Religion V: Utopianism, Fundamentalism, Apothesis

[Jo498]

From what I remember the more common "Eastern" answer is not primarily "trapping in matter" (of Gnosis, Neoplatonism, Embodiment as a prison of the soul etc.) that is responsible for the apparent? division of the ONE/SOUL/Absolute Reality but some kind of "deception" or fundamental cognitive error. Not sure how ist is brought about that we are thus deceived but it is somehow us who are suffering from a disorder that we do not recognize that we are actually part of/identical with the one. (So one is tempted by transivity of identity that Brahman is disordered as well if I am disordered?

Sure, the usual reasons given are that we are greedy/distracted etc. Therefore one has to meditate, practice, get rid of the desires and distractions to first recognize/experience ones actual self and then realize that the self itself is a deception and there is only the ONE. But how did we get greedy and distracted if the Brahman/World-Soul is on the bottom of this? What is the parallel to the Xtian Fall in these religions (or their more abstract systems)?

[Sci-2]

To be fair, isn't that vaguely gnostic? The one Perfect mind becoming "trapped in matter"/divided into multiple minds that need to seek reunion with the One?

Well my problem was actually more a critique of gnosis rather than an attack against Eastern notions of Idealism. Basically their argument was that if I was willing to go through the necessary meditative practices I'd realize the truth of their claims.

My point was that while it's fine for a person to accept gnosis for themselves [so long as said gnosis doesn't infringe on others], trying to claim anything obtained from a subjective experience as definitive evidence contradicts the idea of scientific investigation regardless of how reliable the supposed revelations are. [Just because a lot of people doing yoga have the same revelations doesn't make them true.]

There are & have been, after all, a variety of practices offering a variety of metaphysical revelations.

[Gears of the Beast]

The sort of thing Sci is describing will likely never be that (especially if what Scott does doesn't count- you seem to imply that it requires some force). It seems transparent and illogical but it's obviously critical, in the pragmatic sense that matters.

I wasn't suggesting that Sci was advocating for indoctrination, that was my counter suggestion to 'we should be pushing religion towards x', I fully expect that if everyone started following the process I advocated for religion would begin to die rather quickly - as it is in many countries such as mine.

In other news a shocking number of Americans still don't accept evolution - I find that legitimately disturbing I would have expected to see a massive downward trend especially considering it goes back to fucking 1982.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

GotB,

Which positions, in your opinion, are rejections of evolution?

That said I got into a long debate with a woman I dated in college who, to my surprise, is now a Young Earth Creationist. Based on my experience with her she was about the last person I would have thought that would take up that cause.

[Gears of the Beast]

GotB,

Which positions, in your opinion, are rejections of evolution?

Anyone who fits into that 42%

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Yup. That's a big number.

[Sci-2]

Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?

Revealer: Where did the conference’s title come from?

Sorett: A few years ago, there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Who’s Afraid of Black Sexuality?” that called attention to the way in which sexuality was still often a taboo topic within African-American Studies. In unpacking an observed anxiety in relationship to sexuality, scholars usually invoked the “politics of respectability;” a term tied to the scholarship of historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (who happens to have been my dissertation advisor). She coined this term in her study of black Baptist women, and her arguments reveal the significance of black churches as incubators of a politics of respectability even as those politics were part of a deliberate political strategy for achieving racial equality.

The conference aims to bring together an interest in engaging a variety of issues pertaining to sexuality while also addressing the way in which religion often still remains marginal. Whether because of a sort of secular orthodoxy associated with the founding of Black Studies, or because religion is assumed to be so central to black culture that it’s often marginal, Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality? aims to hold together concerns with both religion and sexuality with an eye toward the broader project of African American Studies.

[Sci-2]

The Sacred Power of the World

Throughout this journey, the question in my mind has been, “Why have I had to become a Christian, go to seminary, and be ordained as a priest in order to return to my work for the Earth?” Part of the answer is that the environmental movement has largely forgotten or lost the sacredness that imbued its early years. It has become increasingly technocratic, placing its trust solely in science, technology, politics, and economics — the gods of our culture.

Nine months after the word priest was planted in my resistant soul, I realized I did have to go to church. I didn’t dare go on a Sunday, because people would see me and I’d have to explain what I was doing there. I wasn’t ready for that. So I went late on a Tuesday morning, when I knew the church would be empty. The front door was locked, which I almost used as an excuse, a sign that I wasn’t meant to be there; but I decided that would be giving up too quickly. I went around to the church office, and a nice person showed me the back way in. I sat down in the empty church, in a pew near the front, on the left side. In the stillness, I knew that I was in the right place. Finally, I surrendered. Within a few months, I was baptized, I had applied to seminary, and I began my training to become a priest in the Episcopal Church.

In hindsight, I understand Black Elk’s words: “I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.... It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.”

One of the things I learned — the first revelation — was something no one intended to teach. When I began reading the Gospels, one little fact jumped off the page: Whenever Jesus is portrayed as praying, the writers take pains to say that He went into the desert, or into the wilderness, or to a lonely place, that He climbed the mountain or was by the lake. It began immediately upon His baptism. In the version told by Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, upon being baptized in the river, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (1:12). Jesus’ life of prayer — his direct connection to his Abba — was outdoors, alone, in the wild places. Jesus went to the temple to teach and to overturn, but never to pray. That, according to the Gospel accounts, was outdoors, in the lonely places.

So I wondered, if a life of prayer, of contemplation, of direct experience of the Divine in nature, was so central to Jesus, and if Christians are called to be imitators of Him, how did this come to be so peripheral to Christian teachings? The answers to this seem relatively obvious: for better and for worse, the Church has shepherded people indoors, where they can be properly taught, guided, sheltered, and ministered to. But if the Church has moved indoors, is it any wonder it has been so absent from recognizing and acting on concerns about nature and the Earth?

[Sci-2]

The Zen ideas that propelled Japan’s young kamikaze pilots

Yet the vast majority of planes never made it to their attack or reconnaissance targets; they were lost instead at sea. And war’s end failed to yield the apocalyptic romance for which Japan’s leaders so fervently hoped. By late 1944 and early ’45, the only ‘life or death struggle’ was the routine misery to which the empire itself had reduced its soldiers and civilians. Conscripts were trained and goaded to fire their rifles into their own heads, to gather around an activated grenade, to charge into Allied machine-gun fire. Civilians jumped off cliffs, as Saipan and later Okinawa were taken by the Allies. Citizens of great cities such as Tokyo and Osaka had their buildings torn town and turned into ammunition.

Nor do clichés of unthinking ultranationalism fit the experiences of many kamikaze pilots. For each one willing to crash-dive the bridge of a US ship mouthing militarist one-liners, others lived and died less gloriously: cursing their leaders, rioting in their barracks or forcing their planes into the sea. A few took their senninbari – thousand-stitch sashes, each stitch sewn by a different well-wisher – and burned them in disgust. At least one pilot turned back on his final flight and strafed his commanding officers.

Nishida sought to reverse the key premise of Western philosophy, writing not about ‘being’ or ‘what is’, but instead about ‘nothingness’. His was not the relative nothingness of non-being – the world of the gone-away, the not-yet or the might-be. He meant absolute nothingness: an unfathomable ‘place’ or horizon upon which both being and non-being arise.

To help students make sense of this idea, Nishida liked to draw a cluster of small circles on the lecture-hall board. This is how people usually see the world, he would say: a collection of objects, and judgments about those objects. Take a simple sentence: ‘The flower is yellow.’ We tend to focus on the flower, reinforcing in the process the idea that objects are somehow primary. But what if we turn it around, focusing instead on the quality of yellowness? What if we say to ourselves ‘the flower isyellow’, and allow ourselves to become perceptually engrossed in that yellowness? Something interesting happens: our concern with the ‘is-ness’ of the flower, and also the is-ness of ourselves, begins to recede. By making ‘yellowness’ the subject of our investigation – trying to complete the sentence ‘Yellowness is…’ – we end up thinking not in terms of substance, but in terms of place. The question isn’t so much ‘What is yellowness?’ as ‘Where is yellowness?’ Against what broader backdrop does ‘yellowness’ emerge?

Neither Nishida nor his great friend and rival Hajime Tanabe – who trained with Martin Heidegger before joining Nishida at Kyoto – ever put their talents unreservedly at the service of Japan’s political leaders. Tanabe was in fact an early and vocal critic of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. But caught up in Japan’s crisis, and fearful of following fellow academics who equivocated in their support for the regime out of their university posts and into the jail cells of the ‘Special Higher Police’, they began to explore how metaphysics, politics, and war might fit together.

Nishida, a one-time devotee of Hegel and Heidegger, returned to his Zen Buddhist roots to ask whether mistaken subject-object dualisms in human thinking – that cluster of circles on the lecture-hall board – might be to blame for Western nations’ ‘imperialist squabbling’. A case of politics rooted in culture, rooted in turn in an error of perception.

Tanabe went much further. By what means, he asked, does absolute nothingness manifest itself in the world of being? Not directly, in an individual’s inner life. No, between absolute nothingness and the individual there must be some kind of mediating power. Looking around, Tanabe saw only one obvious candidate. ‘God does not act directly on the individual,’ he wrote. ‘The salvation of the individual is accomplished through the mediation of nation and society.’

[Sci-2]

Interesting, though I'm sure there's a rebuttal out there:

How Jesus Became God

Instead of being involved with the destruction of God's enemies, Jesus was unceremoniously crushed by them: arrested, tried, humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed.

And yet, remarkably, soon afterwards his followers began to say that -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- Jesus really was the messiah sent from God...

How did that happen? How did we get from a Jewish apocalyptic preacher -- who ended up on the wrong side of the law and was crucified for his efforts -- to the Creator of all things and All-powerful Lord? How did Jesus become God?

On May 14th, 2014, co-host Bo Bennett interviews Bart on the hour long program called The Humanist Hour, which is a one-hour talk show produced by the American Humanist Association whose website is found at: http://americanhumanist.org/ They discuss Bart's personal background in the faith, some fundamentals of the Bible from a historical perspective along with comments related to his book, "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee."

[The Notorious]

I thought the new pope was supposed to be quite progressive .... until I read about the most recent catholic announcements about gay marriage and artificial insemination.

[Gears of the Beast]

I thought the new pope was supposed to be quite progressive .... until I read about the most recent catholic announcements about gay marriage and artificial insemination.

He knows how to feed the media empty platitudes that's all. The notion of a pope being 'progressive' is somewhat ridiculous given that they're meant to be the vicar of christ. If the pope changes the catholic position on something (say purgatory) then either God used to be wrong (and thus not infallible) or the pope isn't actually the vicar of christ.

[Castel]

He knows how to feed the media empty platitudes that's all. The notion of a pope being 'progressive' is somewhat ridiculous given that they're meant to be the vicar of christ. If the pope changes the catholic position on something (say purgatory) then either God used to be wrong (and thus not infallible) or the pope isn't actually the vicar of christ.

I don't see how this follows or how it matters really.

Even if you are right it seems as if you're conflating two separate things here .

[Gears of the Beast]

I don't see how this follows or how it matters really.

Even if you are right it seems as if you're conflating two separate things here .

Care to elaborate? I don't see what you mean

[Castel]

Care to elaborate? I don't see what you mean

Progressive as a label stands independent of how we feel about the philosophical consistency of the Pope's office. If Francis changes things then he is a progressive. Do you find it absurd in a sort of "well...why do religious people take this verse and not the other" or "why all this secularism talk when God said X"? I'm sure you do, and that's your right. But it's kinda besides the point, if we start attacking the label of "progressive" based on that then nothing has been gained, we've just tried to obscure the meaning of a perfectly valid (not necessarily right) word.

It's not necessarily that you're wrong but that constructing your argument the way you did muddles the water for no real good reason.

[Gears of the Beast]

Progressive as a label stands independent of how we feel about the philosophical consistency of the Pope's office. If Francis changes things then he is a progressive. Do you find it absurd in a sort of "well...why do religious people take this verse and not the other" or "why all this secularism talk when God said X"? I'm sure you do, and that's your right. But it's kinda besides the point, if we start attacking the label of "progressive" based on that then nothing has been gained, we've just tried to obscure the meaning of a perfectly valid (not necessarily right) word.

It's not necessarily that you're wrong but that constructing your argument the way you did muddles the water for no real good reason.

You're right, they are separate things but I wasn't using that reasoning to say that a pope cannot be 'progressive' just that given the nature of the papacy I find the notion of a progressive pope kind of absurd. You're also right in saying that if he changes things he is progressive, however, he hasn't and I doubt we'll see a 'progressive' pope for a very long time despite the media's eagerness to give this pope and no-doubt all the following popes this label.

[Jo498]

You seem to be using "progressive" with different meanings. The current pope can be progressive in a sense (say, compared to pope Benedict or to the more conservative cardinals), but the positions he holds wrt to sexual ethics will of course still be a far cry from what a western secularist would call "progressive". As has been said, the Church has a horizon of centuries. Things change, but usually rather slowly. So it was extremely naive to expect a "progressive" (compared to the most conservative Catholics) pope go very far in the direction that could be called progressive in the other sense.

[Sci-2]

DMT and the Bible: An Interview with Rick Strassman

Jeff: Rick, can you tell us a bit about why you wrote this book? Your work, of course, is well known and celebrated through your first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. But this book seems like a ‘return to roots,’ as it were. Can you speak in particular to that?

Rick: I was left with a handful of difficult questions at the end of my DMT research in 1995. And I felt I had only partially worked them through in the process of writing DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2000. It seemed to me that all of these questions would resolve themselves if I could only find the proper model or models that could help me understand the DMT effect. By the expression “the DMT effect,” I mean both the fact of DMT’s existence as well as its effects. What is the nature of the world that DMT reveals? How does it do it? Why does DMT exist in our bodies? What is the value of entering into the DMT state; that is, are we or the world any better off for having visited it?

[Sci-2]

The Outcast: After a Hasidic man exposed child abuse in his tight-knit Brooklyn community, he found himself the target of a criminal investigation.

Kellner was still consumed by the case. It was as though he believed that if he recited the details enough times he might figure out exactly what had happened. Since his case, he said, the rabbis had become even less willing to permit victims to go to the police. Recently, when a father whose daughter had been molested asked for advice, Kellner told him, “If you go to the police, you’re probably going to end up with zero.”

[Sci-2]

The Counterculture and the Occult

Perhaps the single most important vector for the popularization of occult spirituality in the twentieth century is the countercultural explosion associated with ‘the Sixties’—an era whose political and culture dynamics hardly t within the boundaries of that particular decade. A more useful term was coined by the Berkeley social critic Theodore Roszak, who used the word ‘counterculture’ to describe a mass youth culture whose utopianism and hedonic psycho-social experimentation were wedded to a generalized critique of rationalism, technocracy, and established religious and social institutions. As such, the counterculture significantly overlapped, though also sometimes resisted, the parallel rise of the New Left and its ideological and occasionally violent struggle against more-or-less the same ‘System.’ Within a few short years after its emergence in the middle of the 1960s, the counterculture had transformed social forms, creative production, personal lifestyles, and religious experience across the globe. Though the counterculture was a global phenomenon, its origins and many of its essential dynamics lie in America, which will be the focus of this chapter.