Epistemology

"Epistemology." Now this is a word used in some strata of academia and which is another one of these things that no one bothers to ever check. And so of course, naturally, everybody is sure they know what the word means.

Okay...

So if you want to raise the dead though, or walk on water, or heal the terminally sick - then this is the word you need to understand in depth.

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Can you - right now - do any of these things? Can you?

How 'bout you, doc? You - Mr Science-Man; can you manage at least some of that list? ...Maybe turn water into wine, at least? Seems simple enough.

Okay so just how do we get though, from 'espisteme' (genuine knowledge) to the word 'faith' in modern religions? Because the word used in all the books is 'pistis.' Which doesn't mean 'faith.' It means sound, factual knowledge.

Oh dear. Jesus did stuff because he had 'sound, underlying factual knowledge...(?)' Actually, he even laughs at some of the disciples who were not able to heal one particular young boy when they tried to mimic what he was doing, and he told them 'ah, but you don't have the underlying basis (about the particular thing being looked at) to have that happen.'

Hmn. 

You see we don't any longer possess such highly discriminated types of words or explicit meanings, and it is only with some difficulty that we may look at what it was more learned people of deeper times were on about:

Epistemology comes about from a branch of rhetoric, concerned with being able to have and to communicate the necessary elements to induce true judgement about something, and hence also to give proof of a statement.

So what is rendered nowadays as the word 'faith' (pistis) is really something quite categorically different, and with more a much more complicated and long-winded 'meaning.' And there is another word that bears some scrutiny in relation to this whole thing too: proseuxomai. In doesn't really mean 'prayer' like we use that word now - it means prosecute, but not prosecute in the way we use that word either (lol), which is that people go to court and make a lot of accusations and so on...

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No. Proseuxomai means persuading by having (possessing) the underlying factual basis in the correct logically connected steps so that there is only one conclusion to any given matter.

Modern human beings then, you have to admit, from your present basis of knowledge now, are pretty stupid, are they not. You can't say they are just ignorant - they all have incredible access to information and historical references; and they should know better.

I think, I suppose, if we continue to look at the religious context and the vast highway of religious tradition - that the most obvious question arises as to whether or not people at the time actually felt that Jesus was literally or actually doing any of these 'wonderous' (Italian/Latin - 'mirare'/'miror') things. Because if he was and people there thought it to be so from what they saw, then he was some kind of 'futuristic, super-scientist' really, who 'understood the correct underlying basis' of things and was able thereby to manipulate elements of those 'things' in order to secure particular outcomes.

Now this then is a bit different to 'The Secret' and this present-era concept about 'manifesting through the law of attraction. There might not be any such thing as a 'law of attraction.' 

The presumption, of the traditional religious texts is that there is a solution to every given problem and somewhere, some day, somebody will discover it. Assuming Jesus is God, then He must know each one of those solutions. I suppose the only unresolved matter is how come He doesn't just give everyone the solutions so that everyone can solve every serious problem that right know we don't know how to.