[MD] False Messiah

[david buchanan]

DM, Scott and all MOQers:

DM said to 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...

dmb says:
OK. But as I said to Scott repeatedly, non-literalists are not the target of 
my criticism. And when did I ever deny the existence of non-literalists? 
Heck, I've been quoting them like crazy to make my own non-literalist case 
so how could you possibly imagine that I mean to deny their existence? If 
you understand my point here then you'll understand why I think your 
criticism is bogus. This is the same sort of phony straw man Scott keeps 
setting up.

MD continued:
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. ...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.

dmb says:
As I said to Scott at least three times already, bring it. It would very 
likely be interesting if you imported some Don Cupitt into this debate. But 
what I'm trying to say (whcih might be something short of proving anything) 
is explain the MOQ's mysticism in contrast with theism, to explain the MOQ's 
anti-theistic stance. And you may recall that this thread actually began as 
a discussion of America's neo-Victorian moral decline and, by contrast, the 
role the contrarian might play in America's moral regeneration. I was trying 
to frame the current cultural and political climate of the united states. 
The subsequent discussions with Scott were a bit of a tangent and, 
apparently, we are still working this cul-de-sac. In any case, the 
discussions of church history and its central leaders is only meant to show 
that, in the West, theism is the rule and mysticism is the exception. This 
is all by way of background to today's situation, where literalistic 
religion controls the Republican party, the Republican party controls the 
United States and the US controls the world. But this is what I never really 
got around to because, apparently, people are just too personally offended 
and don't want to hear any of it.

DM said:
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?

dmb says:
It appears that I've been asked to defend Mr. Phony McStrawman's black and 
white position once again. Poor me. Sigh. Sigh. C'mon Dave. Do you seriously 
think I don't know that language changes, that definitions change, that 
words have multiple, flexible meanings? As I already said to Scott - I don't 
know, like five times - I was using the dictionary as a reality check. In 
fact, I used an On-line dictionary so that any interested reader could check 
it out for themselves. As I've already said repeatedly, I used the 
dictionary definition to dispute the contention that my use of the terms was 
unusual or biased or prejudiced and to show, by contrast, that I was using 
key terms in a completely normal way. Ironically, I turned to the dictionary 
in order to dispose of another straw man.

You guys are both driving me crazy with the straw man thing over and over 
again. Clarity is construed as rigidity, distinctions are treated as bigotry 
and criticismism are treated as ignorance. You've both been kinda ugly and 
obtuse, insulting and irrelevant, about this whole issue.

Please, respond to something I actually mean to say, not some distorted 
strawman version. Please, respond to the quotes, the many voices I've 
imported. But please don't bother trying to paint me as a rigid weirdo just 
because I used a tangible, checkable source (the dictionary) to dispute 
Scott's bizarre confusions and obfuscatons.

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].”

But thanks for your time all the same,

dmb

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