I can’t really evaluate the specific claims made here, I haven’t read the texts or done the work to think about them enough, but reading this, The Earth became older, of a sudden. It’s the same feeling I had when someone first pointed out that all the moral philosophy I’d been reading amounted to debating the same three basic frameworks (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) since the dawn of writing. Maybe the same is true for the three cranes (chance, evolution, design).
I think the biggest counterfactual to the piece is the general insight the Epicureans had relative to what we think we know raised in a world where there’s such a bias towards Plato and Aristotle’s views as representative of naturalist philosophy in antiquity.
At the same time Aristotle was getting wrong objects falling in a vacuum, Lucretius was getting it right. But we tend not to learn of all the Epicureans got correct because we learn Platonist history because that was what the church later endorsed as palatable enough to be studied and thus dependent for future philosophical advances while Lucretius was literally being eaten by worms for centuries until rediscovered.
The other counterfactual is that there was a heretical tradition of Jesus’s teachings that was describing indivisible points as if from nothing and the notion that spirit arising from the body existing first was the greater wonder over vice versa.
We tend to think the fully formed ideas of modernity are modern, but don’t necessarily know the ways information and theories were lost and independently (or dependently) rediscovered. There’s a better understanding for this in terms of atomism, but not the principles of survival of the fittest and trait inheritance given their reduced discussion in antiquity relative to atomism (also embraced by intelligent design adherents in antiquity and thus more widely spread).
The irony below the surface of the post was that it was largely the church’s rejection of Epicurean ideas that led to people today not realizing the scope of what they were actually talking about. So it’s quite ironic if there was a version of Jesus that was embracing and retelling some of those ‘heretical’ ideas.
So it’s quite ironic if there was a version of Jesus that was embracing and retelling some of those ‘heretical’ ideas.
Sure, but also there are definitely things Jesus is said in the Bible to have taught and done that the church itself later condemned, rejected, or- if I’m feeling generous—creatively reinterpreted. This would be one more example, based on a related but different set of sources and arguments.
Christianity seems to me in general to be much less tolerant of its own inherent ambiguity than many other religions. Not that other faiths don’t have plenty of extremist, absolutist adherents and sects—they clearly do. Still, it seems more common (though there’s a lot of exposure bias here for me) for Christians to decide that not only is there one true law, but humans are supposed to intuit what it is, and carry it out—even when the explicit doctrines of the faith they claim to uphold say the opposite.
Oh for sure. One of my favorite examples is how across all the Synoptics Jesus goes “don’t carry a purse” (which would have made monetary collections during ministering impossible).
But then at the last supper in Luke he’s all like “remember when I said not to carry a purse? Let’s 180° that.”
But that reversal is missing in Marcion’s copy of Luke, such that it may have been a later addition (and it does seem abruptly inserted into the context).
These are exactly the kind of details that makes this a fun field to study though. There’s so much revealed in the nuances.
For example, ever notice that both times Paul (who argued for monetary collection with preexisting bias against it in 1 Cor 9) mentions a different gospel in the Epistles he within the same chapter abruptly swears he’s not lying? It’s an interesting coincidence, especially as someone that has spent years looking into the other versions of Jesus he was telling people to ignore or assuring that alternatives didn’t even exist.
I can’t really evaluate the specific claims made here, I haven’t read the texts or done the work to think about them enough, but reading this, The Earth became older, of a sudden. It’s the same feeling I had when someone first pointed out that all the moral philosophy I’d been reading amounted to debating the same three basic frameworks (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) since the dawn of writing. Maybe the same is true for the three cranes (chance, evolution, design).
I think the biggest counterfactual to the piece is the general insight the Epicureans had relative to what we think we know raised in a world where there’s such a bias towards Plato and Aristotle’s views as representative of naturalist philosophy in antiquity.
At the same time Aristotle was getting wrong objects falling in a vacuum, Lucretius was getting it right. But we tend not to learn of all the Epicureans got correct because we learn Platonist history because that was what the church later endorsed as palatable enough to be studied and thus dependent for future philosophical advances while Lucretius was literally being eaten by worms for centuries until rediscovered.
The other counterfactual is that there was a heretical tradition of Jesus’s teachings that was describing indivisible points as if from nothing and the notion that spirit arising from the body existing first was the greater wonder over vice versa.
We tend to think the fully formed ideas of modernity are modern, but don’t necessarily know the ways information and theories were lost and independently (or dependently) rediscovered. There’s a better understanding for this in terms of atomism, but not the principles of survival of the fittest and trait inheritance given their reduced discussion in antiquity relative to atomism (also embraced by intelligent design adherents in antiquity and thus more widely spread).
The irony below the surface of the post was that it was largely the church’s rejection of Epicurean ideas that led to people today not realizing the scope of what they were actually talking about. So it’s quite ironic if there was a version of Jesus that was embracing and retelling some of those ‘heretical’ ideas.
Sure, but also there are definitely things Jesus is said in the Bible to have taught and done that the church itself later condemned, rejected, or- if I’m feeling generous—creatively reinterpreted. This would be one more example, based on a related but different set of sources and arguments.
Christianity seems to me in general to be much less tolerant of its own inherent ambiguity than many other religions. Not that other faiths don’t have plenty of extremist, absolutist adherents and sects—they clearly do. Still, it seems more common (though there’s a lot of exposure bias here for me) for Christians to decide that not only is there one true law, but humans are supposed to intuit what it is, and carry it out—even when the explicit doctrines of the faith they claim to uphold say the opposite.
Oh for sure. One of my favorite examples is how across all the Synoptics Jesus goes “don’t carry a purse” (which would have made monetary collections during ministering impossible).
But then at the last supper in Luke he’s all like “remember when I said not to carry a purse? Let’s 180° that.”
But that reversal is missing in Marcion’s copy of Luke, such that it may have been a later addition (and it does seem abruptly inserted into the context).
These are exactly the kind of details that makes this a fun field to study though. There’s so much revealed in the nuances.
For example, ever notice that both times Paul (who argued for monetary collection with preexisting bias against it in 1 Cor 9) mentions a different gospel in the Epistles he within the same chapter abruptly swears he’s not lying? It’s an interesting coincidence, especially as someone that has spent years looking into the other versions of Jesus he was telling people to ignore or assuring that alternatives didn’t even exist.