Theosophy [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

NikolaiI

12-13-2014, 04:54 PM

Okay. This topic.

Nope. There shouldn't be contradictions, so I'm shutting it down.

No more theosophy - that is, it's worthless. You're wasting your time on a totally worthless topic by messing with it at all.

What I mean is, there are infinitely better sources of wisdom if you are looking for that, and that message is infinitely sound and true and there's no reason whatsoever, in the entire universe, why you or anyone should ever look up or learn about theosophy.

All of the things you could learn about it are simply an expanded set of the previous few statements.

It's an intense, conflicting, extended set of, "Is he good?" talking about a certain few individuals. It contains many instances of the thought, "Oh, but he's smart."

The details are pointless and useless, but if you want, look it up.

The reason - why? Why would you ever go to a source of "wisdom," or "spiritual knowledge,"

from people who would say such things as

"Judaism is a religion of hate and malice towared everyone and everything outside itself."

That's just insane, and stupid.

If you practice hate-speech, you are guilty of the worst crime you could really ever commit, in my view. Yes, causing harm to others physically is bad, but doing so verbally can be even worse.

Do you understand?

Headache. Sucks. Leave it alone.

Lol.

As for Steiner; okay, he wasn't as bad as Blavatsky, but he would still have to explain away statements such as

No. . um. No. I am not looking more of them up. It's just darkness.

The one I was thinking of was not as bad. . and I started to look for an exact quote and came across..

I will give a few words of it. . .

"Reds and blacks descend from abnormal humans"

I chose not to read any further and I basically, urge you not to either. There is no reason to.

I mean - my commands mean nothing :) Smile. be at peace. but still, why not?

You want words? you want me to convince you in words? force you to believe?

There is one thought, one idea that had to become accepted enough to let the Holocaust to happen, and that thought was a certain race of people is subhuman.

These people were espousing it in the decades preceding what happened in Nazi Germany. . .

The fact that "Steiner and Hitler were at odds" means nothing when they were both espousing that certain members, groups and ethnicities were not part of the human race.

It doesn't matter what else they say.

You cannot say "We're all one" and "This group is less than human" in the same sentence without condemning yourself entirely.

It's not just silly, or stupid, but it's insane, and stupid, and it's the most dangerous kind of insanity and stupidity, the kind that led to the worst crime against humanity in history.

It's the worst kind of insanity, because it mixes the good with the bad in such a way that is so charismatically appealing that it is in a sense, seductive.

It's the most unique case of an intelligent person saying something insanely dumb, and dangerously wrong.

I hate this topic because it's so useless.. but still, there's like still a group of these people. . .and they're still doing things... and like.. the people who said these things - there's a lot of sites that are in favor of Steiner, and Blavatsky...

isn't that crazy?

I'd say let's all put a stop to this...

I mean is there anyone who disagrees? I really don't get it. . these people are nuts, and bad, and dangerous to the world. . .

They contributed to the one idea that had to become accepted before the atrocities of genocide were enacted - and that wasn't just once, in the early 40's, beginning in Germany, it has happened many times throughout history.

I'm not putting the links up. . I'm not putting the quotes up. . .I will put up the original quote, the one that alerted me to the fact that something is seriously wrong with this picture,

Rudolf Steiner is insane and evil, and anyone telling you otherwise is either directly or indirectly part of a conceived attempt to portray him otherwise.

I'm not putting up the links because, there's just no reason to. If you do the research eventually you'll find out.

Eventually you'll find something like "Jewry has outlived its purpose," amixt a bunch of others that don't quite seem so bad,

and eventually you'll see a page full of the most horrible things said about many groups of people. . .

Okay. I did my duty. I rarely do. You should consider yourself luckier than a man in the desert who stumbles acorss a live, Supreme paradise bird.

As is obvious, I won't come back to this thread and probably won't even visit Lit-net for a short while, if it is being often visited and discussed.

Oh - and as is also obvious, the legitimate sources of wisdom in the world are extremely numerous, and contain many wonderful, brilliant, peaceful, kind and wise teachers who are very sane, patient, skillful at sharing wisdom, etc., etc.

I won't go into any of that here, except to say that.

Okay. Peace. Enjoy.

All I will say - and sure, this is important, and yes, it's in many places, but one place I didn't see it is in any of my research on that topic -

all that matters is what you personally experience, what you learn and discover by yourself.

Where does doubt come into it? Well only in the sense that yes, you have to go through many lifetimes before you get to a glimpse of your true nature... that's all I will say.. Go search, go enjoy, go live, go be happy . . .go to your journey and enjoy and live. :-)

Peace - namaste. . see ya later. Go visit a nature park. Forget about evil but do not forget what it looks like, how to recognize and know what would destroy your soul, and do not ever give up the game of learning how to fight it - that is, peaceably, with words, strength, kindness. ..

One of the most touching, dearest, sweetest moments of my life was Tara Brach describing the childhood of the baby boy who was Hitler. . .the fear.. .all the pain and fear that he lived with during his infancy and all his formative years..

It was the tender, sweet and touching moment that it was because Tara had faced it, felt it, processed it, understood it, and passed the story of compassion along; the touching of life to life, the flow of love and endearment ant peacefulness and bliss and love. And in all of those things, power.

Take care, enjoy, search, be happy, and if you ever want help, or need help of any kind,

may you find it.

Peace, adios. I'm not leaving, just leaving this thread for good. Not interested. Never was. But, like I say, did my duty.

Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance analyze Blavatsky's racial ideas in her book Secret Doctrine. According to Spielvogel and Redles, Blavatsky labeled some races superior and others inferior. They clarify that Blavatsky did not advocate "domination of one race over another" and that she was against violence. They comment that Blavatsky's work "helped to foster antisemitism, which is perhaps one of the reasons her esoteric work was so rapidly accepted in German circles." They state Blavatsky "sharply differentiated Aryan and Jewish religion" and believed "The Aryans were the most spiritual people on earth." They quote Blavatsky's writing in Secret Doctrine as stating Aryans used religion as an "everlasting lodestar" in contrast to Judaism which Blavatsky claimed was based on "mere calculation" while characterizing it as a "religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside itself."

NikolaiI

12-13-2014, 04:58 PM

Supreme Paradise Bird. . I am not sure if that is the correct name, I mean the one that is hopping about on the branch with its feathers spread out to indicate a semi-circular pattern, all black except for a flattened, blue "V" shape sort of like a mouth, in its mating ritual . .

but oh, any paradise bird, making the encounter slightly less unlikely.

YesNo

12-13-2014, 05:41 PM

Are the Anthroposophists and the Theosophists antisemitical today? This might be something peculiar to their past. Christianity was antisemitical in its past as well.

I usually drive around the Chicago area on Saturday and today decided to stop by the Theosophical Society in Wheaton because of this thread. Although the main building was closed the grounds were open and so was the Quest Book Store. The grounds were well maintained and the book store contained books, statues, crystals and the sort of things you would find in a New Age bookstore. Many religions were represented and they seemed to be non-judgmental about one's religious beliefs.

Pompey Bum

12-13-2014, 07:44 PM

Thank you to clarify but also I find its etymology which it is:
sophy
Function: noun combining form
Etymology: French -sophie, from Latin -sophia, from Greek, from sophia wisdom, from sophos
: knowledge : wisdom : science <anthroposophy>
But the Greek is more suggested
Why I think that it comes from Sufi :
I think that because the sound is the same and make sure the word (Sufi) is an Arabic word and has the same sound of English , it is being borrowed to English.

Well, sophia is a very common and well attested Greek word. (It's the same sophia in philosophia, for example). Greek culture had a profound effect on Latin (Roman) culture, and the Latin tongue was a parent of French, which is why you find it in those languages. Arabic is a Semitic language, but Greek is Indo-European, so there isn't going to be a direct connection between sophia and Sufi. In theory, it might have been be a loan word, but I'm pretty sure that Sufi comes from the Arabic word suf (wool) and is a reference to the wool clothing that the Sufi ascetics used to wear. It is perhaps a coincide (or is it an esoteric pattern?) that they are homonyms that both touch wisdom traditions.

Are you are a Sufi, Mohammad? When I was a young man (which I am not now), I traveled to Konya in Turkey and attended a religious service at the famous Dervish Mosque. It was such an energetic service, full of dancing and joy. I have never forgotten how happy those Sufis were to be dancing to God.

I am very pleased to make your acquaintance in any case.

free

12-14-2014, 05:23 AM

Thank you all for your replies. I've read something about socalled 'thoughtforms' that are within the teachings of theosophy. The idea of it is very interesting. There are thoughts which can take the life of their own. I think, based on this, there is today's tendency for the world to 'think positive' in order not to let the negative 'thoughtforms' overtake the lead and drive the world towards destruction. Seems very reasonable to me.

desiresjab

12-14-2014, 06:35 AM

Search the world over, but you will find no equal of the Book of Urantia for boredom. This ghastly tome, its origin still shrouded in mystery, is the original bible of Theosophists, and reputed to have been written by more advanced spiritual beings, who simply dropped the book off here.

I used to own a copy. It is a syncretic amalgam of poppycock, fairytales and hocu-pocus, like the holy books of every religion, only this one is about as intelligible as a word jumble is to a wolverine.

Blavatsky was a typical spiritualist charlatan of the variety infesting Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Really, her ilk has never entirely disappeared and probably never will. Remember, the inquisitions of the other holy institution did not fully cease until around 1860, releasing hordes of pent up spiritualists slavering to spread undebunked bunk.

Jackson Richardson

12-14-2014, 08:45 AM

As I understand, Sufism is Islamic contemplative prayer, which in its Christian form I know from that wonderful little book, The Cloud of Unknowing – mean by God, God himself and not what you can get out of him.

In Sufism such contact with God in God’s unknowable reality is partly expressed through esoteric imagery, as I understand.

By contrast, Steiner didn’t believe in God or indeed prayer, as understood by monotheists. The esoteric imagery is of value in its own right and describes a reality additional to our mundane experience. It is the opposite of mysticism.

When I spent six months helping in a Camphill community thirty years ago, I never noticed any anti-semitism. Indeed Steiner’s followers came to Britain to escape the Nazis. It was very, very Germanic though.

Dreamwoven

12-14-2014, 08:59 AM

This is something we share in common, then. Around the same time I was doing something similar. I've started a separate thread on this, The Camphill Village Movement (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?80748-The-Camphill-Village-Movement).

Pompey Bum

12-14-2014, 12:07 PM

I would take Theosophy to refer to the Theosophical Society, associated with Madame Blavatsky.

Most people would probably say the same thing, but theosophy goes back four or five hundred years before Blavatsky, and syncretic esoteric mysticism (which is all theosophy is, really) goes back to antiquity. In my opinion, Blavatsky did a lot to discredit mysticism in the popular imagination (witness the fear and loathing expressed in some of the posts above), but arguably, such normative figures as Augustine, Gregory the Great, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and (as I have recently been reminded by Yes/No) George Berkeley could all be seen as having an essentially theosophical outlook.

I haven't read much by Blavatsky, but I get the impression that she was trying to construct a syncretic system that connected western mystical traditions with new (to Europe at the time) sources of eastern mysticism. But because she didn't really understand the new things she was trying to incorporate into her system, she not only short-changed them in terms of their significance to their own cultures, but she turned her own theosophical vision (in my opinion) into little more than a mish-mash of cool, spooky-looking stuff. Better to take mystical systems apart to see what works and what does not.

Pompey Bum

12-14-2014, 12:32 PM

Jackson Richardson

12-14-2014, 12:57 PM

Pompey Bum

12-14-2014, 03:35 PM

I happen to be reading St Augustine's Confessions at the moment. I wouldn't call him a theosophist. The Manichees which he reacted against could well be. They didn't believe in an ultimate God and they did believe in a whole lot of esoteric knowledge as "necessary to salvation".

A better term than theosophist would be gnostic - knowing esoteric knowledge is essential.

Well, unless we really are talking only of Madame Blavatsky's 19th-century Theosophical Society, then "theosophy" (a term, as I said, that I advocate abolishing) is a rather broader category. Ancient Christian gnosticism was "theosophical" in that it was a kind of esoteric mysticism that sought to syncretize Neoplatonism and the Hebrew Bible with the emergent Christian religion.

I agree that Augustine was a Christian gnostic (via Neoplatonism) by the way, although it's an idea that would have shocked generations of Catholics who held Augustine as a theological gold standard but persecuted such gnostic enclaves as has survived Nicaea and Chalcedon (usually calling them Manichaeans!) Don't forget also that Augustine was (by his own admission) a sort of Manichaean/Neoplatonist in recovery when he returned to his mother's Nicene Orthodoxy. Considering his subsequent animosity to the Manichaeans, and the great influence of Neoplatonism on The City of God, my view is that he saw the three movements as a continuum, with Neoplatonism as useful but backward looking, Manichaeism as extremist, and Christian Orthodoxy as a kind of middle way. And if he hardened his heart to the Manichaeans, he was at least willing to work with the ideas of the Neoplatonists. And if, as I believe, Neoplatonist + Christian = gnostic, then yes, a gnostic, and, yes, um, you know, the T-word. :)

I hope you enjoy The Confessions. If you get a chance, The City of God is just as good (though quite a bit longer) and unexpectedly funny in places. There's nothing quite like it when a saint gets sarcastic. :)

Jackson Richardson

12-14-2014, 06:25 PM

De civitate dei is one of those very, very long books I bought years and years ago which I've never got round to reading. Augustine is wonderful about God, but I do wish he'd be less negative about sex (although I fully agree that the contemporary consensus that sex is totally unproblematic is just blinkered). Mind you I've finished Clarissa in the last few years so I might get round to Augustine.

I totally disagree that Augustine was a gnostic - he's overwhelmed by love of the ultimately unknowable reality of God revealed in Christ. Gnostics and theosophists aren't interested in loving God - religious imagery is primarily an aid to self help.

NikolaiI

12-14-2014, 08:37 PM

Steiner is like, THE hero for the Neo-Nazi movement. Are you aware of this Jonathan B?

Anything to say in reply?

NikolaiI

12-14-2014, 08:40 PM

I just thought you should be aware.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 12:06 AM

I just wrote a long thing but I can't transfer it over to the computer with internet, so I'm going to write this instead.

Life is more wonderful when you're pure. When your heart is pure. And some things might sully your pure heart, like getting into the world.

Fighting evil.

And when you stare into the abyss. . . etc -

And I at first said - if you knew how it felt, to think and contemplate evil, you would never ask me to say this again. . . even in denouncing it.

Because it doesn't feel good. It just feels sickening. To think about it, to contemplate it at all.

And I wrote and wrote, posted very very little, as I very frequently do; and thought a lot and a lot about it, and my conclusion,

Inescapable, impeccable, yes I am perfect. :-)

And my conclusion is - very simply, it's an extremely, extremely small sacrifice.

And, we must fight evil, always always if we see true evil, which is rare, more rare than anything in the world . ..

The one time when being more rare is not the same as being better -

In any case, this is also the more true as part of the fact of evil being allowed to happen is not fighting it. . . "Easier to resist at the beginning, than at the end," as dear Leo da Vinci explains.

So - having said this. . I knew it was a headache and convulted; when I did research, I found out that one of the people, Rudolf Steiner, is basically the head and face of the Neo-Nazi movement. . .

It's impossible to describe how wrong that is. . . how much evil is in the thought behind the idea that certain parts of our species are not human, due to the atrocities which it entails.

We maybe cannot measure how much evil is in the world, but some ideas we may say are wholly rotten. If we were omniscient, we could perhaps mathematically trace. . .

But the point is - understand it in your own way, but the holocaust was one of the most horrifying things in human history... This person is behind the movement believes it should have been done. . .

I'm about out of strength on this one - of course, I am speaking metaphorically . . .I won't write anymore on this.

This time for real.

Got it? Do the research on it yourself, if you need to, if you could imagine why I would possibly ever lie about some random God-forsaken person. It turns out, not just some random philosopher.

I will not put the sites and links up because I have no wish or reason to.

This is why should increse your powers of sensitivity and perception and insight and wisdom, so you can understand the truth of things, and in your research, come to the truth as quickly as possible.

Good day.

Again, Theosophy in pre- 1850's maybe was something else, but again, what on earth is the point of reviving such a contrived pile of crap? I speak that from the point of view of someone who dearly loves the wisdom traditions of every culture, and practices several of them. I guess you can imagine I mean that question as rhetorical.

Good luck and love and peace,

Take good care.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 12:14 AM

Maybe I should have ended just that one line with only, "Inescapable." Or perhaps, "Inescapable, impeccable." Although I do believe, in one ideal sense, that everything in the universe is perfect; in another sense, such a devoted belief is often more valuable simply lived and felt than shared. Go to square A and B again if you think that anything matters but your own experience. Found anything close to peace yet? You'll get there.

Again, peace; see you around.

Jackson Richardson

12-15-2014, 03:17 AM

Steiner is like, THE hero for the Neo-Nazi movement. Are you aware of this Jonathan B?

Anything to say in reply?

I reply that I didn't know that. As I say it is a long time since I was in contact and had no intention of doing so. I found the whole religious mind set deeply silly and unattractive.

I can't imagine the fluffy and earnest yogurt eating, sandal wearing and macrame weavers I knew in a Camphill community giving a Sieg Heil.

Jackson Richardson

12-15-2014, 04:12 AM

YesNo

12-15-2014, 10:56 AM

I tried to find some links between Anthroposophy/Theosophy and Nazism and found this by Peter Staudenmaier, "Anthroposophy and Ecofascism: http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.anthroposophyecofascism.htm

Staudenmaier mainly criticized Anthroposophy, but noted its link to Theosophy. It seems the main objection is Anthroposophy's belief in reincarnation and karma with races being similar to different castes. This seems to be an old idea predating Nazism. I do not see how this justifies anything Hitler did.

Staudenmaier also mocks the "spiritual" aspects of Anthroposophy which makes me wonder if he is trying to associate Anthroposophy with Nazism as a rhetorical means to discredit its spiritual approach to life.

I don't know much about either Anthroposophy or Theosophy so it is hard for me to judge what is true.

Regarding other topics, I wonder if the differences between Neoplatonists, Manichaeans, Orthodox Christians, gnostics and Theosophists are significant.

Pompey Bum

12-15-2014, 11:12 AM

I was never much interested in Steiner, probably because of a comically horrible thing I knew about that happened at a Waldorf school. I had a friend of many years who was into "alternative parenting"--zero discipline, breast feeding until the age of 30, the whole nine yards. Needless to say, her kids grew up to be wild and aggressive bullies. She didn't have a career (which is what it was all really about), but her husband made pretty good dough, so predictably enough, she enrolled her children in a Waldorf school. One of them, the boy, was eventually kicked out after threatening to cut off another boy's penis. That's the horrible part. The comical part is that he wasn't asked to leave for the risk he posed to the other children, or for his constant aggression, but because the incident happened to occur at the same time as the widely reported John Wayne Bobbit incident, in which a wife in a reportedly abusive relationship did to her husband what the boy had only promised to do to his classmate. And that, the scions of the Waldorf school decided, suggested a pattern of "unsupervised television watching." The tragic thing, they explained (according to my friend), was that it was too late to go back. The other children might already be infected. And--to be business-like about it--how could they be sure that an opportunity for him to watch television wouldn't arise again? How could they trust a mother like that? No, no, it was time to separate.

It's probably unjust, but that was about all I ever wanted to know about the Waldorf school. In fairness, my friend's two daughters came through their Waldorf years relatively unscathed, and I have known two other girls who emerged from a different Waldorf school with artistic and scientific six guns blazing (although both have terrible handwriting skills). The epilogue for the boy, unfortunately, is tragic. He is now an adult and, last I heard, addicted to heroine. I hope he has the backbone to pull himself back up, but I don't think he got much of that at home, and I doubt he learned it at the Waldorf school.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 11:27 AM

Thinking a bit more, I reckon that a movement that is so fluffy and doesn't talk about sin, only personal fulfillment, would be good news to those who want to justify their own violence and cruelty.

I've googled Steiner and nazi and seen a bit there. Steiner himself was a heretic but not a Nazi.

Thank you.

I am very glad you understand this.

To explain - and your first post - as I learned more and more - like I said, a lot of convoluted crap; as I discovered more of the truth about this person, eventually I came to a site that made it clear to me that he's the face of Neo-Nazism today.

Maybe they just went completely underground?

You say you googled those terms. . .- anyway, there's a Neo-Nazi movement and they sometimes talk of "Western Destiny," basically is a philosophy in complete alignment with the ideology of Hitler; there is a website with the worst case of racial supremacy crap, and it's all Steiner. So. Very poisonous. The most poisonous of anything in the world, is this kind of thing.

Considering the extremely secretive and cult-like nature of Blavatsky's garbage, and the fact that there are Waldorf schools that are teaching Steiner's ideology to children. Their website says something like they begin "Norse mythology" in third grade. In my opinion, considering all the evidence I've seen, this is one of the most disturbing things I've come across.

Again you say there seems a bit there - my own research came across gradually increasingly condemning information about this person; the tip of the iceberg.

Honestly, Jon- I really don't know what the correct thing to do is - I don't want to give the website, really, because it would increase traffic there. . . maybe that's not so important as exposing it. . .

Okay I suppose I might as well,

“The Jews have a great gift for materialism, but little for recognition of the spiritual world.”

Reds and blacks descend from abnormal humans and have not participated in the evolution

“The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an
even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes
considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.”

“Negroes” are “decadent" and “completely cut themselves off from the spiritual world”

And these are all on a Neo-Nazi website. So, maybe he's not their face, but just someone who has influenced them a lot.

I hope this has been of some help, and clarification.

Pompey Bum

12-15-2014, 11:31 AM

I totally disagree that Augustine was a gnostic - he's overwhelmed by love of the ultimately unknowable reality of God revealed in Christ. Gnostics and theosophists aren't interested in loving God - religious imagery is primarily an aid to self help.

Well, I think we have a serious difference about how we understand the term gnostic, in any case. When I speak of gnosticism (small g), I am describing an ancient Christian theological tendency among several different sects to see the universe in terms of a dualism between a higher and eternal world of spirit and a lower, flawed (or sometimes evil), and transient world of matter; and in which revealed knowledge was a held to be a direct experience of Holy Wisdom. Gnosticism (as I am using the term) was syncretic with the mystical Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry and their followers. That is why I used the formula: Neoplatonist + Christian = gnostic.

I think you are probably using a more traditional Orthodox teaching about Gnosticism (large G) based on Irenaeus' polemical work, Against the Heresies (also a fun book). But I don't want to put words in your mouth. You may merely be reacting to the far looser use of the term in the New Age world of astral projection and carrot circles. :) Or perhaps you just see gnosticism as heterodox. But for some reason, you don't like it.

For a long time, almost all we knew about ancient gnosticism came from the writings of its opponents, but since the 20th century discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, a better understanding of ancient gnosticism has emerged. In that light, it appears that rather than an alternate Church with a consistent and promulgated doctrine ("large-G Gnosticism"), gnosticism was more of a theological tendency to dualism shared by several rival Christian groups, including, to a certain extent nascent Christian Orthodoxy. Clement of Alexandria, for example, who was an Orthodox Church Father, and remains a saint in the Anglican and Eastern Catholic traditions, was as gnostic a thinker as Irenaeus ever took on (his views got him kicked off the Roman Catholic Martyrs list during the Counter-Reformation--after more than a thousand years of veneration),

Clement's famous student Origen was likewise an Orthodox Church Father and gnostic intellectual. He was also venerated as a martyr after his death, but repudiated as a heretic by the Orthodox Church after several centuries. He has since been rehabilitated as a martyr but not as a saint. Origen owed his recall from hell to someone he never knew, but without whom Christian theology could not function to this day. Origen lived in the 2nd sand 3rd century; but his writings had a profound influence on the 5th century Church Father Augustine of Hippo--especially in The City of God.

Do you see what I was getting at in my earlier post? When I said that I have no problem thinking of Augustine as a gnostic, I was not suggesting an association with magic crystals, or lucky eight balls, or any sort of New Age claptrap--even though "gnostic" is a term that many who go for such things like to throw around (some of them even use it correctly). What I meant is that the theological dualism of Augustine's most mature and influential work--his conception of the spiritual City of God as distinct from the material City of Man--follows a gnostic syncretism that involves both nascent Christianity and mystical Neoplatonism.

That doesn't mean, of course, that Augustine belonged to an alternate "Gnostic Christian Church" (although he had been both a Manichaean and a Neoplatonist before returning to his mother's Orthodoxy); nor does it mean that Augustine was influenced by everything that each gnostic sect believed (which would have been impossible in any case, since they disagreed with one another in many things). One of the early heresiologists most drastic charges against gnostics was that they worshipped the devil, or less dramatically, that they claimed that God and the devil were the same. What Irenaeus and others were getting at with that calumny was that certain gnostic groups believed that the material world was so corrupt that it must have been created by a deeply flawed or even evil demiurge rather than a loving God. In the most extreme versions of this view, the perfect but removed God the Father (in effect the God of Plato) or some emanation is the author of life, but a corrupt shadow (in effect the devil) contrives to imprison life in matter. In the allegorical myths of these groups (which were among the texts uncovered at Nag Hammadi), it is the role of a divine Savior figure to intervene to liberate enslaved mankind. But there no reason to think that Augustine believed these things, even if he would have appreciated the sharp distinction between flesh and spirit that such groups made.

Another example of Augustine's distance from some gnostic thought is his acceptance of the Hebrew Bible, with its assertion that God saw Creation to be "very, very good." Most gnostics (and all Manichaeans) would have held that to be a lie. And there are other things of even greater importance, such as the physical (as opposed to spiritual) resurrection of Jesus. In some ways, Augustine wasn't a gnostic. But in some ways he was.

Augustine is wonderful about God, but I do wish he'd be less negative about sex (although I fully agree that the contemporary consensus that sex is totally unproblematic is just blinkered).

Since Augustine's position was developed not only through his own experiences in Carthage, but also through the sexual ethics of Clement of Alexandria expressed in his analysis of 1 Corinthians 7-9, I want to suggest that the problem you are having with it may have to do with Augustine's gnosticizing (via Clement). It's something for your consideration in any case. :)

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 11:40 AM

From everything I can understand, Waldorf schools are teaching the supremacy of blue-eyed, blonde-haired "race," and whether they are currently inculcating their students with anything worse, I do not know, but the former is enough.

Okay - good. I understand more now. I was wondering whether Waldorf schools were founded by Steiner, or what the deal was there. apparently, from a wikipedia,

Waldorf (Steiner) education is a humanistic approach to pedagogy based on the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy.

So yeah - there's probably worse things there.

Y'all are so lucky to have me, lol.

YesNo

12-15-2014, 01:47 PM

You say you googled those terms. . .- anyway, there's a Neo-Nazi movement and they sometimes talk of "Western Destiny," basically is a philosophy in complete alignment with the ideology of Hitler; there is a website with the worst case of racial supremacy crap, and it's all Steiner. So. Very poisonous. The most poisonous of anything in the world, is this kind of thing.

Considering the extremely secretive and cult-like nature of Blavatsky's garbage, and the fact that there are Waldorf schools that are teaching Steiner's ideology to children. Their website says something like they begin "Norse mythology" in third grade. In my opinion, considering all the evidence I've seen, this is one of the most disturbing things I've come across.

Again you say there seems a bit there - my own research came across gradually increasingly condemning information about this person; the tip of the iceberg.

Honestly, Jon- I really don't know what the correct thing to do is - I don't want to give the website, really, because it would increase traffic there. . . maybe that's not so important as exposing it. . .

Okay I suppose I might as well,

And these are all on a Neo-Nazi website. So, maybe he's not their face, but just someone who has influenced them a lot.

I think you need to cite your source.

YesNo

12-15-2014, 01:53 PM

Another example of Augustine's distance from some gnostic thought is his acceptance of the Hebrew Scriptures, with their clear assertion of a Creation that God saw to be "very, very good." Most gnostics (and all Manichaeans) would have held that to be a lie. And there are other things of even greater importance, such as the physical (as opposed to spiritual) resurrection of Jesus. In some ways, Augustine wasn't a gnostic at all. But in some ways he was.

Maybe it is finally sinking in, but I am beginning to see a distinction. Gnostics believe the universe is bad. Orthodox Christians believe it is good.

I found Irenaeus' Against Heresies (http://www.textexcavation.com/irenaeusah1.html). I don't know how far I'll get in it.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 02:45 PM

Staudenmaier also mocks the "spiritual" aspects of Anthroposophy which makes me wonder if he is trying to associate Anthroposophy with Nazism as a rhetorical means to discredit its spiritual approach to life.

I rather doubt it.

I think you need to cite your source.

I will not provide links to the Neo-Nazi movement's primary public website.

Please read this article well and carefully.

http://www.waldorfcritics.org/articles/NJP_RudolfSteinerAndJews.html

Do more research if you need to.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 04:36 PM

It is not simply anti-semitic. It is a complete acceptance and espousal of the idea that one "race" is superior to the rest, and, dehumanizes every other. It is not just people of Jewish, but Blacks, "reds," etc., every other group of people. This is the ugliest idea that ever reared its head in human thinking. There is no excuse for this kind of ignorance, and no excuse for allowing it, accepting it, or endorsing it.

Every decent human being should denounce it with all their heart.

These groups - Waldorf and Camphill - are direct descendents from the original group. These kinds of organizations remain evil, they do not get better - why? They do not evolve out of their previous ways. If someone was not wishing to be a part of it - they would disassociate with them, and leave; and many have done this.

Though the worst of it may be kept secret, it is not very hard to decipher if you are able to see through deception.

If they have not committed genocide, they have nonetheless committed their lives to the one idea which allows it to be caused - the dehumanization of certain groups of people. . . and this is why their original leader, yes, I know he is dead Jon, thank you - is someone the Neo-Nazi movement endorses as an absolute hero.

I think part of the problem is that people conditioned to believe they don't matter. Well, what you say does deeply matter. Many people hear it and think about it. Hundreds of people throughout the world may see it.

What you think and say matters a lot. . Don't sit on the fence. Investigate. Find out the truth of anything you come into contact with.

It doesn't matter what your words are if the idea you are espousing is one of dehumanizing people, and it is wrong. It isn't pleasant to discuss such things - and yes, as you investigate into them, you'll get a sense of the convoluted, and awful intent behind the movement and the people involved in founding it.

That doesn't mean that denouncing it will let you get sucked into it - it was a failure to stand up to these kinds of people that allowed such crimes to happen.

It is important to speak your mind, speak out for the truth, and it is this which can help make the world a better place.

Pompey Bum

12-15-2014, 05:03 PM

Maybe it is finally sinking in, but I am beginning to see a distinction. Gnostics believe the universe is bad. Orthodox Christians believe it is good.

Well, I'd put it this way: all Christians see life as good. The question is where material existence, including the world of the flesh, fits into things. There was always a spectrum of responses to that question. Manichaeism was a separate religion (although Jesus was important to it) founded by the Persian prophet Mani in the 3rd century. Mani's followers believed that matter and flesh were evil, and denied that Jesus could have been God incarnate because God's complete goodness and majesty would not have submitted to anything as corrupt as a human body. In the West, that could be seen as one end of the spectrum.

Gnosticism, on the other hand, was not a religion but a theological tendency toward dualism. It had its own spectrum of beliefs about materialism and the flesh. Some gnostic Christians believed that both were evil and that life was held prisoner in matter through the devices of by an evil creator who was known by various names. Others thought that this creator and the material world were not evil per se, just flawed. But the both groups agreed that creator was not to be confused with God, who was perfect and all good, and therefore remote or totally uninvolved in human affairs. The latter view drew heavily on Neoplatonist syncretism in its belief that material existence is not evil, but neither is it important, because ultimately it's not real.

And there were gnostic Christian traditions, such as the one associated with the non-Canonical Gospel of Thomas, that shared the view of matter as unimportant, but didn't involve itself with a secondary creator at all. God just made the world as it is. Don't worry about it. Don't get too attached to it. Move on to what matters.

Later on, after Orthodoxy had been established, Christians couldn't burn some of this stuff fast enough. But as I said to Jonathan in my post above, gnosticism had already been part of some Christian traditions (that were later accepted as Orthodox) since the 2nd and 3rd centuries. (Christian Orthodoxy was not fully established until the 4th and 5th centuries). Clement and Origen were major Church Fathers as well as Neoplatonist gnostic syncretists. Augustine's City of God, which was a cornerstone of Christian theology throughout the Middle Ages and remains indispensable today, was influenced by both, especially by Origen.

On the far end of the spectrum are a few early representatives of anti-gnostic Christian traditions, that is, Christians who didn't necessarily hold that matter and flesh were good, but that they matter--and profoundly. These Christians were later cherry-picked by the Orthodox Church as early representatives of Orthodox truth. By that time, Orthodox Christians had figured out that they had an important stake in the material world. But the motives of these proto-Orthodox figures had little to do with worldly power.

The most interesting of them, in my opinion, is Irenaeus, who was a member of a Greek-speaking community of Christian immigrants from Asia Minor living in Lugdunum (now Lyons) in France in the 2nd century. While a young priest in this community, he was given his first task of genuine responsibility: to bring a formal request to Rome asking that the renewal of persecution under Marcus Aurelius be lifted. While he was away, nearly the entire community that had sent him was massacred in a bloody pogrom of exceptional cruelty. After his return he became Bishop of Lyons (the other candidates were dead) and went on to lead a church in which witness was made through suffering in the flesh, as Jesus had witnessed through suffering in the flesh, in the hope of resurrection in the flesh, as Jesus had been resurrected in the flesh.

So Irenaeus' writings are not intolerant diatribes against another religion. He is genuinely convinced that the material world matters, suffering matters, martyrdom matters, the resurrection of the flesh matters. And he has nothing but contempt for comfortable elites who study Neoplatonism all day long while their comrades are being torn apart by beasts in the arena. For Irenaeus, those who have lived under persecution deserve authority. The view was not unique to Irenaeus. Others, like Ignatius of Antioch, taught the same thing. As martyrdom spread, so did the theological significance of witness in the flesh. Ironically, many of those who had gone to martyrdom in the first place had tended toward gnosticism. It was why they sang as they went out to the lions. Their bodies just didn't matter that much.

So no, you can't really say that Orthodox Christians think that the universe is good while gnostic Christians think that it is bad. Some important Orthodox thinkers were gnostics, so the dichotomy won't work in the first place. But a valid simplified version would be: Manichaeans believed matter was evil, Gnostic Christians mostly believed it was unimportant (although some thought it was evil and others thought it was at least important), and Orthodox Christians of Irenaeus' sort believed that it was essential to Salvation. But there was always a spectrum, and there is even today.

Do I dare ask if that makes it any clearer?

Clopin

12-15-2014, 08:33 PM

Harpist/songwriter Joanna Newsom went to a Waldorf school which she summarizes like this...

"I went to some weird Waldorf schools… we made quilts and wax sculptures, and threw javelins and beanbags. And recited strange English translations of German poetry about Saints and wild animals"

Here's what her music sounds like!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6UUe3Q54qFg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CBtVaHkJc4I

Edit: What's wrong with Norse mythology?

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 09:43 PM

I began to ask questions. What is Anthroposophy? Why don't teachers allow students in the preschool through the early elementary grades to use black crayons in their drawings? Why do students use the wet-on-wet watercolor painting technique exclusively for so many years? Why is mythology taught as history? Where is the American flag, and why don't Waldorf schools teach civics lessons in America? In a school system that promotes itself as "education toward freedom," why do students copy everything from the blackboard? Why do Waldorf teachers talk in high voices and sing-song directions to their classes? Why must the kindergarten room walls be painted "peach blossom"? Why is learning to read before the age of 8 or 9 considered unhealthy? Why do so many Waldorf classes have problems with bullying, and what is the school's policy for dealing with this? Why are teachers always lighting candles?

What answers I received were not forthright, and the teachers made it clear that my questions were not welcome. They told me, "If you understood Anthroposophy, you wouldn't be asking that question." Yet before we enrolled, I was told that the school was non-sectarian and that Anthroposophy was not "in the classroom!" I was eventually invited to leave.

I would encourage you to read
http://www.waldorfcritics.org/articles/NJP_RudolfSteinerAndJews.html

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 10:02 PM

and they believe things like,

"You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish."

At least, that's what the founder, and his clique, actually a rather large sect, believed. What exists today is what has passed down from that generation. My feeling or understanding is - an organization like this. . .how exactly do you heal from something like that? What I mean is, if you are a person and you have a very twisted view, you can heal over time, if you choose to. And people often do, and they heal and grow. Gradual process. But an organization like that - you're either in it, or you're out. And it appears to be a very tight, close-knit, cult-ish phenomenon.

But the one simple thought that one race is good, and others are not even human, is pure evil. It is pretty much a cult, a bad one at that. Somehow it seems there are a lot of supporters of it, but then, numbers-wise, I do understand why that's the case- but it is (hopefully) a very small number percentage-wise.

But the organization bit - what I mean is, if someone within the organization grows to dislike it, they're kicked out. . .

Such a rigid structure. . . I don't see how it could change much. . . it would always have to hold true to certain ideals.

So Clopin, tell me about yourself. I've certainly told you enough about me. How I feel about certain ideas, such as racial supremacy, etc.

How do you feel about Blacks and the Jews?

I'm not, actually, coming back for the answer.

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 10:14 PM

Secondly -

the two main tactics of the cult in areas of debate would probably be, to ignore, to say good things about the organization, and/or make it seem like the person who is speaking out about it, themselves, are not credible - that it is wrong, to think it is wrong to espouse the one idea that allows people to commit genocide.

If you think I'm over-reacting; well, I'm not reacting at all, I'm just typing.

And all I am saying is,

It is wrong to espouse the one idea that leads to genocide.

Adios, peace.

Taking the first step against this here; I really don't mind, never have. Though I am taking the initial step, which requires so much, it would be nice to have support or thanks. Not for ego, but for the sake of truth.

If I have not spoken the truth at any point in this discussion, please someone say.

If I have told the truth and it is something that matters to you, please say that as well. There is strength in numbers, and when there is only one, strong as he may be, he may not withstand the many...

Although I have created many protections for my soul, for someone to speak up now about this, and say this matters to you as well, would give my heart a little more shelter.

Peace,
Jake

NikolaiI

12-15-2014, 10:22 PM

Clopin - I don't wish to apologize, but simply to soften a little and clarify the intent of my words. I am not wishing to insinuate anything, but merely attempting to indicate strength.

I don't wish to insinuate that you are anything, but please, if you are genuine intelligent person, research the issue.

Nor do I want to hurt anyone. But I am merely saying that the ideology of dehumanization of groups of people is going on within this group, and some support and gratitude for bringing this to light would be much appreciated. . . so that it's not just all on me in this discussion.

And I hope it is well understood, that I never, in this discussion, wished anyone to come to harm; I consider all of you people, and I consider harming people to be harmful to me as well.

I also consider preaching the idea of one racing being supreme, and all others being non-human, to be very harmful to anyone and everyone - those who believe it, those who preach it, those who learn it, those who hear it, and those who act on it.

If this is meaningful to any of you, please speak up, and do not leave me alone in this present discussion anymore.

YesNo

12-16-2014, 01:10 AM

Do more research if you need to.

I found Gary Lachman's "Madame Blavatsky" in the library. Although this is more about theosophy than Steiner's anthroposophy there was a reference to Nazis in the book (pages 251-253). He claims that "Ariosophy", founded by List and Liebenfels, is the movement that should be condemned. He writes this (page 253):

But whatever we may think of Blavatsky's ideas, she cannot be held to account for the way in which List and Liebenfels may have used some of them, nor for whatever "tickle-down effect" their work may have had on subsequent events in German history, if any. In many ways, Blavatsky is in the same position that the philosopher Nietzsche occupied, before serious scholars cleared him of his own appropriation by the Nazis, a false association it took some time to dissolve. Someone needs to do the same for HPB; the taint of "racist" clings to her while her more positive influence--on, for example, someone like Gandhi, which we will look at shortly--is usually ignored.

YesNo

12-16-2014, 01:22 AM

So no, you can't really say that Orthodox Christians think that the universe is good while gnostic Christians think that it is bad. Some important Orthodox thinkers were gnostics, so the dichotomy won't work in the first place. But a valid simplified version would be: Manichaeans believed matter was evil, Gnostic Christians mostly believed it was unimportant (although some thought it was evil and others thought it was at least important), and Orthodox Christians of Irenaeus' sort believed that it was essential to Salvation. But there was always a spectrum, and there is even today.

Do I dare ask if that makes it any clearer? That helps refine the distinction. I also picked up Richard Smoley, "Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition" to at least reference.

NikolaiI

12-16-2014, 10:49 AM

I found Gary Lachman's "Madame Blavatsky" in the library. Although this is more about theosophy than Steiner's anthroposophy there was a reference to Nazis in the book (pages 251-253). He claims that "Ariosophy", founded by List and Liebenfels, is the movement that should be condemned. He writes this (page 253):

But whatever we may think of Blavatsky's ideas, she cannot be held to account for the way in which List and Liebenfels may have used some of them, nor for whatever "tickle-down effect" their work may have had on subsequent events in German history, if any. In many ways, Blavatsky is in the same position that the philosopher Nietzsche occupied, before serious scholars cleared him of his own appropriation by the Nazis, a false association it took some time to dissolve. Someone needs to do the same for HPB; the taint of "racist" clings to her while her more positive influence--on, for example, someone like Gandhi, which we will look at shortly--is usually ignored.

Just like Hitler should be condemned, and not Steiner -

Incorrect.

Any group that preaches the supremacy of one group of humans and the non-humanity of other groups of humans is to be condemned and denounced.

Do you understand?

I'm asking you very directly this time... I would love to hear a yes or no answer from you, you have always seemed like a good person.

Do you have any equivocations on this issue?

Clopin

12-16-2014, 11:00 AM

"Agree with me or you're a bad person".

Get over yourself.

BubGoverned

12-16-2014, 11:09 AM

Just like Hitler should be condemned, and not Steiner -

Hi there

I am new to this, so forgive me if I am speaking out of turn, but someone once told me about this thing called reductio ad Hitlerum.

I wonder if this applies in this case?

NikolaiI

12-16-2014, 11:13 AM

No.

If someone is preaching the supremacy of one race, and the non-humanity of others, this is evil, and wrong.

May I ask you sir, friend, if you agree?

Clopin

12-16-2014, 11:17 AM

Only Sith deal in absolutes.

Clopin

12-16-2014, 11:23 AM

By the way, Judaism espouses the exact same view that one race of God's 'chosen people' are to be held above and subject to different rules than the rest, the subhuman goy. So now that I've enlightened you, go picket a synagogue or you're a bad person.

BubGoverned

12-16-2014, 11:48 AM

No.

If someone is preaching the supremacy of one race, and the non-humanity of others, this is evil, and wrong.

May I ask you sir, friend, if you agree?

The answer seems so obvious, that I feel as though a trap is being set for me! I am a "noob" after all.

Are you a troll?

NikolaiI

12-16-2014, 12:45 PM

The answer seems so obvious, that I feel as though a trap is being set for me! I am a "noob" after all.

Are you a troll?

Nope, definitely not. It is simply, I have discovered that these groups are ones that preach this message. While not preaching outright that genocide ought to be committed, they are yet committed to the idea that many groups of humanity are sub-human, and that their group is the "master race" and "supreme."

I do not believe I have made any faults in logic or reasoning in my investigation, or conclusions after my research.

And yet this fact - which, as you say, is so obvious as to be rather a moot quesiton - has, as far as I can tell, gone rather unnoticed.

After half a day, after no one else had seemed to understand the picture, I began my involvement in the topic. As I did so I continued to learn and understand it more.

To clarify, Waldorf schools and Camphill village are the two groups I am talking about, they are both from Steiner.

This article, from someone who was involved and part of it, but got out, is a well-written and elucidating article about the subject.

http://www.waldorfcritics.org/articles/NJP_RudolfSteinerAndJews.html

It is not easy to understand such a convoluted mind as the one behind this kind of thing - specifically, because it's so convoluted.

Normally I would never in a million years wish to discuss something like this; and I went back and forth quite a bit before I engaged in the discussion, but as I said once elsewhere, I eventually came to the conclusion, that it's really the least I can do. . . Especially considering the fact that, not speaking up is one of the issues that allowed this type of thing to occur in the first place.

I simply believe that a group that is entirely committed to the idea of supremacy of their group - and the dehumanization of every other as non-human - should not be praised, or even considered as neutral. Nor do I think there can be any defense for such a view.

I hope this has been of some clarification.

Clopin

12-16-2014, 12:51 PM

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_as_the_chosen_people

So do you also protest teaching Jewish tradition to Jewish children?

BubGoverned

12-16-2014, 12:54 PM

Nope, definitely not. It is simply, I have discovered that these groups are ones that preach this message. While not preaching outright that genocide ought to be committed, they are yet committed to the idea that many groups of humanity are sub-human, and that their group is the "master race" and "supreme."

I do not believe I have made any faults in logic or reasoning in my investigation, or conclusions after my research.

And yet this fact - which, as you say, is so obvious as to be rather a moot quesiton - has, as far as I can tell, gone rather unnoticed.

After half a day, after no one else had seemed to understand the picture, I began my involvement in the topic. As I did so I continued to learn and understand it more.

To clarify, Waldorf schools and Camphill village are the two groups I am talking about, they are both from Steiner.

This article, from someone who was involved and part of it, but got out, is a well-written and elucidating article about the subject.

It is not easy to understand such a convoluted mind as the one behind this kind of thing - specifically, because it's so convoluted.

Normally I would never in a million years wish to discuss something like this; and I went back and forth quite a bit before I engaged in the discussion, but as I said once elsewhere, I eventually came to the conclusion, that it's really the least I can do. . . Especially considering the fact that, not speaking up is one of the issues that allowed this type of thing to occur in the first place.

I simply believe that a group that is entirely committed to the idea of supremacy of their group - and the dehumanization of every other as non-human - should not be praised, or even considered as neutral. Nor do I think there can be any defense for such a view.

I hope this has been of some clarification.

I'm probably not ready for this in all honesty. What you have written is a bit like Finnegan's Wake again to me. But I do think that generally, people should try to be nice to each other.

Clopin

12-16-2014, 01:10 PM

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy#Judaism

This all sounds perfectly kosher to me.

Jackson Richardson

12-16-2014, 01:16 PM

Setting aside for a moment the anti-semitic issue, here’s another angle on the subject.

The admirers of Richard Dawkins are much in evidence on these boards. For them all religion or belief in God is irrational because the existence of God cannot be proved empirically. It is just belief in “fairies at the bottom of the garden”,

This is totally missing the point. God is not an additional item in existence as we know it – God is the potential for anything to exist at all. We can transcend ourselves through contemplation of God or loving care for our fellows.

By contrast, Steinerites (and I imagine theosophists) to be blunt do believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, in the astral plane and all over the place. Their idea of “spiritual” is just more existence only on further planes, which only clever Herr Steiner has mapped.

Pompey Bum

12-16-2014, 02:08 PM

Well, my opinion, Jonathan, is that you are conflating too many things that you don't like. Dawkins is not Steiner, and Steiner is not theosophy, and theosophy is not (just) New Age silliness. But I've said my say on that.

Bub: Nik is not a troll but one of the warmest people on the site. But since there seems to be so much contention over some of these issues, I think that you are wise to give it some space. :)

Jackson Richardson

12-16-2014, 02:49 PM

I meant Dawkins' argument against God is flawed, but does work against Anthrosophy as far as I could make out from six months living among them and what I've heard since.

Pompey Bum

12-16-2014, 03:01 PM

I meant Dawkins' argument against God is flawed, but does work against Anthrosophy as far as I could make out from six months living among them and what I've heard since.

Okay. Thanks for clarifying that for me.

If you haven't already, you may want to check out an interesting (for me) conversation that Yes/No and I had about the possibilities for God, faith, skepticism, rationalism, and even ghosts, which turns up near the end of the (very long) paranormal thread. Some of us non-Orthodox types love God, too, you know. :)

Jackson Richardson

12-16-2014, 06:08 PM

I'd like to think I'm orthodox with a small "o": it is what I'm committed to. C of E, to be precise, with a background in C20 Biblical criticism and catholic liturgy. I don't think that only orthodox Christians are good, loving and prayerful people. Quite the reverse in all too many cases. But I must be committed to something rather than dilettante.

It's never a good idea to post late at night, I find, so I'll make another point tomorrow, dv.

Pompey Bum

12-16-2014, 06:20 PM

As Sherlock Holmes was an amateur detective, so am I a dilettante theologian. :)

I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow (as always).

YesNo

12-17-2014, 08:12 AM

Pompey Bum

12-17-2014, 09:53 AM

I am finding Smoley's "Inner Christianity" interesting. The overall picture I am getting of gnosticism, which includes Theosophy, is that it is like Eastern enlightenment but from a Christian perspective.

In a general sense, it is--or more precisely the western sort of enlightenment to be found in Plotinus and Porphyry (among others) as applied to the experience of being a Christian. But it isn't hard to find common ground between my heterodox Christianity and my wife's East Asian Buddhism, as long as we respect differences and don't try to lump everything into a big yucky wad of "It's all good." People who do that, from my experience, are usually well intended, but the result of trying to color with every crayon in the box is typically a big brown smudge that destroys the distinctive beauty of each hue. A Holocaust survivor once told me that getting along, religiously or otherwise, is a matter of accepting what you can, respecting what you cannot, and learning from both. Such wisdom!

I haven't read Smoley's book, but the Amazon blurb looked interesting. I noticed another work by Smoley that seemed to pertain to our earlier conversation about consciousness and quantum: The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. Here is the link, if you are interested. (I told you it sounded Hindu :) ).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dice-Game-Shiva-Consciousness/dp/1577316444/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0BP9Z58KR1VEBJRNRS47

YesNo

12-17-2014, 11:42 AM

"The Dice Game of Shiva" looks interesting. I was planning to read some of the sources Smokey mentions in his book such as "A Course in Miracles" and "The Cloud of Unknowning". He introduced me to the idea that we have three natures (flesh, psyche and spirit) and the distinction makes sense. I previously would have said there were only two: mind and body.

I am slowly reading Amit Goswami's "The Self-Aware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world". He would be someone that Lanza probably would not like, but they are saying similar things.

Is your wife's East Asian Buddhism theistic? Or is it atheistic like western Buddhism?

Pompey Bum

12-17-2014, 01:37 PM

The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century prayer/treatise on Christian mysticism, is well worth your while. I believe that Jonathan is also fond of it. You can download a modernized English version of it for free here:

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4308/the-cloud-of-unknowing

I know of A Course in Miracles but have never read it. My impression from the little that I have heard of it is somewhat negative. I think it is exactly the sort of thing that Jonathan was talking about earlier when he gave the opinion that gnostics are interested in "self-help" rather than loving God and each other. I am certainly being an intellectual snob in my attitude, at least insofar as I have not read the book; but I remain skeptical of claims of "channeled writing" from Jesus or anyone else, and where theology is concerned, I prefer to read books that are less involved with the kind of sales that A Course in Miracles has enjoyed since Oprah Winfrey took it up. But I could be wrong. Let me know what you think of it (translation: you buy it. :) )

As far as my wife's Buddhism goes, it is certainly not western. Whether it is non-theistic is more complicated, of course, since ultimately the gods turn out to be illusions in Buddhism. But my wife venerates Bodhisattva Amitabha, a male figure of divine compassion, somewhat (though not exactly) like Jesus; and Bodhisattva Guan Yin, a female figure of divine mercy (though again, not Mary exactly). My wife is a Mahayana Buddhist, so probably the answer to your question (at least in the context in which you asked it) is that she is not an atheist. The fact that she's not a theist or an agnostic either is sort of beside the point. Isn't Buddhism great?

Jackson Richardson

12-17-2014, 03:00 PM

Cloud of Unknowing - good stuff. Have you come across Nicholas Buxton, who spent some time in a Buddhist monastery, Pompey, and is now an Anglican priest? He did his PhD on Buddhism.

Pompey Bum

12-17-2014, 03:35 PM

Cloud of Unknowing - good stuff. Have you come across Nicholas Buxton, who spent some time in a Buddhist monastery, Pompey, and is now an Anglican priest? He did his PhD on Buddhism.

No, I hadn't. Thanks for the reference. I found his we page, if anyone else is interested.

http://www.nicholasbuxton.net

Jackson Richardson

12-17-2014, 04:56 PM

Nicholas Buxton was attached to Ripon Cathedral as his first posting ("our curate" as one of the canons told me). I was browzing in the Cathdral bookshop and came accross his "Tantalus and the Pelican" and read a bit in the preface and exclaimed "Good man!". Other people turned round and stared at me. I thought I better buy the book and found it good stuff.

The quote that made me exclaim was:

"“Rather than seeing spirituality and religion as separate - or worse as opposed - I suggest that if spirituality refers to the innate human instinct to seek meaning and fulfilment, then religion is the formalisation of that in terms of a way of life, to which we have a duty to be faithful and true.”

Jackson Richardson

12-17-2014, 04:58 PM

Here's what I wrote in our parish magazine two years ago reviewing Nick Buxton:

In Buddhist thought, which was a major influence for Buxton, this means that everything in life – pleasurable as well as painful – is somehow unsatisfactory and frustrating as it is all impermanent. We live like Tantalus in Greek legend with satisfaction always just out of reach. And yet there is a sense of an “irreducible fact of existence which some people call God”, a source for healing and wholeness. But this source is not something we can own or describe in words. However words are the means by which we have a formalisation of that insight of the divine. Buxton is sad that although many people now say they are eager for spirituality, they reject church life on the basis that they cannot accept the literal truth of its creeds or scriptures. This attitude he considers a failure of imagination and a failure to understand how stories work. He says:

“We live our lives according to and within stories ... story telling is what we do because we are human: it makes us human.. The supposedly distinct boundary between truth and fiction now seems blurred at best. It is all stories. This is not to say that religious stories are merely stories in comparison with something else that is really true. I mean there are only stories.”

Pompey Bum

12-17-2014, 11:51 PM

“We live our lives according to and within stories ... story telling is what we do because we are human: it makes us human.. The supposedly distinct boundary between truth and fiction now seems blurred at best. It is all stories. This is not to say that religious stories are merely stories in comparison with something else that is really true. I mean there are only stories.”

It's an interesting insight that is also applicable to historiography. There are criteria for making meaning out of historical stories, too, although of course everyone wants them to be something different. For me, religion is somewhat similar. The formula (if you want to look at it like that) is 1) What? (What is the story and what do we think of it?); So what? (How does the story fit into the way we make meaning?); and 3) So now what? (How does the meaning we have made from the story affect the way we go through our lives?)

I didn't make that up, by the way, so I don't want to take credit for it. But thanks for sharing that, Jonathan. It did make me think.

Dreamwoven

12-18-2014, 02:07 AM

I've always had an interest in gnostic thought, just never developed it much. Cloud of Unknowing is something I have often meant to read, and have downloaded it from the link from Pompey Bum's post. Look forward to reading it.

YALASH

12-18-2014, 02:20 AM

I am very faintly acquainted with theosophy. I have met the term in some novel. How much do you know it and what do you think about it?

Peace be on you.
1= Here is some relevant knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy

2= What do you think about it?...Searched to find it in Ahmadiyya literature, following is an interesting quote, which may tell the certain dimensions;

" On the other side of the world in New Zealand, there lived a British-born meteorologist by the name of Professor Clement Lindley Wragge, a theosophist by nature and discoverer by virtue he travelled the world over studying and imparting knowledge. He is also the man who is credited for the use of people’s names to label cyclones and for several other advances in the field of meteorology. During his travels to India in 1908 he met Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and had a thorough exchange with the scholar. He showed leanings towards the teachings and theories put forth by Ahmad even though his actual conversion is debatable.
The Ahmadis beleive he did accept Islam at the hands of Ahmad while his family maintains he remained a theosophist till the end of his days. Nonetheless one thing is irrefutable; he spent a great deal of time conversing with Ahmad and found his explanations on existence of God, of sin, of punishment, heaven and hell, extremely enlightening and incorporated them in later parts of his life. It must be said, muslims the world over also claim he was a convert, therefore due to a lack of evidence suggesting he converted under the tutelage of any other scholar, it is safe to assume that if he did convert, it was done after meeting with Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian."
source: http://ahmadiyyatimes.blogspot.com/2010/07/galileo-of-islam-mirza-ghulam-ahmad.html

YesNo

12-18-2014, 10:25 AM

I suspect there is an "inner Islam" like an "inner Christianity", YALASH, but I know little about either. Smoley's book also left me with the idea that the world that is manifest before us is just the surface of the sea and the gnostic tries to dive into that sea.

I am finding The Cloud of Unknowing difficult to read. I should slow down and not expect everything to fit in my conceptual box. I found this interesting about time in Chapter 4:

And therefore take good heed unto time, how that thou dispendest it: for nothing is more precious than time. In one little time, as little as it is, may heaven be won and lost. A token it is that time is precious: for God, that is given of time, giveth never two times together, but each one after other. And this He doth, for He will not reverse the order or the ordinal course in the cause of His creation. For time is made for man, and not man for time.

Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing (Kindle Locations 335-338). Feedbooks.

It is also at the end of this chapter that he talks about this cloud:

For when I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing: as all that thing that thou knowest not, or else that thou hast forgotten, it is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is betwixt thee and thy God.

Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing (Kindle Locations 372-374). Feedbooks.

Jackson Richardson

12-18-2014, 10:31 AM

For when I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing: as all that thing that thou knowest not, or else that thou hast forgotten, it is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is betwixt thee and thy God.

I don't see how that text can be called gnostic (which means knowledge) when it is precisely saying that wecan't know.

YesNo

12-18-2014, 10:45 AM

I don't know if The Cloud of Unknowing is gnostic or not. It may depend on one's definition gnosticism.

Smoley also referenced The Imitation of Christ. I assume both of these books are orthodox Catholic texts, but could they also be part of an esoteric Christianity?

Pompey Bum

12-18-2014, 11:06 AM

Dreamwoven

12-18-2014, 11:15 AM

Pompey Bum

12-18-2014, 11:42 AM

I don't see how that text can be called gnostic (which means knowledge) when it is precisely saying that wecan't know.

Greek is a very nuanced language, Jonathan, much more so than English. I am sure as a Christian you are aware, for example, of the differences between the Greek words philos, eros, and agape, all of which come into English as "love." Similarly, gnosis does not mean "knowledge" in the conventional sense of "book learning," or in the other sense of "carnal knowledge," but exactly as the kind of knowledge that the author of The Cloud is talking about: direct experience of the divine; that which is not grasped in the more conventional ways. Thus:

For when I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing: as all that thing that thou knowest not, or else that thou hast forgotten, it is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is betwixt thee and thy God.

Is that helpful?

YALASH

12-18-2014, 11:59 AM

Peace to you also, Yalash.

Please forgive my ignorance, but all I know about Ghulam Ahmad is that he was a Messianic figure (?) who spoke against violence. Is that correct? Was there also a gnostic or theosophical aspect to his message?

Peace be on you:
1- It was prophesied in Islam that in latter days, when faith would ascend to Pleiades [i.e. become weak in later days] Allah would send a devotee of Holy Prophet (pbuh) for revival.

2-He was given metaphoric title Promised Messiah (because of slow and cool approach) and Mahdi (means guided by God).

3-There were also well connected prophesies which pin pointed the era of this coming.

4-This 2nd coming of Messiah in islam is like Elijah's as John the Baptist.

5-He appeared in 1889 in India:
Among his sayings:

Some Writings of Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani (1835-1908)

The Promised Messiah, peace be on him
"The doctrine of Jehad as understood and propagated by the Muslim divines of this age who are called maulvis is utterly incorrect."

"It can lead to nothing except that by their forceful preaching they would convert common people into wild beasts and would deprive them of all the good qualities of human beings; and so it has happened."

"I know for certain that the burden of the sins of those people who commit murders through ignorance on account of such preaching's, and who are unaware of the reason why Islam had to fight battles in its early stages, lies on the necks of these maulvis who go on propagating secretly these dangerous doctrines which result in such grievous loss of life."

Suspension of Jihad with Sword

"I have brought you a commandment, which is that Jehad with the sword has been ended but the Jehad of the purification of your spirits must continue to be waged. I say this not on my own but in order to proclaim the design of God. Reflect on the hadees of Bukhari wherein it is stated that the Promised Messiah would put an end to fighting for the faith. Accordingly I command those who have joined my ranks that they should discard all such notions. They should purify their hearts and foster their mercy and should have sympathy for the afflicted. They should spread peace on the earth, for this would cause their faith to spread"

Source: https://www.alislam.org/jihad/docofjihad.html

More @ https://www.alislam.org/topics/messiah/index.php

Pompey Bum

12-18-2014, 12:03 PM

Smoley's book also left me with the idea that the world that is manifest before us is just the surface of the sea and the gnostic tries to dive into that sea.

From my limited experience (and in accordance with radical Grace theology), it is the sea that dives into the gnostic. Or to be more prosaic about it (and in the immortal words of Tom Waits): "Don't take the train, let the train take you." :)

Pompey Bum

12-18-2014, 12:15 PM

Some Writings of Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani (1835-1908)

The Promised Messiah, peace be on him
"The doctrine of Jehad as understood and propagated by the Muslim divines of this age who are called maulvis is utterly incorrect."

"It can lead to nothing except that by their forceful preaching they would convert common people into wild beasts and would deprive them of all the good qualities of human beings; and so it has happened."

"I know for certain that the burden of the sins of those people who commit murders through ignorance on account of such preaching's, and who are unaware of the reason why Islam had to fight battles in its early stages, lies on the necks of these maulvis who go on propagating secretly these dangerous doctrines which result in such grievous loss of life."

Suspension of Jihad with Sword

"I have brought you a commandment, which is that Jehad with the sword has been ended but the Jehad of the purification of your spirits must continue to be waged. I say this not on my own but in order to proclaim the design of God. Reflect on the hadees of Bukhari wherein it is stated that the Promised Messiah would put an end to fighting for the faith. Accordingly I command those who have joined my ranks that they should discard all such notions. They should purify their hearts and foster their mercy and should have sympathy for the afflicted. They should spread peace on the earth, for this would cause their faith to spread"

Source: https://www.alislam.org/jihad/docofjihad.html

More @ https://www.alislam.org/topics/messiah/index.php

Peace to you also.

What an important message for our times. Thank you for posting it and God bless you.

Jackson Richardson

12-18-2014, 01:20 PM

exactly as the kind of knowledge that the author of The Cloud is talking about: direct experience of the divine; that which is not grasped in the more conventional ways. ?

I’d call that mysticism. If you call that Gnosticism, you don’t have a word left to describe those movements criticised by Irenaeus which did base all on esoteric knowledge.

Julian of Norwich is a mystic that you might well look at, YesNo. She describes herself as an unlettered woman, which goes to show that mysticism and profound theological reflection (she has been called the first English woman theologian) are not esoteric but develop naturally from the standard Christian prayer life.

You would do better with a modern translation of Julian and the Cloud rather one with these and thous.

Jackson Richardson

12-18-2014, 01:50 PM

For the Cloud try: http://www.chbookshop.co.uk/books/9780140447620/the-cloud-of-unknowing-and-other-works

The blurb says "Against a tradition of devotional writings which focussed on knowing God through Christ's Passion and his humanity, these texts describe a transcendent God who exists beyond human knowledge and human language." Now personal devotion to Jesus and his passion is just what you get in The Imitation of Christ. Although written before the Reformation, it was very popular with protestants and evangelicals with their emphasis on "knowing Jesus as personal Lord and Saviour". It has not been so popular in the last fifty years and possibly regarded with suspicion as a bit masochistic.

For Julian try http://www.chbookshop.co.uk/books/9780199641185/revelations-of-divine-love The blurb explains about her.

I wonder if people are interested in an inner or esoteric Christianity because they've been brought up to think Protestantism, and evangelical Protestantism in particular, is normative Christianity?

Pompey Bum

12-18-2014, 04:14 PM

I’d call that mysticism. If you call that Gnosticism, you don’t have a word left to describe those movements criticised by Irenaeus which did base all on esoteric knowledge.

Well, the simple solution in terms of this discussion is to simply sing, "You say mystic, I say gnostic!" That's fine with me. "Gnosticism" (large G) is still considered a heresy by Nicene Orthodoxy, and I respect your scruple in the matter even if I don't share it.

But (just to say my say), it is true that as the diversity of Christian gnostic thought has become better understood (that is, since the recovery of the gnostic text trove at Nag Hammadi), many historians have been revisiting the idea that Irenaeus was ever talking about "large G" Gnostics at all. (His original Greek text is lost, and the kind of Greek he was using would have treated capitals differently than we do anyway--they would have been just for names and to start paragraphs). According to the recent view, the word "gnostic" was not used as we (or Americans anyway) would use a word like "Democrat" or "Republican," but rather like "liberal," or "conservative," or "moderate." You're either a Democrat (or Republican) or you're not, but there are some moderate Republicans and there are (or have been) some conservative Democrats, and in Massachusetts, liberal Republicans have even been spotted from time to time.

Irenaeus tells us who he doesn't like: the followers of Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, and so on. And he says he doesn't like them because they are gnostics. But Christians who were considered orthodox, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen had no problem calling themselves gnostics. (Valentinus himself had narrowly missed being made Pope). Platonic philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry were called gnostics, too, as were earlier Jewish philosophers like Philo of Alexandria, who wad an important influence on the theology of The Gospel of John. In that context, you don't need to have "a word left to describe those movements criticized by Irenaeus which did base all on esoteric knowledge"--because that's not what he was talking about. He was talking about 2nd century Christians who had not yet adopted (or had not fully adopted, or had never heard of) his own group's then radical notion of witness in the flesh. At very least, Irenaeus is employing a rather non-specific term--one that could be applied both to theologians later considered orthodox and heterodox.

In historical context, that view works best for me. Remember that Irenaeus and Valentinus are really early witnesses to Christianity. They are only as distant in time from the ministry of Jesus as we are from the First World War, and much closer than that to the writing of the canonical Gospels (Irenaeus is the first Christian to treat the four canonical Gospels as equally authoritative). There was no Christian Orthodoxy--the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon wouldn't even be held for centuries. And before they did (in my opinion), Christians were just doing the best they could, sometimes in the face of truly brutal persecution.

But after Orthodoxy, after the Great Persecution had necessitated the reality of witness in the flesh, and when now Christian rulers of the Roman Empire required uniformity and unanimity to hold the badly deteriorating show together--then the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church found it necessary to show that there had always been one message that had always been the same. So they looked into their libraries and said (in effect), "Okay, this guy Irenaeus checks out--Saint Irenaeus to you now. But Valentinus, no, no, into the fire with that book! Ignatius--Saint! Basilides--fire!," and so on.

So what does the history lesson mean to us? Well, as I said, in our context it needn't intrude much. "You say mystic, I say gnostic." Fine. But I do want to suggest that it opens a question about where our duty actually lies--to doctrine or to God. In which do we have faith? For many, the answer will be both, and that is also fine. But for me, the answer is God alone.

YesNo

12-19-2014, 01:10 AM

From my limited experience (and in accordance with radical Grace theology), it is the sea that dives into the gnostic. Or to be more prosaic about it (and in the immortal words of Tom Waits): "Don't take the train, let the train take you." :)

The sea taking me where it wants sounds good, too. What is radical Grace theology?

Jackson Richardson

12-19-2014, 05:41 AM

I remember being struck by the way the Steinerites referred to the crucifixion as “the mystery of Calvary”. I thought here was a squalid, humiliating, malicious, excruciatingly painful, back streets criminal execution being air brushed out in a twee cosmic euphemism.

They were missing, or ignoring, what orthodox Christianity maintains. The two dogmas defined in the C5 were the Trinity (that God is three and God is one, all “persons” equal) and the Incarnation (Christ is fully divine and fully human, so Mary can be rightly called Mother of God and the crucifixion was at the same time a squalid back streets execution and the redemption of the world).

They safeguard the scriptural insight that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself”. It is not a matter of Either/Or but of Both/And. God is revealed in the squalor and muddle of our compromised, sinful lives and not in some enlightened commune of the pure.

YesNo

12-19-2014, 10:03 AM

I don't want to justify the Steinerites, but wouldn't it be appropriate to call a "squalid back streets execution" that is also the "redemption of the world" a "mystery"? The incongruity of it seems mysterious to me.

Also the incongruity of a child in a manger becoming a religious leader who taught for only one to three years yet having an influence for thousands of years is one of the striking things about Christianity.

What I don't understand is why does the world need to be reconciled to God?

YesNo

12-19-2014, 11:46 AM

To sort of answer my own question about being reconciled to God, I assume that more traditional people, those who didn't have a problem with the existences of God(s) or other beings like that, probably felt they were inadequate and didn't get things right with these forms of consciousness.

Being reconciled would be a way to say that there is no need to offer any more sacrifices to God.

Jackson Richardson

12-19-2014, 12:17 PM

the existences of God(s) or other beings like that,

You're not getting it. There are no other being like God, because God isn't a being. This thread is about Theosophy so I won't go on about the alternatives. (And Jesus for orthodox Christians, catholic, protestant or Orthodox, isn't primarily a teacher. He is God Incarnate.)

YesNo

12-19-2014, 01:40 PM

I get that. Jesus is God incarnate. So is Krishna.

But why does one need to be reconciled to God? How does Theosophy or Anthroposophy look at the need for reconciliation?

Jackson Richardson

12-19-2014, 01:47 PM

You'd have to ask a Theosophist or Anthroposophist.

Marx and Freud rejected the need for God, but they sure thought humans needed reconciliation with each other (Marx) and with themselves (Freud).

Pompey Bum

12-19-2014, 02:40 PM

Yes/No: I'm off for Christmas presents, and that may take a day or two, but I will answer your questions about reconciliation with God and Grace theology (radical or otherwise) when I am done. (Reconciliation has got nothing to do with the "other gods"--polytheism was thriving during the rise of Christianity).

YesNo

12-20-2014, 03:02 AM

You haven't finished your Christmas shopping yet?

I think reconciliation comes from feeling inadequate given the Gods or God and not knowing what to do about it.

Jackson Richardson

12-20-2014, 06:46 AM

Plenty of people feel inadequate without any religious belief.

YesNo

12-20-2014, 02:03 PM

That's true. I noticed in Amit Goswami's "The Self-Aware Universe" (page 56) that "All religions start with the premise that there is a wrongness in the way we are. The wrongness is variously called ignorance, original sin, evil, or just suffering."

The religion then claims there is a way out of this wrongness through participating in what the religion offers as a practice. Viewed like that all religions could be seen as gnostic in the sense that they "know" the way to salvation, enlightenment, or heaven and can justify the practices.

I don't mean to mock these practices. The practices are valuable. I want to point out that there is common ground between all of them.

Pompey Bum

12-20-2014, 06:32 PM

You haven't finished your Christmas shopping yet?

No, I hadn't even started when I wrote that. It's done now though, thank God. (I'd thank Santa but he doesn't exist).

I don't know if The Cloud of Unknowing is gnostic or not. It may depend on one's definition gnosticism.

Smoley also referenced The Imitation of Christ. I assume both of these books are orthodox Catholic texts, but could they also be part of an esoteric Christianity?

But why does one need to be reconciled to God?

What is radical Grace theology?

These questions are related, so I'll address them together.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a 14th Century contemplative prayer (once somewhat obscure) from the late Medieval Latin Church. The Cloud draws on a Christian tradition that had its roots in western Neo-Platonic mysticism--specifically with the idea that, despite the limitations of human consciousness, the unknowable God can be apprehended passively (or as Jonathan might say, contemplatively) through direct mystical experience--what earlier Neo-Platonists, both Christian and Polytheist, had called gnosis.

The Imitation of Christ, by contrast, is an extremely famous book by Thomas a Kempis, which epitomizes the pietistic aspect of European religious fervor during the run-up to the Reformation. It was a devotional work that tried to show Christians how they could reach an awareness of God through personal pietistic practices and thoughts. Kempis was an intellectual force in an influential lay movement called the Devotio Moderna, which was reacting in part to the worldly humanism of the Papacy. Kempis' approach, however, should not be mistaken anything like the (only slightly later) ideas of Luther, Zwingli. and Calvin. They were all products of late Medieval European religious fervor, but the Pietistic movement that produced Kempis' book followed a very different trajectory from those reformers.

By contrast, The Cloud of Unknowing was somewhat similar to some of Luther's (somewhat later) ideas in some ways (Luther's most profound influence was Augustine, some of whose ideas probably also influenced The Cloud). The most important shared understanding between Luther and the anonymous author of the The Cloud is that God's Grace (or, in the case of The Cloud, the experience of the unknowable God, is received almost passively; not (at least as Luther saw it) through pietistic practices.

That becomes important when you ask what a radical Grace theology is, but before getting into it (and into the reason for reconciliation), I want to finish addressing your question:

I assume both of these books are orthodox Catholic texts, but could they also be part of an esoteric Christianity?

Well, they are both part of Christian mysticism, although as I said above, they followed a different and almost opposite trajectory. The Cloud was a work of gnostic mysticism: it sought to open the Christian to passive reception of the overwhelming and infinite experience of God's ("the sea dives into the swimmer"); while The Imitation of Christ was a work of devotional mysticism that sought to bring the Christian to the reality of God through pietistic practices ("the swimmer dives into the sea"). I reject the former (or much of it) in favor of the latter. I'll let Jonathan speak for himself, but the Church of England is known for incorporating a little of both into its theology.

That may seem complicated, but it's kid stuff compared to:

I assume both of these books are orthodox Catholic texts

Believe it or not, things become really complicated when you start to use a term like "Catholic." Let's just say that both are perfectly orthodox Christian texts and leave it at that--unless you want the rest of the Reformation lecture. :)

But why does one need to be reconciled to God?

That on the other hand is very straightforward Christian theology. All Christian traditions hold that human beings are in an existentially fallen state. (That's why, in my doggerel about Milton, Satan was claiming that his having fallen was "A state that I share with all men"). The Biblical source for this belief is the story of the Fall of Adam, filtered through Augustine's (much later) formulation of the idea of "Original Sin." Others (like me) see the story of Eden, conversely as a mythopoetic expression of that fallen state. (Personally I identify Original Sin with natural selection, but that's another story). One way or another, all Christians (at least those who know their own theology) believe that human beings live in an estranged relationship with God. That is the reason that reconciliation is needed.

What is radical Grace theology?

In the Christian view, reconciliation with God brings Salvation. There are several quite different ideas about how Salvation works, although most or all of them see it as the continuation of the immortality of the soul, which was lost with the Fall. Some Soteriologies include the idea that the soul is being saved from hell, others just from permanent extinction.

To simplify things a little, Soteriologies fall within a general spectrum between something called "works,": things human beings can do to achieve Salvation; and "Grace": "the free gift of Salvation open to anyone upon whom God grants it, despite the fact that it is unmerited. In most forms of the latter view, human beings are inherently unable to merit Salvation because of their fallen nature, and so are wholly dependent on God's Grace. Accepting that sort of Soteriology is sometimes called having a Grace theology.

Grace theologies of one type or another were proposed by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin (and arguably, Augustine). They are usually associated with Protestantism, although Catholic Grace theologies have occasionally surfaced--with varying results. The modern Evangelical position that anyone can be saved if they only accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal Savior is an example of a (partial) Grace theology. (The "one thing" necessary may vary in other examples//for Luther it was to accept the promises of God to Abraham). There are other kinds of Grace theologies as well.

On the other end of the spectrum is the view that anyone can achieve Salvation by doing good or pietistic things. That would have been the view of Thomas a Kempis and the adherents of the Devotio Moderna. Ironically, it would also have been the view of the humanist Popes they were reacting against, who were selling indulgences for time off from Purgatory to fund their dazzling building projects in Rome, and their equally dazzling (though less holy) cosmopolitan lifestyles. The idea that a Medieval lord who had slaughtered his brothers and other rivals to achieve his position could achieve Salvation by building enough churches and paying a special priest to say Masses for him all day (they had them), even after he died, is a historical example of a works theology.

Works theologies are typically associated with the Roman Catholic Church, although some Christians (including me) are of the opinion that Calvin "re-Cathalocized" the Reformed Church, which eventually evolved a kind of works theology of its own. Calvin's original idea was that Salvation was pre-ordained and inscrutable, but that a kind of "presumptive evidence" for who was saved could be obtained by observing and judging the good works (or lack thereof) of one's neighbors. That is something for which Calvin's community in Geneva was rather notorious, and for which America's partly Calvinist "Bible Belt" still is. So, on a secular level, is the once-Calvinist land of my youth: politically-correct Massachusetts. Blame Calvin. :)

So to finally answer your question (and you knew I had it in me), when I said that the metaphor of the sea diving into the gnostic accorded with radical Grace theology, I meant "Grace theology" in the sense of being passively received rather than actively pursued; and "radical" simply because I was referring to my own radical religion, which rejects orthodoxies and sees works like The Cloud of Unknowing as examples of the ancient and venerable tradition of Christian gnosticism--historically persecuted as heretical.

Jackson Richardson

12-20-2014, 07:05 PM

Thank you for taking the trouble to write that. I might reply later.

YesNo

12-21-2014, 05:53 PM

No, I hadn't even started when I wrote that. It's done now though, thank God. (I'd thank Santa but he doesn't exist).

I usually put on my presents to my children that they came from Santa although I don't think they ever, even when little, thought it came from Santa.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a 14th Century contemplative prayer (once somewhat obscure) from the late Medieval Latin Church. The Cloud draws on a Christian tradition that had its roots in western Neo-Platonic mysticism--specifically with the idea that, despite the limitations of human consciousness, the unknowable God can be apprehended passively (or as Jonathan might say, contemplatively) through direct mystical experience--what earlier Neo-Platonists, both Christian and Polytheist, had called gnosis.

The Imitation of Christ, by contrast, is an extremely famous book by Thomas a Kempis, which epitomizes the pietistic aspect of European religious fervor during the run-up to the Reformation. It was a devotional work that tried to show Christians how they could reach an awareness of God through personal pietistic practices and thoughts. Kempis was an intellectual force in an influential lay movement called the Devotio Moderna, which was reacting in part to the worldly humanism of the Papacy. Kempis' approach, however, should not be mistaken anything like the (only slightly later) ideas of Luther, Zwingli. and Calvin. They were all products of late Medieval European religious fervor, but the Pietistic movement that produced Kempis' book followed a very different trajectory from those reformers.

By contrast, The Cloud of Unknowing was somewhat similar to some of Luther's (somewhat later) ideas in some ways (Luther's most profound influence was Augustine, some of whose ideas probably also influenced The Cloud). The most important shared understanding between Luther and the anonymous author of the The Cloud is that God's Grace (or, in the case of The Cloud, the experience of the unknowable God, is received almost passively; not (at least as Luther saw it) through pietistic practices.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a passive approach and The Imitation of Christ represents an active approach.

Well, they are both part of Christian mysticism, although as I said above, they followed a different and almost opposite trajectory. The Cloud was a work of gnostic mysticism: it sought to open the Christian to passive reception of the overwhelming and infinite experience of God's ("the sea dives into the swimmer"); while The Imitation of Christ was a work of devotional mysticism that sought to bring the Christian to the reality of God through pietistic practices ("the swimmer dives into the sea"). I reject the former (or much of it) in favor of the latter. I'll let Jonathan speak for himself, but the Church of England is known for incorporating a little of both into its theology.

I can see the difference between "the sea dives into the swimmer" in comparison to "the swimmer dives into the sea". I take it you are in favor of the Imitation of Christ?

Believe it or not, things become really complicated when you start to use a term like "Catholic." Let's just say that both are perfectly orthodox Christian texts and leave it at that--unless you want the rest of the Reformation lecture. :)

I'll skip any reference to "Catholic".

That on the other hand is very straightforward Christian theology. All Christian traditions hold that human beings are in an existentially fallen state. (That's why, in my doggerel about Milton, Satan was claiming that his having fallen was "A state that I share with all men"). The Biblical source for this belief is the story of the Fall of Adam, filtered through Augustine's (much later) formulation of the idea of "Original Sin." Others (like me) see the story of Eden, conversely as a mythopoetic expression of that fallen state. (Personally I identify Original Sin with natural selection, but that's another story). One way or another, all Christians (at least those who know their own theology) believe that human beings live in an estranged relationship with God. That is the reason that reconciliation is needed.

I am aware that Christians believe everyone is in a fallen state and it comes from the fall in Genesis. That is what puzzles me. I can see how humans may feel inadequate and estranged, but why should God require a "reconciliation"? Why should God be angry?

In the Christian view, reconciliation with God brings Salvation. There are several quite different ideas about how Salvation works, although most or all of them see it as the continuation of the immortality of the soul, which was lost with the Fall. Some Soteriologies include the idea that the soul is being saved from hell, others just from permanent extinction.

To simplify things a little, Soteriologies fall within a general spectrum between something called "works,": things human beings can do to achieve Salvation; and "Grace": "the free gift of Salvation open to anyone upon whom God grants it, despite the fact that it is unmerited. In most forms of the latter view, human beings are inherently unable to merit Salvation because of their fallen nature, and so are wholly dependent on God's Grace. Accepting that sort of Soteriology is sometimes called having a Grace theology.

Grace theologies of one type or another were proposed by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin (and arguably, Augustine). They are usually associated with Protestantism, although Catholic Grace theologies have occasionally surfaced--with varying results. The modern Evangelical position that anyone can be saved if they only accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal Savior is an example of a (partial) Grace theology. (The "one thing" necessary may vary in other examples//for Luther it was to accept the promises of God to Abraham). There are other kinds of Grace theologies as well.

On the other end of the spectrum is the view that anyone can achieve Salvation by doing good or pietistic things. That would have been the view of Thomas a Kempis and the adherents of the Devotio Moderna. Ironically, it would also have been the view of the humanist Popes they were reacting against, who were selling indulgences for time off from Purgatory to fund their dazzling building projects in Rome, and their equally dazzling (though less holy) cosmopolitan lifestyles. The idea that a Medieval lord who had slaughtered his brothers and other rivals to achieve his position could achieve Salvation by building enough churches and paying a special priest to say Masses for him all day (they had them), even after he died, is a historical example of a works theology.

Works theologies are typically associated with the Roman Catholic Church, although some Christians (including me) are of the opinion that Calvin "re-Cathalocized" the Reformed Church, which eventually evolved a kind of works theology of its own. Calvin's original idea was that Salvation was pre-ordained and inscrutable, but that a kind of "presumptive evidence" for who was saved could be obtained by observing and judging the good works (or lack thereof) of one's neighbors. That is something for which Calvin's community in Geneva was rather notorious, and for which America's partly Calvinist "Bible Belt" still is. So, on a secular level, is the once-Calvinist land of my youth: politically-correct Massachusetts. Blame Calvin. :)

So to finally answer your question (and you knew I had it in me), when I said that the metaphor of the sea diving into the gnostic accorded with radical Grace theology, I meant "Grace theology" in the sense of being passively received rather than actively pursued; and "radical" simply because I was referring to my own radical religion, which rejects orthodoxies and sees works like The Cloud of Unknowing as examples of the ancient and venerable tradition of Christian gnosticism--historically persecuted as heretical.

Could it not be both Grace and Works?

Those people who were buying their way into heaven were probably doing the best they knew how at the time.

Pompey Bum

12-21-2014, 08:02 PM

I can see the difference between "the sea dives into the swimmer" in comparison to "the swimmer dives into the sea". I take it you are in favor of the Imitation of Christ?

Heck no! I have a Grace theology that would have been too radical for Luther and Calvin. The sea's going to have to dive into this swimmer, I'm afraid.

I'll skip any reference to "Catholic".

Heh heh. I take it you've had enough. :)

I am aware that Christians believe everyone is in a fallen state and it comes from the fall in Genesis. That is what puzzles me. I can see how humans may feel inadequate and estranged, but why should God require a "reconciliation"? Why should God be angry?

Who says God's angry? It's people who seek reconciliation with God. The only question is can they earn it (works) or does God give it to them when and if He wants (Grace).

Could it not be both Grace and Works?

Of course. Both approaches are full of problems, so as I said, there's a spectrum of proportional solutions. I don't think anyone would say it's a zero sum game. (Maybe me, but not quite).

Those people who were buying their way into heaven were probably doing the best they knew how at the time.

Probably. The late Middle Ages were a violent time, and most elites appreciated that according to their own religion they were bound for hell, which is why they went to such extremes to atone for their sins. That was one of the great appeals of Luther's message, which in the beginning was: Look, it's out of your hands, so just stop worrying about it.

Jackson Richardson

12-22-2014, 03:42 AM

Pompey and I have opposite reactions – I hear “Orthodoxy” and cheer, he groans. (Orthodoxy holds the paradoxes together.) So it is nice to say that I mainly agree with his general summary. (I do think the contrast between works and faith is misleading – pre-Reformation Christians certainly believed in God’s grace, his free gift, his incarnation being an obvious example.)

YesNo’s puzzlement about the need for reconciliation puzzles me. As Pompey says:

All Christian traditions hold that human beings are in an existentially fallen state.

And you don’t need to read Genesis to think that. I’d have thought anyone of any sensitivity would be aware of that there’s something radically wrong with the human condition.

Pompey knows more about Buddhism so he can confirm whether the first of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha can been paraphrased as “Life sucks”.

Crudely, for Eastern religions the basic problem is defined in terms of delusion.

For Christianity the basic problem is defined in terms of sin. Although Eastern Christians (ie Eastern Orthodox) tend to stress death together with sin.

Dreamwoven

12-22-2014, 04:48 AM

I don't feel able to join in with this debate, but it makes fascinating reading!

YesNo

12-22-2014, 10:05 AM

Heck no! I have a Grace theology that would have been too radical for Luther and Calvin. The sea's going to have to dive into this swimmer, I'm afraid.

I misunderstood your position. I think I understand more what you mean by "Grace" in contrast with "Works".

Who says God's angry? It's people who seek reconciliation with God. The only question is can they earn it (works) or does God give it to them when and if He wants (Grace).

It seems to me that Christians view God as being angry. He is one of those deities that one must offer sacrifices to. He threw Adam and Eve out of Eden rather than forgiving them. He almost wiped us out in a flood rather than forgiving us. He needed to send Jesus to die on a cross for our sins rather than just getting over it and forgiving us. Why?

If God is not angry the word "reconciliation" is inappropriate for the dissatisfied situation we feel we are in.

Marcio Amaral writes the following in "Creating Luck" (page 28) which expresses the way I see our human condition:

The key is to connect to Heaven energy and express it in our life -- or, rather, to know that we are connected to Heaven energy, as we are all spirits and already do connect, but maybe without knowing it.

I read that last night and the "knowing" part made me think of gnosticism.

YesNo

12-22-2014, 10:26 AM

And you don’t need to read Genesis to think that. I’d have thought anyone of any sensitivity would be aware of that there’s something radically wrong with the human condition.

Pompey knows more about Buddhism so he can confirm whether the first of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha can been paraphrased as “Life sucks”.

One of the keywords for Buddhism is "suffering". I usually put a book on Eastern spirituality down when I hear that word. After that I assume I will get a lecture on non-self or atheism. From my Western perspective, it leads to nihilism which I reject.

Crudely, for Eastern religions the basic problem is defined in terms of delusion.

For Christianity the basic problem is defined in terms of sin. Although Eastern Christians (ie Eastern Orthodox) tend to stress death together with sin.

That's a good distinction. Why is viewing the human condition in terms of "sin" better than viewing it in terms of "delusion"?

Pompey Bum

12-22-2014, 02:12 PM

I don't feel able to join in with this debate, but it makes fascinating reading!

Jump right in, DW. Your view is as important as anyone else's here :)

But your comment reminds me of a question I had, not about you but Papayahed (if she's lurking about this thread). She posted a message on the anonymous thread that read:

ermmm, what?

I don't know if she was talking about me/us on this thread, but I hope so. It gave me a laugh, so if it was for someone else, Papayahed, I don't want to know about it. :)

(By the way, is there any way we can get the name of this thread changed to Theology? It hasn't really been about theosophy for some time).

Jackson Richardson

12-22-2014, 03:49 PM

Changing the title of "Theology" would be a good idea. YesNo raised so many important issues I didn't know where to start, so I thought I'd wait to see what Pompey said.

It's nice to think others are interested here and it's not a conversation of three.

(Maybe Marx's word "alienation" covers what Christian mean by sin and Buddhists by dukkha. Marx, Freud, the Buddha and Paul all thought there was something wonky about the human condition but defined it and its cure differently. I had no wish to appear to criticize Mrs P's Buddhist beliefs.)

Pompey Bum

12-22-2014, 04:57 PM

Pompey and I have opposite reactions – I hear “Orthodoxy” and cheer, he groans.

My rejection of the Christian Orthodoxy as authoritative (which of course doesn't mean that I reject all its doctrines) is based on my low anthropology. Orthodoxy is made by human beings, and we all know what they/we're like. As you say, "there’s something radically wrong with the human condition." Becoming a Christian does not change that all that much--it certainly does not make one worthy of God (at least in my view). The horrific and bloody history of Christian Orthodoxy, with its persecutions, burnings, and tortures, is only what one would expect from people like us. (But take a look at Stalinism to know that secular orthodoxies can be even worse).

For me, the soul must make most of the calls for itself. They will be wrong, too, sometimes, but a personal God requires personal decisions. That's a hard enough task without worrying if you're being loyal to the Church's position as well as God's truth. They are not always the same, which I am convinced is one of the most ignored of Jesus' teachings. I know which I would choose in any case.

(Orthodoxy holds the paradoxes together.)

That is an interesting view. In my opinion, it is God, for Christians, the ultimate paradox, in whom all other paradoxes are subsumed. Orthodoxies only provide human apologetics (not to knock that too hard--it's what we are doing now). What is interesting to me? Though, is that this idea may agree with Yes/No's idea of God as a Berkelean Super-Consciousness, holding the contradictions of individual consciousnesses together into a quantum universe. Any thoughts, Y/N?

So it is nice to say that I mainly agree with his general summary.

Yes, it's nice. If anyone is wondering, I consider Jon a friend and a brother in Christ, and none of our disagreements or debates changes that an iota.

(I do think the contrast between works and faith is misleading – pre-Reformation Christians certainly believed in God’s grace, his free gift, his incarnation being an obvious example.)

Oh sure. There were a number of Church theologians who anticipated Luther, all drawing from Augustine; and Luther himself was an Augustinian monk who originally saw himself as recovering Augustine's theology from the Neo-Pelagianism works theology of the day. There's a good discussion of this (and Augustine's overall importance to the Reformation) in a great book by Oxford professor Diarmaid MacCullough, called The Reformation: A History. (MacCullough also wrote Christianity: The First 3000 years, which is a helpful book to refer to, taken with a grain of salt--unfortunately his ideas aren't always cutting edge anymore).

But yes, it would be misleading to think of the idea of Salvation through God's Grace as beginning with the Reformation; but the Grace-works dichotomy (with some proportional judgment reached on one side or the other) that I spoke of earlier became heightened during that time, and especially after the Council of Trent (between 1545 and 1563) and the subsequent Catholic (and at that point, Y/N, feel free to call them Catholics) Counter-Reformation. The distinction remains, in my opinion, the greatest divide between the Catholic and Protestant to this day.

That may be less apparent to you, Jonathan, since the English Reformation was separate from the German version (Henry VIII burned Jesuits and Lutherans side by side at one of his weddings) and the Church of England includes some Catholic-ish aspects in its theology. All of which gives you your beautiful churches, on which I believe you are an expert. Where I grew up, churches were wooden and painted white, with enormous white steeples. They looked a little cold in the snow, but in the end, you know, it was still home.

Pompey knows more about Buddhism so he can confirm whether the first of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha can been paraphrased as “Life sucks”.

I know a lot less about Buddhism than Christianity, but I can give you some opinions I have from a (very small) amount of critical study and a large amount of being married to a Buddhist. Ecurb is probably the person to talk to, since I believe he studied comparative religion in some detail. And I think JBI (who I have never met) is an scholar of Asian literature. I am sure that either of them would be more qualified to answer than me, but I will do what I can.

I would not agree that the Four Noble Truths can be summed up as "life sucks"--not even the first Noble Truth, that all sentient life is characterized by suffering. As with the Greek word gnosis, there is apparently quite a lot missed in the English translation of "suffering." The Pali word (from a language I do not read or speak) is dukkha. It can also be translated as anxiety or stress, but at, um, a pretty good school in Massachusetts (let's put it that way), I was taught that dukkha carries with it the sense of having the senses stirred up rather than calm. So hitting your thumb with a hammer would dukkha, but so would being turned on by a pornographic picture. Being thirsty is dukkha, but so is being drunk. Being anxious that you might get fired is dukkha, but so is gloating in your heart over a rival who got fired. In Buddhism, these things are not sin but kinds of suffering.

The Second Noble Truth, that suffering is caused by desire, is also subject to misunderstanding. Desire in this sense should also be understood as craving, addiction, and so on. The cycle of suffering and craving is what Buddhism seeks to break.

The Third Noble Truth, that there is an end to suffering, that dukkha constitutes an existential predicament but not a ontological state; and the Fourth Nobel Truth, that the end of suffering is Nirvana, can not in any way be summed up as you said.

Crudely, for Eastern religions the basic problem is defined in terms of delusion.

That is probably a little too crude because it crosses the line between illusion, which is incorrect sensory perception (ISP? :) ), and delusion, which is holding a deep-seated belief contrary to reality. The Buddha taught that dukkha was ultimately an illusion, but not a delusion. Suffering is real in that it really hurts. But it is just a trick of the senses (for me, the phenomenon of phantom pain comes to mind). It is nullified--or extinguished, which is what Nirvana means--when one awakes to Enlightenment.

That's about the best I can do for you. How one gets to Enlightenment is another matter, but at this point I must emulate Virgil in Dante's Purgatory and insist that from here, one more worthy than I must lead you.

YesNo raised so many important issues I didn't know where to start, so I thought I'd wait to see what Pompey said.

I will do my best to address them, but for today, I need to take a break from theology. I've really been neglecting The Pants Game. :)

Dreamwoven

12-23-2014, 01:18 AM

I agree, if it is possible for a moderator to change the thread name to Theology, I for one would be more comfortable discussing it. I know nothing about Theosophy other than that Steiner left it. Since I started this thread, perhaps I can just say that I would be happy if its name were changed.

I don't know a lot about theology anyway. I had heard of the Cloud of Unknowing in relation to gnosticism but no more. I've always had an interest in churches - not for religion but architecture and the transition from Norman to Perpendicular styles, quite a revolution. That height, the stained glass. Beautiful! Monasteries and the life of a monastic always drew me as well.

YesNo

12-23-2014, 11:08 AM

The horrific and bloody history of Christian Orthodoxy, with its persecutions, burnings, and tortures, is only what one would expect from people like us. (But take a look at Stalinism to know that secular orthodoxies can be even worse).

I agree. The only legitimate argument that atheists have against religious (or spiritual) people is the one that religious views might lead to self-righteous violence. However, the problem with that argument is that atheistic self-righteousness has led to even worse violence.

That is an interesting view. In my opinion, it is God, for Christians, the ultimate paradox, in whom all other paradoxes are subsumed. Orthodoxies only provide human apologetics (not to knock that too hard--it's what we are doing now). What is interesting to me? Though, is that this idea may agree with Yes/No's idea of God as a Berkelean Super-Consciousness, holding the contradictions of individual consciousnesses together into a quantum universe. Any thoughts, Y/N?

I am still reading Amit Goswami's "The Self-Aware Universe", but I find it better than Lanza's interpretation since I think he avoids solipsism. The existence of what looks like individual consciousnesses seems to be the heart of the problem of monistic idealism. It has to avoid solipsism.

But yes, it would be misleading to think of the idea of Salvation through God's Grace as beginning with the Reformation; but the Grace-works dichotomy (with some proportional judgment reached on one side or the other) that I spoke of earlier became heightened during that time, and especially after the Council of Trent (between 1545 and 1563) and the subsequent Catholic (and at that point, Y/N, feel free to call them Catholics) Counter-Reformation. The distinction remains, in my opinion, the greatest divide between the Catholic and Protestant to this day.

What is specific about the Council of Trent that one could mark this as the beginning of Catholicism?

I would not agree that the Four Noble Truths can be summed up as "life sucks"--not even the first Noble Truth, that all sentient life is characterized by suffering. As with the Greek word gnosis, there is apparently quite a lot missed in the English translation of "suffering." The Pali word (from a language I do not read or speak) is dukkha. It can also be translated as anxiety or stress, but at, um, a pretty good school in Massachusetts (let's put it that way), I was taught that dukkha carries with it the sense of having the senses stirred up rather than calm. So hitting your thumb with a hammer would dukkha, but so would being turned on by a pornographic picture. Being thirsty is dukkha, but so is being drunk. Being anxious that you might get fired is dukkha, but so is gloating in your heart over a rival who got fired. In Buddhism, these things are not sin but kinds of suffering.

The Second Noble Truth, that suffering is caused by desire, is also subject to misunderstanding. Desire in this sense should also be understood as craving, addiction, and so on. The cycle of suffering and craving is what Buddhism seeks to break.

The Third Noble Truth, that there is an end to suffering, that dukkha constitutes an existential predicament but not a ontological state; and the Fourth Nobel Truth, that the end of suffering is Nirvana, can not in any way be summed up as you said.

My daughter brought home the complete set of Breaking Bad. We have just finished the second season, but the way you describe these first thee truths fits what I see happening to Walter and Jessie.

That is probably a little too crude because it crosses the line between illusion, which is incorrect sensory perception (ISP? :) ), and delusion, which is holding a deep-seated belief contrary to reality. The Buddha taught that dukkha was ultimately an illusion, but not a delusion. Suffering is real in that it really hurts. But it is just a trick of the senses (for me, the phenomenon of phantom pain comes to mind). It is nullified--or extinguished, which is what Nirvana means--when one awakes to Enlightenment.

I agree that suffering, as illusion, is different from a delusion, but I don't think they are easy to split apart unless one can find specific beliefs that one has that would support the continued illusion. Then one can focus on those beliefs as a way to change.

Pompey Bum

12-23-2014, 08:16 PM

I don't know a lot about theology anyway. I had heard of the Cloud of Unknowing in relation to gnosticism but no more. I've always had an interest in churches - not for religion but architecture and the transition from Norman to Perpendicular styles, quite a revolution. That height, the stained glass. Beautiful! Monasteries and the life of a monastic always drew me as well.

I love old churches, too. Are you from England like Jonathan? One of my regrets is that I've never seen the English country churches or the ruins of the old monasteries (after Henry VIII got through with them). I have been to St. Paul's, though. I felt an odd personal connection to the architecture. It seemed somehow flexible and firm at the same time. When I worked, I used to keep a picture of it behind my desk: the famous picture from the Blitz, taken after the whole cathedral had been engulfed in smoke and flames. The photographer had set up his equipment to get a shot of the broken dome when the smoke fell. Instead, of course, he captured it intact, rising above the hell human beings make for ourselves, like the dome of Heaven itself.

It seems to me that Christians view God as being angry.

I'm sure you could find some Christians who agree with you. And to be fair to them, there are books of the Bible, especially those of the Prophets, where God (speaking through the Prophets) is shockingly angry. Most of those parts were written after the horrific destruction of Samaria and Jerusalem by the Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians, respectively, sometimes by those who had survived the worst bloodshed imaginable (Iron Age warfare would have made Isis look like Cub Scouts). The idea that God was angry with Israel and that this was the reason for the holocausts they had endured was floated by some Prophets--usually in quite vociferous terms.

This is a theodicy--in my opinion, an unconvincing one. (A theodicy is an apologistic explanation for God--usually an attempt to reconcile the persistence of evil with an omnipotent and just God). The Christian interpretation of the Hebrew story of Eden is another theodicy. It attempts to explain (in my opinion) why life is so hard and why God seems so far away. God's supposed anger in the story seems more Karmic than wrathful to me ("Here's what happened and here's the result"), but the Augustinian view--fifteen centuries later--was that God had cursed humankind, and many Christians still follow it.

But you are going to have trouble claiming that "Christians" (in the sense of all Christians) "view God as being angry." Personally, I see God as perfect and just rather than imperfect and and angry. It is my sense that Jonathan, a Christian with a somewhat different outlook than mine, holds a similar view in this regard (although obviously he can speak for himself). Other Christians will agree with me and others will disagree. But to claim that it an inherent Christian belief that God is angry, and to base further conclusions on that claim, is at heart a straw man argument.

He is one of those deities that one must offer sacrifices to.

Again, some Christians look at it like that and some don't. In a strong Grace theology, sacrifices to God are meaningless (because human beings aren't capable of doing anything to merit salvation); but for many Christians they are important. Jonathan can tell you whether that's because God demands sacrifices or because such Christians wish to worship God in that way--seeking reconciliation rather than complying with an extortions racket.

I'm probably being too glib. There is quite a lot of sacrifice language in parts of the Bible (and sacrifices were regularly made to the God of Israel at the Temple before the Babylonians (and later the Romans) knocked it down. But there was also a countermovement against sacrifice. Much of the Prophetic movement (of which Jesus was an heir) was a reaction against Temple sacrifice, expressed, for example, in Hosea 6:6--"For I desire goodness, not sacrifice; Obedience to God, rather than burnt offerings," but also Amos 5:21-23; Isaiah 11-14; and others).

And most importantly for Christians is an account depicted in each canonical Gospel of Jesus forcibly expelling from the Temple those who exchanged money for Temple sacrifice (not everyone felt like coughing up a sestertius) and those who sold pigeons to be sacrificed. In the synoptic Gospels, this event happens near the end of the story and is a pretext for Jesus' arrest by the Romans (as it likely was in history), but in The Gospel of John it occurs at the very beginning and becomes a kind of preamble for Jesus' entire ministry. (Tragically and horribly the scene has long been interpreted antisemitically in Christian art and tradition--as if it were the "cheap mercantile Jews" Jesus was driving from their own Temple to be replaced by the Christians whose way he was paving. I told you people were sh*ts).

He threw Adam and Eve out of Eden rather than forgiving them.

Well, let me ask you this in all candor: do you believe (as many of the faithful do) that humankind's essentially rotten nature is the result of what is described in Genesis, precisely; or do you suspect (as I do) that the story reflects that state of being--the rottenness of humankind--and that the author uses the language and detail he or she had at hand to explain how it came to be so?

And if you believe the latter (in other words, if you take the story mythopoetically rather than historically), then are you really able to speculate on what was going on in God's mind during the Fall or afterwards--as if he were a character in a novel or something? Even if you take the story as seriously as I do--and I believe that it is the most important part of the Hebrew Scriptures from a Christian perspective--then all we really have is this:

1. Once we were with God--for me, the God of Love and Justice. Never mind that the author of that part of Genesis worked for the (relatively) new Temple cult established by the (relatively) new Davidic Kingdom, and is therefore at odds to show that this all happened in the material world, where kings and clerics do their thing and try to gain power over the more spiritual Prophets. For me, this all about spirit (perhaps even in a Berkelean sense).

2. We became estranged from God by acting independently--for me, independently of Love and Justice. Don't get hung up on the mythos. The authors and redactors were (mostly) doing the best they could.

3. We exist in a nature/universe that is fallen from the God of Love and Justice, and we ourselves are prisoners of that nature. For me, this is materialism. This solves the problem of evil that we were discussing in the other thread.

He almost wiped us out in a flood rather than forgiving us.

I'll grant you Noah is a weird and upsetting story. But again, I would caution you not to get hung up on the mythos (which existed in a polytheistic version at least a thousand years before Genesis was even written). Do you believe the story really happened as described? And if it didn't, then what reality (if any) does it hold for us? That's Esoteric Religion 101, right?

Biblical literalists have to do somersaults to make it mean what they want it to. Noah was a just man, so God had him build the ark. And as he was building it, all the wicked people gathered around and mocked him. But once the rains started, they stopped laughing. And as the ark sailed away, they swam along and begged to be saved. But Noah couldn't help those poor people without opening the hatch and sinking the whole ark. Sometimes it's hard to be a just man.

The only trouble with that story is that it's not in the Bible. God does choose Noah to build the ark because he's just, and he does build it, but that's all. No sinners mock him, no one repents as the rain starts to fall, no one begs to be taken along. All that is an extra-Biblical Christian attempt to prefigure the Apocalyptic tradition of the Rapture in Jewish tradition. It's like the talking snake in Eden being Satan. It's just not in there.

So what does the story mean? Well, here it is. Read it (it's really short), then I'll give you my opinion. Start with The Wickedness of Mankind.

http://www.bartleby.com/108/01/6.html

You see what I mean by weird and upsetting? For me, this is about the corruption. The human spirit has fallen to material nature and incapable of redeeming itself. The trouble is that the redactor of this part of Genesis has these two strange texts that he uses to make his point (you know what a redactor is, right? Someone who integrates older texts--much of the Hebrew a Bible was composed in that way). One of them is the story of the Flood, already ancient when it was put in Genesis, and the other is this utterly bizarre business about heavenly beings mating with any earth women they wanted. That's a pretty weird detail for a monotheistic religion; and references to "giants" and "mighty men" strongly suggest that these strange verses reflect an older, pre-Monotheist mythology.

Orthodox Christians didn't really know what to make of them either. Eventually they got attached to the (mostly) extra-Biblical tradition of the Fall of Satan with the rebel angels. In that interpretation, the fallen angels raped or seduced human women, contaminating human genetics and facilitating its corruption.

Either way, this story (or these two stories) might be taken as somewhat eccentric. But for me, they help provide a fourth thesis to be added to the three above:

1. We were with the God of Love and Justice.

2. We became estranged from God by acting independently of Love and Justice.

3. We exist in a nature/universe that is fallen from the God of Love and Justice, and we ourselves are prisoners of that nature.

And now:

4. The materialism of that nature has rotted us to the very soul.

He needed to send Jesus to die on a cross for our sins rather than just getting over it and forgiving us. Why?

Ah, why indeed? For Christians, God did not send Jesus to die in pain instead of forgiving us. He sent Himself, graciously, to die in pain, here, East of Eden, precisely because he did forgive us; as he had always forgiven us, even after we had abandoned our solidarity with Him.

If God is not angry the word "reconciliation" is inappropriate for the dissatisfied situation we feel we are in.

Reconciliation can be mutual when both parties seek it. My faith is that God seeks it (Grace). Human beings may or may not do what they can, but it is God's Grace that prevails.

What is specific about the Council of Trent that one could mark this as the beginning of Catholicism

Another time for that. I'm beat. :)

Jackson Richardson

12-24-2014, 02:41 AM

Thank you. I'd put the relation of Christianity to the Hebrew Scriptures differently and I don't believe "the materialism of the universe has rotted us to the very soul". (If anything it is the other way round.)

But I was concerned to answer YesNo's opinion that the Christian God is angry and Pompey has done it - "For Christians, God did not send Jesus to die in pain instead of forgiving us. He sent Himself, graciously, to die in pain, here, East of Eden, precisely because he did forgive us; as he had always forgiven us, even after we had abandoned our solidarity with Him."

Back to Paul. Paul didn't write "We can reconcile ourselves to God through Christ" but "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself". God is taking the loving initiative, as Pompey says.

(I suspect YesNo is thinking of Calvin's wretched idea of penal substiutionary atonement - we deserve punishment, God in justice has to punish someone, Jesus puts himself forward for punishment in our place and we are let off punishment if we have faith in Jesus. It is the centre of much evangelical Christianity and it is highly misleading and Christianity had got on for 1500 years without it.)

free

12-24-2014, 06:42 AM

(By the way, is there any way we can get the name of this thread changed to Theology? It hasn't really been about theosophy for some time).

You shouldn't change the title of a thread if your discussion went towards another direction. Start a new thread with the title you want to discuss about.

YesNo

12-24-2014, 11:37 AM

1. We were with the God of Love and Justice.

2. We became estranged from God by acting independently of Love and Justice.

3. We exist in a nature/universe that is fallen from the God of Love and Justice, and we ourselves are prisoners of that nature.

And now:

4. The materialism of that nature has rotted us to the very soul.

For (1), I think we are still with the God of Love and Justice. We just forget and need to be reminded.

For (2), we make mistakes which increase our forgetfulness.

For (3), I don't understand how the universe can be fallen.

For (4), I think JonathanB is more correct in saying that we do the rotting, not the universe. However, I don't think anything is rotten and materialism is false.

It looks like there are two different sources of the idea of materialism.

On the one hand, some view matter as having an unconscious, insentient substance. I associate this view with atheism. I see this view of reality being falsified by quantum physics and relativity.

On the other, some religious groups believe that matter, though possibly conscious and created by some deity, is nonetheless "rotten" and is something we need to escape from by our own efforts or to be saved from by someone else. I associate Buddhism with escaping from matter by one's own efforts and Judeo-Christianity with requiring a savior or messiah to do that for us. Buddhism would be the "works" solution and Judeo-Christianity would be the "grace" solution.

Ah, why indeed? For Christians, God did not send Jesus to die in pain instead of forgiving us. He sent Himself, graciously, to die in pain, here, East of Eden, precisely because he did forgive us; as he had always forgiven us, even after we had abandoned our solidarity with Him.

I think having a God who is willing to die for us is a way to show that God is compassionate or empathetic toward us. He is approachable.

This thread is still about theosophy. I don't know what theosophists think about these issues, but I will try to find out. What issues are these?

1) Is the universe good or rotten?
2) Do we need a savior to escape from a rotten universe?
3) Do we need to liberate ourselves from a rotten universe?
4) Do we need to simply remember who we are?