[MD] False Messiah

[david buchanan]

Scott and all MOQers:

Scott said to dmb:
Since theologians, all of whom call themsleves theists, have consistently 
pointed out that talk about God must be taken analogically, symbolically, 
and so forth, I don't know where you're getting the ideas that theists take 
God-talk literally.

dmb says:
Yea, theologians are theists. We agree there. But in terms of what they have 
"consistenly pointed out", I think the problem is that they are theists, 
which means they are literalists, even when they aren't slack-jawed 
fundamentalists. Where do I get this idea? Lots of places...

"Their (American Indian) term MANITO is often used interchangably with "God" 
by whites who usually thnk all religion is theistic and by Indians 
themselves who don't make a big deal out of any verbal distinctions. But as 
David Mandelbaum noted in his book THE PLAINS CREE, 'The term MANITO 
primarily refered to the Supreme Being but also had many other usages. It 
was applied to manifestations of skill, fortune, blessing, luck, to any 
wonderous occurance. It connoted any phenomenon that transcended the run of 
everyday experience.' In other words, 'Dynamic Quality'. With the 
identificaton of static and Dynamic Quality as the fundamental divisison of 
the world, Phaedrus felt that some kind of goal had been reached. This first 
division of the MOQ now covered the spectrum of experience from primitve 
mysticism to quantum mechanics." ZAMM p120

Ken Wilber. (The emphasis and parenthetical info is Wilber's):
"The Church would produce MANY great philosophers (reason), and MANY great 
psychic and subtle mystics, but no matter how much these realizers tried to 
downplay the myths, but no matter how much they allegorized them or as-iffed 
them or interpreted them AWAY, there was always the one fundamental dogma 
that hung like a weight around their attempts to transcend, that crashed 
down on their shoulders and pinned them to the ground and never but never 
budged an inch; THE UTTERLY UNIQUE AND NONREPRODUCIBLE REALIZATION OF 
JESUS."

Pirsig in ZAMM p143:
"In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit 
doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you 
think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To 
realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened."

from Campbell's THOU ART THAT: Transforming Religous Metaphor:
"Already in the 8th century B.C., in the Chhandogya Upanisad, the key word 
to such a meditation is announced; TAT TVAM ASI, "Thou art That", or "You 
yourself are It!". The final sense of a religion such as Hinduism or 
Buddhism is to bring about in the individual an experience, one way or 
another, of his own IDENTITY with that mystery that is the mystery of all 
being. ...it is the mystery also of many of our own Occidental mystics; and 
many of these have been burned for having said as much. Westward of Iran, in 
all three of the great traditions that have come to us from the Near Eastern 
zone, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such concepts are unthinkable 
and sheer heresy. God created the world. Creator and creature cannot be the 
same, since, as Aristotle tells us, A is not-A. Our theology, therefore, 
begins from the point of view of waking consciousness and Aristotelian 
logic; whereas, on another level of consciousness - and this, the level to 
which all religions must finally refer - the ultimate mystery transcends the 
laws of dualistic logic, causality and space-time. Anyone who says, as Jesus 
is reported to have said (John 10:30), 'I and the Father are One', is 
declared in our tradition to have blasphemed. ...We in our traditon do not 
recognize the possibility of such an experience of identity with the ground 
of one's own being. What we accept, rather, is the achievement and 
maintenance of a relationship to a personality concieved to be our Creator. 
In other words, ours is a religion of RELATIONSHIP: a, the creature, RELATED 
to X, the Creator (aRX). In the Orient, on the other hand, the appropriate 
formula would be something more like the simple equation, a=X."

Paul Tillich A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT p374 (as its quoted by Wilber)
"Things like miraculous interventions of God, special inspirations and 
revelations are beneath the level of real religious experience. Religion 
itself is IMMEDIACY [by which he means precisely the immediacy of basic 
Wakefulness or pure Presence, which is Spirit IN us, as Tillich himself 
makes very clear]. The supernaturalistic heritage about the suspension of 
the laws of nature for the sake of miracles collapses completely."

All these Ken Wilber quotes come from SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY: The Spirit 
of Evolution, and these can be found on pages 667-9:
"Both Tillich and I are referring to the mythic components of Christianity, 
not to its psychic and subtle level direct realizaton, many of which 
approached a pure nondual understanding (as we saw with Teresa and Eckhart) 
Rather, it is the translation downward into 'mythic dissociation' (precisely 
as defined by Campbell) that I am here discussing, becasue this mythic 
dissociation, particularly in regard to the Incarnation and Ascension, came 
to thoroughly define essential Christianity, divorced it from other 
religions, and set an entire tone for the culture it would subsequently 
define. God created this world, but our final destiny can be found nowhere 
in this world (the classical Ascending ideal of mythic dissociation)."

"..With Tertullian the relationship would become almost purely LEGAL, a 
matter of proper sacramental rites (whether the person understood them or 
not), and thus, for example, baptism cound save an infant. From here it was 
a short step to Cyprian's binding of the Spirit to the LEGAL OFFICE OF THE 
CHURCH. One could become a priest by ORDINATION and not by AWAKENING. A 
priest was no longer holy (sanctus) if he was personally awakened or 
sanctified, but if he simply held legal office.
    Likewise, rituals became 'objectively holy' and 'binding' even if the 
giver of them was NOT subjectively holy, and even if the receiver of them 
did not have the fainest idea what was going on - one coud be 'saved' by 
ritual sacrament alone and not by direct experience and evolution: 'He who 
does not have the Church as Mother cannot have God as Father' (Cyprian). For 
various reasons, Augustine sided with this view, and the Church became 
strucurally a pure mythic-rational legalism.
    Finally, since salvation now belonged to the lawyers, grace became the 
forgiveness of sin (Saint Ambrose) conceived as breaking the law - 'You are 
forgiven'; gone is the conception of Grace as Diefication or discoery of 
true Self (Saint Clement: 'He who knows himself knows God').
    Much of this is unavoidable in any organized realization; but it 
obviously can go too far, and this 'too far' is part of the 'translation 
downward' which I am discussing."

"Phaedrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the 
rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal Dynamic Quality, a sign-post 
which allows socially pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality. The 
danger has always been that the ritutals, the static patterns, are mistaken
for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic 
Quality they were originally intended to preserve." LILA, chapter 30

"The MOQ associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would 
certainly be a mistake to
think that the MOQ endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious 
sect. Phaedrus thought
sectarian religion was a static social fallout of DQ and that while some 
sects had fallen less than
others, none of them told the whole truth." LILA, chapter 30

"The Christian West was too alienated from its own mystical tradition to 
resist this secular effort to eliminate a living cosmology, symbolized 
religiously by the Cosmic Christ. Augustine's theology, which heavily 
influenced the philosophy of Descrates, has no Cosmic Christ. Augustine's 
preoccupation with human guilt and salvaltion offered no resistance ..." 
Matthew Fox The Coming of the Cosmic Christ

If it seems like I'm critical of all types of Christians, except for the 
mystic, its only because I am. As I understand things, Western religion took 
a wrong turn from the very begining, just about the same time philosophy did 
and in much the same way. In otherwords, theistic Christianity is the 
religious version of SOM. In both cases, we are alienated from the world in 
a very strange way. God and objective reality are outside of us and we can 
only have a relationship with it. In both cases we must submit to the law, 
whether its God's or Newton's law.

Thanks
dmb

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/