ant wrote:I am interested in a paradigm shift, which naturally looks insane on the surface to those who are committed to the current false delusional dominant paradigm.
If there is to be any paradigm shift there must first be a consensus of acknowledgement that a specific anomaly (or plural) has resisted the scientific community's "puzzle solving" efforts.
The paradigm shift required to understand Platonic ideas is not scientific but conceptual and religious, an understanding of how human life connects with the natural reality around us. Essentially, Plato had a purely natural and rational view on the reality of concepts, including God, but this logical philosophy was subsequently degraded as a result of the takeover of religion by supernatural orthodoxy with its magical hocus pocus. (The Latin phrase ‘hoc est corpus’ or ‘here is the body’ signifies the magical transubstantiation of the flesh and blood of Christ in the eucharist).
The paradigm shift implied in Platonic philosophy is about the reconciliation of faith and reason within a natural framework, recognising that faith has a crucial subordinate role within a rational cosmology. The error of the current scientific paradigm is more psychological than empirical, consisting in its failure to see how faith is central to ethics.
The anomalies are seen in the inability to read the Bible and other ancient texts coherently, rather than in errors of any positive scientific claims. My view is that the Bible is grounded in natural cosmology, but this grounding was so comprehensively suppressed by the church that it is now all but invisible. The paradigm shift is about putting Christianity back on a natural footing to construct an enlightened ethical vision of religion.
ant wrote:
What exactly are you referring to here and how does it related to Plato's Perfect Realm of Forms?
I don’t think Plato ever referred to a ‘Perfect Realm of Forms’. That is a degraded misinterpretation of his theory of ideas. His argument was that love, goodness, justice, beauty and truth each have an essential conceptual unity that provides the meaning for empirical examples of these ideas. As soon as we speak of a realm we are wrongly spatialising a concept, failing to see the epistemic difference between ideas and things. ‘Form’ is a mistranslation of Plato’s original term ‘idea’. An example of the pervasive misreading is seen in Plato’s explanation in Timaeus that ‘being is to becoming as truth is to belief’. Being is eternal and unchanging, while becoming is temporal and changing. Some wrongly read this as a denigration of physical reality, when actually it is about how the moment of physical becoming or existence cannot be understood in isolation from the past and future, but has to be seen within the process of time, the eternal vision of unchanging truth.
ant wrote:
How would Plato's "Theory of Eternity" solve whatever natural anomaly it is you are going to set forth for us here to consider?
This is actually a fascinating question for the nature of religion. Plato’s Theory of Eternity in Timaeus is presented in terms of visual astronomy, the X in the sky formed by the intersection of the unchanging galaxy and the changing zodiac. This same celestial vision was used by Constantine as the conquering cross of Christianity, the vision of the Chi Rho cross before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 AD. Plato’s Timaeus describes the X in the sky as the meeting of the same and the different in terms that can only properly be understood as referring to the observable X formed in the sky by the circle of the zodiac and the circle of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is simple naked eye cosmology, and is readily visible. On the night before the battle, Constantine would have seen if he lifted his eyes to the heavens that a cross was formed by the intersection of the zodiac with the galaxy between Taurus and Gemini. This cross rose at sunset and was prominent all night, with the zodiac light forming the second bar of the X visible before dawn after moon set. What it means for Constantine is that he understood Christ as an imagined reflection on earth of the actual observed passage of time seen in the heavens. Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα (Through this sign [you shall] conquer) says that just as Christ reflects the power and majesty of the steady movement of the visible cosmos, so too does Constantine.
The heavens certainly are majestic. Nothing we do can influence them. At the end of terrestrial time when the sun goes nova the cosmos will prove all powerful. The mandate of heaven is the mandate of the stars.
Christology proposes that Jesus Christ incarnates a hypostatic union between time (the Jesus of history) and eternity (the Christ of faith). Considered against a precessional cosmology, intimated also in Plato’s Timaeus, the stars symbolise the eternal same, while earth and the moving planets symbolise the changing realm of the different. Plato says the Chi Rho cross (ie the intersection of the circles of the galaxy and the zodiac) is the connection between time and eternity. As philosophy pondered this empirical material, the myth of Christ as the incarnation of the connection between the same and the different provided a coherent narrative. Only at the time of Christ, during the time of Pilate, were the signs and seasons exactly aligned, providing an imagined pure cosmic harmony.
This astronomical material makes sense if you understand it, but precession is an obscure topic, known only to a tiny minority, and understood by even fewer. To make this Archimedian ‘lever of the world’ the basis for an explanation of history is a tall order. That is what I contend happened in the invention of Christianity. From the astronomical observation that the sun precessed at the spring point from the first sign Aries to the last sign Pisces, we have the basis to elaborate a unifying myth, putting human flesh on the dry bones of observation of heaven.
ant wrote:If I need empirical evidence for God, you need evidence for Plato's PERFECT Realm of Forms. Thanks
God is pure concept, constructed in transcendental imagination as Platonic idea. God is not an entity, any more than ideas are entities. God is explained by logic, not discovered by evidence. The paradigm shift here is about recognising the futility and error of pretending that God could be an entity with intentions and intelligence. Instead we can understand the sacred divinity within nature, seeing how myth became the subject of reverence as a way of sacralising the secular by surrounding time by eternity.
green bottle, red star mmmm
tell you what i'll go get the beer and i suspect from there will have to return tomorrow to converse on.
