Lovely stuff, a measured take on the interaction of faith and history. Your faith is robust and admirable and secure. If all one's faith is is the belief in some circumstance, and that circumstance becomes disproved, and you return to your life before the faith, then that is an empty faith. As you mention, the whole point is the ritual, the meaning, the ethical, the holistic system, and so on. How trivial and unstable to base everything on a bet--and not a particularly solid bet. I do think some historical contingencies matter a good deal: like, if Jesus was actually a dude to begin with (which, as ought go without mention, is much better corroborated), but ye. I'm having faint flashbacks to my thesis and Daphne Hampson critiquing Kierkegaard for never responding to the historical biblical criticism (whether out of intellectual insecurity, as she suspects, or not is up for debate) and for having a dumb theory of cause...I'd have to return to it...for another time.
It seems patently true that a historical fact can only broach lively, ethical, existential, or political significance with our intervention. "Jesus rose from the dead." Right on. Bit weird. Probably getting over it though. Filing it along with other weird stuff like quantum physics and people wiping standing up. It becomes "a thing that happened" or we toss it into our laundry list of funky patterns we haven't figured out. What something means is always going to require our contemplation and discussion.
I think about when the U.S. government a few years ago was like, "Yeah I mean...yeah. You got us. We got aliens. I ain't finna fib about it." And we were like, "Oh pretty drastic. Pretty wacky. Where'd I put my Fritos?" And we just carried on along. One of Chad's catchphrases that has sunk into my marrow is "Facts don't make decisions." People are always pitching circumstances and statistics as if they make decisions, but they do not. It's terribly hard to make choices and determine significance, but it's our lot.
The tertium quid point reminds me of some apophatic logic I'm studying: positive negation and indeterminacy, are the two non-classical logical terms I've been ruminating on. Positive negation meaning something like "negating something to gesture toward the superabundant, supra-categorical, excessive mode in which it is positively predicated." Blah blah Aquinas analogia entis etc etc. Indeterminacy meaning, "It cannot be stated whether X or not-X." We can chat more about that some time.
Lovely stuff, a measured take on the interaction of faith and history. Your faith is robust and admirable and secure. If all one's faith is is the belief in some circumstance, and that circumstance becomes disproved, and you return to your life before the faith, then that is an empty faith. As you mention, the whole point is the ritual, the meaning, the ethical, the holistic system, and so on. How trivial and unstable to base everything on a bet--and not a particularly solid bet. I do think some historical contingencies matter a good deal: like, if Jesus was actually a dude to begin with (which, as ought go without mention, is much better corroborated), but ye. I'm having faint flashbacks to my thesis and Daphne Hampson critiquing Kierkegaard for never responding to the historical biblical criticism (whether out of intellectual insecurity, as she suspects, or not is up for debate) and for having a dumb theory of cause...I'd have to return to it...for another time.
It seems patently true that a historical fact can only broach lively, ethical, existential, or political significance with our intervention. "Jesus rose from the dead." Right on. Bit weird. Probably getting over it though. Filing it along with other weird stuff like quantum physics and people wiping standing up. It becomes "a thing that happened" or we toss it into our laundry list of funky patterns we haven't figured out. What something means is always going to require our contemplation and discussion.
I think about when the U.S. government a few years ago was like, "Yeah I mean...yeah. You got us. We got aliens. I ain't finna fib about it." And we were like, "Oh pretty drastic. Pretty wacky. Where'd I put my Fritos?" And we just carried on along. One of Chad's catchphrases that has sunk into my marrow is "Facts don't make decisions." People are always pitching circumstances and statistics as if they make decisions, but they do not. It's terribly hard to make choices and determine significance, but it's our lot.
The tertium quid point reminds me of some apophatic logic I'm studying: positive negation and indeterminacy, are the two non-classical logical terms I've been ruminating on. Positive negation meaning something like "negating something to gesture toward the superabundant, supra-categorical, excessive mode in which it is positively predicated." Blah blah Aquinas analogia entis etc etc. Indeterminacy meaning, "It cannot be stated whether X or not-X." We can chat more about that some time.
Peace