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WILLIAM WHISTON 1667-1752
Tuesday, 6 February 2024 at 22:04
WILLIAM WHISTON 1667-1752
He was a close associate of Isaac Newton, being appointed assistant to Newton at Cambridge in 1701, and succeeding Newton as Lucasian professor in 1702.
Whiston fell out with Newton over Bible chronology for, unlike Newton’s, his cosmology involved direct intervention by God.
In May 1702 Whiston succeeded Newton as Lucasian professor. He eventually lost his position, being charged with heresy by his Cambridge colleges.
He did not believe in the Trinity.
In the 1720s, Whiston came to believe that Jews manipulated the chronology of the Bible to support the view that Bar Kopha was the Messiah.
Whiston believed that Josephus drew upon an earlier unmanipulated authentic Bible as his source for history.
The Discourse on Hades,that Whiston thought was by Josephus is a Christian-like text about Hell and resurrection. Most scholars think it was actually by Hypolitus Bishop of Rome, but Whiston was sure it was by Josephus because of some verbal parallels.
Whiston believed that Josephus dealt with Jesus, John the Baptist and James favourably. The simplest explanation for Whiston was that Josephus was a Christian, an Ebbionite, a Jewish Christian, who saw Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, but who still followed the Torah.
Whiston thought also that Josephus went back to Jerusalem from Rome to become the Bishop of Jerusalem.
© John Dunn.
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Opening the threshold to the light of the Logos
Sunday, 4 February 2024 at 14:55
Opening the threshold to the light of the Logos
Nature without man is the vast oneness, the interminable infinite, the undisturbed equilibrium. It is before the Beginning, it is death. For the Beginning to be, the grip of nature must be released, death must be overcome and life installed in its place. Life depends upon the destruction of nature, its repeated destruction. Life depends upon the violation of Ananke, her repeated violation.
A sense of a freedom might feel ephemeral, and just out of reach, but how is the ephemeral made to be enduring? What is this ephemeral feeling? It is a sense that the equilibrium of the accepted might be disturbed, i.e. the interminable cycle of nature might be broken. This equilibrium in my mythological terms is the undisturbed realm of Ananke, i.e. the vast, the infinite, the One. The violation of Ananke is the Beginning. In the Beginning is Mind.
The ephemeral feeling of freedom is the light of the Logos breaking through. The light of the Logos can only permeate nature by destroying it. This destruction of nature must be the overcoming of that which was shaped by living thinking, but which is reflected back to us as ready-made material nature devoid of any thought(or spiritual) content, i.e. devoid of our own content.
Before this can happen, the chaotic equilibrium of the individual subsumed in nature must first be destroyed. The intervenor, the destroyer of that equilibrium is Love. Only the Elect, touched by Love, are newly conscious of that which is missing, i.e. the Logos, or the shaping power of living thinking. Only the Elect can wilfully violate Ananke and break the interminable cycle, thereby radicalising the void and opening the threshold to the light of the Logos. Thinking is not confined to the skull. Thinking, in truth, rests in the Logos. It must be worthy of expressing the Logos. The greatness of man is to become identified with the madness of God.
© John Dunn.
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Galations 4
Sunday, 4 February 2024 at 14:49
Galations 4
Below are two translations from the first ever Bible, written in part and compiled by Marcion of Sinope in about the year AD 150. I am in the midst of studying aspects of Marcion’s work, including the following extract.
Before the Beginning, we were subject to the elements of the cosmos. With the coming of Christ we were purchased from slavery and released from the random ‘ordering forces of the world’, which Paul equated to an existence ‘under the law’. Interesting.
August Hahn and James Hamlyn Hill translation
Paul’s Letter to Galatians CHAPTER FOUR
1 When we were infants, we were held under the elements of the cosmos.
2 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son,
3 To ransom them that were under the law, that we might receive sonship.
6 But now, having known God, or rather being known by God, how do ye turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which again anew ye desire to be in bondage?
Jason BeDuhn translation
Paul’s Letter to Galatians CHAPTER FOUR
1When we were infants, we were enslaved by the ordering forces of the world. But when the completion of the time arrived, God sent forth his child… so that he might purchase those under law, so that we might receive adoption.
And now that you have come to know God, or rather now that you have come to be known by God, how is it that you are turning back to the weak and impoverished ordering forces, to which you wish to enslave yourselves again?
© John Dunn.
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Barren, shrivelled-up womb of apparent “truth”
Saturday, 3 February 2024 at 22:09
Tree of Barren Women by Fradga
Eros harangues the dumb masses
Barren, shrivelled-up womb of apparent “truth”
To a child Heaven-sent everything is amazing. You only have to look at the face of a child in his first months of growth as messages are received from angels. This is the state of mind as it is before Blake’s cosmic Pharisee intervenes between the Logos and thought.
A child beaks free from the womb seeking Love, with the eyes of Love. Amazement is knocked out of the child, not by familiarity, but by conformity to the idolatry of the herd. The doors of perception are closed as the windows of sensation are opened. Made to kneel before Urizen, the child’s amazement shrivels in the distractions offered by the Children of Satan.Love is murdered on the cross happiness.
Apparent ‘truth’ is loveless, the cold, dry, barren, shrivelled-up womb of the unloved and never-loved. Reclamation of amazement is dependent upon the intervention of Love, the resurrection of Love. I am here to make that intervention.I am here to violate Ananke the untouched, unpenetrated, and undefiled.I am here to force entry into the cosmic realm of inevitability, necessity, fate, destiny and everlasting oneness, where the goddess rests contentedly in her undisturbed repose of oneness and equilibrium.
The endless repeating cycle must be broken. Shrug off the chains imposed upon you by Urizen, regain conscious determination of thought and take your place in the eternal Beginning. For what is real does not come to you from the past but is created in the eternity of your present, behind which there is no past and before which there is no future According to your submission to Urizen’s ancient impulse of non-freedom, which is your submission to revealed truth, you are led to refer to a truth outside of you, to a god apart from you, with the world petrified in its alterity standing as the symbol for the death of the ‘I’. You are led to believe that truth lies in the outer object, in the quantifiable phenomenon, in a cosmos to which man’s presence is incidental. Reject all this!
© John Dunn.
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Eros harangues the dumb and stupefied masses of Beulah
Friday, 2 February 2024 at 21:51
Eros harangues the dumb and stupefied masses of Beulah
No objective reality exists in opposition to thinking. If such a thing as an objective reality exists, it does so because it already rises up as thinking. Nevertheless, to you, the dumb masses trapped in Beulah, you with your normal realistic-naive attitude in which life as an outer scenario pre-exists thought. You do not notice that you imagine life and, by imagining it, you identify it with what you see, without really seeing it. This is because you see only the physical-sensory manifestations of life, not life itself. Nature, the past, history, eventhe predicted future, are forms you take up from outside the process from which they have sprung, and having become sensations, images, and thoughts, are the non-truth that sickens you. The petrified world is the spirit which presses upon you as life, and though sickened, YOU, the sleepwalkers, continue on your way.
© John Dunn.
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Love is the only starting point
Thursday, 1 February 2024 at 21:58
Simone Weil
Love is the only starting point
The cosmic creation turns on the intervention, the penetration of Chaos, the overturning of an interminable equilibrium. The cosmic creation is a metaphor for the individual’s wakening; both require the intervenor, the Originatory Principle.
Where does being start, and what is the Originating Principle? Simone Weil confirmed, or at least supported,my suspicions, in that she proffered the view that the only way in which we can know that there is something external to ourselves (and by that I mean our own little world, our own set of ‘given’ circumstances),is through Love. Words by Simone Weil come to mind:
The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Gravity and Grace.)
Love as the Originatory Principle, it cannot be explained; something I tried to express in Child of Encounter.
Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.
I think about those chance encounters. They left deep and lasting scars on all my life. I would never have predicted that. How did this happen? I am asking a metaphysical question here. I am asking about causality. I am in the presence of a mystery, a reality rooted far beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.
Does this mean that for being to be we must be in Love? in God? Well yes, is the answer, now and at every moment.
…he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)
It seems that the intervenor in our own chaotic equilibrium is God, is Love.
© John Dunn.
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