Phatboy writes:
Conversely, if two or three are gathered together to experience a living personality, is this MYTHOS if that personality truly lives?
No, that would be Logos--a literal description of reality.
I thought you might be wondering, if you are at all interested, what's left to Christian ER when all these PR beliefs I have mentioned are left out.
In my opinion, what's left are the essentials. Private experience tells us that we have minds, conscience, and free will. It tells us that our ego or self is at odds with our conscience, since it is the very nature of the self to be selfish. So we experience guilt. Our private experience also invades our hearts with the idea that there is a great deal of physical suffering and sorrow in the world, that, in fact, suffering and death are universal. This is a horrible fact, but true.
Christian ER tells us that somehow or another, we are responsible for this suffering down through the ages of beings--for the tortured, the mutilated, the abandoned, the mocked, the unloved. At the bottom of our consciousness is this terrible notion of some "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"--and the mythos of the Christ story is meant to convey that suffering powerfully, as indeed it does.
But the very fact that we feel this guilt tells us that there is something beyond which allows us to know such things, for we have never known any world but this. We have nothing to compare our world to, and yet we do compare it to something or other that is beyond our experience. This ideal that we somehow know about is REALITY.
In this REALITY lies MEANING--the meaning of all this suffering for which we are responsible--and the meaning of death.
By this view, all these ideas that PR gets so worked up about don't matter--whether the Bible is "divinely inspired" or not, whether Mary was a virgin, whether there are such things as miracles, how old the earth is, whether or not we evolved, and so on--none of it matters in the least.
This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-24-2005 16:07 AM
This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-24-2005 20:33 AM
The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.--Cyril of Jerusalem
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