Seth, I’d like to introduce you to Israel Shamir (assuming you don’t already know him), and bring him into our discussion. You are both of Jewish background - “Jews by birth” - who have adopted Christianity. And you both talk of the spiritual impoverishment of our times.
Although my possibly-Jewish surname could suggest a Jewish ancestor - not in recent generations - I have never had a Jewish consciousness. I grew up Catholic in Sydney, in the 1950s when Catholics constituted a ghetto. Australia’s Catholicism was the Irish kind, fundamentalist, and militantly anti-Communist.
I entered a seminary at the age of 17, but, while there, stopped believing in the Devil, and stopped believing that “we” were the good people and “they” were the bad people. Rather, the line ran through all of us. So, I lost my reason for being there, and left, as did 75% of my class. I no longer consider myself Catholic, but Shamir still refers to me as “our Catholic friend” (he freely uses the Royal plural). So, perhaps there is still something “Catholic” about me, just as others might see some lingering “Jewishness” in each of you.
You wrote, “I presume you are still a theist”. I believe in “Divinity” but not “God”. “Divinity” is a neutral term which allows me to say that I don’t know what it is, but that I think it’s there. There is such a thing as “religious non-theism”: a religion can be non-theistic. Buddhism is; and Jainism too.
The simple question you raised has led me to long-forgotten pages of my website where I explored such issues. I’m now delving into them and quoting them.
We have all come across Christians - evangelicals mainly - who talk as if they know God like the guy next door. Yet, God’s mind - assuming a theistic God - could not be like ours.
Our minds can only think of one thing at a time. Five minutes later, we are hard-put to recall what we were thinking five minutes earlier. Our mind wanders around like a goat browsing, as Buddhists like to say. Sheep, unlike goats, stay in one place longer.
I am conscious of sensations coming from my body: my stomach is full, my toe hurts, my nose is itchy. God would have to be aware of all the sensations in my body - and the thoughts in my mind - as well as those of billions of other people, animals, insects etc - SIMULTANEOUSLY. And be aware of all past events as well as all future ones. We cannot imagine what it would be like to have - or be - such a mind.
Therefore, the next step is to postulate that “God is not a PERSON”; but rather “impersonal” - a principle. This brings us to the concept of divinity in Eastern civilizations.
Taoism calls it “Tao”; Hinduism calls it “Brahman” (impersonal divinity, as distinct from Brahma, a personal divinity). Buddhism has this concept of “Brahman” too; and Karma is a sort of “cosmic law”. But Hindus believe in PERSONAL gods (deities) as well as IMPERSONAL divinity. How could this be possible? Theosophists explain it using the analogy of an electric light circuit, eg in your house: The personalities are like the lights on the circuit, while the divinity is like the electricity that flows through the circuit, illuminating the divinities.
Anyway, when my kids were growing up in the 1990s, I found it hard to discuss this topic with them. On the one hand, I felt uncomfortable with the “received package” I had inherited: I did not want to pass it on. On the other, I had not formulated a replacement. So there was this silence, when it comes to discussing the most important things in life.
And “modern culture” - the media, MTV etc - had no words for such things. The words themselves have disappeared from popular discourse. The Soviet atheists campaigned against God, but at least they had to mention “him” to oppose him. In popular youth culture, by contrast, there is no such necessity. God has been abolished. Killed, as Nietzsche put it - and “we” did it.
Yet despite the illusion of liberation, all is not well.
Siegmund Levarie noticed that “Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting civilization ... The new barbarism, with its pre-musical, pre-civilized worship of noise, glissando, and indistinct pitches, offers no vision and denies natural and artistic norms.” The liberation and beautiful music of the Beatles has inaugurated an era of rebellious barbarianism - a rejection of Civilization itself. The London riots are but one expression of it.
More from Levarie at http://mailstar.net/glass-bead-game.html
- ‘They faced death, fear, pain and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolation of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. ... They moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.’ (p. 22)
- ‘... Even as intellectual ambitions and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in particular were stricken by horrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized ... that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in.’ (p. 23-4).
More from Hesse at http://mailstar.net/glass-bead-game.html
Hesse thinks that the West, apart from returning to its roots, must now import culture from the East. During his travels, he stayed in Singapore; it was his base in Asia.
John Courtney Murray’s book The Problem of God touches on it. And, surprisingly, that leading dogmatist Thomas Aquinas made an important contribution in his presentation of The Three Ways of Knowing God. The Three Ways are:
- Negation (Agnosia - we concede, God cannot be like such things we have experience of)
- Analogy (we reach from things we have experience of, to transcendence) “we can know that God is but we cannot know what he is”.
{p. 66} Cyril of Jerusalem summed up the patristic insight when he said: “In the things of God the confession of no knowledge (agnosia) is great knowledge (gnosis).”
{p. 73} Ignorance of God becomes a true knowledge of him only if it is reached, as Aquinas reached it, at the end of a laborious inquiry that is firmly and flexibly disciplined at every step by the dialectical method of the three ways. ... Only then may man confess his ignorance and have recourse to silence. But this ignorance is knowledge, as this silence is itself a language...{endquote} More from Murray at http://mailstar.net/murray.html.
In the following, I draw from of my writing from those webpages:
Spinoza pioneered a pantheistic version of Judaism, which is not theistic (therefore atheistic) yet religious. Albert Einstein, and many other Jewish non-theists, admired him.
Moses Hess, in Rome and Jerusalem, lavishes praise on Spinoza. David Ben-Gurion and Harry Waton, like Hess combining Communism and Zionism, similarly portrayed Spinoza as a major thinker.
Albert Einstein, in his writings about Cosmic Religion, pays tribute to Spinoza’s re-definition of God in non-anthropomorphic terms. Karl Marx wrote that Hegel used Spinoza’s God to develop his concept of Absolute Spirit.
Spinoza writes of God, but his God is not the God of the Bible, a God that walks in a garden, wrestles with Jacob, appears to Moses in a burning bush or on a smoky mountain, or has a Chosen People. It’s more like the God of the Deists.
In his denial of those anthropomorphisms, Spinoza has been considered atheistic. Hegel’s concept of “Absolute Spirit” looks like “God”, but is it theistic? Is Hegel’s God the God of the Bible?
Spinoza can be seen as pioneering a more elevated concept of divinity. For Jews of that persuasion he is the prophet who has made a new, higher, revelation of Judaism; and they consider Marx similarly.
By comparison, consider the Taoist notion of “Tao” as an expression of divinity that comes to us from 2500 years ago. The Tao Te Ching contains no creationist mythology, no anthropomorphisms, no historicism.
Around the same time, Heraclitus in Greece (Ionia, the edge of the Persian Empire) enunciated the concept of the Logos - unity through the clash of opposites - similarly a remarkable achievement. The identification of dialectic as a process in nature is both Daoist and Zoroastrian, the Daoist envisaging it as Complementarity, the Zoroastrian as Antagonistic, the basis of fundamentalist (“Dualist”, “Manichaean”) thought.
Heraclitus probably got his idea of the Antagonistic dialectic from the Zoroastrian tradition, Greece being a little blip on the edge of the First Persian Empire, which ruled from India to furthest Egypt. As usual, the dominant economy exported its ideology.
The Daoist notion of dialectic as a process-in-nature is non-historicist, non-linear: it does not envisage History as Predestined, Progress as a fact, inevitable or even necessarily desirable. The Zoroastrian notion of dialectic-in-nature, on the other hand, envisages history as “Salvation History”.
The Cynics were independent thinkers in the mould of Socrates (whom one must free from Plato’s political use of him to promote Sparta), and advocates of the simple life; they had similarities with the early Taoists.
Nietzsche opposed Socrates, as the instigator of Rationalism. In The Birth of Tragedy, he writes:
“Socrates emerges as the perfect pattern of the non-mystic, in whom the logical side has become, through superfetation, as overdeveloped as has the instinctual side in the mystic.
“It was Socrates who expressed most clearly this radically new prestige of knowledge and conscious intelligence
“.. we cannot help viewing Socrates as the vortex and turning point of Western civilization. ...“ever since Socrates the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and syllogisms has come to be regarded as the highest exercise of man’s powers, nature’s most admirable gift. Socrates and his successors, down to our own day, have considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments - noble deeds, compassion, self-sacrifice, heroism, even that spiritual calm, so difficult of attainment, which the Apollonian Greek called sophrosyrle - to be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge, and therefore teachable.
“Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture.”
{end of quotes from Nietzsche} More at http://mailstar.net/nietzsche2.html
“Socrates believes that knowledge is teachable, and if virtue is knowledge, then virtue is also teachable.”http://cscanada.net/index.php/css/article/download/1240/1259SparkNotes comments on The Birth of Tragedy:
“The theoretical man ... suffers under the profound Socratic illusion that thinking can reach to thedepths of being and modify it.”
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/birthoftragedy/terms.htmlAgainst this illusion, Heinz R. Pagels writes, “No amount of reading books or attending lectures on bike riding will train you to ride a bicycle”
But is it the “Socratic illusion” or the “Platonic illusion”?
Socrates insisted that he knew nothing; Plato gave the impression that he knew everything.
Socrates wrote nothing; Plato wrote volumes of books.
Socrates’ teaching amounted to showing others the limits of their knowledge; Plato ran an academy which is the inspiration of the formal courses in Academia today.
Socrates was, in reality, the first Cynic; whereas Plato is the inspiration of the know-it-all Theorists of today’s Meritocracy.
The early Christian movement blended Cynic with Jewish influences. If you don’t know about it, read this webpage on it:
http://mailstar.net/downing.html{p. v.} The traditions about Jesus, then, are Palestinian Jewish, with supporting and interpretative literary material drawn from Jewish writings. The audience is ‘hellenised’, and perhaps mostly ‘hellenistic’. ...
{p. vi} If we want to understand these documents {the New Testament} we need to glean what we can of popular hellenistic culture at the time ... at least one important (but not at all monochrome) strand was provided by radical ‘Cynic’ philosophers. ...
Yet if the first Christian missionaries obeyed instructions of the kind recorded in Mt. 9.35-10.16, Mk 6.6-11, Lk. 9.1-5, 10.1-12, they would have looked like a kind of Cynic, displaying a very obvious poverty. Not all Cynics wore exactly the same dress (§40, §151); not all of them even carried the staff that for some was symbolic. But a raggedly cloaked and outspoken figure with no luggage and no money would not just have looked Cynic, he would obviously have wanted to. ...
{p. 37} What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? No? What did you go to see? A man in soft clothes? You find people got up like that [in fine clothes, living in luxury] in royal courts - Lk. 7.25-26, Mt. 11.7-8; on popular response to the messenger, see Introduction and §2; on attitudes to kings, §151, 173, etc.
Once upon a time Alexander came and stood in front of Diogenes and announced, I am Alexander, the Great King. And I, said Diogenes, am Diogenes the Dog [Cynic] - LEP Vl 60; cf. 43, 44, 65; ps.Diogenes 23.
{p. 38} Diogenes says, Going naked is better than all the scarlet robes in the world; and asleep on bare earth you’re in the softest bed you could find - Epictetus I xxiv 7.
Take a look at me then, says the Cynic. I’ve no home, no city, no property, no slave ... no governor’s tiny mansion, nothing but earth and sky and one worn cloak ... - Epictetus III xxii 47.{p. 43} Jesus said to the would-be disciple, Foxes have their earths to go to and birds have their nests to fly down to, but the son of man has nowhere to rest his head - Lk. 9.58, Mt. 8.20.According to Theophrastos Diogenes had watched a mouse running around, not bothering about finding anywhere for its nest, not worrying about the dark, showing no particular desire for things one might suppose particularly enjoyable. It was through watching this mouse that he discovered the way to cope with circumstances - LEP Vl 22.
{endquote}These are just a small % of the quotes Downing provides showing parallels between the Gospels and Cynic literature. I hope you’ve been enticed to read more:
http://mailstar.net/downing.htmlI’m reminded of the story from India, of the four blind men feeling an elephant. One felt the trunk, one the tail, one a leg, one another part, and each got a different perception of what an elephant is. We’re sighted, but blind like those men in that our knowledge is limited. Therefore, we seek the perceptions of other people from different circumstances, in order to discover the limitations of our own - in order to discover which things that we thought absolute, are in fact relative.
This theme of the Limits of our Knowledge relates to the modern philosophical position called Fallibilism, espoused by George Soros. I’m a Fallibilist, like him. Soros, the best-known presenter of Fallibilism today, puts it this way:
“the ultimate truth is beyond the reach of humankind ... nobody has a monopoly on the truth ... We must promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth. But if ultimate truth is not attainable, how can we accept our fallibility as ultimate truth?”
Seth, you deny the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, as do I. But, without the Fall, surely there is no need for Redemption, and Christianity loses its purpose. You write,
“Our fallen state is self-imposed, a result of man’s narcissistic worship of self, of man.
“I could not worship the God of the OT. The first Reform Jews in late 18th century already committed the heresy of positing progressive revelation. This was a way of accounting for the primitive God of the “Torah.” I don’t know anything about Reform Judaism today--it seems its God is nation-state of Israel. But the classical Reform Jews of which Rabbi Elmer Berger (the anti-Zionist) was the last prominent representative believed the prophets were working up to a higher concept of God. It’s not Torah but the prophets who are the bloom of Judaism.
This contains some interesting ideas. Leading Zionists like Ben Gurion and Ben-Ami Shillony have been fond of quoting Isaiah’s vision of beating swords into ploughshares as inaugurating an era of Peace, but it also amounted to World Government.
David Ben Gurion writes, in his book Ben-Gurion Looks At The Bible, of
{p. 112} yearning all over the world to insure the perpetuation of the declaration of Isaiah, son of Amoz, that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”{endquote}Yet, Ben-Gurion says on p. 41, of this same Isaiah, son of Amoz, “The special greatness of King Uziahu lies in the fact that he knew how to integrate settlement, development and irrigation projects with military and war activities. It is no wonder that he merited having his full biography ... written by Isaiah, son of Amoz, the prophet”.
{p. 265} There was no other non-Jewish ruler who merited praise from the greatest prophets of Israel as did Cyrus from the prophet Isaiah, whom Bible critics call by the name of Isaiah the Second: “I say to Cyrus: ‘You shall be My shepherd and carry out My purpose, so that Jerusalem may be rebuilt and the foundations of the temple may be laid.’ Thus says the Lord to Cyrus His anointed, Cyrus whose right hand I have strengthened to subdue nations before him and loosen the loins of kings; before whom gates shall be opened and no doors be shut. I shall go before you and level the uneven hills; I will break down doors of brass and hack through bars of iron. I will give you treasures from dark vaults, and hidden treasures of secret places” (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1-3).
{endquote} More from Ben-Gurion at http://mailstar.net/bengur-bible.html
Ben-Ari Shillony wrote, in his book The Jews and the Japanese: the Successful Outsiders:
{p. 31} Judaism was the first religion to make world peace a central element in its eschatology.{p. 32} Yet quite often peace implies domination, and in many languages the word “pacify” also means “conquer”. King Solomon could afford to be a king of peace because he ruled “over all the kings from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt.”{this quote, from 1 Kings 4:21, may not be historically accurate, yet it is the basis of promises that Jews will rule those lands again - at Genesis 15: 18; Exodus 23: 30-31; Deut 11: 24; Josh 1:4 - and is a major motivator of modern Zionism}
... The peaceful world that the Jewish prophets envisioned was to be ruled over by a scion of the House of David, later called the Messiah.
The Jews ... were always inspired by the belief that in the future world of peace and justice they would serve as spiritual leaders {i.e. rulers}. This vision of a world mission gave them the strength to suffer severe persecution and propelled them to the forefront of various messianic and “idealistic” movements in modern times like those of human rights, socialism, and communism.
{endquote} More from Shillony at http://mailstar.net/japan.html
Karl Kautsky said that the Romans discovered “how strong and dangerous” Judaism was:
http://mailstar.net/kautsky.html.Today the West, after centuries of thinking that Judaism was another heretical Christian sect, is making the same discovery. Yet I maintain that Judaism, like many medicinal substances, is beneficial in small doses: the Jews have their own insights, and one can learn from examining their perspectives, even if not wanting to be subject to them.
Should Karl Marx be viewed as a social scientist, or as the prophet of a religion? Did the Totalitarianism of the Soviet Union derive from Plato’s Republic, or from Judaism?
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