Christian apology by a non-Christian

[Felasco]

As opposed to Felasco, I will "get all moralistic on you".

I knew somebody would take on the job...

In other words, when it comes to right to life and freedom, there are no meaningful distinctions between humans and other animals - we all are capable of both suffering and pleasure, we all want to keep on living - yet we as humans in our bigotry extend our ethical concern only to other humans, and not to all life as we ought to.

Surprise, surprise, surprise this leads me back to another sermon about the illusion of division...

Harry has made a good moral case, but moral cases ultimately fail unless they reflect a practical case. The practical case here is that our environment is functionally a single entity.

When we poison "the environment" or "animals" or "the lake" or "the ocean" we are at the same time poisoning "humans" because functionally it's all one big thing. Words (ie. thought) give the impression that animals, lake, humans are three different things because it's three different words, but in the real world they are really one thing. This is the key insight of the environmental movement, everything is connected to everything else.

This can also be a perhaps more easily grasped example of the distorting effects of thought, which also apply to the religious inquiry, as someone has bloviated extensively above.

The key threat to our environment is, yes you guessed it, the distorted picture delivered by the inherently divisive nature of thought, because it creates the illusion of division and separation which causes us to think things like...

- we can pore poisons all over our crops and it won't hurt us because we're something different, or....

- we can jam animals full of anti-biotics and it won't affect us because we're something different, or...

- we can fill the oceans full of trash and it won't affect us because we're something different, and so on.

Most of the problems we face personally and socially arise from the inherently divisive properties of what we're made of, that's why they can be so hard to solve. When we approach these problems, we do so using the same equipment which caused the problems in the first place.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I find the last series of posts to have some, but limited, relevance to the thread as a whole. Making any comments on any of the various points will only re-open the whole PETA-style conversation. You can never win with such people. It is its own obsession and seems to have an almost religious substructure. And watch out giving out your address: you may come home to find your hamster has been 'Liberated in the name of the animal-rights revolution!'

(The link here is obviously to liberal protestantism and so it is, essentially, a religious issue and certainly a Christian one. There is a very interesting, if short, essay on liberal protestantism in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought which perhaps, later on, can be spoken about).

I also cannot really comment, Harry, on your post. I would encourage you, if you so desire, to reveal the precise nature of the issues you face. Then, your choices in respect to them, and the way you conceptualize them, could be discussed in a theologically-oriented conversation. I have observed though, on more than one forum, that you avoid doing this. Frankly, you cower away from it. Because that is so one senses you are protecting something from full view. In respect to your notion that I 'deny your experience' I would respond by saying, no, I don't deny the experience but I question your interpretation of it. A great deal hinges there.

But further: my concerns and my interests right now have moved in a direction that, at least as far as the present (*laughs*) 'conversation' is concerned (within this thread and on the forum generally), is likely unintelligible to you and to the other participants. I have the sense of talking with emotional women and men who desire to become women and so the primary concerns seem, essentially, feminized. It is a challenge to reorganize my discourse in relation to that. It is also quite boring insofar as it consumes so much time and you get nowhere with the effort.

I also assume, as is often the case with you, that you will at any moment retreat back into self-intoxication and disappear until you happen to imbibe a motivational caffeine hyper-dose and rattle off PETA-Jeremiads and interminable treatises where God is treated as an engineering problem to be solved…

Ain't the Internet wunderful?

[Felasco]

I find the last series of posts to have some, but limited, relevance to the thread as a whole.

The "PETA-style conversation" has relevance if a reader/poster is interested in seeing an exploration of Christianity evolve beyond abstract intellectualism at a distance, to actual action in one's day to day life. That is, if the reader values the walking of the walk over the talking of the talk.

I would certainly agree that there can be many points of view regarding the relationship between the talking of the talk and the walking of the walk, so a challenge to this point is welcomed.

Speaking only for myself, I find the walking of the walk more interesting, even though, or perhaps because of the fact, that I personally am better at the talk than the walk. I would hazard the guess that the talking of the talk serves mostly as a place to hide from the very much more challenging walking of the walk.

And watch out giving out your address: you may come home to find your hamster has been 'Liberated in the name of the animal-rights revolution!'

This is a fair point, as we have personally witnessed the most committed and effective wildlife rehabber in our community be sidelined by the PETA people.

I also cannot really comment, Harry, on your post.

Ok, so don't then....

But further: my concerns and my interests right now have moved in a direction that, at least as far as the present (*laughs*) 'conversation' is concerned (within this thread and on the forum generally), is likely unintelligible to you and to the other participants.

We applaud your awesome intellectual superiority!

So you see my friend Gustav, I advise you to back gently away from the path of sneering snottiness, because you have met your match in the socially cluess butthole department, and if we are to proceed in that direction, due to my superior assholeness, I will l likely sneer you in to the ground. Why not be the leader and call us all to our higher selves instead?

I have the sense of talking with emotional women and men who desire to become women and so the primary concerns seem, essentially, feminized.

The only reason I'm in this thread is in hopes of finding some hunky studly manly man who will sodomize my butthole and turn me in to a real life full fledged feminized girlie woman!! Is this the kind of admissions you are seeking?

It is a challenge to reorganize my discourse in relation to that. It is also quite boring insofar as it consumes so much time and you get nowhere with the effort.

When you have become fully logical and rational, you will objectively examine the evidence provided by thousands of years of theological discourse, and realize with a clear mind that never getting anywhere is what it does for a living.

Then, optionally, if you are still interested in what is sometimes called "the religious inquiry" you will begin to seek other ways of furthering that investigation.

I also assume, as is often the case with you, that you will at any moment retreat back into self-intoxication and disappear until you happen to imbibe a motivational caffeine hyper-dose and rattle off PETA-Jeremiads and interminable treatises where God is treated as an engineering problem to be solved…

Are your personal issues now open for investigation too? Again Gustav, take it from the experts, you are too young, inexperienced and generally decent to win an asshole contest.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

You again!?
________________________________________

A few points:

• One of the issues I discern when it comes to 'spirituality', religion and ethics, especially bearing on attitudes that we would take on for ourself, toward ourself, is that of softness vs. hardness, laxity vs. severity, comfort (seeking) vs. rigor and discipline. The attitude I am interested in exploring, for numerous reasons, is the harder one, the one I would define as 'masculine' and the one that can be separated from 'feminine'. It is important to make this distinction not for purposes of enforcing sexism or oppression but in helping (one) to define oneself and thus direct oneself. By taking a strong stance---in any case I will speak for myself---I am clear that I do not intend malice. You, Sri Felascovitch, misinterpret my intentionality. But you do so as a result of your having installed a feminized perspective. Thus, in your ethics, to speak or write directly, to cut to the chase, would be symptomatic of being an asshole.
• The thing about 'walking the walk' (in my developing views) is that no one seems to really know what that should be. This is another area I am interested in staking out, another area that needs defining intentionality. As I understand (or don't understand to put it more exactly) your views, you propose a dissolving of a form of intentionality in favor of some unifying state. Also, a similarly vague and general notion that 'love' is in and of itself the answer or an answer. I honestly feel that you have made a mistake in the ordering of your ideas in respect to this issue. And I feel that in general terms so has 'Christianity'. So again, I have the sense that you will take my efforts, which you interpret as in the asshole spirit, as negative and even harmful. I discern that a big part of a problem lies just exactly here: your notion of 'love' is soft, condones weakness, favors PC distortions, and it really shouldn't be like that. If love is to be considered real and 'genuine' I think it needs an established ethical foundation. But more than ethical. Attitudinal. Orientative.
• A watered-down pseudo-Christianity, one that has deviated from the foundation that Christianity built, is one outcome of 'liberal Protestantism'. It is inclusive of all points of view, it really cannot take a positive stand except perhaps in relation to one obsessible point (animal protection for example, though there are numerous others), and tends toward dissolution. This is not to minimize the issue of animal abuse in vast corporate enterprises, the issue is by no means unimportant. But it does in a sense easily become a foil for facing and dealing with other issues. So, in a greater sense, the conversation (should be) not about a specific but about a whole, general attitude.
• If you confess that you are better at the talk then the walk, perhaps it is because you have only partially defined what 'the walk' would be? In this some knowledge of what Christianity is or has been in these areas would be required. Or, and I suspect this is true in your case, is it that you 'liberally' select some fave areas of concern, orient yourself around them, and simply don't consider the rest?
• 'Awesome intellectual superiority'. This is a 'female' response, that for the record. On this forum, so far, the level of interaction with the core question (as defined in this thread) has been abysmal. To say this is not to embody maliciousness, but rather to state a fact. In my view---you can take it as 'intellectual superiority' or you could, conversely, try to understand what I mean---everyone seems quite lost in respect to the very essence of the issue, yet what comes easiest is a sort of 'barking', like an aggressive dog, of half-baked and hardly-thought-through partial ideas. You, Uwot, Tillingborn, Harry, Emmanuel even, Skip: you all seem to fail almost completely because you don't take the issues seriously! It is a far more relevant issue to put THAT on the table for conversation. I will admit that making such a statement is bold indeed, but it is not due to a desire to act superior. So, you misstate intentions again. But what I am coming to understand is the deep and important need for greater levels of commitment to the Questions. (I admit, too, that actually 'demanding' this on an Internet backwater is silly…)
• With this:

  So you see my friend Gustav, I advise you to back gently away from the path of sneering snottiness, because you have met your match in the socially cluess butthole department, and if we are to proceed in that direction, due to my superior assholeness, I will l likely sneer you in to the ground. Why not be the leader and call us all to our higher selves instead?

  You have perfectly encapsulated nearly precisely what is the incorrect attitude to take! First, to mischaracterize rigor as sneeringness and snottiness, but then to react against it with a womanish vengeance. Yet additionally, I might say that taking a higher road and actually being capable of 'sneering' where sneering is required, should be defended. This turns back to attitudes of liberalism (liberal Protestantism) which seeks to 'include' every and any attitude or viewpoint and will not hierarchize! But I have already stated that I understand the need for and defend hierarchies. If one therefor is going to be 'snotty' it seems a good idea to have some clear sense of what one is defending.
• 'Why not be the leader and call us all to our higher selves instead?' This is an example, to me, of the thoroughly pathetic! It is exactly the culmination of certain (again) 'liberal' Christian notions. I totally reject this as an ethic. But you can 'call' and tweet and even warble whom you wish to their 'higher selves'. What you have done here is perverse, Felasco. You have used a feminine form of 'shaming' to describe a totally correct and direct means of communication as being NOT of a 'leader'. You turn therefor 'leadership' into some sort of soft, feminized, democratic, emotionally-sensitive activity. Really, Felasco. It is barfable. Yet I say this in a completely friendly manner. I am not even speaking to you since I have no hope of reaching you. But it is this sort of thing that must be shown for what it is. It is perverse.
• 'Is this the kind of admissions you are seeking?', you ask. All that I can hope for, in your case, is that you will succeed in reading what I write absent of your own overlays, your projections, and your restatements. Again, read what I write in a different frame of mind and subtract your own motives from mine. That would be a start! If after undertaking and succeeding at this you could then begin to understand the deep relevance and necessity of 'discriminating thinking', you would be better poised to understand why the intellectual work of theology (etc.) has value and importance. Your argument about 'not getting anywhere' is simply your subjective projection. In any case, you have also turned it into some mass, universal activity of 'getting somewhere'. Did you vote for Obama too? Myself, I am not concerned with the mass but with 1) myself and 2) any other person whom I might reach and communicate with. I am interested in defining the highest and the best first, with no regard to the mass or those who can't even make the definition.
• 'Personal issues' are spoken of, in these context, when our 'personal issues' are layers of lies that we use to keep ourselves weakened, 'feminized' (as I say), and stuck in ruts of powerlessness. It is a far more 'manly' attitude, and a very basic one, to support the stances in regard to our own weakness that move us toward overcoming.

[Felasco]

You again!?

Well, if you can't win a debate with a potted plant, I think you should know that, don't you?

The attitude I am interested in exploring, for numerous reasons, is the harder one, the one I would define as 'masculine' and the one that can be separated from 'feminine'.

Ok, I know your intentions are sincere, and you wish to focus on ruthless reason. Fair enough. I still don't understand what gender has to do with it, but will accept the gendeer labels as your manner of speaking.

My proposal is that you are not yet doing the ruthless "hard" reason you speak of. I propose the following instead.

You possess a natural gift for theological logic and rhetoric, and have an understandable emotion based need to see these talents of yours as being central, crucial, very important, because if these gifts are important in some universal sense, you are important too. This is what I mean by "tool bias".

As I've said probably too many times, your tool bias is not fundamentally reason based, because it seems to insist on ignoring the abundant evidence provided by the history of theology generally, and two thousand years of Christianity in particular.

It is important to make this distinction not for purposes of enforcing sexism or oppression but in helping (one) to define oneself and thus direct oneself. By taking a strong stance---in any case I will speak for myself---I am clear that I do not intend malice.

Yes, I understand this, which is why I don't take offense.

You, Sri Felascovitch, misinterpret my intentionality.

I would appreciate it if you would address me with the appropriate formal honorific of "Your Flatulence Sri Baba Bozo". Or, ok ok, I guess just Bozo is enough among friends.

But you do so as a result of your having installed a feminized perspective. Thus, in your ethics, to speak or write directly, to cut to the chase, would be symptomatic of being an asshole.

I can speak quite directly myself, as you have seen. So given my feminized perspective, perhaps I am a bull dyke Hell's Angel old lady? I dunno, I'm becoming quite confused about my sexuality now....

Anyway, being an expert on being an asshole myself, I would say clueless is a more accurate and less judgmental label which can replace the label asshole. Social cluelessness, sometimes called nerdiness, is that state of mind which doesn't realize that almost all human conversations are about our egos, not the stated topic. It's a form of simplemindedness which takes the cover story literally. Again, I remind you, I am rather expert at this cluelessness procedure, having done is repeatedly for six decades now.

[*]The thing about 'walking the walk' (in my developing views) is that no one seems to really know what that should be.

Or, it could be that we all already know what it should be, but we don't want to actually do it, so we analyze it instead. This is a clever strategy, because the analysis can go on forever, eternally protecting us from the challenge of walking the walk.

As I understand (or don't understand to put it more exactly) your views, you propose a dissolving of a form of intentionality in favor of some unifying state.

I would put it as, very intentionally, deliberately and ruthlessly (in a masculine way) applying the process of reason to reason itself, in the context of what is sometimes called the religious inquiry. Put another way, aiming the process of theology at theology itself.

Also, a similarly vague and general notion that 'love' is in and of itself the answer or an answer.

An answer, the answer favored by Western culture, expressed most explicitly in Christianity.

So again, I have the sense that you will take my efforts, which you interpret as in the asshole spirit, as negative and even harmful.

My point was only that if you're going to go after Harry in a personal way, knowing the weaknesses of my own personality, those chickens might come home to roost in your own direction, and then we will have succeeded in destroying what has otherwise been a fun thread.

I discern that a big part of a problem lies just exactly here: your notion of 'love' is soft, condones weakness, favors PC distortions, and it really shouldn't be like that. If love is to be considered real and 'genuine' I think it needs an established ethical foundation. But more than ethical. Attitudinal. Orientative.

It's entirely possible that for you, a highly analytical person, this is true. You are the best judge of that.

But the evidence very clearly shows this is not a universal truth applying to all persons, given that many people are able to love to impressive degrees without the analytical/ideological component.

[*]A watered-down pseudo-Christianity, one that has deviated from the foundation that Christianity built, is one outcome of 'liberal Protestantism'. It is inclusive of all points of view, it really cannot take a positive stand except perhaps in relation to one obsessible point (animal protection for example, though there are numerous others), and tends toward dissolution.

I take your point that Christianity has been widely watered down in order to make it acceptable to a wider audience. Fancy multi-million dollar church buildings on every other corner seem evidence enough of that.

So, in a greater sense, the conversation (should be) not about a specific but about a whole, general attitude.

Ok, fair enough, so steer us back towards the topics that work for you, I'm agreeable, and am over my animal rights rants etc.

[*]If you confess that you are better at the talk then the walk, perhaps it is because you have only partially defined what 'the walk' would be? In this some knowledge of what Christianity is or has been in these areas would be required. Or, and I suspect this is true in your case, is it that you 'liberally' select some fave areas of concern, orient yourself around them, and simply don't consider the rest?

I would put it this way. First, like you, I was born with a natural knack for the talk, so like you, I have a bias in favor of the talk. Next, the talk inflates my ego, and is thus quite inviting. Finally, walking the walk is more work, and more challenging, and less ego rewarding, so it tends to go the back burner. So, I talk a lot about the walking of the walk, while trying to keep a sense of humor about my predictament.

This is a 'female' response, that for the record.

"Whatever that means....", he said almost to himself, while reading further in the hopes of finding out.

On this forum, so far, the level of interaction with the core question (as defined in this thread) has been abysmal.

See my epic thread on the nature of the "almost anybody can post almost anything" publishing model in use on almost all forums.

You, Uwot, Tillingborn, Harry, Emmanuel even, Skip: you all seem to fail almost completely because you don't take the issues seriously!

Did you mean to say, we don't take Gustav's favorite issues seriously enough for Gustav? Speaking only for myself, I have invested a rather large amount of time in to responding to your points.

But what I am coming to understand is the deep and important need for greater levels of commitment to the Questions. (I admit, too, that actually 'demanding' this on an Internet backwater is silly…)

Ok, me too to that last point. Are you perhaps confusing "THE QUESTIONS" with "the questions that most interest Gustav"?

You have perfectly encapsulated nearly precisely what is the incorrect attitude to take!

I'm a quite talented person actually.

First, to mischaracterize rigor as sneeringness and snottiness, but then to react against it with a womanish vengeance.

And you sir, are going to sleep on the couch tonite, and that's final!!

[*]'Why not be the leader and call us all to our higher selves instead?' This is an example, to me, of the thoroughly pathetic! It is exactly the culmination of certain (again) 'liberal' Christian notions. I totally reject this as an ethic.

Ok, fair enough, but if you insist on ignoring the reality of ego, and thus the social mores which are thus required to lubricate social interactions, you will (as I have too often) find yourself talking only to yourself, because others will pick up their toys and go home. This is reason too, ya know?

What you have done here is perverse, Felasco.

Do you mean the buttfucking my way to dykedom part, or something else?

You have used a feminine form of 'shaming' to describe a totally correct and direct means of communication as being NOT of a 'leader'. You turn therefor 'leadership' into some sort of soft, feminized, democratic, emotionally-sensitive activity. Really, Felasco. It is barfable.

So barf then. And please recall, nobody is forcing you to read any of our posts.

Yet I say this in a completely friendly manner. I am not even speaking to you since I have no hope of reaching you. But it is this sort of thing that must be shown for what it is. It is perverse.

Please explain how being so frank with each other that it reads as insults will assist the conversation, and then you may claim the mantle of superior reasoner.

That would be a start! If after undertaking and succeeding at this you would then begin to understand that deep relevance and necessity of 'discriminating thinking', you would be better poised to understand why the intellectual work of theology has value and importance.

Again, once again, I ask you to examine the evidence provided by all those remarkable people who love in extraordinary ways, without the benefit of an intellectual theology.

It is a far more 'manly' attitude, and a very basic one, to support the stances in regard to our own weakness that move us toward overcoming.

Ok then, I challenge you in a manly way to bravely confront your own tool bias. Or, make a more convincing case as to why an intellectual theology is necessary for the exploration of the Christian experience. Or the religious experience if you prefer a broader focus.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Ok, I know your intentions are sincere, and you wish to focus on ruthless reason. Fair enough. I still don't understand what gender has to do with it, but will accept the gendeer labels as your manner of speaking.

This is a restatement, which I think you could avoid if you put your mind to it. Gender has a great deal to do with 'it' and with so many different things. But in the present PC-determined environment these issues have become so politicized that they are hard indeed to talk about. It is not a 'manner of speaking' though.

You possess a natural gift for theological logic and rhetoric, and have an understandable emotion based need to see these talents of yours as being central, crucial, very important, because if these gifts are important in some universal sense, you are important too. This is what I mean by "tool bias".

I think this is perhaps the 15th time you have stated the same thesis. But it is another restatement of what I am saying, yet not exactly what I am saying. First of all, it is more accurate to say that I do not have a 'gift' either for theology nor for strict 'logic', so you are inaccurate again in your restatements. You assume and seem to project, again, some of yourself when you refer to 'emotion-based', yet this is not either where I am coming from. I will say that man's defining capacity, his thinking capacity, his analytical capacity, and his ability to function within abstract through is one of his core important activities. This can be demonstrated. Out of these activities come all that we value and the structures in which we live: civilization to put it bluntly. It is important to understand this and not to fall into the trap of denigrating this orientation, which is, naturally, quintessentially masculine. There are reasons why this denigration takes place; there are reasons why men are, shall we say, 'tricked' into performing this act against themselves, and you, Felasco, are almost a 'textbook case'. You have so interiorized it that you cannot even distinguish it nor are you aware that you do it/that it has been done. You justify it with every breath, and yet I suggest that you have not really examined nor do you really understand what you are doing. And I further say that it is exactly this that needs to be rectified. To rectify, one has to examine and to understand. This is not easy when one is driven by Politically Correct thinking. It is somewhat like turning a big ship around: it happens by degrees.

With this, your pet thesis is undermined. What I am talking about and referring to is distinct from what you project onto me. Just seeing this would amount to the beginning of possible communication.

Now, these core issues of misunderstanding, misapprehension and mis-definition are not yours alone so I cannot 'blame' you. You are one voice among millions of voices who warble these tunes. I am coming to see this issue as one of decadence and degeneration, and this can be talked about.

And truthfully, the 'bias' which I most certainly have and also desire to cultivate and to accentuate, is not one of 'tools', though tools have something to do with it, but of even more fundamental questions and issues. I am somewhat sure that you don't have an inkling of what I refer to, and so in this sense you may have more of a 'tool bias' than I. It is possible. But your 'tools' are not exactly consciously chosen. They seem more assumed. Perhaps 'imposed'. In any case, whatever they are and however they originated, based on the specifics that you write as well as a far more indefinite sense one can only 'pick up' (sense, intuit), I chose to take a contrary stance and it also arises, perhaps one might say, 'instinctively'. These are not minor issues though. They are not as you sillily say 'ego-based'. Egos can get involved with them, true, but they have an 'objective presence within the structure of our reality'.

I would appreciate it if you would address me with the appropriate formal honorific of "Your Flatulence Sri Baba Bozo". Or, ok ok, I guess just Bozo is enough among friends.

This is funny, I admit, and yet it is also revealing, I think. I would suggest that in perhaps a significant way this reflects your core attitude toward 'hierarchies' (in this case of religious figures and of institutions they might organize and create). Your humor is a form of ridicule, perhaps? Is there a religious/theological structure that you admire? One aspect of 'liberalism' (which I mean as the European movement and also as 'liberal Protestantism' in a rather specific sense and not the 'liberalism' that is critiqued in 'conservative' newspapers) is the undermining of hierarchies and is part of a process of 'leveling'. Don't want to read too much into it…yet…

I can speak quite directly myself, as you have seen. So given my feminized perspective, perhaps I am a bull dyke Hell's Angel old lady? I dunno, I'm becoming quite confused about my sexuality now....

Because you are 'in reaction', and the terms I use, which you will not make the effort to understand, run quite counter to PC attitudes that you have installed and defend, it follows inevitably that you must paraphrase and rephrase my words. Yet, it is an option for you to stop doing that. And if you did you could then begin to consider what I am actually attempting to talk about.

Anyway, being an expert on being an asshole myself, I would say clueless is a more accurate and less judgmental label which can replace the label asshole. Social cluelessness, sometimes called nerdiness, is that state of mind which doesn't realize that almost all human conversations are about our egos, not the stated topic. It's a form of simplemindedness which takes the cover story literally. Again, I remind you, I am rather expert at this cluelessness procedure, having done is repeatedly for six decades now.

Here we come to the 'operative core'. You often state quite exactly what you are about. It is admirable. Yet the mistake you make is to include me in your self-description, as if we are in the same boat. If this is your boat, own it. But I am not myself speaking about being an asshole, or a socially clueless nerd, nor ego-driven. I am attempting to speak about concrete and objective ideas in relation to which we (as men) can orient ourselves, or not. You make a severe mistake, as well as reveal your own hand, in reducing this a priori to an 'ego-battle'. It is not. There are larger ideas and principals operating under and over the specifics. If you were to realize this your relationship to what is being talked about, and why it is being talked about, might change. It is possible. Yet, if this is at the core, for you, an 'ego-issue', and if you take your own ego very seriously, you will only be able to defend your ego-structure and thus lose sight of the objectivities. Trippy, huh?

Or, it could be that we all already know what it should be, but we don't want to actually do it, so we analyze it instead.

And yet perhaps this is merely another statement about your most 'favorite subject', yourself? I radically disagree with what you are saying here and that radical difference is at the core of my position generally. And I cultivate it. There is another possibility: We have lost our connection with 'it' and don't know how to recover it. And that the 'tools' we are presently using, and which get us into a mess of indecision and self-sabotage, need to be brought out into the open and examined. Your stated view is, if you will permit me to say it so, the 'hippy version' which is that 'what we need to do' is already there, it only needs to be 'uncovered'. You have to remove something from your self so that the self can 'shine' (or whatever). Yet what I am speaking about it distinct insofar as it has to do with the construction of ideals, the definition of ideals, and the institution of ideals which is a whole other arena and involves work.

I know from reading your posts that what you imagine is needed is this thing your call 'love'. You can even refer to a hippy song which effectively sums it all up. I suggest that the mood alone is deficient. This is a crucial point of bona fide difference. Yet it is not an 'ego-issue'. It is perhaps ideological.

An answer, the answer favored by Western culture, expressed most explicitly in Christianity.

And with some advantages and also with some noted disadvantages. Discrimination allows for the recognition of the duality there. To speak of these things requires some discipline. It is a murky and difficult area.

My point was only that if you're going to go after Harry in a personal way, knowing the weaknesses of my own personality, those chickens might come home to roost in your own direction, and then we will have succeeded in destroying what has otherwise been a fun thread.

This is an odd statement. First, let Harry deal with things for himself. But it also pegs my discourse, my choices, my thrust, to your actions and choices. And instead of using the 'we' I think what you mean is 'I will'. Important distinction. One thing I always resolve whenever and wherever I write: to be thoroughly independent. You can of course do whatever you wish or desire. 'I don't control you'.

If we don't find a common ground of agreement, do you suppose that we might bring it to a rest for awhile? I don't know if continuing to hammer the same points will get us any farther. I have some other things---blog-style!---I might bring forward.

Ok then, I challenge you in a manly way to bravely confront your own tool bias. Or, make a more convincing case as to why an intellectual theology is necessary for the exploration of the Christian experience. Or the religious experience if you prefer a broader focus.

If you would like me to expound more on why I think it is not solely a 'tool' issue, I will. I have satisfied myself though.

Your term here is 'intellectual theology'. I would not use that term, exactly. I would say 'ideational' though. And I would certainly defend theolog(ies). But that is note solely what is being 'defended'. That is your label which is deficient in my view. I have throughout this thread, more or less, been offering just such explanations. Since it is indeed an important point I don't mind continuing. Yet I think that the view and the information that supports it is so foreign to you that it will take some time. It certainly appears so.

At the base, I think I am speaking to 'literacy'. To become literate is not as common a thing as we imagine. It is hard to gain it and easy to lose it. In Western civilization, like it or not, the Bible and Church writings have been at the base of literacy in our culture. Not surprising the extreme degree that Christian ideas have penetrated so deeply into our very selves. The two are interwoven and inseparable.

In essence, the 'Christian experience' (your term not mine) is one that is intimately bound with literacy. The Word has been handled by the scriptoria and literacy extends from and retreats there, to put it colorfully. The Bible itself has only become available, and people have only become sufficiently literate to read it, recently. Say 500 years. I don't have specific numbers yet I would imagine that before that 90% of the population would have been illiterate. I am inclined to link the development of persons---persons as we define persons---to literacy, and this means far more than merely to know an alphabet. It means some level of capability functioning within literacy. So, when you say 'Confront your own tool-bias' I am forced to conclude that you are not exactly sure just what you are referring to. To be able to approach an ideational world is the beginning of the 'possibility of self'. And before you wrench this away and twist it to mean something other than what I mean I do not mean that an illiterate person is not a person. I should not have to explain what I mean because it is fairly obvious. In order to confront the Reality in which we find ourselves, we recur to ideas, symbols, sentiments, and so much that it cannot really be named. It is the water we swim in. Language and ideation is the 'tool' of our being.

My notion of 'theology' is then located in literacy and in involvement in that 'world'. Theology is one aspect of it. This is the 'tool' then. I regard language therefor, as do the Hebrews and as did the Rishis, as a sacred endowment. To be literate means to have a relationship to this world and to have fluidity in it.

[Felasco]

But in the present PC-determined environment these issues have become so politicized that they are hard indeed to talk about.

You're attempting to defeat any point you can't meet by labeling it PC.

I will say that man's defining capacity, his thinking capacity, his analytical capacity, and his ability to function within abstract through is one of his core important activities.

I don't dispute this, and have been asking you to use this capacity throughout this thread. You're only willing to take it so far.

Out of these activities come all that we value and the structures in which we live: civilization to put it bluntly.

I don't dispute that thought is very important to civilization etc, but am addressing my comments as best I can towards the topic of this thread you have started, Christianity, theology, religion in general etc.

It is important to understand this and not to fall into the trap of denigrating this orientation, which is, naturally, quintessentially masculine.

Sigh, gender has nothing to do with any of this, and it is fair to denigrate intellectualism in the context of the spiritual inquiry.

There are reasons why this denigration takes place; there are reasons why men are, shall we say, 'tricked' into performing this act against themselves, and you, Felasco, are almost a 'textbook case'. You have so interiorized it that you cannot even distinguish it nor are you aware that you do it/that it has been done. You justify it with every breath, and yet I suggest that you have not really examined nor do you really understand what you are doing. And I further say that it is exactly this that needs to be rectified.

You want everybody to place intellectualism at the pinnacle of the human experience so that you, an intellectual, will also occupy that pinnacle.

To rectify, one has to examine and to understand. This is not easy when one is driven by Politically Correct thinking.

From here out, when ever I can't defeat one of your points, I will simply wave my hand and label your thoughts PC thinking. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

What I am talking about and referring to is distinct from what you project onto me.

What I'm projecting on you is the mirror you'd rather not look in.

And truthfully, the 'bias' which I most certainly have and also desire to cultivate and to accentuate, is not one of 'tools', though tools have something to do with it, but of even more fundamental questions and issues.

Another way of saying the same thing. You insist everything must be analyzed, because you are an analyzer.

This is funny, I admit, and yet it is also revealing, I think. I would suggest that in perhaps a significant way this reflects your core attitude toward 'hierarchies' (in this case of religious figures and of institutions they might organize and create). Your humor is a form of ridicule, perhaps?

I am ridiculing my own pompousness, the degree to which I take my own bloviations seriously. It's an interesting procedure called sanity.

Is there a religious/theological structure that you admire?

Religious and theological are not equivalents. Religious is experience, theological is talk about experience. One is real, the other merely symbolic.
In Christianity I admire the walking of the walk, the experience, the reality part.

Because you are 'in reaction', and the terms I use, which you will not make the effort to understand, run quite counter to PC attitudes that you have installed and defend, it follows inevitably that you must paraphrase and rephrase my words.

I must admit I get bored quickly with lazy posters. The next time you
chant PC, PC, PC as a defense I may become an ex-reader.

And if you did you could then begin to consider what I am actually attempting to talk about.

What you are actually attempting to talk about is as many words as possible for as long as possible.

But I am not myself speaking about being an asshole, or a socially clueless nerd, nor ego-driven.

Because you're too young yet, and not quite honest enough. You're not speaking about it, you're just doing it, apparently sort of blindly.

I am attempting to speak about concrete and objective ideas in relation to which we (as men) can orient ourselves, or not. You make a severe mistake, as well as reveal your own hand, in reducing this a priori to an 'ego-battle'. It is not.

My point is about the process as a whole. This forum is primarily about ego, not the stated topics. Many of us, including me, often get carried away in buying the cover story that it is the subject matter which is the primary driver of this experience.

Example, you are spending literally hours a day typing to 2 or 3 people, as am I. That can hardly be described as logical, or a recognition of the great importance of these topics etc etc. You and I are the same, in that both of us will keep typing until the end of time if even only one person will pay attention to us.

You like to talk, talk, talk about masculinity. Being "manly" is being brave enough to see these less the glorious things about ourselves, and maybe admit them in public too. But, to be fair, it is rarely a lesson one learns early in life. It usually takes time to become that confident a man, a slow natural process which unfolds at it's own pace.

There are larger ideas and principals operating under and over the specifics.

Yes, life is full of things that can be analyzed. What I've been asking readers to do in my posts is more carefully analyze where it is productive to analyze, and where it is not. You wish to analyze everything, except analyzing itself, because to do that would threaten the game itself, which you find unacceptable.

If you were to realize this your relationship to what is being talked about, and why it is being talked about, might change. It is possible. Yet, if this is at the core, for you, an 'ego-issue', and if you take your own ego very seriously, you will only be able to defend your ego-structure and thus lose sight of the objectivities. Trippy, huh?

I am smiling here, because I'm guessing you are 30 at best, and you are attempting to advise someone twice your age on the great issues of life etc. But ok, that's fair, go for it.

And that the 'tools' we are presently using, and which get us into a mess of indecision and self-sabotage, need to be brought out into the open and examined.

You talk endlessly of examining things, but then you decline to actually do it.

Yet what I am speaking about it distinct insofar as it has to do with the construction of ideals, the definition of ideals, and the institution of ideals which is a whole other arena and involves work.

Yes, you are an analyzer and so you wish to elevate analysis to an exalted status at the center of everything, not just for you personally, but in a universal sense. If analysis is very important, then so is the analyzer.

I know from reading your posts that what you imagine is needed is this thing your call 'love'.

In the Christian context yes, all you need is love. In the East they approach the challenge by addressing that which is the source of the apparent division within and without us, thought. In both cases, the aim is to address the fundamental human condition. I think they are both good approaches, and each is suitable for some, while being less suitable for others.

This is an odd statement. First, let Harry deal with things for himself. But it also pegs my discourse, my choices, my thrust, to your actions and choices.

No, it doesn't. You are entirely free to go after Harry on the personal level if you don't mind me doing the same thing to you. I suspect Harry probably has too much class to join us to any great degree, but I don't myself have that obstacle.

If we don't find a common ground of agreement, do you suppose that we might bring it to a rest for awhile?

You are fully in control of how and when you engage my posts. You surely have no obligation to engage.

Yet I think that the view and the information that supports it is so foreign to you that it will take some time. It certainly appears so.

You are arguing for analysis. I am asking you to analyze analysis itself, in the context of the subject of this thread. You decline to challenge analysis itself. You are declining to do the very thing you are arguing for.

The Bible itself has only become available, and people have only become sufficiently literate to read it, recently. Say 500 years. I don't have specific numbers yet I would imagine that before that 90% of the population would have been illiterate.

Which clearly demonstrates that the Christian experience can easily survive the loss of literate analysis, because it has already done so for over a thousand years.

So, when you say 'Confront your own tool-bias' I am forced to conclude that you are not exactly sure just what you are referring to.

Tool Bias 101: If the evidence were to show that ideology is not an aid but an obstacle to the religious inquiry, would we then drop ideology? If not, we have tool bias, that is, a particular means have become more important to us than the stated end.

I should add that this is hardly a crime, as surely no one is obligated to pursue a religious inquiry. But philosophically speaking, tool bias which is not openly disclosed represents either a lack of clarity, or a dishonesty.

To be able to approach an ideational world is the beginning of the 'possibility of self'.

The tiny little prison cell of self is just what we hope to escape. But first we'll usually try making the tiny little prison cell bigger, bigger, bigger.

In order to confront the Reality in which we find ourselves, we recur to ideas, symbols, sentiments, and so much that it cannot really be named.

Ah, but I say that is not confronting reality at all, but ideas, symbols, and sentiments etc, ie. symbols that point to reality.

You are confusing the photo of your friend with the real friend. Look up at the night sky. The moon does not have a name anywhere except in our minds. In the real world beyond our minds, the moon is entirely nameless.

It is the water we swim in. Language and ideation is the 'tool' of our being.

It is the tool of YOUR being. And mine as well to a large degree. Now you are confusing particular personal situations with some universal truth.

To be literate means to have a relationship to this world and to have fluidity in it.

To be literate does not mean having a relationship with this world, but a relationship with words about this world. It is primarily the "literateness" which obscures a relationship with the actual real world.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Here is a definition of 'political correctness'. I use it in the sense of 'ideas that have been generated culturally and which are internalized by persons and accepted without [adequate] examination' and possibly too: 'that when examined reveal cultural and political narrative understructure which is 'political' but not necessarily truthful'. I would add to that the 'power' dimension in 'enforcing' PC ideas on others which is part-and-parcel of why PC ideas are formulated. It is an interesting if labyrinthian subject.

I don't dispute this, and have been asking you to use this capacity throughout this thread. You're only willing to take it so far.

I consider this a false challenge. I don't consider this desirable. Therefor it is not a goal I am interested in. I am interested in accentuating differences, not eliminating them. Perhaps that means I am interested in (metaphorical) war and not (metaphorical) peace? If so, fine with me.

I don't dispute that thought is very important to civilization etc, but am addressing my comments as best I can towards the topic of this thread you have started, Christianity, theology, religion in general etc.

Civilization and Christianity are thoroughly interwoven. When speaking of Christianity one will automatically speak of civilization, cultural institutions, etc. I am not sure if you understand the connection, which is inseparable.

Sigh, gender has nothing to do with any of this, and it is fair to denigrate intellectualism in the context of the spiritual inquiry.

Gender has a great deal to do with much of it insofar as men, traditionally and in fact, define the world of thought.

The term 'intellectualism' is a potentially confusing term. Do you mean 'intellect' or do you mean a sort of an obsessive use of intellect: intellectualism? If you mean the latter, you are referring to a perversion of intellection. And the term 'spiritual inquiry' is also confusing. I cannot be sure if what you mean to say is that inquiry into the spiritual, or into spirit, can only be pursued through non-intellectual means, i.e. non-thinkingly?

My sense is that you separate them. I absolutely do not separate them. I unite them.

You want everybody to place intellectualism at the pinnacle of the human experience so that you, an intellectual, will also occupy that pinnacle.

This is a false assertion yet it is your pet assertion. At this point I can see no avenue to your changing or modifying it. Still, to be clear, I am most certainly asserting that intellection [In`tel*lec"tion (?), n. [L. intellectio synecdoche: cf. F. intellection.] A mental act or process; especially: (a) The act of understanding; simple apprehension of ideas; intuition.] is of paramount importance to mankind. There are many ways to do it but it is a core activity of man. I also do not believe or accept the fantasies or romantic conjectures that it can be done away with or that it should. So we can at the least understand that our viewpoints vis-a-vis this question is irreconcilable. I accept your view but I am in fundamental disagreement with it. Again, this is not a minor issue. It is large. We part ways on this and some other points.

I promised myself that I wouldn't cry but look at me!

Religious and theological are not equivalents. Religious is experience, theological is talk about experience. One is real, the other merely symbolic.

I believe you are significantly in error on this point, and certainly in respect to Christianity of the West. I sense you are referring to some sort of religious experience as in Zen or Hinduism or perhaps even a psychedelic experience and in this I have no problem conceding that levels of religious experience indeed 'exist' (and I have had them). But my point(s) are different and extend from that experience in a number of ways. One is that without a vast cultural experience, which is also literary experience in the sense I use it, the 'revelation' experience, if it occurred, would occur differently. There is an interplay between what we have inside of us and the 'revelatory experience'.

And yet still, I am NOT INTERESTED in the mystical experience per se, I am interested in the 'theological articulation' because it is with that material that a man can really work. So, we can set out on the table another and fundamental difference in both understanding and choice in relation to what is understood.

I follow Ortega y Gasset ('Estudios sobre el amor', 1957) in the following:

• "Professional noisemakers of every class will always prefer the anarchy of intoxication of the mystics to the clear and ordered intelligence of the priests, that is, of the Church. I regret at not being able to join them in this preference either. I am prevented by a matter of truthfulness. It is this: I think that any theology transmits to us much more of God, greater insights and ideas about divinity, than the combined ecstasies of all the mystics; because, instead of approaching the ecstatic skeptically, we must take the mystic at his word, accept what he brings us from his transcendental immersions, and then see if what he offers us is worth while. The truth is that, after we accompany him on his sublime voyage, what he succeeds in communicating to us is a thing of little consequence. I think that the European soul is approaching a new experience of God and new inquiries into that most important of all realities. I doubt very much, however, if the enrichment of our ideas about divine matters will emerge from the mystic's subterranean roads rather than from the luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!"

These are fundamental differences in basic orientation, Felasco. I don't mind that we arrive at a clear demonstration of these differences because it is my view that we in the West suffer from a sort of weakening condition of which your (vague) view(s) is a symptom. And so I argue for a curative: "the luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!"

But I don't want you to be confused: I would not in any sense rule out any other level of experience. I couldn't because I have had many of them. But again: we come back to the body, and to our location in time, and we have to translate what have *seen* (in vision or revelation and in 'experience') into concrete works in this world. Again: 'the luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!'

I am smiling here, because I'm guessing you are 30 at best...

I am 30 at times. Most often (as I said) I am 273 and my bones ache from 'walking up and down in the world'. However, you will never know my *exact* age and I rather prefer it like that. The Internet is a place for projections. Becoming aware of that changes how one communicates.

Which clearly demonstrates that the Christian experience can easily survive the loss of literate analysis, because it has already done so for over a thousand years.

This is not correct. It survived because it was held and cherished in the scriptoria. But again we are only facing, again, one of those core differences. You wish to see Christianity or religious experience as separate and independent of culture, intellect, art, the mind perhaps. In your view, you would need none of any of it and 'the Christian experience' could still be there. I fundamentally disagree with you. 'Christianity' is not solely an 'experience', it is a group of ideas with which a person engages in differing ways.

I could go on speaking of this and yet it feels like vain project. The advantage of having done so thus far may not be for either of us but for those (if any survive) reading. I am strongly opposed to your 'project' yet with reservations, which I have explained: ''The luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!'

If the evidence were to show that ideology is not an aid but an obstacle to the religious inquiry, would we then drop ideology?

If I did I would likely try to drop it on your foot at this point!

What I have attempted to do in this post is to demonstrate why and where our basic orientation differs and to set them in contrast. What 'inquiry' is to you is anyone's guess. I capture some vague ideas from what you write but maybe you just haven't put your heart into it?

I will certainly not 'drop ideology' insofar as it is an outcome of 'the luminous paths of discursive thought' and it is there where value is held and where the possibility of creation resides. But don't let my choices or orientation stop you from dropping it!

Felasco, I do appreciate that you take the time to express yourself. It is what should happen on these forums. I will continue to post some additional things related to the topic simply because I enjoy it and it is useful to me. (That is why I write, mostly. If someone likes or hates it, that is a by-product).

But let us get clear of the area between us that is unbridgeable. I don't have a problem with differences.

[Harry Baird]

To think, Gustav, that I actually deleted a post from this thread at your private request, even though there was nothing wrong with it, as confirmed by a mutual friend with whom I shared it. You seem to want me to refrain from posting objections to you in this thread, yet at the same time you want to be free to snipe at me for things I say in *other* threads. That's some nerve you've got.

I find the last series of posts to have some, but limited, relevance to the thread as a whole. Making any comments on any of the various points will only re-open the whole PETA-style conversation. You can never win with such people. It is its own obsession and seems to have an almost religious substructure. And watch out giving out your address: you may come home to find your hamster has been 'Liberated in the name of the animal-rights revolution!'

Perhaps, 200 years ago, you would have been an apologist for slavery, as blind to the problems with our treatment of our fellow humans as you currently are to the problems with our treatment of our fellow animals (taking it for granted that caging small animals for our own pleasure is acceptable - how much more evidence of blindness could one ask for?). Perhaps you would have even seen slavery as part of our Christian Civilisation of which you are so enamoured. With "such people" you can never win - unless, of course, you take up arms and literally fight a war against them.

PETA are exactly right, but you don't see this because of your unexamined presuppositions.

It's interesting that you refer to those in the animal rights movement as "obsessive", when they are simply struggling for justice, and when you have dedicated many hours to the - largely pointless, since you are getting little traction - discussion of your own ideas in this thread. So, other people who are passionate about their ideas are "obsessed", but your own passion for your own ideas isn't obsessive. Funny how that works, isn't it?

I also cannot really comment, Harry, on your post. I would encourage you, if you so desire, to reveal the precise nature of the issues you face. Then, your choices in respect to them, and the way you conceptualize them, could be discussed in a theologically-oriented conversation. I have observed though, on more than one forum, that you avoid doing this. Frankly, you cower away from it. Because that is so one senses you are protecting something from full view.

You are delusional if you think there would be any value for me in sharing my private problems in any level of detail on hostile forums - "hostile" in the sense of being significantly composed of those - including yourself - who reject the very possibility of what I have experienced. Of course I protect myself. I already know what the outcome of such a self-revelation would be, and it is both pointless and unpleasant. This is a somewhat over-the-top analogy, but it's like asking a woman to walk into a room full of strangers and acquaintances and undress, so that they can analyse her body (for her own benefit, of course) - and if she doesn't do this, she must be "cowering away" from something. I mean, really, with all due respect: fuck off.

In respect to your notion that I 'deny your experience' I would respond by saying, no, I don't deny the experience but I question your interpretation of it.

I know you do, but you have no knowledge of that of which you speak, and I have made this point to you several times, but you have never dealt with it. You have nothing to substantiate your interpretation, whereas I have taken pains to explain to you the substantiation of my own interpretation. Too, there's nothing personal in it for you, no reason for you to *want* to find substantiation, to you it's all theory and it doesn't really matter whether or not you are right. For me, it's different.

But further: my concerns and my interests right now have moved in a direction that, at least as far as the present (*laughs*) 'conversation' is concerned (within this thread and on the forum generally), is likely unintelligible to you and to the other participants.

Now where have I heard something like that before? I could swear I've been in a place amongst people who think that their ideas are so lofty that mere disagreement indicates failure to understand, and where discussion of anything else is mere (haha) gossip. You wouldn't know of such a place, would you?

I guess until recently I'd been somewhat blind to your sense of superiority; it's funny what friendship will do. It very much fits with your Christian-inspired conservatism though: there you have a whole culture which fancied itself so superior that it performed such "graceful" acts as deeming inhabited land "terra nullius", and massacring its occupants, and of setting up an entire industry in which inhabitants of foreign lands were dehumanised, chained, bought and sold, and brought "home" to serve - without pay and in abject captivity - their (superior) Christian masters.

I mean, what the hell, they were only savages - and certainly, they would have had no capacity to participate in a conversation of ~~{{ADVANCED IDEAS}}~~ with the likes of *you*. No doubt, your position is that these are "historical mistakes", now corrected, and, of course, I'm sure you'd have no truck with the idea that there is both significant evidence of the persistence of that type of attitude into the modern day in our Christian traditions, and that you have a significant relationship with such attitudes.

Your tendency towards mockery I had become aware of somewhat less recently. But hey, it's "good-natured", so there's something wrong with *us* if we take offence, right? That's quite a handy little get-out-of-jail-free card you get to play there. "Yes, I'm the one mocking you, but *you're* the one with the problem if you object to it". Curious, isn't it?

Sorry, Felasco, to have proved myself not as classy as you might have hoped.

But Gustav, I can guess your response: "How feminine of you, to have turned to ironic personal commentary, since you clearly aren't capable of dealing in my ideas". OK, so let's examine your ideas and see how "advanced" they really are - or, should I say, "try" to examine your ideas, since you are so loath to put anything specific and tangible on the table? Apparently there is something unique that we ought to value above all others about Christian culture - or is that Western culture, or is it our Hellenic heritage, or are the three inseparable? You don't really seem to know, it all seems to be some vague mish-mash of indefinable interweaving strands.

OK, so, right from the start we have a problem with clarity, but anyway, let's continue: there is some amorphous "thing" (culture / way of thinking / body of ideas) to which we all in the West are heirs, and there is something (or some things) uniquely valuable about it which is (are), in your view, being lost. One might expect that in your thread on that topic, you might have gone into some detail about exactly what it is that is valuable about this thing, what it is that is unique about it, and why it is so valuable and unique, but no such luck. When I asked you to put those details on the table, you simply directed me to an online book. I have no idea what in that book was relevant to your own views - I put a few of the things I read in it to you to ask whether they in particular were what you meant, but no, you didn't want to engage in a discussion of such specifics - you seem to like to keep things as abstract as possible, presumably so that you don't have to really justify yourself, and can instead indulge in rhetoric from on high.

OK, so, there is something valuable about this thing that we are losing but you don't want to say what it is. Let's try to work it out for ourselves then. Let's start with the Bible, since, apparently, this is a valuable document in your view. Could the thing of value in the Bible be the Christian doctrines expounded within it, and by the various commentators on the Bible, and by the various Biblically-inspired theologians throughout the ages? Apparently not, because, according to you, modernity has destroyed the literal doctrines of the Bible. OK, so the Bible is not literally true, but there is something anyway about it which is exceedingly valuable, and is, in some sense, (partially) responsible for the successes of our culture. I wonder what that might be then.

I guess it must be the *values* of the Bible. But wait, many of the specific values in the Bible too have been "destroyed by modernity". OK, so then it must be the more *abstract* values of the Bible - the notion of a transcendent reality, and of the possibility of relationship with that transcendence, and of taking life seriously. Hang on though, we are supposed to be looking for something *unique* to the Western tradition - but these values can be found in many traditions.

OK, but there's got to be *something*, right? I mean, Gustav wouldn't be bringing forward the notion of there being a unique exceeding value in our cultural heritage if he didn't actually know what that thing of value was, right? He wouldn't spend pages and pages in this thread unless there was *some* basis for his claims, would he?

OK, so, let's keep on looking. Could it be the notion of a saving grace? Perhaps, perhaps - but if we abstract this from the notion of Christ as a literal saviour (which Gustav requires us to do), then can we really say that even this is unique to our own culture? Don't many religious platforms incorporate some sort of soteriological component? The answer, according to Wikipedia, appears to be "yes" - so then, is there something *unique* about the Christian notion of soteriology that is valuable? Perhaps, perhaps - but if so, Gustav has not done a very good job of explaining what this is. And anyway, is soteriology, really, what has advanced our culture? It seems to have been as much a cause of sanctimoniousness as elevation: "We are saved, but you lot will burn in hell - and yes, we are superior to the likes of you, and no, we will *not* associate those likes".

As Skip might testify, however, Gustav prefers not to focus on the failings of our culture, and prefers instead to focus on its strengths. So, we might ask, has this notion of saving grace been of value over the ages - have many people been saved, and are people currently being saved? And, indeed, Skip has already asked these very questions in this very thread. And alongside that, we need to ask, as indicated in the previous paragraph: how unique is this saving grace to our own culture anyway, what *makes* it unique in our culture, why is that uniqueness *valuable*, and how common in contrast is it across other cultures? I will leave these questions as an exercise for the reader (but really just for one reader: Gustav).

Well, that's a start. We didn't come up with much, but then, it's pretty hard to figure it all out when the guy who's doing the promotion refuses to talk about exactly what it is he's promoting. "Advanced theology", perhaps, is the best description we can hope for.

I have the sense of talking with emotional women and men who desire to become women and so the primary concerns seem, essentially, feminized.

You sense the emotionalism of femininity in us and I sense the arrogance and bullying of masculinity in you. The way you frame gender polarities is to take the strengths of the one and the weaknesses of the other and pretend that you're making a fair comparison - interesting when it's put like that, isn't it?

I also assume, as is often the case with you, that you will at any moment retreat back into self-intoxication and disappear until you happen to imbibe a motivational caffeine hyper-dose and rattle off PETA-Jeremiads and interminable treatises where God is treated as an engineering problem to be solved…

But, Felasco, you might see ^^ that my lack of class has some provocation.

[Harry Baird]

Another thing I find interesting, Gustav, is that you suggest that I publicly reveal the specifics of my (personal) problems, when you aren't even prepared to reveal the specifics of your (impersonal) claims in the very thread that you started to discuss them. Isn't it interesting how double-standards work?

I would suggest, too, that you tag your own posts, perhaps in the top left corner, right up-front, to let people know what they're getting in for if they choose to read your posts, preceded by an implicit "In this post I will be", and not limited to a single tag:

COP (criticising other people)
AMS (asserting my superiority)
WAR (writing abstractly and rhetorically)
SML (spamming multiple links)
SMCID (substantiating my claims in detail)

Get back to me when you've got an SMCID tag.

[Felasco]

It might be said that this thread is making progress.

We are journeying from the superficial level, intellectual abstractions, to a deeper level, personal psychology. The idea that forums such as this are about the intellectual abstractions is the cover story, while our personal situations and motivations etc are the real story. We are journeying past the press releases of our public relations department, to a look at the real people behind the curtain.

If we are to be manly men as Gustav suggests, we might hope for the courage to step out from behind the protection of the cover story, and face the realities driving the cover story.

I propose that the intellectual abstractions and the personal issues arise from the same source, the inherently divisive nature of what we're made of, thought. The ideological divisions, and the personal divisions between "me" and "you", are differently flavored expressions of the same thing. It's like vanilla ice cream, and chocolate ice cream, the central fact of both is ice cream.

While "my ideas" and "my situation" can feel very personal, I argue that the reality is more that both are just a natural mechanical process playing itself out.

Our blood is mostly water, and due to the properties of water our blood flows through channels in our body, as a river flows within it's banks.

Our breath is just air, and due to the properties of air it blows in and out of our bodies like a breeze on a summer morning.

Our thought is just symbols, and due to the properties of symbols our thought is continually dividing and sub-dividing, creating the observer and observed, the conflicts both within and without.

Our "lack of class" feels very personal, but really it is just a collection of natural elements, each doing it's thing.

All human beings experience this conflict between the public and the private, between this inner thought and that inner thought, between this person and that. Given that everyone experiences these things, we can argue it's really not personal, but has more to do with the nature of human beings.

We are thought.

Thought is inherently divisive in nature.

The huge complex human story flows from these simple facts.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

A Statement About the Use of the Terms Masculine and Feminine

In my way of seeing things, always in movement I should add, which I consider a positive thing though it *allows* for some contradiction, I acknowledge the high relevance of the 'personal-psychological' in any and all conversations (except perhaps in strict mathematics!), after all I have come under the influence of Dr Jung, and yet I also think it is sensible and intelligent no to reduce everything to 'psychological', or 'ego', elements. There are abstract ideas and ideals at stake.

My present understanding, or perhaps it is merely the way I would state it today, is that 1) either an 'eternal standard', an invisible, eternal constant exists in our universe and cosmos with which we either become aligned, or don't (the former resulting in harmony and progress, the latter in chaos and discord), or 2) that we simply chose to INVENT and *believe in* such a standard and such a preexistent and cosmic force or power. But, and no matter what, my personal view is that 'we have to' (we should and we can) chose a radical and demanding *center* toward which to orient ourselves. It is this---the capability of doing so and the will and desire to do so---that I am calling 'masculine'. I am not unaware of the dangers of using such charged terminology and I do see and understand the downside, and yet I do understand the distinction as being highly relevant. I don't have the sense that many will understand the difference between a radical, spiritual and 'masculine' orientation, and what it is contrasted to: the 'telluric', the 'prakritic' (prakriti), and also (hold on to your seats my PC-indoctrinated lovelies!) 'the female' as mere body.

In my view, an important essence that defines man and mankind is quite precisely 'spirit-masculinity'. It is very true that abuses against the 'female body' and against nature-prakriti perpetrated by groups that have abused 'spiritual authority' (men as the defining intelligence in history) have disturbed, profoundly, (what I conceive of as) 'proper relationship', and these abscess need to be understood and considered. Yet, in my resent view, it is still the responsibility of men and any given man to ardently pursue a path toward self-mastery (interior and exterior), and to avoid, as poison, the invitation to 'become a woman' as a solution to the tremendously difficult problem of masculinity.

When stated in this way, the nature of the problem comes more clearly into view. Obviously, these issues are highly contentious, and they are also charged with political concerns. At every level the process of examination of the core ideas, the core facts, is a fraught road. Simply by mentioning the gender issue one will immediately become alienated from vast groups of persons who have---as I say---merely swallowed certain ideas as naturally as they drink water but without fundamental examination. And the first reactive step they will take is to vilify you. (Felasco summed it up, colloquially, with his 'hoo boy').

'Christianity', in relation to the intensity and the rigor that I begin to define as 'necessary' and 'valuable', is both a friend an an enemy. This is indeed part of the problem. Sorting through it all is a challenging and demanding area. Yet suffice to acknowledge that this 'Christianity' is so interwoven with our being, with the 'construction of the European self', that even if a person outwardly rejects 'Christianity' they are still, and quite fundamentally, Christian. I have used the term 'Christian outcome' or 'Christian product'. The more 'liberal' aspects of Christendom will bring you precisely to a modern Walmart social and economic arrangement. Yet that is of course 'another story'.

But it is NOT another story insofar as defining another level of self with which to confront this 'liberal' outcome (again 'liberal' in a more theological sense, the European political sense, not as it is used in American newspapers). If I had an 'mission' at all it would be to assemble and to articulate the ideas and ideals from which 'alternative self' could be constructed. And in that I again refer to the *undeniable relevance* of the masculine spirit and the masculine capability. Nature-prakriti-femininity is molded, quite naturally. 'Parusha' can be linked with a 'masculine' modality, as well as with the notion of 'spirit' as-against nature. And so again, and with few misgivings and no apology, I make efforts to assert these ideas. They become very valuable for consideration and they can be used to combat an encroaching present which seeks to uniformalize men, to neuter them.

Edit: Took me 7 edits to get one link right.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The group of ideas, expressed immediately above, is NOT reconcilable with the feminized philosophy of Sri Sri Felasco-Bozovitch. Without being aware of what he is doing---the ideas and the processes are received and not 'forged'---he proposes nearly precisely 'becoming a plant'. Merging with 'prakriti' and with nature. And surrendering himself to the design or intentions of his woman or Woman. He writes it out in extremely clear terms.

Underneath our 'abstractions' is a physical, corporal reality. The 'abstractions' are seen as *unreal* as compared to the substrata which is *real*. To become *real* we must allow the *abstraction*, the symbol, the vessel in which meaning and also intention is held, to melt away. This is very precisely what I mean when I refer to 'becoming feminized'. The way that this plays out around us needs only to be considered and studied. The end result is basically to become a 'mass' that is incapable of self-direction because it cannot DEFINE direction. Unknowingly, and without examining consequences, this is the route to submission to various forms of unconsciousness. It is surrender of *responsibility* and also *duty*.

• "While 'my ideas' and 'my situation' can feel very personal, I argue that the reality is more that both are just a natural mechanical process playing itself out."
  
  Our blood is mostly water, and due to the properties of water our blood flows through channels in our body, as a river flows within it's banks.
  
  "Our breath is just air, and due to the properties of air it blows in and out of our bodies like a breeze on a summer morning."
  
  "Our thought is just symbols, and due to the properties of symbols our thought is continually dividing and sub-dividing, creating the observer and observed, the conflicts both within and without."

I sense that with this statement one *surrenders* to a 'prakritic self'. It is presented in a lovely way, as if in a Wordsworth poem, and entirely 'naturally'!

• "All human beings experience this conflict between the public and the private, between this inner thought and that inner thought, between this person and that. Given that everyone experiences these things, we can argue it's really not personal, but has more to do with the nature of human beings."

While this is 'true', it negates the essentially important---and 'masculine'---activity of defining ideas and ideals and also the Will required to live them. This viewpoint is again essentially 'feminine' insofar as it holds everyone, reduces everyone to sameness, forgives and *understands* everyone. It is not a bad attitude or choice, no, but it is 'essentially feminine' (or feminized).

[Felasco]

But, and no matter what, my personal view is that 'we have to' (we should and we can) chose a radical and demanding *center* toward which to orient ourselves. It is this---the capability of doing so and the will and desire to do so---that I am calling 'masculine'.

Well put, concise and clear, nice job. I will not further quibble with your inclination towards gender based labels, and will instead proceed to your main point.

What is the "center" we should orient ourselves to?

For myself, I propose reality as the most appropriate, valid and useful center.

Whether one is theist or atheist, believes in the supernatural or not, reality can serve as a trusted authority, given that it is beyond the power of human manipulations, misinterpretations, agendas etc. Reality is, if you will, uncontaminated by human weaknesses.

At this point it becomes important to distinguish between human interpretations of reality, and reality itself. Obviously, human interpretations of anything are subject to all kinds of human weakness, limitations, failings etc and thus should be suspect.

Gustav asks for something radical and demanding. Orienting ourselves to reality, putting it at the center, and setting all the competing human interpretations aside, is just that, radical and demanding.

With a single move it sweeps aside the entirety of thousands of years of theology, and our rightness or wrongness, our winning or losing, our superior or inferior status, our largeness or smallness, all that fuels the endless merry-go-round to nowhere of ideological conflict.

If one is an atheist, then observation of reality is already central to one's operating system.

If one is a theist, observation of reality without the attempt to interpret creates a quietness in which THAT which is larger than us might be heard.

When observation of reality becomes the center, when observation is valued for itself and not as a means to some other end, the terms theist and atheist melt in to irrelevance, and the ancient pointless game is over.

Or, if we are not ready for radical and demanding, we may retreat in to the coziness of our so familiar interpretations, and the merry-go-round music continues for as long as we need it.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

KPA*
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Esteemed Harry. I am not quite sure that you understand 'friendship'. Certainly we are friends, to the degree that friendship in possible through the Internet medium. Yet no matter how it is conceived I think it might help you to understand that, according to my sense of duty, I am 'acting like a friend'. True, it is not to your liking and this is understandable. But the bottom line for me is that unless you yourself 'self-reveal' and put it all out on the table, I cannot myself do that. But without that done I have no means to speak with you. And because I cannot speak to you I cannot really tell you what I think. And believe me, if you are upset with a few ironical and 'insulting' comments which are benign really, you would be decimated if you were to allow me to really tell you what I think. I do indeed believe that that IS the route you should take. In relation to me and in all your friendships. It is the harder road.

True, I 'snipe' at comments made on other threads, but they are not out of line with my general revelation of my ideas.

Just so you know: I asked you to remove a post because (I am somewhat embarrassed to say this) I had the impression you wrote it when drunk. I have a particular aversion to alcohol and to the *energy* of it. In this sense I am 'Vedic' and regard it as a terribly destructive intoxicant. The Vedanta philosophy, it may interest you to know, links alcohol intoxication with demonic descent. The idea, I suppose, is the recognition that there is something 'divine' in man that should not be seduced and 'lowered' and that the 'sovereignty' of that internal spark is insulted and also possibly destroyed. I read once in a 12 Step Program book that alcoholism and addiction ends in 'madness, imprisonment in institutions, and death'. But I suppose that would be for a bona fide alcoholic and you are far from being one, right?

In any case, I would define friendship in this sense as 'helping a friend to avoid 'madness, imprisonment in institutions, and death'.

Moving right along...

I must also confess that at some level, perhaps it should be defined as 'an abstract level', I agree with the Aristotelean notion of the 'natural slave'.

• "But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?
  
  "There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
  
  […]
  
  "Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another's and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend a principle; they obey their instincts. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life. Nature would like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one strong for servile labor, the other upright, and although useless for such services, useful for political life in the arts both of war and peace. But the opposite often happens--that some have the souls and others have the bodies of freemen. And doubtless if men differed from one another in the mere forms of their bodies as much as the statues of the Gods do from men, all would acknowledge that the inferior class should be slaves of the superior. And if this is true of the body, how much more just that a similar distinction should exist in the soul? but the beauty of the body is seen, whereas the beauty of the soul is not seen. It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right."

I say 'abstractly' since I don't have the material power to have or to create slaves. But I do not shy away from the fact, as I understand it, that though we carry it out in different ways, our modern consumer-culture, though it offers an illusion of 'freedom', is really the application of the 'master-slave' model to a mass culture. The meaning here, again as I understand it, is that in one way or another the larger mass of man requires a guiding and controlling structure into which they can be incorporated and incorporate themselves. Many people---most people?---are actually incapable of 'free thought' and self rule. So, they 'require' a guiding and defining structure, and they receive it. As I often mention I live in a cruder and more basic reality where the essences of these issues (at least to me) seem easier to see. It is bizarre to watch but right now (I mean over the last 10 years in which I have been coming to and living in Colombia) I have witnessed a pacification process where the American model of social management is 'installed'. It is a production and distribution system, basically, and the TeeVee is the 'controlling mind' as it were. And people who cannot define for themselves something different, something---what is the word?---more noble? More profound? have no choice but to flow in the stream of control offered by Greater Forces. True, if I were in charge I would set it up differently, but I am not in charge. Mercantile interests are basically in control. In Vedic terms this means that the 'vaishyas' caste or social group is in charge and defines culture. I would rather that it be 'brahmins' but they won't listen to me!

I will suggest that it seems possible to me that men or 'a man' could begin to define for himself a different path. The Beatniks I once read used to speak not of transforming culture but of 'evading' its reach. This is basically how I see things. It is NOT POSSIBLE to 'change the direction' of things. As I have expressed, once you let 'mass men' out of the box (as is a vaishya) his pursuit of 'freedom' will run its course until it ends in ruin or until some other (superior or inferior) force comes to bear against him-it. Yet it is possible to chose and define, for oneself, noble paths. To do so one must separate oneself from 'mass definitions'.

What other crazy shit did you say?

I cannot at this time reveal to you, because I am in a process of defining it, what exactly I value and devalue. As I say my ideas are constantly in processes of evolution. I do understand the Greek Modality as being uniquely powerful and 'good', and I also do understand that 'Christianity' (or Greco-Christianity) is uniquely powerful in the world of definitions, and that Western Culture has uncovered unique and distinct avenues that have enabled everything that we see around us to come into existence. But it is not all a rosy picture. Yet what is 'good' in it needs to be pointed to and also preserved. One does this through reading. If you asked I would suggest that you undertake this reading. But haven't we already covered this ground? Personally, all I can do right now is to point, ominously and dramatically, like one of the ghosts of Christmas past, in the direction of certain 'cores' that I feel have value and importance, while the seas of chaos rise and swamp 'us'. It is a losing battle, Harry. In the so-called Traditionalist School we are descending into an Age of Darkness and Obscurity. They do not see technological progress as 'good' but rather the tools by which enslavement will take shape. Sure looks to be what is happening from where I sit.

And what's that crawling up your leg, Harry?

What is ultimately important then, at this time? Masculine self-definition. Our friends over on 'the other forum' very much got this right (I always said that, didn't I?) It is a crucially important idea. I have come to serve it, like a Knight of Old. True, I am rewriting the Doctrine as I promised I would (BTW: Hello Brother Diebert!), and with some success! It is a very powerful and necessary distinction.
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KPA = 'Kicking Pansy Ass'