Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

Magnum Force 1973

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

 

... ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

... the unexamined life is not worth living for a man ...

 

-- Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a 

The unexamined life is not worth living, so you examine it, but subsequently more life happens which requires further examination, so you examine it, only to find that you were mistaken about the results of your previous examination. 

Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. It's like bailing out a boat with a sieve and it drives you crazy, but if you are lucky you realize that you are not the measure of all things.

You have died to the self. Like Sergeant Schultz, you know nothing.

You might as well be a Lutheran then, practicing the Socratic elenchus on yourself by drowning the ignorant Old Man daily in the waters of your baptism:

Baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. 

-- Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, "The Sacrament of Holy Baptism" 

Better to die daily than to die forever.

Paul described this variously, including by underscoring the contingency of human nature, and therefore the possibility of its passibility:

ἑαυτοὺς πειράζετε εἰ ἐστὲ ἐν τῇ πίστει ἑαυτοὺς δοκιμάζετε ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς ὅτι Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν εἰ μήτι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.

-- II Corinthians 13:5

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

-- Philippians 2:12  

Perhaps what the Delphic oracle was really trying to get at (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) after all, as seems to be the earliest interpretation, is that there really is nothing infinitely deep in man, but that man has his limits indeed and must come to know them.

Unlike Briggs.

 

The saying Γνῶθι σεαυτόν: ‘know yourself’, is of heavenly origin,

It should be fixed in the memory, dwelt on in the heart, whether

You’re seeking a wife, or aim for a place in the sacred Senate;

Thersites had no wish to win the contest for Achilles’ armour,

That breastplate in which Ulysses made an exhibition of himself.

If it’s you who affect to defend a difficult and highly important

Case, then take counsel with yourself, ask yourself what you are,

A powerful orator, or merely a windbag, like Curtius or Matho?

You must know your measure, and be conscious of it in great

Things and in small, even for instance when you’re buying fish;

No point in desiring mullet, if your purse only runs to gudgeon!

Think of the fate that awaits you, as your wallet grows leaner

While your appetite increases, when you’ve sunk your paternal,

Inheritance, your property, your silver plate, all of that heavy

Stuff, with all your fields and herds, in your spacious stomach.

With spendthrift lords the last to go is the Roman knight’s gold

Ring, after which Pollio ends by begging with a naked finger.

It’s not a premature demise, an early funeral, the extravagant

Should fear, but old age, that is more to be feared than death. 

-- Juvenal, Satire 11, 26ff.

The baleful influence of Norman Vincent Peale and Paula White on the thinking of the president of the United States is in evidence almost everyday

The Strait of Hormuz is open.

Iran is in submission.

He calleth those things which be not as though they were, as if he were God.

 

Paul's interpretation of his experience is what people today might call his truth

 

Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?

-- I Corinthians 9:1

And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.

-- I Corinthians 15:8  

The salient points in the three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts are that he could not see who was talking to him because he was blinded by the light, and that he did not recognize who it was that was speaking to him:

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: ... Who art thou, Lord? ... And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. 

-- Acts 9:3, 5, 8f.

And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. ... Who art thou, Lord? ... And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus.

-- Acts 22:6, 8, 11

At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me. ... Who art thou, Lord? 

-- Acts 26:13, 15.

Nevertheless he calls it "seeing" the Lord. 

Meanwhile the witnesses in Acts 9 heard only a voice, and saw no one.

In Acts 22 the witnesses saw only the light, and heard nothing.

In Acts 26 Luke has Paul say that he and the witnesses were knocked to the ground after being enveloped by the light.

Most notably there, Luke has Paul summarize the whole experience explicitly as a heavenly vision, which is the experience through which Paul says elsewhere that he received his gospel (II Corinthians 12:1, 7; Galatians 1:12, 16; 2:2; Romans 16:25; Ephesians 3:3, 5), whereupon the governor Festus pronounced Paul a madman.

No one "saw" the Lord in the Acts accounts, but in the final analysis Paul's claims to have seen the Lord are unfalsifiable because they are heavenly and beyond our ken. They are as a result self-insulating and self-authenticating.

Don't throw a fit, man

 

 These orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

-- Jonathan Swift 

Paul hastily wrote off humanity, unlike the Psalmist who knew better

 

Let God be true, but every man a liar.

-- Romans 3:4

I said in my haste, All men are liars.

-- Psalm 116:11 

Paul's private experience of resurrection faith lead him to an excess of presumption and of despair

 

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

-- I Corinthians 15:17ff.

Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one--I am talking like a madman--with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death.

-- II Corinthians 11:23

 

Are not all or most evangelical virtues and graces in danger of extremes? As there is, God knows, too often a defect on the one side, so there may be an excess on the other: may not hope in God, or godly sorrow, be perverted into presumption or despair?

-- Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) 

Because he's insane?

 

Why is Peter Thiel Talking So Much About the Antichrist?

Valerie Hudson, Deseret

Italian sociologist of religion dislikes fellow sociologist's book which says most founders of religions were mentally disturbed

 Massimo Introvigne v. Stephen Kent, here.

Kent's book is Psychobiographies and Godly Visions: Disordered Minds and the Origins of Religiosity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). 

Of course you wouldn't like such a book when your career involves defending religious liberty and someone comes along and almost says that the myriads of misguided followers of these religions all belong in the nuthouse. 

The review is as long on disappointment as the book apparently is on vituperation and makes little effort to engage with the substance of the claims, which in its own way is very amusing to those of us who have never granted that fields such as sociology and economics are real sciences.

Meanwhile, it would have been nice if this review had engaged the New Testament's statements, for example, that Jesus' family thought he was beside himself, or that Festus thought Paul's great learning had made him mad, but it didn't.

The topic is not illegitimate.

  

Interview with Religious Studies academic states right out of the box that many UFO experiencers learn from it that a bad end of the world is coming lol

Gee, where did they get that idea?

The possible answers to that are not seriously addressed in this more-ways-than-one frustrating podcast with Ross Douthat of The New York Times.

 

... Douthat: When people report having a telepathic connection, you said they get information from, or they feel like they’ve gotten information from, these experiences. What kind of information do they get? What does that mean when people report this?

Pasulka: A lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. They would have ideas of basically an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future.

The people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2,000 years. [Chuckles.] ...

Pasulka: It appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been identified in the various traditional religions.

Douthat: Identified as what?

Pasulka: Well, I’m not going to name it, because in some traditional religions it’s named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattvas, angels, demons — things like that. ...

 

The whole thing is here in "What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do?"

If you are looking for a religion scholar to say that the UFO cult is a human creation just like every other religion, you won't find that from Diana Walsh Pasulka, a practicing Catholic who wants to argue for the legitimacy of mystery and of people's experience of that mystery, even if they work for a government which cannot be trusted on UFOs.

It is telling that a member of a hierarchical religion which is imbued with deference to authority finds the belief in UFOs among government employees somehow more compelling than that belief among private individuals:

... they have various titles. They have quote-unquote “day jobs” as, say, a mission controller at Cape Canaveral, things like that. And almost all of them called it this: They said, “my hobby job.” They would call it their hobby.           

Elites also run in herds.  

I said in my ecstasy: Every man is a liar

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

KJV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my haste, All men are liars.  

RSV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my consternation, "Men are all a vain hope."

LXX Psalm 115.2:   ἐγὼ εἶπα ἐν τῇ ἐκστάσει μου πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης

God bites off head of Satanist, 76

 

Ozzy Osbourne, pioneering heavy metal singer and Black Sabbath frontman, dies at 76

 

... Their 1970 self-titled debut album hit the top 10 in the U.K. and No. 23 on the U.S. charts. A year later, their second album, “Paranoid,” topped the charts in the U.K. and reached No. 12 across the pond.

Still, the critics were not kind at first. Black Sabbath was dismissed by some as “Satanic claptrap” and worse.

... Despite all his success, Osbourne — in the eyes of many in the public — continued to be the madman who outraged animal rights groups in 1982 by biting the head off a live bat during a concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

“I thought it was a rubber bat,” Osbourne said at the time. “I picked it up, put it in my mouth, crunched down, bit into it, being the clown that I am.”

That same year, Osbourne infuriated the state of Texas by urinating on the Alamo, a stunt that got him arrested. ...

Hundreds of millions can't be wrong: Providence, the magazine of Christian realism, laughably redefines barbarism out of existence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This guy's problem isn't that he doesn't know what barbarianism is, it's that he doesn't know what civilization is, which was born in a tiny country in the Mediterranean with a small population of just a few million.

 

Can you guess which one?

 

These Are Not Barbarians

Robert Nicholson 

“This is not a clash of civilizations,” the prime minister continued. “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together.”

The speech went on for almost an hour, conveying a clear picture of the high-stakes war to which the US is unwittingly a party. By the end, however, I was still reeling from the analytical flaw embedded in the first few lines.

On one hand, Netanyahu is right. The actions of Hamas on Oct. 7 were barbaric, at least in a colloquial sense. The Iranian regime and its proxies threaten the US-led order. Israel needs all the help it can get.

Yet he’s also wrong. Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization who want to destroy our way of life for reasons we don’t care to understand. More importantly, they are supported by hundreds of millions of Muslims—the majority, not just the mullahs in Tehran—who, inspired by a shared understanding of the Islamic tradition, deem the killing of non-Muslim civilians as legitimate for the same reasons the ancient Israelites killed the Canaanites: because God said so.

Yeah, if hundreds of millions applaud crashing planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11 and the rape, torture, and murder of 1,000+ Israelis on 10/7, they must have a point.

Can you tell I'm disgusted?

And the assertion of immoral equivalence between Islam and Judaism is breathtaking, which isn't designed to do anything but undercut the moral superiority of Christianity and the West in the fight against Islam and other evils, like The Empire of Japan, whose holocaust in Asia is on the lips of no one like Nazi Germany's is and shouldn't have been ended by dropping the atomic bombs, according to this lunatic.

That Christians like this aren't laughed off their own stage isn't a sign that they are correct. It's a sign that Christianity has become wholly empty-headed and incapable of defending itself. London has become Londonistan in our lifetime, now infamous for knife and acid attacks by Islamists. Enoch Powell predicted it in the 1960s, but the prophet is without honor in his own country.

Barbarism isn't the "extreme outlier". It's in every man. Christianity used to teach this, as did Aristotle, and the prophet Jeremiah, but not Nicholson, nor George W. Bush for that matter, whom Nicholson resembles perfectly:

True barbarians . . . are rare in our world. ... To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves. They are merely drawing on a tradition different than ours.   

If I had a subscription to this rag I would end it.

 

This is most certainly true about the tattoo

 

Joe Biden was widely regarded as the clown of the U.S. Senate 1973-2009 for offensive antics like this, but America made him president anyhow

 

 Because whom the gods would destroy they first make insane.

 

President Joe Biden has enraged Catholic Church regulars with his latest show of approval for abortion, a Vatican red line.

On Tuesday in Florida, where he blasted the state’s impending six-week abortion ban, Biden blessed himself with the sign of the cross when the woman introducing him referenced Florida’s shorter window for abortion.

The group Catholic Vote blasted Biden’s actions on X.

More.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad

They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night. 

-- Job 5:14

 Solar eclipse frenzy sweeps across North America • FRANCE 24 English:

 

A Hellenized Jew might well recognize in Paul's three descriptions of his conversion experience and of his life in general a man judged by God according to Greek Deuteronomy

 

The LORD shall smite thee with madness (παραπληξίᾳ, stunned confusion), and blindness (ἀορασίᾳ, sightlessness), and astonishment of heart (ἐκστάσει, being out of one's mind): And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee. 

-- Deuteronomy 28:28f. 

Stunned confusion

And he [Saul] said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. 

-- Acts 9:5

And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.

-- Acts 22:8

And I said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. 

-- Acts 26:15

Sightlessness

And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. ... And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.  

-- Acts 9:8f.,18

And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus.  And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews which dwelt there, Came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight. And the same hour I looked up upon him.  

-- Acts 22:11ff.

Being out of one's mind

And [Saul] hath seen in a vision (ὁράματι) a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.  

-- Acts 9:12

And it came to pass, that, when I was come again to Jerusalem, even while I prayed in the temple, I was in a trance (ἐκστάσει);  

-- Acts 22:17

And there arose a great cry: and the scribes that were of the Pharisees' part arose, and strove, saying, We find no evil in this man: but if a spirit or an angel hath spoken to him, let us not fight against God.  

-- Acts 23:9

Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision (ὀπτασίᾳ):  

-- Acts 26:19

And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself (Μαίνῃ); much learning doth make thee mad (μανίαν). But he said, I am not mad (μαίνομαι), most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness.  

-- Acts 26:24ff.

Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one--I am talking like a madman (παραφρονῶν)--with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. 

 -- II Corinthians 11:23ff.

Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.  

-- Acts 26:32

 

$13 trillion in new debt and climbing, and 7.2 million new illegal aliens in America and counting since Crazy Uncle Joe's inauguration in January 2021

But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:

The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.  

-- Deuteronomy 28:15, 28, 43f.

Jesus' gospel was about something good coming to you now, not about you going somewhere good later

 

The Gospel Is About Going to Heaven When You Die

Mitch East, Mere Orthodoxy 

 

 

Jesus taught no one to pray "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take", but

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 

 

-- Matthew 6:9f.

 

Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

 

-- Mark 1:14f.

 

 

The enthusiasts for Paul's other gospel, a private revelation of his individual ecstatic religious experience, for that is what it is (Galatians 1), know this truth, they simply subordinate it to Paul the fox, putting the disciple above his master (Matthew 10:24; Luke 6:40).

And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. 

 

-- Ezekiel 13:1ff.

 

Paul is the jackal of Zion, the scavenger of the failed Jesus movement scattered by the crucifixion.

 

For this our heart has become sick, for these things our eyes have grown dim, for Mount Zion which lies desolate; jackals prowl over it. 

 

-- Lamentations 5:17f.