RE: Hindu hell
January 30, 2019 at 3:33 am
(This post was last modified: January 30, 2019 at 3:35 am by Belacqua.)
(January 29, 2019 at 8:23 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: The christians I'm referring to have been dead for centuries, Bel.
The christians I'm familiar with are not those christians who've been dead for centuries. The christians I'm familiar with don't even have the first clue who plato was or why it is or isn't relevant to their religion, lol. Those christians, are irrelevant to the issue of a piece of historic trivia that I've already told you I have no interest in debating. That the god contained in and described by plato is not the god contained in or described by -any- christian dogma. It doesn;t matter who or how many people have claimed that it was throughout time or what christians I'm most familiar with, or who or how many people have souught to draw a line from the one to the other. The simple fact of the contents of the respective works is that they are not describing the same concept.
It occurs to me that your idea of the Christian God may be derived from descriptions given by Christianity's opponents. Certainly Dawkins and Hitchens and those guys describe God as something like the Platonic demiurge. This is why people educated in the field find their criticism irrelevant. In his latest book, Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray calls them entertainers, which is a fair judgment.
It's sad, because those "new atheist" types ignore Popper's wise advice to engage with your opponent's position at its strongest point. By hitting the low-hanging fruit and then declaring victory, these entertainers damage public understanding.
To get past their over-simple understanding, there are a couple of entry-level books. David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies explains in clear language why the demiurgic view of God is wrong. Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate covers some of the same ground, in a light-hearted way.
Once the ground has been cleared, more scholarly works to describe the near-Platonic view of the Christian God include Christian Moevs' The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, Jaroslav Pelikan's Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism, or Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. (This latter one is more Aristotelian than Platonic, but shows the difference from the simple-minded demiurgic view.)
A succinct listing of the differences between Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy is available in R.T. Wallis, Neoplatonism.
All of these books will be useful in pointing you to primary sources. If you're interested in the field, you'll eventually want to read Augustine, etc.
As always, I know that the rank and file Christians in your neighborhood have probably not read these things. This does not give anybody the right to declare that real Christianity is unlike what these books describe. There are many views within what is called Christianity, and it isn't fair to dismiss them all together.
