Would you please excuse and accommodate me and my ignorance by re-posting your assertion concerning the demise of Christianity, including the Platonian quotation supporting it, DB. Thanks.
You don't have to be excused brother/sister because I am guilty of misinforming you of the whereabouts of that aforementioned Platonic thinking . It is not in this thread.
Check this out, good reading
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph. D.
These and a hundred other irrationalities make it sheer folly to uphold the literal historicity of the Bible. Yet the major theses of Christianity stand on this weak ground. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the history of the Church has been a tale of warfare, controversy, schism, blind faith and frightful cruelty, and that it is repudiated by about sixty per cent of the populations among which it is strongest, and is rather loosely held by its own adherents.
We are prepared to support the statement, then, that the Bible, sadly misinterpreted by its most loyal devotees, is in reality a collection of ancient works that embody in veiled figures the fundamentals of the genuine old wisdom of the hierophants. One might say indeed, that it is a repository of the great Mystery teaching of early times. In fact it is an assemblage of material comprising the substance of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Kabalism, Chaldean astrology, Greek Orphism and Hindu Wisdom, drawn mostly from ancient Egypt. It would not inaptly be described as a book of Platonic Theosophy. For Plato summed up most of the elements of these systems. To an orthodox churchman it would doubtless seem to belittle the Book to say that it contains nothing but the Platonic philosophy. But this is only because the churchman knows nothing of the grandeur and rank of the Platonic wisdom. It is enough to say that it could not be a great book if it did
not embody Plato's philosophy. For this was truly "of the gods," and perhaps the most luminous presentation of spiritual knowledge ever to be vouchsafed to the human intellect. Fortunate is Christianity that its Bible is heavily charged with the elements of the great Divine Wisdom of past ages.
It is a practical impossibility, however, to expound even the crudest outline of Plato's teaching in such a lecture. We must be content with a few statements dealing with the emanation of living streams of being and intelligence from the first fount of all things. Plato represents life as unfolding from within itself at the beginning of a new period of manifestation, and proceeding outward or downward from a summit of pure spirit into ever-denser forms of creation. The One Life pours forth its power and essence in streams, called "rivers of
vivification", "from on high as far as to the last of things," bringing all forms of life into existence and ensouling all forms with more or less of its own mighty being. At each step of the way out, or down, this life takes embodiment in coarser forms of cosmic matter, thus giving birth to the greater and lesser gods of various ranks. For the gods are embodiments of the several grades and forms of nature's life, power and intelligence. The whole creation forms a chain of beings reaching from the lowest mineral crystals to the highest God. Somewhere in this chain stands man, and Plato tells us where it is. Humanity occupies a place of great strategic importance in the hierarchy, standing precisely at the point of junction between the highest animal and the truly
New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom--No I
