attofishpi wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 1:27 am
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:27 pm
If I had 'an apologetics project' (and mine is that we should not merely dismiss Christianity and on the other should have for it an immense respect -- and this is what I have said all bloody along!) I would go about the process of closer examination more thoroughly. My assumption is that most people do not understand well enough why Christianity, as such, came to be seen as insufficient (as well as also *untrue* in some aspects).
Easy. US mega-church evangelist pastors, enough to turn any (intelligent) person off of the notion of Christianity and what being a christian is all about.
I honestly believe that those pastors are atheists!! - just see the money $$$
What you say here has a good deal of merit. But the 'mega churches' of the US are a late phenomenon and, additionally, everything about the American modifications and wild interpretations of the Christian form (Mormonism, Pentecostalism, Christian Science, etc.) would need to be studied separately from, but also as an evolution of, an earlier and general rejection of Christianity. For the simplest way to refer to the necessity of rejection we need look no further than these various pages in this specific thread. And the prime example is -- and here IC is the culprit -- the way the Adam & Eve story is rhetorically handled. I refer to one example but there are of course dozens. For true-blue and ideologically committed Christians, and this in the face of evidence that cannot be put aside, the core lie has to be held to, or explained in a new, creative way, in order to hold the fabric of the story together.
So a curious thing happens. A rational and grounded person realizes that there are structures of mythology that form the core story -- in this case of Christianity -- and realizes that many ‘believers’, in order to maintain the story-structure, must prevaricate to do so. This then becomes a broad and necessary tactic that cannot be abandoned since if the truth is told the Story will collapse. The only way therefore to preserve the valuable content or the larger sense in the Story is to tell the truth about the function of the story. And largely this is what I write about when I suggest that, no mater what or how, the Story is never the truth contained in the story. Because *Truth* at these levels is, in its essence, metaphysical. These truths do not and in fact
cannot pertain to what we mean when we say 'physical fact'. These represent two distinct epistemological orders and
they cannot be reconciled except through elaborate prevarication.
So there is simply no way to salvage the Adam & Eve story except through elaborate mental gymnastics performed by Moderns who, as consummate liars and jugglers, even if very well intentioned, attempt to reconcile our modern method of gaining and assessing knowledge with that of a radically different epistemological system. But here I must point out that this is what Immanuel Can directly did and what he indeed must do. I use the phrase 'can only do' because, obviously, if the truth is told the story collapses. That is, if a pillar falls other pillars are in danger. And once one or two fall, and once the sound of their crashing down is heard widely, the entire system is understood to be in danger.
I must explain why Immanuel Can's context is not only relevant but essential to talk about. He desperately resists this focus, and whines about ad hominem (though the filibuster strategy seems to have been abandoned), but this is all an attempt to avoid focus on the social-psychological aspect of the undermining of the Christian story. These Stories, and religious metaphysics and ideology generally (within all religious structures) are not only the foundation of *ideas* in a neutral sense (such as those ideas that IC wishes to discuss 'rationally') but are supports and explanatory systems on which the individual depends. The worldview that Christianity (and all religious structures) offer are a platform upon which the individual constructs existential identity -- literally his reason for being.
Now it happened, and it was
inevitable, that the stories themselves
were undermined and could not, by responsible, thoughtful, rational and upstanding persons be any longer
believed (and here it must be stated that this was (and still is) because of an essential sense of personal integrity) it needs to be understood that to have the ground shift under one's feet, to have the supporting pillar threatened or removed, to have the 'horizon' erased, is a terrifying threat the the structures within the individual.
What happens to the individual who has the ground removed? Well, that is a question for sociologists and psychologists, isn't it? But it is no small thing and is a thing of tremendous consequence. And here a curious and noteworthy tactic emerges: the construction of the lie and the reinvention of another level of story in order to 'patch together' the shredding or shredded belief-system.
Here I have no choice but to introduce Immanuel Can as a chief protagonist and apologist in this specific conversation and I must examine his context. That context is social and psychological. And therefore it is relevant and fair to discuss his specific church -- the place and the assembly where the phantasy is explained and bolstered and maintained in order to keep the System from falling down. It is therefore imperative to see these religious environments as 'salvage stations' having immense relevance and importance for people who genuinely feel threatened.
This is why I posted the videos which show
the religious performance as it operates. I cannot see any way around seeing these sort of events as enactments, as participatory performances, as deeply social and also psychological events. And certainly the fact that they are 'mass events' and are given to mass audiences cannot be negated or dismissed. I have been thinking about Benny Hinn's peformance and reading the commentary. Many people write that they are
genuinely moved and affected. Maybe their 'lives are transformed' as Christians, and as IC, says that our lives must be transformed. Maybe these events produce 'born again transformations' in many people. Well if that is true how is it then that IC for example disassociates himself from the transforming event? That is within the individual? In that crowd surely many were 'born again'.
But the idea, suggested by IC, is that these are the Biblical 'wolves in sheep's clothing' who will lead many astray. So then let us now imagine some of those who were 'genuinely transformed' as a result of being moved by Benny Hinn's performances. They have now come face-to-face with God himself. "Answer for yourself!" God thunders to the just-dead individual. "I was moved in the most sincere way that I had available to me! I did the very best I knew how to do under my circumstances! I heard the Word -- what I thought was the Word of Isaiah that would move through time and history and transform everything, and I was transformed! I did my best!"
"No no no
no! You were
led astray! And now you will pay the price for all eternity. To Hell you go!"
But now we have to turn back to the fin-de-siècle period, but it is hard to assign a precise date, in order to understand what happened in European culture when 'the story' did in fact fall down. We have to focus on this time and ask 'What did people do?" and we also have to ask ourselves "What are we doing now?" because we are all living in the consequence of this 'falling down' and of this collapse.
What happened in European culture was that people began to consider, from new angles and with a different perspective, what religiousness and spirituality actually mean. There was a shift from the conceptual picture of a god 'out there' to the realization that if god is anywhere, or is in any sense perceived and understood, it occurs on an inner level. Obviously then a shift took place where the focus becomes the individual and the individual's internal structures. And where might someone turn for information on this 'internal level'? Suffice to say that whole arrays of avenues opened up, and must inevitably have opened up. Nature, psychology, a return to more Earth-centered conceptions of what spirituality is or must be, social relationships, certainly the entire therapeutic movement (and these are extremely varied), and of course the seeking of new modalities in, let's say, the spiritual forms and ideologies of the Indian subcontinent, in Buddhism, and all the rest.
See for example:
Mountain Of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900-1920 by Martin Green
"In 1900 a group of disaffected intellectuals, preoccupied with their own unhappiness in a rapidly industrializing Europe, built the Nature Cure Sanatorium on a small hill outside the tiny Swiss fishing village of Ascona. Soon others joined them, erecting ramshackle cabins and villas on the hill, which they called "Monte Verita," the Mountain of Truth. During the next twenty years Ascona became the place for many of Europe's spiritual rebels to visit, including D. H. Lawrence, Hermann Hesse, C. G. Jung, Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan, Paul Tillich, and Mary Wigman. Seeking an alternative to the "iron cage" of European civilization, they embraced anarchism, pacificism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and nature worship, and developed new art forms, including Modern Dance, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Although their idealistic pursuit of the alternative life eventually was interrupted by the reality engulfing Europe, the ideas that emerged from Ascona lived on to inspire later counterculture movements and art forms. In this first thorough account in English of life in Ascona, its remarkable inhabitants, and their counterculture experiments, Martin Green apprached the Mountain of Truth from three perspectives. First, he describes the lives of the three most interesting and representative Asconans: Otto Gross, Gusto Graser, and Rudolf von Laban. He then surveys the whole phenomenon of Ascona, showing who was there at different times and how their variety of interests and enterprises led them to invent a new religions, ethics, psychology, diet, art, and above all new relations between men and women. Finally, he examines the ideas developed at Ascona at their later influence on arts, culture, and politics. In particular, Green relates the counterculture in Ascona to the Gandhian movement in India nd the 1960s counterculture in America. Because the story of Ascona is inseparable from the ideas embraced by its inhabitants -- from paganism to Freudian psychology -- this is a wide-ranging and evocative study in culture history and the history of ideas.".
These are giant shifts in the way people approach being and existence as well as interpretation of existence. All that we might refer to as manifestations of the shifts have a cultural, ideological and metaphysical origin that needs to be better understood through processes of being
seen.
