Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:02 pm
I still say agnosticism is the way to go. I'm not so sure about the god of the Hebrews. Could be a demon, a lesser spirit of whatever sort or could be a fiction invented by tribal elders and passed down from generation to generation like people tell their children about Santa Claus. It strikes me as odd that the creator of this vast universe is at all interested in one of the many creatures that sprung up on one relatively tiny rock within this seemingly infinite cosmic ocean. I suppose it's possible but one sort of looks at the seemingly random nature of natural disasters and the fact that anyone and everyone is a potential victim regardless of whether they are Christian or not and my first notion is that there's no "plan" to them at all. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, for me the jury is still out.
In order to understand the Christianity that has been the base of Occidental culture, and which is now in a state of crumbling (with all sorts of strange results even if they are inevitable) one has to back-up and examine the entire traditions of the Greek world, the Roman world, the Hebrew world, and the world of 'Alexandria' where they got melded together. One could, I suppose, jettison the entire thing, and I often feel that that is what hard 'atheists' try to do. But this is a terribly bad choice.
What I notice -- but if I describe what I notice I will be accused of ad hominem -- is what happens to people when they fall away from having a deep knowledge, understanding and appreciation of 'our traditions'. Part of that is and indeed must be understanding how the relationship with the transcendental had been so central to profound thought in our culture. When the capability to have a relationship with transcendental categories is annihilated through 'atheistic thought' which is, in my view,
alarmingly reductionist, those schooled in an anti-transcendental frame of mind lose so much and yet the strange thing is that they can't even recognize what it is that they have lost.
In my own case this was brought home to me in a strange way: I came across an old book, in English, in a used bookshop in Cali, Colombia. It was an English study book for advanced English students and contained poems and essays, sometimes just in parts, that were to be read and studied by students (
Select Readings in English Prose and Verse, adapted for the use of higher classes in schools and for private tuition, 1871). All of the poems and writings came from 'our traditions', including selections from Shelley, Faber, Lady Fullerton, Longfellow, Manning, Newman and so many others. Because most of the entires deal in religious terms it is in them and through them that the transcendental is presented. But I'd argue that the transcendental,
by nature, transcends the 'vessel' in which it appears. Theology and poetics point to something indefinable in strict materialistic terms.
All of these writings -- and I worked my way through them -- are deeply metaphysical, and difficult, and rather complex to grasp because they deal on things multi-dimensional. I realized that there are no students today -- none! -- who would be exposed to this sort of material. The barrier would be impassable. And I asked myself "What happened?" To answer that question is difficult and challenging. And for this reason, and this reason alone! I have resorted to speaking 'critically' of those who write on this forum. You are, and as I always say we are the *outcomes* of the loss of relationship to the depth of our own traditions. And what results? What results is a person, a man, who has been reduced to an intellectual low common denominator. Limited in language, limited in a conceptual order, limited in the sort of ideas and the depth of ideas that circulate in him, he becomes merely a babbler and a bickerer. He talks -- and he has nothing to say. But tell his this and stand back because he will jump at you and "rend you with his teeth" (if he can catch you in them).
When we return to the question of what the Hebrews wrote and did a reductionist mind-set is not enough. Indeed that frame of mind is quite bad. But who can sort through what is highly important and what will forever be relevant -- indeed exalted and of the highest order -- from what I have described as the cynical and manipulative efforts of a 'priest-class' attempting, it would seem, to capture and in a sense oppress a people through creating the Imago of a terrifying, vindictive and violent-minded god? In short, the reductionist mind-set
is a symptom of the disease and of intellectual break-down. But once reductionism, like and comparable to a mental disease, has taken hold of the person that person is now on the outside of the capability of thinking in the terms necessary for self-analysis and self-understanding.
Here is an example of a mind captured by the *reductionism* I describe:
Could be a demon, a lesser spirit of whatever sort or could be a fiction invented by tribal elders and passed down from generation to generation like people tell their children about Santa Claus. It strikes me as odd that the creator of this vast universe is at all interested in one of the many creatures that sprung up on one relatively tiny rock within this seemingly infinite cosmic ocean. I suppose it's possible but one sort of looks at the seemingly random nature of natural disasters and the fact that anyone and everyone is a potential victim regardless of whether they are Christian or not and my first notion is that there's no "plan" to them at all. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, for me the jury is still out.
However, to have been 'captured' and 'manipulated' and to have become the end-result of such vile processes is understandable! Those (like Lacewing who I often think about) who were raised in Evangelical settings and who later needed to escape from the 'mental and spiritual prison', break out as a necessary evolution. Similarly, Gary (seeking solutions, respite and succor) would desire to find "healing water" of a genuine sort (as of course we all seek) but is inhibited by those who occupy positions of authority within the religious communities themselves. Instead of offering "healing water" (the metaphor is profoundly relevant) they offer the equivalent of 'drugs' and 'poisons'. And who would not recoil away from those?
So, there is the 'demon'.
But where's the angel? Who ever have you come in contact with who carried within themselves an angelical healing balm? Think about it. These most certainly exist. And they are the most valuable and influential people we ever meet. And they often leave their mark on us for our entire lives. Certainly we find *them* in our literature. But when the mindless, brainless, idiotic *outcome* of reductionist modes of (non)thinking are the majority surrounding us, and indeed when we ourselves are the sickness itself, the end result, the *outcome*, who fiercely resists anything and anyone who might help us to lift ourselves up to another level -- then we have encountered not only where the problem is but our very selves who have become the problem.
So, I read what Gary writes (I focus on what people
put out here, the content of their speech and their discourse and try to understand what informs it) I see that Gary is stuck. He cannot get beyond the veritable barriers which have been established, and which he can't get around, and thus he laments: "I cannot get to the Living Water" "I remain unnourished" "I remain within a suffering for which there is no resolution" "My only positive statements are declarations that I am stuck and that there is no way out".
He is stumped before what he has established as an insoluble logical problem: 1) There can be no Spirit, internal or external, that has an concern for my being since I am, in the end, just a biological blob sitting lamentingly on a 'rock' floating in incomprehensible nothingness. 2) No step I take can reach, nor does reach, anything that feels like or is *resolution*. 3) I have no access to anyone who I recognize as filled with
generous Living Water.
