Pharoz

Here’s a train of thought that is sort of difficult to express.

The monotheistic religions start with an all powerful God which sort of provides a clean slate for creation, as with in the first chapter of Genesis. This idea of creation out of apparent formlessness has a parallel with some kinds of human action - the claim of terra nullius in colonial times is a strong example, but also for more mundane acts of creativity. It could also allows for free will, but there are many other cultural ways of doing this as well.

Such an absolute claim made by anything or anybody other than God must be followed by a Fall of some kind, a realisation of limits.

But even so, even after the Fall there is still the result of the intended action without consequence. Something is broken and it is difficult to point out what that is. It traditionally goes by the name of original sin and is assumed to be with every person born after the Fall. (These ideas are a discussion using some religious concepts.) But perhaps rather than being based in a flawed humanity, the original sin may be based in an unrealistic concept of God as omnipotent. The Fall transfers the blame away from the concept of a perfect God. And that precious idea, the omnipotent God, remains as it was originally.

There is perhaps a sense that sacrifice is sometimes a consequence of an initial audacious stepping out. The creative act may have been audacious and the person paid for it, but the consequences remain and the assumption of a clean slate within which that initial audacious action may have taken place becomes confirmed in some way. It’s like a disruption to the natural order that becomes solid through irreversible consequence and sacrifice.

But then in Christianity, what would it mean that God would be sacrificed in the person of Jesus? It is like a more humble concept of God, even while maintaining the original concept of an omnipotent creative God. There is still the possibility for creation and free will in human life but the blame, so to speak, for the Fall may not be all due to original sin in humanity.

And then again, the creative potential is still there and more honest and realistic. You could say that Christianity also tries to redeem God, even if that would not be admitted. It is difficult to express this idea properly. It’s not taking the mickey. The twentieth century ground on after Freddy’s claim that God is dead with the quick-fix failure of an idea to try to substitute Man into the role of omnipotent God. Twentieth century history and postmodernism have thoroughly ridiculed that idea.

So what does the Christian story have to say about the nature of God? The conventional Christian story is that Jesus redeemed humanity through his sacrifice, but could the Christian story also be about redeeming God? Now that would be a strange twist in the story! But ideas take a while to take root, if there is anything to this new perspective.

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There are obviously different cultural contexts for the phenomena of sacrifice. In the Judeo-Christian religions it has various meanings, possibly related to the way God is understood. I think that in some ways of living, as with Buddhism which does not believe in an omnipotent God, there are different notions such as generosity and meditative practice. It’s a difficult topic to talk about but it is important because a notion of God is still part of our culture. In a way the Christian approach brackets [God] , unless of course they make out that Jesus of Nazareth was something of a triumphant Uebermensch. That would be missing the point in my opinion.

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3 Jan 08

And creation here is meant as a cultural act by a person. The natural world changes continually with some aspects of things changing while other aspects remaining constant (such as mass/energy, momentum, etc). A creative act by a skillful person can have an effect in the physical world but that is more through something like guiding impersonal physical processes to create some thing or situation that may have been imagined. It would be nearly impossible for any person to construct even a biological cell or a strand of hair from the raw elements, but everything that goes into reproduction, eating and keeping a person healthy is covered through culture and the ways we live. Creative action is not about literally placing every atom in place from moment to moment, which couldn’t be done in any case.

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4 Jan 08

These are not value judgments or opinions. The posts in this category are about seeing these topics about western religion and modernity in a different way. Whether I like it or not,  or whether you like it or not, is beside the point. What is important is that the ideas have consistency and that the ideas hold together. It is very difficult to explain a different paradigm and it is possibly something that can only be evaluated over a few generations.The point made in this post is that the problem of evil is related to the way that God is understood. The way a culture defines The Good will impact on the way that the culture defines what it sees as being not that Good. With the Judeo-Christian religions God is all good and all powerful so that prevents analysis to an extent. In pre-modern times you could not criticise directly the way that God was conceptualised for fear of excommunication, exclusion or worse. Even so, there also seemed to be something culturally unconscious, a sense of justice or truth maybe, that over time corrected for the nature of the problem.

Translating the Bible into local languages and the printing press had a profound effect on the cultural understanding of God within Europe. The Reformation was also about things such as the relation of the church to the people, the nature of authority, reading the Bible and its stories for oneself, having religious services that people could understand, and so on. The mystery in pre-Reformation religion was not just theological but through ignorance and the power relations of the clergy to the people.

Perhaps our problem today has to do with -  being stuck with the need for an ABSOLUTE Good without really acknowledging it. And being too clever and sophisticated to admit to such a cultural need. Think of nationalism, ideologies and totalitarian states, greed and consumerism, the fuss about perfection in our bodies and looks, fundamentalisms of all shades and colours, the way the public and media places celebrities in the public spotlight and then criticises every single perceived imperfection, as with Diana. God hasn’t died, He’s just gone kitsch. And it’s not a Good look. We still hanker for perfection, or carry on as if we expect it, somewhere; but still rip anything to pieces that we momentarily set our collective hungry gaze upon.

The ambiguity is in the way that God is conceptualised in our culture. The churches don’t really understand what is going on.  They seem to be stuck repeating tired formulas or else tarting up their image of God and church to match the times. It’s difficult to explain…

One of the main differences with this new interpretation is about recognising the context and limits of individualism. It’s difficult to describe succinctly, and this is making a very crude attempt of it too.

In pre-modern times the church and local community did provide a context and limits within which most people lived. I suppose that the Enlightenment ideals grew over a long time out of that solid understanding of society and people’s place in it. Yet the Enlightenment with it’s industrialisation, science, migration from rural communities to large cities, and occasional crises and revolutions also undermined that social context where people can live safely and contentedly.

Pre-modern life was certainly not idyllic. Yet you also find with some of the revolutionary ideologies that they idealise aspects of that pre-modern life. Rousseau could be a source for a quote at this point. You could include some kinds of religious fundamentalism, national socialism and communism as ideologies that tried to turn the clock back or that try to harness modern science within something like a pre-modern social order (that just happened to also be authoritarian). Personally I think the reality of communism had nothing to do with a classless society. The people in the dominant political party of one party states constituted an elite class for those societies. Marx deliberately tried to find a way to reconnect workers in modern societies with the product of their labour as was the case in pre-modern societies, at least in theory. Communism may be a world apart from pre-modern society, but there are some important threads that link the two, so the claim made above is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear.

The Enlightenment did, however, emphasise the Individual; the rational individual. In the popular mind there is still a strongly negative connotation to some of the Enlightenment ideals. I think part of this is because science and industry can appear indifferent to human society and a person’s place in it. It is really tricky to untangle these ideas. Modernity does not in general pay due attention to society and community, and that may be part of the cause for cynicism about science and industry.

All I wanted to say, or am asserting, in this post was that the pre-modern world view is based more around narratives of people and how they live in communities. The fundamentalist religions seem to be harking back to a pre-modern world. Modernity grew out of a pre-modern world, obviously a tautology, but it initially took some things for granted, such as society, in ways that we no longer even consider or may be aware of these days. I am not saying that the social context in those early modern days were all good, or even that good for most people. It would have been a hard life. Perhaps what I am saying is that the problem may not be with modernity and the Enlightenment ideals, but that we have over time lost the social context and that we have to consider that in theory as well.

The left and right political divide has formed in an ambiguous way where the left champion society but with Enlightenment ideals, while the right champion the Individual but more in a pre-modern conservative context. There is a strange twist in the old way of dividing left from right. Both sides of the political divide could claim to represent people in communities, and yet both sides could miss the point.

An alternative, as stated many times through this blog, is to recognise the difference between public and private. The public world is about testing knowledge, while the private world is more about affirming others in our immediate circles. You can have both, but there is a structure that separates the two modes. Science as well as narratives. That approach is usually found at the centre of the political spectrum. Does that make sense?

[Cross posted on Becrux]

Christian theology has the Trinity; God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is more hidden from view and more elusive, so writing about it is sort of futile anyway. I would associate the Holy Spirit more with the feminine. A common symbol of the feminine from other cultures is the moon, and how it waxes and wans between the new and full moon in a regular cycle.

In the story of Jesus 2000 years ago he was baptised with a symbol of a dove and he spent forty days in the desert. The symbols of the dove, the forty days in the wilderness and even his tempters in the desert hark back to the story of Noah with similarities to do with the duration of the flood, the crow and the dove.

The connection I’d make is between the crow and the new moon, and between the dove and the full moon. Then there is also the idea of pregnancy in these stories, but not in a crude way please.

It’s not that you could say the feminine is good like a dove or bad at times, it is more that the feminine is indifferent at times to people’s hopes and fears. Birth and death happen. Cycles begin and end in a way that could be characterised as the moon cycles from maiden to mother to crone (and then back to the maiden). [Does that match the pattern of a 3 act play?].

Masculinity wants certainty. The moon cycle is a certainty, but not the maiden to mother parts of it alone. The problem that the story of Lilith highlights is that an attempt to keep only what is perceived as good in the feminine and banish what is perceived as bad can not work. It ends up sending the genuine feminine into hiding, and turns it into a false facade of motherhood goodness behind a seething, negative and vicious unconscious.

Most cultures have stories that help people understand and deal with the process of grief. Even the story of Jesus’ death and his resurrection follows this pattern. But the feminine principle is still shunned in our culture, even as Sophia calls out from the rooftops. While the feminine remains artificially polarised in the Judeo-Christian cultures the problem will persist and, in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit can only remain in the shadows. It’s funny to see some of the fundamentalists who might contest such a proposition. Archetypes are tricky things to work with, they end up toying with you in ways you might not expect. A society and culture needs to find ways to deal with them in a healthy way.

Now this is an aside about a topic in this blog category that may need to be expressed explicitly. It is a comment on ideas within some of the Western religions. If the idea of the second coming of Jesus could be about a reinterpretation rather than a kind of literal reincarnation, then wouldn’t the idea of the rule of Jesus after such a second coming or reinterpretation also be more abstract rather than a literal kingdom? There are variations but some of the Western religions make out their Messiah to be something of a ruthless political ruler, one of the images has him running around with a figurative iron bar popping any cracked clay pots that happen to stand in his way. You’d have to wonder about any Western politician that may have those kinds of delusions. Perhaps they’d be in two minds when walking along the corridors of power, taking a bob each way with a swagger and a lumber.

Anyway, an ideal such as the rule of law combined with human rights is something that can not be corrupted, it will not age and can be long lasting, and such an ideal is something that can be universally argued for apart from any particular religion or culture. It won’t be limited by quirks of personality. I think it is fair to say that most people would want to live in a functioning liberal democracy under the rule of law and with human rights. The story of Jesus’ arrest, sentencing even while being innocent and then execution two thousand years ago is a lesson about the value of having a separation between church and state, and the consequences of a failure of the rule of law with human rights, among other things.

So the idea is quite simply that a literal interpretation of messianic prophesies may not be realistic or achievable, they may be inherently controversial, and if people act to try to fulfil those prophesies this can be very destructive. If instead these things are reinterpreted in a more abstract way then, paradoxically, you might find that that reinterpretation might actually achieve what was desired. That reinterpretation may be the key. A proposed rule of iron can instead become a rule of law with human rights. And it wouldn’t matter that many people are not part a particular religion since they would have all the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else. At least you’d be able to argue a case for the rule of law with human rights within modern states.