/lit/ - Literature

It is not remotely a "refutation" of anything, it is a claim using itself as its only source. It's a very intelligent model but it all relies on believing the author's mystical experiences.

>>20108486
Well, there was this thread >>20107895 but it got deleted before many actual book recommendations could be given pertaining to this particular subject.

>>20108510
Yeah I was there. Doesn't really have much relevance to what I said.

>>20108515
Are there any other accounts of similar experiences to Swedenborg's? Why are they not taken seriously let alone integrated into the usual doctrine, since it is vague enough to be open to interpretation?

>>20108530
You're not getting it. Swedenborg's whole thing is based on a series of (essentially) dreams that he has had where he went to heaven and hell and talked to angels and so on. All of his theological work ultimately stems from this, and thus it doesn't really serve as more than an amusing thought exercise if you don't at least at some minimal level think what he saw was 'real'.

Also, it's just very poorly fit to model that most large churches hold. They aren't going to go out of their way to accept it. There are lots of smaller churches that 'like' him, but pretty much only the actual Swedenborgian churches *accept* his model (and by the way, they're still pretty non-commital on it, I've poked around).

>>20108530
If this helps understand the distinction: a non-example of this would be Thomas Aquinas. His work is a bunch of lawyerly "if we apply principle X in subsection 27 to situation Y in chapter 11, this is what we get" stuff, it is an analysis of sources that his audience is already familiar with.

>>20108555
>>20108565
Ok, I understand.
What about my last question from the OP
>if not, which books might?

>>20108569
Swedenborg's actually is a very good choice, I was just giving you the rundown on it. As a lifelong atheist, it is the only religious source that at least made me *want* God to be real.

Apart from that, just read books on the history and historicity of early Christianity. You'll see that the model we've come to think of as 'default christianity' has almost nothing to do with the vision Jesus had, almost however you slice it.

>>20108587
Do you derive Jesus' visions from the New Testament? If so, he was outspoken, although vague, on matters related to the afterlife.

>>20108600
I'm relatively confident in my view that Jesus was just a more sophisticated 'messiah' and was talking about a physical Kingdom of God in Israel within his own lifetime, and it got re-packaged after he died and the message wouldn't have worked in its original form. For example, "there be weeping and gnashing of teeth" is part of a longer quote that makes a whole lot more sense as referring to dishonest Jews being rejected from the new kingdom of Israel (empowered by God, with Jesus as the 'king'). Being kicked out of your home just as it is attaining perfection and having to brave the unforgiving outer world (or just be killed, that would make sense too) would absolutely make someone weep and gnash their teeth.

>>20108619
>it got re-packaged after he died
The issue is that there's nothing to infirm or confirm this, the gospels are the only source available.

>>20108631
I don't think it was changed all that much, the source for this theory *is* the gospels. Obviously I think the made up the virgin birth and the resurrection and so on, but I think they kept the words of Jesus largely the same.

>>20108652
I guess. Taking this point of view, Christianity almost becomes even more impressive: how did what essentially amounts to an apocalyptic cult for Jewish tribes in Roman backwater regions become the largest and most influential religion in human history by far?

>>20108665
>how did what essentially amounts to an apocalyptic cult for Jewish tribes in Roman backwater regions become the largest and most influential religion in human history by far?
It's really not the same religion, that's the point. Christianity was turned into a vessel for syncretism between other religions and various philosophical ideas (you'll hear it called "neo-platonism"). The bible had very little to do with it until the protestant reformation, and the way that went should make clear to you the issue.

Here's the main book I'm taking this from (in addition to my own interpretations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealot:_The_Life_and_Times_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth

A lot of people here hate this book and, frankly, I kind of get why. It's has a very unbalanced pacing and seems to dumb a lot of things down, but it gets the point across. It's certainly an easy read and if you like the idea but want a more sophisticated source, there are many other books with the same theme (the main ideas go way back).

>>20108689
This book seems interesting, what do you make of the criticisms concerning the alleged inaccuracy of some of its historical claims (according to the overview given by the wiki article)?

>>20108696
It reads to me like a bunch of people whose careers rely on not agreeing with it going "umm this other paper deboonked you, sweetie??", but of course they are right that it is written to make a singular argument to the public and thus doesn't cover every little nuance that scholars would like. I wouldn't use it as a source for any specific factual claim if it came up as an issue, it just makes the basic case.

>>20108704
Yeah, I get it.
So in essence, Christianity went from being a primitive cult in its early days to gradual syncretism in order to infiltrate Roman high spheres, eventually incorporating Neoplatonism. Was this what led Constantine to convert? I guess you can see the same dynamic repeated on a smaller scale nowadays with books like Christ: the Eternal Tao where Christianity acts like an assimilator of the foreign ideas ("I made this") that aren't too incompatible with it to simply dismiss as demonic. It's an extremely efficient and effective system though.

>>20108719
>So in essence, Christianity went from being a primitive cult in its early days to gradual syncretism in order to infiltrate Roman high spheres, eventually incorporating Neoplatonism.
Zealot says that the shift was happening like right off the bat. Obviously, the 'beyond the grave' element started right away (it had to, wouldn't have worked otherwise), but the Hellenization was within the next few decades, before the gospels were compiled. It went even more that way under the Catholic church, but the beginning was in the same century. The last quarter or so of the book is all about Paul taking it in this very new direction, while James (brother of Jesus) was leading the "core" movement as an inherently Jewish religion.
>Was this what led Constantine to convert?
No one really knows about this, lots of conspiracy theories.
>Christianity acts like an assimilator of the foreign ideas ("I made this") that aren't too incompatible with it to simply dismiss as demonic. It's an extremely efficient and effective system though.
Christianity is too vague and diverse to be able to truly say this, different sects have different ideas about tolerance for other religions. I think it's more to do with how vast and unclear the ideas are, you can take it almost anyway you want. Don't forget that Jim Jones (koolaid mass suicide guy) claimed to be running a christian church.

>>20108738
>beyond the grave
How did early Christians deal with the prophecies not happening in their lifetime? You'd think Jesus' death + prophecies turning out to be fake would be cause for despair and the eventual dismantling of the whole project.
>lots of conspiracy theories.
Sounds interesting, are any of them sensible?

>>20108752
I'm sure some of them did defect, but lots of people will find any reason to stay in a community they like. Once again, it comes down to the inherent vagueness of Christianity, they had lots of wiggle room to come up with new answers.

The one you hear the most often is that he was forcefully converted, but I don't know much about the conspiracy theories with Constantine's conversion. I think that in general they stem from a lack of evidence either way, so the Dan Brown thriller novels are almost as valid a source as any other. Now, the *confirmed* conspiracy about him is that the church fabricated a document saying he signed over the state's power to the church, and put himself beneath them in the hierarchy. The document was proven fraudulent long ago and the church has accepted this.

Back on the idea of assimilation, my personal favorite is the attempt to try to align christianity with capitalism and neo-conservatism. It's one of the hardest things to try to fit into it but still probably the most common. I think there's a good case to be made that even Jim Jones' ideas made more sense with the source material than neo-conservatism does.

>>20108565
>His work is a bunch of lawyerly "if we apply principle X in subsection 27 to situation Y in chapter 11, this is what we get" stuff
This is the first time I've seen someone put properly into words why his stuff feels so clinical and soulless, it turns the transcendent into an autistic legal document

Henry Corbin loved Swedenborg and thought he saw similarities between Swedenborg and guys like Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, and other Islamic mystics.

>>20108790
Yep. To people like him, God is an abstract concept. The only real difference between him an atheist-materialist is that he has chosen to 'accept' this concept.

>>20108803
St. Thomas had mystical experiences of God, and certainly accepted and fully integrated the Catholic position of God as incarnate - especially if you realize what a neo-aristotelian has to be and how much he shrugged of Platonist tendencies in Christianity, your position is ill-considered and ignorant.

>>20108828
>St. Thomas had mystical experiences of God
That is quite true; though it is worth noting that after his final and strongest experience of God towards the end of his life, he stated that all of his previous work seemed like straw in comparison to what he had seen.

>>20108828
mmmm, no, very unwise

>>20108665
Religions are stories of exceptional men and women. Jesus is the ultimate ideal slave to the church. The gold standard of slaves. When you truly believe that the master you serve is righteous and good to a superlative degree it transforms your lack of a will to power into a desirable trait. It's a sickening hijacking of child psychology so that the individual is always stunted at child maturity and dependent on "the father". Useful in antiquity for bonding large groups of humans together for the purpose of warfare territory expansion and protection. In modernity it has no use case and in fact is actively creating suffering because modern societies have grown too large and resource consumptive under hare brained religious dogma like man's de facto superiority to animals, be fruitful and multiply, and manifest destiny. Religion was absolutely vital to our progress and development for the time it was born around. It has long worn out its helpfulness and positive impacts.

>>20108866
My interpretation of this piece is a straw-strawman. The 'implied author' was a christian making an atheist strawman, but the strawman accidentally makes very good points.

>>20108652
Interesting how personal interpretation of scripture always entails “all the stuff that makes me uncomfortable was made up later”.

>>20108893
Denying magic is not the same as denying moral ideas you don't like.

>>20108893
>all the stuff that's impossible was made up
Not an outlandish assumption, larper.

>>20108893
give me your personal interpretation of The Epic of Gilgamesh

>>20108898
>>20108900
>Noooooo the stuff that scares me isn’t reaaaaaal!
Imagine the level of cringe required to become Muslim but deny the Quran.
Red Guenon.

>>20108908
>Imagine the level of cringe required to become Muslim but deny the Quran.
what did they mean by this?

>>20108907
I can’t interpret it, I’m not Akkadian. I certainly won’t project my 21st-century western mindset poisoned by (((archeology))) onto it.

>>20108908
Things that aren't real don't scare me. Take your meds

>>20108914
It's the same thing with me and christianity. I came out and said I was a "lifelong atheist"

>>20108480
>he doesn’t know about Jakob Lorber’s Robert Blum (From Hell to Heaven) which absolutely blows any Swedenborg book away

>>20108866
cringe

Even as a small child I intuitively understood, although I was unable to communicate it (and still am, somewhat) that the whole of existence is not so limited and centered around our petty civilizational squabbles that abrahamic religions, which entirely hinge on an inconsequential set of alleged events in some desert, could ever hope to provide an all-encompassing framework for the question of being. At least dharmic religions, for all their shortcomings, have that broad overarching scope that abrahamism will always lack and which will always make it utterly ridiculous and impossible to take seriously on a purely intuitive level.

>>20109155
>abrahamic religions, which entirely hinge on an inconsequential set of alleged events in some desert
I have a somewhat different explanation of why, but I agree that this is a major shortcoming of Christianity.

>>20109158
What is your personal explanation?

>>20109163
For me the issue is just that it's fucking random. Why was Israel (in God's eyes) the only part of the world that mattered until 2000 years ago when he changed his mind? It is a tiny place that by all sensible accounts is not unimpressive, but an actual shithole even by the standards of the time. Pretty much all of their neighbors had a more educated population and a real intellectual tradition, religious and otherwise.

>>20109181
*is not ONLY unimpressive, but

>>20109181
Yeah, there's that too. I think it goes hand in hand with what I said, really. Abrahamism is just random, utterly arbitrary and even petty in a way that robs any of its claims to truth of all genuine spiritual substance. For all intents and purposes, it's a set of primitive cults that got too big. But in the grand scale of history, it's a big nothing that will be remembered a couple thousand years from now as yet another dead belief system.

>>20109155
>>20109181
What's surprising is that so many people buy into it. I really don't get it, the required mental gymnastics are untenable. And I'm not even an atheist.

>>20109202
>Abrahamism is just random, utterly arbitrary and even petty
Yep. Yesterday I was reading a creationist cope piece explaining how Cain (the murderer son of Adam) ended up with a wife, trying to explain the dynamic of incest in a generation where everyone was siblings. The author concluded by saying he accepted entirely that it was in fact incest, but that it was fine since it wasn't until a later book of the bible (Deuteronomy) that incest was defined as a sin.

The issue here is that in the old testament, God *constantly* punishes people for things that had not yet been established as sins. In that same book, Onan was killed by God himself for "spilling his seed" and we know it was the first instance of this being an issue because they named the sin after him. Also, to my understanding Job got punished for no reason at all.

>>20109760
>Job got punished for no reason at all.
If you see Yahweh as an abusive BPD girlfriend thing start making more sense immediately