Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 3:38 pmThe person *Immanuel Can* is not relevant to the struggle we are involved in. What we oppose is the *idea-constructs* to which he has wedded himself. Oddly, that puts me in a position of needing to argue against his metaphysical structures. These are giant assertions about what the world is and about the ruling structure that, in this metaphysics, is understood to rule the entire manifestation.
In spite of your insightful negations, you do him far too much honor. For one thing, there is no metaphysical structure to the idea that one must believe in a specific entity to be saved. It's nothing more than a demand that you must do this to achieve that resolving to a single decision to accept or not as IC has himself many times made abundantly clear. Even metaphysics requires a degree of logic to come across as viable. Where's the metaphysics in any of this?
What feels discordant to me about you is that like Don Quixote you strive against that which is essentially obsolete in the name of a specific type of metaphysic which it never really was to start with but still thoroughly acceptable to any deranged fundamentalist.
My view is this...
Anyone so controlled by extreme fundamentalism, which knows no other than itself, lacks all the essential preconditions for judging the merits of others who aren't likewise so debilitated. If someone doesn't think and only responds with glib replies denoting his inability to respond then that person, from a philosophic point of view, should be considered mentally deaf, tantamount to being brain-dead where instead of silence you get only gibberish.
Thinking doesn't glide on a monorail; it's a multilane highway allowing for detours and exits, routes taken based on one's power of deciding or arguing for the approach. No such decisions are necessary for a fundamentalist who has reached his destination, time in such a mind, having subsumed the goal, the conditions for being eschatologically deterministic, in effect, finalized.
Absolutes cannot be argued with; only the variables of uncertainty, which require a modicum of cerebral processing based on one's neuronal flexibility to resolve. A fundamentalist is a person thoroughly immunized against any such process...
from whom nothing can be gleaned or learned, and as such, totally ignorable. One can't survive in a desert so barren it can't even grow a decent cactus! What's the point of contending with someone whose mind perennially remains the same as do its responses yielding nothing more than simplistic point-blank negations especially so the more viable the argument.
The IC type mind is a thorough write-off as a communication device capable of arguing on only one channel, everything extraneous being simply noise.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 3:38 pmHere I can say with surety that the gist of the unfolding conversation will move into a difficult, a fraught, and also a dangerous zone. Simply put the rejection of Christianity is the rejection of Judaism. Now, the rejection of Judeo-Christianity definitely brings one into the zone of The Culture Wars and directly into ideological, cultural and other sorts of struggles that are playing out today.
But it also means -- that is to say that the rejection of the Cosmic Order on which the Christian vision and metaphysics is constructed means -- that you will either do without any sort of defined order and accept the *erasure of the horizon* with no replacement offered, or you will have to define a new order, a new conceptual order that will become common, accepted and even perhaps universal.
The way I see it, the rejection of Christianity is the rejection of Judaism for Gentiles which Judaism itself rejected. Judaism never needed the deformation of Christianity and certainly would have been better off had it never existed. Both Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, required a cradle called Judaism, both living abortions of its original mother, the former two themselves being in a culture war with each other but ironically historically united against that which fostered it.
We can live within a vacuum for a while ameliorated by the ghosts of beliefs called tradition which shrouds the yawning abyss underneath when no-longer upheld by actual or real belief. Tradition remains and operates as an intermediate, an anodyne, a plateau, however long it lasts among individual groups, until a new existential paradigm comes into being causing the after-glow of belief, i.e. traditions themselves to subside.
An epochal belief never disappears simply by the assertion that god is dead whose demise, in fact, is a psychic process and never simply an event. It's a development which negates, forces transitions into consciousness and born again in some new existential order of metaphysic which we are minimally aware of while it's happening. We have the imagination and the need; both will conjoin to create it. Unless globalism manifests itself completely (very unlikely), every civilization will brand itself accordingly since former beliefs, at their very center, are rarely ever completely dethroned. In that respect I regard culture wars, religious or secular as always persisting.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 3:38 pmIt is obvious to me, and I assume it is obvious to all who write here, and it is certainly obvious to Immanuel Can (as chief representative of the Christian metaphysic) that the rejection of Judeo-Christianity has immense ramifications. But as we see (if we are paying attention to contemporary events) the cultural and the ideological battles rage right in front of us.
If
the rejection of Judeo-Christianity has immense ramifications it's only because its ancient/medieval Weltanschauung, replete with abundant errors has been dismissed, at best functioning as a precursor to another, as yet unidentified stage whose locus has not yet been established. What remains contemporary for all times are the secular power plays which have never ceased to whose purpose god and its metaphysical establishment were both suborned to serve....in effect, a transcendent non-secular power serving a secular will.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 3:38 pmSo I referred to *the infiltration of eastern ideas* in the form of Judeo-Christianity and to the prospect of *recovery by a people of those attitudes and elements that can define a new and better modality*.
For up against the gods
No man
Should measure himself.
If he raises himself
And touches the stars
With his head,
Nowhere can the insecure
Soles of his feet take grip,
And he will be the plaything
Of the winds and the clouds.
If he stands firm
On vigorous bone
On well-established,
Enduring soil,
He will reach a height
To compare himself
Only to the oak
Or the vine.
As for Goethe, though a countryman, I'm not obliged to consider him as more than he really is or appears to be. Having said that, note the last eight lines in which he affirms the lack of any metaphysical dimension to our existence. The forces of nature are the indifferent gods, for nature never judges; it only acts and reacts.
The two following poems also by Goethe are further descriptions of these non-metaphysical transitions and transformations of nature.
1. PARABASIS
Joyful many years ago
Did the Spirit use his powers
To examine and to know
How creative nature flowers.
'Tis the eternal One and All,
Variously revealed, I find :
Small the great and great the small,
Each according to its kind;
Given to change, and then duration,
Near and far, and far and near,
Shaping form, then transformation-
'Tis for wonderment I'm here.
2. EPIRRHEMA
Students of nature, make this your goal:
Heed the specimen, heed the Whole.
Nothing is inside or out,
What's within must outward sprout.
So without delay one sees
Sacred open mysteries.
Truth in semblance never shun,
Solemn sport uphold,
What's alive cannot be One,
It's always manifold.
