Posted: May 04, 2019 10:54 am
Alan B wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:The only other more recent post from you I found was where you asked why God had destroyed "most of the dinosaurs". From that it looked that you hadn't bothered to pick up that I believe we live part way up in a hierarchical world, "God" is the word in English for the supposed top pole of that hierarchy and we can't usefully ask up the hierarchy.
According to Jesus we humans are the 'top pole of the hierarchy': Matt. 6:9 and Luke 17:20-21. 'God' can only be found within ourselves, so Jesus said - unless he was lying...
The Bible passages you cite don’t support your claim that in Christianity, humans are the top pole of the hierarchy.
Matthew 6:9 gives the first line of the Lord’s Prayer:
9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
In this passage the person praying is clearly told to address someone greater than himself, who has power to forgive and protect. The first human wish is that a state be created on Earth that doesn’t currently exist here but which expresses the will of the greater Other.
Luke Chapter 17: (KJV)
20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
In the rest of Chapter 17, Jesus likened the coming of the kingdom of God to the disasters that fell on mankind in Noah’s day, on Sodom and on Lot’s wife:
31 In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back.
Taken on their own, verses 20-21 seem to invoke the "Indwelling" God, but in the chapter context the Kingdom of God is presented something like a latent virus that will strike from within, without warning, indiscriminately and destructively.
There is absolutely so way that these passages contradict my position that we live part way up a hierarchy with the word “God” for the supposed top pole. The choice you offered of either agreeing with your bizarre reading of scripture, or declaring that Jesus was lying, was invalid.
Christianity, like other religions, necessarily supposes a hierarchy with mankind part way up and it’s rather atheism that places mankind at the top. According to George Maclay in “The social organism (1990)”, authorities who have seen individuals embedded in a social hierarchy include Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Rousseau, Comte and Durkheim (apart from Paul and the Christian Fathers) The medieval Great Chain of Being built the animal food chain into a synoptic hierarchy but it may have only been the rise of paleontology that created space for the idea of a natural hierarchy with a creative capacity. In his1860 letter to Asa Gray Darwin expressed his sense of human position in a hierarchy with genius simplicity “A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. In 1926 Smuts tried to formulate a general hierarchy, in “Holism and Evolution”.
So, this isn't strange or unfamiliar territory.