[MD] False Messiah

[david buchanan]

DM, Scott, Matt and y'all:

dmb said:
According to the meaning of the terms "theism" and "literalism", there is no 
such thing as a non-literalistic theist. They are contrary terms.

DM replied:
That's just plain wrong, never been entirely true, and certainly not true 
now, due to the fact that we live in a dynamic world, you really should know 
that. The response to literalism has been going on since Strauss's Life of 
Jesus. You have been talking a load of rubbish on this one. Of course we are 
all ignorant on certain subjects, the smart thing is holding your hand up 
when you are not on well explored territory.

dmb says:
Those terms are not contradictory because we live in a dynamic world? Huh? 
This hostility to dictionary definitions is mighty weird, gents. When I say 
that theists believe in a LITERAL God, I don't mean to say that all theists 
believe in a child-like conception of the giant bearded father in the sky. I 
simply mean that theists, by definition, believe in an ACTUAL God. I mean, 
literalism doesn't have to take such a crude form for it to be literalism. 
In any case, I hope these quotes help you to see the point of my ignorant 
rubbish...

"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." Joseph 
Campbell

"Plotinus had held the Ascending and Descending currents together admirably, 
expressing and polishing the original Platonic nonduality. And the nondual 
school of Plato/Plotinus would have almost certainly carried the day - as 
exxentiall similar Nondual systems of Shankara and Nagarjuna would do for 
Hinduims and Buddhim, respectively - were it not for one overwhelming and 
utterly decisive factor; the entrance on the scene of mythic-literal 
Christianity." Ken Wilber SES p360

This, he says,...

"...has led to some very harsh judgements from the more profound thinkers of 
the Christian (and Judaic) tradition itself, starting with Clement and 
Origen (and Philo), all of whom would concur with Paul Tillich; '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, sichis Spirit IN us, as Tillich himself makes very clear]. 
The supernaturalistc heritage about the suspension of the laws of nature for 
the sake of miracles collapses completey.'
Bernadette Roberts in "THE EXPERIENCE OF NO-SELF":
"The whole problem is that until we come upon this final event we do not 
know it is missing from the literature; thus we have no way of knowing what, 
specifically, to look for. In other words, until we know first hand or by 
experience exactly what to look for, we are not is a postion to judge 
whether or not this event is in the literature. This does not mean that 
millions of people have not come upon the no-self event, indeed, sooner or 
later everyone will do so. All it means is that an accurate, distinguishable 
or clarifying account is not in the literature. The challenge of providing 
such an account is what my writing is all about. ...It may be that for 
centuries our various censors have eliminated any event they did not 
understand or which they thought too upsetting to their clientele.
To journey beyond the self means leaving behind our relative notions,.. 
going beyond our usual frames of reference and encountering areas of 
theologcial sensitivity which, alone, would necessitate such account 
remaining unrecorded. I have always been of the opinion that John of the 
Cross, with the Spanish Inquisition breathing down his neck, failed to give 
us the full story. We know that his writings were left incomplete."

"If you ask a Catholic priest if the wafer he holds at mass is really the 
flesh of Jesus Christ, he will say yes. If you ask, 'Do you mean 
SYMBOLICALLY?' he will answer, 'No, I mean actually.' Similarly if you ask 
Lila whether the doll she holds is a dead baby she will say yes. If you ask, 
Do you mean SYMBOLICALLY?' she would also answer, 'No, I mean actually.' It 
is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is 
really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. ... The main 
difference is that the Christian, since the time of Constantine, has been 
supported by huge social patterns of authority. ... That isn't a fair 
comparison, though. If the major religions of the world consisted of nothing 
but statues and wafers and other such paraphenalia they would have 
disappeared long ago in the face of scientific knowledge and cultural 
change, Phadedrus thought. What keeps them going is something else." 
(Pirsig, LILA chapter 30)

As Campbell explains it, the literalism began to take over early in the 14th 
century. From Mask of God vol.4, p583...

" 'Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: Beings of essences 
are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. With this formula, known as 
'Occam's razor', the Invincible Doctor closed with a single phrase the book 
of scholastic 'realism', wherein substantial 'reality' had been attributed 
to ideas; and on September 25, 1339, his 'nominalism' was the object of a 
special censure by the Paris Faculty of Arts.

In effect, the import of Occam's slash across the field of names and forms 
was to convert metaphysics into psycholgy. The achetypes of mythology (God, 
abgels, incarnations, and so forth) could no longer be referred to as a 
supposed metaphyscial sphere but were of the mind. Or if they referred to 
anything outside the mind it could be only to individual facts, historical 
events that were once actually percieved in the field of space and time.

Half a century before Occam, in the Condemnations of 1277, the point had 
been made that neither Scripture nor its interpretation by the Church could 
be reconciled with reason. One could choose to stand either with reason or 
with Scripture and the Church, but not with both. ...There followed the 
absolutely anti-intellectual piety of the so-called Devotio moderna, of 
which the Imitation Christi (1400) and Theologiica Germanica (1350) are the 
outstanding documents. The later, through it influence on Martin Luther 
(1483-1546), became a contributing force in the inspiration of the 
indomitable churchly and scriptural positivism of the Protestant Reformation 
and subsequent centures of bibliolatry; the sum and substannce of the whole 
movement being epitomized in that supine formula of John Gerson: "Repent and 
believe the Gospels, all Christian wisdom lies in this.'"

"The selling out of intellectual truth to the social icons of organized 
religion is seen by the MOQ as an evil act." RMP

Northrop (“Logic of the Sciences & Humanities”,p.376-77):
“The divine object in the West is an unseen God the Father. This means that
He cannot be known by the aesthetic intuition after the manner of the divine
being of the Orient. Christ tells us that His kingdom is not of this world.
St. Paul asserts that the things that are seen are temporal and that it is
only the things which are unseen which are eternal. All the theistic
religions affirm in addition that the determinate personality is immortal.
Certainly this is not true of the self given with immediacy in the aesthetic
intuition….  Western religion becomes [therefore] defined as one which
identifies the divine with the timeless or invariant factor in the theoretic
component [of knowledge].”

“This explains why the Far Eastern religions do not need a religious prophet
if the divine is to be revealed to man, and why the Western religions must
have one. If the divine is given with immediacy then it is here in the world
of immediate intuition already without the mediation of a divinely inspired
representative. Thus all that religious sages in the Orient have to do is to
direct one’s attention to the factor given with immediacy [i.e. Kant’s
phenomena] with which the divine is identified…”

“If, however, the divine is identified with an unseen factor in the nature
of things, then obviously the only way in which man can know God with the
immediacy of the aesthetic intuition is by a divinely inspired being
representing God coming into the world of immediacy. Hence the religious
prophet without whom man in the theistic religions cannot be saved, becomes
essential.”
"Nearly all the peoples around the Mediterranean had at some point adopted 
the Pagan mysteries and adapted them to their own national taste. At some 
point in the first few centuries BCE a group of Jews had done likewise and 
produced a Jewish version of the Mysteries. Jewish initiates adapted the 
myths of Osiris-Dionysus to produce the story of a Jewsh dying and 
resurrecting godman. , Jesus the Messiah. In time this myth came to be 
interpreted as historical fact and Literalist Christianity was the product". 
Jesus and the Lost Goddess, p 123

"In synthesizing the perennial myth of the dying and resurrecting godman 
with Jewish expectations of a historical Messiah the creators of the Jewish 
Mysteries took an unprecedented step, the outcome of which they could never 
have guessed. And yet, upon analysis, the end was already there in the 
begininng. The Messiah was expected to be a historical, not a mythical, 
saviour. It was inevitable, therefore, that the Jesus story would have to 
develop in a quasi-historical setting. And so it did. What had started as a 
timeless myth encoding perennial teachings now appeared to be a historical 
account of a once-only event in time. From this point it was unavoidable 
that sooner or later it would be interpreted as historical fact. Once it 
was, a whole new type of religion came into being - a religion based on 
history not myth, on blind faith in supposed events rather than on a 
mystical understanding of mythical allegories, a religion of the Outer 
Mysteries without the Inner Mysteries, of form without content, of belief 
without Knowledge." The Jesus Mysteries, p.207

But feel free to ask if my point isn't clear here.

dmb
(the uninformed garbage man with lots of company)

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar – get it now! 
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/