Bigotry Unleashed: "SeN" Declares Open Season on Calvinism and Other Faiths

[Kishkumen]

I’m guessing the use of “just” is similar to how it might be used in a conversation between a creationist and a biologist. In response to a claim by the creationist about how miraculous it is that a creature fits so perfectly into the environment, the biologist might well reply “no, that’s just evolution.” That doesn’t imply that evolution is not important.

OK. Maybe. Just maybe.

[Alphus and Omegus]

None of these claims are true, of course, since Christianity is just a mishmash of neo-Platonism with badly misinterpreted Judaism, which itself is a fusion of Egyptian religion and Canaanite paganism.

I get what you are saying here, but increasingly I think that the “just” is needlessly dismissive. After all, all culture springs from a variety of influences. Do we need to preface every description of a culture with “just”? Where would this stop?

My usage of "just" here is colloquial, as Res pointed out. It's intended to mean that the evidence shows Christianity and Judaism are syncretic products rather than divinely revealed. All religions are this way, as are all political and philosophical movements. We are finite beings who believe what we've seen, in one sense or another.

[Alphus and Omegus]

The Ten Commandments are like a slimmed-down ripoff of the Negative Confessions of Ma'at.

Not really. People make this comparison because the Negative Confession's list format makes it seem vaguely similar to the Ten Commandments. But three of the commandments ("have no other gods before me", "make no graven image", and "honor the Sabbath") are completely alien to Egyptian culture; "honor thy father and mother" doesn't have a parallel in the Negative Confession; and ancient cultures pretty universally condemned murder, theft, and adultery because they made other people's lives worse.

"Have no other gods" is something that one would expect that an emergent monotheistic tradition would instruct believers to obey. Biblical Judaism is also clearly henotheistic rather than monotheistic, as frequently evidenced by the books of Job and Judges.

"graven image" prohibitions are similarly expected for a universalist tradition. Islam developed this injunction even further.

And finally, having a commandment to honor one's parents seems hardly unusual or innovative.

[Alphus and Omegus]

I think a particular negative in Calvinist thought may in part result from desiring a complete moral rule book so the Torah is latched onto. The effort has the danger of shortcircuiting real moral reflection and human understanding allowing for moral corruption to take root in the disguise of moral reform.

I agree. This is the biggest problem with all religious fundamentalisms. Books written by primitive ancient desert nomads cannot possibly be a reliable moral source in the modern age, especially since Abrahamic fundamentalisms are modern-day inventions. In the ancient world there was no concept of canonicity so people believed whichever myths and teachings they deemed most credible. Modern-day fundamentalists are engaged in a dangerous fantasy project to imagine that their opinions are some sort of "absolute truth."

[Alphus and Omegus]

Suppose we give a chatbot a bunch of old Neo-Platonic texts, and the Old Testament plus the Talmud, and ask it to merge them after garbling the Jewish parts. I bet the bot will do that job many times, each time differently, without producing anything that seems much like Christianity. Even insofar as Christianity is a mishmash of Neo-Platonism and garbled Judaism, it's one particular mish out of many possible mashes.

How important are the particular choices it made in the mashing? That's a subjective issue, I reckon. If you don't see them as at all important, then maybe "it's a mishmash of Neo-Platonism and garbled Judaism" is the only headline you need. I'd be surprised, though, if any of those A.I.-generated mishmashes will have what it would have taken to become a major world religion. History isn't a replicable experiment but I think the most plausible conclusion is that Christianity probably has some secret sauce with its burger and bun.

Positing a completely random scenario with drastically reduced inputs would almost certainly not yield the output of Christianity, which was formed out of a billion difference moments over the span of about 200 years by many different people. I'm not sure that your hypothetical is meaningful to my point.

In terms of the theology, philosophy, and linguistics, it is very apparent that Christianity leans very heavily upon Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, in addition to the Judaic sources it acknowledges. That does not mean that Paul and the rest did not make their own unique contributions, whatever those might be. Is it possible also that perhaps some Christian doctrines were formulated independently from the more ancient sources? Yes. But the ground trod by others is still firmer even if the path was discovered independently.

This is no different in my view than noting similarities between various Mormon doctrines and the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg and others. All ideas have lineages, just like people. And they are no less fascinating, profound, or horrible because of this fact.

[Physics Guy]

My point was to investigate the precise meaning of an expression like "A is just a mishmash of B and C". A strong reading of that kind of expression is that combining B and C in any typical way is sufficient to yield A. If that's what the expression means, then it can be tested by asking an A.I. to combine B and C in different ways, and seeing whether it does typically produce A, or anything much like A.

I don't think that Christianity is "just a mishmash of Neo-Platonism and Judaism" in that kind of strong sense. A sufficiently weak interpretation of "just a mishmash" might be a truism, but I think you might need an interpretation so weak as to be tantamount to admitting that the phrase was an overstatement. Neo-Platonism and Judaism are certainly there in the mix, but I'm having a hard time seeing a true statement that I'd consider best expressed with that reductive-sounding "just a mishmash".

Even among things that consist entirely of just two ingredients, the combination isn't so often trivial enough to warrant a "just". Is a book just a mishmash of paper and ink?