Christ did not exist! Do you still believe?

There was a lot of discussion recently on Greek Facebook about a famous and popular priest who decided to stop being a priest. A choice that divided and provoked either positive or negative comments. I will not dwell on this discussion and on whether a priest who does such a thing is doing the right thing or not. Instinctively, I believe that such an act involves more the element of cowardice, as a friend of mine mentioned, than an element that could arouse admiration. Anyway, I did not know the man so my judgment is superfluous and may also be wrong.

This small event though made me think about another much more important issue: What effect does the fall of a person who is nothing more than an idol have on the people who followed him and believed in him as their guide in life? It may sound funny, but many people are looking for such guidance. Many times I have heard people talk about a priest in terms like "He is good, come and listen to him" or "He is an enlightened man" etc. What do the same people say when this priest gives up? Does their system collapse? Do they just... go to the next priest available? And regardless of that, the views these people had and which they based on their... previous idol, have they remained intact? If so, what role did this idol play in their lives? If not, then what role did these views play in these people's lives?

These questions may seem funny or a little serious - especially to those who follow such idols - but they can be made even more serious by choosing another example: Christ.

Many Christians say they believe because they believe in Christ. What does this really mean? That their faith is based on His Resurrection, which they have believed beyond any doubt? So if they somehow go back in time and discover (hypothetically speaking) that the Resurrection was a complicated lie, then they would cease to be Christians? Or that if Christ suddenly started saying nonsense (again, hypothetically speaking), would they follow that nonsense literally because He says it? What does it mean to have a faith based on your faith in someone, even if that person is God?

To me, a lot of faith is a sign of little faith.
To yourself.

If you believe in the teaching which says "Love each other" (Gr. Αγαπάτε αλλήλους) you should do it not because someone else said it, but because you heard it, processed it and decided that you agree with it and incorporated it into your life. And the interesting thing is that if you did all of the above, it no longer matters who you heard it from or who said it! The seed that Christ sowed, if it eventually sprouts, belongs to each one of us. It no longer belongs to Christ, in the sense that a fool who follows someone else 'belongs' to the latter without mind and knowledge. If you believe in the teachings of Christ, then it does not matter if He even existed! Let alone if He was crucified, if He did what they say he did, etc. Because now this love is your own and you are now its self-luminous bearer. By your choice. And even if you took a time machine to go back in time and see that Christ did not even exist (the permanent dream of all hardcore atheists), your Christian values ​​will not and should not be affected. If that happened then we would all be in big trouble and these values would not be actual values to be honest.

So let's leave all the fake idols.
Let's stop following them.
Let us ask ourselves simply and honestly.

Would we follow... us?

On the other hand, I may just say nonsense.
Who told you to follow me?

You would also crucify Him...

Nowadays, all Christians are so … Christians that they don’t even think about the obvious.

That if we lived in a time when Christ appeared, we would crucify Him too.

Think. A dirty beggar without a second cloth to wear, coming to you to tell you to forget all your beliefs and abandon anything holy you hold in respect to follow him.

If you wouldn’t crucify Him with your vote, you would definitely crucify Him with your tolerance. And you would laugh as he ascended Golgotha. That is, if you happened to pass by and you hadn’t gone for coffee. And you would definitely change the channel at night if the news happened to mention the event, because at the same time Masterchef would start or you would have to write a very Christian post on Facebook.

Accept your fall.

It is the first step to rise.

Coronavirus, Christianity, Death, "sissies"...

There is a lot of discussion about the new coronavirus affecting the world as we speak. Harmonia Philosophica usually does not deal with such news since our focus is philosophy and not everyday matters. Our subject is the eternal, not the ephemeral.

And yet, as we have said many times here, the ephemeral is sometimes more eternal than the eternal. And philosophy needs to take into account everyday life if the latter poses important and interesting questions.

The coronavirus has suddenly made humanity again aware of its fragility. And right when we thought we were "progressing" and ready to conquer the world, Death is suddenly again part of the discussion.

This is, understandably, unsettling to many people. I will not make the arrogant mistake of not including myself with all those people. I am also afraid of death. I am also afraid of suffering. But as we have said again many times, my personal or your personal feelings on the matter at hand mean nothing.

And here is where Christianity comes into play. Despite what most people believe, Christianity does not evangelize that if you are a good Christian you will not suffer; the exact opposite is true! Christianity reminds us of death and suffering. Christianity emphasizes death and suffering and brings them to the spotlight. Jesus and all the saints have died horrible deaths. No one is spared from death or suffering because of being a good Christian. Being a Christian does entail accepting pain and suffering, so that we can acknowledge that death is nothing more than a portal to real life.

The world had rejected Christianity because of those attributes of Christianity. Because the world does not like death and suffering. Because the world believes that it is - or can be - immortal and live for ever. Because we admire matter and we cannot see beyond it. Blinded by our dogmatic materialism, we fail to see the obvious only because we are cowards.

As Johnny Cash has said, "Christianity is not for sissies".

Don't be afraid.

Yes, at the end you will die.

Can you not cry?

(Where is your philosophy?)

Related article: How to easily win an atheist in a debate…

Burned churches. Blood. Democracy.

This year there will be no Christmas celebration at Notre Dame of Paris for the first time in 200+ years.

Can you imagine when it was last time?

Well, you guessed right. It was during another correspondingly "enlightened" era. It was at the time when "freedom" against oppression was being built and promoted once again. It was at a time when the guillotine was setting the pace for "tolerance". The time of the French Revolution.

We are now living in similarly beautiful era. Soon we will all be "free". We will have all the rights in the world. The right to wear a burqa, the right to become men and women of our own free will and to allow the children to do whatever we want after they have their genitals mutilated in the name of political correctness, the right to kill babies even after they are born (we are surely very close to that, since it is now  allowed for women to kill their babies at the latest stages of pregnancy), free to insult Christians and Christ but of course never anyone else.

An era of freedom.
And just like in the French Revolution, an era of blood.

For the time being definitely some people will cheer. In some years from now, some may for sure celebrate even greater victories over Christianity. But they would be forgetting that if their "democracy" is strengthened with blood, Christianity was born in it...

(The era of Aquarius)

Who is a Christian?

An interesting question that arose from a discussion with friends about the crime of a mother who recently threw her baby in the trash. Someone commented that this is a consequence of the nihilism of modern atheism, for which man is nothing but a mixture of flesh and blood. So what's wrong with throwing a baby into the trash?

Someone objected: But the one who did this might be a Christian.

So the interesting question is: Is it? Who is a Christian after all?

Why are you a Christian? Because it is written on your identity card? But it is not anymore! Because you do what you do according to what Christ says? But not even the Apostles did well in following His teachings. Is someone killing a child simply a Christian simply because he or she identifies himself / herself like that? Is an atheist a Christian if he follows with his heart all the teachings of Christ even if he consciously identifies himself as a non-Christian?

I think this is one of the occasions that the question is more important than the answer. And to be more precise, our difficulty to answer,  simply mean that the question itself is wrong...

Is Christianity against knowledge? (Yes and No!)

Many have wandered whether religion and Christianity in particular is against knowledge. Not because of it being related to the “dark” Middle Ages (a story which has been discredited a long time ago by Harmonia Philosophica; read the relevant article “Middle Ages – An enlightened era“) but because of the famous story of God forbidding Adam to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This story, along with the hostility of the church against enlightenment (something which is completely justified; read the relevant article “Enlightenment was darkness” in Harmonia Philosophica), has made many people wander whether the church has any dogmatic stance against knowledge per se.

The short answer: Yes. But only because it values knowledge!

Let me explain my self. Knowledge is something which for millennia was held in very high esteem. And for that reason it was kept away from the majority of the people who were not worthy of it. This was not only a church thing. Think of Pythagoras for example. His students had vows not to reveal anything they learnt to the non-worthy on the penalty of death. Think of the alchemists, who encoded everything they wrote so that they don’t fall into the wrong (not worthy) hands of the people outside their closed cast.

Harmonia Philosophica in general is a testament to that belief. Its articles are written in such a way that they draw people away and which seem to convey nothing more than a vague hint to what they were meant to convey.

The Fathers of the Church have explained that eloquently: God doesn’t forbid Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil for no reason. He does so because Man is not yet mature enough to handle this knowledge. If we had the patience we would be allowed to eat from the tree; we are part of God Himself anyway aren’t we?

So the church doesn’t want to forbid knowledge in general. But it wants to impose respect to knowledge as such. Knowledge is not something you read in Wikipedia (Read the articles in Harmonia Philosophica by the way against Wikipedia). Knowledge is something which you should earn with sweat and huge effort. As Buddhism says, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”.

And we are certainly not ready.

Education and knowledge without ethics generate monsters. Remember, Mengele the “Angel of Death” had two PhDs. (Read the relevant articles “The source of ethics” and “Against the fallacy of education as a source of ethics“).

Don’t worry.
You will soon eat from the tree of knowledge.
For now you just have to compromise.
Come on. Eat a banana.

And some day, if you are a good boy, Pythagoras will speak to you…

Only to tell you not to speak.

Philosophy Wire: The dark future of Christianity…

Jesus said it clearly: The ruler of this world is not God but the devil.

John 12,31: " Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out". John 16,11: "[...] because the ruler of this world is judged". John 14,30 : (before Jesus was arrested) "I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me". [1]

And we all know what the third secret of Fatima was all about. At the end Christianity will fall. Everything will be worse before they get any better... It is right before the dawn that the darkness is most intense. And it takes a great deal of courage to admit that this hour has come…

"It is time for weeping but also for laughter, it is time for mourning but also for dances" [Ecclesiastes 3: 4]

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective…

Philosophy Wire: Christianity. The difficult choice. [Atheism: The easy choice]

Photo by Spiros Kakos @ Pexels

A cold world that consists only of matter does not contain anything scary. Without free will, without spirit, without soul, we are simple sets of matter. And in such a world, atheists feel safe. In their nihilism, they build a golden cage where nothing can hurt them. Since in essence in such a world they do not even exist...

A world full of spirit and personal responsibility is terrifying and difficult. And no one today chooses the difficult road. Like the famous singer used to say…

The third secret of Fatima is out. We do not choose Christianity for an easy life. We do not choose Christianity for a happy ending. Pain is at the core of the teachings of Christ, not pleasure. Αρκεί σοι η χάρις μου…

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective…

Merry Christmas! Καλά Χριστούγεννα!

Merry Christmas!

Καλά Χριστούγεννα!

Philosophy Wire: Wickedness. Evil. Virtue. Will. [Christianity = The DIFFICULT path]

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2017-02-09]: Hannah Arendt said that to do great evil one does not need to be someone special. Even the most common people can become the biggest criminals. The case of Nazis showed this clearly. It needs strong will to be good. And the lack of will (free will) is the beginning of the road or evil. One only has to just surrender to his passions to become bad. One must make true effort to stay good. This is something all those who speak with ease against religion with the logic that it is chosen by the people for relief need to remember. No, Christianity does not teach the EASY path. It teaches the DIFFICULT path! You feel nothing but relief when you know and truly understand that you have to be in a constant struggle against evil.

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective…

Philosophy Wire: Freedom. Genes. Christianity.

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2016-07-29]: Scientists discover how specific genes are to be blamed for specific human behaviors. Ranging from outbursts or rage, to lack of wish for sex, everything can be attributed to a gene. [1, 2, 3, 4] Accepting responsibility is too hard. Accepting your freedom is too hard. Humans never wanted to be free. And that is why they fought or loved Christianity so hard…

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective…

Philosophy Wire: The positive effect of Missionaries. [OR: Christianity as the basis of civilization]

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2016-07-25]: A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product (GDP) and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation. Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations, thus resulting in great decrease in the mortality rate in these countries.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study ever has been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting. Woodberry was required to turn over his entire database to editors of the American Political Science Review, who subjected it to extensive, independent reanalysis. But after this vetting, the editors were satisfied that the robust statistical results were correct; in fact, they gave Woodberry considerably more space than the usual maximum to present his findings in detail.

The research [The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy, Robert D. Woodberry, American Political Science Review, Vol. 106, No. 2 May 2012] can be found online here. [related book: Rodney Stark (sociologist of religion), "How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity"]

Civilization = Freedom.

The hatred of atheists and “progressive” people has distorted the truth so much that we need a research to see the obvious: That love is freedom and it can do good and only good. And despite how many people misinterpret hate for love that will always be the case. Christianity was based on the love of Jesus Christ. Europe was built on Christianity. And only men with good solid foundations as Christianity can be so free so as to question their own… foundations.

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective…

Terror in Paris: A CHRISTIAN Europe is the only solution... Again.

Terrorist attacks in Paris. [1]

Humanism and multiculturalism finally get results. Love is on the air everywhere. The world is better. Now the fascists will say "We told you so" and the anti-fascists who are the new fascists will say "You are fascists" and the real fascists will continue to slaughter and when we are awaken it will be too late. And all the anti-Christians will say "You are the same with them" and the Christians will be looking at them with sadness. And if anyone says anything about the fact that Europe has been dealing with STUPID things for so long (see. gay marriages and the "right" for adoption because this is the most important issue in a disintegrating society) rather than build mounds that would help us in the face of the hurricane that is coming, he will be accused of racism, bigotry, phobias etc.

When the "Pray for Paris" hashtag appeared many people started showing the REAL CAUSE of the catastrophe: What is important now for the "progressive" Europeans is to show to everyone that sciences, humanism and arts did not flourish in a Christian Europe, that the Muslims are not to blame, that there are only some lunatics killing in the name of their religion, that Christianism and Islam is the same, that we are all immigrants, that everything is as we imagine they are. Everything needed to keep believing in our nice ATHEISTIC ANTI-CHRISTIANIC DREAM that we live in a world where we can do anything to anyone.

What to wish to a continent that is sleeping but... good night and sweet dreams.

See you in the Islamic Europe of 2050 where we will meet secretly to yearn CHRISTIAN Europe that we have been blaming for everything for so long.

Related sources

Religion and Science unification - Towards religional science

Βυζάντιο - Η Χιλιόχρονη Αυτοκρατορία

Η Θρησκεία σαν Πολιτιστικό Φαινόμενο

Φιλοσοφία της Επιστήμης και της Θρησκείας

Religion as a Guide (or… Is Religion out of date? Yes! And that is good!)

How to easily win an atheist in a debate…

Πως να κερδίσεις εύκολα έναν άθεο σε μια συζήτηση...

Middle Ages - An era of light!

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Many people refer to the Middle Ages as a "dark" era.

But take a look closer. Why do they say that?

The main reason is that during these ages research in sciences like mathematics, geometry, astronomy et cetera was not so intense as, e.g., in the era before Christ.

But is that really bad?

Why does research in more humanistic issues is "bad" and does not constitute "progress"?

Do we need cold geometry more than divine inspiration? Do we need raw mathematics more than the acknowledgement of our higher essence? Do we need astronomy more than a reason to look at the stars?

It is true that Christianism brought a change in philosophy. And for many years people were busy with analyzing this new philosophical system and its implications. Christianism elevated humans to the higher spiritual realm to which they belong. It helped people see that they are not just animals. It helped people realize their true potential, see their soul, understand their esoteric divinity. It taught people look after the eternal life more than profits here and now, making them less materialists and more... well, humans. (during the Middle Ages all people were taught to seek the 'necessitas' - every quest for things beyond what is necessary was condemned)

Why is that "darkness"?

Why is the Enlightenment... "light"? Don't forget that history is written by the winners. And the winners in this case were crude enough to verify their win by naming their era with a name which is synonym to Light! Enlightenment, the worship of logic* instead of human, is one of the worst things ever happened. The fact that some people named it this way (vi-a-vis the "Darkness" which anything opposite to that must represent) does nothing more than to make the crime against humanity even more obscene.

Middle Ages had Aristotle as a reference point. How ridiculous is to have it characterized as 'darkness' by the era which follows... Dawkins? Why is the belief that many people today have to the Random (everything happened... because!), the purposeless (there is no purpose anywhere in life), the mechanistic (we are just machines doing what our genes tells us to do), the unconscious (consciousness is just an illusion, we are just computers) "light"? Why should we believe that we are nothing while we are everything?

Take a look again.

Dark. Light. Light. Dark.

* Note that we are talking about a wrong type of "logic" here. Because even logic can lead to God. Read "Religion and Science Unification" for more...


Famous misunderstandings

Middle Ages have been falsely related to many things...

• No, the Galileo case is not what is seems. Neither is the Hypatia case. Read my article here for more on these false stories...
• Witch hunting was initiated by the church has been supposed to cost the lives of millions of women who burned at the stake. True? False. The most accurate number of people accused of witchcraft is about 40,000 and one third of them were men. And they were most probably hanged rather than burned alive. The church had nothing to do with these persecutions. [Witchfinders, 2005] [The book of general ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson - Το βιβλίο της Ολικής Άγνοιας, Τζον Λόυντ & Τζον Μίτσινσον] Using such arguments is deeply flawed and hypocritical. Not only we must recognize that in general all the past societies were more violent because of their structure, imagine what we could say about the Middle Ages if it had millions of dead like the ones our "enlightened" centuries have (see World Wars, atheistic regimes that kill millions, eugenics, etc.).
• People in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat. True? False. Besides some people before Middle Ages who were not actually related to the church (Lactantius, Cosmas Indicopleustes - see here), the idea of Flat Earth was popularized much after that era. In 1828, American writer Washington Irving (author of Rip Van Winkle) published a book entitled The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. It was a mixture of fact and fiction, with Irving himself admitting he was ‘apt to indulge in the imagination’. This book spread the wrong perception that people back then thought the Earth was flat. What is more, Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884) - an English inventor and writer - wrote Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe in 1864 and through this work the idea was made famous. [The book of general ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson - Το βιβλίο της Ολικής Άγνοιας, Τζον Λόυντ & Τζον Μίτσινσον] So it was the 19th "scientific" century and not the "dark" Middle Ages who brought forward this ludicrous idea...
• The Middle Ages has brutal punishments for criminals: Nothing can be more misleading. Everything must be analyzed within context. Yes, people in the past was more raw and that applies for every age in the past! However note that during the Byzantium age there was a great reform of criminal punishments so as to better define them and make them more humane. Yes, the punishments still were harsh, but these punishments were mainly inherited from the previous non-Christian regimes. [Ιστορία Δικαίου, Σ. Τρωϊανός, Ι. Βελισσαροπούλου-Καρακώστα, Δ' Έκδοση, Νομική Ββιλιοθήκη, Αθήνα, 2010]

Relates books

• The Byzantine Millennium, Hans-Georg Beck
• Medieval Civilization, 400-1500, Jacques Le Goff

Related sites

• The education in the Middle Ages (Greek)