I think the experiences of today can show us exactly what sort of things were happening then. Bitcoin writings & other content have been translated by those who have "seen the light" & the message has been spread all around the world. Julian Assange has been imprisoned & tortured for the crime of telling the truth. The covid scam did a lot to wake people up to the true nature of govt. I think the story of Jesus had an impact on people that was something like Bitcoin, Assange, & Coivd all rolled into one & as such became a massive catalyst for changing minds. But I think like most old stories it is heavily distorted today, almost to the point of being inverted.
Discussion
I’d agree this has probably happened to some degree but couldn’t chalk everything up to misunderstanding, especially when you have so much context, combined with millions religious scholars devoting their entire lives to the study of these texts, with unbroken chains of translation, also embodied in human action and tradition.
It would be like if there was a group of people who devoted their entire lives to one Shakespeare play, the translation of that play and performance of that play. Who had preformed the play everyday since it was created.
There are lots of people who have devoted their lives to acting out Shakespeare's plays & they are just as clueless when it comes to 16th century agrarian puns & humor as everyone else.
The meanings of words shift over time. Things are lost bit by bit. And there are natural forces from the top down & bottom up that want the meanings distorted. Kings don't want average people to challenge them, & average people don't want the responsibility of having to challenge kings. The death of a language alone would be more than enough to lose a great deal of any message. The clues to uncovering things are there, but none of it is straight forward as far as I can tell.
For example, the word for the Christian study of sin is hamartiology, which points toward the real meaning of sin being "to miss the mark," which would explain why we are born "in the land of sin" because aim is not innate, it is something we have to develop. But most people attach all sorts of shame & guilt to the concept of sin & they act as though people must ask to be forgiven just for being alive.
I think the Bible actually explains in multiple places that everything will be misinterpreted. One of those places IMO is the story of the valley of dried bones. Ezkiel goes into the valley, talks to the bones, & God breathes life back into them.
There is a modern story about an experiment done on a bunch of monkeys. They were all placed in a room with a bunch of bananas on top of a ladder. Whenever one monkey tries to climb up to the bananas all monkeys get sprayed with cold water. They quickly decide that climbing the ladder is off limits. Monkeys get rotated out of the room one at a time & the new monkey gets beat up by the others when he tries to climb for the bananas. Eventually none of the monkeys has ever been sprayed, but they all still beat anyone up if they try to climb. This is the socially perpetuated bones of a behavior that once made sense but is now disconnected from reality.
I think there are a lot of things in churches that are very much like this. People repeat phrases & sayings without any real ability to convey what they actually mean. They pretend to have passion because they know they are supposed to have it, but when covid comes around few if any actually stand up for their right to hold church. All that "passion" seems to be completely empty IMO. The treatment of sex has become a wildly unhealthy anorexic sort of denial of any desire being natural at all.
I think, whatever the spiritual nature of God (which I think is basically impossible to determine with any certainty), the world around us, REALITY itself, is God's body. In the same way that a map can never contain all the information in a landscape –& only the landscape itself can contain info about every changing grain of sand– for God to be all knowing God must be reality itself. So disconnection from reality is disconnection from God. Delusion is what traps people in hell. Satan is the most deluded or most separated because he believed he was God. It seems that people like Gates or Soros or Scwab suffer from similar delusions & similarly spread hell in their wake.
Good stuff here. On the analogy of a play. Like Shakespeare’s play, Christianity has multiple components, not just text, the practice of play (tradition) increases the fidelity in which information is transferred. But it’s even more than that the experience of the practitioners continually verifies the the scripture and tradition. Whereas with Shakespeare, there’s no such process.
Broad bush: It seems like you’re disagreements are with the current lay people.
If we tought everyone in the country jujitsu and 98% of the people are terrible vs some objective measure, what does that mean that jujitsu it’s self is the problem? When the same jujitsu teachings have produced different and much better results at a different time in the not so distant past.
Don’t judge jujitsu by it’s amateurs (myself included)
I agree with this approach.
Don't look at church and the people in it and analyze backwards.
If true meanings are indeed lost in translations, then it's time to look at the original and study them and try to understand.
For sure. I think most of the religious world is as upside down as economics & diet & healthcare & so many other things are today. But that doesn't make me hate religion or hate economics. Despite regularly being told that I'm not, I actually consider myself a Christian.
Haha I see.
I would say I don't like religion. But I like seeking truth.
Some names for you to remember: Catholic contributions to science.
Pope Sylvester II ( the first in Europe to introduce the decimal numeral system using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. He is credited with the invention of the first mechanical clock in 996), Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and others.
“Seek and you shall find” 🫡
Matthew 7:7-8
Yep, it’s very similar to those other categories.
Checkout “Orthodoxy” by GK Chesterton.
For me it’s been rabbit hole, except the work required to go deeper down is exponentially greater than any other topic. Because a large aspect can’t be intellectualized.
You can read about jujitsu your entire life but until you practice it you’ll never actually understand it. Same with Christianity.
Gods speed brother
Thanks for this well-written message.
I see that logic, but that logic is based on putting Bitcoin and such at the same human level as stories of Jesus.
The Bible is not just about stories of Jesus. The Bible is not about Jesus. (Hmm...)
This might be a weird analogy, but it's like saying "every guy I met is an asshole, this all men are assholes."