Karl on Nostr: I don't think they slander the true God because the true God isn't bound by an ...

I don't think they slander the true God because the true God isn't bound by an identity. YHWH and Allah and Brahman have different attributes but they're talking about the same conceptual being, even if they accuse the other names of being frauds. It's a case where the designators are flacid.

I think Christianity and Judaism (and even Islam, though its *so* disorganized and detached from history that I have to parenthesize it) are good in their symbolic representation of the world. The idea that the way to world peace is for the highest possible king to commit the highest possible human sacrifice is undeniably true, because that is how history progresses. A king performs a mass human sacrifice to create an empire, and the world stabilizes and advances in the aftermath. That king often ascends to godhood too, or at least legend. Even though I don't like it, the death of all other gods fits perfectly into this pattern.

Christian saints like Ephraim the Syrian do describe the perceived world as it's integrated with mythical thinking with near 100% accuracy, and Kabbalah (insofar as I can tell, bc a lot of the texts are untranslated) is legitimately the best symbolism for explaining metaphysical categories ever created, which is why there are still a minority of Christian Kabbalists in the Catholic Church to this day despite it being a foreign tradition.

I legitimately don't know what to make of how well it represents the world, Christianity is almost a perfect worldview, my only real contention with it right now is that it failed. World peace didn't happen, we've still had to have smaller kings come and do human sacrifice the old way to keep ourselves going. Christians (and sort of Muslims though the details are different) have the cope that the fulfillment of that comes during his return at the end of the world, but that raises so many plausibility issues about the specifics of what Christ and the early Christians taught. It seems like they had this amazing archetypal revelation, and thought it was going to manifest in their lives, but it didn't, and now we have to sit around and cope in the meantime. Same with Muslims since they basically inherit that same eschatology, with a few things added.

Jews don't have this incompleteness problem but they also don't have such a perfect archetype in the "Christ as God" figure.

So Idk. I'm at a loss for what to make of it. I think if Origen and Gregory of Nyssa's school of thought had won in the Church and the jews had maintained a better relationship with the Christians throughout history instead of backstabbing us at every turn, we'd have a somewhat shared tradition here that made a lot more sense.