Nick_A wrote: ↑Fri Aug 19, 2022 3:14 amAs you know I disagree with I Cs belief in a personal God governing our universe. I believe that the universe is the body of God. But he seems to understand what it means to be "born again." What does it mean to you? Why is it essential for Christianity? Does the fist verse of Amazing Grace have meaning for you?
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I'm found
Was blind but now I see
There are a number of things that can be said and they provide a starting-point. Generally, everyone knows that the Christian cult (I do not mean this as a deprecation) began as an opposition-movement to what was seen as 'cultural degeneracy'. To take the Christian cure was to submit oneself to a process of spiritual and also social regeneration supervised by an authority and also, as the process was understood, by supernatural authority. The paradigm of this religion was expressed in relatively simple terms: the Earth is a realm that is infected with disease. Disease is demonic. The Earth is a prison, a punishment and a trap and to get out of the trap requires an all-powerful transcendental figure. One cannot get out alone. That is, through one's own will or choice. The condition a human finds himself in is incurable except by divine intervention. One is required therefore to give over one's own will to the Divine Authority. And this was conceived as being comprised of God, the Holy Spirit, angels, one's own 'guardian angel' and also the Saints who had won their own terrestrial battle, achieved heaven, and yet still communicated with the Earth-realm where the primary battle of the soul trapped in a dangerous, disease & demon infested world went on.
It seems that when you negate the 'personal god' you negate as well the foundation of the Christian conceptual structure. What is 'Grace' then? But the fact is that Christianity as it was originally conceived -- and later it developed into an elaborate 'world-picture' that we know as
The Great Chain of Being -- had to include that 'personal' element. Yet it is true that God's directive, salvific power was distributed, let's say, to angels and saints but also to living human figures who could 'direct' a soul properly. Perhaps my answer to you will seem a bit sociological, so be it, but I recall that Harold Bloom in his researches of The American Religions noted that a high percentage of Americans believe that God is aware of them, concerned about them in even the smallest details (like in the health of their pets and how they are *feeling* today), and is intimately involved with their daily process and affairs.
So what I try to do is to place religiousness within its real & actual context. That context is our present. And we cannot understand the developing and evolving forms of religiousness unless we also grasp
the context. These go hand-in-glove. Or to put it another way to understand Harry you have to understand the Energy Drink. But understanding the Energy Drink also helps to explain Harry.
Does this make sense?
How could you suppose, given that I write so often about 'higher world' and 'higher consciousness' (or the conceptual world of God and Angels) that I do not recognize processes of spiritual regeneration? Why are you asking me to explain? I would submit the general picture I have often submitted. If a man does not have awareness & intelligence, i.e. intellectus:
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
That man will lack the discriminating intelligence to be able, even, to conceive his situation. When I refer to *dumbing-down* I can only be referring to loss of discriminating intelligence. If this is true then all emphasis if placed on defining what is 'discriminating intelligence' as a human faculty.
If it is a human faculty it is universal to man's awareness. And at that point the metaphysical principle can be understood.
Now if you are to ask me what I think of the song Amazing Grace I would have little choice but to regard it as a sentimental and even self-indulgent *mood* that has got hold of the author or singer. I can only suppose that the sentiment fits into a particular historical process.
Newton wrote the words from personal experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by others' reactions to what they took as his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed (conscripted) into service in the Royal Navy. After leaving the service, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland, so severely that he called out to God for mercy. This moment marked his spiritual conversion but he continued slave trading until 1754 or 1755, when he ended his seafaring altogether. Newton began studying Christian theology and later became an abolitionist.
Ordained in the Church of England in 1764, Newton became curate of Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he began to write hymns with poet William Cowper. "Amazing Grace" was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day of 1773. It is unknown if there was any music accompanying the verses; it may have been chanted by the congregation. It debuted in print in 1779 in Newton and Cowper's Olney Hymns but settled into relative obscurity in England. In the United States, "Amazing Grace" became a popular song used by Baptist and Methodist preachers as part of their evangelizing, especially in the South, during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. It has been associated with more than 20 melodies. In 1835, American composer William Walker set it to the tune known as "New Britain" in a shape note format; this is the version most frequently sung today.
I can only thank God in Heaven above that Barack Obama
busted out with this overwhelmingly powerful song with its deeply important message for America! What more need be said? What more could possibly
be said?
[Harry, it has been brought to my attention that you play
a melancholy version of
Amazing Grace on your didgeridoo. Is that right?]
Oh Dear God
there really is a version!
In our world today -- this is what it seems like to me -- so much is reduced to maudlin displays. And the maudlin display vulgarizes what, and I personally do believe this, is a higher idea. The problem seems to be in distinguishing the 'higher idea' and what it can mean from the maudlin expression of the idea which debases it. In order to recover -- meaning to be capable of understanding -- the essential idea one needs, in my view, the sort of outline of concrete idea as Richard Weaver spells out in
Ideas Have Consequences.
So the question that I would ask is What is 'spiritual development'? What really is regeneration? Who is regenerated? What examples will you refer to? And when you present an example you will also simultaneously present a 'hero' of the set of ideas he and you are championing. I
personally do not go along with the general emotional and sentimental trends (
the maudlin) as they are conceived and represented today. It seems to me that if there is a 'real bedrock' that can be described as 'metaphysical' that it is strict and unyielding
in principle. But since this inevitably involves hard definitions and strict limitations the entire realm of those ideas is seen as 'oppressive' to man's (present) unrestrained will.
Thus in a way Harbal is explained . . .
So is it your intention to attempt to define what *regeneration* actually is? (Obviously you have a set definition and you are always expressing this and writing about it -- trying to convince and influence!)
Myself, I am still trying to work out this question. But in my view we cannot focus on Our Present because it is captured by sentimental and maudlin currents as well as ruled and directed by media-systems and intense propaganda and directed social manipulation and engineering. That is why I use the term and the phrase *we are subsumed in* a reality that has us in its grip.
Again, think of it like Harry who has downed, say, 2-3 cans of, say, V Energy Drink (Harry, what
is your preferred brand?) and then writes like a maniac forgetting
that which is giving impulse to the motion. Similarly, we are all *under the influence* of currents which move us along.
So again the sort of analysis I'd recommend is that offered by Richard Weaver. You have to have an initial description of the 'conditions' and the 'system' before you could devise a counter-current or counter-measures to deal with it.
In the meantime let's all feast our greedy eyes on these babies!
