GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - "Vote for insanity. You know it makes sense." -Lord Sutch

17-11-2004, 05:12 PM

(paghat) wrote in message ...
As someone who has for many years studied comparative religion, whose
personal library includes everything from the Babylonian Talmud to the
Zohar and Targums and Midrash Rabbah, to the Upanishads to the the Devi
Mahatmya to Kojiki: The Record of Ancient Matters, to the complete works
of the AnteNicene fathers, five translations of the Bible, the Ng Hammadi
texts & every conceivable scrap of Pseudepigrapha, to the Koran and the
complete works of Rumi, ad infitum, & having read this entire library more
than one time through, I can say that my interest in religion goes as deep
or deeper than yours. Good chance I even know more about your faith than
do you, unless you too have Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria within
arm's reach.

I'm afraid that this claim to authority must be disallowed by any
reasonable person. You are not an authority on a religion of which
you are not a member.

As someone rather seriously interested in patristics
(http://www.tertullian.org/fathers), I was nevertheless unable to
follow your comment about Tertullian and Clement. Nor would either
have agreed with you here.

And I know this: At the mystic end of all religions there is
common ground, there is poetic philosophy, & there is wisdom devoid of
divisive hatred. You've only gotten as far as the divisive, damaging,
hate-justifying part of what it means to be relgious. I may not see in you
the capacity to ever become spiritual, but who knows, maybe you'll have
more than one life to work it through, & you'll become a credit to your
faith to everyone's great amaze.

You did not find this low-grade syncretism in any of the fathers,
however. Nor can this position be rationally justified, as far as I
can tell.

All the best,

Roger Pearse