Theos-Talk Archives (September 2004 Message tt00323)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bartl@s...> wrote:
> Breasted was a noted atheist, and did have a stake in
> discrediting Judaism.

Well you might read the book before making statements like that. It 
contains no indication of discrediting anything. It is almost 
entirely focused on the development of early moral thought among the 
ancient Egyptians and mentions Moses entirely because he lived there 
and was influenced by them. The el story is in Genesis if you care 
to read it, and the volcano story is in Exodus. If you want to 
believe that thought has not evolved in the last three thousand 
years, then you must deny all the evidence.

> And he subscribed to the belief that, if religion was
> destroyed, religious hatred would disappear. Even Freud,
> himself, wrote, "the essay doesn't seem to me to be too
> well substantiated, nor do I like it entirely."

The point of it was that Manetho was right, and that Moses lived 
during the time of Akhnaton, a few years earlier than Ramses II, who 
was identified by Budge as the reigning king. That the "Habiru" were 
rampaging across the countryside during the reign of the mystic king 
is testified to by the Tell El Amarna letters which were written 
during his reign. Debating whether he lived during the eighteenth 
dynasty or the nineteenth does not in any way "discredit" anyone, or 
not that I can see anyway. The second part of Freud's book, which 
was all psychoanalytic theory, is pure garbage.

Freud did see clearly that our theological ideas are projections of 
unconscious contents, but what he did not see is that this does not 
bear on their validity. The ancient Christian writers did not have 
the understanding we have today of projection, but they saw 
accurately that the mind can be considered a sense in addition to the 
five external senses identified by Aristotle, and that the mind is 
the sense with which we sense things spiritual. This is a profound 
insight which is only deepened by the insights of modern psychology. 
The ultimate question of whether the things sensed have objective 
reality is and will probably remain unsolvable by science.

18680From: Pedro Oliveira <prmoliveira@y...> 
Date: Thu Sep 9, 2004 5:55am
Subject: Scholars and Sages: to K. Paul Johnson

> Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is possibly the very
> foundation of modern rationalism. In it he reasserts,
> with greater sophistication, the role of categories in
> the process of understanding reality. But even Kant,
> one of the most brilliant intellects of his time as
> well as of the history of western philosophical
> thought, conceded, in his well?known statement, that
> "the things in themselves cannot be known". Our
> knowledge, therefore, is a knowledge "about" things,
> not of things in themselves. It is a mediated,
> categorically?induced knowledge. It is not the
> knowledge of what is.

Somehow I am missing your point. The ding an sich cannot be known 
because all we can know is the contents of our own consciousness. 
That is not a concession but a basic assumption of Kant's whole 
argument. If one were to have a mystical experience that would still 
be a content of consciousness and not the ding an sich. The question 
would still remain whether the ding an sich in this case could be 
something external to the perceiver, or merely the result of the way 
the brain is wired, and, if something external, what?