Christian apology by a non-Christian

[Felasco]

Ok, now that we've characterized the inconvenient challenge, let's proceed towards "making progress" as you state you wish to do.

Progress towards what?

What is the goal of the religious inquiry?

Please state for us as concisely and clearly as you can what destination you are trying to reach.

Here's my answer.

1) The goal of the religious inquiry is to constructively address fundamental human needs.

2) The fundamental human problem is an experience of separation. We feel divided from reality, from other people, and are even divided within ourselves, as illustrated by the phrase "I am thinking".

3) This experience of division is a primary driver of most social and personal problems.

Religion attempts to address other fundamental human needs, such as the desire to know. This need is really a symptom of the experience of division. We want to know because we feel separate, alone and vulnerable, and we hope that knowing will make us safe in the little separate bubble of "me". As example, if we know there is a God, and know what God's rules are, we can follow the rules, then "me" will be safe.

Please correct me, but my impression is your goal is to do intellectual analysis. It appears that for you intellectual analysis is not a means, but an end in itself.

Is this true? If not, as requested above, what is the end you seek? What is progress?

[Felasco]

that because you understand 'reality' as being more space than matter that somehow this means that you should, I should, we should focus on the empty space.

The unexamined assumption underlying all theology, including atheism, is that the goal of the inquiry should be "to know", that is, the creation of a conceptual object, a something.

Given that we can not, after thousands of years of earnest effort, produce evidence of our ability to know answers to the kind of huge questions theology poses, the entire enterprise can be reasonably labeled as irrational.

If one see this irrationality, this doing the same thing endlessly over and over expecting different results, one then may abandon theology and the fantasy quest for knowing, and search for another way to proceed with the religious inquiry.

If the quest for theological knowing has been seen to be essentially irrational, this rules out all the holy books and self appointed human experts etc as reliable guides.

Seeing this, one turns to the real world for guidance, as any person of reason is advised to do. Upon examining the real world, one sees it is mostly nothing.

This enormous nothing may remind us of our human ignorance. The truth of reality is that it is mostly nothing, and the truth of the human situation is that we are mostly ignorant. Both reality and our "knowing" are essentially empty.

So what is a rational person to do? Continue chasing answers, fantasy knowings, which can not be caught? Or work constructively with what one already actually has, our ignorance, the nothing of our knowing?

If it is true that thought is inherently divisive, anything made of thought will fuel the experience of separation which lies at the heart of the human condition.

Seen this way, perhaps our ignorance on such matters is a gift, an asset, and not a problem to be solved?

The nothing of reality thus connected to the value of nothing in our human lives. Maybe reality has been trying to answer our questions all along, but we refuse to hear the answer, because it's not a something, a knowing, as we insist?

You asked for me to spell out some definitions toward theology. I did this.

Um, no, you completely ignored my request for a clear concise comprehenable summary, and instead gave us another wall of text.

And your response was a sort of Bozo-the-Clown or Zen-Bozo trick.

A wall of text meets it's opposite, a wall of space. You got what you deserved. If you can not offer a concise version of your theology, or will not, we need not take your theology seriously, whatever it may be.

I admit to finding it amusing but I can't take it seriously.

Things might go more smoothly if we don't take ourselves quite so seriously.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I began with the numbered 'axioms' here.

I 'concisely and clearly' made an effort to explain where I begin. I assume that though you can read it, you don't have a place for it. And that makes sense because:

The goal of the religious inquiry is to constructively address fundamental human needs.

From your other, basic definitions, we discern the outline of a theology devised by a 'woman' (more properly a feminized man) and directed toward womanish needs. Whoever the 'person' is that you are attempting to 'heal', that person is in a calamity because of 'feelings of separation', 'division from reality' ('reality'), and from self. You reduce the core concern of 'awareness' and 'consciousness' to 'social and personal problems'. It naturally all fits together with everything else that you think and say, including your emulation of your woman, who does not *think* but who *serves* frayed nerves and human pain.

You have embodied, in some critical senses, certain aspects of Christian idealism and you make the effort (possibly an unthinking one, one not thought through) to generalize this Christian internalization to religion generally: all religion. And so you can speak of the 'the goal' of (enquiry into) religion as one goal. A goal that you possess and define.

I do not in any sense negate the importance of the values and necessity of 'caring' for people, for youngsters, for women and children, for the wounded, etc. These are necessary values and actions. But it also needs to be understood what happens when these 'needs' are placed at the very center of human concern or human response to 'existence'. What happens is nearly precisely what is happening in our societies. All endeavors and all enterprises turn toward man-as-appetite, man as need, and need and lack define how a man presents himself in his world. Institutions, enterprises, educational centers, entertainment complexes then devote themselves to fulfilling those 'human needs' while culture, generally, reorganizes the definition of the human as various levels of appetite to be fed and fulfilled.

And a 'new' sort of man is 'bred' in this circumstance. Not a man who finds satisfaction in himself and in his 'inner self', or through a sense of duty that arises in response to 'higher value' and (in this sense) to the negation or postponement of transitory 'needs' (or whims or desires). Once you have 'set loose' this New Man onto the plains of history, he orients himself NARCISSISTICALLY in relation to society and also, by extension, the cosmos. Demands are not really placed on him but he makes demands on the cosmos.

I could do this all day, Felasco. You simply have not really examined the origin of your predicates. And the reason is because you have fucked yourself out of the duty of thinking. Your admiring eyes fall on your 'saintly woman' and as you know she does no thinking at all. When you are required to be serious, you resort to clownishness and self-deprecation and you see yourself as reduced to a service-role: 'My good Felasco, who fixes doors and repairs broken china'. You serve your woman.

And you seem not to be able to recognize the slippery-slope that descends from these definitions.

Please correct me, but my impression is your goal is to do intellectual analysis. It appears that for you intellectual analysis is not a means, but an end in itself.

This erroneous conclusion comes about because, Oh Inflicted Sir, you cannot read what I write. The messages cannot enter into your consciousness.

So, I can only start over again and repeat what has already been said. You asked for some theological definitions and I gave them. My 'answers' are expressed there.

But I now take a stand against your formulations, and this is necessary to advance and privilege those that I hierarchize to a superior position.

Your thought-processes have been contaminated by half-baked notions born of certain forms of idealism that you have not really examined. Vast currents of 'interest' have an influence in them and you in this sense represent the mass-mas who does not have defenses against the Powerful Forces that vie for control of his consciousness. All this can and should be spoken about. Laid out, explained and understood. It is unlikely that you will do this however. It takes work. One gathers from you that you are not about 'work' but about 'play', about pleasure, about clownish comicalness, about elation.

It is possible to suggest a far more demanding path and process to come to understand and to act in response to Existence and incarnation. True, doing this will establish some definitions and aspirations that are not accessible to many men, and most certainly not to the Homo Necessitous that you define. Also true that it is not a path for everyone and makes sense to very few. But these roads and paths have most certainly been alluded to in core philosophy (Plato as just one!) and are also expressed by very many religious traditions.

What is progress?

To begin to answer that questions would mean to go over again the basic predicates. I suggest that you read them when you are not ripped off your can.

Things might go more smoothly if we don't take ourselves quite so seriously.

Another fundamental and decisive error: If you are really concerned with 'important things' you have to take them and yourself in relation to them more seriously. Poor Bozo though. His pratfalls and shenanigans get placed on a back burner.

[Felasco]

I began with the numbered 'axioms' here.

Yes, I know. Wall of text.

I 'concisely and clearly' made an effort to explain where I begin.

Not even close on either count.

From your other, basic definitions, we discern the outline of a theology devised by a woman and directed toward womanish needs.

Oh geez, not Vagina Theology again...

Whoever the 'person' is that you are attempting to 'heal', that person is in a calamity because of 'feelings of separation', 'division from reality' ('reality'), and from self. You reduce the core concern of 'awareness' and 'consciousness' to 'social and personal problems'. It naturally all fits together with everything else that you think and say, including your emulation of your woman, who does not *think* but who *serves*.

So your theology does not seek to address fundamental human needs? If so, what good is it then???

You have embodied, in some critical senses, certain aspects of Christian idealism and you make the effort (possibly an unthinking one, one not thought through) to generalize this Christian internalization to religion generally: all religion. And so you can speak of the 'the goal' of (enquiry into) religion as one goal. A goal that you possess and define.

Wank, wank, wanking on your masculine, um, consciousness.

And a 'new' sort of man is 'bred' in this circumstance. Not a man who finds satisfaction in himself and in his 'inner self', or through a sense of duty that arises in response to 'higher value' and (in this sense) to the negation or postponement of transitory 'needs' (or whims or desires).

Addressing psychic human needs is no different than addressing physical human needs. Please read that again.

An attempt to address and meet human needs is not a pathology Gustav.

I could do this all day, Felasco. You simply have not really examined the origin of your predicates. And the reason is because you have fucked yourself out of the duty of thinking.

Then why am I burning all your arguments to the ground, if I'm such a lazy thinker?

Your admiring eyes fall on your 'saintly woman' and as you know she does no thinking at all. When you are required to be serious, you resort to clownishness and self-deprecation and you see yourself as reduced to a service-role: 'My good Felasco, who fixes doors and repairs broken china'. You serve your woman.

This is a common defense tactic, when one can't meet a challenge, change the subject to the challenger.

So, I can only start over again and repeat what has already been said. You asked for some theological definitions and I gave them. My 'answers' are expressed there.

If you can't deliver a concise and clear version, that means you haven't found the bottom line of your theology yet.

Your thought-processes have been contaminated by half-baked notions born of certain forms of idealism that you have not really examined. Vast currents of 'interest' have an influence in them and you in this sense represent the mass-mas who does not have defenses against the Powerful Forces that vie for control of his consciousness.

Characterizing a challenge you can not meet...

All this can and should be spoken about. Laid out, explained and understood. It is unlikely that you will do this however. It takes work. One gathers from you that you are not about 'work' but about 'play', about pleasure, about clownish comicalness, about elation.

Characterizing a challenger you can not defeat...

It is possible to suggest a far more demanding path and process to come to understand and to act in response to Existence and incarnation.

Yes! If you want demanding, try doing nothing some time, really nothing, and see how long you last. Whipping up piles of fancy words is easy, too easy for a person of your intelligence.

True, doing this will establish some definitions and aspirations that are not accessible to many men, and most certainly not to the Homo Necessitous that you define. Also true that it is not a path for everyone and makes sense to very few. But these roads and paths have most certainly been alluded to in core philosophy (Plato and the pre-Socratics) and are also expressed by very many religious traditions.

Philosophers like philosophy, theologians like theology, agreed.

What is progress?

To begin to answer that questions would mean to go over again the basic predicates. I suggest that you read them when you are not ripped off your can.

I provided a clear and reasonably concise answer, and would suggest you can too.

Another fundamental and decisive error: If you are really concerned with 'important things' you have to take them and yourself in relation to them more seriously.

Let me guess. Endless intellectual/theological analysis for many more centuries is the only way a real man can be serious, right?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

From your other, basic definitions, we discern the outline of a theology devised by a woman and directed toward womanish needs.

Oh geez, not Vagina Theology again...

A definition of masculinity is very definitely at the center of my philosophy and theology. So it is not 'oh again' but a defined narrative that runs all the way through. It is a predicate and part of a group of conclusions.

Let me guess. Endless intellectual/theological analysis for many more centuries is the only way a real man can be serious, right?

After dropping the sarcasm (which I do appreciate BTW) you would have in your hand part of the essence: Analysis, certainly, about 'theology' (about man's existence and relationship to Existence and to god, God and 'God') which is applied to a man's life. And by 'a man' I mean literally one, solitary man.

It then becomes What I must do, my duty. In order to arrive at that power-of-definition, according to my view, one has to start with a group of basic and very strong predicates. Yours to all appearances are very different from mine but I suggest that this is so because you are rather intellectually lazy. Also that you represent a general 'hippy-dippy' style of thinking and being. Too, you have literally absorbed a set of values and foci that are more proper to women. But I mean something more specific than just a jab at your masculinity.

To speak of 'femininity' in our culture is to speak to third-wave feminism as an expression of Marxian definitions (of social life principally) and it is also to speak to values and attitudes about women and femininity (and about masculinity) handled (purveyed) by vastly powerful ideologically-driven institutions that make determinations for people and in respect to which they live, having internalized those values, regarding them as 'normal'.

If you can't deliver a concise and clear version, that means you haven't found the bottom line of your theology yet.

My interpretation gently guides me toward different conclusions.

No matter what I'd say and no matter in what style of prose, the content of what I desire to communicate has no place to 'land' within your grey matter. All this is so foreign to you: to the person and to the attitudes you've spend a lifetime constructing and solidifying. Possibly, to accept the more 'poignant' parts of what I suggest would involve you in some years of difficult self-analysis. Also, you'd be required to expand your reading from what is likely no reading at all. These processes are sometimes too demanding and too 'costly', and this is understandable.

But now I am speaking far beyond mere Felasco, the man in a local circumstance, to larger swaths of humankind who people the landscape. And I would also begin to speak to a whole age and also to 'modernity'. To understand what I am speaking of is basically beyond your grasp. So, you respond in no substantial way to any of the content I bring forward. OTOH I address again and again the sole point you bring forward and one on which hangs your whole thesis.

I admit with some embarrassment that it is all too easy. I wish you were a better-prepared 'opponent'.

But again, I would start with this:

• 1) First order of theological understanding: that the 'miracle' is the miracle of conscious awareness. There can be no other place to begin since everything hinges on it. The Miracle therefor is that of conscious awareness within this 'world', this cosmos. Awareness then is the 'tool', the object, the reward, and also---very much so---what stands to be lost. Awareness then, as it is suggested (but not explained) must be understood as precious beyond all price. Everything begins here. Also: if a philosophy or a theology were to begin on any other premise (axiom) it should be obvious that it would have begun incompletely, even defectively.

And any part of it that you don't understand I will most graciously, and patiently, explain. Just ask!

[Felasco]

Yours to all appearances are very different from mine but I suggest that this is so because you are rather intellectually lazy. Also that you represent a general 'hippy-dippy' style of thinking and being. Too, you have literally absorbed a set of values and foci that are more proper to women. But I mean something more specific than just a jab at your masculinity.

You'll find that like you, I am rather durable, and I really take no personal offense. That is not my complaint here.

My complaint is that you continually fail to meet the intellectual challenges I present to you, and then try to cover this up by repeatedly asserting I am intellectually lazy. Again, I am not taking offense at an insult, I am asking you to please cut the dodging and weaving and prove your ability by actually meeting the challenge I present to you.

CHALLENGE: This thread is about Christian theology. The key assertion of Christian theology is that a God exists in the real world. Please explain why we should look for this God in the symbolic world, ie. in theology?

In a sense you are right. I am lazy in the sense that I have little desire to continue a theological/philosophical process that's been going on for thousands of years, endlessly repeating the same arguments and counter arguments over and over, with no evidence that this process is leading anywhere but to more of itself.

You can call that lazy if you wish, I don't mind. I call it using reason to cut the crap and get to the bottom line.

Here's another challenge, which I ask you to answer honestly, if only to yourself.

Hypothetical: Let's imagine for a moment that we were to uncover 100% perfect proof that bowling, not philosophy, was the most useful method of pursuing the religious inquiry.

What would you do with this fact? Would you head to the bowling lanes, or keep doing philosophy?

Your answer to this question will reveal whether the process of philosophy is for you a means, or an end.

There isn't a right or wrong answer, it's your right to choose either bowling or philosophy.

My point is that you appear not to know whether your use of philosophy is a means or an end, and that is really sloppy philosophy.

If pursuing the religious inquiry is not your real goal, not the end you seek, you should not be surprised if you never get anywhere with that project.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

CHALLENGE: This thread is about Christian theology. The key assertion of Christian theology is that a God exists in the real world. Please explain why we should look for this God in the symbolic world, ie. in theology?

It seems to me, Esteemed Interlocutor, that you have your predicates wrong. First, it is a thread started by one who declares he is not a Christian and yet finds good reasons to defend at least some aspects of Christianity. And it seems to have been less specifically about 'theology' and more about certain ideas, or ethics, or moralities, and cultural factors which have gone toward the creation of a Western person.

Recently, and perhaps in the evolution of this thread, it seems to have become more about what I think, and how I organize a theology and of what that 'theology' is composed. At this point it is fair to say it really has not a great deal to do with historical Christianity and in fact some part of it, and perhaps a great deal of it, runs quite counter to Christianity. In fact, I am personally not terribly interested in Christianity since, in so many ways, its tenets have become untenable. One applies analytical pressure to it and it gives way. There is not a great deal that is solid in it, except insofar as a given man finds solid things in himself, or his experience, and thrusts this back on Christianity (as an 'edifice'). Personally, again personally, I think that Christianity needs to be radically restructured---rewritten in fact---from the ground up. And radical of radical notions I also think that Jesus-Spirit-God need to be totally re-conceived. It is almost that you have to wipe everything off the table and then replace items, if even you can, one at a time. But even that may not be enough. So, one needs to (somehow) plunge backward, back down and through essences, down into and even beyond any specificity of predicate/assumption and to (somehow) extract the most core and basic details, and ones that a man can use in life as it is now, and in a thoroughly strange present, as is our present.

Now, you make some statements about Christianity. You say that 'the key assertion of Christian theology is that a God exists in the real world'. This formulation is strange to me. Is there a Gospel that I have not yet seen that makes distinctions between the real and the unreal? Please locate for me and quote, if you'd be so very kind, where this aspect of Christianity is spoken about. I am especially interested in the use of the term 'real'. Or please speak about how this idea derives from Christianity, even if it is some later notion.

You have made a distinction between a 'real' world and an 'unreal world', and yet I simply cannot see how and perhaps even why you make this distinction, since everything that occurs must occur within a real world. So, please speak about who or what is 'in a real world'. Is a tree in a real world? A star? Is a dog who barks---that is by his barking---in the real world? Talk about exactly what you mean. I do get your notion that a photograph of a man is not the man. I also do get that a word 'fish', though intelligible to you and me, is not the fish itself and no one (among animals and plants and stones) but ourselves would understand what the vocalization refers to. Does this make it unreal? Thoroughly unreal? Are you really and truly sure? To be honest with you, I don't now and I haven't spent much time trying to penetrate your metaphysics.

Maybe you wish to refer to some meaning such as from the Gospel of Thomas?

• His disciples said to him, "When is the kingdom going to come?" Jesus said, "It is not by being waited for that it is going to come. They are not going to say, 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it."

Is that the 'real world'? A 'world' that men cannot see?

I would make a case that man lives--and must live---in symbolic worlds or that his relationship to how world is 'symbolicized'. Because that is the *place* (the event-ground?) where meaning can occur. Meaning does not occur in the 'real world' as you seem to refer to it. In that world, I reckon, there is really no one or nothing to perceive it (except lizards, or monkeys, etc.) who interact with what is seen strictly for immediate reasons. Man has a different relationship not only to 'the world' in this strict sense, but in so many other senses and in different dimensions of senses. Are these 'unreal'? Who says? Who decides? But more importantly to what does the distinction refer? Is 'Felasco' in the real real world? Is Gustav (*genuflections*) not?

Hypothetical: Let's imagine for a moment that we were to uncover 100% perfect proof that bowling, not philosophy, was the most useful method of pursuing the religious inquiry. / What would you do with this fact? Would you head to the bowling lanes, or keep doing philosophy?

I am reading right at this moment a book called Bushido by Inazo Nitobe. It is about Japanese samurai ethics. Your question, though silly, is not completely without merit insofar as some people, in some periods of time, understood that it was not about what you thought but about what you did. That there are other levels in being than 'thought' and 'thinking'. The doing part was privileged over the thinking part. Or, the thinking part was understood as brittle, even useless, if it was not attached to a strong, guiding ethic: an energetic principal.

How one came to this 'ethic', or how a man came to this 'energy center' are indeed interesting questions. There are many different examples possible where a doing is a way to knowing, too. Or the two function together. There is the Catholic/Christian notion of credenda and agenda also. ('Things to be believed and things to be done'). A great deal of what I desire to communicate stems from the notion of What is known or What a man chooses to place in the field of the known, and What a man does with what is known.

You will please note that I 'simply' place very different items in the To be known column which, naturally, extrude things quite different in the Things to be done column. In fact all of our differences begin here, as I see it.

So, I find that I cannot answer your question, not honestly, which also means that I will not be corralled by you toward your Favorite Conclusions, odd as they are.

But if that's how they do it in Gainesville, who am I to argue?

A man finds those activities that help to define his being, and he is. Being in certain ways nourishes certain aspects of self and these seem to function in a circle, so to speak, with what is thought. (Just speculating here!) For those who are called to work with language and meaning, the road itself has its rules and its 'order'. But I do not rule out the possibility of 'being' in other ways. I just tend to think that the 'conceptual' realm, and that of words, meanings and concentrations of ideas is particularly relevant. It is my area, I suppose.

Finally, I hope you will recall that I made the assertion that theology has more to offer man than 'mystical revelation'. I extend 'theology' to all sorts of other areas and allow much more within my 'theology'. In fact, unfairly perhaps, I broaden it to 'literacy'.

[Skip]

Egad! This must have been one very naughty horse. As you were.

[Felasco]

Gustav,

Are you ever going to answer the question, or will you continue to hide behind yet another a wall of text?

You already know exactly what I mean by the question, as we've covered the relationship between the real and symbolic extensively above, so I'm not going to be sucked in to yet another dodge and weave routine.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

What I think is that it is best to bring this conversation to a close. The shame I feel right now is too great! I need some time. My entire platform is radically different from yours, and yours from mine. I must restructure myself! For the record: I totally and dishonestly evaded your very important and poignant questions which, if I would have answered them, would have led you like a rockslide to a proof of the sheer sanity and easily understood common-sense-ity of your basic idea. I have been running, Felasco, running like a scairt rabbit. That central idea, though simple, is so devastating to philosophy and theology and to all who live in illusion that we who use those as 'places to hide' (as you so aptly put it), discover that we are terrified cockroaches exposed to your hard gaze! I have wasted your time, Felasco, and for this I am sorry. Yet I thank you for your patience! Theology is not, never has been and never will be 'the place to look for God', and if bowling or skeet shooting or participation at the local bingo parlor were understood as more effective in the 'religious enquiry', that yes, roundly and totally certainly, one would, one should, immediately choose bowling over theology. There is a bowling alley in a town about 30 minutes from mine. I understand your reference as a sort of 'omen' and am planning a visit. Where to get those two-tones shoes I will leave in the hands of a 'real' god to reveal. While I don't think you would think or describe yourself a Great Man it has just dawned on me that your Teaching is among the very highest. You have soundly dominated this discussion in any case. I retire, humbled. All I can say is 'Thanks!'

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and come to their end without hope."

---Job 6:7

Increasingly, philosophies of nihilism and despair and lack of faith, appear valid today. Job has a better grasp of reality, time trudges on 'day after hopeless day'. Man's world is running down.

And those who have spent some time within philosophy and literature and in the midst of the 'culture wars' and within almost any of the debates and concerns that are active in the world of ideas, ethics, politics, economics: all domains in fact, are aware on some level at least of this idea of 'nihilism'. To get to a working definition of 'nihilism' and the reasons for it, and what to 'do' about it, is not simple. Really, it seems that so much hinges on this question.

It is also, I think many agree, really pretty easy to totally undermine the presumptions of Christianity, one by pious one, and be left with no platform or ground on which to stand. (But what has been undermined is, in fact, for more substantial*) Though it is also true that there are many who, despite having lost their ground, still hold to their faith. But one has the sense that they hold not to the tenets of the faith but to a 'superior sense', a notion, a grasp, that is NOT tied to the doctrinal formulation (my impression anyway). But for another and I think much larger group of persons the loss of the platform, the destruction of a platform on which to construct a faith and a religious practice, is a quite serious affair. The consequences are real. To understand 'nihilism' is to understand some of what it entails and what it produces. One traces the evolution of various forms of despair and different strategies for dealing with it in much of literature and philosophy over the last 150 years, and the fact of The Death of God cannot be sidestepped.

Nor can 'God' be simply recovered. You cannot just will a whole 'connection' to the Divine back into existence. It is not a question of return to some means of understanding God, or of choosing, say, to attend Church, or to 'rediscover faith'. The issue is really much more vast---and dangerous. The Nietzschean formulation: 'God has died' and 'we have killed him':

• F. Nietzsche in The Gay Science:
  
  "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

The Power of Questions! I am sure that many who have actively studied philosophy and Nietzsche have gone over some of his rather complex statements. We 'killed God' because we undermined the metaphysic that upholds him, and by that we mean a God upheld with certain stories, with certain mythologies, in a miracle-context, a context of reverence and acceptance that simply became impossible. We really did listen carefully when the Lord Himself said 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' (was said to have said, though John is unreliable in this sense), for we pursued truth as the highest goal and, following it back and back and back, discovered that the whole structure of the Story, the structure through which it was presented, was revealed and taught, was not true. Is someone laughing? Ha ha ha. It seems to me a giant irony that in pursuing the Truth that we would undermine the possibility of the Truth we desire to follow and uphold. This is a simplistic way of putting it, and yet this is exactly what has happened.

I am amused to read in the above quote the reference to 'empty space' and 'infinite nothing' and then I think of a present nihilist-of-sorts who comes festooned in hippy colors and reeking of patchouli oil. But I will leave that one alone.

• Julius Evola in Ride the Tiger wrote:
  
  "Ιn particular, an important factor has been the mutilated character οf Christianity when compared to the majority οf other traditional forms; mutilated, because it does not possess an "esotericism," an inner teaching οf a metaphysical character beyond the truths and dogmas οf the faith offered to the common people. The extensions represented by sporadic experiences that are simply "mystical" and little understood cannot make υρ for this essential lack in Christianity as a whole. This is why the work οf demolition was so easy with the rise οf so-called free thought, whereas in a different, complete tradition the presence οf a body οf teachings above the simply religious level would probably have prevented it.
  
  "What is the God whose death has been announced? Nietzsche himself replies: "Only the god οf morality has been conquered." He also asks: ''Is there sense in conceiving of a god beyond good and evil?" The reply must be affirmative. "Let God slough οff his moral skin, and we shall see him reappear beyond good and evil." What has disappeared is therefore not the god οf metaphysics, but the god οf theism, the personal god who is a projection οf moral and social values and a support for human weakness. Now, the conception οf a god in different terms is not only possible but essential within all the great traditions before and beside Christianity, and the principle of nonduality is also evident in them. These other traditions recognized as the ultimate foundation of the universe a principle anterior and superior to all antitheses, including those of immanence and transcendence considered unilaterally. This conferred on existence---on aΙΙ of existence, including that part of it that appears problematic, destructive, and "evil"---the supreme justification that was being sought through a liberated worldview, to be affirmed beyond the demolitions of nihilism. Zarathustra in fact announces nothing new when he says: ''Everything that becomes seems to me divine dance and divine whim, and the liberated world returns to itself"; it is the same idea that Hinduism casts in the well-known symbol of the dance and play of the naked god Shiva. As another example, we might recall the doctrine of the transcendent identity of samsara (the world of becoming) with nirvana (the unconditioned), that ultimate peak of esoteric wisdom. In the Mediterranean region, the saying of the final mystery initiation, "Osiris is a black god," refers to a similar level; and one could also include the teachings of Neoplatonism and of a few mystics of high stature concerning the metaphysical, impersonal, and super-personal One, and so forth---right up to William Blake's allegory of the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and the Goethean idea of the God of the "free glance" who does not judge according to good and evil, an idea encountered from the ancient West right up to Far Eastern Taoism. We see one of the most drastic proofs of this wisdom in the words of an ascetic on the point of being murdered by a European soldier: "Don't deceive me! You too are God!"

Evola mentions an interesting idea: that there never was a God who makes demands on man, or 'commands'. The notion of the existence of such a God is false, or falsely conceived. In esotericism, he asserts, there is another level of understanding: that man intuits something about the 'great order of things', that he extracts out of it a whole paradigm that in relation to he constructs a Value System which, then, is applied to himself and the world he lives in. While the idea is radical, as against conventional religious positions, it does not decimate a 'metaphysical position'. What is 'killed' is a group of false tenets and also much of the all-too-human personalization of God. It seems that then God becomes again something genuinely abstract. And in a very real sense something (one would hardly say 'someone', would one?) that cannot be said to be precisely concerned with man. Man must concern himself with man. And this formulation allows for a union and marriage, on some level, between all that has arisen in theology and thought with the recognition of the Death of God (whole orders of outmoded conceptions), and a restructuring of an entire metaphysic---for those who are inclined to do so---but along 'new' lines. For Evola, naturally, it is not at all 'new' but rather ancient and eternal. And yet what is the difference, really? The deep past and the deep future---what separates them?

What interests me---huar huar huar---is the 'resurrection'. What is obvious to me might not be obvious to others: If you kill your God, and if you do this in the context of a God who by definition cannot be killed, you are locked in to the necessity of God's resurrection. But, you won't be able to fool either God or yourself. You won't be able to lie. You won't be able to avoid that terrible scent of decomposing corpse that infects your being on all levels. If you are going to go crazy then you'd better get on with it. Hadn't you best devote some time to your Last Will and Testament? Oh wait. I hear shovels piercing the cold ground. A grave is being prepared. Yet who dares to sing and make melody! Let's toss up a few ironies suitable of Hamlet!

• "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?"

'God' becomes (I suggest) infinitely humorous even as the game of life becomes infinitely more deadly. Beyond all the bleakness something shimmers. It is just as real as it ever was, isn't it?
_____________________________________

*Here is a list of what has been overturned:

Adapted from Waldo Frank's The Rediscovery of America.

• That the Earth is the center of the universe, the heart, and everything revolves around it.
• Man is the lord of all created things and creatures. The earth-world is an independent creation beyond which only the gods and God exists.
• Man's reason is absolutely trustworthy (truthful). One can confide in it and have faith in it.
• Man's faith (say, his Christian faith) is entirely reasonable, and that is because it was inspired by God and by God's revelation.
• Man has the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.
• To practice 'the good' conduces toward the good in life and toward 'sanctity' (that sanctity is a real thing, is possible), and 'the blessed life'. Inner and outer union. And opposite conduct will lead inexorably to death and punishment.
• Reason and faith reveal Godhead. Godhead is 'good' and it is one.
• Man's grasp of the natural world, while incomplete, is fundamentally correct. There are three main reasons why this is so (please choose):
  • Our senses enable us to know reality.
  • Our reason corrects our sense-perceptions, enabling us to know reality.
  • Because God, wisdom, faith supplement and correct the senses and reason, enabling us to know reality. (And no need to put 'reality' in quotations!)
• We know what matter is, even if we cannot create it.
• We know what thought is, as distinctly different from matter.
• The laws of cause and effect, upon which logic and science is based, is absolute.
• Time and space are real; are independent of our intelligence. We exist in them rather than they in us.
• The individual (the human individual) whether we call is a soul, spirit or 'self' (ego), exists, not relatively, but absolutely in time and space.

[Felasco]

What I think is that it is best to bring this conversation to a close. The shame I feel right now is too great! I need some time. My entire platform is radically different from yours, and yours from mine. I must restructure myself! For the record: I totally and dishonestly evaded your very important and poignant questions which, if I would have answered them, would have led you like a rockslide to a proof of the sheer sanity and easily understood common-sense-ity of your basic idea. I have been running, Felasco, running like a scairt rabbit. That central idea, though simple, is so devastating to philosophy and theology and to all who live in illusion that we who use those as 'places to hide' (as you so aptly put it), discover that we are terrified cockroaches exposed to your hard gaze! I have wasted your time, Felasco, and for this I am sorry. Yet I thank you for your patience! Theology is not, never has been and never will be 'the place to look for God', and if bowling or skeet shooting or participation at the local bingo parlor were understood as more effective in the 'religious enquiry', that yes, roundly and totally certainly, one would, one should, immediately choose bowling over theology. There is a bowling alley in a town about 30 minutes from mine. I understand your reference as a sort of 'omen' and am planning a visit. Where to get those two-tones shoes I will leave in the hands of a 'real' god to reveal. While I don't think you would think or describe yourself a Great Man it has just dawned on me that your Teaching is among the very highest. You have soundly dominated this discussion in any case. I retire, humbled. All I can say is 'Thanks!'

Clever, articulate, intelligent, as is routine for you.

And yet another dodge and weave, part of your routine too.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Off-the-mark, unsubtle, having missed every point brought to you attention, as is 'routine' for your fine self: the only means left for communication is irony:

This life's five windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.

To get clear about you, to understand why certain ideas have no 'echo' in you, is to understand how it came to be that understanding became 'afflicted'. (This really does mean 'all of us': as the problem we are curing, perhaps? But what if we are not curing it? What if we are getting more ill?)

Just the preamble of this thesis contains many ideas that, I think, challenge those that seem to possess you. (I came across this thesis by running a search under the name R.L. Brett, author of Fancy and Imagination, one the The Critical Idiom series by Methuen & Co Ltd). (Now published by Routledge).

(I am evermore convinced that the foundation of the possibility of understanding 'religion', 'spirituality', 'philosophy', 'ontology', 'epistemology' and 'hermeneutics', is based in the grasp---even the beginning of a grasp!---of the 'terms of literacy'. Religion, existential definition, a grasp of ourselves, starts in this area. How bizarre!)

But that doesn't negate 1 John 3:10

Or, to put it another way, it doesn't negate: 1 John 3:10

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Returning to the image of 'death-of-god', graves and grave-diggers and then the notion of corpse, including the corpse of the dead god, its stench and all that, and the deathliness that moves through all of us, especially when we reveal the content of our thinking, of our souls, and the often putrid content one actually seems to 'smell', one is led to the rather gruesome image of ghouls and grim feasts on that corpse, and the image becomes that of one who intoxicated with delight rips apart and 'devours' the dying flesh of the dying god.

It seems a strange, though very young and self-exultant pride that with some minimal conceptual skill becomes capable of destruction, and will this make one more real perhaps? though it be only a more complete destruction of something that is anyway already dying or even quite dead. Oh joy! Also, there is no consciousness of just *where* or *how* there might still live and exist---excuse the tiresome reference---the god of 'higher metaphysic' which the 18th and 19th century poets understood can only be known by a certain kind of mind: a 'sophisticated mind', meditating on nature and man and existence but apprehended in and through 'Imagination' ('Through the eye' not just with it as Blake says):

• Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
  Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
  As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
  As we our food into our nature change.
  From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
  And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
  Which to her proper nature she transforms
  To bear them light, on her celestial wings.
  Thus does she, when from individual states
  She doth abstract the universal kinds;
  Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
  Steal access through our senses to our minds.
  
  From S. Coleridge Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV.

In imagination the 'bodies' of things perceived are turned to 'spirit' through strange sublimation, similar to how fire consumes and sublimates what it burns, and as our bodies turn things outside into things 'inner'; and from this 'gross matter' imagination 'abstracts' something like 'essences' which are returned [?] to something original, 'to bear them light, on her celestial wings', to carry meanings of a higher sort. From out of objects imagination condenses 'universals' which, given new form, gain a unique access to our understanding (not available to mere seeing).

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

One Arising_uk, a notably erect member of PN, has declaimed to one Leaping & Prancing Gnome: "Please stop spouting your nonsense about Logic upon this forum as whilst I can just about cope with the fact that you've never read those we call the philosophers, that your epistemology is flawed, that you are a closet theist and you don't subscribe to the PN mag, I find it an affront to Philosophy when you speak such bollocks about Logic from a position of sheer ignorance about the subject."

Will you tell him or shall I that you DO subscribe but to the Akashic Edition? That it falls down around you like mystic dew-drops the third Monday of every month?

And a particular Greylorn Ell, conceived in analogue yet delivered digitally, has written: "And I take responsibility for encouraging this particular troll. Felasco is a clever and sneaky troll, first appearing in common tourist garb after a recent shower, inviting conversation, and only showing its greenish teeth and malodorous excretions after I'd made the dreadful mistake of inviting it for lunch."

Now, that is going a bit far! Harumph I say! 'Clever' and 'sneaky'?! Them's fightin' words! (Though he's said nothing against Elvis---yet). But wait: Can you really be called 'clever'? Or 'sneaky'? Hmmmm. The jury's still out. And you do shower in January don't you? Right after Christmas? So he got that right...

What is interesting is that, often, we bring our position, whatever it is, a priori along with us and then we seek the rationalization and justification for it as we are pressed and challenged to defend it. Myself, I am not at all inclined to 'dismiss' the inarticulate *sense* that arises in us, that which we *know* but can't explain.

• "Philosophy, when she puts aside the finished products of religion and returns to the 'nature of things', really goes back to that original representation out of which mythology itself had gathered shape. If we now call it 'metaphysical' instead of 'supernatural', the thing itself has not essentially changed its character. What has changed is, rather, man's attitude towards it, which, from being active and emotional, has become intellectual and speculative. His earlier emotional reaction gave birth to the symbols of myth, to objects of faith; his new procedure of critical analysis dissects it into concepts, from which it deduces various types of systematic theory. But in shaping these systems, the standards of value characteristic of the two opposed temperaments continue to exercise their unconscious influence, dividing the streams of thought into those two channels whose cause we shall trace in the two concluding chapters."
  
  ---F. M. Cornfeld, from the introduction to Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation.

Still, your 'philosophical dog' really does need an 'epistemological kitty'.

We can help!

What is interesting, at least to me, is how at the end of a long long chain and movement of thought, man is in no better position than he was at the start. True, he may have 'mastered' phusis to a great degree, and what greater outcome has there been? But can he really say that he understands anything at all any better at all? When he abandoned one vessel of thought---like a Hermit Crab abandoning a shell that no longer serves---and makes his home in another, seemingly more spacious one, is he a 'wiser' man? Can he really say that he *understands* life, his own being in life, and can he say that he lives it better?

What I notice in many, who with a new level of emotionalism 'take up residence' in a strange strange form of sword-rich 'rationalism' and with tremendous zeal work at cutting the threads to older orders of conception, is that they end up in a dead and denuded zone. Can they really be said to be 'in the world'? In what World is it? Why is it that I have the sense and the feeling of something dead?