The facts of the case:
(1) A Jewish prophet is tortured to death for blasphemy and sedition.
(2) This man’s followers claim he is the true Lord of the world and that his murder was somehow “for us.”
(3) They answer the question, “How do you know this?” with claims of personal experiences or trustworthy secondhand accounts of his having been “raised from the dead.”
Supposing we believe their story, how can we make sense of what is plainly lunacy?
Christian theology.
Haha, who's side are you on anyway?
ReplyDeleteThis is really only 'plainly lunacy' in the post-scientific world. Many things far more ludicrous were routinely and confidently asserted, and, in much of the world, they still are.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, plain lunacy of a different kind thrives in the post-scientific world. Witness the simultaneous claims made, often within the same speech, by our current presidente that A.) too much of our GDP is spent on health care and that B.) we need to invest more in health care. Madness, obviously, or something worse.
Also, Dragon Age is fantastic. I started playing again as soon as I finished.
@JJ: God's.
ReplyDelete@Dan: The lunacy issue is only in play if we assume from the outset that things are supposed to *make sense* in terms of "a unifying principle" or logical consistency. Popular Western theology has long eschewed mystery in the vain (and oft-times horrifying) attempt to systematize the actions of God into something straightforwardly rational. I pose the question this way to make a point: if God had any interest whatsoever in doing things in a logically consistent way, I'm pretty sure he would have come up with something a little less ridiculous.
When we recite the historical claims in this manner, the actions of God in the NT seem much less different than the actions of God in the OT. Namely, whenever God does stuff, it looks pretty nuts to us.
Maybe it's systematic theology that's nuts, and not God at all.
I just turned Uncharted 2 in; Dragon Age is next on my GameQ. Uncharted 2: Gameplay, 8, Story/Characters/Dialogue: 10 for being everything that Indy 1 & 3 nailed, 2 kind of hit, and 4 flailed at.
ReplyDeletechristian theology does not make sense of it.
ReplyDeleteI've got the Uncharted 2 demo. The game play is really cool, and, yeah, the characters seem totally solid. The one caveat with DA:O is that you need a LOT of time to invest. The meat of the game is all the voice acting, dialogue trees, and lore that you find in the world. The battles are decent, but nothing we haven't seen in KOTOR or Fallout.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest, I agree that the Bible can't be read coherently through the lens of Aristotle, except as either saying something other than the plain meaning of text, or as being, as you say, lunacy.
Also: There are some very dark quest lines in DA:O that I think you will like. 'A Paragon of Her Kind' and 'Something Wicked' are both creepy, and there are shades of Titus Andronicus in 'The Nature of the Beast'.
ReplyDelete