AJ wrote: A wonderful gift really, given in love, that if refused sends your soul to unimaginable torture for eternity.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 2:45 pmYes, it's an amazing gift. It's really quite astonishing it's even available. It's certainly unexpected, and nothing that can be demanded.
Allow me to work through what Immanuel has written here. It is important to try to identify where he is coming from and also who he is speaking to so to better understand his position.
Doing so, I wish to demonstrate that other religious systems and other metaphysical conceptions, attempt to speak to the same sort of
conditions that Immanuel refers to: "alienated from God, uninterested in righteousness, devoted to self and enslaved to sin, too arrogant even to acknowledge it, and willfully choosing an eternal destiny without God".
I am most familar with he Vedic religion and specifically Vedanta. And I can assure all who read here that in their way, and with their particular focus, they are also deeply concerned for *man's condition* and try to provide an answer for it -- a means, a route, a path, an outline to rise out of a determined condition and toward *freedom*.
What Immanuel does not realize and indeed
cannot because of his
specific religious fanaticism, is the very simple fact that other people can be concerned about these things and make efforts to address them. I think this is one of the main things I have received from Immanuel over the course of these months. I have had to face a man
so obsessed with a specific tradition that he is unable to realistically assess it from a perspective outside of it.
The human starting point is this: alienated from God, uninterested in righteousness, devoted to self and enslaved to sin, too arrogant even to acknowledge it, and willfully choosing an eternal destiny without God. Man's natural state, like yours, is to hate, ridicule and despise God Himself...calling down righteous judgment on his own head.
Notice that Immanuel, because of what I said (quoted at the top) is now aligning me with those who "deny the gift freely offered". Yet this is completely false. I notice that all traditions of deep spirituality and wisdom tend to speak about the same things. They all seem to recognize that an 'unexamined life' is to be avoided. That seriousness is needed. And that the deepest questions must be thought about and that a thoughtful man must answer them.
It is simply absurd -- and it is deeply dishonest -- to assert that other peoples are not concerned about *alienation*, about righteousness and ethics, about sin and sin's consequences, about *arrogance* as a blocking mechanism. And they definitely talk about what *union with god* or *service to god* is and can be.
Immanuel Can is really upset that people in his own milieu and around him do not pay sufficient attention to the sort of preaching that Immanuel is engaged in. But he is also unable to understand the degree to which he turns people off! Indeed, he shoots himself in his own apologetic foot time and again. He does more to alienate people from the possibility of understanding what is of value in Judaism and Christianity than he does to explain those parts that are valuable. He convinces no one. He brings no one over to his side.
And the other side of this blindness is that
he cannot examine the foundations of his own tradition from a critical perspective. So the moniker 'religious fanatic' sticks.
Is there a way around this? That is the question.
Curiously, and quoting Pogo,
"We have met the enemy and he is us".
To prevent that, God Himself has undergone the judgment we have been calling for, and offers us complete forgiveness without cost.
Here is an example of being able only to speak from within his own tradition. Since no other tradition could be considered to have any validity at all (since there is only one way and that way is through Jesus Christ) he can only think and see through the lens of his own determined system. Thus he can only see the human problem as one that requires 'forgiveness'. And he notes that Jesus of Nazareth went through the trial, performed the ultimate sacrifice, and redeemed man. Yet I say that he is unable to see that this is just a *lens* through which the human problem is seen. It is a story, it is a narrative, that refers to larger truths (which are metaphysical). But it is not the sole truth and it is not the exclusive truth.
And when people begin to *wield* specific and absolute truths, what I say -- and this is certainly true of Judaism and thus of Christianity (and Islam) -- is pay attention to the god that stands behind this sort of coercion. Because it is not 'god' and it is really
the voice of a priest-class who sends up a terrifying
Imago of god as a social and political tool. And that god says
"You will do as I tell you or I will cut you and your beloved children into pieces".
And here this is expressed as:
....calling down righteous judgment on his own head
These become
social hallucinations which are believed
literally. They become Images that haunt people. And they seem to become *fate* which is invoked and which then becomes manifest.
How is it possible,
and is it possible? to get out from under these terrible constructs?
But I would be remiss if I did not mention that as people break away from these *social control structures* (and the men who like the former priest-class intone the predictions of doom) that people
do, simultaneously, break away from the established ethical rules and regulations that had been established. And they are often *set adrift*.
But this does fit with Nietzsche's predictions, no? That a person will have to confront themselves and all their choices and actions not from the coercive stance of "you should" and "you must" but more from a mature and self-conscious perspective of "I will do and act because I recognize that it is
best".
That is a tremendous gift...and nothing anybody deserves. Refuse it, and there's nothing better to go to.
The 'tremendous gift' needs to be better defined. What I say in response to Immanuel Can's terrible threats of condemnation and destruction is that this voice of intoned curse is becoming less and less likely to achieve the ends which (one gathers) he is interested in. It simply does not work any longer.
But I really do think that we can ask ourselves what then is the *tremendous gift*. I mean this not in relation to the claims of one religious system located in Judaism and Christianity, but how could this be turned into a question: What
really is of tremendous value? Who achieves this? What really is being talked about? Produce the person who embodies this so we can examine him or her.
To answer that question requires actually looking at and seeing people in a
real sense.
turns to psychopathic rage. 
