Pithy quotes from our current reading which give us pause to reflect

[St.Roymond]

@MarkD

Certainly they don’t trust their own perception or intuition at any point.

The irony there is that (in my experience) the majority of Christians are operating out of the same foundation of “what feels right” as any atheist, they just claim the imprimatur of divine revelation to justify what they already feel – few and far between are those who actually learn something new about ethics from God and change their lives accordingly.

It was interesting – and horrifying! – to me a number of years back when in a discussion at a church retreat someone was absolutely positive that the Parable of the Good Samaritan (which I tend to think of as the Parable of “Who’s My Neighbor”?) only applied to drastic situations like someone mugged and left in a ditch; the guy couldn’t see that the parable set out a principle of acting like a good neighbor to everyone we might encounter, all he could see was the extremity of the situation Jesus used, oblivious to the fact that Jesus used an extreme situation to try to drive the point home to people . . . just like him.

@MarkD

“Don’t believe everything you think”

I saw one that said “Question Everything You Think You Know”, with text in fine print that said “even what your mother taught you”. I found it a wonderful twist on the “Question Everything” ones I see fairly often.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

I considered making this a separate thread but I can’t imagine there would be much interest for many others. However it fits my situation well that I"m curious to see if anyone else has a reaction to it so I’ll just park it here. If no one is interested, so be it.

I listened watched this video of Rupert Sheldrake speaking to from a month ago and he used an interesting term to describe people who are not traditional theists but come to recognize the way scientific reductionism and materialism have robbed those of us who’ve bought into it this cultural shift toward the secular and given up belief in the something more which is the sacred.

Most of the video is chatty but the very beginning, the part I copied off the automatic transcript seems true to me.

I’m speaking about, rediscovering God. There’s actually a word for it which you may or may not know. Anatheism. You know what theism is? Belief in God. You know what atheism is? Disbelief in God. Anatheism is returning to God or back to God. and it’s something that is happening much more now than it ever has before because we live in basically a post-Christian, secular society.

Recent surveys show that 51% of the British population describe themselves as having no religion. I mean, this is almost unprecedented in human history. as the philosopher Charles Taylor said, in the year 1500, no one in Europe would have been an atheist. It was simply impossible, not because people were simply, oppressed or forced to believe in God, but simply you couldn’t conceive of a world without God and a world in which nature was not permeated by the divine spirit. It was just an inconceivable thought, except perhaps for a tiny number of people.

But over, the subsequent centuries, the secular option has become more and more standard, and it’s now the default option of most educated people, a kind of secular atheism. In that context. there are many people who find their way back to a belief in God, but it’s not quite the same kind of belief as you would have if you just always believed in God. There are still some people in Britain who are raised Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, and continue with, ancestral belief. But most people, especially those from Christian backgrounds, are not in that position.

I don’t think many of us anatheists will be able to just reassimilate into traditional forms directly but fortunately the unity known as God has a plan even for us.

Anatheism: Rediscovering God in a Secular Age

@Rob_Brewer, have you seen this yet?

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@MarkD

@Rob_Brewer, have you seen this yet?

Hi Mark,

Yes, I am familiar with Rupert Sheldrake and Bede Griffiths, who I encountered on my journey with its discoveries when I realised that there was something missing in the contemporary Christianity I was experiencing. Working for the Catholic church at the time, I steeped myself in the few slim books by Bede Griffiths, probably transcriptions of sermons or talks, and followed the lead to mystical Christianity and Advaita Vedanta. That is why what Rupert says about the universality of Catholicism and the Trinity is particularly interesting.

Father Bede was a huge help to me in rediscovering the Christian tradition and seeing how it could link to the insights of the Hindu tradition, particularly through the idea of the Holy Trinity. The Ashram was called the Ashram of the Holy Trinity in English; in Sanskrit, it was called SAT-CHIT-ANANDA Ashram. As many of you probably know, the Hindu conception of ultimate consciousness or reality, especially in Advaita Vedanta, is that the ultimate consciousness on which all else depends, almost the whole universe depends, on which all individual consciousness, yours and mine, depends on, is Sat-Chit-Ananda; it’s three-fold.

Sat means being, or conscious being. Chit means consciousness, the contents of consciousness, and what you can know. And Ananda is bliss or joy. So, the idea is the ultimate consciousness is the knower and also the known, because both have to be part of consciousness. The knower and the known. And it’s not an undifferentiated blob, as it were. It’s a structure within ultimate consciousness. Part of its very nature is bliss or joy, which is why mystical experiences of connection with the divine are usually supremely joyful or blissful because that’s the divine conscious nature. And the Hindu view is that all forms of consciousness, including yours and mine, are part of that ultimate consciousness bit like sparks of the divine. Or, if you like fractals, they don’t use the word fractal, but like fractal derivatives.

One of the very familiar similes that they use in India is, imagine seeing the moon reflected in hundreds of buckets of water at night. Every bucket looks as if it’s got a separate moon in it, but the same moon is reflected in all these buckets, and each one is set differently. And so, our consciousness is part of the divine consciousness. And that’s why through meditation, through going to the ground of our own consciousness, we connect with the divine consciousness.

That’s why meditation is such an important part of Hindu and Buddhist practice. And indeed, of Christian contemplation practice in monasteries and convents throughout the centuries. So, there are many forms of this trinity.

Another Hindu version is with the three main gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma is the ultimate source or creator. The ground of all things. Vishnu is the god who preserves order and form. The preserver keeps things in order and form. And Shiva is the creator and the destroyer, portrayed as in dancing, or in flames of fire, or in the erect, lingam or phallus as the kind of energetic principle. As Father Bede pointed out the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is very similar.

The ultimate understanding of God in the Christian tradition is the Holy Trinity. That’s why all Orthodox churches, including Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist chant, practically all have the Holy Trinity as the central conception of God. What this says is that the ultimate reality, God’s consciousness, is not undifferentiated. It has this division but differentiable aspects within it.

God the Father is equivalent to such. And the Hindus as to conscious being in the present. When God announces himself to Moses in the Old Testament, and Moses says, “What’s your name?” At the burning bush, he says, “I am who I am,” or “I am that I am.” So conscious. Being in the presence is the very definition of that aspect of God.

Then the second person of the Holy Trinity is the logos. The word. “In the beginning was the word the word was with God. The word was God.” So, the logos is very similar to the platonic idea. The idea is in Plato’s philosophy, in a Christianized form; it’s the ideas, forms, patterns, and structures of everything. It’s what gives form, pattern or structure to everything in the universe. Through him, all things were made. The logos, the second person of the Trinity, is not the same as Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously, the whole universe wasn’t made through Jesus of Nazareth, born in Nazareth, or in Bethlehem. The divine aspect of Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the logos, is this ultimate formative principle.

And then the Holy Spirit is the principle of movement, change, and dynamism and underlies all things through activity. The principal metaphor is speech as it comes in spirit, which means breath or wind. and logos means word. Even at the very beginning of the book of Genesis, you get this. And God said, well, the first verse, “The Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” Spirit is wind, wind moving on the face of the deep creates waves. So, it’s a kind of vibratory pattern of activity. And then, in verse three, God said, “Let there be light.” A word is a pattern, a form, a structure, a pattern of vibration. And in order to speak words, you have to have the flow of breath.

When describing reality, humanity has various perspectives, culturally and geographically diverse but united if it is really reality and not some kind of spiritual elitism. I have spoken to and read diverse Vedantians who say that their teachers saw a great affinity with the teaching of Christ, especially the Sermon on the Mount.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@Rob_Brewer

One of the very familiar similes that they use in India is, imagine seeing the moon reflected in hundreds of buckets of water at night. Every bucket looks as if it’s got a separate moon in it, but the same moon is reflected in all these buckets, and each one is set differently. And so, our consciousness is part of the divine consciousness.

I particularly like this simile which he also mentioned in the video. It makes me think of the Christian idea of people as being God’s image bearers.

[heymike3]

This one made me pause

“Sometimes it’s so good it’ll move before I even think it to move”

First Neuralink patient claims implant is like “an aimbot” for gaming on Joe...

[St.Roymond]

I want one that will let me remember everything I’ve ever learned instantly at need.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

There is a reference to GK Chesterton at the 46:37 of this video which I don’t quite understand. I’ve started the my slice just before that where Dawkins cuts in to challenge the idea that Christianity provided the roots for the Enlightenment movement. Any help by a Chesterton scholar would be appreciated.

"Theological BULLSH*T!" Richard Dawkins Challenges Ayaan Hirsi Ali's New-Found Christianity

Edited to add my best attempt to transcribe the relevant quote:

my objection to throwing the baby out with the bath water is that if you create this disconnect so that young people do not they don’t they haven’t been told of those debates they’re reading works that tell them that everything that the white male Christian Left behind is exploitative, it’s destructive, it has to be replaced with something else it’s Colonialism, whatever - it’s being cut off from the roots of that civilization and I think part of the reason why that vacuum came about and it was possible was because of this casting aside of Christianity and this attitude within atheism that if you say reason everybody will suddenly start becoming you know reasonable and think reasonably and in that there’s been a mistake. GK Chesterton was right.

She obviously has a specific passage or theme from Chesterton’s writing in mind but I wonder if anyone has a clue what that would be.

[heymike3]

Goal-directedness is traditionally called teleology, but many scientists have avoided using the term since Francis Bacon’s great work Novum Organum in 1620 outlining the inductive method, which formed the basis of the reductive approach in science. That has been interpreted to mean that scientists should avoid teleology, famously referred to by the nineteenth-century German physiologist Ernst Wilhem von Brucke as ‘the lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.’ Monod and Jacob even adopted the term ‘teleonomy’ to refer to ‘apparent’ teleology.

Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life

[St.Roymond]

@heymike3

Monod and Jacob even adopted the term ‘teleonomy’ to refer to ‘apparent’ teleology.

I remember coming across that term. Some wit changed it to “telanomally” just because.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

Well I’m sympathetic in the sense that if there is purposeful intentionality at play in events not under human control it isn’t easy to differentiate that from simple happenstance. You can ask the universe but generally won’t get a solid answer as to whether it knows what it is up to.

On the other hand, too many science types like Dawkins feel it is important to vociferously rule out teleology at every opportunity, when that is no more justified than insisting it is real.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

More quotes from the recently finished Elizabeth Oldfield book: “Fully Alive.”

This, from her last chapter: “The G-bomb” (where she “finally” gets around to talking about God … as she freely thinks of it)

Maybe it would help to go back to pride. Pride is the big cheese of sins in theology not just because it keeps us from the intimacy and community we are designed for but because it makes an encounter with God impossible. Pride disconnects us because it regards need as the enemy. Relationships of broad equality or sycophancy are all that are acceptable to pride, and any connection with the divine is not likely to deliver that. Almost all religions conceive of God as above and beyond us, and approaching with a swagger is liable to end badly.

I find the fact that Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” is the most popular funeral song genuinely horrifying. I feel angry even thinking about it. Not only because it’s a bad song (don’t @ me) but because generations have been infected, at their most vulnerable moments of deep reflection, with the idea that a proud individualism is something to celebrate.

The last verse of “My Way” contains the line that best explains my hatred. It argues that a man has nothing but himself, and warns against being “one who kneels,” that last phrase sung with a stylish sneer.

Oldfield, Elizabeth. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (p. 229). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Only just a little later (even on the same page), she continues with what I would call the capstone explaining her visceral reaction against the mental/spiritual poison she describes above …

What we have, at the end of our lives, if we have lived them well, is not ourselves, but a team, a family (whether biological or chosen), a weighty legacy of encounter and relationship that rings a note in eternity. The desire to be invulnerable, so scared of coercion or the demands of mutual care that we consistently cut the threads between us and other people, is poison. It is sin. And its high priest is Ol’ Blue Eyes.

Oldfield, Elizabeth. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (pp. 229-230). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[If you’re worried that Elizabeth may be going a bit overboard there … have no fear. I’d say she wasn’t trying to make Sinatra the leading candidate for “the AntiChrist”. Just suggesting that (at least in this song) he celebrates a message that most in the west have already been celebrating both before and after him in any case.]

[heymike3]

My oh my…

Even the most complicated of these diagrams are simply two-dimensional static maps of what is in fact a dynamic four-dimensional process. Furthermore, they are not multi-scale. They simply summarise our knowledge at a molecular level. As we will see, functional biological networks necessarily include interactions with higher levels.

Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

God … as she freely thinks of it)

What else can she do. Free will: blessing or curse, it is unavoidable. While I agree with condemning the “did it my way” song as craven ego worship, what choice do we have but to freely think for our selves? Just accepting the faith of our fathers is fine if you’re not born into the Westboro Baptist Church but Christianity is not a monolithic church or set of beliefs despite all the attempts to settle on a common creed. In the end one must decide not only whether or not to be faithful but also to who or what. It shouldn’t just be a nihilistic ‘heroism’ of the Frank Sinatra variety. But one must decide what one can and should believe and who or what to trust. That choice is necessary, not just rebellion, for any of us, Ms Oldfield included.

[GJDS]

This quote from Hegel:

"… Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss. "

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

I think she would agree with everything you wrote there. Yeah, we’re going to be making choices, obviously, as everyone must.

Maybe the difference might be… Was I too proud to listen to or heed the voices calling me toward deeper relationship and interdependence? Did I only heed the cultural sirens calling me to enter into the rat races of ego building and envy? I suppose one could retort to the “did it my way” enthusiasts that there really is no such thing as purely “my way”, as if I was capable of being totally original in all my pursuits and desires. I might like to naively imagine I’m the one in the driver’s seat, but Rene Girard (mimetic desires) makes a pretty convincing case that we learn our desires (for both good or ill) from those we choose to follow or be discipled by. So in the end, Sinatra’s song is probably only chasing after an illusion anyway. And in fact, maybe in a height of irony, the closest we may ever come toward true originality and freedom (as opposed to enslavement) might be to surrender ourselves, voluntarily going down to our knees, for the other. In other words, the only exit door away from slavery may look a lot like slavery, but with the infinitely significant difference that I volunteer it to another out of love instead of it being coercively applied.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@Mervin_Bitikofer

in a height of irony, the closest we may ever come toward true originality and freedom (as opposed to enslavement) might be to surrender ourselves

Yes common decency places demands which, when overcome, only make us a lout. Nothing praiseworthy or heroic in that. So Sinatra’s lyric would become something like “and did it the only way I could with a clean conscience”.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

I really liked how this got portrayed in a recent “Chosen” episode where some Roman soldiers conscripted Jesus and his disciples (very inconveniently and humiliatingly) to carry all their stuff for the obligatory mile. At the end of it all (as gospel readers will well know), Jesus keeps walking (to the amazement of both the soldiers and disciples who themselves were chaffing under the humiliation of the whole situation.) The soldiers command Jesus to stop. He turns around and gives this reply (which I’ll repeat here as I can best recall it.) “You’re headed toward that outpost up yonder, are you not? I’ll carry this the rest of the way for you. The first mile you coerced from us. But now we freely offer!”

And suddenly the power dynamic of the whole situation changed. The soldiers, who had formerly been lording it over “the rats” were suddenly not the ones in the power seat - “making the calls” over what should happen. (well - yeah - they technically still were and did.) But the point is, Jesus actually demonstrates a deeper power to them that they hadn’t realized was there. In their minds, the only reason a subject would do anything for a soldier is because the soldier compels them to - all the power belonged (or seemed to belong) to the soldier. But then, in an astounding reversal, it is revealed that love was there all along in the “weaker” party, and in defiance of the coercion, was essentially saying “So you think I’m only doing you this service because I have no other choice, do you? Well let me show you something … I would have done it even if you had just asked! And will demonstrate that to you now by doing it beyond what you’re allowed to require of me!” In doing so, Jesus revealed to the soldiers that not only was their immediate coercion of the first mile not actually “in the driver’s seat” as they had been thinking, but that even the authority above them, limiting what they were allowed to require, even that authority was not in the drivers seat over this man!

Or at least that’s my interpretation of how that situation was portrayed. I thought their portrayal of that teaching was just excellent.

[heymike3]

@MarkD

only make us a lout

but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

More from Elizabeth Oldfield.

My aim is growing up and outwards into Love—the greatest thing, the Bible says, the one that remains. It is not a three-month or even a five-year goal. It’s not a project, not something I can ever tick off my list. Which is quite liberating, actually. All my other projects, my work stuff and health stuff and house stuff, need to be secondary to this, and it helps keep them in their place. I can’t pass or fail, in this growing, which is part growing up and part growing down, becoming more like a real child and a real adult. I can just move, on any given day, towards Love or away from it. I can choose to grasp out beyond the boundaries of my self into connection, or I can refuse. And the days I refuse are not irrevocable. I believe that because of another death, the death I sought to participate in through baptism, the path is always open for me to turn around. Repent just means think again. Sometimes it does feel like a little death, this changing, but it turns out some deaths are good.

Oldfield, Elizabeth. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (p. 245). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Oldfield. Mad respect for her integrity and earnest desire for the truth. Thanks for the quotes from her book. This one makes me think of some things E.E. Cummings’ has written. Poems about being “born again” long before it went mainstream. He was actually very religious as well as irreverent.