Karl on Nostr: Paul provides important context, his experience with Christ is clearly something akin ...

Paul provides important context, his experience with Christ is clearly something akin to what became the Merkabah tradition, the universal mystical experience of the ancient prophets in that region, but a lot of that context is lost by the early Christians. People are only making the connections recently because we finally have old jewish and Christian literature for cheap and in the same language.

Anti-semites won't like this, but you really do need judaism to understand what's going on in a lot of the New Testament, even though it's also true that the two schools disagree on some fundamentals, the Church Fathers, even the earliest ones, are missing so much context right away.


I looked into Buddhism seriously but the problem I found with it is that it can't account for transcendental goods, neither can Stoicism.

Why do patterns converge on complexity even when it shouldn't. Fundamental patterns are more likely to replicate and survive. Why are there universal positives that every being, even non-thinking ones, work toward?

Whatever the precondition for the world is has to account for these things, and it has to do so at scale, from planets to life to atoms, and below even that. Emptiness philosophies do not account for hierarchy in nature.

I love a lot of things about Stoicism and Zen insofar as they're useful personal philosophies, but their accounting for universals is their weakness.