Was there ever any Satirical religions back in ye ancient times like Discordianism or FSM?
There aren't really any now, are there? - I mean the ones you mention are not religions, but parodies of religion that certain militant atheists use in thought experiments that are designed to be prejudicial to religion.
The closest I can think of is the cult of the snake god Glycon, who - according to Lucian - was invented in the second century AD by Alexander of Abonutichus. Lucian claims that Alexander simply invented Glycon as a sort of cynical con trick. The apparition of the deity in his temple was actually a puppet. However, the cult proved very popular and lasted into the third or perhaps even the fourth century. Whether this counts as a "satirical" religion or not is unclear though, even assuming that Lucian's account of its origins is true.
Alan Moore, who is a neo-pagan, is apparently devoted to the cult of Glycon. I think the idea of worshipping a god which you know to be a fabrication is quite philosophically interesting.
I do not disagree, but my point was with Eran above post that "excludes" the influence of the divine (or appearance of the divine) on history. If we go back to Joan for a minute, I think that it was her belief in her divine mission that actually directed the events of her life and the history of France. If one sets aside the "truth" of whether or not god actually acted through her, it is quite apparent that her belief that god had spoken to her (as well as, the belief of others that god could speak to her) determined the course of history. I seems to me that for a historian to merely pay lip service to her beliefs is to ignore the facts: it was her beliefs and the power of their manifestation in her that drove history down that path. The real story may not be whether or not god actually directs events, but that belief that it can happen is an ongoing force in human affairs.
I suppose this is for Eran to answer really, but it doesn't seem to me that he said anything to contradict this. One can acknowledge the importance of an individual's religious beliefs (or indeed any other kinds of beliefs) in explaining their actions, without having to commit to any position regarding the truth of those beliefs. Eran only said that the historian ignores the divine as a possible explanation for events, not that the historian must ignore historical figures' belief in the divine as a possible explanation.
Hello.. I'm an (jewish) atheist, and am lately reading the bible (in Hebrew) in search of better understanding of religious moral values and history.
I'm new to this thread and haven't read it all..
I want to ask Plotinus : What do you think about Moses in terms of religiousness? :
I saw his main actions (I may miss a few..) :
0. Leader/strategist of the exodus.
1. Organizer : Making an inner division of the Israelites into tribes, cohens, cities for refugees....)
2. Judge : Giving moral values via laws.
3. Reestablished the belief in one god.
4. God is worshipped at one place.
I think that 3 and 4 may have been his invention so he will be heard about the rest !!
He may have wanted to give them good laws to obide by, but noone would listen to him that way.. so he may have created 3 and 4.
Had he created them (meaning there was no burning bush nor a god talking to him for example), he would get into a win-win situation :
1. The Israelites would listen to him as a man through which god speaks, giving him the ultimate authority.
2. [creating 3] Make the Israelites coherent in believes and laws (before, they had many "gods", each with his own theme of laws... now there was just one set)
3. [creating 4] All worship can be managed at one place, making worshiping regulated (and concentrated money earning).
So it seems to me that he may have lied when he said "I spoke to god and he said...",
but his aim was ONLY for the organization and future of his newly formed nation.
Do you think he was really a believer? Can you see somewhere in the text any indication for something like that?
Like anything Old Testament-related, this really isn't my area of expertise, I'm afraid. I do think it's very hard to know anything much about Moses; indeed I'm not sure that it's even very certain that he existed at all. In particular, even if we grant that Moses did exist (and even that he led the Hebrews out of captivity), I think there's great dubiousness over whether the Law had anything to do with him. The Pentateuch as we know it formed in the Exilic period and immediately after; and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell us of a "rediscovery" of the Law during this time as well. The earlier prophets don't seem to talk about it at all. It's therefore likely that the Law was actually compiled in the post-Exilic period, and that one of the purposes of the Pentateuch was to project the Law back to the time of Moses and suggest that God gave it via him. Instead of the traditional "Law and the prophets", it was more a case of "the prophets and the Law". In which case the Moses of the Pentateuch becomes an even more legendary figure.
But suppose we set all that aside and assume that Moses did exist and that his career was at least tolerably similar to the story told by the Pentateuch, I doubt very much that we can know anything much about what "really" happened. Part of the problem here is that we just don't have any other sources. At least with Jesus we have a number of texts which were written within a few decades of the events in question; in the case of Moses we have a single text (certainly based on various earlier ones, but any views we have of those must necessarily be speculative to a certain degree) which was written centuries after the events it purports to describe. So speculation about what Moses may "really" have thought is just that - speculation.
Still, I have to say that it seems to me prima facie improbable that someone would do the things attributed to Moses fraudulently. To put it another way: suppose we take at face value the story of the Pentateuch of Moses as a law-giver. Which seems a more plausible hypothesis? That Moses really believed himself to be called by God and to have been given a Law for his people, or that Moses made the whole thing up to convince people of the validity of his Law? In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that the former is far more plausible.
Other thing related to that: Wouldn't it be reasonable to say that "fully human" implies "no god"? If something is human, it can't be god, right?
Well, why not?
This is actually a very interesting question and one at the heart of contemporary thinking on the incarnation. One problem here is that the word "God" is really used in two senses. In one sense it is a proper noun, the name of an individual (or character). So "God" is
him, as it were. But in another sense, it is a category or sort of thing. Something is "God" if it has certain properties.
Now in the case of the incarnation, many have argued that - taking "God" in the second sense - God cannot be man because some of the properties that are essential to divinity are incompatible with some of the properties that are essential to humanity. For example, it is essential to divinity to be omnipotent, and essential to humanity to be limited in power. Or it is essential to divinity to be timeless, and essential to humanity to be temporal. And so on. Those defending the incarnation have responded in various ways. One is to use "reduplicative" properties: for example, Christ is "omnipotent as God" and "limited in power as man", the assumption being that these are not incompatible properties. Another is to deny that all these properties are actually essential: for example, it is not essential to humanity to be limited in power, so Christ can be omnipotent and still perfectly human (Thomas Morris argues along these lines).
Another strategy is to bite the bullet and argue that, in becoming human, God did lose certain essential properties. (This is the "kenotic" strategy.) For example, in becoming human he ceased to be omnipotent. If you think that omnipotence is essential to divinity, then it would follow that in becoming human, God ceased to be divine. But if you take "God" to be the name of an individual, rather than of a sort of thing, then this might not be a problem. God could lose
all of the essential divine properties, but he would still be God (in that sense). And in that case, God could indeed become human, or indeed become a watermelon if you like. Thomas Altizer popularised a radical kenotic doctrine of the incarnation in the 1960s which went along these lines: God became human, in the sense of being completely transformed into a human. Jesus had no divine properties or anything that anyone else lacks, other than the rather peculiar property of having once been God. When he died, that was it. So during Jesus' lifetime somebody existed who had once been God; after Jesus' death even he no longer existed. So God is, quite literally, dead. This view isn't very fashionable these days.
Also, if human can be god, couldn't there be other humans who are gods?
That's also an important question which a few philosophical theologians are starting to look at (Robin Le Poidevin is one). The traditional answer is "no". This is because the orthodox doctrine is that when the Son becomes human, he becomes
permanently human. Humanity is not a temporary state that he adopts for the duration of Jesus' lifetime, to divest himself of (with a sigh of relief) once it's all done. He's still human now and always will be. The union of divinity to humanity is real and permanent, which is why all human beings have the ability to become divine. Moreover, of the three members of the Trinity, only the Son
could become human. (I'm not quite sure of the reasoning behind this beyond the rather vague and unconvincing notion that
it is more "fitting" for the Son to be incarnate than any of the others.) So given this, there could never be another incarnation.
However, on some models of incarnation, there could be more than one. For example, Schleiermacher thought that Jesus' divinity was a matter of his having a perfect consciousness of God, in virtue of which God could fittingly be said to exist in Jesus. On that view, there's nothing stopping anyone from having the same property.
These lead to two more general questions: How have christians thought the existence of only one god? Is it just a matter of fact, or is it impossible for any other gods to exist?
Christians (and I think monotheists in general) have pretty much always thought that there
could be only one God. This is partly because the divine properties are such that they exclude any duplicates. For example, suppose you have God1 and God2, and they are both omnipotent. Does that mean that God1 has the power to overrule God2? If he does then God2 is not omnipotent, but if he doesn't, then God1 is not omnipotent. And so on. Again, part of the definition of God is that he is the greatest being in existence, but only one being can have that property, just as there can't be two people who are the tallest person in the room.
More fundamentally though, God as traditionally conceived is not simply an entity with certain properties, but the very ground and cause of existence itself. Indeed, according to Aquinas God simply is existence. God is the true reality which underlies the phenomenal world; he is the beginning and end of the universe, the alpha and the omega, if you like. There just can't be more than one of those.
(Of course Christians do believe that although there is one God, there are three divine persons. That's just a little complication to keep things interesting.)
And is it part of the doctrine of Jesus' dual nature that the doctrine isn't contradictory? (I mean, is the doctrine "Jesus is full human and full God" or "Jesus is full human and full god, and this can not imply any contradictions"? Those seem to be same things (at least for believers), but if the latter is the real doctrine, then any attempts of finding contradiction are vain. And it perhaps wouldn't be the biggest skip of intellectual integrity that has happened).
Christians have generally thought that God does not have control over what is possible. God cannot, for example, decree that 2+2=5. (Of course he could decree that we use the name "5" to refer to what we currently call "4", but that is not the same thing.) Descartes apparently thought otherwise, and Peter Damian is sometimes cited as sharing this view (unconvincingly, in my opinion). But the Cartesian view is problematic. If you think that God determines what is possible then you open up all sorts of strange possibilities and effectively remove any prospect of reasoning about God or indeed anything.
Given this, the orthodox view would be that to say "Jesus is fully human and fully divine" is the same thing as to say "Jesus is fully human and fully divine, and this implies no contradictions", since anything that is true must imply no contradictions. If you took the Cartesian view, you could envisage the possibility of something being true and yet inconsistent at the same time, but as I say, most Christians have rejected this possibility.
And lastly, I saw a weird dream not long ago, it was a nightmare, and at one point in the dream I prayed for God, and promised him that I would become a believer, if he'd help me. I thought that perhaps I could wake up and it all would be only dream, but then I realized that the hope was absolutely absurd, and that can never happen.
After I eventually did wake up (and this didn't happen immediately) I've been thinking about two questions:
1. Am I obliged to fulfill the promise I made? (although I probably could do so only in my outer behaviour)?
2. Was the event miracle?
Interesting stuff! This reminds me of Jerome. As a young man, Jerome was devoted to Cicero. One night he had a dream in which he met God. God asked him, "Who are you?" Jerome replied, "I am a Christian." God answered, "No - you are a
Ciceronian!" And Jerome promised that he would never read Cicero again. Upon waking, Jerome held himself to be bound by this promise and abided by it.
Later in life, however, Jerome did go back to reading Cicero. During his immense and distressingly public argument with his former friend Rufinus, Rufinus brought this up and accused Jerome of backing out of his promise to God. Jerome retorted that promises made in dreams are not binding.
I don't think anyone has theorised beyond this about the bindingness of promises made in dreams. But there are at least two issues (that
have been much discussed) that might seem to be relevant to your case.
First, does it make sense to promise to
believe something at all? A fundamental principle in ethics is the "ought implies can" principle (OIC). This states that you can't be obliged to do something that you can't do. But it's not clear that choosing to believe something is within our power. Can you just decide to believe in God? It seems implausible to me. If you can't, then you can't be morally obliged to do it. You can, at most, be morally obliged to make conditions as optimal as possible for doing it; perhaps you could read lots of pro-theism literature, or talk to theists, or whatever. Or, if you already believe in God, you could go out of your way to avoid coming into contact with people or ideas that might challenge this belief. These are things that it is within your power to do. But I find it hard to see how it's within your power simply to believe itself. So I would say that either you shouldn't promise to do it, or if you do, you aren't morally bound by that promise.
Second, what is the status of promises made in dreams? One of the reasons why Descartes' dream hypothesis was such a powerful sceptical tool is that, for any given state of affairs, it's possible to dream that this state of affairs holds when in fact it doesn't. This goes for states of mind too. I once dreamed that I was unsure whether I was dreaming. So I considered the question very carefully and concluded that in fact I was not dreaming. But actually I was. In reality, I hadn't considered the question carefully at all. I'd only dreamed that I had. Similarly, it seems perfectly possible that you could dream that you've made a promise when in fact you have not. Given this, it's impossible for you to be certain that you made the promise at all. That raises the question whether we're morally bound by such promises. I'm not sure what the answer to that is.
As for whether it's a miracle... Well, that will depend on your definition of "miracle" and what criteria you employ to determine whether a given event was one or not. A vogue among modern theologians is to reject the traditional definition of a miracle as a divine intervention that breaks the normal laws of nature, and instead think of a miracle as an event in which we perceive God's intent. This is helpful because it means that one can believe in miracles and also believe that the universe is a closed box in which everything can be fully explained naturalistically. (I suppose it's like saying that my action in typing right now can be explained mechanically in terms of neurones firing in my brain, messages going down my nerves and moving my muscles, and so on, and it can also be explained personally in terms of my desire to answer your question. Similarly, a given event can be explained naturally, but it can also be viewed as an expression of God's will.) But it's also problematic in that it seems that the only distinction between a miracle and an everyday event lies in how we perceive it, which sounds very thin. Still, if take that view, then it was a miracle
if you want it to have been.
If, on the other hand, you adopt the traditional definition of a miracle, then in order to think it was one you'd have to have some very good reason for supposing that it could not be explained by natural factors alone. It's hard to see what that reason could be in the case of a dream like this. If you'd had a dream of some very specific event, and then awoken to find that this event really happened, without your knowledge, then you might have a good reason to think that something supernatural had occurred.
Anyway, these are good questions! Thanks for asking them.
