Well, Mage wasn't talking about how the religion is intepreted by the average believer. He made a (false) statement about the monotheistic conception of God, coupled with a (false) statement about Plato. Presumably these notions should be looked at in their most sophisticated forms -- sophisticated Platonism rather than vulgar Platonism, and the monotheism of the theologians rather than the monotheism of the Bible Study group.
--- On Sun, 2/15/09, Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There are two threads here. Actually, a thread within a
> thread.
>
> There's the thread you're pursuing, which is almost
> entirely academic;
> based on your studies of Christian theology and philosophy.
>
> And then there's the thread being pursued by Thornton
> and me (and
> maybe Doug too). We're describing things as
> they're understood and
> felt by people who grew up in Christian homes, went to
> Christian
> schools and for whom Christianity isn't something they
> studied so much
> as lived. John mentioned going to Catholic school. I went
> to the
> Protestant equivalent. In my case, and probably John's
> too, the
> schools were a formal extension of a wide ranging system of
> reinforced, ground level belief.
>
> Christian ideas were taken like mother's milk.
>
> So, although your philosophical objections may be
> technically correct
> (for example, your deployment of Aquinas) they're
> almost entirely
> irrelevant to praxis.
>
>
> In the "Leninists find Jesus" thread, you
> mentioned that you "...grew
> up in an aggressively, obnoxiously atheistic, BF
> Skinner-worshiping
> household." Which means your approach to these
> questions is, as I
> wrote earlier, 'almost entirely academic'.
>
> In other words, you might have all the facts right but your
> conclusions don't jive with the actual beliefs of a lot
> of Christians
> -- both practicing and former.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
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