Posts Tagged ‘religion’

The Resurrection of the Body Too: The Misunderstanding of Christianity


2009
06.05

Some people say that Christianity has been misunderstood. It looks to me more like it is Christianity which has misunderstood! The world, perhaps even Christ!

I’m not associating Christ with Christianity. When Nietzsche wrote “Der Anti-Christ” (usually translated as “The Anti-Christ”), his polemics was directed more to Paul and Christendom/Christianity, (a note in the translation says that it is probably more fitting to translate it as “The Anti-Christian.”) The same with Kierkegaard, his beef was with Christendom (the bureaucracy of Christianity). Christianity, as we know it today, is according to biblical scholarship, largely the work of Paul the Apostle.

(more…)

Nietzsche, Hume and the Buddha


2009
01.17

reposting… november, 2003.

best regards,

ian

Nietzsche, Hume and the Buddha

When I first heard of Nietzsche, it was in association with Hitler and the Nazis. I simply dismissed him as a rabid, power-hungry maniac who probably had an unhappy childhood. A classmate in college wrote a paper on this Nietzsche guy and I was silently chuckling on the thought that a comic book idea (“superman”) can be the subject of a scholarly paper.

But when I did get to read him (years later), I was simply won over by this crazy guy! He says provocative things that, when thought about, actually make sense. He’s probably among the few philosophers who doesn’t come across as an insipid intellectual. He’s got style, lots of it. He doesn’t say things just for effect (although sometimes it feels like that). He’s an artist, an artist-philosopher. He’s very passionate and his sincerity comes across. He also has a weird sense of humor. Indeed, he writes with his blood. Indeed, he’s a dynamite.

(more…)

From “The Book of Lights” by Chaim Potok:


2008
05.11

From “The Book of Lights” by Chaim Potok:

“From the age of fifteen until the age of twenty-one he lived in the apartment world of his aunt’s whispery talking and his uncle’s coughs and brooding silence, and he did not know which was more frightening. For a while after his cousin’s death he thought his family had somehow been singled out for a special curse. But he talked to friends and found that throughout the neighborhood ran a twisting river of random events: parents died in slow or sudden ways, children were killed, relatives slipped young from life. The world seemed a strangely terrifying place when you really thought about it. He tried not to think about it too often.

(more…)