Terrorism thread

[zompist]

Why do people convert to Christianity? Don't people find the various mysteries as arbitrary as the 12 Imams? Is the BS introduced gradually like in Islam?

Have you asked any converts? Some of them have written books about it. No guarantees that they will be enjoyable for an outsider.

But then I find both religious and anti-religious diatribes tedious. Also suspiciously similar. Hoffer's "The True Believer" is good reading and fully brings out the parallels between religious and political zealots.

A more direct answer is that your question is unanswerable, because people are different. I'd say that some people find no irrationality at all in the process... but it's also true that weirdness and impenetrability are attractive to yet other people. Some people actually like hymns, some hate them. Some people like theology for the same kinds of reasons people like math or philosophy.

A good place to start is cults-- I recommended a few books in my book on religion. The idea is not to reinforce your views of religion as irrational, but to come to terms starkly with what people find attractive in an unconventional view. A hint: people like hearing answers; they also like having friends. Sometimes esoterism, the feeling of being let in on a secret, is powerful to people; yet others like being told what to do, perhaps because their own lives and efforts feel in vain. Honestly you have more than a little of the feeling that you Understand The World better than everyone else, so understanding this feeling in others should not be so difficult.

[Travis B.]

It really depends on what time period and location. Many people converted under threat of execution or at least made the appearance of having converted to avoid execution. Others saw economic or political advantages, the opportunity to form alliances with Christian kingdoms and so forth.

Converts are willing to die for Jesus in places like China and Pakistan. Meanwhile, leftists find it hard to convince people to fight for their own interests.

Religious converts are well-known for being fanatics regardless of the religion. You get this just as much with Western converts to Islam, for instance.

Maybe people are inspired by the symbolism or the pageantry.

There is indeed a certain pageantry to Christian church services and especially the mass; this cannot be understated.

The New Testament doesn't sound particularly beautiful to me, but maybe taste is culturally relative. Or maybe the hardcore believers are reading it in other languages. The Quran does have a hypnotic rhythm in Arabic while sounding moronic in English.

The New Testament is normally consumed in the vernacular these days; it has been a while since many read the New Testament in Latin or Koine Greek (and for centuries the Catholic Church taught its priests to preach in the vernacular since they realized that most people couldn't understand Latin even when the mass was in Latin).

Regarding explanations like this, I have read hymns to Greek gods that move my more than church songs. On the other hand, the mass is similar to ceremonies in other Mediterranean religions. It is possible to come up with esoteric interpretations for it. Theurgists, for example, find a lot of value in the Catholic mass. Maybe people want Hellenic pageantry combined with a nicer god.

You still get people who place a special value on the Latin mass even though the Catholic Church has been doing the mass in the vernacular for decades now.

Furthermore all religion is fundamentally rather silly anyway. If you grew up hearing about the earth resting on a giant turtle or gods dancing around on Mount Olympus, would Christianity strike you as especially daft or arbitrary?

You have to read difficult philosophers like Proclus to even understand the problem that doctrines like "3 people are 1 God" are meant to solve*. I'm pretty sure most converts understand none of this. They are giving their lives for doctrines accepted on faith, but they won't listen to straightforward common sense.

The vast majority of Christians do not, to my knowledge, really understand the doctrine of the Trinity. I scarcely do myself.

I'm sure gods living in mountains and a turtle shaking the earth made more sense in the past (was the turtle thing ever a real belief?), but I'm mostly interested in contemporary times.

The tortoise thing apparently shows up in places in Hinduism, traditional Chinese religion, and some Native American mythologies, but in a modern context it seems to be most associated with Discworld, which like all things Terry Pratchett I don't think is meant to be taken all too seriously.

*Very briefly, Islam says that the soul is made to return to God. Christianity says that the soul is fallen. Returning to God is a Good thing, so this return must be done by a person within God Himself. The soul is saved by grace that comes from faith in this Good person, Jesus. Still weird as hell, but that's the general idea as I understand it. There's also a huge clusterfuck around henads, but let's not go there.

This all sounds like just one big post-hoc rationalization meant to justify why God would have his Son be crucified.

[Travis B.]

About the Western converts to Islam, from all appearances most lone-wolf Islamic terrorists are either new converts or recently intensely religious people from largely secular backgrounds, rather than moderately religious Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not terrorists.

[rotting bones]

Thanks, all. Some good-natured terrorism always cheers me up.

[rotting bones]

This all sounds like just one big post-hoc rationalization meant to justify why God would have his Son be crucified.

In early Christianity, the relationship of Jesus to God was unclear for a very long time.

Note that themes like the God Man and crimes multiplying from generation to generation were recurring tropes in pre-Christian Greek tradition.

[Travis B.]

This all sounds like just one big post-hoc rationalization meant to justify why God would have his Son be crucified.

In early Christianity, the relationship of Jesus to God was unclear for a very long time.

Note that themes like the God Man and crimes multiplying from generation to generation were recurring tropes in pre-Christian Greek tradition.

And disagreement about Christology persists to this day -- if one looks at Eastern Christianity one will notice that there remain miaphysite branches of Christianity.

[rotting bones]

This all sounds like just one big post-hoc rationalization meant to justify why God would have his Son be crucified.

In early Christianity, the relationship of Jesus to God was unclear for a very long time.

Note that themes like the God Man and crimes multiplying from generation to generation were recurring tropes in pre-Christian Greek tradition.

And disagreement about Christology persists to this day -- if one looks at Eastern Christianity one will notice that there remain miaphysite branches of Christianity.

The earliest systematic Christian theology said Jesus was an enemy of the Creator.

[Travis B.]

The earliest systematic Christian theology said Jesus was an enemy of the Creator.

How exactly does one go from being 'an enemy of the Creator' to 'the Son of God'? Was this some kind of dualistic system where 'the Creator' was explicitly an evil God?

[Travis B.]

Yeah, Gnosticism.

[rotting bones]

The earliest systematic Christian theology said Jesus was an enemy of the Creator.

How exactly does one go from being 'an enemy of the Creator' to 'the Son of God'? Was this some kind of dualistic system where 'the Creator' was explicitly an evil God?

Yes, the earliest Christian theology was Valentinian Gnosticism. Orthodoxy developed later as a reaction to the various Gnostic sects.

Greek idealism was very ambivalent about "generation":

Conduct my erring soul to sacred light,
From wand'ring generation's stormy night

The hymns of Proclus are some of my favorites: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/proc ... 1_text.htm

In traditional Greek religion, the slain god was Dionysus. From the hymn of Proclus:

Once by thy care, as sacred poets sing,
The heart of Bacchus, swiftly-slaughtered king,
Was saved in aether, when, with fury fired,
The Titans fell against his life conspired;
And with relentless rage and thirst for gore,
Their hands his members into fragments tore:
But ever watchful of thy father's will,
Thy pow'r preserved him from succeeding ill,
Till from the secret counsels of his sire,
And born from Semele through heav'nly fire,
Great Dionysus to the world at length
Again appeared with renovated strength.

Hera was jealous because Zagreus wasn't her son. She sent Titans to tear him into pieces. Athena saved his heart. Zeus cooked the heart into a potion and gave it to the mortal Semele, who became pregnant with Dionysus. Tricked by Hera, Semele demanded that Zeus reveal his true form, which burned her into ashes. Zeus took the fetus and sewed it into his own thigh. This is why Dionysus was called the twice-born.

In this story, there are two heavenly powers, one trying to save the God Man and the other trying to kill him. If you see the Greek gods as archetypes, various interpretations are possible about what all this means. Monotheisms often developed by combining the various polytheistic gods or turning them into demons. Do Zeus and Hera represent higher and lower powers? Good and evil powers? Are they one power doing something mysterious revealed by studying dialectical treatises in Neoplatonism? The various options lead to various possible theologies.

[zompist]

Hera was jealous because Zagreus wasn't her son. She sent Titans to tear him into pieces. Athena saved his heart. Zeus cooked the heart into a potion and gave it to the mortal Semele, who became pregnant with Dionysus. Tricked by Hera, Semele demanded that Zeus reveal his true form, which burned her into ashes. Zeus took the fetus and sewed it into his own thigh. This is why Dionysus was called the twice-born.

In this story, there are two heavenly powers, one trying to save the God Man and the other trying to kill him. If you see the Greek gods as archetypes, various interpretations are possible about what all this means. Monotheisms often developed by combining the various polytheistic gods or turning them into demons. Do Zeus and Hera represent higher and lower powers? Good and evil powers? Are they one power doing something mysterious revealed by studying dialectical treatises in Neoplatonism? The various options lead to various possible theologies.

i think myths are routinely overinterpreted Who says myths are created by philosophers, or even priests? They're more like superhero comics. They're created for entertainment and then, centuries later, theologized, and millennia later, turned into metaphysical parables for post-believers.

E.g., what's he "meaning" of the Flood myth? In the Sumerian myth, some of the gods were annoyed at the "noise" of their new human workers; others wanted to save them. Millennia later the Hebrews rewrote it to be about a single god with mixed motives, annoyed by the "sin" of people he had created but did not then lead.

The narrative advantage of polytheism is that characters can have ordinary human motivations. Hera is not an evil power, she's jealous. The young Krishna has the amorous thoughts of a teenager. Seth kills Osiris out of perfectly ordinary power politics. Ea wants to destroy mankind, Enki doesn't. A lot of the weird stuff in myths is explained if you remember how premodern kings and queens behaved. It's the same stew of extraordinary power, lack of morals, struggles for power, and a pose of benignity.

Also, though monotheism can arise by combining gods, polytheism can arise by combining the single gods of city-states.

[rotting bones]

i think myths are routinely overinterpreted Who says myths are created by philosophers, or even priests? They're more like superhero comics. They're created for entertainment and then, centuries later, theologized, and millennia later, turned into metaphysical parables for post-believers.

E.g., what's he "meaning" of the Flood myth? In the Sumerian myth, some of the gods were annoyed at the "noise" of their new human workers; others wanted to save them. Millennia later the Hebrews rewrote it to be about a single god with mixed motives, annoyed by the "sin" of people he had created but did not then lead.

I don't think most myths were created by philosophers, though some, like Atlantis, might have been. The Neoplatonic philosophers thought myths are important, and the theologians took philosophical arguments seriously.

Philosophers like Proclus wrote hymns at various levels. The lower hymns contain the outward forms of the myths. The higher hymns abstract away more and more of their penny dreadful qualities to show the Ideal Forms they thought the myths demonstrate.

The first hymn of Proclus, To the Sun is a rare example of a higher hymn that has survived. It praises Helios as the fire of the intellect that orders cosmic harmony.

More generally, humans think in terms of tropes. Cultural philosophies are accounts of how the various tropes circulating in a society fit together, very likely arguing against the validity of some of them and in favor of others. Philosophies also introduce new concepts. Sometimes, these become culturally current. Then new philosophies have to incorporate or argue against them.

Hellenized peoples thought it's plausible that the story of Jesus refers to a god because the gospel stories fit the forms of divine stories current at the time. The people who originally circulated them almost certainly had pet interpretations of what they meant. Those don't necessarily fit what they have come to mean 2000 years later.

(One major difference between Christianity and Orphism that's not commonly mentioned is that Orphism was much more ecstatic than rationalistic compared to Christian theology.)

Of course, there are many factors determining whether a particular story is good enough to become canonized. Usually, divine forms are just used for literary effect. For example, I'm pretty sure the Bollywood image of a guy dancing with a bunch of girls is downstream of Krishna. Even in this serious poem: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... %E0%A7%87/, a beauty with "blood-soaked feet" (literally, feet with blood splashing from the chest) evokes an image of Kali. Personally, I'm inclined to imagine something more along these lines: https://youtu.be/TDtPLoFIofY

The narrative advantage of polytheism is that characters can have ordinary human motivations. Hera is not an evil power, she's jealous. The young Krishna has the amorous thoughts of a teenager. Seth kills Osiris out of perfectly ordinary power politics. Ea wants to destroy mankind, Enki doesn't. A lot of the weird stuff in myths is explained if you remember how premodern kings and queens behaved. It's the same stew of extraordinary power, lack of morals, struggles for power, and a pose of benignity.

Once you theologize the myth, you might want to use simpler categories to be taken seriously. It's hard to convince sophisticated people that non-human phenomena are motivated by jealousy or romance. For example, Radha is Krishnaism's equivalent of Jesus, the most devoted soul. Krishna's girlfriends are the souls worshipping God. Krishna is God, who is attracted to His worshippers in loving (but not literally romantic) attraction. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Radha and Krishna's sameness and difference is a mystery that can't be grasped by the conceptual mind.

Also, though monotheism can arise by combining gods, polytheism can arise by combining the single gods of city-states.

The most important god, you mean.

[Man in Space]

Well, looks like another assassination attempt has happened. I suppose that counts as being under the purview of this thread.