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  1. John D. Brey

    Exegeting Exodus 34:7.

    We live in utterly unique times such that the tools we have to exegete passages of scripture are so transformative that they can instantaneously reveal aspects of the holy writ, it's transfer, handling, interpretation, and translation, that would shock and stagger the imagination of the greatest...
  2. John D. Brey

    Jesus

    You draw a fitting parallel. When Freud called "religion" a pathology, it wasn't expressed in a pejorative sense. He was simply stating scientific fact. Similarly, in direct relationship to your dear brother (may he find peace), the philosopher Norman O. Brown said that the schizophrenic isn't...
  3. John D. Brey

    Is it possible that the Bible involves exaggeration? (and King Solomon)

    The word "faith" is interpreted multiple ways. It's used to speak of religion in general. It's used as a synonym for confidence. And as R.B. Thieme, Jr. taught (with Plato too) it (faith) is a non-biological organ, or means, of perception. In the latter sense, faith isn't in something. It's a...
  4. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    In context, the key phrase from Handelman's quotation of Derrida concerns the "logos which believes itself to be its own father, being lifted above written discourse." This Logos, as Handelman notes, is clearly none other than Jesus, whom the Christians fancy the son of God. Derrida is right to...
  5. John D. Brey

    Christians Only: Hitler the Anti-Christ?

    The term "anti-Christ" is often misunderstood. The anti-Christ isn't "against Christ." He believes he is Christ. The anti-Christ will present the world, believers too, with a serious problem. How do you know a man is God? Jews are aware of the problem. And its why they rejected Jesus' claim to...
  6. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    None of this seems to dent the invincible virtue of the Jewish understanding that even if a transcendental signifier makes great sense, nevertheless, finding, labeling, or worshipping, some transcendental signifier is just as likely to be the worship of a devil, a chimera, or a doppelgänger of...
  7. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    Precisely this, is the nature of Jacques Derrida's attempt to deconstruct the Logos (an attempt labeled "shattering the Logos" or even "crucifying the Logos"): Deconstruction endeavours [sic] to show the operation of logocentrism in all its forms, and to show that the transcendental signifieds...
  8. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    With that as the conceptual backdrop or context, the alleged stubborn-ness, the "invincible ignorance" of the Jew, starts to look more like an invincible virtue that refuses to fall into the fatal idolatry that assumes the transcendental signifier can become the temporally (carnal/finite)...
  9. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    The distinction between a Jewish hermeneutic versus a Christian one seems to revolve around the concept of the "transcendental signifier." As Handelman makes clear, the concept is powerful in that it acts to anchor thought and interpretation so that words and concepts can function without the...
  10. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    I can't parse any of these statements? They don't appear to reference anything discussed in this thread or elsewhere to my knowledge. John
  11. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. Julian Jaynes, The...
  12. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    Professor Boyarin's claim that Jews have made something perceptible, graspable, and evaluable, is a gross understatement in context, since Boyarin, with Handelman, make it possible, through their "Jewish" insight, for a non-Jew, and more particularly a Christian, to potentially fulfill the...
  13. John D. Brey

    Professor Susan A. Handelman.

    In her praise of James Carroll's book (quoted above), Professor Susannah Heschel laments that for two thousand years Jews have been waiting for a Christian who would understand their experience. And although James Carroll's Constantine's Sword indeed attempts to understand things in a more...
  14. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    The aliens in the crosshairs of this thread don't parasite bacteria cells. The fact that they (bacteria) don't age and die, and don't use selection to choose a sexual partner, means whatever evolution (replication with modification) takes place among them does so so slowly that when the sun...
  15. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    For the sake of brain tissue being parasited by alien thought, only higher, penis-producing mammals need apply. No birds, or fish, have a human-like grammar that makes them attractive to the aliens. That's actually not true. The evolution of intelligent life like ours not only requires about...
  16. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    I've read reams and reams of commentary implying that MAGA people are not even good impersonations of a human being. Which would imply that we have at least one exhibit of alien humanoids peopling the planet. How many other planets has the Webb telescope found better than earth? Has Webb spied...
  17. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    There are no square, or rectilinear planets. The law of gravity guarantees that. Likewise, the laws of nature guarantee that most mammals will have some sort of phallic-mechanism to allow them to reproduce. Sexual mixing, and the death that comes along with sexual mixing, allow enough biological...
  18. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    Addressing your last statement first, the Bible assumes alien life-forms from the get-go. Genesis chapter six speaks of an actual infiltration where they interbred with humans resulting in the universal flood to attempt to annihilate the hybrids (though some survived the flood). There's even an...
  19. John D. Brey

    FETI: Found Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

    The serious argument in this thread is found in message #19. For instance, say that the aliens found at Roswell looked like this: . . . And say they were circumcised (had a circular scar where the foreskin was removed). Since they're not from our planet, if they're circumcised, and have...
  20. John D. Brey

    The Paradox of Atheism and God

    You sound like the brilliant Catholic Scholar Jean-Luc Marion: What disqualifies the attempts of theoretical atheism is found not in the weakness of their arguments, but in the senseless ambition that arguments, whatever their form, might grasp what is at issue when the issue is God...
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