Is this serious? A few thousand Jews sustained by constant immigration by the Diaspora is not a continuous presence. The Romans, Byzantines, and Crusaders slaughtered Jews and Samaritans on large scales; millions died under the Romans alone. Kindly drop the pretense of educated condescension.
[RD] Ask a Theologian V
- Thread starter Plotinus
- Start date
Is this serious? A few thousand Jews sustained by constant immigration by the Diaspora is not a continuous presence. The Romans, Byzantines, and Crusaders slaughtered Jews and Samaritans on large scales; millions died under the Romans alone. Kindly drop the pretense of educated condescension.
Then I was confused by your reference to "early" Christianity in your original question - I assumed you meant something much earlier than this. I don't really know anything about Christian-Jewish relations in this period.
That may be right - I don't know. But if it is, then it lends support to my claim that entire populations rarely move from place to place.
I don't know where I said this, but if I did, then I was wrong. Luther was very pro-Paul. He based his "justification by faith alone" theology on his reading of Paul's letter to the Romans.
You said this period your supposed mass extermination of Jewish people happened was what, 800-1000? This was the timeframe you gave Plotinus, despite then mentioning even crusaders... Or is that just the supposed resulting massive cover-up story meant to turn the jews who were left into christians? At any rate, you chose a very bad time period to focus on so as to further pursue this claim of yours. In the 800-1000 era the region of Syria (including the modern-day country of Israel) was already permanently lost by the Byzantine Empire. A famous quote by one of the emperors, who decided to abandon it to the arabs, was to bid it fairwell, in a manner somewhat echoing Pyrrhus' quote about the battle-ground of Sicily (foreshadowing the punic wars).
Considering that in the 9th century the arabs at one time invaded Anatolia and got as far as Lydia so as to burn down the main city there, your claim that somehow romans/byzantines did something bad to the jews in judea is rather bizarre.
The region did not even get back to the Empire during the late years of Basil II, which should tell you that it was pretty much lost for good and no influence could be had there.
Um, JELEEN was talking about how Jews were still around in the nineteenth century. Which prompted me to refute him. The timeframe I gave was for when the Christians would have invented the expulsion myth. But the accepted version is that the Jewish diaspora was formed by the slaves taken by the Romans. You took completely unrelated statements made by me over multiple posts and spun them together into a bizarre, multilayered strawman.
Last edited:
I am just working with the material given
Just another way to link you to the fact that in the 800-1000 it was very unlikely this issue would have bothered anyone in the region, cause somewhat more important things were going on, including the usual endless war there.
I see. So Luther's translation of Paul's letters (which was what we were discusiing at the time) might be entirely accurate.
Now to our 'strawman':
Where on earth do you get this 'information'? None of these statements have any foundation in historical record.
For the record (see right above) you did not 'refute' anything. No sources are provided for your outlandish claims - possibly because none exist.
I can see why everybody gets pissed off after interacting with you. If this were a serious debate, you'd be justified in asking for sources. Since this is nothing more than me asserting uncontroversial historical facts and you making intellectual-faces at me, I think it's best if I leave it at this.
If you need anything else, just replace 'Romans' with whatever culture happened to control Palestine at that particular time.
All this bickering and arguing about who slaughtered who?
Borachio
Way past lunacy
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2012
- Messages
- 26,698
Who slaughtered whom. Still... never mind. "Who slaughtered who" is common enough usage, after all.
(But we're talking biblical times. And both Romans and Jews were picky over language. Maybe that's what they slaughtered each over for.)
(But we're talking biblical times. And both Romans and Jews were picky over language. Maybe that's what they slaughtered each over for.)
It was actually a (slightly mangled) quote of something else, I couldn't remember if they used "whom" or not in the original . . .
Borachio
Way past lunacy
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2012
- Messages
- 26,698
madviking
north american scum
Are there modern-day Cathars? If so, are they of any importance?
I know this might be difficult for you to understand, so perk your ear up; challenging theories that aren't controversial at all means you have the burden of proof. Ask
Plotinus, if the mind is immaterial then how can brain damage be explained? If your soul could go on communicating after your whole brain was gone, how could damage to the left cerebral hemisphere take away your ability to talk? And damage to the frontal lobe has been known to change someone's personality entirely. How do proponents of dualism, especially religious ones, reconcile such observations with their beliefs?
timtofly
One Day
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 9,445
Most would just call it one of the mysteries of life and God.
God set down the principle of the soul in the first chapter of Genesis. Most just relegate that to meaning life. Later it was written that the soul that sins will die. Not the human or physical, but the soul. Yet some would just say that is still just human life. Up until the time of Christ, it was accepted that the body went to the afterlife. Yet no one actually saw the body leave, in fact most bodies that survived, even if they were actually prepared to go somewhere can still be seen somewhat in tack even today. So what went to the after life? What is supposed to die, yet lives on when the body dies?
It was not until recently with the advent of monism that humans questioned the fact that this immaterial thing surely must not exist, seeing as how it has no substance. What are we trying to reconcile? We know that the ability of personhood is effected as to the health of the physical brain. It would seem to me that monism just relegates the whole activity to the product of evolution. If one accepts evolution and throws God away they have already sent the soul along with him. One can still be moral and create a religion void of all that.
I don't think that any one has a full grasp on how the soul is connected to the body, or even how it fully interacts as the mind and functions in the physical realm of the brain. It may matter to some, but that there is a soul would be the most important fact. It would appear pretty simply that if the material brain is affected in any way, it is going to cause a person to act in ways that would not be considered normal or in their right mind. There is going to be a disconnect in how the soul is manifested in such a person. I don't see how just saying the soul does not exist, because we cannot find it will cause any one to change how they reconcile the soul.
It was philosophy that tried to explain how the soul works. It is philosophy that seems to be taking the soul away.
God set down the principle of the soul in the first chapter of Genesis. Most just relegate that to meaning life. Later it was written that the soul that sins will die. Not the human or physical, but the soul. Yet some would just say that is still just human life. Up until the time of Christ, it was accepted that the body went to the afterlife. Yet no one actually saw the body leave, in fact most bodies that survived, even if they were actually prepared to go somewhere can still be seen somewhat in tack even today. So what went to the after life? What is supposed to die, yet lives on when the body dies?
It was not until recently with the advent of monism that humans questioned the fact that this immaterial thing surely must not exist, seeing as how it has no substance. What are we trying to reconcile? We know that the ability of personhood is effected as to the health of the physical brain. It would seem to me that monism just relegates the whole activity to the product of evolution. If one accepts evolution and throws God away they have already sent the soul along with him. One can still be moral and create a religion void of all that.
I don't think that any one has a full grasp on how the soul is connected to the body, or even how it fully interacts as the mind and functions in the physical realm of the brain. It may matter to some, but that there is a soul would be the most important fact. It would appear pretty simply that if the material brain is affected in any way, it is going to cause a person to act in ways that would not be considered normal or in their right mind. There is going to be a disconnect in how the soul is manifested in such a person. I don't see how just saying the soul does not exist, because we cannot find it will cause any one to change how they reconcile the soul.
It was philosophy that tried to explain how the soul works. It is philosophy that seems to be taking the soul away.
Simple: if you believe in the soul you can say that the brain acts rather like a radio receiver. If the brain is damaged, it won't pick up the soul's broadcasts properly. If the brain is the (main) point at which communication between the body and the soul occurs, then clearly damaging the brain will damage the communication between them, even though the soul itself remains untouched.
I don't think this is quite accurate. The notion of the soul, in the sense of an immaterial thing that survives the death of the body, was very well developed in Greek philosophy long before the time of Jesus. It's clearly taught in Plato's Phaedo, where Socrates tells off his friends for mourning his immanent death, on the grounds that only his body will die, and not his soul. In Judaism, and indeed in most of Middle Eastern religion, there was much less sense of a soul; rather, people thought of life after death - to the extent that they did think of it in bodily terms, as you say. This developed in Judaism into the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, a doctrine which by Jesus' day was held by some Jewish groups (notably the Pharisees) and denied by others (notably the Sadducees). Since both Jesus (apparently) and Paul (certainly) were closer to the Pharisees on this, the doctrine became part of Christianity too.
You cite Ezekiel 18:20 ("The soul who sins, he shall die") but it is a mistake to think that the word translated "soul" here has the same overtones as the English word "soul". The Hebrew word is "nephesh", which simply means a living (or, more literally, breathing) creature. It has no sense of immateriality or something distinct from the body. It is used throughout the Old Testament to refer to living creatures, including non-human animals, e.g. Leviticus 24:18. Sometimes it refers to dead creatures as well, including corpses, e.g. Numbers 9:6.
The notion of the soul is present to a slight degree in the New Testament, largely because Judaism had by this stage picked up some influences from Greek philosophy; but it became more important in Christianity later on because of the direct influence of Greek philosophy, notably Platonism, the philosophical school that most of the early Christians liked the most. Note that other schools of Greek philosophy denied the existence of a soul (in this sense); the Stoics were materialists and thought that the soul is physical, and the Aristotelians thought that the soul is the form (i.e. the structure) of the body, although Aristotle does seem to have thought that it was immortal in some sense.
Philosophically speaking it's obviously possible to believe in both evolution and the soul; I should think most Christians do, including Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, who wrote an entire book entitled The Evolution of the Soul. Obviously you can believe in evolution and also in God, as well. Perhaps more surprisingly it's perfectly possible to be an atheist and still believe in souls. The philosopher John McTaggart is the best example of this; he was an atheist idealist.
It was philosophers who invented the idea of the soul in the first place, so I suppose they're entitled to get rid of it again. But philosophers don't deny the existence of the soul simply because they can't find it. They deny its existence (and the vast majority of them do) because the concept of the soul is incoherent, it's impossible to explain how it could interact with the body if they're fundamentally different things, and (perhaps most important) because it just has no explanatory value. If we can explain the workings of the human mind solely in terms of the body (including the brain), as we probably can, then there's no point in imagining that some other entity is involved.
