A:
That's the thing that drives me crazy about people that think Jesus would be against gay marriage. It seems clear to me that the whole thing about Jesus wasn't the specific views he articulated, but the fact that those views were way more sensical and loving than the ones currently going around. The takeaway shouldn't be "Jesus enumerated these nine things we should or should not do", it should be "Always err on the side of taking care of people" or "If a law doesn't make any sense, and actively harms people, then don't follow it."
B:
So you think Jesus had a first-order philosophy?
A:
What do you mean?
B:
Well, if he just had nine things or whatever that he wanted to get across, he would have a zeroth-order philosophy. But, you're saying his philosophy is actually related to the common wisdom of the time, so it's first-order.
A:
And if his views were based on how quickly the prevailing views were changing, it'd be second-order?
B:
Yeah, I guess. The problem with this, of course, is that you can't just define Jesus to be 20% more liberal than the rest of the population. Well, you can, but it starts to get weird at the edges.
A:
Well, look. I think Jesus' actual views really are zeroth-order. I'm sure He actually had some set of things that He thought were Right--and Right with a capital R here, because He's Jesus after all--and some things he thought were Wrong. But, he's a smart guy. He knows you can't just bust in there and throw stuff out without paying attention to the conditions on the ground; "Hey, I'm Jesus, you guys won't know about stem cells for another two millenia, but trust Me: I'm cool with it"
B:
Well, He could if He put on a big show. He could've carved "Stem Cell Therapy Is A Good Idea, Take Them From Wherever You Can Get Them, Trust Me, It's Fine" on the Moon. That would've conveyed his point nicely.
A:
Well, yeah. But we're just taking it as Writ--again, with a capital W there--that He wouldn't do something obvious like that.
B:
Too easy.
A:
Well, for whatever reason.
B:
So you're proposing that Jesus has some views, but that he kept to himself. He couldn't tell them, because they were so far out from what everyone else thought at the time, He would've been kicked out. Again, we're assuming no convincing miracles, Just Because. So, instead Jesus does a sort of linear interpolation. He wants everyone to have a tolerance of 1.0, say, most people at the time only had of 0.0, so Jesus throws out a .20.
A:
Exactly.
B:
Gets them moving in the right direction. But
A:
But the problem is that people start to assume that Jesus actually just wanted a .20! And not that he was actually compromising.
B:
And so you think
A:
I propose that we actually try and project out and arrive at Jesus' real views, and then start headed there. So if we could try the line out farther, we could see that Jesus was actually aiming tolerance at 1.0, and then set that up as the goal.
B:
But we don't have the t-axis for any of this. We can draw the line out, but we can't tell if Jesus was aiming for 1.0 or 10.0, just that he was going for somewhere on that line.
A:
Exactly! And that's where Kabbalah comes in.
B:
Is that what Kabbalah is about?
A:
I have no idea, honestly. I just finished Foucault's Pendulum, though, and I'm trying to work Kabbalahism in wherever I can.
B:
Sure. Maybe that's what the Rosicrucians were after!
A:
Haha, maybe. You read it too?
B:
Yeah, a long time ago, I don't really remember much of it.
A:
Yeah. I finished it last night and I don't remember big chunks, haha.
B:
Sure. Good though.
A:
Oh yeah, definitely.