about specific events that will take place, why is this so hard for the religious? Why is everything clothed in this vague imagery that's reinterpretable to the point of being utterly meaningless? Is there a single thing that your text even vaguely implies, other than the most general?

Let me try to summarize my take, having spent my life studying first neuroscience (undergrad), then complex systems / philosophy of science (grad school), more continental style philosophy (while teaching), and now physics (more grad school while teaching). This will start with the sciences, but I will loop back to Christ.

The ressurection is far in the future, a future where sentient life has progressed far beyond our current state. The ressurection is within the Absolute, the sum total of all potentially, something that is slowly coming into being, and yet, necissarily, has always been.

I. Global vs. Discrete - Global Laws

It took 14 billion years for our universe to produce sentient life on the Earth. Our best guess is that it would take about this long for sentience to show up anywhere. This is because life, particularly complex life, requires many things that take a very long time to create. For example, heavy elements from super novae, the formation of planets with high amounts of metals, aeons for natural selection to do its work, etc.

Our universe is governed by mathematical symmetries that ensure that the the laws of physics follow laws of logic, and that physical forces do not vary across time and space (Gauge Invariance, Noether's Symmetry, etc.).

So, part of the "Book of Nature" man has access to through his reason and our sciences is all about these universal laws. These laws, which are invariant through time, ground the reality and behavior of objects.

This is a mathematical form of knowledge. Universal laws are derived by translating experience (collectively, empircle data) into mathematical systems and formal logic.

E.g., Boltzmann Entropy: S = k. log W

Note that thermodynamic entropy is a law of universals; a tendency of the actual microstates of a system based on the physically potential states of a microsystem given a specific macrostate. Expand the volume of a container of gas and the molocules will tend towards greater entropy, following certain macrostate parameters (e.g., Boyle's Law).

This does not say anything about the behavior of individual molocules, nor does it take account of the specific interactions between molocules. It assumes an ideal gas, where the behavior of one molecule is not correlated the behavior of others.

Thus, this is a law for a global scale, a law of universal applications. In Piercean tripartite semiotics, this is a Thirdness, a tendency or habit. (Semiotics is the study of meaning, more on its role later).

II. Global vs. Discrete - Discrete Laws

For a long time, science focused only on these global laws. In physics and in other sciences, differential equations without equilibrium solutions (generally asymptotically stable solutions were the focus). Although things as simple as pendulums actually exhibit irregularity, they were treated as having equilibriums.

Science did this because so much of how it had worked was taking out the details of a physical system that could be easily measured, and applying universal laws to them. It was a system of simplification and abstraction that assumed away details. For an example, look up laws for gas behavior. You'll see they are almost all for ideal gasses, not the gasses we actually work with.

It was assumed that the variance caused by discrete effects was just noise and could be smoothed out by knowing universal tendencies. This was wrong. Even very simple differential equations can lead to unpredictable cycles, in a word, chaos. For a simple example in Excel: http://paulorenato.com/index.php/random-stuff/118-excel-chaos

What people began to notice was that, within this chaos, was also self similarity. A good example is that daily price fluctuations in economics, rather than being just noise, often tend to mimic long term marker fluctuations over the course of years.

>>20154327
Mandelbrot realized that this self-similarity could be modeled with the mathematics of fractional geometries, and chaos theory was born.

The reason images of irises look like nebulae, veins and arteries look like tree branches, the universe at vast scales looks like neurons, etc. is tied to the mathematics of self similarity and fractals.

James Gileck's Chaos is a great book on this subject.

Now, with the study of chaos also came the study of complexity and emergence. New mathematical tools were developed for dealing with the discrete (Firstness, local) that differed from the tools used for the continuous (Thirdness, global). Graph theory (pic related) is a big one. We also have had huge advances in the philosophy of causality from this work, with causal diagrams and do-calculus.

We now know that good models should involve non-linearity, tipping points, and the effects of networks. Simulations are likely the research tools of the future. The replication crisis almost certainly has to do with publication biases, but is almost certainly also due to fields trying to model complex, dynamical systems with distinct non-linearity using linear models.

The big takeaway here is that while global laws are summarized in formal equations, the description of the discrete must be contained in algorithms. This has philosohical implications as the Kolmogorov Complexity of a string of information, its "algorithmic entropy" is logically incomputable (see also: omega numbers, more on this later).

So, we have two types of knowledge. the global and the local. This is covered in detail with the mathematics used in this free text: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1

It is an amazing highlights reel of discoveries in science, problems in epistemology and philosophy of science, and presents a way forward. Don't be turned off by the speculative introduction. Buying into the information ontology it presents in the final section of the book isn't necissary for using the summary parts. The 'weird' stuff on psychedelics, religion, cryptocurrency, etc. is interesting food for thought too though. He notes when he is being speculative.

>>20154343
II. Complexity and Life - Information

Now, between the local and global, we have a middle ground, Secondness. This is the home of complex systems, far from equilibrium systems, and life. Complexity is also a middle ground between chaos and order. Too much of either and complex systems cannot form.

In order to understand life, you need to understand information theory. Information theory is underpinned by Shannon's information entropy formula. This formula is actually identical to the Boltzmann entropy formula above, except that it uses log 2. It uses log 2 to compute information in bits.

It does this for practical reasons; electronic computers store all information in binary. However, there is also a philosophical reason for this. With the law of the excluded middle and principal of bivalence, it must hold that we can only store true or false values about things in the world. Of course, we know from quantum mechanics that modality is a physical reality; objects can hold probabilistic values anywhere between 0 and 1 before wave function collapse. That's not central now, but the qbits of quantum computing hold promise here.

What Shannon Entropy is summarizing is essentially all the possible messages that could be contained in a finite signal through a channel. The entropy of a sentence would thus be the total possible character combinations (all letters upper and lower case, spaces, punctuation, etc.) Multiplied by the length of the string. Borges' story "The Library of Babel" is a great example.

However, not all letters are equally common in English. Not all words follow each other with equal frequency. The use of words in human languages actually fall into a power law distribution. So, we can further define entropy as the mathematical amount of surprise a message holds for us. That is, based on the information we have already received through a channel, what is the likelyhood of each possible message of X characters.

For more on information, the Great Courses - The Science of Information is really great and currently free with a membership. The Ascent of Information is another good book.

The main point here is that information is physical (Landauer's Principal).

Pic related gets at the tie in to the emergence of life.

>>20153306
Why are Christians so bloodthirsty? They claim a copyright on the founding moral values of the west, yet their wet dreams include globalscale genocide and they're perfectly fine with thousands of people going to Hell on a daily basis for the crime of not believing in their jewish fairy tale

>>20154356
In biology, it's long been recognized that a genome acts as a one way membrane that lets information about the enviornment into a lineage, but does not let useful information leave. Increasingly, biologists argue that teleology makes sense in the frame of biology, it is the tendency of the system to maintain itself.

Fitness is directly tied to the amount of information an organism carries about its enviornment.

Life can be viewed as far from thermodynamic equilibrium self organizing systems. (Storgatz' Synch, on the mathematics of self organizing systems is great here).

Organisms must prevent taking on too much thermodynamic entropy (Boltzmann Entropy), but must also store Shannon Entropy about the environment in their genomes and nervous systems to build fitness. An organism can only bring a very small amount of information into itself, or else it would be destroyed by entropic trends. This means organisms have to rely on computation to generate a picture of the world.

(To see why most of our sensory experiences have to be 'created' by computation' think about the amount of information in just one mole hydrogen gas. Its phase space contains Avagadro's number worth of information about each molocule, an astronomic sum.)

The universes tendency towards entropy means that self-organizing systems are under constant threat. It is this very tendency towards chaos that drives complexity, in that an organism's having more computational power and information about its environment increases fitness and sustains a lineage.

So, our world is one uniquely structured to give rise to ever greater complexity and self-reflective awareness. Here we can start to bring in Hegel, whose idea of universal progress towards being knowing itself as its self seems to be realized in the mechanics of our universe. This is a result between the interplay of the mathematics of the global and local, and of chaos and order.

Informational representation in life, a result of evolution/selection (itself a result of the trend towards entropy), will never fit to an ideal solution because the Kolmogorov Complexity on any string, while necissarily less than the Shannon Entropy for all non-random strings, in computable. In essence, non-random strings can be compressed as algorithms.

Thus, life has every incentive to use computation over pure representation. However, an algorithm of length Y cannot compute the shortest possible algorithm that represents string Y+n because doing so entails logical contradiction. It essentially recreates the Barber Paradox in abstract form, resulting in halting problems and faliures in both digital and mechanical calculators. Keep in mind the point that logical contradiction is an observed limit of physical action, that will become important.

>>20150782
>The Empire Never Ended

>>20154372
This means life will always have to default to a form of semi-random walk to glean information from the enviornment. This walk is also necessitated because, in the language of complexity studies, the environment represents a moving landscape with optimal solutions constantly changing, and because so many natural dynamical systems have limitless potential iterations (see also: "period three implies chaos").

The takeaway here is that life isn't random. It comes into being inexorably due to the laws of nature. Progressive complexity is dictated by these same laws. We don't just see this sort of selection effect in biology, but also in the creation and survival of languages, computer programs, corporations, political ideologies, and nations (see Fukuyama's The End of History for a flawed, but decent application of Hegel to political history).

IV: Boehme, Hegel, and Progression Towards the Absolute

We know there is being (becoming) because we're here, right? But how did God have being before creation, before time? The idea of an anthropomorphic sky father creating the world as an artist paints a picture runs into logical problems.

Behemism says God couldn't have being in that period. Genesis starts with "In the beginning," a begining that coincided with creation for a reason. Because if there is only one thing, God, how can God have any meaning. An infinite string of ones carries no information in the same way an infinite string of zeros lacks information. As Sausser says, "a one word language is impossible," because if one word carries equal reference to all things, it denotes nothing.

In Boehme, this means God's knowledge of God is frustrated. God cannot define God. God must posit another, must create, in order to be defined, hence creation and time.

Hegel builds up a similar story, starting with a thought experiment on human experience. Pure sense certainty has no definiteness. You don't see dogs or sheep or trees. There is only a now, devoid of interpretation. But this pure, undefined sensory stream lacks all meaning, and so is itself pure abstraction, meaningless. This pure being is contradicted by the pure nothing of its content. The contradiction results in being sublating nothing and incorporating it into itself.

>>20151233
This is actually what happens, if you bother to read the book. It is called the Harrowing of Hell.

>>20154383
The result is becoming. We experience a now of being that falls away continually into nothing. The new concept entails both, the beingness of being in "now" and the nothing of nothing in the falling away of "now," which is then replaced by another "now" of being.

This sort of dialectical can be found at the heart of physics, in the direction of thermodynamics entropy. The tendency towards higher entropy is what defines the "arrow of time." It grounds our perspective vis-á-vis physical systems, giving us a past and future, despite the equations of physics being reversible.

We have a universe begining with minimal entropy tending towards maximal entropy. Complexity only exists in the gap between order and chaos, on the fringes. According to Penrose, when your reach either end of theentropyscale, the heat death of the universe, or the pre-Big Bang singularity state, the formal mathematical description of our universe becomes increasingly identical. Here we we have order and chaos standing in contradiction, undefinable in their absolute states, and so we get complexity within becoming as a secondary synthesis.

This is a mirror of being and nothing standing in contradiction, giving rise to becoming, the continuous transition of being into the nothingness of the past.

Becoming, what we live, seems to flow logically from the existence of the Absolute (I use Absolute here because God has too many anthropomorphic connotations).

At the same time, ever greater complexity and self knowledge appears to follow the insights of mystics and esoteric practitioners, and formalized by Hegel, of a self aware Absolute coming to know itself. This is an immanent God, but also a transcendent one in that the Absolute encompasses all that is. It sublates the objective/subjective epistemic cut by holding all within itself.

>>20154402
And which God would this apply to?

>>20154402
V. Logic

Now, so far I've stuck to the physicalist based models here. But there are tons of great arguments against physicalism. However, these arguments are not arguments against epistemological realism or for solipsism. For a great primer on these arguments and a modern objective idealist ontology, see pic related.

However, our specific ontology is aside the point for now. What we have seen is observations for the insights on the Absolute that I believe Hegel summed up most effectively of any person in history (to date).

The question does come up though, why trust logic? Boehme's mysticism seems to show the necessity of creation, but isn't logic just in our heads, just a quirk of evolution?

The problem with this line of thinking is that denying the world is logical entails skepticism about everything. If nothing follows by necessity from anything else, all of science is useless.

However, this sort of skepticism is warranted to some degree. After all, if the universe was just created 12 minutes ago, with evidence of its history all our memories created at the same time too, who could tell the difference? Does being exist without perception? Who could tell the difference?

The problem with this sort of skepticism is that it mimics psychosis (Bernstein sums this up well in his class on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Google "Bernstein Tapes;" he also has a class on Kant). You are unsure of anything except your immediate sensations. What then Phenomenology attempts to do is almost a type of affective therapy. It walks you through the how far logic can get you, and gives you the confidence to move forward.

The argument that logic is just a sense developed by evolution is self defeating. If logic is something to be found from inductive science, science becomes circular because it relies on logic, and it is a vicious circle. Evolutionary espistemology is an ok framework, but it still has to take logic for granted as posterior to the results of inductive inference in science for it to hold. Even our most pragmatist epistemologies require a leap of faith.

But we have good reason to have faith in logic: the relationship of logical reversibility and thermodynamic reversibility, the fact that computers also can't handle contradiction, the fact that the laws of physics predict observations so amazingly well, etc.

Problems of Knowledge is a great intro to epistemology. The Great Courses Philosophy of Science is excellent too.

>>20153065
>and completely empty promise
A loaded and unfounded statement. How surprising. Jesus Himself doesn't know the exact time of His own return, so He necessarily has to be vague about it. See >>20152451

>>20154427
>A loaded and unfounded statement.
Apparently not, because you have yet to give any specifics on this grand event that will totally happen someday

>>20154408
I'm slowly getting to that although I am running out of steam and might not finish.

Also on epistemology, Quine's paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism is key. Wigner's paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

---

VI: Religion - Christian Freedom

How does this impersonal process of the Absolute, being coming to know its self as Its self link up to Christianity.

To answer that, I feel I have to start backwards, from what Christian freedom means to me, what I see of value in esoteric systems, and how I see human history through the lens of Hegelian dialectical and process philosophy.

Gospel of John

>In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him,(and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it...

>...He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.

> The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

>>20154440
>Jesus Himself doesn't know the exact time of His own return
There's your specifics. The specifics is that it is unspecific. The statement is obviously loaded, because the poster is exposing his own prejudice and unfounded because he must first demonstrate Jesus to be someone who is not worthy of trust.

>>20154442
Logos here is often translated as word, but can mean variously reason, meaning, or even logic. For a contemporary Hellenistic Jewish perspective, look at Philo of Alexandria. For him the Logos is universal reason, the logic of the world, the laws of causality and physics etc., both that which understands them in man, and that which generates them in the world.

Logos gives meaning to the world:

Colossians 1:15-20

>[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Jesus himself speaks to this role:
>Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

However, when we talk of salvation, Christians unfortunately shift away from Christ role as Logos. This leads to a misunderstanding of Christian freedom as a freedom from Jewish law, and a freedom from punishment, rather than as a higher freedom of the will.

Note that Logos, meaning, is absolutely essential for defining sin. We do not call acts with unforseeable negative outcomes "sin." Sin is all about the meaning an act has, and our will to or against an action.

Romans 7

>For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.

>Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good.So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me.For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it.For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do.Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me.So I discover this law:When I want to do what is good,evil is present with me.For in my inner selfI delight in God’s law,but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body.What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
>Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.

>>20154459
Christian Freedom is freedom from "death in sin." It is a salvation from a death of autonomy and personhood. Man is driven on all sides by a legion of desires, instincts, and fears.

To give this concept some clarity, bear in mind that obesity is preventable and treatable by an act of will. One can choose to eat less.

However, obesity is extremely heritable, (0.7-.0.8). That is, about 70-80% of the variability in who is obese is attributable to genetics (the environment being held mostly equal, i.e., first world access to surplus calories). This is likely a greater degree of heritability than IQ or many other traits.

Our freedom is highly constrained. And indeed, constraints are required for there to be freedom. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel asks the question, what would absolute freedom look like? Unintuitively, it is the absence of choice. You can have your cake and eat it too. No limitations means you can be in two places at one, choose yes and no, reverse your decisions, etc. Absolute freedom means absolute freedom from consequences. It drains choices of any significance and so one is left unable to make real choices, as choices carry no weight and become equal to one another.

Freedom to choose only exists in the context of constraints. We face many constraints, we cannot fly, or be two place at once, etc.

Our universe is one which we can understand because it works through universal, logical laws, but this also means our freedom of action is constrained to the small domain of the discrete.

Now, it is not the case that physics entails determinism. Freedom of action can exist through top down causality. That is, a higher level, emergent system can act on lower levels, as when a person improves the health of organ tissue by choosing to exercise and eat well.

Indeed, top down causality seems necissarily to explain some phenomena. How else can the creation of fundemental particles not seen since the first moments after the creation of the universe in human-made particle accelerators be explained?

Our freedom from our animal nature is derived from our share in the Logos. When the Bible says man was created in "the image" of God, it clearly is not referring to man's physical body. It is man's share in the Logos that he shares with God.

(Indeed, the entire ordering of creation seems to be based on degrees of freedom, see: The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Kass - this is a more humanist commentary, so agnostics will generally find more to like here than more theological commentaries)

>>20154485
Man is an animal, a physical entity, and thus subject to the laws of causality. He stands within the circuit of cause and effect. Yet he is different in that he can apprehend these laws, and fathom how actuality comes into being from potentially. This allows him to select and shape what becomes actual according to reason.

When man reverts to a beast and is ruled by passion and social forces, this is sin. He is cut off from the part of himself that is in the likeness of God. Thus, Paulexperiences a death in sin while biologically alive after losing a war with the members of his body. Yet, he also experiences a ressurected personhood through Christ, the Logos.

When Christ casts out the horde of demons who call themselves "Legion" in Matthew, this can be seen as symbolic of universal Logos defeating the inner demons of passion, desire, instinct, etc. Christ is removing the chains of causality.

Man's share in the Logos is too small to save him from sin. He degraded into a beast. Only by accepting the universal Logos can he act freely. Christ is the path to ressurection.

As Paul notes in Romans 8, this transformation is not instant. It is a long, excruciating process. He likes it to childbirth. The world we live in today is moaning as it goes through the labor pains of giving birth to the freedom of the ressurection. This is the slow labor is the progression of the Absolute, the dialectical at work.

>>20154504
Ok, so I am out of time. Didn't even get to Pierce and the semiotic tie in.

The big question for me, coming from an atheist household, was: "why would one religion be right versus the others? Sure, maybe it is plausible, but others say similar things."

This question has more impact when you've only been exposed to dogmatic, and more simplistic formulations of religion as well.

I realized over time that history, as respects the dialectical and how the past shapes the future, and begets progress and antithesis, is different from "which potentialities became actualities at time X relative to my time Y."

Christianity is STILL developing alongside the absolute.

I didn't get to get into my study of Gnosticism, the Hermetic Tradition, Alchemy, or Kabbalah either, or Hindu thought.

That's ok, the big takeaway would be: look at history from the perspective of the dialectical and see how the ideas are progressing!

If you're not inclined to take esoterica seriously, start with more academic studies. Magee's Cambridge guide is a great start. Schloem too for Kabbalah.

>>20152447
Any Mary/Jesus /SS/ in your library, anon?

>>20152998
One substance, different persons.

>>20154578
>>20154504
>>20154485
>>20154459
>>20154442
>>20154415
>>20154402
>>20154383
>>20154372
>>20154356
>>20154343
>>20154327
>>20154319
1. tl;dr
2. Meds
3. Dilate
4. You will never be a woman

>>20150782
(You) are supposed to be the next Him. Not in a schizo 'I"m the messiah sense'. I mean, one of the conclusions of Christian theology is that you must live and be as near to Him as possible. No, I don't mean go literally be a carpenter (builder) and preach to people. I mean you must attain as high a level of virtue through sacrifice as you can, for the sake of your community, your family, and yourself (your salvation).

>>20154601
And it is necessarily so.

Kant's a priori recognition of the self (Hegel's self positing Spirit), that is, the spontaneity needed for the procedurally necissary of the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding (the "categories" following off Aristotle) must be different in God for God to be Its own ground.

God must contain all elements of the semiotic triangle.


The Trinity Reflects the Piercean Semiotic Triangle. Christ, the Logos, is a symbol. It proceeds from the Referent, which is the ground of being, the Father, which is the Object. The Holy Spirit is the Interpretant. Since being requires meaning, since pure unmitigated input is pure abstraction, which is no different from nothing (biting off Hegel here), this interrelationality represents the essential requirement for being qua being.

>>20154578
Of course, this is all restating others work mostly, although some exegesis and tie ins are my own.

I hesitate to add my own experiences with mysticism, the combination of sensory deprivation set ups with psychedelics (LSD, cannibus, salvia divinorum, DMT, mushrooms) and disassociatives (normally ketamine, dextromethorphan, and nitrous oxide), or esoterica because modern bias is to stop listening at that point regardless of any formal logical or mathematical rigor, or commitment to empiricism up to that point.

Hegel is experiencing a rebirth in the physical sciences, as is semiotics, but only as far as theory generation is concerned. There is still a hard guidelines against all but one of the Aristotlean causes as well.

good thread gang. thanks to kind schizoanon for his omega point ramble. archive ph W5e2v

>>20153346
Revelation 22:6-7
>And he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true, and the Lord, the God of prophetic spirits, sent his angel to show his servants what must happen soon.” “Behold, I am coming soon.” Blessed is the one who keeps the prophetic message of this book.

Get rekt faggot <img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="32" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/7081142e_goldface.png">

>>20154343
my boy's wicked smaht

>>20151124
>God keeps setting a date but then some mortal predicts it so he has to postpone launch to the next non-predicted day
Nice to know God operates the same way my scrum team does.

>>20152359
Saint Luke had The Holy Virgin Mary as the main source for his gospel.
>>20152443
Well said brother.

>>20154485
>>20154459
>>20154442
>>20154402
Hegel is where high IQ becomes indistinguishable from schizophrenia. The Phenomenology of Spirit and Whitehead's Process and Reality are more esoteric than actual esoterica and fucking gibberish.

If that's the role to some sort of progress, provided it isn't just gibberish, it's going to have to wait until gene editing makes average IQ what is currently like 170.

>>20150782
nigga you are jesus

>>20154739
Kek

>>20150782
Didn't Jung write a book about it?

>>20154504
Thanks a lot for your effort posting anon. I am very much interested in your ideas and would like to read more. One thing I don’t get tho.

>Man's share in the Logos is too small to save him from sin. He degraded into a beast. Only by accepting the universal Logos can he act freely. Christ is the path to ressurection.

What does it mean to accept universal logos. How does believing christ is the messiah changes anything. Who os christ anyway. Isn’t the self effort to get away from passions better than having some vague beliefs even tho in the end it might not be enough. Why should I belittle myself and protrude myself. Isn’t it better to do what you can and leave it at that.

>>20150782
He decided Severian would do a better job, so he's just playing video games and getting baked.

>>20155644
Thanks. Had a lot of time to think of them and the opportunity to study quite a bit over two graduate degrees and teaching.

I came from a non-religious household. My first exposure to philosophy outside Plato was reading Nietzsche in highschool. I worked my way through everything he published over the next two years and began reading other existentialists, mostly Camus and Sartre, although I read Dostoevsky and Kundera.

I found the idea of overcoming the essential absurdity of life compelling. Only meaninglessness could make one's determination to continue to struggle on in spite of that meaninglessness a sublime act of creation and strength, right?

But I was plagued by doubt. This all seemed like so much cope for the coming silence of death.

The Bible says it best in Ecclesiastes:

"Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south,
and goes around to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.
All things are wearisome;
more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been,
in the ages before us.
The people of long ago are not remembered,
nor will there be any remembrance
of people yet to come
by those who come after them.

The Futility of Seeking Wisdom

I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind."


But I only had studied basic undergraduate physical sciences and mathematics at that point. Despite going to a program with a very high reputation, I wasn't exposed to the now long emerging trends of chaos theory, information science, self-similarity/fractal reoccurence, or the mathematics of synchronicity and self-organization. Nor did majoring in two science fields give me much exposure to the philosophy of science.

>>20156009
Once I understood these things better, I realized that no one takes the old Newtonian meme of life being a "random occurrence of molocules bumping together," seriously. Life was better understood as arising from the properties of the universe and the physics of far from equilibrium systems. To get to this though, sciences needed to incorporate the mathematics of the discrete (graph theory, etc.) instead of only looking at the global/Piercean Thirdness, something that is still a struggle for many fields.

Realizing the pattern in natural history towards ever greater complexity wasn't just a random counter to the universal trend towards greater entropy, but a result of that trend have me a new lens through which to look at life. Shannon Entropy and information theory also gave me a new lens for looking at how meaning flows through systems. Life now seemed part of a great process of cosmic evolution. This process didn't stop with biology, but was also reflected in history, state development, and the growth of human knowledge (Hegelian dialectical shapes my knowledge here).

Hackett's line by line commentary on the Phenomenology, Hegel's Ladder (an allusion to the ladder Jacob sees leading up to heaven in Genesis) helped here; it takes the religious side of Hegel seriously as many don't.

It became clear to me that life, my own life included, was part of a greater whole that was coming into being.

Why not just do your best? I was very sympathetic to Aristotle's ethics. To looking to a golden mean. But it wasn't enough for me. First, I had a strong hunger for truth, to see the big picture, to fathom the Absolute.

Second, I realized that living as a slave to desires isn't really living. It is a sort of death (Romans 7). We squander our time, we do things we hate. I wanted to live a life of freedom, not of mere comfort. Sure, I had enough freedom/self control to avoid being addicted to drugs, to keep my bank account full, etc. but hardly enough to live my ideal life.

The higher reason, Logos, can give us those ultimate answers. It may take a lifetime. Fathoming it is much like pulling back the layers of an onion. But the joys are incomperable. At the same time, living with and for a higher reason let me do more for others, be a better son, husband, father, and friend.

I don't know why you think worship or religion "belittles" you. Perhaps this is an artifact of too much focus being out on forgiveness in the faith.

Worship doesn't belittle you, it elevates you into something you could never be on your own. You live with the will of God (I Peter, 4).

Look up "diefication" in the Patristics. Their theology focuses on man rising up to become more like God. This is the labor Paul is talking about in Romans 8, the birth of a self that is free and able to fully embrace the Absolute.