Trevor wrote:
"...when you really think about it, this thread couldn't have turned out any other way."
(I hoped it would because it is a great subject).
HEEB Magazine interviews
Camille Paglia. I have the impression that some here, perhaps average, are really not up on what Christianity is, and how Biblical ideas, both Jewish and Christian, are inextricably interwoven into the culture, out minds, our subconscious and our unconscious.
I have to agree with Trevor about Nietzsche, I mean, agree insofar as Nietzsche has done more for an authentic Christianity than anyone. The way I see things is the Christian revelation, that peculiar, inner, mercurial revelation, needs to be refracted all over again through the modern lens. The internal message, the core spirit, needs to be summoned, invoked, and needs to be set to work again, like a genii, like a dangerous, unstable force, on all the main questions we deal with. It really can be done, and what can come of that is not the resurrection of an old, useless fossil, or reconstructing the same, outworn edifice all over again, or surrendering back to acquiescence ('group-think'). Really, it seems to me that Nietzsche rushes into the whole problem intrepidly. And also, as Trevor pointed out sometime back, it is easy and almost inevitable to misinterpret Nietzsche. He seems accessible but he really isn't.
I personally think that one must take Jesus in the highest and most sublime form into the toilet bowl of rebellion. It sound weird but I have heard people talking about their married life, their sexual life, and say If I don't take God into the bedroom with me, I'm lost. Meaning that you have to take the idea of the sacred (but when you are 'with' the sacred it is more than an idea...) into all aspects of human life: sex, work, struggle, community work, the thinking and learning processes, relationship, love, birth, death. But the thing is that so many people, when they 'come back to Jesus' use it as an excuse to cut themselves off from the struggle of learning, the challenge to apply spiritual truths, and to apply them into the fabric of an incarnation into the flesh (as it were). As you go in, so too you go out. As you are brought in to flesh-existence, so too there is a psychopomp that can accompany you as you move through life, and out of life. I have personally seen a Catholic priest literally guide a dying soul through the death-process, while reciting 'and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil'. I just sat there and watched and was genuinely amazed. There are certain truths about life that only experience can teach. (And now the jab:) I don't know if I have too much faith in some garrulous boys with pretentious ideas about Genius) who can't locate their assholes!
Life is a very, very heavy thing, a very intense experience, and those who really go to the limits of that experience, often not at all by choice, learn things in an existential process that pales, not all the time but sometimes, what youngsters
suppose they know. I am personally of the opinion that we are never alone in our experience of our incarnation here---not for one, solitary second---and something attends us, and it also seems to me to wait on us, to be waiting for something from us, but sometimes one has to go to the pit, so to speak, before one is capable of 'listening'. And it is there that the Christian experience
begins. There is no reason in the world for that experience to 'narrow' and constrict or to revert to old, dead dogma. Often, the initial experience is very real, but then all this convention rushes in to fill up the empty spaces, and the experience is solidified into something without real potency, a sort of semi-potency. I submit that the day that the Christian experience is wed to a knowledgeable social, ethical, spiritual, artistic and religious consciousness, is the day that Christianity will be a real and vital force.
Cory said he was perplexed by the apparent '180', but I personally don't see QRS-tianity as being 180 degrees opposed to the Christian conversion experience. Actually, it is the mental and willful rendition of the same opus! Ha ha ha. I find that so funny. It seems sometimes that we use all our will to go to the very limit of the extension of the rubber band that holds us, but at a certain point we recoil back into our matrix. It is a part of the whole substrata of who and what we are. And it is when we 'flip back violently that we sometimes lose the good aspect of our own will, and we recoil into mere convention.
Cory wrote:
"...which to me implies that he doesn't encourage blind trust that Jesus will take care of everything for you."
I can't speak for anyone here defending Jesus Christ or Christianity, but there is an experience that happens to, say, mystics, to devotees, that is one of assurance that, spiritually, one is on the way 'home'. It would be impossible to explain it to someone with an atheistic viewpoint, who could not conceive of a personal God. Even if you don't share the view (or a personal, saving God) at the very least you can 'enter into' the experience and on some level understand it.
Even Dan said something recently, like if you are 'perceptive enough' you can 'perceive' sat-chit-ananda: being within infinity (that is how I understood it). What is this
perception he speaks of?
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David wrote:
"Forget it, Jason. Alex will never shift from the certainty he enjoys above."
It is very womanly to
interpose yourself between two people, David. It has a deliciously devious feel to it! I assume that if Jason has something to say to me, he will say it, and what he says may not be what you want him to mean, or interpret him to mean.