Hindu hell

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

As much as is known about it, my own ancestors' traditional mythology (Celtic) didn't seem to include the idea of eternal punishment after death.  Transgressions were dealt with in the here-and-now and the afterlife appears to have been more or less a continuation of this one, but more pleasant.

Ignorant fucking heathens.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Shinto does have a hierarchy.  There are people priests and beings all arranged by rank and order, even the shrines have a conceptual rank..shakaku seido.

Meiji Jingo is the royal shrine, Ise Jingo is the imperial shrine.  Then you have the jinja....a few of which called taisha, grand shines..and kasha, government shrines.  Some shrines have offshoot shrines called bunja.  There are twenty two ni-ju-ni-sha, which are set aside as "privileged" shrines, with seven high, seven mid, and eight low ranking shrines among them.  

Before the end of WW2, there was actually an administration that ranked those shrines, called the Jinja Cho.

Individual shrines to ones departed father are not even included in this system, as they're beneath any official mention or recognition, as ones departed father likely was.

Animism is only noticed as existent by whatever animist theme it operates on, specifically what representation is found most commonly in art. If people are carving a billioin jaguars (as they did in meso-america pre-civ) you can be confident that they see the jaguar as having some privileged place in a cosmic hierarchy. Similarly, shamanism (n american or eurasian) and it's totems can hardly be classified as an egalitarian separation of sacred power.

For a very long time, the organization of the gods or the sacred into the hierachy represented earthly divisions of power..and stories of zues being confounded, tricked, or subjugated in whatever form they take are representative of the warring proto states and their divine patrons...and just as commonly their legendary establishment heroes.

Plato an aristotle's concept of god is very much -not- the christian concept of a god. The christian god would be placed lower in -their- hierarchy of the divine. Christians absolutely do not believe in that concept...but for whatever reason, as they rediscovered classical thought and sought a greater philosophic syncretism and credibility, they sort of drew an equals sign anyway. This distinguished their god philosophy as somehow above or greater than or more refined than whatever the dirty heathens out there in the wilderness may think (and the dirty heathens out in the wilderness appear to have thought much the same in return).

Now, we see this organization everywhere - every culture, throughout all time. It may be that humans are innately obsessed with their place in the universe...and religious or divine schemas are a comment on human beings place. Any comment on a human beings place in the cosmos will create differential variance either explicitly or implicitly. We may see some outlier where a human life is placed lower than..say, cattle..but this isn't an exception, it's a demonstration of the same. The same is true of a schema that places humans at or near bottom with nature itself as the adjudicating force of dispensation. Ultimately, what we put primacy in and where we rank ourselves (and other things) seems to be entirely bound up in realities of life at the time of the formation of dogma. It's no coincidence that redeeming gods are said to elevate or rise us up through their favor. This was not meant to be taken as a merely procedural comment (ala whisking us up to heaven in the clouds), but some indication of our improved (or repaired) status with regards to all that we see around us.

Buiddhism, even with no gods, has an immense hierarchy.

-For Boru. Dubnos of Tech Duin is the celtic analog for hell. Ruled over by Don, god of the dead and ancestor of gaels. You stopped along that way en route to the other otherworlds, as you mentioned just more pleasant versions of our earthly lives..but not everyone made it past the screening process. Ellis Island for the dearly departed.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Right as canbe, but I was pointing out that the ancient (read: pre-Christian) Celts didn't seem to possess the concept that earthly crimes would be punishable by torment in the hereafter.  You might miss out on the Big Prize, but there was no indication that doing so meant being consumed in a fire or eternally eaten by worms.
.
Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, it's not exactly the same (no two hells ever are, even christian hells)...and for what it's worth we don't know how christianized alot of these stories are.  Tech Duin and Don as dark one may be an insertion of some variety. The celts did have stories of otherworldly torment or imprisonment as a consequence of earthly trangression (especially geasa) but it's qualitatively different from the christian notion of hell. As per your comments..if a person was going to go to some otherworld for punishment, in those stories..... they generally didn't get a reprieve until the day of their death. The denizens of the otherworld sorted that shit out forthwith.

[Belacqua]

Shinto does have a hierarchy.  There are people priests and beings all arranged by rank and order, even the shrines have a conceptual rank..shakaku seido.

Meiji Jingo is the royal shrine, Ise Jingo is the imperial shrine.  

  

You've described the hierarchy of the the shrines, not the hierarchy of the gods. There is no boss god. 

There is no such thing as Meiji Jingo. It's Jingu. 

Plato an aristotle's concept of god is very much -not- the christian concept of a god.

It depends on the theologian. In some cases (if we include Plotinus in the mix) the Christian god is nearly indistinguishable.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm positively certain that I misspelled plenty of the names, lol.  

People did, indeed, create hierachies for the various gods that made their way into shinto, and a conceptual ranking of where different types of spirits found themselves, greater and lesser this and thats. I included the rankings of the shrines only because they show how far down the ladder shinto took the idea of a hierarchal structure.  Even a place of worship..had a place, relative to other places of worship.  This isn't unique to shinto, obviously..some places are more or less holy or sacred.  

Hierarchy exists in every religious system - it's not really a stretch to maintain that the proposition of some hierarchy is necessary to bind religious precepts into a cogent whole. All of these ideas, at a bare minimum, seek to describe our place in the universe. That...alone... is an imposition of hierarchy.

It's true, though, that they don't always do it by ranking gods (at least not officially, lol), sometimes they rank spirit animals or places or stations of enlightenment (or groups of people.....like priests). All of which is entirely lulzworthy, but meh.


As far as christianity and a platonic god...I think that you'd probably want to drag Vulcan in on this one to explain to you why a theologian drawing an equals sign does not establish that we're discussing the same thing. The impetus of the particular theologian accounts for that equals sign more than any classification of concept might. If a person believes that some portion of the platonic god concept is credible, or there is a tangible benefit to attaching plato to their god concepts...that's what they're going to do.

The christian god is platos demiurge, a subordinate figure. His form of the good was impersonal, the christian god is personal. I could rattle off the rest of a list of dissimilarities, but I assume you'll be able to find them yourself.

[Belacqua]

If a person believes that some portion of the platonic god concept is credible, or there is a tangible benefit to attaching plato to their god concepts...that's what they're going to do.

Fortunately the best thinkers show their work -- the logical chains by which they reach their conclusions. So we don't have to rely on assumptions about their psychology, of the type you're making here. 

The christian god is platos demiurge, a subordinate figure.  

This assertion reveals that you haven't read very much Christian theology. It's true that some Christians assert a figure of this type. Eventually you may want to look at the more respected thinkers.

[The Grand Nudger]

We can see the work of those best thinkers and we can see that they were trying to shove a square peg down a round hole.

You've created a category were "more respected thinkers" is just another term for those that take a tack you agree with, regardless of the above. That some thinker attempted a synthesis of demiurge and the form of the good and then drew an equals sign to their pet god, ignoring all of the other contradictory bits of platonism with respect to judaism and later christianity qas well, is a matter of historic trivia...not a contestable fact that I'm going to spend any time debating with you.

In short, I'm sure that you can find a nutball who swears to christ that the christian god and the god of platonism are identical..but so what? You can find some nutball to say anything, and then call them "more respected thinkers" - that's been the business of god beliefs since the beginning of the business of god beliefs.

[Belacqua]

We can see the work of those best thinkers and we can see that they were trying to shove a square peg down a round hole.

You've created a category were "more respected thinkers" is just another term for those that take a tack you agree with, regardless of the above.  That some thinker attempted a synthesis of demiurge and the form of the good and then drew an equals sign to their pet god, ignoring all of the other contradictory bits of platonism with respect to judaism and later christianity qas well, is a matter of historic trivia...not a contestable fact that I'm going to spend any time debating with you.

In short, I'm sure that you can find a nutball who swears to christ that the christian god and the god of platonism are identical..but so what?  You can find some nutball to say anything, and then call them "more respected thinkers" - that's been the business of god beliefs since the beginning of the business of god beliefs.

Dante Alighieri is a more respected thinker than Ken Ham.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's nice?  How about the wonderful folks at creation.com, are they respected thinkers, or more respected thinkers?  Probably not, and yet they manage to hit the nail on the head.

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Plato is often termed the father of Western philosophy. His ideas have had a massive impact on the West, including on Christian thinkers, and continue to do so even today. But how indebted is Christianity to Plato? Did Christianity come from Plato’s philosophy? T.S. from Spain writes:

wikipedia.org plato
Plato: copy of portrait bust by Silanion
I´m a student and I´m trying to do a research of philosophy vs Christianity to do a project for my philosophy teacher. He said that Christianity came from Plato’s philosophy (theory of forms). I´m really not agree with that. I would like to know how to refute that. And what articles would be better to share with him from your website. Thank you and God bless.
CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds:

Plato’s philosophy was by no means the historical ground from which Christianity sprouted. Historically speaking, Christianity is a form of early Jewish messianism—it was birthed in a 1st century AD Palestinian Jewish milieu in which there was a lot of messianic speculation. Many Jews of the period hoped that the Messiah would come and overthrow the Romans, and establish universal Israelite rule. Jesus came into that context claiming to be the Jewish Messiah, though with a very different agenda than what many Jews were expecting. Of course, to understand any of this, one needs to be familiar with the Old Testament—the creative and sovereign supremacy of the God of Israel, His promise to Israel to make them a nation of priests and a light to the world, and the historical dealings God had with Adam, Noah, and Abraham before that, and David and his royal line after that. In other words, the foundational corpus for understanding the ideological origins of Christianity is not Plato’s dialogues, but the Old Testament. Christianity certainly didn’t start off as a Greek philosophical school of thought.

And since Plato thought disembodiment was the best, he certainly would not have liked the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body!
Nonetheless, in terms of philosophy, Christianity does share some important features with Plato. The New Testament writers believed that we remain conscious after physical death (e.g. Philippians 1:23), as Plato did. The Bible rejects atheism and materialism, as Plato did. Both believed in a supreme beneficent reality. Both believed that the physical universe was designed.

However, there are also important differences. For instance, Christianity is a form of monotheism—the belief that there is one supreme being who is the beneficent source and sovereign of all things. While Plato certainly believed in some sort of ultimate beneficent reality, so that many of his ideas are easily conformable to monotheism, he’s not really clear on the precise nature of that ultimate reality. He had two notions that he never really systematized into a single coherent worldview—his Form of the Good, and his Demiurge. The Form of the Good was the ultimate form for Plato, from which every other form derived its goodness, but it was impersonal. The Demiurge was the ‘craftsman’ who gave shape to the material universe by moulding the matter (which Plato believed to be eternal, which the Bible rejects) after the pattern of the forms. However, his Demiurge was in a real sense ‘subordinate’ to the realm of the forms. Later thinkers identified Plato’s form of the Good with God, and located the other forms in His mind as divine ideas (many early church fathers were champions of this modification of Plato), and others identified the Form of the Good with the ultimate good god, and the Demiurge with a bad, subordinate god who made the physical universe (as the ultimate good god wouldn’t sully himself by using or creating matter)—this was Gnosticism.

Moreover, Plato believed that souls are indestructible, which the New Testament rejects. We are God’s creatures, soul and body, and God has the power to annihilate our souls. We only remain conscious after death because God wills it so, not because He can’t destroy our souls.1 Moreover, Plato’s assessment of the disembodied state is very different from that found in the New Testament. For Plato, being disembodied was the desirable final destination. In the New Testament, being disembodied is a form of nakedness (and thus shame), so the dead await to be re-embodied at the final resurrection (2 Corinthians 5:4–10). This is why the disembodied state of a dead person is called the intermediate state. And since Plato thought disembodiment was the best, he certainly would not have liked the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body! For more on this, please see Soulless humans?

Nonetheless, early Christians certainly utilized some of Plato’s ideas, such as his theory of the forms, to construct defences of Christianity against competing philosophies. However, Platonism was one of those philosophies that competed with Christianity in the early centuries of the church. As such, the early church fathers almost always modified Platonic ideas in light of the data of Scripture.

As such, in many ways, Plato was on the right track, but the specifics of biblical theism he didn’t have access to better explain many of the things he ‘saw as through a glass darkly’.
For instance, Plato’s theory of the forms, and especially his notion of the Form of the Good, were ‘rolled together’ into the mind of the God of Scripture. This meant God himself played the role that Plato’s Form of the Good played in his philosophy. Moreover, Plato’s forms were reconceptualized by Christians as divine ideas, which internalized them into God, meaning that they didn’t have a separate and independent existence apart from God.

Now, the big difference between Christianity and Plato at this point was that Plato’s Form of the Good was an impersonal object, but God is personal. But this also provided Christianity with several advantages. For instance, Plato’s realm of distinct forms could all be internalized into God as His ideas, making ultimate reality much simpler. God’s personhood also means that God, unlike the Form of the Good, can act and create, and even create from nothing. This does away with the need for eternal matter, so that time, space, matter, and the forms are all ultimately dependent on God, whether as His thoughts (the forms) or His creations (space, time, and matter). It also means that Plato’s Demiurge is a superfluous concept; a poor substitute for the God who makes all things from nothing. As such, in many ways, Plato was on the right track, but the specifics of biblical theism he didn’t have access to better explain many of the things he ‘saw as through a glass darkly’.

Christianity has a long and interesting interaction with platonic ideas; sometimes fruitful, many times detrimental. But the true ideological grounds for Christianity are not to be found in Plato; they are found in the Old Testament.

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b-mine
https://creation.com/plato-and-christianity