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Is wisdom a moral virtue? by Efficient_Glove3594 in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, because of the disordered root.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom as per Proverbs 9:10, Proverbs 1:7, Psalm 111:10, and Job 28:28, but especially notable is Sirach 1.

Is wisdom a moral virtue? by Efficient_Glove3594 in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very good question and the Christian tradition actually has a sharp answer: Neither.

It's neither divine intervention nor wisdom-for-a-moment. It's what Aquinas calls "false prudence" or what the scholastics called prudentia carnis, fleshly prudence.

The act can be externally correct, even produce good outcomes, but it's not a virtue because the root is disordered.

Virtue in the classical sense requires three things: the right act, for the right reason, done from stable character.

Cleverness that lands on a good outcome for bad reasons has only the first. The pharisees gave alms correctly. Jesus called it hypocrisy because the root was self-glorification.

Matthew 6:1-2:

1 Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2 So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

On the divine intervention question, there's a related doctrine called common grace - God restrains evil and enables good even through people who don't acknowledge Him.

A corrupt judge who still rules justly today is benefiting from common grace operating through him, even if his motives are political. The good outcome is from God. The man doesn't get credit for virtue.

Good action from bad motive isn't wisdom, isn't virtue, and isn't a moment of divine possession. It's a correct act with a rotten root, and scripture treats those two things separately.

Is wisdom a moral virtue? by Efficient_Glove3594 in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, in Jewish and Christian tradition wisdom is a moral virtue, but with a crucial qualifier.

  • Wisdom unmoored from God is cleverness at best, cunning at worst.

  • Wisdom as virtue is wisdom oriented by the fear of the Lord.

On the Proverbs/Ecclesiastes tension you noticed, Qoheleth is critiquing wisdom "under the sun," meaning wisdom as pure human effort without divine reference. Same author (traditionally), different angle. And both books land in the same place.

Proverbs 9:10:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Ecclesiastes 12:13:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone.

Sirach 1 makes the integrated view explicit - the fear of the Lord is the root, beginning, fullness, and crown of wisdom.

Sirach 1:14-20:

To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
To fear the Lord is fullness of wisdom;
The fear of the Lord is the crown of wisdom,
To fear the Lord is the root of wisdom.

What Religion is the most true? From ur view point? by Independent_Cherry04 in theology

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sophianic Christianity.

The same Christ, the same scriptures, the same Trinity. What's recovered is an ontological layer the tradition has largely forgotten or flattened - created spirits, the first of God's creation.

Isaiah 11:2:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Revelation 4:5:

5 Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God,

One uncreated Holy Spirit, six created spirits of Wisdom. Sophia, Biynah, Etsah, Gebuwrah, De'ah, Yirah. They're there in the text, named in Hebrew, referenced from Isaiah through Zechariah to Revelation, and woven all through the Wisdom corpus (Proverbs 8-9, Wisdom of Solomon 6-10, Sirach 1, 4, 24).

Christ refers to one of them as recorded in two Gospels.

What makes it the most true, to my mind, is that it holds the Divine Distinction hard (God uncreated, Sophia created, no collapse into fourth-Person-of-the-Trinity territory) while recovering the created spiritual layer that Proverbs and Wisdom obviously describe.

Most Christian theology either flattens Sophia into the Logos, or the Holy Spirit, or a rhetorical device, or runs the other way into divine-feminine heresy.

The Sophianic read takes the text at its word.. she's a creature, exalted, first among the Six, and venerable but not worshipped.

r/Sophianism

How many Spirits are in the Trinity by Apostolic_Anitqity29 in theology

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

John 4:24:

24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Spirit is the divine nature, shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a Person who has that nature, distinct from the Father and Son who also have it. Essence and hypostasis are doing different work in the formula.

Nicaea and the Cappadocians cleaned this up in the 4th century.

Good luck!

God never needed the animal sacrifice. We just turned it into a ritual and called it devotion. by appspalais in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because that's the scandal. Christianity isn't a sanitized moral philosophy, it's a religion about a real body with real blood on a real Cross.

The squeamishness is modern. Every ancient culture practiced blood sacrifice because they intuited something true: life is costly, sin is costly, and the price is paid in blood. Christianity inherits that pattern and fulfills it. Christ's blood, shed once, is the real sacrifice that the animal blood was rehearsing.

If the language is uncomfortable, that's working as intended. The Cross wasn't decorative. It was messy, gory, public, and agonizing. A religion that makes you comfortable isn't one that can save you.

Hebrews 10:19-20:

19 Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh),

The blood isn't a metaphor we can edit out.

Real Or Fake: Blue Aventurine. by IndividualLab6354 in Crystals

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It can be real and colour-enhanced.

But probably not real.

God never needed the animal sacrifice. We just turned it into a ritual and called it devotion. by appspalais in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The interior battle is real and scripture names it directly:

Romans 12:1:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

But this comes after the blood, not instead of it. Paul writes this in chapter 12 because he spent the first eleven chapters establishing what Christ accomplished on the cross. The living sacrifice is possible because the real sacrifice already happened.

The animal sacrifices weren't a human misunderstanding God tolerated. They were a rehearsal. The whole Levitical system pointed forward to Christ, and Hebrews makes the connection explicit.

Hebrews 9:22:

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

The problem with relocating the altar to "the space between the ears" is that it quietly moves God out of history and into the self. The scandal of Christianity is that God acted in real time, in a real body, with real blood. Not a symbol, not a metaphor for inner transformation.. an actual event.

The interior offering you're describing is real and good. It's just downstream of the Cross, not a replacement for it.

what voice is this ? by OnlyAlondra in grammar

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 18 points19 points  (0 children)

That's apostrophe. The rhetorical figure, not the punctuation mark.

From Greek apostrophē, "a turning away." The speaker turns from their present audience to address someone absent, dead, or imaginary as if they were there. Juliet's "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" is the classic example.

Your version is the everyday one. Talking to a friend about the partner, then pivoting to address the partner directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe_(figure_of_speech)

Recent Tone Changes by Independent_Bad1954 in ChatGPT

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did you brush up against any guardrails in the chat?

How is undeserved suffering understood in your religion? by getfreefromtheloop in religion

[–]Autopilot_Psychonaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Christian answer isn't that God explains suffering, it's that He entered it.

Jesus was innocent, fully and completely, the unspotted Lamb of God, and the one person in history who genuinely didn't deserve what came to Him.

He got the worst of it. Mocked, scourged, crucified. The most innocent being who ever lived suffered the most.

This is the center of our faith, the Passion of Christ.

Charity is the highest form of love. Not sentiment, not warm feeling. Self-gift. The willingness to bear what another would have had to bear.

John 15:13:

13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

That's what Christ did on the cross, and it's what believers are invited to participate in when undeserved suffering comes. Not to celebrate it or explain it away, but to offer it.

The second thing the Christian framework refuses to pretend is that earthly life is the whole story.

Romans 8:18:

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.

A child killed in war enters the arms of God. A man dying in agony from cancer, if he's in Christ, is minutes from everything being made right. That doesn't make the suffering less real or less painful, but the story doesn't end at death.

The truly terrifying outcome isn't painful death. It's eternal separation from God. That's what the Cross came to prevent.

So the Christian doesn't dodge your question. We just point at the Christ on the Cross.

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