Wikipedia says "A polemic is intended to establish the supremacy of a single point of view by refuting an opposing point of view. Polemic usually addresses serious matters of religious, philosophical, political, or scientific importance, and is often written to dispute or refute a widely accepted position." JS Mill said "The worst offense that can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatize those who hold a contrary opinion as bad and immoral men."DWill wrote:I wouldn't call polemics a "view", in the same class as the first two you mentioned. It's an intent whereby the speaker decides that dispassionate argument isn't going to carry the day, so he takes a more aggressive approach. I enjoy a good polemic, but it's so hard to this well, without merely asserting what would need to be proved, and sometimes flirting with name-callling.
Polemic comes from the Greek for war, polemos, so it naturally aims to prove the opposing view is obsolete and wrong. I regard religious polemic as justified, simply because the quality of religious understanding is so low, and the need for religious understanding is so great. In this context polemical argument can have an educative value.
In religion, language carries a lot of baggage. For example, apologist is a term that is used with pride by theologians, but has come to have a strongly negative popular meaning as denoting a liar. Maybe that popular meaning is something theologians should ruminate on, but I was not asserting that all conventional theologians are liars by any means, only that they are wrong. To confront apologetics as intellectually vacuous is an obviously polemical stance, but not one that falls prey to the vice described by Mill. I do not agree with Interbane that I have been sloppy in discussion of conflicting views. I try to be precise.
Fundamentalism, like apologetics, is a word with baggage. The explicit fundamentalist movement in the USA a century ago had strong continuity with older dogmas that did not use that term. As an intellectual concept, fundamentalism is the attitude that you are completely correct and that all questioning of your views is evil. Biblical inerrancy is a relatively recent manifestation of this attitude, but it goes back firstly to the Protestant Reformation with the rediscovery of the Bible, and then to the Inquisition and to early efforts to stamp out heresy. If you read old books like Against Heresies by Irenaeus you will see that the Roman Church did in fact hold to detailed views that are very much fundamentalist. The big debate on whether the Son was co-eternal with the Father was a debate about fundamentals. The Orthodox held that the Gnostics were fundamentally wrong in seeing a symbolic link between the twelve disciples and the twelve months of the year.what the Catholic Church promoted was the central Christ myth as reported in the Bible. The Church wasn't particularly known for its detailed fundamentalism.
This is all really central to rehabilitating theology. For example, if we define God as the set of requirements for human flourishing, then it can be socially useful to anthropomorphise this abstract set of moral values etc as an entity, even though a mathematical set is not strictly speaking an entity. The popular tradition has systemically corrupted such abstract ideas into simple images, which is why the Ten Commandments ban idols. The Historical Jesus has become an idol.But how can we give God some symbolic truth yet be required to reject him intellectually? I don't have that kind of split mind. I'm not even sure I know what you mean when you say the Apostle's (singular or plural?) Creed appeals to you as a myth. Maybe it's me. Here's another thought, that what you respond to in myth is best classified as beauty, as aesthetics. Maybe in all of our discussions of religion we omit the importance of beauty. Could this also be, essentially, what you feel a total reliance on science deprives people of? Not that I would agree that science and beauty are at all in opposition (nor would you, I think).
The Virgin Birth is a beautiful story, for example as a symbol of each new day emerging from the purity of night. Nature is the ultimate aesthetic, and that is why I see supernaturalism as such a degraded vision. Ironically, it is supernaturalism that is a human creation, whereas the real creator spirit of our universe is purely a matter of natural law. This means the supernatural church is guilty of what Paul attacked the Romans for in worshipping the creation rather than the creator, in the sense that church theology worships a God that they themselves have made as a totem.
It is a seductive practice, to explain a complex abstract idea by means of a simple visual symbol. It helps the mass of illiterate believers to follow. But as with the sorceror's apprentice, the tool becomes the master.
If the Jesus Myth has continuity with pagan traditions of dying and rising saviors, then we have to ask if those pagan traditions regarded their myths as true in the way that Christianity regards its myths as true. I suspect that it was an innovation of Christianity to assert that its God walked and talked and went to the toilet. Such a carnal materialism might never have previously occurred to earlier myths, which readily saw their fertility fetishes as imaginary.it doesn't seem likely that things start with a story known to be just a story--for purposes of entertainment, supposedly? It seems more likely that people's need or desire to believe shapes the story in particular ways.
The comment I made about Chinese Whispers was at http://www.booktalk.org/post55245.html#p55245consider just as a hypothetical this scenario: some fervent followers of a messiah-like figure face the shock of their savior's ignominious execution. What might their states of mind cause them to think is true? Could hysteria lead them to begin, right then and there, the myth that became Jesus Christ? Your scenario of Chinese whispers begins with a group of stories, all supposedly transmitted orally, that everyone takes as metaphorical. Is that likely to be the case with an oral tradition? Isn't is always a coterie of elites that diverge with an esoteric interpretation? Chinese whispers also doesn't sort with coming to believe over time that stories are true rather than symbolic. That phenomenon is only about mistakes being introduced along the way.
"the idea of the meme as an evolving and mutating idea is very helpful to interpret the origins of Christianity. A key point is that in an oral culture, the weight of moral stories is increased by falsely claiming that invented fictions are historically based. This would go through several stages, each of which could last decades as the view of a community –
1. I know its false;
2. I heard that it is false;
3. I don’t know if its true or false;
4. It may be true;
5. It is probably true
6. It is definitely true
7. If you so much as ask if it is true you are a heretic and blasphemer and will go to hell."
Your point is that an alternative memetic evolution is possible
1. Our hero was crucified
2. Our hero was a messianic savior
3. Messianic saviors are meant to triumph over evil
4. Because our savior was a messiah, he must have triumphed
5. Therefore he rose from the dead
6. Therefore he is a miraculous God
7. Therefore all stories of heroes that can plausibly accrete to our hero should be attributed to him in order to aid the growth of our cult.
This is the traditional evemerist line, and there is nothing to disprove it. However, I do not believe it. The main problems include the scanty references to such a real messiah figure before the gospels were written several generations later, and the equal plausibility that numerous such heroes contributed to the myth, not just one. The Gospels and Epistles read like a response by mystery schools to a new historical situation, an experiment with a public fictional story that rapidly grew out of their control.
To say "there likely wasn't any Jesus Christ who lived" is the precise point at issue in this thread. If the Epistles and Gospels found it expedient that one man should exist, in order that all might believe, we find here a better explanation for the line in John 11: "it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish... and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one."If there was a model for a ur-Christ, this isn't the Jesus Christ that resulted from all the accretion over the decades. There doesn't have to be, and of course there likely wasn't, any Jesus Christ who lived. As for the second temple trauma, that was no doubt crucial, and it is likely that Jews reached pretty far back to gather around them the most comforting parts of history and myth. Whether they recognized the difference is again key. By this time they did have an interesting mix to draw on, a combination of Jewish historical-sounding narrative and the myth and religion of Greece and the Middle East.
To unify the scattered faithful requires a single agreed narrative. As such, the numerous disparate sources had to be brought together into a story of one man. If Jesus did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.
