A Natural Miracle, or Miraculous Nature
November 5, 2009
Let’s see. By natural causation we can account for the rise of the Moral Religion adequately expressed by the Christian moral (see the previous post). We start with a petty but righteous Jesus who is slain for his attempt to reform Judaism and whose body is taken from the tomb and lost among the host of rotting bodies in the cemetery pit.
Next we have a Saul who is so screwed up in himself about the reports of the resurrection (visions in the eyes of loving and grieving followers of Jesus) and who brings it all out in the heat of the day of his persecution of the Christians (to redeem Zion) and sees this resurrected Jesus in the sky, and who is so moved as to become a changed person and begin helping both his Jewish friends and the gentile Christians and promoting the story of the resurrection. He is astounding, and goes out and convinces others of this resurrection and of the establishment of the Kingdom and we end up with a culturally conditioned icon of the universal, free and moral religion, i.e., there is only one law and that is the law of love. That is all sufficient (all that is needed is the information to be achieved to via sharing).
We start with Saul and Jesus. They are both treading the natural footsteps of the conditions forming them, and they meet up in an hallucination which leads to the revelation of Kant’s Moral Religion in cultural garb.
That then would be God’s trick for the angels. He would have created a world of nature and let it run its course and will have shown how very naturally the Moral Religion arose amongst the humans of this natural world, and how, as I speculate, this would lead to the eradication of evil, i.e., the New Jerusalem.
This ought to be represented by a faith which adhered not to Paul but to the principle of self governance, and so could include those who believe that Jesus was resurrected and those who do not, but then who still can see a “miracle†in the juxtaposition of Jesus and Paul, a very good and benevolent event in natural history. It seems incredible to me that through Jesus as might be supposed here as a possibility, that this petty man, so conceived, was able to influence the world, and which he did (best) through Paul. Paul was the one who understood the role of Jesus in bringing people to accept a second chance and start working for the moral world order. So I guess we could say, the practical effect of Jesus and Paul on the world is in the announcement of the Moral Religion, what Kant called a “revolutionary†moment in human history.
By natural means then the Moral Religion is made evident in the natural order of the world. Kant recommends that we (the morally inclined world) seize this religion and make it the universal religion, albeit independent of its dogmas, and leave room for the possibility of historical error without impinging the conscience and for all to join with people of a like spirit in a mutual moral enhancement of the world.
So there will be the believers and the agnostics, but who (the latter) at least will admit that it would be easy to imagine that the fact that nature produced Jesus and Paul means that it was a program to produce a miracle, namely the establishment the moral religion in a realm of nature.