Janoah wrote: ↑Sun Nov 26, 2023 12:02 am
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2023 2:40 pm
If you wish to know where, or how, I orient myself, or how I solve these problems and challenges -- well that is a separate question.
I'd still be interested in knowing that.
There are a few recently posts of mine, in other places, where I find I am thinking about and trying to answer the question I believe you are asking. For me it is not a simple issue and the reason is because my entire outlook is being/has been remodeled. And since the reason I write here (as I have said many times) is exclusively for my own purposes and benefit, it does not matter much to me if I can, in a given moment, only offer a partial picture or a tentative one.
This morning I was reading GK Chesterton -- a defining voice in the Christian tradition. He wrote:
"...this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets."
It occurred to me that this very interesting, and very revealing phrase, could be a beginning point to offer a picture of where my own thinking tends.
But let's start with a statement of the obvious: On this forum, in this thread, there is
one person who works with the outlining idea that Chesterton expresses. That is Immanuel Can. He has tempted you a dozen times now to "contradict God" -- and he perversely uses the Jewish term
HaShem to manipulate you. "Deny your own culture's God" he says to you.
So "God" is understood to be that 'unbegotten bird' brooding over the entire Earth, the Earth's manifestation, beginning and the Earth's end. The idea expressed by Chesterton is also expressed in Isaiah:
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.
If I am opposed to both Jewish and Christian ideological imperiousness, must I then reject the large and fantastical idea that is expressed by Isaiah and re-expressed by Chesterton and all Jewish and Christian believers?
My answer is
yes and
no. Let me start first with the *yes* portion. At least right now, and for reasons that are visible and intelligible to all, both Judaism and Christianity are deeply involved in social and political games and battles. You cannot disassociate either from the concrete and tangible affairs of the world. Presently, when we examine Israel and 'the shining city on the hill', we see that it is all a perverse and immoral mess. The very state of Israel is unlikely to make it through what it is now setting itself up for. That so well known Israeli arrogance will be knocked on its ass. This is a very serious matter but from where I sit I do not get the sense that people realize the implications.
Christian Zionism -- the chief aider and abettor of present-day Israel -- has involved itself with a tremendous *evil* (if you will allow me that word). Doing so, it demonstrates that what it stands for, its absurd interpretation of metaphysical truths, is a sheer farce. Now, if there is such a god as both Judaism and Christianity propose, and if this god is a god of wrath and corrective punishment, then it stands to reason that all who support Israel, all who contribute to it, will be rewarded with annihilation. I say this not because
I *believe in* this punishing god but because both Judaism and Christianity do! So my view is that when you get to the heart of the *picture* as I call it that the religion diagrams, what you find there is *the heart of darkness* and not that which it is purported to be: a light.
There is a weird contradictory absurdity here that I cannot yet fathom. The self-styled declaration of being *good* when in fact one is not good. The contradiction, of course, is that there is so much in biblical lore and doctrines which, in fact, is 'of the good'.
But here is the core point as far as I am concerned: Judaism and its younger brother Christianity are religions and ideologies of imperative imperiousness. They define themselves through acts of destroying other gods and god-concepts and disrupting people's genuine connection with their own lenses of perception and their metaphysical foundations. Let us be realistic: Israel came to birth through a genocide. This is a fact and a truth that cannot be denied. It is a part of the foundation. What happened once, is necessarily repeated since it is
paradigmatic. The re-founding of Israel in our present took shape through an imitation of the biblical model. That is to say through a *divine command* and a divine permission to do so. So let's push this forward and say that *the god of these people* is deeply implicated -- and here I will extend the use of the metaphor -- in the present, on-going genocide in Gaza. The god doing this, inspiring this, directing this, is something else entirely.
Therefore: this is the
core idea operative at the heart of Israel. What is really bizarre and paradoxical is the Jewish and the Israeli regard for *life* and the celebration of it. How does one then reconcile that there is a death-cult there at the center of it? It really does contradict the Jewish (and the Christian) self-assertion that they side with the righteous god of light.
So then, what God is this brooding over the world if I return to Chesterton's metaphor?
But let me contextualize what I say here also to how our own Immanuel Can behaves -- what he says, what he does, that which he says he represents and serves. What then is this Idea he has involved himself with? Indeed has become possessed by?
If I choose to conceptually operate within the imaginal paradigm of both Judaism and Christianity I would be forced to say that what we see here are manifestations of Anti-Christ. Again, if I choose to hold to those conceptions (and in fact I choose not to).
Conceptual systems, by their nature, lock us into parameters of determinism in a classical vicious circle.
So I think that you grasp that I do not hold either Judaism or Christianity in the esteem which they believe should be accreted to them. I am not inventing this interpretation through a contrived prejudice. In fact it is all clearly expressed in Genesis! The pattern was set there.
But if I now return to that portion of Isaiah, but disassociate *ownership* of the process of evolutionary growth that is implied in it, what can be done with that? If I am dealing with a metaphysical concept, and associating it with *deity*, I am not sure if I can or should identify the god of Israel and of Christianity as a representative of whatever it is that is meant by the idea of "god". But if I take the idea as real or valid (and I confess that I cannot help but conceive of our human world as really a play within metaphysics and humans as quintessentially metaphysical) I believe that
I must transcend the actual matrix.
This does lead, or can lead, to a certain
irreverence. A negation of what has been established to be revered.
revere (rɪˈvɪə)
vb
(tr) to be in awe of and respect deeply; venerate: from Latin reverēri, from re- + verērī to fear, be in awe of]
The *mystic dove of the prophets* refers, naturally, to the so-called Holy Spirit: a transforming Intelligence. I can go along with the idea but especially when I separate it from its matrix. Indeed from
any socio-political matrix.
There is something I once suggested to Immanuel Can, an idea so far outside of his conceptual order that he could not take it in. It was based on the Greek (Johannine) idea of Logos: an implied or perceived metaphysical underpinning to the
concept of god. If indeed "En arkhêi ên ho lógos, kaì ho lógos ên pròs tòn theón, kaì theòs ên ho lógos" [In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God] then this must be a reference to a force that operates throughout the entire Universe.
The thought I had was that whatever the idea expressed, whatever logical order it stood upon, must be reducible and expressible in metaphysical terms. That is, any specific history (such as that on Earth: the biblical story, the enactment) would not be applicable when the ideas are considered.
But then:
what are those ideas?
We would have to transcend any specific picture -- Judean, Greek, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, what-have-you -- in order to attempt to get to the core of what is meant.
And then what comes into focus is actually
meaning. So, in case it is not obvious, I place *religious story* down there at a lower level in the Platonic Cave: it is what is broadcast onto a screen. But the essential meaning is really of another order.
I realize that in some sense I contradict myself. It would appear that I do believe a "brooding" entity if one wished to see it in this way. I do not think it could actually be named, or possessed, or assigned to one people, or perhaps to any people at all.