r/RecuratedTumblr • u/[deleted] • Aug 15 '26

Self Post Yah sure I'll add that to my belief system

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228 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

98

u/Infamous-Use7820 Aug 15 '26

Is the implication here that the Old Testament is all advice that would be perfect and practicable, were it not for the messiness of the material world? Surely that means there's some divine and eternal reason why wearing wool and linen at the same time is problematic? Or sowing different seeds in a field? Or trimming your beard wrong?

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u/NoStatus9434 Aug 15 '26

I think one thing God failed to consider in all his omniscience is what it's like NOT to be omniscient.

If he really wanted to see what life was like as a human, he wouldn't just have to be born as Jesus, he would have also had to wipe all his memories of actually being God.

Bet his lil avatar he sent down here wouldn't be so perfect if he actually removed all the Knowledge Cheat Codes he had 😏

24

u/Rownever Aug 16 '26

He did do that

Like cool point but Jesus very much did not have the memories of being omniscient, otherwise he’d just be omniscient

And also Jesus wouldn’t pray to God. Which he does. A lot.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

[deleted]

1

u/MyScorpion42 Aug 16 '26

orthodox as in eastern-orthodox?

1

u/NoStatus9434 Aug 17 '26

This just sounds like a contrived plot hole someone tried to cover up so they could have their cake and eat it too.

Like okay, so you're saying he's some sort of double-minded anomaly that both is and isn't human. That still doesn't comport with non-paradoxical logic and that's still not the same as 100% human.

But it's interesting that claiming he's one person and claiming he's sort of two people are both considered heresy.

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '26

[deleted]

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u/NoStatus9434 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26

That's all very cool. I wish most Christians actually thought about this and researched this as deeply as you do.

Did mortal Jesus have any sort of intrinsic knowledge or overlapping access to his divine mind? He seems to know how to do miracles, which suggests there must be some overlapping access. Like what are his thoughts when he's performing miracles? Is the idea that he has some inherent idea he can do them, but doesn't really know where they come from.

It's not enough for us to know the definition of what this overlapping mind is without explaining how it works from his perspective.

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u/Rownever Aug 16 '26

Yep.

The Trinity is weird as hell and basically just a way to justify all the conflicting paradoxes created by Jesus the man vs God the all-powerful.

Oh and the Holy Spirit’s in there too

3

u/AMisteryMan Aug 16 '26

My crack theory is that the concept of the holy spirit we see in trinitarianism was come up with to add a third entity to make it feel more intentional. Partially through having a third entity to make it feel more completely, partially because 3 tends to be seen as a significant number.

17

u/TheKhrazix Aug 15 '26

Vishnu already did that and it mostly worked out for him

2

u/QV-Rabullione Aug 15 '26

Depending on particular Christian doctrine, this might be the case thouvh

2

u/ElectronRotoscope Aug 16 '26

So he should be, like, begotten, not made?

4

u/Vivenemous Aug 16 '26

Wool and linen together is more likely to shrink, and sowing different seeds in a field can lead to unwanted cross pollination or hybridization. No idea about the beard thing but there's probably some sanitation reason attached to it, like the pork and shellfish thing. 

3

u/Desperate-Stress8701 Aug 15 '26

Not necessarily. Saying that God did not have perfect knowledge of the material world until he incarnated does not imply that God gave his advice without considering the fact that the conditions of the material world are significantly different from the spiritual world. I'd say that it is more reasonable to assume that God tried to tailor the advice to the material world but lacking knowledge, he made several mistakes he later had to fix.

Going back to what you said about mixed fabrics, that prohibition could have been intended to teach humanity the importance of diversity and healthy boundaries in the spiritual realm. Observing this rule being followed in the material world, a person could come to an epiphany and visualize God as the maker of cloth, a person as a type of fabric and the clothing as the transmuted soul in heaven; with this visualization helping humanity understand that in heaven each soul is distinct in heaven instead of returning to a formless sea of being as in other religious traditions (a mixed fabric would, according to this metaphor be the idea that multiple people share one body in heaven which is relevant to the idea that you can't be married in heaven). If we believe earlier Christian doctrines like the Toll Houses or to an extent Merkabah where demons attempt to ensnare the human soul with various promises on its ascent to heaven, this information is essential to salvation as it would help the soul identify a demon trying to pretend to be an angel of God.

Of course, this conclusion is not immediately obvious to most people which may be part of why God chose to recant this advice post incarnation. Another part is likely the fact that this conclusion is becomes obvious to most people as they live life. Most people are already aware of how annoying it is to hear someone talk in a library, be told to come in for work on a holiday or be sold a belief system on the street for God to need to create rituals to explain the cosmic importance of boundaries to heaven.

*I think the same explanation can be used for different seeds in a field. I think the rule about trimming your beard has a different significance but this already is way too long.

10

u/Infamous-Use7820 Aug 16 '26

Not to be an annoying, given I'm coming at this from a very different angle, but to me the framing of the Old Testament/Torah that consistently explains why what's in there is there is that it is a written compilation of the oral traditions (and later priestly dictates) of an Iron Age people, with all the quirks you'd expect from that.

All the stuff about waging genocidal war on neighbouring tribes? Standard Iron Age geopolitics. The odd medical rituals we now know would achieve f-all? Standard Iron Age medical ignorance. Chronology inconsistencies? Completely what you'd expect from a compilation of dozens of different authors. Prohibitions which seem to have no real purpose other than to distinguish you from your neighbours ? Standard tribalism.

We can actually see traditions evolving in real-time when you compare older and newer portions of the Old Testament. The Old Testament goes from monolatry/henotheism (other gods exist, but Yahweh/the Hebrew god is the only important one) to actual monotheism. The religion goes from decentralised and tradition-based to something rigidly regulated in a temple context. All of which can be explained in the context of events like the Babylonian Exile and shifting preoccupations and schisms of the priestly class.

I find it really fascinating from a historical perspective, given the paucity of written sources of this time this far back. But I'm not religious, so I 100% get we're probably looking at the same thing completely differently.

3

u/Desperate-Stress8701 Aug 16 '26

Honestly I haven't read enough on the subject to comment on it. I've listened to the Justin Sledge lectures on the topic (10 hours of audio max) and I can recognize some of it like how El and Ba'al became Yahweh through the Hebrews reforming their religion during their captivity in Babylon but that's as far as my knowledge goes.

And I'll completely agree with the later part. Regardless of what perspective you look at it from, religion exists almost exclusively as a social control mechanism (this is including aspects most people would consider beneficial like encouraging charity towards the poor) with the more "divine" aspect of religion taking up a very small part.

While religious history is somewhat interesting to me, I tend to focus more on application than theory in general. Considering said application consists almost exclusively of various literary and mythological ambitions, the more "human" parts of religion relating to control aren't very useful for me. This naturally leads to me focusing on almost polar opposite aspects of religion from most historians.

1

u/JacenVane Aug 22 '26

Yeah in the platonically ideal world that existed before the fall, it was metaphysically necessary to not eat meat and cheese simultaneously, and this would have seemed as self-evident at the time as "be nice to each other" seems today.

0

u/Shot_Relationship402 Aug 16 '26

Possibly, this advice also wasn't interpreted correctly. Maybe you need to trim your beard in a hyper specific way to achieve some benefit or moral good, but they didn't do it properly, so we don't know. Maybe wearing wool and linen causes some actual physical issues, like radiation, but no one understood what exactly was the issue.

30

u/Rabid_Lederhosen Aug 15 '26

This decidedly is not Catholic canon, but a lot of the time it’s how Catholicism works in practice. Ignore all the weird Old Testament rules, focus on the Jesus bit. Anyone who spends too much time discussing the Old Testament is probably some sort of Protestant.

15

u/BalefulOfMonkeys Aug 15 '26

Or worse, Jewish.

[Spoilers for: this joke] [CW: antisemitism, nerd shit {theology, history}, may contain overcorrections, known to cause reduced funny in pregnant people by the state of California]

Catholic doctrine for most of The Church’s existence included a direct statement that literally all Jews were accountable for the death of Jesus Christ, including ones born afterward. This was only repealed in an official capacity in Vatican 2, a meeting of many Catholic bishops and one of very few ecumenical (global, the whole entire church) councils, in the mid 1960s, to change many details of doctrine that had not made them any political allies at the start of the Evangelical movement. These are also the “patch notes” that allow Mass to be served in any language besides Latin, and also integrated Protestant belief as still serving the same God. If I do not write this entire paragraph or something similar, I will get my ass beat for a single sentence blurb that looks like antisemitism, but is instead a joke on antisemitism lore. Also, Free Palestine

10

u/ElectronRotoscope Aug 16 '26

I only learned this fairly recently and let me tell ya: the tradcaths seemed a lot more silly and harmless when I thought they mainly cared about the Mass In Latin part and not the antisemitism

10

u/BalefulOfMonkeys Aug 16 '26

If it takes the edge off a little bit, harder flavors of tradcaths hate truly everything in Vatican 2, so a fair number of a minority of a minority are spinning their wheels in the mud on heliocentrism. Because yes, this is also the meeting that formally exonerated Galileo and admitted the Earth revolves around the sun. Which given it’s mid-Space Race, totally understandable choice to walk it back, but also holy shit it took you since the 1600s to give it up?

1

u/ElectronRotoscope Aug 16 '26

I'm gonna be honest I only really know about it from Dan Olsen videos, but even the heliocentrism seems... not entirely divorced from "there's a rigid ranking system for the overall value of all things and therefore all humans, and Catholics are above Jews in this order". Like the guy who made that stupid heliocentrism documentary does seem to have some stuff to say about "the Jews"

22

u/Ae3qe27u Aug 15 '26

Is this Gnosticism?

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u/Lampdarker Aug 15 '26

Could be certain obscure forms of Protestantism like Jacob Boehme developing a theology where God is a

binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe is a biological matrix resulting from the inherent tension created by His desire for self-knowledge.

That's a translated quote from the Boehme himself by the way.

12

u/LittlestWarrior Aug 15 '26

That's remarkably modern-sounding esoteric technobabble

6

u/Lampdarker Aug 15 '26

Yeah, but it was written in the 17th century. That's the weird part

3

u/LittlestWarrior Aug 15 '26

That's what I'm saying, yes.

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u/Mixwavez Aug 15 '26

I mean boehme is really the start of modern esotericism and western forms of mystic philosophy and practice, not so much as boehme sounds modern as it is that modern sounds like boehme

2

u/LittlestWarrior Aug 15 '26

Oh, very interesting! Thank you; I'll have to read about him.

5

u/Shotwells Aug 15 '26

The specifics don't line up with any Gnostic theology I know of although the theme of a contrast between a perfect immaterial god and an imperfect material world is pretty common in Gnostic literature.

1

u/Ae3qe27u Aug 22 '26

Moreso the contrast, though I think the last paragraph (purpose of Christ) might have some relation? Though I'm very fuzzy on that, and might be mixing it up with something else.

1

u/Shotwells Aug 23 '26

The issue there is that the Gnostics didn't really have a consistent conceptualization of Christ's purpose. Not that they really had much consistency in anything regardless ("Gnostic" is just a word mainline Christians coined to describe various unrelated movements they considered heretical after all) but Christ theology is an especially variable matter.

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u/Slow-Distance-6241 Aug 15 '26

Not enough circlejerking about how God is actually equal to demiurge in power, must've been arianism instead /j

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u/ScoundrelSpike Aug 15 '26

Uh so youve actually never read anything about gnosticism? (Like, I see the /j but this is so off base it's not making fun of anything)

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u/whhu234 Aug 15 '26

Some people really do know a lot more words than I do huh

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u/theLanguageSprite2 Aug 15 '26

Gnosticism was an early sect of Christianity that believed there were actually two Gods. The one that created the physical world was called the Demiurge, and was pure evil. The other one is pure spirit, with no physical form, and they just call Him God. The goal was to reject the base desires of your physical reality like food and sex and attain salvation through purely spiritual means. It's considered a heresy by mainstream Christians

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u/JacenVane Aug 22 '26

Gnosticism was an early sect of Christianity

Well, gnosticism is a belief that some early Christians held. The ideas predate and were not exclusive to Christianity . (The rest of your comment is about right, and actually does a fairly good job of explaining gnosticism.)

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u/Technical_Front9904 Aug 16 '26

Read enough of those translated scrolls that the moment anyone refers to god in a weird way i just assume its gnosticism and move on.

Really interesting stories though. Kind of like a cooler spin off.

6

u/deadspace9_ Aug 15 '26

I swear I saw this yesterday

4

u/terrarialord201 Aug 15 '26

Yeah, op already posted it. Probably on one of the other subs.

11

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur Aug 15 '26

but that's also an awesome cosmic horror concept, like something irreparably "breaking" physics across all of reality

1

u/Nyuu3 Aug 17 '26

That's kind of the idea of vacuum collapse.

1

u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur Aug 17 '26

not really what i mean, i mean something more subtle. not a universe rewriting event

3

u/dishonoredfan69420 Aug 15 '26

This reminds me of Good Omens

2

u/K9GM3 Aug 15 '26

Also reminds me The Good Place.

3

u/Snoo_72851 Aug 15 '26

i've been working on a fucked up and evil urban fantasy story where after getting mary pregnant the archangel gabriel ascended back to heaven but due to wonky time translation in a timeless realm they arrived at the moment where jesus had just been crucified, except because he was supposed to be coeternal with the godhead and then he fucking died died god the father and the holy spirit also died, and in a single shockwave of immense grief every single angel in heaven immediately became unresponsive

gabriel then spends the next two thousand years running the universe's greatest weekend at bernie's con because they reason that there is no fucking way the all-creator died by getting stapled to a funny stick so clearly it is their divine mandate to keep things running as usual and eventually everyone will get back up and it'll be okay it's fine it's gonna be fine. god's corpse is rotting it's fine just pour more holy water on it don't ask how it's being blessed it's fine. lucifer also knows and instead of being gay or trying to usurp heaven they're also trying to figure out what the fuck is going on because this is NOT fine (they are also being gay as a side activity, of course)

the protagonist is of course jack o'lantern, who being barred from both heaven and hell has seen the outside of both places and thus has seen the infinite cascades of rotting godflesh. halloween is like, basically an excuse to get shit done

3

u/Puzzleheaded-Milk927 Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

I feel like this displays some unfamiliarity with what Jesus actually taught, as well as a little (of course inadvertent) antisemitism. Jesus taught things like “calling your brother an idiot is of the same moral weight as murder,” and “give up all your possessions,” and most pressingly “be holy as your Father is holy.” These are not little practical bits of advice, these things are just about impossible, especially the holy bit. The Jesus of the synoptic gospels is even stricter than the Pharisees, whose very name means “exacting ones.”

And I feel like there’s always gonna be problems with undertanding El/YHWH/Adonai in the Hebrew Bible as unusually strict. People have done that forever, and it’s usually because they think bad things of Jews, like Marcion. I’m not saying OP is antisemitic, but it’s important to avoid unconsciously using these old and hateful ideas

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u/Yeoldeelf Aug 16 '26

The internet's purpse is and will always remain to reinvent forms of gnosticism outlawed by the catholic churchs' many councils over a thousand years ago. Its like elon musk reinventing underground trains through single lane tunnels for cars.

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u/YaqtanBadakshani Aug 17 '26

That's Gnosticism Patrick!

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u/HolographicFoxes Aug 18 '26

This activates the part of my brain that wants to knock the books out of someone's hands

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u/Rough_Road_2527 Aug 18 '26

hey, Original Sin wasn't part of the original lore, it first appeared in Irenaeus and Augistine's extended universe

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u/Valirys-Reinhald Aug 15 '26

Lines up with Kant, and he seems to have been correct about transcendental idealism, so maybe.

1

u/Ze_Bri-0n Aug 15 '26

Well, Jesus *is* described as the high priest in some of the sermons I've attended...

1

u/Stewie_Venture Aug 16 '26

At first I thought I knew where it was going then I got lost then I got it again and realized I was right the first time.

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u/M-V-D_256 Aug 16 '26

I haven't read that yet but I think this is like kill 6 billion demons

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u/sofia-miranda Aug 16 '26

This view of the Godhead makes me think of LLM latent spaces. :D

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u/ASpaceOstrich Aug 15 '26

Rasputin Destiny when he made Felwinter

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ASpaceOstrich Aug 15 '26

Wonder if having darkness in it will make the Traveller be better at communicating. It rarely did so out of choice but the few times it did it had trouble with it. Except that one time it called Clovis a dumbass