Posted by John West  7/16/2016 9:53 am | #41 |
884heid wrote:
Do you sometimes have trouble accepting this concept of eternal hell? P.S. I apologise in advance if I am incorrect in the assumption that you're a Catholic.
No need to apologize for assuming I'm Catholic! I spent some time in the RCIA, but I have too many doubts about Catholic theology to become one right now.
I'm, however, not troubled by the problem of Hell. I've always suspected that its bite is from questionable suppositions about ethics and divine duties.
|
Posted by John West 7/16/2016 9:59 am | #42 |
Here are excerpts from an Eleanore Stump book that discusses PST. I decided to copy and paste from a random blog to make it easier to show her points:
[. . .]
Just a note to those that haven't read Stump's Aquinas that she attacks the popular penal substitution theory, (P), to propose Thomas's theory, (T), as a superior alternative in the following sections.
|
Posted by Jeremy Taylor 7/16/2016 12:32 pm | #43 |
Buddhist's are in a strange position, since they think that there is no permanent self (nor permanent anything) in the first place to either reincarnate or "attain" Nirvana.
I think any-thing is the important phrase here. Nirvana is permanent, though it is not individual or manifested thing. In some forms of Buddhism it is a transcendent state above individual things, but in others it all individual things are in some sense of it yet it transcends them (Samsara is Nirvana, as it is said). This is much like Advaita (and, indeed, Platonism).
|
Posted by 884heid 7/16/2016 1:33 pm | #44 |
Do you sometimes have trouble accepting this concept of eternal hell? P.S. I apologise in advance if I am incorrect in the assumption that you're a Catholic.
No need to apologize for assuming I'm Catholic! I spent some time in the RCIA, but I have too many doubts about Catholic theology to become one right now.
I'm, however, not troubled by the problem of Hell. I've always suspected that its bite is from questionable suppositions about ethics and divine duties.
Yeah that's true. It's more of an emotional issue for me rather than a logical one. Like Augustine couldn't experience ecstacy from Plotinus' meditations, I can't experience it from Catholic teachings and gospels. And that is a big problem because that's the only way i would ever go beyond philosophical theism. And that's not only relegated to Catholicism but to Avicennan version of Islam and Dvaita Vedanta of Hinduism as well. If Christianity is true, that would essentially qualify me as a reporbated individual who could not accept Jesus' proposal of being united with him, and thus, relegating me "by my choice of will" to spend an eternity in a place that is at worst, an unimaginably awful place. And excluding faith, I still have issues with Original sin, Trinity and Divine Simplicity, and most of the Theology concerning Mary. Sorry for the rant, it didn't really provide incentive for any person to continue the conversation, just simply wanted to write that.
|
Posted by AKG 7/16/2016 3:28 pm | #45 |
If individuality is retained during union with the One, will people be able to interact with another, and do stuff?
|
Posted by iwpoe 7/16/2016 5:16 pm | #46 |
Buddhist's are in a strange position, since they think that there is no permanent self (nor permanent anything) in the first place to either reincarnate or "attain" Nirvana.
I think any-thing is the important phrase here. Nirvana is permanent, though it is not individual or manifested thing. In some forms of Buddhism it is a transcendent state above individual things, but in others it all individual things are in some sense of it yet it transcends them (Samsara is Nirvana, as it is said). This is much like Advaita (and, indeed, Platonism).
The emphasis on the negative in Buddhism is such that one could hardly be blamed for thinking that Buddhist nirvana means the personal attainment of nothingness. or, at the very least, the attainment of the cessation of all that is in life that brings about suffering, which is most of life, including one's very self.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
|
Posted by Jeremy Taylor 7/16/2016 6:51 pm | #47 |
The emphasis on the negative in Buddhism is such that one could hardly be blamed for thinking that Buddhist nirvana means the personal attainment of nothingness. or, at the very least, the attainment of the cessation of all that is in life that brings about suffering, which is most of life, including one's very self.
Well this has certainly been alleged. And it is true that Buddhism tends not to emphasis the positive sides of phenomenal existence, although a few schools do. But all Buddhist schools deny individual things are either entirely lacking in existence or that they have true substantial existence. And it is made reasonably clear from the Pali Canon onwards that liberation is in some sense a positive thing. Buddhism always is radically apophatic, so there is a great reticence about Nirvana, but it is described as blissful and so on. In the Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna and those (Mahayana and Tibetan) schools influenced by it, it is said that we are already in Nirvana (Samsara is Nirvana), if only we saw things as they truly are. The similarities between this and the Advaita view (and, indeed, that of Platonism) are striking (although a Buddhist is unlikely to admit it).
Last edited by Jeremy Taylor (7/16/2016 6:52 pm)
|
Posted by Jason 7/16/2016 9:26 pm | #48 |
Do you sometimes have trouble accepting this concept of eternal hell? P.S. I apologise in advance if I am incorrect in the assumption that you're a Catholic.
No need to apologize for assuming I'm Catholic! I spent some time in the RCIA, but I have too many doubts about Catholic theology to become one right now.
I'm, however, not troubled by the problem of Hell. I've always suspected that its bite is from questionable suppositions about ethics and divine duties.Yeah that's true. It's more of an emotional issue for me rather than a logical one. Like Augustine couldn't experience ecstacy from Plotinus' meditations, I can't experience it from Catholic teachings and gospels. And that is a big problem because that's the only way i would ever go beyond philosophical theism. And that's not only relegated to Catholicism but to Avicennan version of Islam and Dvaita Vedanta of Hinduism as well. If Christianity is true, that would essentially qualify me as a reporbated individual who could not accept Jesus' proposal of being united with him, and thus, relegating me "by my choice of will" to spend an eternity in a place that is at worst, an unimaginably awful place. And excluding faith, I still have issues with Original sin, Trinity and Divine Simplicity, and most of the Theology concerning Mary. Sorry for the rant, it didn't really provide incentive for any person to continue the conversation, just simply wanted to write that.
Will pray for you, may you find that which you seek.
|
Posted by Timotheos 7/18/2016 8:07 am | #49 |
16. The soul that never inclines upwards is damned in the sense that he returns to life and its disorder over and over, and lest you get too deluded into thinking that, by, say, spending your life on opium you're pretty happy, you shall die and be utterly lost and return as some sort of plant or something blown about almost entirely by external forces for some untold number of generations, etc.
This is actually pretty close to how the medievals visioned hell, sans the reincarnation; Brandon over at Siris has a good post on this. http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2016/01/subordination-to-fire.html
We have to remember the Aristotelian elemental sense of the word fire in this context even in Dante, if not especially in Dante; his rings of heaven, hell, and purgatory are built on Aristotelian cosmological principles, so much so, that much of Dante's work reads much like an allegorical medieval "sci-fi", as long as one is hip to the latest in 14th century Aristotelian cosmological theory.
Last edited by Timotheos (7/18/2016 8:22 am)
|
Posted by iwpoe 7/18/2016 2:07 pm | #50 |
That's true as well, though I don't usually admit that of scripture outside of the context of Aristotelian theology, since it's not at all clear that the kione Greek of scriptures is particularly informed by an Aristotelian understanding of fire. I favor a classic philosophic reading of the New Testament not in the least part because of Paul and the Gospel of John, but many protestants do not.
As for hell, there is a moment in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, where Faustus comes to ask Mephistopheles if hell is so irrevocable how does he, as an especially damned demon, find himself out of it:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
That seems to ring true for the Platonist also. Hell is here in this confusion separated from the highest things. There is an extra ingredient of, from the classical perspective, what Nietzsche calls Christian nihilism and antipathy towards life, but it's not as if the Platonist has any particularly good reason to think life all that much sweeter. He doesn't deeply lament his own depravity, but his entire practice, just as much as the Christian's, is consumed by looking to the transcendent in life. He ends up a kind of ascetic.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
