How do you as a Christian view an unconditionally loving god with conditions

Discussion in 'Christianity' started by Mountain Valley Wolf, Feb 27, 2021.

  1. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    That's the one! And in Quantum Mechanics it is called the Zeno Effect.
     
  2. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Back when Philosophy was in its prime, and philosophers performed at the Fillmore and were making so many gold records that they used them as frisbees, and they couldn't go anywhere without being swarmed by mobs of fans... OK---maybe none of that happened, but-------seriously, back in the days of the French Salons and coffee shops, when all the great contemporary philosophers such as Sartre, Camus, and so forth would sit and drink coffee and alcohol and smoke and argue over the meaning of life, that is how philosophy progressed and evolved. Philosophy thrives on debate.

    I have made great strides in my own philosophy after debating it here on Hip Forums over the years, including with you. I remember you and I arguing about something years ago, and I came back with what was my answer at the time. But your argument stuck with me and probably a few weeks later I realized that you were right and it enabled a break through for me. (I apologize that I can't remember specifically what it was, if I go back and read some of my notes or writing at the time I'm sure I will remember it.)

    So I would never consider your arguments or questions as bull. They are very valuable.
     
  3. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Funny, I remember that argument and I concluded you were right.
     
  4. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    I think in some cases it is more a human discovery. By calling it a human construct, you suggest that it's arbitrary: murder is wrong because people decided to make it so. I think murder is wrong because it objectively inflicts terminal harm on one or more human beings, and therefore threatens the social order. The law distinguishes between offenses that are malum prohibitum (wrong because society has decided to prohibit them) and malum in se (wrong because they are intrinsically harmful to individuals or society.

    That may be true of some religions but I have trouble relating to it in terms of my own religious experience. To me, spirituality and religion are integrally related. Spirituality is the personal experience of the numinous or sacred, which hopefully religion enhances instead of shuts off. Religion is about the organized expression of spirituality: creed, code, cultus, and community. The religious community I belong to is concerned mostly about how we live in the world and treat others. Probably, most believe in an afterlife; I do not, whether going to another place or being reincarnated. Death is something we acknowledge and talk about sometimes, but how to live is the main focus. This was even more pronounced in the good ol' days, before the Axial Age (8th to 3rd centuries BCE). Religions (with the exception of the Egyptians) were mostly not focused on an afterlife, which was conceptualized as a shadowy place where the souls of the dead were warehoused as shades. Religion was this-worldy and transactional: improving one's lot in this life by appeasing the gods with prayers and sacrifices in exchange for their supernatural help and protection.
     
  5. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    I don't think they are human constructs. Madness, death, the irrational, darkness, plagues and evil are real, objective parts of the world in which we live, and I see little about them that is "relative"--except in the sense that you could say one is relatively worse or better than something else.

    Not sure I follow you here. I think what you may be saying is that people can interpret death, disease, etc., in ways that make them less threatening. For example,in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna admonishes the reluctant warrior Arjuna not to be worried about death because it's just an illusion. Yes, that would be an example of a social construct. So, too, I think, is the notion of a God who has a perspective that makes death inconsequential. Humans, like most healthy animals, have an instinctive aversion of death resulting from biology. It is conceivable, of course, that this can be overcome psychologically through mental constructs that represent it as non-threatening. For example, in the book and movie Logan's run, people who reached a certaon age were told that Carousel would transport them to a new plane of existence, when in fact it eliminated them to control the population.
     
    Last edited: Apr 4, 2021
  6. Tishomingo

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    I disagree that dualism is caused by civilization. I think the evidence points to local circumstances and cultural diffusion as the causes. Most of the world's early civilizations were polytheistic; that would include the Greco-Roman civiliation of Jesus' time. They tended to be pluralistic or monistic in their views of the world. Judaic dualism was largely a post-Babylonian exile development. I think there seem to have been two basic causes in play: (1) exposure to Zoroastrian dualism during the period when Judea was Yehud Medinata, a district in the fifth satrapy of the Persian Empire.; (2) a loss of confidence in the "punishment for breach of covenant" reason for Jewish adversity. The latter happened after Judea and Galilee came under Greek and Roman occupation. The apocalyptic notion took hold, particularly among the Essene and Zealot factions, that the world had fallen under the control of Satanic forces which God would soon eliminate. In the Pre-Columbian Americas, Aztec dualism was a result of exposure to the Toltecs, whom they regarded as culturally superior the way the Romans viewed the conquered Greeks. The Toltecs saw the world as divided between the competing forces of tonal (the world) and nagual (the spirit). Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpen (the serpent who crawls, the bird who soars) was mediator between the two worlds. Topcatlipoca (Smoky Mirror) was the obscurer who clouded vision of the nagual with images of the tonal. The Aztecs superimposed this on their polytheistic pantheon centered on sun worship of Huitzilopochtli.

    I think Satan was inherited by the Church from the Jews. (See supra). But early on, Christians decided that the gods of their opponents were demons. Satanism, as the worship of this Evil One, may have gone on in subversive quarters, inspired by the tales of the Church (Giles de Rais comes to mind). A French knight, he combined Satanism and pedophilia in a form that would lead Q-Anon to suspect he was a Democrat.
     
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  7. Tishomingo

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    Here I tend to agree with you. Modern-day Satanists made it up on the basis of traditional ideas from the Chuch, just as modern day witches in Wicca made it up in the 50s & 60s on the basis of what they claimed were pre-Christian pagan (mostly Celtic) ideas.

    Some of the early church fathers thought half the fun of heaven would be knowing that the damned were suffering eternal pain. From an evolutionary standpoint, a successful meme is not necessarily a nice one or one which makes sense but one which enhances its own survival value. I suspect that the success of Christianity as a meme owes much to the fact that its idea of hell is more horrific than that of any other view of the afterlife that existed or exists in any other religion.
     
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  8. Tishomingo

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    I think he's talking about Jewish Law, the Law of Moses.He fulfilled the Law of Torah by offering Himself as a perfect sacrifice. (Heb.9: 22; 10:12; Lev. 14: 19). Or that's the story.
     
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  9. Tishomingo

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    Ah, so you think deontological concerns should be part (or all) of the picture where moral actions are concerned. So do I. I favor a hybrid form of utilitarianism called moral realism which allows deontological considerations. http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/Vol19/Deontology.pdf Whether Derrick Chauvin meant well is certainly a consideration in what we should do with him, since a well-intended killer is arguably less of a threat to social norms than an intentional one. On one of the police camera videos, he can be heard justifying his actions because of Floyd's size and the perception that he seemed to be on something. I think he is exaggerating the danger which those factors per se posed to himself and fellow officers under the circumstances, considering that Floyd was handcuffed, in a prone position, and held down by three officers. But it might make a difference between second degree manslaughter and murder. Whether it was Hitler or Mother Teresa instead of Floyd should be irrelevant It is not the job of the police to administer extrajudicial punishment. And the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The law holds people responsible for well-intentioned but unreasonable conduct (e.g, negligence, which is conduct that falls short of that of a hypothetical reasonable person). And I think the interests of society are better served by that standard, even though it might not be the perpetator's fault that (s)he's unreasonable.

    It depends on what that means and how far it goes. If it involves eating babies, I'd say yes. Even Freud said some people could use some more good inhibiitions.
    Probably.
    In their cases, absolutely!
    Not necessarily. In a slave society, or a society of maurauding brigands, we would have a duty to resist .
    Yes,and it might be happening right here in River City..Societies become diseased from time to time. We have to be ready to assess for that
    Just asking questions here.
     
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  10. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    I wasn't really commenting on the Floyd case specifically.
     
  11. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    A 'discovery' works. But I do think most social constructs are so firmly integrated into our culture, and such a strong part of our cultural programming that it is hard to argue that it is arbitrary. But obviously, with a Will to Live that is so inherent in life, it is pretty universal that killing a fellow human is wrong. But killing another, which I think is the basis of so much of our morality, is in fact fairly arbitrary. For example, there are those who would argue that an abortion is horribly evil and against God. But then some of these same people are so firm in their belief that they will kill people and blow up health clinics to stop abortions. It is beyond me that people can claim to be pro-life and then willingly kill people. And the life they are trying to save does not even have a brain yet. War is still another example, where young men are taught not to kill, unless it is many young men from another country on a battle field.



    In my understanding, and it is based on experience and may gloss over certain definitions, so it is not necessarily academically correct without specifically defining it as I use it, but I view spirituality as an intensely subjective experience that is an authentic experience with the universe---or God, or however you want to define it. I argue that what Western man commonly defines as primitive religion is in fact a spirituality and not a religion. There is no Native American religion. In fact, in all of the thousands of languages and dialects spread across the Americas, there is no word for religion. Even the Native American Church, which works under the pretense of a religious institution, in practice, is a spirituality. The peyote ceremony is deeply spiritual. There is no real creed around it, no rules, outside of the basic rules of ceremony, in other words the traditions that determine how the ceremony is performed. There is no written word. For me, religion is an institution of civilization. This fits in with your last sentence. But spirituality is the core of religion. So, yes, I can understand that you would experience this close relationship with religion and spirituality. When people ask me about Christianity and other religions, I urge them to seek the spirituality beneath the institutional surface.

    The closer a culture is to its hunter gatherer roots, the more their belief system is like its spiritual roots than its religious dimensions. I argue that religion started to form as hunter gatherers shifted to planter cultures, and there was a shift in understanding of such things as the group ethic---for example, as communities worked to plant and harvest fields for the community's survival, that man began to understand concepts such as the in-group out-group, and personal property. There was a shift from a great emphasis on the individual to the group. We see this happening throughout the Americas---in the South West for example, or the East Coast, you start to see a shift towards group ceremony, for example the dances and ceremony performed in the kiva, as opposed to the very individual oriented experience of the vision quest and sun dance found on the plains.

    So when you speak of religion before the Axial Age, you are speaking of a belief system that I believe is more spiritual in basis than the organized religions of today. There was still a strong connection to death---it was still focused on survival--almost everything about these religions was connected to fertility--the exact opposite of death. But death was conceptually connected to birth, even going back to the paleolithic. The blood sacrifice, which goes way back, is a prime example of this. If we go back to its origins, evidence suggests that it was a connection between death and birth. The elixir of life--blood--was poured into the ground at the success of the hunt, so that the animals would be born again. People were buried in the fetal position covered in ochre, the color of blood. So the whole reason behind the sacrifice itself, and which was in fact inherited from its ancestral spirituality, was a connection to death. The gods were appeased because it was imperative that the crops were successful for the survival of the community. The consequences of an unhappy god or goddess was death. So you are right in this regard, but I would argue that these early religions represented a transition from spirituality to religion. The focus on death, just as it was with their hunter-gatherer ancestors was 'for life.' The shamanic spirit journey, for example, to the otherside, the land of death, took place for life, whether to heal someone, produce healthy crops, or some other benefit for the living. But this transition, as spirituality was replaced more and more by religious structures, did change from a focus on life, (and rituals of death for life) to a focus on death (and how to live for death).

    I grew up in a fairly progressive church and there was a lot of focus on life. But the religion itself could not escape this grounding of life for death. This is the implication of the whole argument I asked about in this thread---the conditions placed upon the love of an unconditionally loving god. The punishment of not believing in Jesus is being cast into the Lake of Fire, or an eternity of fire and brimstone. If we treat other people with respect and love, then we too should be treated with respect and love, but if we do not treat people with love and respect, and commit sins against them, then we may spend eternity in hell. And then there is the whole problem of, if we are not Christian...
     
  12. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Yes, those things are very real, they are not human constructs. I was still referring to our concept of good and evil.


    Kamikaze pilots are another example. But what I was referring to was people like my wife, and others with similar spiritualities and relationships to the nonphysical like we find in many indigenous communities, where there is still a connection with those that have moved on. Death is still a sad separation from a loved one who has passed on, but there is still a connection to that loved one, with the understanding that they are not gone forever but are there if they are needed, for example. My wife lost her father in recent years, and then her brother (the same one I spoke about above, who was in a coma). When she misses them, she feels their presence. She lost her mother when she was a young child, and she has always felt her presence in times of need. When she was a young mother with her first husband her oldest son had gotten sick and had a real high fever. She was completely asleep and had no idea what was happening to him as he started to go into convulsions. She insists that her mother woke her up. While death is a loss for her and people like her, I don't think it is as sad, depressing, and final as it is for those of us living a modern existence in the West.
     
  13. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    Of course, definitions are largely a matter consensus on usage.
    Clifford Geertz – Religion as a “System of Symbols”
    Defining Religion: Robert Bellah What is Religion
    Swidler and Mojzes, The Study of Religion
    There are structural, functional and cluster approaches (I prefer the latter).
    "[Religion is] a system of symbols (creed, code, cultus) by means of which people (a community) orient themselves in the world with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings, and values." (Catherine L. Albanese, America:Religions and Religion)
    What you seem to be talking about is formal, institutional, organized religion. True, there is no counterpart for that in Native American cultures, at least in North America. ( Religion with a priesthood, temples, etc) And it did develop with "civilization", characterized by structural differentiation, hierarchy, priests, temples, etc.For gods, priests, and temples we need to go further south to Mexico, Central America and the Andes, where the myth of the Noble Savage bites the dust. There is no single Native American religion. As a Native American, myself (Chickasaw), I know there were traditional belief-value systems in my tribe that most social scientists would consider religion. The basic elements were there: a sense of the numinous or sacred (what you may be calling "spirituality", which is experienced by individuals but can be culturally defined or conditioned). But we also had beliefs in celestial powers or "Beloved Things: the Sun, clouds, the clear sky, He that lives in the clear sky and He that lives above the clouds(Aba' Binni'li').. Each clan had a totemic animal spirit. There were rituals (cultus), especially the Green Corn festival, a time of thanksgiving and self-purification. There were norms of conduct that qualify as code, albeit not a formal written one. And of course the community is bound together by all of these. The dead were buried with grave goods for use in the afterlife. The aliktce (shaman) provided the functional equivalent of clergy, although (s)he was primarily a supernatural healer. Illness was attributed to malevolent animal spirits conjured up by enemies of the afflicted, and the clan would hold a Picofa (fasting ceremony) to get rid of them. There is no word for religion because it was considered such a natural, integral part of life.

    So much to unpack here. My people at the time of the European arrival were sedentary agriculturalists, not hunters and gatherers, which is true of all of the southeastern tribes of the so-called Mississippian culture. You mention the South West and the East Coast. We could add the Pacific Northwest, where the tribal economies were geared to fishing, but they were essentially sedentary. Those totem poles weren't just decorations. Your "hunter gatherers seem to be plains Indians, who were nomadic. Although the vision quest was a solitary experience and the sun dance had its immediate impact on the individuals participating, Plains Indians were as communal as the rest of us. In the sun dance, members of different bands came together annually as a tribe to ask for guidance from the spirit world. They believed in Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit or Great Mystery),a sacred totality that pervades all nature-- wakan being a creative power or force which is not necessarily personal. (BTW, this is pretty much how I conceptualize God, which may cause confusion when I discuss religion.) And like most hunter-gatherers, they were animists who believed that all things contained spirits.
    When I speak of religion before the Axial Age, I'm using Karl Jaspers' terminology referring to religion from the eighth to third centuries BCE, when religion shifted its concerns from "this worldly" transactions with the gods to improve personal fortune to a preoccupation with more "other worldly" concerns, the afterlife, samsara, etc. It was the Axial Age that brought us the Upanishads, Budddhism, Taoism, the Hebrew Prophets, etc. So with that in mind, I can't agree that religions before the Axial Age were more spiritual. The main focus of religion before the Axial Age was on enlisting the support of the gods for practical benefits, and that seems to me to be less spiritual and more pragmatic. I think we may be saying similar things, but our terminology might be a bit different.

     
  14. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Again I think what you are talking about here is an issue of transition from the multiplicity of hunter gatherer cosmology to a later dualism that plays out in civilized societies. There is certainly local circumstances and cultural evolution and diffusion that makes up this dynamic. Of course, such a statement is a generalization too, so it is very likely that there are exceptions. The other thing to keep in mind is that a dualistic cosmology is not always reflected in the Gods and beings that are held above man. Hinduism is a polytheistic faith, for example, but there is still a strong dualistic theme that presents earth/female/suffering/physical and sky/male/bliss/spiritual.

    The important thing is that it is a transition that could last for a few centuries to many centuries, so it would make sense that cultures in various stages of the evolution of civilization would have adopted different levels of a dualistic philosophy. But in my own research I have seen that as civilization evolves further and further from its roots it loses this multiplicity of its distant ancestors. Consider China for example, it held onto its multiplicity through Taoism, and there has always been a strong philosophy of finding balance among the various multiplicity of forces. But Confucius presented a rationalism that I argue was a shift towards dualism, while social structures themselves grew more and more dualistic, for example, gender relations, and a rise of an upper class and a peasant class. Eventually you have the rise of Mao Tse Tung and the stark dualism of Communist China. We can argue that this was because of the adoption of a Western philosophy, or that gender relations became more dualistic with the influence of religion from India. Certainly in Japan, it was the influence of both Buddhism and Confucianism introduced from China that toppled the status of women there. But these dualistic forces go hand in hand with the development of civilization in these countries and the move from indigenous cultures.

    Consider the Modern World that has grown increasingly secular. Regardless of the culture, so long as it is fairly industrialized, there is a high degree of dualism. Even as man embraces materialism, he maintains a high degree of dualism, and even turns to the dualism of nature to validate his duality. It is interesting, for example, that in a culture that has always valued nature so deeply and intimately as Japan, is one of the primary examples of man's attempt to control nature as one of the dominant dualities of industrialization. We forget that the world is not black and white, but a multiplicity of forces and states. In fact, I would argue that civilized man has now advanced to a point to where he is beginning to question this duality. The question of gender today, for example, to an old fuddy duddy like me, can seem silly, but it is an example of society attempting to come to terms with our inherited duality.

    Regardless of the various dynamics such as cultural diffusion, I think it is fairly universal that as mankind evolved from the hunter-gatherer, where the individual was more significant, to a planter culture where the group was more significant, and where community and private ownership became more important, where the in-group and out-group suddenly mattered, that there were psychological developments and changes in cultural programming that made dualism as opposed to multiplicity more important. In the early stages of development you tended to have the rise of the goddess, and here dualism was beginning to develop with more greys and off whites. But with the rise of the masculine, everything stood out as a stark black and white, under the sun. Under the male god, you had the rise of duality between the rational and irrational, life and death, madness and mentally healthy, in-group and out-group, friend and foe, and so forth. Now we find ourselves in the post-modern stage of development and we are questioning these values, there is a struggle to preserve it, but at the same time there is a deconstruction at play. It makes sense that as civilization matured that we would go through a stage of Hegelian dialectic, which is really a play from one duality into another (because the synthesis of of one duality of thesis and antithesis, is nothing more than the thesis of the next duality), Then as civilization reached a point where it could potentially crumble into nihilism and collapse, that Derrida would present deconstruction that is really a self-consuming dualism where the dominant side is forever consumed by the marginalized side. The next step is obviously one of nihilism as duality itself becomes meaningless. But, if man is to move onto the next stage of existence, and avoid the self-destruction of our species, I think that we have to return to, or rediscover, the multiplicity of our most ancient ancestors. We have to move away from division and a will to power and instead seek a balance.



    Yes, it came from the Jews, but the Jewish and Muslim counterpart was not originally the all-powerful being that it later became under the church.
     
  15. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    I agree. Fear is a very compelling force to maintain and build membership. Fear is a very big part of the struggle for power, i.e. large numbers of followers, of any religion. Many followers may not realize how much pressure of fear is placed on membership, but try leaving the fold and you will soon see.
     
  16. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Yes, I define religion in terms of a formal, institutional, organized form. I do this because this is where man takes his experience of the spiritual and organizes it into a man made structure of control, and social programming. It is where the irrational of nouminal experience becomes rational. I would argue that in Central America and in the Andes, civilization developed enough that religion had developed. Whereas in the pueblos of the Southwest you saw spirituality still in a process of evolving clearly from a spirituality towards a religion. It is interesting that it is here that you see the twins and the early development of duality.

    Another point about religion, which relates to your last sentence, is that a religion by its existence, is a duality in that it recognizes that there are those who are not of the religion. Likewise, with the rise of temples and so forth, there is a place of the spirit and a place not of the spirit. Not only, as you wrote, was the native spirituality so natural and integral to life, that it was ridiculous to think that there was any other way, or that one could be somewhere outside of the spirit.

    A social scientist would consider that all those things you mentioned are religion, in part because he/she would consider all of them as social constructs. He would fail to realize that all these things are understood and experienced as an actual nonphysical interaction with the universe, if you will. If there had been no European invasion, and the Native societies were left to develop in their own time and place, then at some point various rituals, beliefs, and motifs would be surrounded by an institution, and possibly holy books, and hierarchies and a stronger group ethic that diminished the subjective spiritual experience, into more objective group ritual. At some point there would be missionaries and so on and so forth. Then you would have, what I define as a religion. You would still have this spiritual core, but it would be buried under the institution.




    Most indigenous tribes around the world are sedentary---most of them have have already evolved into a planter stage. But in terms of their spiritual beliefs they are all closer to their hunter-gatherer ancestors--to varying degrees--than other peoples who have developed city states and then whole nations, etc. Even the tribes of the plains were not purely hunter gatherers either, they planted and so forth as well. I didn't mean to imply that Native Americans were hunter-gatherers, but we all have hunter gatherer ancestors but the degree of civilization different people have passed through has separated us from this original understanding of the universe.

    I have not encountered an indigenous belief system that is not animistic. But here again, I think that any religion that argues any form of essentialism is inescapably animistic to some extent, and that is basically all religions. I love to ask Christians, for example, where is God? and the answer is everywhere, and then use this to argue that it is no different from animism. Yes, we can characterize the soul or essence as different from an animating force, but the deeper you go, the more you find we are simply talking labels.

    The concept of Wakan Tanka makes the most sense to me as well, and is how I conceptualize God. Wakan Tanka is of course a Lakota/Dakota/Nakota word, and they were some of the last tribes to be forced onto the reservations and preserved their spiritual traditions, as I am sure you know, so there are many today who still walk the Red Road and still believe in Wakan Tanka. The Lakota pray to the four directions, Unchi Makha (Grandmother Earth), Wakinyan (the Thunderbird), and Taku Shkang Shkang (the animating force within) but each is, and all are, Wakan Tanka, and yet they will often refer to Wakan Tanka as Tunkashila (Grandfather) in their prayers and prayer songs.



    I agree, I think it is more definitions as to where we differ. However, I would argue that no matter how pragmatic our needs are, I would argue that participating in a ceremony with a shaman or other type of healer/medicine man who seeks help from the spirits is more spiritual than writing a request to a priest in hopes that he will pray over it, which is still more spiritual than taking action in the secular world to meet ones needs.

    Here is an example of my reasoning: I assume that one of the things you are referring to in the Pre-Axial Age is that of seeking rain for ones crops. Most of my life I assumed that this was something that no one could actually do. There would be a ceremony and sooner or later it will rain anyway. It therefore wouldn't really matter if spirits were invoked or the gods were invoked, it is simply a pragmatic need that is hopefully fulfilled. Then I married my second wife, the Filipina, and one of the gifts that was handed down to her from her ancestors was an ability to change the weather. I know that sounds very far-fetched and stupid, but I have seen her do this many times, and always with success. She has no idea how she does it, she simply draws a picture in the dirt. She has decided that it causes trouble elsewhere or upsets the natural flow, so she does it much less than she used to, but I have seen her do it many times. It took her 15 minutes to break up a heavy rain storm with clouds that stretched across to the horizon, 20 - 30 minutes for it to rain when there were no clouds in the sky. The question is, what would we refer to this gift if not something of a spiritual nature.
     
    Last edited: Apr 6, 2021
  17. Tishomingo

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    If we're talking about a time when humans had only a sense of awe at the sacred but none of the social forms for expressing it, we're talking about a mythical State of Nature--very seventeenth century. The Bible tells us there was a time when there was only Adam and Eve, but social scientists tell us we don't know of any time when humans existed apart from society. Hunter-gatherer societies were smaller and tended to consist of kin, which made them more intimate, but that may have made them more influential on the individual members. William James' analysis of religious experience in terms of individual encounters with God is a very late, American phenomenon--reflecting the cultural individualism of western society. Durkheim, in his classic study of the sociology of religion, emphasized the distinction between sacred and profane, which I think you may be getting at. Yes, I would say spirituality has to do with the sacred. Durkheim also stressed, however, that access to the sacred is always mediated by society. Societies, early on, developed ideas about the spirit world and how humans could relate to it, totemism being one that caught Durkheim's attention. That's not just a feeling but a belief that was part of a system developed by society. And they developed communal rituals, the ostensible purpose of which was to relate to the spirit world, but which also served the purpose of reinforcing group solidarity. Shamanism developed early on--in the Paleolithic. The shaman was a specialist in communing with and influencing the spirit world.

    When you say that somehow this was more "spiritual" than what we had later on, with the Toltecs, Aztecs, Maya, Incas, etc., why is that? I think what you seem to be saying is that with the development of large-scale societies, where it wasn't all face-to-face relations, things became more impersonal. The priests no longer lived in the neighborhood, but lived apart in or near the temple. In Weber's terminology, there is a routinization of charisma-- a transformation from the situation in which 'the religious motif largely determines the inner social structure of the sect' and religious pressures predominate over social, to one in which “as the spirit recedes into remoteness and the sect hardens, as it were, into ecclesiastical forms, the pressures predominate in the other direction, from the social to the religious." "The Routinization of Charisma?

    So is what you mean by spirituality intimacy? Emotional intensity? Would a Pentecostal or charismatic worship service, where people are speaking in tongues and rolling around on the floor, be more spiritual than, say, the average Lutheran one in Lake Woebegone? What about an Orthodox service or a Catholic mass circa 1950s, with lofty architecture to make you feel you were in another world, incense, chanting, Latin that you followed with a guided missile--all very mysterious--and, as the highlight, consuming the body and blood of Jesus? Less spiritual? For some, possibly. My father used to sleep through most of it and make his visit later on. Others find it emotionally overpowering. There old ladies with tears streaming down their faces. It's my impression it was intensely spiritual, in the sense of awe-inspiring. Not at all like handing a written prayer request to a priest.

    I'll concede there's been a trend toward desacralization since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and post-Darwininan secularization. Is it religion or civilization that disturbs you most? Civilization certainly has its downside, but I regard it as inevitable. And much as I love living in a small town where everybody knows my name, I think it would get on my nerves if I didn't have a car and the internet to stay connected to the wider world. I wouldn't want to go back to the traditional Chickasaw lifestyle where we were always fighting with neighboring tribes and torturing our captives, of vice versa. Nothing particularly spiritual about that! Spirituality is where you find it. I think we already established that God is everywhere, if we look closely.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2021
  18. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    There is always a social form of expressing the sacred in any community. So I do not separate religion from spirituality simply in that manner. The Lakota for example, have the 7 sacred ceremonies, and they are very powerful unifying forces in a community. I remember on the last day of the first time I went on a vision quest, the feeling of love and closeness to the other people and the supporters and so forth, I immediately thought back to the commune or two that I had visited in the 70's and thought, no wonder they all failed, they had no ritual or ceremony that was so deeply unifying as the vision quest.

    The problem with Durkheim is that he was very heavily influenced by positivism and realism. He was very much a product of the materialism of the late 1800's. William James is not much different and heavily influenced by pragmatism. I would argue that their understanding of the indigenous spiritual experience was that of facing the fallacy of the Noble Savage, then denying it because of science. The idea that individual encounters with God as a American phenomenon, based on western individualism is very funny to me. (The implication of this statement is that the spiritual experiences of all the prophets in the Bible were nothing more than mythical creations to act out a will of power for a ruling class). In fact, I would argue that Western individualism is more of an elitist group ethic chasing after an ego-ideal of individualism, than actual individualism. Anthropologists in their day, for example, tended to approach indigenous people with a sense of superiority and many biases through which they interpreted their lives. This lasted well into the 1900's. It wasn't until the 1980's or 90's for example that they finally acknowledged that the life of a hunter gatherer was largely one of ease. James, like so many others, I assume, believed that indigenous communities were based on the group ethic we refer to as tribalism still today. And that he projected power, leadership and social structure, based on the context as it exists today, which is also flawed. Being a sociologist in the Modern Age, he could only see the possibility of access to the sacred being mediated by society. He understood know other possibility. If we take Durkheim and James, together on the sacred, we would have to conclude that there is no authentic experience of the sacred on an individual level, it is a social construct achieved through ritual and serving a social purpose more than anything else. And this makes the most sense if you look at it in the terms of the modern day world. And if anything supernatural actually did happen (and they felt that the supernatural was a modern illusion as well), it was just a mere coincidence, which Jung would later label a synchronicity.

    I would argue that indigenous tribes place more emphasis on the individual than does Modern Western society (The modern individual, for example, becomes typecast into a special box in the society based on all kinds of records that start accumulating very early in life and which labels and integrates him into the overall social group around him. These records include school grades and performance, medical history, credit ratings, job history and performance, criminal history and so forth. In many tribes human subjectivity is so well understood that a person's actual name can change depending on who he is (what skills and heroics) at what time). I would argue that the most authentic spiritual experience is that which the individual experiences subjectively, and while it may be culturally or religiously programmed its authenticity is partly in that the access to it is not mediated by society. For modern society this argument made more sense perhaps before the 1970's, in a society where most everyone goes to church on sundays, and where the religion of a culture or subculture is fairly homogeneous and makes up the unifying myth, or the remnants of it. And I would argue that the individual experience of God, existed from the very dawn of human experience, regardless of how he labeled it, defined it, or interpreted it. But we hippies, for one, in the 60's and 70's have showed everyone that we all individually have access to sacred experience, even if its going into a forest and sitting.

    All social expressions of the sacred, because they have a social component that is composed of ritual, and a recognition of authority and shared experiences among the community, represent systems that both create communities and are manipulated by the community. In the Lakota tradition to run a sweat lodge, for example, you have to pierce for four years at a sundance. But sitting inside a sweat lodge is a very personal experience--everyone experiences it differently, and its intensity opens the individual up to his/her own experience of the sacred. I would argue that it pushes one into his/her own subconscious and that the subconscious is the doorway to the numinous. The hanblechiya (vision quest) is even more powerful as an individual-oriented ceremony, and while there is a medicine man that oversees it and members of the community support the vision quester, he/she is all alone in his/her sacred space and what happens is entirely between him/her and the universe/nature/god.




    First off, you called me out on this---yes I can get a little too fanatical about this. I support everyone in their individual spiritual paths, and while I still stand by my argument in general terms, I try not to deny the experience of others, regardless of the religious setting. I have to remind myself occasionally that a Christian can have a deeply spiritual experience in a church or a retreat or something like that and that spirituality is where you find it.

    My problem is with the institution, and so yes, it is an issue of religious experience becoming more impersonal, that is a a big thing. I agree with Weber's routinization of charisma. I interpret this in Baudrillardian terms, where ritual and the sacred are recreated as simulacra for mass consumption. In other words, the impersonalization of religious institutions and other factors such as the dominance of a strict hierarchy, and Durkheim's access to the sacred mediated by the institutions of civilization, and so forth, create an artificial or simulated religious experience. This is part of the process of desacralization, and disenchantment is another big issue. The enlightenment and the shift towards materialism was inevitable in my opinion. It is the logical end-conclusion of Western religion, really, all religion. And it carries us to that point of extreme nihilism at a cultural level where man either destroys himself, or rediscovers meaning and truth, and grows to the next level of development.

    I have to remind myself though, that the old lady in the church with tears streaming down her face, may very well be experiencing a deep authentic religious experience. The ecstatic experience of the evangelical and others could very well be authentic. In fact, I have a book in my library that was written by a researcher who worked on the ecstatic experience of the sacred. And he began by examining this state of mind that is physically expressed by people in these charismatic sects. He (or she--I forget) noticed that there was a common state among many of them, and that it was the same regardless of what country or language the service was in. Then he happened to notice the same expression in ancient religious art, and this got him into researching shamanic states of consciousness and so forth, and there was a commonality among these different ecstatic experiences.

    I am biased on the issue and I do have to keep that bias in check. I was raised Christian, but from the time I was very young I was very compelled to seek out proof of a spiritual reality. I could not blindly accept that there was a god. A leap of faith on something that is so critical to our being was not good enough. At 8 years old, I expected something amazing to happen at my baptism. But nothing happened, nothing really changed. People told me it did, but it didn't. In the summers I would go to church camps and retreats and sitting around the campfire everyone, especially in High School, would get very emotional and feel the presence of the lord. People would share stories of miracles and everyone would cry and hug. I would look for the presence of the lord, and I could allow myself to get caught up in the emotion, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't really see anything supernatural going on. The emotions were clearly a collective construct that was a product of the setting and the narrative. I could not feel or see anything truly authentic there. I looked forward to it as it was my chance to hold all kinds of pretty girls in my arms.

    I remember there was always one kid, long hair, a little older than me, at the Senior High camp who every summer would tell about how God came into his life and miraculously pulled him away from drugs. His mom was there to corroborate the story. But each summer it would be a new story about the previous year, and it didn't take me long to realize that, man, either God is not doing a very good job helping him, or those drugs must be REALLY good, or he is making this stuff up.

    Anyway this was the search I was on for much of my younger days. I explored hinduism, and buddhism and other traditions and even trekked to Asia, though by then it was becoming clear to me that it was the institution that I disagreed with more than the various religions. Then came the 1980's and like so many people my focus changed to money and getting rich. It was during that time that I had given up on finding any proof. I resigned myself to the idea that we cannot prove something that is objectively nonphysical. I became very agnostic at this time, and felt that given time, science will surely figure it all out. But the implications did not sit well with me. I do agree with Liebniz and his Principle of Sufficient Reason---that every Why can lead us to deeper whys, until we get down the deepest why---but that if there is no answer to that deepest why, then the why's just continue ad nauseum, and life is absurd.

    Then the event with my stepdaughter and the death of my wife's ex-husband that I wrote of above, which made me realize that reality is not as simple as it may seem. This was not my proof, but then some things happened and we were in need of a miracle. My experience with prayer has always been that it is a 50-50 proposition--either it works or it doesn't. All the praying didnt help us, and this included my wife going to the cathedral in Manila and getting down on her knees and slowly walking on her thighs from the back of the cathedral to the altar and back again several times, leaving her knees joint black and blue and bleeding. There was no answer, no proof.

    My sister sent me a letter that I was being punished by God for, among various things, divorcing my first and marrying my mistress. I found the letter fairly offensive and demeaning to my wife and so forth. Yes the end of my ]=]=
    \ - =cmarriage did not happen in an ideal manner, but my first wife was a monster, and I wasn't looking for anyone when I found my second wife, and we were soulmates and I was in fact separated from my first wife and trying to figure out the least painful way of severing ties with her.

    Eventually things worked out and we made our way back to the States where the experience with my stepdaughter, and other things going on in my wife's family and with her, got me back onto that path of searching for proof. I had looked at all the religions and tried to experience them as a believer would, and that was a dead end for me. But I kept running across the Eliade's book on shamanism (his book was basically the anthropologist's bible on the subject) and finally I decided that I was meant to buy it., and within the first chapter I had understood so much of my wife's family, and things about my wife, and the event with my stepdaughter. It was like a lightbulb turning on.

    As an experiment, I sought out someone to teach me the Tungusic practice of the spirit journey. The first time I tried it, I was so amazed. All of the meditation I had done when I was younger had never even compared once to that. But I explained it away, rationalized it in Jungian terms. Was this a spiritual experience, or simply a psychological archetypal dynamic that I could now access and use? I explained it away by the latter argument. But the amazing thing was the miracles that came out of it. I always rationalized them away--crazy coincidence, etc. etc. Eventually I got my proof---something that happened in such a way that there was no way I could deny it. I could even go back to the place it happened to try to explain it differently, but there was no way to explain it away.
     
  19. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    Speaking of ecstatic experiences, I owe my Christianity to one--which could be characterized as a moment of clarity, psychotic break, whatever. I was sitting there as an agnostic minding my own business when a passage from the Bible (Gen. 1:26) entered my mind and triggered a cascade of thoughts leading me on an ecumenical journey that included Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and eventually Christianity--all in less than an hour. I've never been the same; I see and feel God everywhere. The phenomenon could probably be explained in psychological terms, although there were no visions or voices, just thoughts and feelings. I call my beliefs "Christian", because that's the label that seems to fit best, but I draw on other traditions to inform my Christianity. So instead of exclusivity, I'm pretty much a believer in the so-called primordial philosophy that thinks all religions have something to contribute. The Christian writers who best fit my views are Marcus Borg, Huston Smith and Adam Hamilton. I take fellowship primarily with the Methodist church, but also with the Church of Christ, a Catholic bible study class and a "freethinkers" group of atheists and agnostics. Like Borg, I use an historical-metaphorical approach toward scripture, and a hermeneutic of love to reconcile difficult passages. I find the community fellowship of groups important, although I understand the downside of institutions.

    Right now, my Methodist group is wrestling with the impending decision of the larger church to split over the gay issue. So successful has the Church been in its missionary work that a majority now reside overseas, especially in Africa, which for cultural reasons is intolerant of gays. I'll basically follow my progressive Sunday school class, wherever it may go. In a way, Christianity presents a paradox. It began as a small sect of Judaism, and would probably have remained that if it survived--were it not for Paul and later the gospel writers, the herisiologists, and Constantine. Each of these introduced innovations which enabled Christianity to spread around the known (and later the unknown) world. Unfortunately, they did so by what I regard as somewhat warped perspectives: an emphasis on the particulars of belief as the key to salvation, exclusivity, hierarchy, and hellfire. At the same time, I think Christianity still offers invaluable spiritual insights concerning Jesus' teachings of love of God and neighbor, concern for the society's rejects and the least advantaged of society, peace, and social justice. As the saying goes, "take what you need and leave the rest."
     
    Last edited: Apr 9, 2021
    Mountain Valley Wolf likes this.
  20. Running Horse

    Running Horse A Buddha in hiding from himself

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    If as a parent you know that the choices your child is making will eventually lead to pain, suffering, and death would you not try to sway them from that path? If you genuinely respect their autonomy then you certainly can't force the correct path on them. Now multiply that by infinite amounts because you are omniscient and omnipresent. Truly unconditional love doesn't force itself onto someone but it never stops trying to show them it is there. In other words it isn't God who puts us into hell. We do that voluntarily by simply choosing to not be with Him/Her/It. Hell is the absence of God with full knowledge of what we have chosen to be absent from.
     

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