Well this is no revelation!
See the thing is, there is so much confusion about ideas from the past these days.
You can take something quite interesting like Fowles' The Magus and read way too much into it. All it is fundamentally an idea that individual people repeat or 'play out' or mirror, big things that happen across the whole of society, on the national and world stage, and in a sense they also follow in line with concepts of 'labeled' divinities (of the ancient past, of mythology).
Candice Bergen as Artemis, in The Magus. |
The problem for me being that people take what they see there in these sorts of books and films, and impute whatever is in there, to the actual original descriptions about the 'gods' that ancient people had.
I'll give you a really good example from right now, today.
If you look up 'Lucretius,' the first century BC thinker and poet - who wrote 'The Nature of Things' (apparently in five books, all composed in verse form) - all you find is a vast echo-chamber across the internet saying that, 'despite Lucretius being probably the first person who proposed Evolution, and the first who explain atoms as the building blocks of everything, he also ended his first book declaring the absurdity of the idea that the Earth was a sphere, even though this was by then an established view among most thinkers.'
Yeah well you find me where he actually says any such thing and I will give you a pat on the back.
He never says it! At all. He was writing in Latin to a retired Roman Tribune who was intending to purchase some land nearby where Lucretius lived, with the view of building a property there where he (Memnius, not Lucretius) and others were going to write pornography. Lucretius was trying to dissuade Memnius.
For the vegetable-loving people: blistered padrons. |
And he uses some words like 'mundus' which never meant 'the Earth' back then, and which Lucretius is clearly using in terms of the visible, manifest, material Universe of things, everything, including things in space. And he is actually describing Universal gravity or gravitational forces - and saying that what others are suggesting about it is absurd -, and it is in the context of what he is talking about.
But how are you ever going to get to every single remorseless ignorant uneducated idiot, who keeps saying that he said something that he never said?
You'll be wasting your time. The lesson they all never learned at any stage, was to go consult the actual sources.
And then, in any case afterwards, you'd have to go 'fix up' the next piece of, and every other piece of bloody nonsense that is just simply everywhere these days, masquerading as 'facts' and 'information!'
Unfortunately one combined total overall effect of this kind of thing is it promotes this notion that, well, these 'smart' people of the past, yes they were smart, about one or two things, but see, they didn't know this or they were foolish and ignorant about that... So therefore just don't go looking too closely at them or go too deeply into what they can teach, because we know everything - and they didn't.
It's completely the other way round.
And fennel and almond soup. Not too bad this stuff... |
So did Jesus really morph on that road into a different-looking body or body structure and face, or was it maybe a completely different body altogether - when those two 'did not recognize Him because He appeared in another form to them?'
You will even get mainstream church people actually say: 'No, He didn't.' And then they'll give all kinds of weird explanations that are not found in any source text at all to justify what they are wanting to assert to be true.
The actual source text unambiguously says 'He appeared in another form to them.'
Now you can really split hairs here trying to make the word 'appear/ed' apply just to what the two people witnessing something were doing exclusively (IE 'seeing' thus apprehending that which 'appeared' lol), and but not, apply to the existential minute specific dimensions of the actual figure itself/Himself.
Yet the text does not say 'appeared as if like another form;' it says in another form.
So yes, Christians have more than just three 'gods:' they have Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Mary (LOL I include this for Dr Zakir Naik and his followers), Baby Jesus, Jesus 1, and Jesus 2.
Which leads us nicely back to my real point started up by a good questioner here earlier on: What is Personality?
The Christian 'Father' God, does not have the same personality as His Son -, 'Jesus.' And by all accounts this 'Holy Spirit' has quite a distinct character and personality as well. But they all have 'God' powers. And they all have the same 'God' powers. And which makes them all equally 'Divinity.'
Lucretius puts this type of conceptual problem this way: '...emerging from the arrangements of distinct particles.' And I agree with him.
'7' is integral with '9' and with all of the Nine. But she has an individual separate real personality. So they are several persons who are one thing (when integrated).
Did Jesus 2 have different particles in Him, compared to Jesus 1? Or was it just that the arrangement of particles was different?
LOL
This is what is known as an Irish Catholic Question. What happened to His fingernail clippings, and His hair? The Muslims have much more 'rugged' questions about it but along the same lines.
Look. Look. Don't break your mind on this. This is just me being silly for a while here.
And yes, I could easily drift into the 'And Loki kept all the nail clippings in order to make a ship from to save some people in the world at the Ragnarok later...'
This is the 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' kind of thing again, you see. Do Jesus' nail clippings have all the Divine powers of the rest of the particles which make 'Him' up...?
Aaaaaah! See it all turns on what we are proposing 'Him' to even be.
Don't worry, I'll distract you well enough that you won't have seen part of the super secret here. |
Same goes for 'you.' And 'me.' All of us are something about what we are on the unseen inside, and which thing has zero need to tie any single particle or set of particles on the material 'outside' to the 'us,' the real 'us.'
But believe me, the worst possible thing, would be for some staggeringly advanced thinker or philosopher way more advanced even than Lucretius, to perfectly pin down what that set of internal compositions was, which made up the personality that could move from one 'arrangement of particles' to another and yet fully still be the same actual person.
Because then you'd have AI promoters and CGI companies all literally manufacturing you.
Meaning human beings as such.
Luckily, it's a mystery. That they will never find out. And this, my friends, is why people such as Pythagoras and especially Orpheus (and Ovid - do you read... ...Ovid?) had 'mystery schools' that required initiation into and all kinds of very serious oaths and so on to be taken before certain levels of knowledge was imparted. I don't have this kind of stuff to impart though. Whew. Got away with that one pretty good for the moment.
Great music (relax, lay your head down on this):