[lbo-talk] nailing the holy ghost

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sat Jan 8 12:46:02 PST 2005


Yikes. God may be the Father, but this Holy Ghost character is clearly the Godfather, the Capo Di Tutti Capi... Carl Remick

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Clearly you are not getting into the spirit of this. I blew off a whole afternoon a few weeks back figuring out who the fuck the holy ghost was. It took what I consider some serious philosophical elbow grease to work it out. BTW the NewAdvent site was very helpful. The whole low down on the HG is here:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07409a.htm

The site you quoted from Jon was irrelevant. But it does bring up an interesting problem. The holy ghost was Jesus, his person according to Catholic cannon, consubstantial with god---well post-resurrection in any case.

So then how could Mathew and Luke quote Jesus saying that to sin against the holy ghost was unpardonable? Presumably Jesus hadn't been the holy ghost yet, so how would he know? Sure he had a direct line to god the father, but they hadn't worked out the holy ghost part, because the holy ghost hadn't been on earth as jesus, post-resurrection yet, because jesus had't been cruxed yet. The time line is all fouled up here. This could be gotten around if Mathew and Luke are quoting the holy ghost, come to them as jesus, post-resurrection of course. I have no intention of reading the new testment to find out for sure, but I'll bet they were just mouthing off in general terms and not quoting jesus at all.

So, what's going on? Well, what I think is going on in these quoted passages is a bit of ex post facto redaction probably from the fourth century or there abouts. The period of the first Constantinople conference (381), the council of Chalcedon (451) where they cleared these matters up and formally condemed Arians, Anomans, Eunomians, Socinians, Ebionites, Pneumatomachians, and Monarchians, among others---who all sinned against the third person of the holy trinity, aka holy ghost.

The holy ghost is a real problem because nobody knows what the holy ghost is. It's like the ether. You need it, but you can't find it. So, here's the holy ghost according the chuck. The holy ghost is jesus's soul. Jesus has to have an extra special soul, not just any soul, because he is god's son. Now this brings up Mary and the immaculate conception. Was Mary a virgin? Really a virgin. She was married, so we can assume Joe dipped his wick so to speak. So how virgin is that? Well, it turns out that Mary was officially made virgin at her own conception in 1854 by official decree. Seems a bit late to me, but shit bureaucracy takes time to work these things out. Virgin Mary was virgin in the sense of being free of original sin.

So, getting back to the holy ghost. You have to believe in the holy ghost, because the holy ghost was jesus's version of the soul, sort of like ours, only better since it was god. Jesus died but he rose, that is his soul rose, the holy ghost. In other words, after jesus died, the holy ghost was on earth instead, as the person of jesus and did his walk about and so forth. So it's possible that the passages about dissing the holy ghost could have been original, if jesus as the holy ghost ran into Mathew or Luke while he was the holy ghost. As I said, I never read this part, so I can't be sure.

Now, let's say that was the case. Dissing the holy ghost is like dissing the soul, dissing the whole idea of the soul, bad, bad, bad. So now we get into some real bailiwicks here, because the holy ghost isn't entirely a simple soul, even if higher order. There is the problem of the person, the intellect versus the will for the soul. The intellect, the objects of thought and thought of the person jesus are not part of the holy ghost. It's the will that's the holy ghost part. The rest is of a lesser order, some of that which was begotten, less pure. So the holy ghost is the holy will.

This latter part is a little dicy because it bares on the possibility that god isn't just another guy. God knows, but evendently he doesn't think thoughts. He just knows and has a will and judges and has certain principles. So too the holy ghost isn't just another shadow. The holy ghost can hand out gifts. But these are usual cheezy Catholic gifts like wisdom, understanding, knowledge(I hear problems), piety and of course fear. The knowledge part is probably glossed as holy knowledge, not any of the regular knowledge that might be useful, like how to win at black jack and so on.

What's going on here I think is a kind of ad hoc theory of the mind, but they are hung up on the parts problem. You know which part goes with which part.

That's it. I am sending it.



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