Plato went so far as to say that the physical world had no valuable substance, was not important in understanding man's place in the universe."
You refer to the theory of ideas. Many Greek philosophers addressed the matter of perception and senses. Put simply, you know what's going on around you through your eyes, ears, smell, touch and taste, correct? However, my dog perceives things differently as he can smell far better than I can. So, to put it bluntly, if another dog happens to have urinated on the garden wall, my dog will immediately be aware of something I'm not as my eyes and ears aren't going to match his sense of smell.
Thus, the senses are our guide to perception but they're basically limited. Sometimes they can even be distorted.
So, Plato had this idea of, say, a perfect circle. You can draw a circle on a bit of paper and it may look like a circle but if you analyse it scientifically you may find it's not really quite a circle at all. How do you know? Well, they assumed there has to be a perfect circle somewhere (maybe in the spiritual world) that constitutes the perfect idea of a circle. Somewhere we have a spiritual awareness of that reality.
All of this stuff interested the Pythagoreans who were also fascinated by number and reincarnation.
At any rate, all of this leads us to perception.
In the modern world we talk of atoms and electrons and use miscroscopes to view cells or X-rays to view cellular tissue. We call a cell a cell and an electron an electron. Still, the Greeks questioned that reality really was that which you perceived it to be (physically)..
"Christianity came along in the west during the interim and revived Plato's concepts of divine revelation...."
I take your point. The N.T. and St Paul teach there is perfect goodness we all fall short of so you could only go to heaven through grace. However, the Gnostics went into it a lot deeper as they claimed they had access to the deeper secrets of Jesus's teachings and there was a divine revelation as you say.
"The PROOF was gone in an instant by the understanding of eliptical orbits about the sun. Faith became primary for religion, science contradictory in many cases."
I'm not so sure the Greeks, Babylonians and ancient Egyptians didn't know much more about stars and planets than, say, mediaevel monks. The Egyptians knew about the dog star and I believe many Greeks understood the earth revolved as a satellite.
"now, only through the grace of God, salvation given as a gift to the un-worthy, could man recieve his oneness to God."
Yes, this was classic St Paul. The snag with Orthodox Christianity is that if you study even the accepted texts, it seems the apostles didn't always agree on everything. St Paul and St Peter were seemingly at odds. Some apostles urged all believers to become spiritual Jews and get circumcised and that upset St Paul.
Here is the problem for the fundamentalists and please consider this carefully: The fundamentalist states every word of the Bible is true. But how can St Paul be right and St Peter be right if they both disagreed and were historically proven to have disagreed (according to Church history)? Surely it makes sense to read the book in context and use some basic human interpretation as to what Jesus actually taught? Even the Gnostics at the time were considered to be Christians and they left writings behind as well.
"So, many now continue to beat that "unworthiness" into themselves, practicing blind faith over what they see as previously fallable natural observation (with or without paddle.) "
Maybe Orthodoxy was bad for Christianity. It became so dogmatic and terrified of analysis that all of the early Christian teachings were just lumped into one, simplistic summary and became rigid: "Jesus was crucified for your sins, was reurrected, was equal to Yahweh, God incarnate, believe and ye shall be saved. Finito!" The more complex, mystical stuff was simply burned or rejected or stamped out. Still, you ask yourself what would a Christian or Nero's time actually have belied as opposed to a modern Bishop or priest.
I have no idea why Jews used to stone adultresses in the streets of Jerusalem or why nuns abused and flogged orphans in convents. Neither do I know why Moslems blow themselves up on buses or refer to non-Moslems as infidels. Even so, there are good Christians such as Mother Theresa and good Moslems such as Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X. There are decent, tolerant Jews as well, of course.
At a guess, I'd suggest maybe the Bushes, Bin Ladens, Herods and Catholic Conquistadores possibly fear those who don't share their beliefs may be right after all so they try to eliminate this fear by destroying unbelievers. Who knows?
CDAKIAHONDA said:
Context. Let's revisit your favorites, the Greeks, for a moment. along with the works of Ptolemy (among others) the classical greeks, ( I'll choose Plato and Aristotle as "composite characters," so favored a device in modern history telling), were pretty darn sure that the Universe as they knew it revolved around a stationary Earth.
This cosmological view lent itself, contextually at the time, to the view that man was without a doubt, as the master of the center of the universe, devinely placed. The Greeks built a pretty firm foundation on this seemingly firm platform, developing a system of philosophy that Plato used to identify the key archetypes of human endeavor. Plato went so far as to say that the physical world had no valuable substance, was not important in understanding man's place in the universe. Aristotle differed of course, but yet we must remember that this cosmological system of divine placement trancended the Greeks and survived in the west until the scientific Revolution of the middle ages.
Christianity came along in the west during the interim and revived Plato's concepts of divine revelation, once again relegating the more naturalistic approaches of Aristotle.
What's this got to do with anything? Consider the "foundational shaking" of modern thought brought forth when Copernicus (others) showed that the Earth was NOT the center of the universe. The proverbial "rug" was pulled out from underneath the basic "proof" of God that had survived for thousands of years from the first time man gazed upwards at the stars. The FACT, contextually, of man's divine relationship to God was broken. The PROOF was gone in an instant by the understanding of eliptical orbits about the sun. Faith became primary for religion, science contradictory in many cases.
The concepts of good works, up to that point, culminating in the dreadful practice of "indulgence," or the "service to God" in the Crusades faded with the ideas of Luther and others. No longer was Man God's partner on Earth, here to discover his relationship TO God, his kinship if you will, but here was a new ideology that rather than being able to "earn" your way to heaven, purchase it if you will, take the step toward the everlasting based on your own good works, now, only through the grace of God, salvation given as a gift to the un-worthy, could man recieve his oneness to God. This conceptual challenge rent the west apart. It also marked the beginnings of a very dynamic period in western history of schism, reformation and scientific revolution. The concepts of the natural and the divine were seperated, God was trancendant of nature, not of nature.
The literal approach to the word of God was born BECAUSE of man's "contextual" realizations of his own unworthiness set forth in the new cosmology. So, many now continue to beat that "unworthiness" into themselves, practicing blind faith over what they see as previously fallable natural observation (with or without paddle.) It doesn't matter what science says, God trancends science, can manipulate it, is interdependant of it. The stars are not Gods, God is not part of the "analytical world."
"It would seem negligent, that once we become firm in our beliefs, we fail to understand WHY we believe WHAT we believe."
-Anselm, 11th century Arch-Bishop of Canterbury
The same questions have been asked, and will be asked anew, for as long as we lack a complete understanding of our place in the Universe. Super String Theory anyone?
