I suggest that one of the reasons that you and I cannot understand each other, or cannot seem to arrive at any but a very general 'sort of' stance of shared agreement of value, is because you are forced to stay within one place. You have a doctrinal stake planted. You have a ground to defend. A doctrine. You have advanced with this to a certain age from which there will occur no additional shift. Choices made ... become Fate. And certainly you have to raise a substantial defence against those pesky Gnostics who seep through the walls ... or who pop up in your breakfast cereal.
This is an interesting narrative, and certainly would support the metanarrative you would prefer us to agree upon as a prerequisite for our discussion. I will even go so far as to agree that, from a third-person perspective, it could be seen as plausible as one way of understanding our differences. But all this is a different question from its truthfulness and accuracy. I think that there it fails.
In your comments, I hear in the background the echoes of a couple of things. Firstly, there's the history of a post-Catholic, with its residual guilt and resentments that I have noticed many post-Catholics continue to work out throughout their lives. I'm sympathetic to that, as it's a truly nasty burden that really makes a lot of people genuinely miserable; and yet, since I have no such background myself nor any comparable mistreatment, I find I am removed from it in any experience of my own, and can only imagine its frustrations. Secondly, there's the myth of the stereotypical evangelical, the hard-headed, indoctrinated, nervous and contentious Southerner so beloved by secular television producers. I'm used to hearing that, as it is the routine response to anyone who expresses any measure of conviction or who has the temerity to think his/her beliefs might actually be true. And quite often you seem to overlay that onto me. I don't take it personally, because I know clichés and stock characters are powerful visions, and our society is currently extremely indoctrinated with misapprehensions about evangelicals. But, of course, neither does your recurrent reference to such stock characters move me to much concern for myself and those Christians I know.
Where do I see these two echoes, you ask?
There's both the post-Catholic anxiety and the stereotypical evangelical dogmatist united in a single paragraph. But I am not here to inflame your personal spiritual anxieties, nor am I here to stand for you as the representative dogmatist of your past or of the mass media. They are not me, though I may not convince you of that.You in a significant and notable sense---as idea structure, as conformist, as a pole of judgment---represent to me an enemy. You are something that I have had and will have to confront and also to defeat. You represent to me the backward-turning, the regression, the refusal to advance which I have to battle, and defeat, in myself.
And then you object:
Perhaps. And yet do you suppose you know me? How ironic. I am perhaps not what you think I am. But I cannot convince you of that if the resonances you are hearing inside your head keep telling you otherwise. You'll have to doubt those resonances first; and that I may not do for you.you have no way to understand nor to categorise my experience on the spiritual plane.
It would be very far from the first such attack I have witnessed. I have no fear of such things. And on the contrary, in a spirit of gentlemanliness, I am made cautious in speaking to you by a desire not to offend you by revealing how much of what you are floating here both is known to me from other sources and fails to strike any terror into my heart. I think you shall not "rock my world."What I would like to be able to do, here and in relation to your vision of Jesus the mendicant Galilean carpenter, is to undertake a work that amounts to an attack against that thought-form, that idealisation, that distortion. But I cannot do that unless I have a direct permission. It is not my style to inject power-darts into another person's view-structure as, I have observed time and time again, they need their 'imagined world' in an intact form.
This is a good axiom. I would even suggest I do aspire to live by it in regards to philosophy, in my own poor measure.I say that to some degree it is if one is prepared to do a good deal of work and to accept the consequences.
Interesting indeed.