[MD] False Messiah

[David M]

Hi DMB

I have no doubt that a large part of the story of organised
religion fits the description you have cited below. I also
have no doubt that a large number of people who would
see themselves as relgious, as being associated with this
tradition, have now come to a stage where their thinking
is non-literalist (at least here in the UK) and non-traditional
in many other ways. They live in  the modern world as much
as you do, perhaps more in fact as you seem to think the
middle ages are still with us and occupying religious thought.
Here's an example from New Zealand:

http://sof.wellington.net.nz/

What are you trying to prove and how would you like to set
about banning theism? Personally I suggest encouraging radical
theology of which there is a great deal. Have a look at Don Cupitt's
After God.

By the way have you ever been out and bought a new dictionary
or do you still use one handed down to you from the Enlightenment?
Funny thing is dictionaries do change and are updated? Why might that be?

DM



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] False Messiah


> 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)
>
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