| Freud | On this website I don't seek to represent the opinions of others or take their conversations with me out of context, so these paragraphs are some of what I have said in the context of discussion but with the discussion removed. The one exception is an email from Jakarta. These extracts from email contributions come from 2003 and 2004 relating to Sea of Faith and Faith Futures Forward. They have been rearranged in roughly subject order and each title refers to a whole email. |
| Six hours or so on the cross | |
| Not Jesus who did the conning | |
| Jesus the crucified will meet them | |
| Jesus in India | |
| Resurrection | |
| Mutations and Sheldrake | |
| Dawkins | |
| Blessed are the meek (evolution) | |
| Give and take | |
| Reciprocity | |
| Fundamentalism a rejection of modernism (don't agree) | |
| Fundamentalism and invented traditions | |
| Early Unitarians and fundamentalists today | |
| Atheism is aunicornism | |
| God who trusts us (Archbishop of Canterbury) | |
| Ascribe value | |
| Interventionist God | |
| Liberalism |
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 18:10:59
Subject: Re: Revelation
Freud, for all his speculations, made a distinction between a preconscious, stuff stuck in the back of the mind and stuff locked away that is part of the Id's generation of instincts. So if things spring to mind, it is because they were there. That seems right, but this business of an unconscious is all a bit of an invention to me. There must somewhere be instincts, and there are (not the same) near automatic means of doing things, like fluently driving a car. He thinks you can lock stuff away in the unconscious that is too traumatic, whereas most people would regard that as a good idea - trauma is what people remember all too well. But the idea that the unconscious represents some sort of evolutionary past in instincts pushing through, or leading to obsessions, I think is fanciful, or that personality is made when very young. It's the twisted nature of living all the way that makes people peculiar. As for dreams, they're just narratives of fancy playing on what we do already, or have done, if they are close enough to waking to be remembered. If you are lucky they may suggest a solution to a problem, but may not.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 02:15:50
Here is my speculation: that after 6 hours or so on the cross, with disciples escaped and out of harm's way, and certainly not long enough to die from suffocation, Jesus is taken to a tomb (controversial) or place as dead with healing herbs and is rescusitated. He is obviously knackered but the miracle is that he is alive after this. They meet later remotely, and Jesus says I will return (second coming) when the Roman empire is ended by God in these last days. He gets out of their jurisdiction (it's on the boundary of the empire after all) and he can never come back as a marked man. The eucharist, we are told, is not to be celebrated until he ws in their presence. Well he was, so it was. The glossy gospel accounts of experiences are of course about not knowing the truth, and then recognising it and the whole context (Jesus is recognised) and moving on (Jesus vanishes) with the early church way forward laid out for that time. Resurrection seemed an appropriate language. It's a good story.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 18:55:31
Subject: Re: transubstantiation
Hang on. It's not Jesus who did the conning, if conning it was, on my revisionism. All Jesus did, on this account, was wake up, wherever he woke up. He and others then may have seen this continued existence as evidence that the new earth was coming in, given the wrapping up in events. But he is still a marked man, so has to go, and it is all clandestine. He still has not written anything, its the later people who do who do and it is still a miracle. There is the problem of too few hours on the cross and the new belief in a second coming when Jesus comes back, which should be very soon.
Now if this seems deceptive, then so in a sense is the Pauline plus tradition where we start with his experences and the awkward language of resurrection and it makes its way to claims of a body that walked and talked, appeared and disappeared in arguments about materiality and rejection of the gnostic view.
Whatever it is (and who knows?), the most important thing is the multi-layered functioning of the writing: what shall they do now, who's boss and asssistant bosses, where do the arguments fit with the charismatic salvation figure, who to recruit.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 01:31:13
Subject: Re: transubstantiation
Just to push this a bit further. I do not understand how a subjective feeling, a presence is any less a deception (he is with us) than the very real physical meeting. Imagine the disciples hear that Jesus the crucified will meet them. They gather in a spot having gathered elsewhere after running away. From the distance someone walks closer, and it is their powerful leader before his apparent putting to death. They discuss that the end is nigh, and everyone agrees. Perhaps Jesus is the messianic figure whom God has saved, returned. He now must find the other tribes of Israel. They will be back too when that final time has come. He must be careful, he has a job to find them, and leaves the Roman jurisdiction. Indeed there is no point whatsoever Jesus returning until the big time comes. Jesus is about 70 (if he lived much further given the impact of the hanging time and injuries) when the temple is destroyed and had found no tribes. By then other things had happened back in the Roman orbit.
The alternative is Jesus dies, the body we assume is dumped somewhere unless it was buried and did go walkies (and who took it?). The disciples who ran gather together. Either there is a God who tells them via certain appearances that all is not lost, or there are bereavement impacts which they cannot see for what they are (and only likely to affect a few, something to lead on to pentecostal fervour). Nevertheless they pick up pieces on small clues and maybe big emotions but with Paul's difference organise their emergent synagogues and churches.
Either way then there is a form of deception. Bereavement impacts, like comforting presence after death, is known, but it is unlikely to affect all of them or even most of them. So they just decided he was coming back then on the balance of things, like Paul thought there'd be a return. Of course there were all sorts of intense social and personal pressures at the time inside a loony religious culture, but there is a kind of deception at the heart of it, isn't there. Which is why I like, though doubt, the simpler approach that he actually met them, went and said he would return, which is also understood simply. That is real evidence of a miracle, and vindication of God, something to get stirred up about. People on the cross up to three days did recover after being left for dead. So the six hours is quite an odd time given in the texts
It is like four accident reports on the man who died in a car crash but whose body was not found at the scene. Four people wrote to accident investigators what witnesses had told them, from what they had been told, and the police knew that the car had done it because it was driven by a secret agent. But the reports say the car did around 20 miles an hour. The man gasped his last, they say, and shouted different things on the impact. The closest actual witnesses to his life, who later received some reports, had fled when they knew the car was coming. They heard that someone dragged off the body and rested it somewhere and took medicine. They'd expected a usual 80 mph bump off job. No wonder when the victim himself approached them they believed all he had said, and thus things would happen, and he'd also better get out of the way unless another agent drove at him, this time at speed, should he carry on making trouble. Anyway, he could be out of the police authority, doing important work gathering those who were far off to bring them back for the showdown. The followers, meanwhile, could make a song and dance that he, unlike others, had survived this running over, and later on the accident investigators wrote down the stories that don't quite add up taken as a whole.
Not the same, is it, if they just dream of him, asleep or awake, having survived the accident when he hadn't.
In the end we all look at the same traffic investigators reports.
To: adrian@pluralist.co.uk
From: +++@++++++++.net ++++ ++++++
Subject: Jesus in india
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 10:50:12 +0700
Hi! Hopefully I'm not bothering you with this.
My name is ++++ ++++++ (or you can just call me ++). I live in Jakarta, Indonesia, Southeast Asia. I'm an observer of the theory of "Jesus in India". I'm not an expert but I've been watching this theory for about four years.
I read your interesting review about BBC documentary "Did Jesus Die" I'd like to inform you that there's a powerful site about the theory of "Jesus in India" It's http://www.tombofjesus.com , it elaborates a lot about the theory. I would be more than happy if you would review the website.
There's also a captive forum inside: http://tombofjesus.com/forum/index.php http://tombofjesus.com/forum/index.php My nick is "zxg" there. You are certainly more than welcome, if you care to participate.
BTW, regarding your review, I think this page could answer your wonder about "Why Kashmir?" http://www.tombofjesus.com/Antisemitism.htm http://www.tombofjesus.com/Antisemitism.htm
Looking forward for your comments! Thank you in advance!
To: +++@++++++++.net
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 21:57:48
Subject: Re: Jesus in india
Thanks for these links, ++++ ++++++.
I have had a look around. Some of this does come from spread of Christianity outside the Roman sphere of influence, the Nestorians who evolved and went into all these countries including China, and you get legends and more, and all sorts of claims. There's even the legend of Joseph of Aramathea in England.
The whole business of resurrection and what happened is lost in a fog. There was clearly a lot of expectation and pentecostal spirit about, and belief in the end time into which the Jesus movement fitted. The curiosity is the time reported spent on the cross, which is not long enough to suffocate and die. I think the focus has to be not on what might be history and what not, in the end, but where narrative intersects with faith. People do try to get to the history of the teachings by textual analyses; getting to the history of the resurrection period and after is a lot more difficult.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 02:46:18
Subject: Re: SOF and science
All I would say, of course, is that it is quite possible that there is some broader sense intelligent purposeful energy wrapped up in bodies and beings and even matter, such that mutations are not random but break-outs of purpose according to some perceived need within the genetic structures. So it isn't just the long necked animals survive and breed better alongside tall trees, but that somehow the genes identify a need to stretch necks and push them. Analytical and responsive evolution then. It may also be that this intelligence is not confined to bodies but has some sort of wave-energy impact that connects us together. It is very spooky.
There would need to be methodologies of evidence, not just mathematical claims that it cannot happen the more naturalistic way (mutation making seems to be more frequent in some periods than others, and in some species compared with others, at least in a sense of looking back, for example the many human species and now stuck with one with very few changes, at least as we look at it).
The Sheldrake and variants minority view has failed to be methodologically convincing, and is fanciful. Perhaps the universe is fanciful. What Dawkins says is that the sorting mechanism is so rough and fast that the genetic mutations and breeding make a difference, and just like human breeders, nature does a distinctive job without any overall design, only local circumstance. And this can be shown and mimicked. Varieties are made and lost.
Anyway, perhaps we are all inside virtual reality being tested as computer models. All the science is just a pursuit within a vast computer and religion is a groping mindset that never fathoms the computer. After you die it will be "take off the goggles and earmuffs time" and see how you did in life. Harold Shipman has switched off his biological life and self-consciousness to end his experience of incarceration after his contribution to other life of the world, so perhaps he is taking off his goggles and headphones now. Or perhaps he is like all of animated life: a biological lump who, as far as each one is concerned, is as though it never had anything once it ceases to be. Death is not only final, for every lump wipes all history. Somehow I think Sheldrake does not handle this brute matter too well and desires continuance and continuity.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 15:29:30
Subject: Re: Revelation
Dawkins never feels happier, he says (do we believe him) when he can talk science and keep off religion.
I have never seen and know nothing about Matrix. Yes my language, e.g. about energy was vague because vagueness was called for in trying to understand possibilities of these spooky or even incoherent goings on. That's the point, isn't it, that these wibbly wobbly theories are designed so that they cannot be pinned down, cannot be replicated.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 20:42:05
Subject: Re: Revelation
Darwinism and Blessed are the meek?
Humans and other animals have social selection as well as sexual selection. Survival of the fittest, a crude expression, is not the only criteria of species survival and development, and operates at different and long term levels. Mutations produce variants that may take some time to either fizzle out and can suddenly find environmental advantage. Species which show variability are likely to be stronger in the long term because they are faster adapting, and we see all kinds of variability including sexual. Difference and plurality is a distinct advantage in itself. Blessed are the weak who will inherit the earth may actually be the case biologically as well as socially as well as ethically.
There is no need for theories of deep resonances and deposits, like archetypes, places for religion, essences of spirituality, and all the rest of it. What does deliver a huge advantage is communication, as it allows organisation and memory; and the ritual-symbolism of exchange in communication turns individuals into interactive groups, about which religion is a reflector in its own space. Groups which carry its weak as well as strong have a strong collective identity and sense of purpose and may well succeed over those that fight among themselves to produce winners too me-only based and knackered to take that opposition of nature red in tooth and claw.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 20:06:44
Subject: Transubstantiation
Isn't transubstantiation about a bloke who in the substance of his body thinks he would rather be a woman and then puts on something of this appearance?
The important thing around religious transubstantiation is, I suggest, maintaining the element of the give and take (Mauss' social anthropology) which is believed to take place. This is where soemthing is given for something else deemed to be greater, the basis of sacrifice, and the basis of the market economy.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:49:45
Subject: Re: Umberto Eco on Natural ethics
Perhaps it is not religious intutition we are born with as such, but a necessity to carry through exchange, or give or take, or reciprocity. In this we find the basis of the market economy, the sex act, sacrificial ritual. It is about communication, the semiotics of economics, sex, religion, and about symbolic meaning. This relates to us being chimps rather than Orang Utans, gregarious types interacting rather than lonely old souls. The suggestion then is here is religion and economics as social anthropology and biology at root.
http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/invented.html relates to this in part (as well as a bogus Unitarian who created a cultural institution that even involved the present Archbishop of Canterbury in controversy).
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 23:55:16
Subject: Re: [FFForum] (unknown)
I don't agree that fundamentalism is a rejection of modernism. It imposes on to a rich, layered, myth-history understanding of the past in their accepted books, a pseudo-scientific realist-truth view of text. The fundamentalism of today is a clockwork fundamentalism (I have a film I could write), small measures and detail by detail, a history by proof if proof can be found. Send someone back in time with a video camera. For those in traditional times, those historic truths were grand visions, stories which told what truly took place. No one needs to go back, the imagination is enough. When postmodernity recovers the literary nature of those past stories, it forgets and indeed can never recover that they had the exclusive force of the histories relayed by speech and circulated texts. We know that there are better explanations for realities that they lived under.
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 14:17:00
Subject: Re: [FFForum] (unknown)
Well my approach is that of the Invented Tradition (Hobsbawm, Ranger) in that fundamentalism which claims a stretching back into the distant past is in essence an invented tradition. It is a recreation that can only be understood in terms of its current environment.
The current environment is not one of a sacred canopy that guides all our ways of thinking.
The labourers in the fields really did used to think that God had much to do with the harvest that year, and the singing of "We Plough the Fields and Scatter" was a direct reflection of the real. I do not read this in farming journals in our times.
So everyone now has to operate in the context of naturalism and technical tasks and, in religion, the inevitability of liberalism where once there was powerful literary tradition. Fundamentalists start here.
The fundamentalist has to think and have a way to think. The primary truth-way to think is the scientist's: look, it is true. So this is the means to their end.
They are not literalist regarding the whole Bible because they select, and their selection is based on their community approval. Thus there is no
fundamentalist movement (of any significance) against usary, but a huge one against homosexual relationships. Their literalism is always small and focussed. Their big arena includes the ideology of social control (of their own followers and anyone else), approved hierarchies and pseudo-scientism.
We can compare these sort of selective modernist fundamentalists with the sort that were the early ideological Unitarians, who I'd happily argue were also biblical fundamentalists. It's just that their selection was different, but still used the same scientist literalism of what was selected. In many ways our fundamentalists are old fashioned liberals.
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:01:12
Subject: RE: [FFForum] (unknown)
I made a parallel between early Unitarians (into the eighteenth century) and fundamentalists today in method, not between most Unitarians today and fundamentalists. That's why there is more than a hint of liberalism about contemporary fundamentalism - of the right, as we see it. It is about how they used the bible, selectively and literally (though I would argue that the early liberal Unitarians were more thorough because they claimed nowhere in the Bible does it contain the doctrine of the trinity, but that there were miracles that did happen, and the resurrection was historical - they demanded the centrality of the Bible).
As for the Florida USA UUAs, I have no information, but the UUA covers a very broad stream from that secular society stance through to Channing Christianity - now there's a museum piece for specialists.
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 02:05:12
Subject: Re: [FFForum] Fundamentalism and Atheism
Supreme atheism is aunicornism, that is to say you don't have to enter into arguments about something apparently opposite which does not exist. We do not see aunicornist movements. I'm sure we would if there was a groundswell in unicorn belief. People who meet to to deny theistic beliefs may do so because there is something in them to debate, or because practioners of them have too much political power. European secularist arguing is very small because most atheists really just get on with living.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 19:09:27
Subject: Re: A Happy New Year
"One of the things that religious belief tells us is that we are trusted - by God; a God who trusts us to speak for Him and about Him, to act for His sake, who gives us liberty to make mistakes and still gives Himself into our hands for us to share His life and promise with others." (Archbishop of Canterbury)
It means, possibly, that where deep values have a real and objective basis we can speak in a roundabout way about them; and that the highest of these, love, has some resonance in personality because they concern persons, so we can speak of true values as person, making ethical errors but the standards remain, and the basis of hope is there which we can all share.
Now is this believable?
I take the point that the Archbishop's message can be read as a lack of revelation, a God both existing and disappeared (or lost its voice).
Adrian Worsfold To: Sea of Faith
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2004 15:13:25
Subject: Re: A Happy New Year
The problem with ++++'s account is that if you ascribe value to something by which to live the life, it never quite has the power of something thereby copied which, according to theology, has power over you. The reason metaphors work is that they point to this believed thingy that has power over you. When that view is lost, the metaphors have a lightness of being.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 17:04:00
Subject: Re: Revelation
"I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do dear...
So ask Him now to reserve us a convenient parking slot,
That next time you do the lottery you can win more than a lot;
To miss and get the next train when there's one that has a crash' Let's go to the bank and find we've got a stash;
Walk through the crowds and let others get the flu,
Wake up in the morning and know what's good and true;
Live long and prosper, and never really die,
Everything is rosy, so we'll never have to try;
Have everything so good, that we'll never have a gripe!"
"Shut up darling, you do talk some tripe."
To Sea of Faith
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:52:35 +0000
Subject: Re: The point and end of religion
I have more sympathy with true liberal thinking, that is to say a searching thinking process that omits no relevant starting details and has no prescribed end point.
To: Sea of Faith
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 20:08:51 +0000
Subject: Re: The point and end of religion
My view of liberalism is about a freedom given or taken to examine issues without fear or favour, to let the examination take the result where it will rather than to some end, whether the end be liberal Christianity or not. If liberal Christianity is just a bargain about levels and limits and adhering to appearances for role performances then clearly it is somewhat bankrupting itself, unless of course there are compelling reasons for levels and limits and adhering to appearances for role performances. If liberal Christianity comes about because the evidences are collected, sifted and found credible, and the ritual is in a good relationship to those, then it seems to me to be intellectually and ritually alive and kicking.
The doubts are not simply over liberal Christianity and what might be left, as in a moribund compromise, but how radicalism can carry a label Christian (given what is left) unless, of course, the rule book is changed there too. The change in rules is usually towards a greater symbolism. It seems to me that the difficulties over a phrase, such as (say) "We believe in God, maker of heaven and earth" present the same difficulties of symbolic talk to both the liberal and the radical. The liberal may ask in what sense is there a God which makes, but if the radical regards that search as irrelevant there is still a huge problem in using that phrase: in what way does it make sense using that phrase and why not use a more direct one and what is left of any Christianity? Both liberals and radicals are actually closer than is made out when dealing with any distinctive Christian texts: both are working in shades of grey, both do consider whether there is historical evidence to be considered (such as a phrase "Galilean sage") and how the literary and symbolic thrust is to be combined with community.
My own position at present is that I have abandoned the Unitarians in any meaningful sense (I keep a contact via its National Unitarian Fellowship email) because it has opted for a premeptive liberal Christian cause in its Object, and because many churches and chapels have a pre-emptive position too. So the pluralistic position of truly liberal free enquiry is lost. At the same time I do have a view about reciprocity which has people giving in order to receive something greater, which is in the market economy, conversation, sex, and religious rituals, even prayer and meditation. This is grounded in social anthropology (Mauss). Clearly the Christian cross and the ideas of resurrection are plugging into this fundamental. So I ought to be a little more ritualistic and have more of a path. At the moment I attend no church or other place, but somewhere my historical views, my cultural views and the fundamental of my position (I used to be very pro-eucharist) ought to come together. Do they come together, then, in a re-application of a Christianity, or perhaps a Buddhism, or both, that is going to be not an empty shell but a reworking of an actual Christianity (or Buddhism or both) and not Cheshire Cat Christianity with plenty of smile but no face. Is there a new way to have the present as well as the radical's fondness for keeping the wrapping paper?