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IFISEEUS
"There are a thousand hacking at the
branches of evil |
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Do we need a fresh theology? The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. -- Herbert Agar Premise This site has a few major premises scattered through its pages where that premise is best substantiated. One premise of this site is that we DO need a new theology, and that the source of material information for this comes from a surprising direction. As far as existing religion or theology is concerned, never has so much been promised and so little delivered. The question can be asked, "If the universe is under the control of a good agency, why would that agency offer us less than what we really need and what we legitimately want? Since I almost always try to gently steer a prolonged friendly conversation toward meaningful, and many times, philosophical issues, I often talk with people who are driven to exclaim that they don't have a belief system, or doctrines, or concepts. This usually prideful exclamation is now always greeted with, "Oh, that's the no-belief belief system" or "That's the no-doctrine doctrine or the no-concept concept". The point here is best stated using the double negative--we cannot not have a belief system, or doctrine or concepts! The issue is not whether we are going to have these, but whether the ones we will have are any good. Are we stuck? Overwhelmingly people in the world wind up with the belief system, world view, into which they were born. They were "injected" with this belief system and programmed by it, are seemingly incapable of changing it, and are usually left being victims of it. Yet, what kind of mature, responsible human being would settle for something--more important than anything else in his life--that is slapped onto him by others? "It is better to know nothing Context Let’s set, in a frank, honest, and meaningful way, the context in which we find ourselves. First and foremost we are born into an insane, troubled, and dangerous world under a sentence of death with a limited lifespan. The best we can do, given good training and good luck, is to not shorten this lifespan too much. We must run a vicious gauntlet of accident, disease, and temptation for excess, we must carefully guard our health with good hygiene, diet and habits, in order to accomplish even this. Unless we have pre-existed, and designed this life for ourselves—a paradigm we may examine later—, we are born with a set of personal specifications, traits, characteristics and attendant geographical, geopolitical, cultural, religious, social, and family factors with which we had no volitional involvement. We need say little more about the context after birth than what Thomas Hobbes said, “The life of man [in a state of nature is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The second major premise of this site was stated by a Roman philosopher long ago, "The world WANTS to be deceived". In other words, there is a deep psychological condition, which is generally not recognized which predisposes us to turn away from significant truth. We also find ourselves in a world of 7 billion people with a hundred thousand competing and mutually exclusive belief systems, each claiming to be the way, or the truth. Meanwhile not one of these ideologies, religions, denominations, organizations, nor groups or individuals is in a majority. Every religion, ideology, value system, organization, sect, doctrine, denomination, and individual is in a minority. The inescapable logic is that at least most of these are wrong, and a direct implication of what we see is that almost all, and possibly all, are wrong or false to some degree. The Dark Veil of Unreason and Hypocrisy The thinking or paradigm behind these systems is fear-based, confused and muddled, psychologically twisted, dark and negative, uncritical, and often unstructured. They tend to leave people in a state of denial or defeatism, ridden with guilt, saddled with emotional burdens where some even descend into physical self-flagellation. They leave others in a state of irresponsibility, too character and value deficient to make good citizens. In fact, whole schools of psychology (which literally means soul science) exist to undo the damage. The conclusions of these systems are irrational (non-factual), illogical, unreasonable, unworthy of our idealism, and unworkable or unproductive. They must be accepted by a faith that is a leap in the dark rather than a step in the light of knowledge and reason. Never actually delivering what we actually want and need, the best these systems can do is to promise some kind of afterlife after suffering the “slings and arrows” of this one. The result of these systems of thinking is a profusion of hypocrisy, and a situation where we are on the verge of a global religious war using new methods of terrorism and new tactics that include the "martyrdom" of suicide bombers. With a predatory calculation religious leaders actually take advantage of the most naive, needy, and vulnerable young people to become nothing more than dehumanized weapons. Can the veil be lifted? Is not this world a cacophony of confusion? How can we continue to cling to paradigms that have failed miserably to unify? How can we continue to blame fantastical constructs like the devil instead of ourselves? Where would we start in a zero-based reconstruction of our concepts? Can we set the stage for a meaningful challenge to existing theology by squarely looking at the spiritual context in which we find ourselves? “We have said that religion is arguably the most powerful and pervasive force in human society. This is both a historical fact and a dynamic reality shaping our present and future world community. As such, we must all take religion seriously.” Kimball, Charles, When Religion Becomes Evil, Los Angeles, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2002, p. How better to do this than to examine our own religion and its conceptual underpinnings? We might also ask ourselves the age-old question, “What is truth?” Or, if we are comfortable with the concept of an objective truth, better yet to ask how would we recognize truth if we heard it or saw it? Is there a universal, structured way to go about determining truth? Every dualistic religion that has a fallen superior being has this evil agency sowing confusion, introducing counterfeit concepts that are unworthy of a reasonable god. Therefore, if you do not define your god or what your god is like, you quite literally have the problem of recognizing what may be god, less than god, or even anti-god. The Search for Truth The unequivocal need for faith demands that we believe three things: 1) There must be truth worth pursuing, 2) It must be available for us to find and grasp, and 3) We must be able to recognize it when encountered. The first premise bears worth looking at further, for if the truth is not “good” for us personally, then why would we even want to find it or know it? If there is not a significant payoff, and if it is not available, then why invest any effort just to learn bad news? We cannot affect the realities of these and can only choose to believe the best. But we can respond to number 3. We can and must develop criteria for recognizing truth. What might those criteria be? Let us consider the original meaning of the word “religion” by looking at its derivation. The first part of this compound word is “re”, meaning to do over or again. The latter part “ligion” has it roots in the Greek word for logic with a French connotation for binding together. Thus we have “binding together again with logic”. In its original denotation, what a wonderful word it is and what a wonderful sentiment it has. When we look at the net result of the world’s so-called religions, though, believing they have measured up to the word’s promise doesn’t pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does not our first criterion have to be that our worldview, our “religion” is rational, logical, and reasonable? What person would be comfortable in considering his religion or theology to be irrational? Or illogical? Or unreasonable? If the truth is outside these qualifiers, count me out. For my part I am simply not willing to live in a universe where truth is irrational, illogical, and unreasonable! Quote from The Rise of Universities by Charles Homer Haskins, pg. 51: "If it is something to be discovered by search, the search must be free and untrammeled. If, however, truth is something which has already been revealed to us by authority, then it has only to be expounded, and the expositor must be faithful to the authoritative doctrine. Needless to say, the latter was the mediaeval conception of truth and its teaching". The Nature of Belief and Knowledge "Recent philosophical investigation has shown that metaphysical assertions, and world views in general, are not verifiable in the fashion that statements about experience are verified. But many philosophers...have jumped from this springboard to the conclusion that statements about empirical experiences are validated in some direct fashion independently of any metaphysical assumptions. This epistemological position rests upon an implicit and unrecognized metaphysic which assigns a self-subsistent character to a "physical" world independent of man who is merely an observer of this world. At this point the methodological separation between observer and phenomenon required by scientific work has become a conclusion about the nature of the world itself." Emerson W. Shideler, Taking the Death of God Seriously; The Meaning of the Death of God, Vintage books, Random House, New York, NY p. 115. What is being said here is simply that one cannot "know" meaningful things without belief, and one cannot "believe" meaningful things without knowledge. You cannot start with one and arrive at the other, and it will not work to be active on one side and passive on the other. We need to be actively seeking and be open to an external reference of revealed significant empirical knowledge in conjunction with choosing what to believe from an internal reference in order to find the assurance of ultimate meaning. Both we and the source must be committed and actively involved in the apprehension and comprehension of ultimate meaningful Truth. Human Psychological Condition Quote from Hunter, Robert, The Storming of the Mind, Doubleday & Company, 1972, p. 18. "For now, it is our present dilemma which must be considered, the life situation with which we are confronted. Arthur Koestler has expressed it perfectly: 'All efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefs--an assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the world--the equivalent of a major biological mutation. Then, and only then, would mankind as a whole, from its political leaders down to the lonely crowd, become receptive to reasoned argument, and willing to resort to those unorthodox measures which enable it to meet the challenge. It is highly improbable that such a mental mutation will occur spontaneously in the foreseeable future. . . . '6 "Koestler here recognizes the multidimensional nature of the trap in which we find ourselves. Not only are the meta-problems themselves completely resistant to our traditional problem-solving techniques, but the perceptions and cognitive and intuitive reflexes which we have at our disposal do not even allow us to see this failure; let alone clearly perceive the nature of the solutions now required. We are trapped, as it were, in an invisible prison, unable to see that we are, in fact, imprisoned by the limitations of our perceptions, and therefore more or less unconscious of the need to escape, to climb over the walls and move at will through other perceptual worlds wherein a new order of answers might be found. Unaware that we are trapped, bounded by very high walls, locked into complex cages, we fail--to begin with--to recognize our situation. This basic failure does not allow us to begin to act." From a slightly different angle we can see what Schopenhauer observed, "No: it is impossible to solve the metaphysical puzzle, to discover the secret essence of reality; by examining matter first, and then proceeding to examine thought: we must begin with that which we know directly and intimately--ourselves. "We can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we may investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades.” Let us enter within. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world." The Will of Man Schopenhauer again, "Nothing is more provoking, when we are arguing against a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he will not understand, that we have to do with his will." What is this "will" that is so perverse that it would override the rational intellect and so powerful that it can? "Will" is a wonderful thing in that it is an integral part of us as human beings, and the best of us treat other people's will as sacrosanct unless it threatens us personally. But how did it get to be an obstruction instead of a servant? How do people wind up with a will that can ignore the best and most humane aspects of the individual's own belief system, engender greed, wage war, alienate and kill other people, and even commit martyrdom over ridiculous doctrines and dogmas? Religions have answers farcical and fantastical, that bring in demigods and demons, powerful "spirit beings" that all but control us. But what they don't have is any assuring rationale for why their thinking is still not inside the "box" introduced by Koestler and Schopenhauer above. What is being said in the above three quotes is that we are obsessed and controlled by a confused will, a will that is not worthy of us, a will that is not trustworthy, a will that overrides that which we determine to do or not to do in our better moments, a will that clearly does not even have the best interest of the individual and others. Even though this subconscious will is inconsistent, it is not weak, rather it is strong. What can be done? The Ultimate Questions This is where the hard question needs be asked, "Why, in the name of God and the spirit of goodness, can't the universe be set up to deliver the entire package of human needs and desires indicated by the acronym at the top of these pages?" Or, "Is the universe set up for us to win by the honest, universal human definition of winning"? And the ultimate choice is to believe that it is or isn't. Most people are quite uncomfortable in openly, consciously choosing to believe that it isn't, but are staggered at the thought that it might be. They might then have to live in the context of that choice and actually go for the ultimate reward. Yet, It always seems more comfortable and politic to stay in denial, to stay a victim with the herd or flock. The choice is an easy one for the godless evolutionist. The universe is the way it is, and Man had nothing to do with the deplorable human condition. The best we can do is work for progress toward a better world, meanwhile coping and living like noble stoics and hedonists sucking all the juice out of our mortal lives that we can. Believing there is no way to win IFISEEUS and that there is no afterlife puts a "fashionable" edge on the enterprise, and seemingly justifies the drama to which we are all addicted. But what if IFISEEUS is available and the problem lies in our own misconceptions? And, what if the package cannot be delivered partially or piecemeal? What if it cannot come about unless we seek it and demand success? One thing is clear, there is no indication anywhere in the literature, ancient and modern, that man has entertained the delivery of the ultimate in what he really wants and needs! Unamuno--and others--go part way. "All or nothing! ... Eternity, eternity ... that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal."-- Miguel de Unamuno Quotes from: Harrington, Alan, The Immortalist, Discus Books, 1968, p. 11. "Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable. Man has all but lost his ability to accommodate himself to personal extinction; he must now proceed physically to overcome it. In short, to kill death: to put an end to his own mortality as a certain consequence of being born. "Our survival without the God we once knew comes down now to a race against time. The suspicion or conviction that 'God is dead' has lately struck home not merely to a few hundred thousand freethinkers but to masses of the unprepared. Ancient orthodoxies may linger, but the content of worship has begun to collapse. This is what makes our situation urgent: around the world people are becoming increasingly less inclined to pray to a force that kills them. "The most imaginative philosophical and religious answers to the 'problem of death' have become precisely irrelevant to the fact that we die. Humanity's powers of self-deception seem to be running out. Modern theological word-games may be pleasing to seminarians. Let jazz be permitted in the old spiritual gathering places. Such developments must be understood as gallant but altogether pathetic holding operations. "Emotionally, growing millions of us are in crisis. 'Men are so necessarily mad,' wrote Pascal, 'that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.' Three hundred years later, with the mass-communication of anxiety, and new weaponry and drugs in our possession, we need only open the morning paper or sit down to television, or look into our own lives, to observe signs of a growing spiritual insurrection. Life as it used to be seems in the process of slowly exploding. We wonder at the bursts of 'senseless' violence that seem likely at any moment to invade our days and nights. Yet is this sort of behavior necessarily irrational? If sanity now calls upon us to accept death without hope, perhaps such recent ceremonials as smashing pianos and guitars on stage may be viewed as expressions of maddened realism." Harrington, Alan, The Immortalist, Discus Books, 1968, p. 21. "Having lost faith, a great many men and women have returned to the old superstitions now cloaked in new disguises. God may have retreated, but the gods today are by no means dead. Though disposed to destroy them, we simultaneously bow down to some of the weirdest assortment of deities ever known, such as History, Success and Statistics. We worship purveyors of Luck, Fashion and couches, sexual statisticians, psychological testers, polltakers, various merchants of paranoia, the manipulators of public relations and television personalities--the multiple gods of our quickening-century." Harrington, Alan, The Immortalist, Discus Books, 1968, p. 25. "The immortalist position is that the usefulness of philosophy has come to an end, because all philosophy teaches accommodation to death and grants it static finality as "the human condition." Art too, insofar as it celebrates or merely bemoans our helplessness, has gone as far as it can. The beautiful device of tragedy ending in helplessness has become outmoded in our absurd time, no longer desirable and not to be glamorized. The art that embellishes death with visual beauty and celebrates it in music belongs to other centuries." Harrington, Alan, The Immortalist, Discus Books, 1968, p. 26. "The Immortalist thesis is that the time has come for man to get rid of the intimidating gods in his own head. It is time for him to grow up out of his cosmic inferiority complex (no more "dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return . . ."), bring his disguised desire into the open, and go after what he wants, the only state of being he will settle for, which is divinity." Religion as product One of my friends, a businessman, once remarked to me that religion was absolutely the best business product. Its promotion and enjoyment are protected by the U.S. Constitution, and if promoted smartly, the profits can be enormous. The manufacturing costs are negligible, the packaging and warehousing costs are nil, the shipping costs are minuscule. Better yet it's all done in cash, you can get but never extend credit, accounting costs are modest and virtually everything is either tax-exempt or deductible. The only significant cost in the whole enterprise is promotion and it is only barely restricted in its scope or range of activities by the various governmental agencies. Once the buyer is sold he needs it on an ongoing basis, and more of it in emergencies. Still nicer is that you can convince a majority of the people that the more they have of it the better, yet the purveyor need not use as much of the product as he is urging his listeners to use. And best of all in this climate of litigation there is no product liability in that if anything goes wrong in its use, regardless of whatever promotional claims were made, the product is never considered to be faulty. The buyer is always to blame! Oh, I might add, the manufacturers and promoters are given special privilege, status and respect in our society, not to mention some cost discounts on other products, services and amenities. God talk Within this context, why even talk about God? Why run all the risks? It really is a very dangerous thing to do. People are very defensive when someone challenges their belief system. You take a chance of emotionally disturbing yourself and exercising someone else's latent anger. When people talk about God or religion they often hurt other peoples feelings and threaten their psychological comfort level. Some people have learned that they best get along with others if they do not talk about God and religious concerns. Why not be like some of these people who believe that everyone should just have their own ideas and try to be good and loving? After all, even close friends and family members can become disturbed and/or intensely angry. Societies actually become violent over religious differences and nations tend to make war against each other in the name of these differences. In the context of all these negative things one possible reason as to why people continue to run the risk and so blatantly and forcefully talk about God and promulgate different ideas is that deep within us our idealism is crying out for spiritual unity. We just naturally feel that other people should be like us in spiritual matters such as purpose and values. This may be the reason why we do talk about God or spiritual issues. Within the context of why we do talk about God, a constructive reason as to why we should talk about God is based on the reality that a person's concept of God absolutely determines a persons character. The psyche of Man always takes on the character as that of the conceived deity; it is a natural law that we model after and grow into that conception. We literally become like whatever "God" we visualize and "worship". See a Perspective on Christianity and Gnositicism For those that are Christian or need to deal with Christianity see: The old God should be dead because he didn't offer to us what we really need and what we really want. For those that still believe in the God of our mythmaking ancestors or need to deal with the old concepts of God see God is Dead See article on the Power of the Liberated Mind See the Impertinence of dogmatic theologians See the Nature of Belief See 20 questions concerning the god concept See the common theological assumptions that need to be challenged See the Non-Christian Jesus Recommended reading: Harris, Sam, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton & Company, New York & London, 2004 |
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