Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 5:14 am"Drips with animus"?
Not at all. I'm just pointing out the historical facts. If somebody finds them uncomfortable...well, I don't know what to tell them, except that history doesn't change retroactively to please us. It is as it is.
My position here on this thread is to make every effort to see as clearly as is possible, and in relation to the extremely wide topic of Christianity, and of religious belief generally, how people orient themselves within the world of belief, perception of reality, interpretation of reality, and how they either come out in support of constructed and maintained orientations, or take a radically oppositional tack, or tacks of radical revision and re-vision.
Clearly, Dubious (hello my pretty-grumpy one!) and Harbal (hello my vegetating dullard!) -- just two examples of *moths* drawn to the debate and the conflict and there are many others who could be cited -- take the radical-opposition stance, though in very different ways. Myself, I do not really much care what they have chosen for themselves, and as I often say they are *relevant* to me only insofar as they explain, deliberately or inadvertently, positions taken in the larger culture.
The debate about the truth of the metaphysics of Christianity is one topic, yet it seems impossible for any man to say which practitioner of the metaphysical system will pass through those
metaphysical gates and onto the *eternal life* promised in the Christian vision, and which won't.
There is a point where *the debate* (the bickering arguments, the theological battles, the endless expositions) devolve into
absurd spectacle. For someone like myself, situated outside of historical commitment (i.e. historical in the sense of not having been born into a specific religious modality and certainly neither Protestant nor Catholic), and one whose cultural milieu was that of the post-Sixties and involved the rather *innocent* investigation of such widely divergent religious sources as Paramahansa Yogananda (The Autobiography of a Yogi), Carlos Casteneda, DT Suzuki, Joseph Campbell, American Indian shamanism traditions, and such an array of spiritual and quasi-spiritual modalities that became commonplace in the post-Sixties and with which my parent's generation, and following generations, got involved with as alternatives to traditional Christian (or Jewish) forms, it is very hard for me indeed not to understand religion in our present as being
deeply syncretistic.
IC writes: Catholic theology has often had a syncretistic relationship with a whole bunch of other ideologies and religions. Mysticism, Santeria, Voudun, Metis and Aboriginal Catholicisms, Marian Cults of Velankanni and La Vang, old English village superstitions, and even Marxism, in the case of things like Liberation Theology...the Catholics have always done business through massaging local deities and practices into their system, provided that the Roman system still dictates the total outcome, so far as their clergy can estimate it. That's why it has a different "flavour" in every country, with different "saints" and "holy days," and a different stock of stories, myths and traditions, but with an overall RC base to them all. It's a kind of chameleon religiosity, in that sense.
In this paragraph, I note, a Protestant with specific commitments *takes aim* through negative portrayals precisely at the syncretism which has always been so troublesome as a concept to Protestant theology. However, the central pillar of all Christianities is St Paul, and St Paul syncretized early neoplatonic ideas into his *Christian program* as did most of the early Church Fathers (both the orthodox and the heretical). I could go on to illustrate how Protestantism itself, no matter the degree of its idealistic position, could not be seen in any ways except as an evolution of 1,000-1,500 years of cultural and intellectual syncretism. So the use of the
accusation becomes, in my mind, absurd.
The *committed Catholic*, naturally, has a developed, articulate and intelligent response to the Protestant critique. But the committed Protestant has an established rebuttal which is trotted out more or less precisely as IC has brought out his critique. So what happens is that if one accepts the challenge to get into the debate, into the historical conflict, and into the ideological conflict, one is forced to take sides. Or, as is the case with nearly everyone who holds to the more or less modern view most common on this forum, to reject the entire *debate* and to toss out the entire undergirding metaphysical conception.
I have resolved this rehearsed conflict and this *spectacle* in my own way, obviously, and by seeing any determined metaphysical description as a *picture*. The easiest way to reference this is to refer to Plato's Cave where the denizens, at the lower levels, have no choice in the matter of perception except to regard the pictures flickering on the walls as *reality*, and also as *truth*.
It should be obvious that my view implies that there is, that there must be (!) a different and a more elevated perspective from which to view the entire problem of *pictures* in our world. And it is a tremendous problem indeed. Everything we understand to be *true* has been presented to us through a
picture that we have received. There is nothing that we perceive that stands outside of this. But we tend, I think, not to see
this.
For this reason when Basil Willey said that we need a master metaphysician to be able to see the elements and the terms of our perception as gleanings formed through our ideological insertions and impositions, the idea is tremendously sound but also problematic. Who after all actually sees in these terms? And what does that person who does succeed in seeing in these terms
do and
say? What stance does he take and what stance
should he take?
Philosophical distance and metaphysical distance does not necessarily help one to become aligned with -- and here I'll tern back to the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, literally *as old as the hills* -- either one side or the other. In fact, and in combination with the perspective implied in the metaphor of Plato's Cave, one is compelled to take a 'transcendent' perspective.
This statement ...
the Catholics have always done business through massaging local deities and practices into their system
... though it appears to be a coherent critique that requires some level or sort of corrective action which the Protestant or the Catholic zealot will certainly bring forward, can actually be looked at in a very different way.
The
human mind, and man's perceiving mind, always
does business through entertaining *concepts* and *conceptual pictures* within a mental, and therefore within an *imagined space* that is necessarily abstracted from 'reality' if reality is taken as the flow of phenomena. And it will inevitably compare one picture to another, and it will inevitably and unavoidably syncretize one concept-set with another.
We could take 'local deities' as, say
regional conceptions, or those
pictures which are formed in historical contexts. And here is the upshot: the European mind (and here I do not exclude other locales and cultures but rather hone in on
ourselves) is precisely and exactly that incorporation of idea-divergencies into our specific *pictures*.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health, also known as Sanctuary of Our Lady of Velankanni, is a Christian shrine located at the town of Velankanni in Tamil Nadu, India. The place is also a minor basilica of the Latin Catholic Church dedicated to Our Lady of Good Health. Devotion to Our Lady of Good Health of Velankanni can be traced back to the mid-16th century, attributed to three separate miracles believed by devotees to have been worked at the site: the apparition of Blessed Mary and the Christ Child to a slumbering shepherd boy, the healing of a handicapped buttermilk vendor, and the rescue of Portuguese sailors from a deadly sea storm.
Initially, a simple and modest chapel was built by the Portuguese in Goa and Bombay-Bassein, soon after they washed ashore safely in spite of a severe tempest. More than 500 years later, a nine-day-long festival is still celebrated and draws nearly 5 million pilgrims each year. The place has been called "the Lourdes of the East", because it is one of the most frequented pilgrimage centers in South Asia.
