Philosophy Now Forum

I am chuckling to myself a bit because I recognised this would be your thrust. However, and if you don't mind, I would hope you might spend a moment speaking to my last post, two or three up. I see the area which it broaches---the ethical issue there---as being quite relevant. I know from our lengthy PM conversations that you don't always recognise an idea or statement as requiring an answer so I am putting it explicitly.

Immanuel Can wrote:Is your assumption, then, that they were both good and evil? That what they did to the captured servicemen was both good and bad? That they are both heroes and villains?

It seems to me that you are moving the conversation toward an area you have experience in or perhaps greater enjoyment in conversing? I would imagine that you have some skill here because of your specific training and involvement in ethics. I don't have an issue with delving into this but I don't want to lose sight of what I had broached a post or so up.

In order to decide the question: "Is your assumption, then, that they were both good and evil?" you would, rather obviously, require an axis or a pole on the outside of the entire question. And clearly you understand that you have that, which is to say a God that is the ultimate moral arbiter. This also provides you with recourse to that moral arbiter and indeed you can assign yourself to that role. I venture to say though that your platform of analysis, possibly from top to bottom, is faith-based and not necessarily reasoned or reasonable. In the end, for you, it fades back to a question of faith. The problem is, I reckon, that at least 1/2 of the Earth's inhabitants or possibly 2/3rd do not share that particular metaphysical ground. It ISN'T necessarily self-evident.

As you mentioned, the Bushido and Samurai codes---though I imagine they were distorted in many ways, amplified perversely in Imperial Japanese military policy as also happened/happens widely in modern conflicts, in differing degrees, among all players---was the ethical structure that would allow for such radical praxes. Do you mean to ask if those praxes, within that system, were seen as 'evil' by those in the system, and that the evil was hidden or pushed aside? Or, do you mean that a warrior ethic that is brutal and completely unforgiving, cruel and merciless even, is 'metaphysically evil' in all contexts and would be recognisable as such to any observer?

Additionally, and you already know this, I tend to be suspicious of strict binaries, either/ors, and the hard Aristotelian predicates. They function excellently in abstract systems, and are thoroughly necessary in typical conversation, but always when the limitation is understood.

You also know that I regard existence itself, and having a body that is ensconced within biological reality, as an ethically nonsolvable problem, and that we are forced to 'make deals with the Devil' at every turn because---as is my understanding---Christianity is horrified and deeply resentful of the fact that we have to carry on in this intolerably difficult realm, and even that we have bodies. You also have come to understand that I regard classical Christianity, without rational and conscious modification, as being defunct insofar as it is incapable of actually seeing this platform (the plane of existence) directly. It sees, rather, a projected vision: an overlay. This is both a stumbling block ... and a manoeuvre of genius.

Was Eichmann excusable by his cultural location, or was he still evil, though his society may have thought he was not?

I thought the topic was the Japanese atrocities? Eichmann was very clear NOT to be excused specifically because of his cultural location. It also seems true that the whole regime of Hitler exemplifies quite literally a definition of evil to which we regularly recur, of which we avail ourselves. He renders into flesh our sense of 'ontological malevolence' (which term I ripped-off from Bowden but since you likely didn't listen to his talk you would be none the wiser! Therefor, I take the ethical high-ground here by revealing my theft).

Gustav:

I would hope you might spend a moment speaking to my last post, two or three up.

Was it the number 2 or number 3 to which you refer?

In order to decide the question: "Is your assumption, then, that they were both good and evil?" you would, rather obviously, require an axis or a pole on the outside of the entire question. And clearly you understand that you have that, which is to say a God that is the ultimate moral arbiter.

Indeed.

you can assign yourself to that role

Never.

I venture to say though that your platform of analysis, possibly from top to bottom, is faith-based and not necessarily reasoned or reasonable.

I believe this is incorrect. The two are not mutually exclusive. A person can have faith in that which is reasonable, or faith in that which is not. That he has faith does not settle which of the two it is. That must be determined on rational grounds.

The problem is, I reckon, that at least 1/2 of the Earth's inhabitants or possibly 2/3rd do not share that particular metaphysical ground. It ISN'T necessarily self-evident.

You're perhaps mixing problems here, Gustav. One problem is the question of what is objectively right or wrong: a separate problem is the question of how many people know the right or wrong. We've no reason to assume that moral perspicuity is equally spread around the globe, or that it should be. It may be, or in some locales it may be inhibited by custom, bad teaching or corruption of some kind: Eichmann surely furnishes some example of that, and arguably, so do Japanese prison camp guards.

I think we can't just treat ethics like a popularity contest -- at least, not without first proving that popularity is the true and just arbiter of right and wrong. On the other hand, right and wrong, if they are objective properties (as in "Eichmann was wrong") are not decided by the number of people who agree or disagree, but by the actual, objective rightness or wrongness of the action in question. No doubt there were many who thought Eichmann was right: and if popularity made "right" happen, then Eichmann would have been right. As it is, I think he was objectively wrong; and it seems you do too.

Do you mean to ask if those praxes, within that system, were seen as 'evil' by those in the system, and that the evil was hidden or pushed aside?

No: I think it's obvious that different cultural systems support different actions as ethical: the real question is whether that makes them right. It's a different question.

Or, do you mean that a warrior ethic that is brutal and completely unforgiving, cruel and merciless even, is 'metaphysically evil' in all contexts and would be recognisable as such to any observer?

I mean, is feeding people a cup of rice a day and working them to death, or sticking them in boxes in the hot sun for days on end without water, or making them purge latrines by hand always evil? And I say "yes," regardless of who is observing. For the Ultimate Observer says such things are evil. And they're still evil if people don't believe in the Ultimate Observer. It's objectively evil, like the Holocaust.

Christianity is horrified and deeply resentful of the fact that we have to carry on in this intolerably difficult realm, and even that we have bodies.

Gnostics have that issue, and so do theologians who have been influenced by Gnostics. But that influence is entirely unfortunate. My Christianity is incarnational, and celebrates the body as a good gift from the Creator, a gift of which, in fact, God's Son Himself partook. That's very different from what you are suggesting, I think. So I wouldn't agree on that.

I thought the topic was the Japanese atrocities?

Look at the topic of the strand. We were speaking of the Japanese as a further case under the umbrella of the original question, I believe.

Eichmann was very clear NOT to be excused specifically because of his cultural location.

Why not? If the Japanese could be, why not Eichmann? Why not ISIL's butchery of Christians? Why not the bride burnings of Hinduism? Why not child sacrifice in Central America? All have been or are culturally approved by a huge number of people: so that should make them all right...if morality is a popularity contest or a cultural sensitivity exercise....

It also seems true that the whole regime of Hitler exemplifies quite literally a definition of evil to which we regularly recur, of which we avail ourselves.

Well, according to what you said above, it would seem we must be wrong to do that. After all, if popularity or cultural compatibility determine rightness and wrongness, then Eichmann fits the pattern. But I think you sense what I'm saying: that Eichmann really WAS wrong, and would have been wrong under any conditions, in any society, anytime.

But ask yourself why you think this is true. Why is he so "exemplary" of evil for you?

I know why I believe it: but why do you?

Celui-ci.

Merci, monsieur. Je le comprends: mais, avec votre permission, je voudrais le debater encore un peu...

Premierement,

these massive deaths, at least the most notorious cases, have little to do with general ethics and more to do with a sort of psychosis of leadership (uncertain how to phrase this).

Do you really think this is true?

Did you ever ask yourself why you would suppose that something would be true of the collective that would not be at least latently present in the individual? I don't think that's even plausible: it's too "magical," to "emergent" to be believed. And not only that: have you ever tried to make an ethical or moral appeal to a collective without the expedient of appealing to any individual conscience? Why would the role of "leadership" magically produce a quality in an individual that was *in no way* present in him or her a few seconds before?

Et aussi,

And the supposed psychosis of the masses? We are en masse nothing else than we are as individuals...but magnified and distorted by numbers and power. We don't become more wicked in groups, just differently wicked...more powerful, more impulsive, more able to actualize our bad ideas, less gripped by conscience...but always, always, the reservoir of evil is in the individual heart.

For that reason, I don't look to social justice, to political reform, or even to the idea of a "Christian society" (as if such a thing existed) to save us. Unless we are individually saved, we will not be saved at all.

Or as that great theologian Sting put it, "There is no political solution / To our troubled evolution. / Have no faith in constitutions, / There is no bloody revolution.../ We are spirits in the material world."

A word of explanation

I noted above that you have access to, and refer to, both a God and a Law. Obviously, the idea is totally core in Christian theology and is I think best expressed in John: 'En archē ēn ho Lógos, kai ho Lógos ēn pros ton Theón, kai Theós ēn ho Lógos'. ('In the beginning was the Word ... etc.) No matter how one responds to it---believing or rejecting the specificity of Christian idealism---the more interesting fact is that the notion runs through our literature, our science, our Weltanschauung, our psychology: it permeates us. Also obviously, the notion predates the specific Christian declarations. Christianity, in my view, should more properly be understood as a modernised version of ancient beliefs---in fact a 'gnosis' in quite the sense that you use the term.

So, and this is important to understand as we speak to each other, my interest is in proceeding to the ground or the back-ground of an Idea that permeates our way of thinking and perceiving. You know from our PM conversations that I regard the Christian revelation as a Story. That means a group of symbols that function together. A symbol is not the thing itself, but a symbol is a complex of messages that allude to other *things* which in my view at least are more or less impossible to put into words. You also know that I believe we---all of us---function in and live in, think in and operate out of, our 'metaphysical dream of the world'. We live in an 'imagined space' and we relate to everything that happens to us through our imagination of it. Christianity then is a huge imposition of an imagined structure overlayed on the world, though it attempts to define existence in absolute terms, terms that can be explained or revealed in a story-form:

• En archē ēn ho Lógos, kai ho Lógos ēn pros ton Theón, kai Theós ēn ho Lógos.

In my way of seeing things this concept is totally relevant to the sort of anthropology I would define. In my view one has to come into such a way of seeing in order to be able to understand more fully what is really being talked about.

With that in mind I submit the following pages. They are scans from a book of essays I have been reading (Essential Writings on Race by Samuel Francis) that interests me for a number of reasons. But it also has to be said that the ideas presented skirt a dangerous territory. It seems to turn back on issues of 'identity' as an earlier poster here stated. To write about these things on a thread in which Eichmann and hitlerism are discussed requires numerous qualifications not the least being, for certain personal reasons, that I am not at all interested in defining anti-semitism. It is my contention though that the advent of Nazism, and the fact of it, is a sort of barrier beyond which we ('we') cannot move. I agree with Bowden who in his talk on Savitri Devi says that unless 'we' (the 'we' he speaks of is some aspect of the political Right) deal with what this meant and also what it means for our world, that (I paraphrase) we will not be able to advance.

That is the spirit in which I go into these things. It is all a forbidden territory, in fact. The cool thing about someone like Bowden is that he seems to be freed from liberal and PC constraints and so he unfolds a whole range of ideas that need to be thought about and discussed.

But the main point of the pages below are to point toward the Greater Idea: the notion of Cosmic Order: Rta. I am forced to dismiss Christianity---though in no sense to cease to consider it---because of the fact that it is steeped in ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense. It is plagued, seeped, soaked and poisoned by its essential hatred of the body* (as I say and which you always fail to understand).

When last we spoke in a rather long PM session I left you on the note that 'it all has to be reconsidered'. And that it does. 'You' have turned the symbol of your God into a weak, exasperated (and exasperating) homosexual, a too-soft man, a man who hates everything about the way the world really is, who cannot bear it and who therefor suicides himself. There is a core here which is so relevant to understanding Christianity-as-sickness ... yet to remodel it, which is necessary not so much for the masses as for those capable of thinking things through, will render it significantly different. In my view then to 'resurrect' the notion of rta is highly important and is a form of necessary transcendence of the present Christian form. Remember that I said:

• The individual most certainly can, and more often than not does, 'swallow his moral obligations by putting them inside the actions of society'. Case in point: you.

This was not just an opportunistic jab. In my view it is the Christian of today who lives out of a form of immorality. But of course all of that will have to be explained---or not---in other moments.

I submit the following to illustrate what I understand as the deep relevance of the idea of rta. It connects certainly with previous ideas I have expressed on PN.






____________________________

*You have the luxury of a Christianity that does not locate itself within Christian history, specifically the Medieval era, and a 1000 years process of thinking all these things through. You hop over all of it with your 'non-demominationalism' which is thoroughly and perhaps completely revisionist! Yet when I refer to Christianity and Christian metaphysics I refer to the way that these things were actually understood and lived in accord with in those previous times. We are in another *surface* now; we have come up to another surface from our previous medievalism and that previous 'total view of reality' (the Scholastic understanding and relationship to Cosmos and *meaning*) but---but!---our scientism offers us no tools to understand 'where we are' nor 'why we are'. For this reason medievalism is our unseen and unrecognised substructure, the 'substrata of consciousness', and still deeply relevant. By hopping over it with a jolly, liberal, Christian reading-room hop, you seem to---in my view of course---wind up in a thoroughly unreal realm. Good perhaps to indoctrinate some Central American peasant ... but irrelevant to map the territory into which ... somehow .. we will have to proceed.

as I say and which you always fail to understand

Not "fail to understand," Gustav, but invariably do not agree with. With the risk of offending you, I will explain.

I've studied the Gnostics extensively, including many of their key writings. I do not agree with your thesis that Christianity partakes of it, but I would concede to you that Catholicism certainly does. And that seems to be your frame of reference, unless I'm mistaken. So you're likely to feel right about saying so, and I'm going to disagree.

If you are using the Catholic frame, then no doubt you have been told that that institution is "authentic, historical Christianity," a mistake you share with many secular historians who try to deal with the subject. In fact, it never was. It was the largest and most politicized group of theological compromisers on the face of the planet...nothing more. As a massive, ambitious political entity, it left a huge legacy of the kind of data historians love to study...documents, paintings, creeds, visible political arrangements, vestments, rituals, etc., all of which really make it easy to locate. And historians often assume that because Catholicism is the easiest so-called "Christianity" to study historically, it's the most authentic one.

It's decidedly not, having departed massively from the Biblical text long ago. You don't have to take my word for it. The Bible has historically been such a threat to Roman ecclesiastical authority that for thousands of years they shut down the public reading of it completely; and then they burned at the stake all Christians who would seek to follow it rather than their perverse and compromised institution. (That, if nothing else, should show you how genuinely unchristian that institution was.) As late as my father's day, most Catholic priests were forbidding their congregants even to read the Bible, barring the road to personal relationship to God in order to increase their prestige. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you could call all that in any sense "Christian," it's certainly not by reference to Christ.

So yes, I do not agree, and am not likely to: not because I do not understand, but because I understand it very, very well. But I do also understand why you erroneously suppose...

You have the luxury of a Christianity that does not locate itself within Christian history, specifically the Medieval era, and a 1000 years process of thinking all these things through. You hop over all of it with your 'non-demominationalism' which is thoroughly and perhaps completely revisionist! ... By hopping over it with a jolly, liberal, Christian reading-room hop, you seem to---in my view of course---wind up in a thoroughly unreal realm. Good perhaps to indoctrinate some Central American peasant ... but irrelevant to map the territory into which ... somehow .. we will have to proceed.

I'm just not sure that someone whose frame of reference is Roman Catholicism is ever going to think otherwise. History does indeed stand in need of "revision" there, but not to suit a new agenda -- merely to reflect the simple truth it has missed because of the massive profile of the RC institution.

Historically speaking, I would say that the (nominal) church went wrong when it became Roman and declared itself Catholic (universal and political) which was (at the latest) with Constantine, and it never came back. Thus the only real Christianity and the only real church there has ever been is the spiritual community of those active in real obedience to a mendicant Jewish Carpenter and to the words and example He left to us. The rest of the ecclesiastical and political furniture is really nonsense. And thus, having no association with that Roman quasi-pagan political entity called Catholicism, I have really not "hopped" anything at all. I would submit that I have done nothing other than respect the teaching of Jesus Christ Himself, and conceived Christianity on the basis of the instructions left by Him and His immediate followers. What could be more "Christian" than to follow Christ?

But you and I will just have to disagree on that, I suppose. It cannot be helped.

FYI: I am non-offendable. It is more that I worry you may be offended by what I write. The purpose here is simply to enjoy the platform and develop the ideas ...

I wish to say just two principal things now before I head off to the gym:

The subject of Christian metaphysics and theology, and the development of the Medieval 'picture' of reality, the description of the order of the world and such, certainly is central to Catholicism and to all the European forms of Christianity, conventional or heretic (Gnostic). So, it is certainly true that when one refers to the medieval conceptual picture of the world (as in the view and understanding out of which Shakespeare emerged, a later form), one cannot discount or eliminate the RC Church.

Yet to understand the overarching metaphysic of which all forms of Christianity partake, that understanding supersedes the Catholic institution, and if one pushes back on the entire notion or idea, one must push it back literally to everything that precedes manifestation of existence altogether. That is the meaning of any focus on 'archē'!

You don't possess this. I mean you don't own it or control it. When I said earlier that I sense that you feel you can function and that you do function as God's Rep in this world I think you failed to understand what I meant. A defined doctrine is an act of selection and leads, though I use this word in a more technical sense, to forms of violence. To define things is to concretise them. (Law in a cosmic sense implies law in a specific sense, and also 'law-abiding', and then punishment). But you are definitely not alone in this. All of Christendom does it and so does the entire religious outlook no matter where and how it manifests itself! So, what I tend to speak about is a way to develop a stance, if you will, to examine religiosity. It is a perception-game. It is a game of coercing agreements.

Yet there seems to be---I assert there is---a very real and important and more inner dimension. That for you---as exotericist---is forbidden territory. These are areas into which you can't allow yourself to enter. It is Gnosticism. That makes sense to me. To hold to a defined structure enables one to be powerful in the use of that structure. If a given church did not do that it would undermine itself.

So, we arrive (once again!) at a similar point we have come to before: To define the 'archē' out of which the 'Lógos' and the 'Theón' manifest themselves in consciousness---become 'real' for us, or considerable, or vital, when we refer to these high symbols---is what I will always be focussing on. I am less concerned with convention and standard, developed views.

Additionally, in the post above that I asked you to comment on, I allude to the fact that---'in truth'---this form of Christianity has entirely developed itself within Liberal European ideas and culture. We live in the outcome of it. We have created in a sense a disgusting and vulgar imago of Christianity which however functions as an excellent political tool. All that comes out of this: homosexuality, consumerism, vapid focus on dancing lights, and the dominance of the inane ... is evidence of the success of this form of religiosity. The liberal, oversensitive queer is (though I am being a wee bit dramatic here) an outcome of this form of Christian metaphysics. I am not making this up.

By attempting to locate this 'Gnosis' and 'Gnosticism', and label it negatively, I think you are committing a certain error and I have and of course will continue to focus on this because to me it seems largely self-evident. I know it is part of what you must do and all that I do is present alternatives to it.

All ideas, all speculations, all formulations, all symbols, all imaginings, all encasements of what is alluded to---allusion itself!---is essentially 'gnosis'. It is quite possible that a Gnostic heretic and the RC Church itself have deviated into error, I take that as a given, and it would appear likely that man stands or is ensconced at some level within 'error' (the 'body' in this sense is fleshed error), but the more interesting thing here is that the notion of error implies a corrective, and thus the whole proposition of an overarching Order that predicates existence itself is really what is being talked about. So, all the specific forms, at least it seems so, fall short of offering a full conceptual model.

I attempt to transcend certain rigorous and rigid doctrinal positions, or as I say to gain a sense of what the symbol contains.

Thus the only real Christianity and the only real church there has ever been is the spiritual community of those active in real obedience to a mendicant Jewish Carpenter and to the words and example He left to us. The rest of the ecclesiastical and political furniture is really nonsense.

I think that to say what you really mean here would be helpful. Do you mean a Jesus prior to Paul? Do you mean a Jewish Carpenter and not, literally, the entrance of All Powerful God into our reality as an Event which functionally changed everything? Do you mean something specifically Jewish?

When you say 'The rest of the ecclesiastical and political furniture is really nonsense' you essentially dip the whole Occident in some sort of purifying bath that dissolves away everything thought, done and said ... except whatever it is, whatever doctrine or value, which you desire to bring to the forefront.

I asked you this before: What exactly is salvation?

Gustav:

I get Gnosticism, Gustav. I've done advanced academic work on it. I've read and considered its source documents, from the ancients all the way up to the new techgnostics and extropians. Believe me, I get it. I just don't believe in it.

I asked you this before: What exactly is salvation?

Have you? I cannot recall, and I think I would have answered if I had noticed. It's my favourite subject.

Salvation is not a form of gnosis. It's not a product of esoteric knowledge uniquely possessed by an "enlightened" elite, whether RC priests or the Illuminati. It is available to everyone, from the most ardent academic to the simplest person, to all regardless of talent and culture, and even to children. Salvation is to enter into a living relationship with the Source of Life, the Creator, God Himself. This is not achieved by wit or worth, but rather through saving faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. To enter such a relationship is be saved, and to enter into life. Not to know it is to be drawn away from the Source of Life, which is to be drawn to death, and to be lost.

It is this truth that the RC group has so long suppressed -- though it co-opted whatever Biblical terms it could find convenient to aid its own projects, creating massive confusion as to its true nature. The Bible is actually an astonishingly clear and accessible book, not a sort of secret esoteric code. Millions have found it so; and so can anyone who reads it in good faith.

Back to Eichmann...could there have ever been a better example of a person who, with all his abilities, was drawn towards death? And his society -- rife though it was with human wisdom, with advanced science and technology, with the best in scholarship and even theology -- was there ever a society more evidently drawn toward death? What would have "enlightened" Eichmann? Could anything merely of knowledge, of gnosis, if you will, have transformed such a man from his magnetism toward death and set his feet on the opposite course?

Why then would we look to gnosis when confronted by the reality of evil represented by Eichmann?

Immanuel Can wrote:Salvation is not a form of gnosis. It's not a product of esoteric knowledge uniquely possessed by an "enlightened" elite, whether RC priests or the Illuminati. It is available to everyone, from the most ardent academic to the simplest person, to all regardless of talent and culture, and even to children. Salvation is to enter into a living relationship with the Source of Life, the Creator, God Himself. This is not achieved by wit or worth, but rather through saving faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. To enter such a relationship is be saved, and to enter into life. Not to know it is to be drawn away from the Source of Life, which is to be drawn to death, and to be lost.

In my view it is exactly this definition which we must grow out of. And I do not mean that toward what is a rather specific Christian Evangelical creed, but all religious definitions that reduce things ... to the level of children. Even if it were true I would say that such a teaching should not be taught, not in that form. It comes down, I reckon, to the difference between adapting a message to a child, or someone with a child's mind and consciousness, a wilful desire to always remain an ignorant child, and the sort of teaching, and the definition of a praxis in life, that only a mature adult can carry out. If we turn to children, or to easy decisions that children can make, we significantly devalue so many different meanings that are hard-gained in life, and additionally children have little stomach for long-range discipline and their consciousness flits from one thing to another. And they are also impulsive, emotional and of course have little developed reason. It is hard to conceive of a child having the capacity of making a really tough and a morally-complex decision. And then children too just want to play. At Play in the Fields of the Lord ...

OTOH, when an adult (even an atheist who rejects all the transcendental mumbo-jumbo (which so quickly turns into absurd gobbledygook) who is sober, intelligent, prepared, and committed to self-discipline comes into the field of knowledge that I would define, he will have to make dozens, hundreds and thousands of demanding moral choices that involve his reasoning capability. He would have to be a prepared man, and one who had committed his life in very significant senses to following an arduous path, one requiring sacrifice.

Instead of following instructions, or commands, and going along with the hordes, he will be forced to deeply think things through when few others care to undertake that project. And he will then make decisions that can be said to be truly moral: decisions that he makes because his will and his intelligence have given assent to them. Decisions that he will then have to take responsibility for.

Frankly this is the sort of decision-making and the seriousness of approach that in many ways defines the Occident---your gnostic Occident?

To be able to speak about 'valuation of life' would involve a great deal of previous, and difficult, philosophical work, and to assign value in that category is certainly no domain for a child, nor one unprepared and 'simple'. To be drawn to life is too to be able to handle and to deal with both death and life, since these two function together in our world.

You have rather totally avoided the central and unavoidable (without serious revision) tenet and foundation of Christianity: that it has always revolved itself around otherworldly concepts and thus denied actual living in favour of a postponed living, and also an avoidance of becoming fully incarnate. I am going to imagine that everything having to do with post-world existential questions or prospects is part-and-parcel of gnostic contamination?

I am not immune---and perhaps that means that I am susceptible---to an aspect of the message of the salvation you define. Good will I would call it in the most simple sense. (It does not sound like much more and good will is difficult enough!) But I think that one could develop a very good case that the doctrine that you have defined, above, is seriously incomplete if we are to define a total way to undertake our living, and our dying, here in this plane.

And that is of course why I suggest that we have no other choice but to push much harder for, and to demand, and subject ourselves to, much harder and more demanding structures of philosophy and praxis.

A mass of children, a civilisation of children, who want it all easy and to be spoonfed their 'truth' will result, quite logically, in very much what we see coming up around us. The relationship, the cause-and-effect implied, is rather startling. To assume, and to teach others, that their God is essentially a simpleton, and that such simpletonism is actually desired by the Author of all creation, and to present it as a decision and a statement that could be expressed in some 'confession of the mouth' by a child, is definitely a platform requiring serious analysis.

Gnosis is inevitably imperious and elitist -- which may be very attractive for those whose problem is pride, but renders it absolutely impossible for the simple, no matter how sincere they may be. Christianity, in contrast, is open to everyone.

You regard that as a weakness: I regard it as the grace of God. I do believe He's much kinder than the Gnostic illuminati. I must confess I find Gnosticism a rather cruel and self-important creed, and one that leaves most people without hope. You may not mind: I wonder if the God who made those people does...

You have rather totally avoided the central and unavoidable (without serious revision) tenet and foundation of Christianity: that it has always revolved itself around otherworldly concepts and thus denied actual living in favour of a postponed living, and also an avoidance of becoming fully incarnate.

This isn't true, but I see I can't convince you of that. Or rather, I should say that your assertion amounts to a half-truth gone mad.

I agree this far: it is true that Christianity has otherworldly concerns as its primary focus; what would one expect? But it's totally wrong to think this is dismissive of the body or the physical word. Now,Gnosis is, for sure; but Christianity can never be, since "the Word became flesh," as John says. Or as the author of Hebrews writes, "since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same..." If God was manifest in the flesh, how can flesh itself be evil? And how could anyone genuinely Christian believe such a thing?

The Bible simply doesn't support the Catholic or Gnostic readings on that, whether I can convince you or not. So perhaps I'll simply register my dissent, and let that stand as it may. I really cannot agree: I know too much about what the Bible actually says on the subject.

I am going to imagine that everything having to do with post-world existential questions or prospects is part-and-parcel of gnostic contamination?

Something's wrong with this sentence, or with the way I'm reading it. I'm missing its import.

if we are to define a total way to undertake our living, and our dying, here in this plane.

And are we going to do that?

Why? And if we wanted to, how would we know for certain it was right to do so? If there actually were another plane, why would confining ourselves to thinking only about this one make any sense?

And that is of course why I suggest that we have no other choice but to push much harder for, and to demand, and subject ourselves to, much harder and more demanding structures of philosophy and praxis.

This has never worked -- not since the dawn of human history. Shall we keep trying until we all die? I would say we should not.

Now, you say Christianity is simple: and it is, in one sense -- so simple a child can be saved. And it's a good thing it is that simple. For were it not, how many would there be who simply could not be saved?

But it's not simplistic. I needn't point out to you that Biblical theology has occupied some of the best minds in Western history and all around the world for two thousand years, and the Jews for a lot longer. So before you conclude that it's too simple, hadn't you better ask yourself what they've really been doing? And hadn't you better ask yourself why it's still true today that brilliant minds still find a challenge in those books?

Come on, Gustav...think for ten seconds of the people in history who have been passionately dedicated Christians, and you'll know it's no philosophy for fools. At the doorway, it may be simple: but the inner chambers have complexities sufficient to stretch the greatest minds in history.

But now, let's see what your Gnosis has: what is the Gnostic explanation for Eichmann?

The mistake here, and this of course began in our lengthy PM conversations, is that you have been able---you feel justified---in assigning a negative label of Gnostic to describe what I think or the ideas I am developing. It is not possible to control or to modify how another chooses to define another so I accepted it. But an issue is developing where, by accepting your definition and your structure, I am locked into a debate that I sort of don't want to have.

What I mean too really is simple: you cannot win a debate with a 'typical believing Christian' because, by definition, their view and understanding is 'right' and also by definition yours is 'wrong'. However, I would not ask you to modify your ideas and that is not really my point here.

But I do not see things---not at all---in binary terms. So, I have no problem at all exploring all the various forms of Christianity and just seeing how they functioned, and what people were able to construct out of those idea-systems. Because we can see, now, into an ancient idea-system and understand how it mis-functioned, and even miscarried, I think this (should) give us a unique perspective to be able to analyse those idea-systems surrounding us that are accepted as 'The Way Things Are'---and of course also the metaphysical assumptions underlying our present age---and then too our own positions. My understanding is that we are in a huge process of redefinition as we come to new understandings and new ways to see things, express truths.

I note here, now, that you wish to argue against what I take to be, what you apparently take to be, your supreme enemy: Gnostics and Gnosis. It appears obvious to me, though you might clarify it differently, that everything that is not non-denominational Christianity (your branch of it and however you understand and define it) is 'Gnosticism'. I won't bother to name the various non-Christian and then non-non-denominationalist varieties that exist. The entire structure of religious thought is all contaminated therefor and the only one that has validity and can approach 'truth' is non-denominationalism which aligns itself around the mendicant Jewish Carpenter. I am not trying to be deliberately difficult, nor snide. I think that this is your position and if that is so I can respect it.

I agree this far: it is true that Christianity has otherworldly concerns as its primary focus; what would one expect? But it's totally wrong to think this is dismissive of the body or the physical word. Now,Gnosis is, for sure; but Christianity can never be, since "the Word became flesh," as John says. Or as the author of Hebrews writes, "since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same..." If God was manifest in the flesh, how can flesh itself be evil? And how could anyone genuinely Christian believe such a thing?

Again, you have the 'luxury' as I am calling it to dismiss the European Christian tradition generally, which very certainly and truthfully has had many problems with carnality and the earth-plane. Doing this, you can then redefine a special Christianity which, according to you, exults in physicalness and has no issue with incarnation and mortality. But we have covered this ground, haven't we? The Christianity you define, excepting the rigour of a necessity of holding strictly to halachah, seems in this sense more a form of Judaism. You certainly can and have every right to define whatever you wish to define, but it does not seem fair to call it 'Christianity' since Christianity is what happened when the Greco-Christian world met Europe.

The Bible simply doesn't support the Catholic or Gnostic readings on that, whether I can convince you or not. So perhaps I'll simply register my dissent, and let that stand as it may. I really cannot agree: I know too much about what the Bible actually says on the subject.

The Bible, both Jewish and also Christian, is an astounding and a rich source. It is foundational to almost everything that we think and do. One could devote a life just to tracing all of that. But the Bible does not, in the conversation I am interested in having, define the issues. And certainly not the New Testament nor the Epistles. Nor the Early Church Fathers. In my view one does better to step back from a specific source and look at the entire ancient world. If one became interested in doing that, one could turn to resources like Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture by Werner Jaeger as a good starting point. In 3 volumes he covers the whole sweep of that corner of the ancient world. And having done that one would realise that what is said to be 'new' in Christianity is not new, and what is good in Christianity (worthy, valuable) is not necessarily Christian. Christianity is in my view significantly revisionist. It is a compendium. It is many things and of course many excellent things, things really remarkable and important. Yet I venture to say that the angle you take in limiting it so much is an aspect of its undesirable side.

I wrote: 'if we are to define a total way to undertake our living, and our dying, here in this plane.'

You wrote: Why? And if we wanted to, how would we know for certain it was right to do so? If there actually were another plane, why would confining ourselves to thinking only about this one make any sense?

I think that what you are trying to say is that you consider the Bible, and the New Testament, or in any case the Gospels, as revealed scripture and therefor we know what is right and what isn't. The work has been done for us.

I am afraid that I'd have to---if I have understood you aright---reject this assumption. That predicate. Especially now on a farther shore of history. And basically this is what I have been trying to communicate in all that I have written on the topic of religion. I am interested in exploring the common traditions of the Indo-Europeans and I think that there we can discover all sorts of different ideas which we can use. Perhaps I can say this: By grasping where we have come from we might be in a better position to define what really is valuable, and what really needs to be protected.

But we have only skirted that conversation because it is not one you have any interest in, it seems to me.

Now, you say Christianity is simple: and it is, in one sense -- so simple a child can be saved. And it's a good thing it is that simple. For were it not, how many would there be who simply could not be saved?

'Salvation' is your category. I see it as a terribly problematic term. It is similar to 'enlightenment'. Possibly one of the reasons---one among many!---that we can't meet so well here is that 'salvation' is not a meaningful category, for me. I am really only interested in ideas and traditions that can be used to create worthy things while we are alive.

...think for ten seconds of the people in history who have been passionately dedicated Christians, and you'll know it's no philosophy for fools. At the doorway, it may be simple: but the inner chambers have complexities sufficient to stretch the greatest minds in history.

All the writing I have done, nearly all of the writing on this forum, has circled this topic. It is a little surprising that you would write what you have written here. But it seems pretty clear I have a different orientation in relation to it.
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I was trying to think of something funny to say, to lighten the mood, toward a Gnostic explanation for Eichmann. The best I can come up with is that he never heard Captain Beefheart sing Ice cream for Crow. Might have saved him...

Gustav:

I think you're right...we're not going to go far here. The reason is that your thesis requires certain things to be said about "Christianity" that are predicated on an incorrect genealogy of Christianity itself. Without the version of history you want as your starting point, you can't get your project off the ground, it seems. But you can hardly expect me to accept your version as a starting point when I know full well, speaking as an insider to the faith rather than merely as an outside observer, that the differences between what you trace as "Christianity" and what I would know to be genuinely the Christian message are so different.

Switch it around: if I tried to tell you what your views had to be, and floated to you the idea that you owed me to trace your intellectual lineage and moral responsibility through everything ever done by anyone who called him or herself a "Gnostic" -- everyone from the Marcionites to the Manichees to the Theosophists -- you'd surely call me on it...and rightly so. It would be unfair, and I shouldn't expect you to agree unless it really were true that you subscribe to all the things those people thought and did.

I'm not a Catholic, and I owe that organization no loyalty. Nor do I answer for what those who were disobedient to the moral dictates of their own proclaimed faith may have done. The version of history that requires me to do that is merely a slander, but unless you are prepared to reconsider the history you have in mind, we cannot make much headway.

One of us may have made up his mind about this before he began. But if so, maybe it wasn't me.

Reviewing the thread, I think that you wish to have a faith-oriented conversation, with Nazism as your backdrop, with ontological evil as the backdrop, so to be able to speak about the excellence of conversion to Christianity and disciplement under Jesus.

The conversation I desire to have is different. A specific conversation about faith, or how a given man develops a 'relationship' with divinity, and all that attends that, is to me acutely private. I cannot imagine how a conversation about such things could occur on a public forum and one not specifically devoted to that topic. Though I might assume that a faith and conversion conversation could be interesting for those who wished to participate in it, for various reasons I am not available for it.

I'm not a Catholic, and I owe that organization no loyalty. Nor do I answer for what those who were disobedient to the moral dictates of their own proclaimed faith may have done. The version of history that requires me to do that is merely a slander, but unless you are prepared to reconsider the history you have in mind, we cannot make much headway.

There is a great deal of material written on the topic of Christianity from many different angles, and the better of it opens up into a wide conversation and a very interesting one. I could list 30 titles that, at least to me, seem super-interesting and historically sound.

We know that many Protestants have deep issues with Catholicism. Some literally demonise the Church. But that usually occurs within a faith-oriented conversation, a doctrinal conversation that will always occur and recur. I am not available for that conversation though I imagine you could have it on a Christian forum. I don't need to enter into that conversation with you because I have come to understand your faith-position. I could repeat it back to you. It can be expressed in one paragraph. It is simplicity itself.

You should have that conversation with as many people are are interested in it. I am not so sure though that PN forum is the place for it though perhaps it is exactly the place for it, I can't really say. But philosophy is so analytical and it values its sharp analytical tools. Things are more often taken apart than assembled in every forum of philosophy I have visited to date. It is not a place for building-up.

Building a religious platform---the construction of a man's religious and existential platform within his self---is totally personal and I think that one would undertake that after submitting oneself to the philosophical/analytical process. Or, one would simply convert. Those are just a couple of shared thoughts but as I say I am not interested in a Christian faith-exchange conversation with you or with anyone.

The things that interest me are, of course, all the things I have written about in this thread and in other places to. And too I am aware that my topics and my thrusts and my 'TLTR' posts are rather imposing. It would be worse if I wasn't aware of it ...

Reviewing the thread, I think that you wish to have a faith-oriented conversation, with Nazism as your backdrop

Not wrong, but only trivially right: you've only discovered the obvious.

Your comments take me back to an interview I have read between The Humanist magazine and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (prior to his demise, of course). The interviewer from The Humanist asked Roddenberry if it concerned him that so many of his episodes had buried philosophical content, and particularly humanist ideology. He answered that it really didn't. After all, he said, "What can anything I create be, but 'Roddenberry on life'?"

He was who he was. He was saying that his ideology was not incidental, disposable or optional. As a humanist himself, he was being authentic in portraying his own values, and in creating out of his own understanding of the world...and he could not somehow be more authentic if he had attempted to take on alternate ideologies In which he actually did not believe! We can only represent how things are for us...the heuristic position of neutrality is a fake, and we're never really successful at sustaining it. Roddenberry was saying didn't bother playing that game, and wouldn't be good at it if he did.

That's how we all do business...from our own worldview. If we don't believe it, and if it is not the filter through which we categorize and make sense of reality, then it is a mere plaything, not a worldview at all; and our real worldview is something unknown...perhaps even to us.

Now you -- you seem to say you're not really a Gnostic. You seem to say you're not a Catholic. Well, fine: I couldn't expect you to be either. Nor could I expect you to participate in a conversation that did not take you as you are.

So I well understand that you are not available for certain kinds of conversation. And I accept that. On the converse, you must realize that I am a Christian. I would not be one, if I did not actually recognize reality through that medium, and did not speak authentically from what I genuinely believe to be true. So you will understand that for me, a Christian-faith- type exchange is the only kind that's possible. What would you expect from a Christian?

And as a Christian, I see the Eichmann problem as a powerful manifestation of the truth of Biblical anthropology. I find its account of human nature superbly capable of accounting for his existence and actions. Since it is the most accurate way of seeing the situation, I believe, why would I opt for another...unless you could show me it was better. And that you have not even attempted, so I don't know if you can do it.

So no hard feelings: it seems I'm not the conversation partner you're looking for. No problem.

Are we finishing up here or just beginning another round?

Analysing your anecdote, and the point you wish to illustrate, I have a couple of comments. I think that my comments will add a piece that is missing from your intellectual and perhaps also spiritual conclusions about my person and about my interests and capabilities. But we have already covered this ground---unsuccessfully from my perspective at least---in the PM conversations we have had.

Basically what I say to you---as the 'confirmed traditional Bible Christian' as this is the role you assume for yourself---is that you have no way to understand nor to categorise my experience on the spiritual plane. I say this without a drop of rancour (and please keep this in mind): Yet I resist your effort to attach names and labels to my experience. And I believe that anyone that you encounter would have a similar reaction when/if you were to carry on in that way. I don't ask that you change your thrust or the way that you organise perception. Every position that a person takes and defines is both---on some level---a trap and also the very lever that allows them to move their world (so to speak).

What I feel that I can do---and it is a strength that I desire to hone and polish---is to weave in and out of narratives and I mean this more or less intellectually. But it goes beyond 'mere intellect' too. Additionally, I hold it as a value to weave in and out of perceptual stances. It may, or it may not, interest you to know that I have lived, very really, a relationship similar to that which you describe as the basis in your faith-position. And I have also lived from other platforms. It is because of a certain 'inner configuration' that I am called to (in a manner of speaking), and have some skill in, 'weaving in and out' as I put it.

I say this to qualify what you have written here: "That's how we all do business ...from our own worldview. If we don't believe it, and if it is not the filter through which we categorize and make sense of reality, then it is a mere plaything, not a worldview at all; and our real worldview is something unknown...perhaps even to us." I suggest that one of the reasons that you and I cannot understand each other, or cannot seem to arrive at any but a very general 'sort of' stance of shared agreement of value, is because you are forced to stay within one place. You have a doctrinal stake planted. You have a ground to defend. A doctrine. You have advanced with this to a certain age from which there will occur no additional shift. Choices made ... become Fate. And certainly you have to raise a substantial defence against those pesky Gnostics who seep through the walls ... or who pop up in your breakfast cereal.

Conversation, to me, is tricky if only because---and especially in this medium---it is a form of sparring. It is a kind of fighting really. It can involve what I term 'violence'. I find that I hold myself back from thrusts that are too violence-laden---and I don't only or exclusively mean toward you personally but really toward anyone---because I see a man's faith as being hard-won. I don't think faith is at all rational though we are all asked to defend it rationally and we undermine our own faith by demanding that it conform to rationality.

(I also have come to understand that self-defense, against a myriad of distorted ideas and untruths, is very much a part of the path that I find myself on. I am speaking about society at large, politically-correct idea-structures, as well as 'identity' in the more radical sense. All of that is what I desire to explore, privately and in my writing).

You in a significant and notable sense---as idea structure, as conformist, as a pole of judgment---represent to me an enemy. You are something that I have had and will have to confront and also to defeat. You represent to me the backward-turning, the regression, the refusal to advance which I have to battle, and defeat, in myself. You are really rather chummy and nice, and of course polite, so it makes it somewhat harder to strike out at exactly what is necessary to defeat in you. (Which is not you, not your person). Let us take one example: You claim 'life' for yourself. You exclaim with a pure and 'obnoxiously typical' certainty that is oh-so-Christian that this is your endeavour, your realm, your purpose, your desire. From your self-defined cat bird's seat you define away what others do and think or how they relate to the question of Value (life essentially). Your attitude is, in essence, what someone like me has had to battle. My incarnation, if you will, has been about carrying out that battle. You have no right at all to assert that you have some special access to 'life' over and against any other. It is startling hubris that you imagine you do. To defeat that hubris will, I suggest, result in your collapse, and thus I do not recommend that you defeat it. Hold tight to it! At all cost.

See I think that getting things out on the table is really more interesting than namby-pamby game-playing. But it has to be done in a gentlemanly manner. When it ceases to be gentlemanly, I exit.

As it turns out, and despite Nazism or Maoism or Stalinism, we as men (emphasis on men) need to undertake and complete within ourselves very demanding and difficult inner works. Why? Why do that when it is far easier to float along? Apparently it is because I define 'soul' differently from you. Soul is to me the active and defining agent in ourself. Soul certainly harkens to *something* which is very hard to define but soul is the agent of activity in this our world.

What I would like to be able to do, here and in relation to your vision of Jesus the mendicant Galilean carpenter, is to undertake a work that amounts to an attack against that thought-form, that idealisation, that distortion. But I cannot do that unless I have a direct permission. It is not my style to inject power-darts into another person's view-structure as, I have observed time and time again, they need their 'imagined world' in an intact form.

Unless one has the fluidity and the strength to dissolve and to assemble 'worlds' and still have the means to hold to 'soul', undermining a 'world' will always turn out badly. As you know I understand that 'common people'---the Mass as I say (which term irks you a wee bit)---require structures of illusion. And our geo-political world is constructed, literally, around the provision of that to them. Is it possible to see things, to understand things, from another view-point? I say that to some degree it is if one is prepared to do a good deal of work and to accept the consequences. In my own view that is when intellect meets philosophy meets the inner structure of a conversation (dialectic) about 'religion' and 'religiosity'.

It is a fabulously interesting conversation! Though some of this (what I just wrote) seems personal the issues to be discussed are impersonal.