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.

People seriously ask how Jesus became so influential when our world goes crazy for men like Fulton Sheen and Pope Leo XIV

People perennially underestimate the human capacity for exaggeration, self-deception, and idolatry.

 

Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise

 μὴ ποιεῖτε τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρός μου οἶκον ἐμπορίου

 ... Postulators are tasked with preparing a “positio” – a formal dossier summarising the case for sainthood, which can often span several thousand pages. These must be translated into Latin, printed, bound into special red volumes, and hand-delivered to the Vatican – meaning they can rack up exorbitant costs, often around €500,000 (£429,000).

Sheen’s positio ran to 15,000 pages, according to the Catholic University of America, where he taught. Two books published in 2016, Avarizia and Merchants, by two investigative journalists, claimed that leaked Vatican documents showed costs for Sheen’s sainthood cause had spiralled to €330,000 (£283,000) by 2013. ...

More.

Sainthood is big business. 

 

Holy moly, we truly do live in The Age of the Awesome and The Season of the Superlative

 

 The murky legacy of America’s first televangelist ‘saint’ 

... Just 62 saints were crowned in the 150 years before Sheen’s case was put forward, his own diocese stated in 2002.

But sweeping changes to saint-making rules have seen a flurry of halos handed out in recent decades. In 1983, Pope John Paul II reduced the mandatory waiting period before a sainthood bid could be opened from 50 years after a person’s death to just five. It allowed the Polish pope, who died in 2005, to beatify and canonise more people than all his predecessors combined.

Pope Francis, who died in 2025, went even further – authorising 912 saints during his 12 years as pope. He made 800 saints in one fell swoop in 2013 by canonising the “Martyrs of Otranto”, a town of 15th-century Italians who were massacred by Ottoman invaders.

Each of the past three popes has personally canonised more saints than all other popes combined. ...

Yes, the arguments for Catholicism are so compelling

Why didn't they just stuff him like Trigger, Buttermilk, and Bullet, and put him on tour?

 

How Fulton Sheen Paved Way For American Acceptance of Catholics

NCReporter

 

 

 

It turns out that Scottish New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall (1934-2015) was a driving force behind the NIV's redefinition of adelphoi as brothers and sisters

Under I. Howard Marshall's influence, the NIV ended up interpolating "sisters" and "sister" in the New Testament about 150 times when they didn't appear in the Greek, in order to make the NT more gender neutral.

 

But to do this it had to supply a novel definition of "brothers" to justify doing so, even though the New Testament authors were perfectly capable of writing "sisters" when they wanted to, and did.

 

An example of the novel definition is shown below at Acts 1:16.

  

 

Except there is no Greek word for brothers and sisters, and it certainly isn't adelphoi.

 

To convey this meaning the language routinely relied on compounding the two words. If "brothers" were in fact the shorthand for "brothers and sisters" as the NIV insists, it is news to the gospels, which shouldn't have bothered to say "sisters" alongside "brothers" for example in Matthew 19:29, Mark 10:29f., and Luke 14:26.

 

If "brothers" means "brothers and sisters", why use "sisters" anywhere at all?

 

I. Howard Marshall (The Gospel of Luke, 1978, reprint 1986, 688) was remarkably uninstructed by the Luke 14:26 example above (If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple) in his interpretation of Luke 18:29 (And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake), where Marshall says sisters is omitted because "brothers will include both brothers and sisters just as Luke uses parents for father and mother". 

 

His authority for this is not in any early Christian literature, but in usages outside the New Testament which themselves appear only occasionally and in special contexts (e.g. when referring specifically to a brother-sister pairing, or with the classical Greek dual which virtually disappears in koine). Ordinary usage everywhere in classical and koine displays the typical male dominance of "patriarchal" society.

 

It is simply not the case in Luke 14:26 that brothers includes both brothers and sisters, nor is it justified to say brothers contains sisters in Luke 18:29 in the same way that parents contains mother and father.

 

On the contrary, Luke used parents and father and mother freely, even when parents alone would have served:

 

And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in, save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the maiden. ... And her parents were astonished: but he charged them that they should tell no man what was done.

 

-- Luke 8:51, 56.

 

Marshall was straining for excuses to justify his novel definition of brothers instead of relying on New Testament and especially Luke's own usage. 

 

The fact of the matter is Luke edited out "sisters" once before when the parallels had included it (Mark 3:35 and Matthew 12:50):

 

And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.

-- Luke 8:21.

Marshall strangely missed this opportunity at 8:21 to argue that brothers included the sisters on his new definition of adelphoi. Instead he says Luke is abbreviating Mark to avoid referring to the distasteful topic of the strife which existed between Jesus and his family. 

It's characteristic of Luke sometimes to compress language and omit elements, especially those which may seem needlessly repetitive, descriptive, or offensive to him.

Luke famously omits the scourging of Jesus by Pilate, which would have been a distasteful topic for Luke's Roman audience to read.

Luke tones down the coming judgment of Israel at the center of an eschatological drama from Matthew in favor of a gospel preached to the ends of the earth by Paul, culminating at the center of the world. "And so we came to Rome" (Acts 28:14).  

Luke omits "lands" in addition to "sisters" at 18:29, possibly as Marshall says because Luke is against the idea of material reward for disciples. Luke emphasizes that the gospel is good news for the poor, not the rich (Luke 1:53; Luke 4:18; Luke 7:22). Luke well understood that the cost of discipleship was saying goodbye to everything which one owned (Luke 14:33). Luke is nothing if not uncomfortable with the talk of rewards in Mark 10 and Matthew 19, to the point that he is completely non-committal about just what the "manifold more" actually is which the disciples will enjoy "in this present time". 

Is Luke omitting "sisters" twice in his gospel not because they are subsumed under "brothers" but rather because Luke just thinks that they are not worth mentioning? That dismissiveness could simply be unconscious expression of the "patriarchal" mindset of the times reflected more broadly in the language itself, against which feminists in the church have been raging since the 1960s.

Marshall was nothing if not a child of this time, as were the early Christians in theirs. 

Luke generally is omitting things here and there mostly because as the longest of the gospels he has to make room for a lot of other things which he wished to emphasize. Occasionally the hobby horse of a crank is a victim.

In keeping with most Greek speakers of the time, Luke does not think of females when he thinks of "brothers". He thinks of males. Marshall knew and admitted this, but Marshall's ideological prejudices overrode what he knew to be the truth: 

... Ian Howard Marshall, who was one of the translation committee members for the gender-inclusive TNIV Bible, has made an argument along these lines in a recent article:

What we are suggesting is that the usage is one in which sometimes the context may make it clear that the reference is exclusive and purely to males, but that the letters are addressed directly to mixed audiences, and therefore generally adelphoi is used in a way that does not exclude women, even if it is probable that the author may have been thinking primarily of the men. 

... But there is a problem with this argument. The problem is, the writers of the epistles ordinarily seem to be "thinking primarily of the men," as Marshall allows, and so his statement that the epistles are "addressed directly to mixed audiences" is rather problematic. If the writer is thinking primarily of the men when he addresses the congregation, then he is not really addressing the men and the women equally. Yet Marshall proceeds to build his argument concerning the meaning of adelphoi squarely on the idea that men and women are addressed equally, as equals, in the epistles of the New Testament. It is largely on the basis of this idea that a gender-neutral sense for adelphoi is posited by him and by Strauss. The whole argument collapses under the simple recognition that the apostles directed their attention primarily to the men, and used language which reflected this orientation. There is no intent to "exclude women," but the habits of speech reflect a male orientation.

... First, it is clear that Marshall's egalitarian vision of the early Church has prejudiced his whole approach to the linguistic issue at hand, in such a way that no careful philologist is likely to approve. Second, this egalitarian vision of the early Church is simply false. It represents an anachronistic illusion about the early Church, and not the historical fact of the matter. Despite the "trajectory" imagined by Marshall, men and women were not equal in the early Church. Third, Marshall ignores the contrary linguistic evidence from New Testament itself. Fourth, we note that his argument shows the inner connection of "inclusive language" with egalitarian views on the TNIV committee of translators. Spokesmen for the International Bible Society have repeatedly denied that any such ideological connection exists, and have asserted that the reasons for their gender-neutral TNIV are purely linguistic, but Marshall makes the connection clear. A revisionist egalitarian view of the early Church plays an important part in his "linguistic" argument. ...

This is why men don't go to church anymore

 

Men don't go to church anymore because the church is out to cancel them. That's part of it, anyway. Why go where you're not wanted or respected?

The Acts of the Apostles in The New International Version of the Bible is a good example of this.

The NIV, perhaps the best selling Bible in America, especially among Evangelicals, wants its translation to reflect gender equality, so, for example, whenever brothers appears it often adds "sisters" even though "sisters" is not even there. The NIV's gender equality ideology actually trumps the text by adding "sisters" in 124 places where the Greek New Testament doesn't have it. It also adds the singular "sister" about 26 times. I guess the feeling on the part of the women is that the sisters have been canceled long enough, but the fact is they were never there to be canceled in the first place.  

We meet up with this even more acutely, however, in Acts, which is famous for its many orations by individuals which begin "Men, brothers" or "Men and brothers" (ἄνδρες ἀδελφοί), but "men" in these cases are actively canceled by the NIV.

An NIV footnote to the first of these at Acts 1:16 informs us that 

The Greek word for brothers and sisters (adelphoi) refers here to believers, both men and women, as part of God’s family; also in 6:3; 11:29; 12:17; 16:40; 18:18, 27; 21:7, 17; 28:14, 15.

Yes, Inigo, they keep using that word but it does not mean what they think it means. If the text had meant to add "sisters" (ἀδελφαὶ) it would have. Unfortunately for the NIV, "sisters" appears just nine times (or eight) in the Greek New Testament, and this ain't one of 'em. It goes without saying that "sisters" is missing also in 6:3; 11:29; kai ta loipa (the funniest of these being Acts 6:3 where the NIV with a straight face wants us to imagine that The Twelve tell the brothers and sisters to choose seven "men").

The tell though is that the NIV manages to never translate ἄνδρες in these instances in Acts, except where it absolutely had no other choice in Acts 7:26. Otherwise the "men-ness" of the brothers is simply ignored, because it is counter evidence to the NIV's assertion that adelphoi means "brothers and sisters".

Here are all the instances of canceling ἄνδρες before ἀδελφοί in the NIV of Acts: 

The NIV has "brothers and sisters" at Acts 1:16;

"fellow Israelites" (not there at all!) at Acts 2:29;

"brothers" at Acts 2:37;

"brothers and fathers" (fathers is there) at Acts 7:2, even though it had to translate "Men you are brothers" at Acts 7:26 (the NIV shows by this that it knows it is up to no good); 

"brothers" at Acts 13:15;

"fellow children" at Acts 13:26 (ROFLMAO);

"my friends" at Acts 13:38 (even more ROFLMAO);

"brothers" at Acts 15:7, 13;

"brothers and fathers" at Acts 22:1;

and "my brothers" (!) at Acts 23:1, 6; and Acts 28:17, ending on a chummy note that isn't there either.

This is a completely disgraceful business, an indefensible slaughterhouse of "men" and the maleness of ἀδελφοί.

No wonder men don't go anymore.

The King James Version (observe "Men, brethren" as opposed to "Men and brethren" at Acts 7:2, 26 and Acts 22:1), and Young's Literal Translation both are among the translations which retain the forms of address which preserve the maleness and the dignity of the brothers as men.

The RSV was the Bible of my youth, and the KJV has been the Bible of my old age. But the NIV will never even be a Bible to me. It is literally an abomination. 

 

KJV

 

YLT

O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

George C. Scott as Shylock, Bob Lerner, 1962

  Mark you this, Bassanio,

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose!
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3 

When are Evangelicals going to get upset about their Orwellian woke NIV?

 

 

Maybe not until this generation passes away.

 

Evangelicals think they embrace gender equality in obedience to their god. I say they do it in obedience to the spirit of the age. They most certainly do not do it in obedience to the meaning of words, and have assembled scholars for themselves who will defend this absurdity to their last breath. They are in thrall to an ideology. 

 

For example, ἀδελφή and ἀδελφαὶ, the Greek words for "sister" and "sisters", occur about 26-times in the Greek New Testament.

 

But Evangelicals' favorite Bible, The New International Version, has "sister" about 42-times in the New Testament, and "sisters" a whopping 133-times in the New Testament, supplied completely out of thin air alongside "brothers" in order to be gender-inclusive, even for example alongside ἄνδρες ἀδελφοί ("men, brothers") in Acts 1:16, where the footnote says "The Greek word for brothers and sisters (adelphoi) refers here to believers, both men and women, as part of God’s family".

 

 ROFLMAO.

 

Compare the much-maligned "liberal" translation of yesteryear, the old RSV. It has "sister(s)" 24-times in the New Testament. It follows the manuscript evidence, unlike the woke NIV.

 

"The NIV relies on recently published critical editions of the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts", Wikipedia assures us, except for the 149 instances of sister and sisters in the New Testament for which there isn't a shred of evidence, and who knows what else. 

 

If you ever wondered how variant readings popped up in the Bible in the first place, the human capacity for dishonesty, pride, and self-deception on display here explains it pretty well.

 

The NIV translation project began in earnest in 1967, with origins in the liberal Christian Reformed Church headquartered in Grand Rapids, MI. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller of UCLA was the first to formalize the split between biological sex and gender identity in 1968.

Not so family friendly Christianity leaves the old man and the family business behind in the boat

Woodcut from the UK Wellcome Trust

And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zeb'edee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zeb'edee in the boat with the hired servants, and followed him.

-- Mark 1:19f. 

And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zeb'edee and John his brother, in the boat with Zeb'edee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

-- Matthew 4:21f. 

J.D. John Kerry Vance hated on the end times before they ended up fascinating him his entire life

 He was against them before he was for them.

 

Your enemies were the members of your own household, and the world was going to end in like a week

 

I got your Antichrist right here, J. D.

Vance suspects Antichrist 'among us'... 

... like I'd be not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us ... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.

-- Luke 6:35 

The vices darken and distort human understanding

 Wrath and malice, envy and revenge, do darken and distort the understandings of men.

 

-- John Tillotson 

 

 

The best thing about the death of Saint Dolly Parton is that they wasted no time burying her after she died, you know, before things could get out of hand

😏