Tell that to Boris here, who is convinced that all Bible scholars are pious types who work from churchy assumptions.
Yes, that is the sort of thing religion scholars do, in order to provide a common playing-field. A Jewish scholar is not going concede that Jesus was the Christ (i.e., the Messiah), so agreeing to say “Jesus of Nazareth” allows Christian and Jewish scholars to work together on the same material without introducing a point of religious contention. Another thing that is typically done in religion departments is to speak of the “Hebrew Bible” rather than the “Old Testament”, to avoid prejudging the question whether the New Testament supersedes the “Old” (and hence to avoid prejudging the question whether Christianity is superior to Judaism). But Boris seems blissfully unaware of such secular adjustments.
You have a point, which Boris ignored. We can agree that the Age of Pisces begins in the year that the planet is aligned with Pisces at the spring equinox. But when in that year does the age begin? At the first of the year (and of course there are many different times in various cultures for that), at the equinox itself, or at some other time? You vote for the equinox itself, and Boris advances a fairly random-looking date to fit his preconceptions.
Also, what does “aligned” mean here? Rising at sunset, at its closest approach to zenith at midnight, or what? Of course that also depends on what you consider the boundaries of the constellations. Very imprecise science, astrology.
Sometimes it is better not to make eye contact with people, if you get my drift.
I’ve always preferred “the Tanakh” which is a combination of the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim. I like to call it what the Jews call it since they are the ones that produced it. “Hebrew Bible” is used within Judaism, but it can be derivative of the Tanakh. With all of the different apocrypha and versions there probably isn’t a “correct” term.
You are missing the point of what I’m talking about. It 's not about boundries of constellations, the zodiac exact dates or horoscopes. It’s about what the ancients saw happening in the sky at night and how they wrote their stories to reflect what they saw. I brought this subject up here over a year ago. So if you had any interest in learning about this at all you have had over a year to go to the library or check Amazon and get yourself up to speed on the subject. Obviously you did not and my guess is you won’t. If you’re happy with the monotheistic religion’s own stories on how they came about so be it. Parting the sea, angels dictating stuff, tongues of fire on people’s heads is just a little too farfetched for some of us.
The Pythagoras paradigm notes the movements of the star, planets, sun and moon. Every ancient culture watched the sky at night and then invented allegorical stories about what they saw. To think that the Hebrews and the Christians did not do this is a real stretch. These are both New Age religions which means they are intended to welcome the new astrological age. Moses is a solar character representing Aries and this why the Jewish people blow the rams horn 72 times during Rosh Hashanah. Are you with me shofar? (pun intended). It should be obvious to everyone that Jesus is also a solar character associated with sign of Pisces and 12 disciples with the zodiac. What do you think the fish sign means? There’s a reason the author of John’s Gospel has Nicodemus visit Jesus at night, when Jesus can show him the stars.
I’ve read a lot of books on this subject and right now I don’t remember where that date was advanced. You keep insisting that these are my ideas and I just made them up. It makes it so much easier to disbelieve them than to have to admit that real scholars and historians who know a lot more than either one of us made these observations and got them published.
I can never get my head round this Trinity concept. What is a ‘mode of being’ in which one can exist? What does it mean to ‘essentially exist’? Does that imply that one could also ‘non-essentially’ exist?
How does one determine the alignment? When the sun is out you cannot see the stars, and when you see the stars the sun is below the horizon. How does this even work?
I don’t think you are getting my point. The SEP has a number of definitions/descriptions of the Trinity, in fact, so many that it demonstrates that this issue is as unsettled today as it was 2000 years ago.
My point, however, is much more basic. Whether you call the “constituents” of the Trinity gods, or persons, or modes, or tri-personalities, their “co-equal” status makes the Trinity a polytheistic doctrine. As with a number of doctrines accepted by the Church long ago, Christianity now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of trying to justify and rationalize it’s ridiculous assertion that the Trinity is not a straightforward example of polytheism…
I wanted to add that there is an historical context to the doctrine of the Trinity. The first targets to whom the disciples preached were Jews who were absolutely locked in on a very clear doctrine of monotheism. By claiming Jesus divine and the incarnate son of God, Christians had to come up with some way of convincing contemporary Jews that Christianity was monotheistic, despite the obvious fact that it wasn’t. Otherwise, Christianity would have been a non-starter within the pool of potential Jewish converts. So, they simply, by fiat, claimed the Trinity was a form of monotheism and the problem was “solved.” But of course, it wasn’t…
That’s nonsense. It would take very sophisticated instruments and a very precise placement of constellation boundaries to determine exactly when the precession of the equinoxes had proceeded to just the right place.
No problem. So you can’t explain these oh so obvious conclusions of yours. Do you even know what entering a new age looks like and how it would be detected?
This is explained here: Trinity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
As I understand it, a “mode” is a way that something is, an intrinsic or relational property. (For example, “God’s wisdom” would be an intrinsic property, and “God’s love for us” would be a relational property). So if God acts in both a son-like way and a father-like way, he could be called both a Son and a Father. “Essential” means that God necessarily is tri-personal (or tri-modal); he can never not be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Where it gets murky is that one-self trinitarians claim God acts as both a father and a son to himself, as he is only one self. Rahner writes that “[God] is – at once and necessarily – the unoriginate who mediates himself to himself (Father), the one who is in truth uttered for himself (Son), and the one who is received and accepted in love for himself (Spirit) – and… as a result of this, he is the one who can freely communicate himself.” To me this is quite incoherent, and certainly unbiblical, but I guess to each their own.
Not true. The type of one-self trinitarianism that I articulated to @faded_Glory isn’t polytheism, because it doesn’t postulate that there is more than one self who is God. As I said above, though, it doesn’t make much sense to me that God (if one self) could be both Father and Son to himself.
Indeed… so it’s quite interesting that we don’t see any disagreement between the earliest Christians and other Jews in the New Testament on basic questions like the identity of God or if the Messiah would be divine. There are no long diatribes in the book of Acts about how Jesus is Yahweh, or that God is three persons, like there are about Jesus being the Messiah. Make of that what you will.
Did they? As the original post argued, there is no ‘doctrine of the Trinity’ (one God in/as three Persons) articulated in the NT. That was very much a later development, which isn’t in dispute among scholars of early Christianity as far as I can tell. We don’t see Christians trying to justify the Trinity as monotheism until the 4th century (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa’s On Not Three Gods). They also tried to justify Logos theory as monotheism from the 2nd century onward (to no avail, since it’s pretty clearly bitheism). But we see nothing like that until the mid-2nd century, let alone in the NT itself.
Just the right place hilariously irrelevant. Who named the stars and the constellations? Modern astronomers with sophisticated insttruments? The earliest evidence naming of star patterns comes from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) dating back thousands of years. Ever heard of the Babylonian Star Catalogue? A constellation is a recognizable pattern of stars often associated with mythological people or creatures. These mythological people and creatures are the basis for the biblical narratives.
Again: these are not my conclusions. They are the conclusions of scholars of antiquity who have studied a subject you know absolutely nothing about. This isn’t about me knowing what a new age looks like or your personal revelations. It’s about what the ancients thought and what they wrote down.
I have nothing against that term, which is entirely accurate, but let’s face it, to most of the non-Jewish public, that term will be opaque. “Hebrew Bible” conveys the idea that it’s the part of the Bible that is written in Hebrew (albeit with a small portion in Aramaic, a closely related language), and most lay people can figure that out from context. So I will use “Tanakh” when speaking to fellow-academics, or to Jews, but in more general conversation I use “Hebrew Bible”. In my graduate school, as in most graduate schools, the PhD program was in “Hebrew Bible”, though of course in Jewish institutions where a deep familiarity with the Bible and Jewish matters is taken for granted, a doctoral program might well be labelled as a program in “Tanakh.”
If Roy is asking for confirmation of only a specific point about, say, the constellation Pisces, he shouldn’t need to read ten or twenty books from your lists to get an answer. Surely you could say that on Page 27 of such and such a book, the date he wants is calculated. It’s sometimes necessary to read a whole book, where the whole book is “one long argument” and all the parts of the argument must be seen together (e.g., Darwin’s Origin or Denton’s Nature’s Destiny) in order to grasp the argument’s force, but for many if not most of the claims you are making, all that is necessary to defend them is to point to particular passages in particular books – and you seem unwilling to do that. So naturally, your readers here are skeptical that such detailed calculations or bits of evidence are found in those books.
I think the general principle asserted here is a sound one. Now, if only people would agree to define “intelligent design” in the way that Discovery defines and explains it, since Discovery is the one that produced it (or at least, gave it its contemporary meaning)…
“We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
Intelligent Design is creationism and I can prove it. “One of the most damning moments in the Kitzmiller - Dover trial involved the use of a text-matching computer program to compare the Intelligent Design version Of Pandas and People to the earlier creationist editions. The ID version was identical to the earlier creationist versions with the only difference being that all instances of “creator”, “creationism” and “creation science” were replaced with “intelligent agent” and “intelligent design”, leaving all the rest of the text unchanged. Hilariously one copy of the book that surfaced during the case even contained the “missing link” between creationists and intelligent design proponents: the cdesign proponentsists. An editor had copied and pasted “design proponents” over the word “creationists.” This typo has been mocked as the missing link between creationism and intelligent design, notably ironic considering creationists don’t accept transitional forms.”
So? How does that make the entry of the Age of Whatever sufficiently precise that you can give it a date? You’re acting as if it’s a switch that every so often clicks from one position to another.
And apparently they’re conclusions you don’t understand. So how do you know they’re correct?
