Blog Archives

System Distancing Is An Imperative, But It Must Not Lead To Isolation

1/20/2021

It's been nearly a year since the birdemic broke in the West. Since then, we have witnessed a devastating dissolution of society and the implementation of what I privately refer to as anti-society. Granted, prebirdemic society was at best a mess of mass psychic and spiritual contagion held together by the frailest of social conventions, but within this mess traces of authentic community could still be found, as could vestiges of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the forms of culture, knowledge, and, yes, even religion. Those trace elements still exist here and there, but they are in danger of being completely torn apart by the vortexes of chaos and destruction tearing through the world.

Anti-society strives to imprison every single human being in the System. As is the case in an actual prison, anti-society aims to atomize and isolate individuals as much as possible. Though it allows its prisoners to mingle and "socialize" a little in the prison yard, this mingling and socializing is only permitted under heavy surveillance and strict controls, thereby nullifying most authentic or potentially authentic forms of socializing. In essence, anti-society seeks to create a world in which everyone is alone with everyone else. A world in which a person becomes an isolated thing disconnected from every other isolated thing.

Recognizing the anti-society currents in the System is a big push factor for system distancing - the spiritual act of freeing and separating oneself the evil inherent in the System. However, this act of freeing and separating also contains an atomizing and isolating potential. Individuals who succeed in spiritually freeing and separating themselves from the slavery of the System might find themselves in circumstances where they feel they are or actually are very much alone in the world. In circumstances such as these, the alone with everyone else of anti-society may appear preferable to the alone with no one of system distancing.

We are, after all, social creatures. Moreover, we are beings and as such we seek to communicate with and "be" in the presence of other beings.

This is why I believe system distancing must be paired with some form of community nurturing or building. Once individuals commit to distancing themselves from the system, they must also commit to creating some form of community. For system distancing to truly work, the communities must remain small at first - perhaps no larger than a few trusted friendships or a close-knit family or a combination of both. These communities must be made up of individuals who value the primacy of the spiritual, are all on the side of God's creation, and are all willing to work together and support each other. I imagine these sorts of communities will be as varied as the individuals who comprise them, but I believe they are absolutely necessary. Without them, most people who commit to system distancing may find themselves in positions of unbearable isolation. Of course some individuals will be perfectly successful going it alone, but the vast majority will not. Hence, community is key.

I'm still picking away at Berdyaev's Slavery and Freedom in my spare time. During my reading today I came across an interesting passage that lends some credence to what I have described above (slightly edited by me):

Man lives in an evil servile dependence upon society and he himself creates that dependence by hypostatizing society and creating myths about it. Social influences and suggestions distort religious beliefs, moral values and man's very grasp of truth. But there is a reality which lies deeper than that to which the name of society is given - the reality of the relations which exist among people within the society, the reality of the degrees of community existing among men. It is this that makes a sociology of knowledge necessary.

In the process of cognition, man acts not as an isolated being but as a social being. The apprehension of truth has a social character and, therefore, the process of cognition depends on the form taken by the communion which exists among men, upon the degree of their community. Logical universal validity in the apprehension of truth has a social character. It is a problem of communicability. But the dependence of the acquisition of knowledge upon the social relations of men is in a much deeper sense dependence upon the spiritual state of men. The social relations which men have with one another, have their effect upon the process of acquiring knowledge and indicate degrees in the spiritual isolation or spiritual community of men.

5 Comments

Berdyaev and Arkle on Divine Friendship

1/19/2021

3 Comments

The Creation of Adam - Michelangelo

I recently discovered an intriguing connection between William Arkle (1924-2000) and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948): both unorthodox spiritual thinkers posit the establishment of divine friendship as an overarching religious goal in mortal life.

The suggestion that some kind of deep friendship can exist between man and God - to say nothing of the idea that the formation of such a friendship should serve as a primary spiritual motivation in mortal life - is enough to set most Christians' heads spinning. Concepts like divine friendship are immediately treated with suspicion and are often imputed as occult speculations involving some form of esotericism or, worse, Gnosticism.

Objections to the possibility and viability of divine friendship in Christianity stems from complex theological misinterpretations concerning the nature man, the nature of God, and the nature of the possible and potential relationships the two can form, both in this world and beyond. A blog post is a poor venue through which to explicate the details of these misinterpretations; so, in the interest of brevity I will reduce the matter to the following: divine friendship is only possible if Christianity is considered a personal, dynamic, and active religion rather than an abstract, passive, and static religion.

In Slavery and Freedom, Nikolai Berdyaev elaborates on this point in the following manner (emphasis added):

This is the God-likeness of man; but the other side of this God-likeness is the man-likeness of God. This is true anthropomorphism, not false. For this reason, alone a meeting between man and God is possible - a relation between man and God. . . Man is personality because God is personality and vice versa. But personality presupposes the existence of its other. It has a relation not only to the One, but also to the many. How can this be in the case of the personality of God? Personality is an existential center and in it is a capacity to feel sorrow and joy. There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. The conventional theology of the text books denies the suffering of God. This appears to it to be a degradation of the majesty of God; in God there is no movement; God is actus purus.

But such an understanding of God is taken not so much from the biblical revelation as from the philosophy of Aristotle. If God is personality and not the Absolute, if He is not only essentia but also existensia, if there is revealed in Him a personal relation to the other, to the many, then suffering is inherent in Him, and there is a tragic principle in Him. Otherwise God is not a personality, but an abstract idea or a being such as conceived by the Eleatic philosophers. The son of God suffers not only as Man, but also as God. There are not only human, but also divine passions. God shares in the suffering of men. God yearns for His other, for responsive love.

William Arkle expresses a similar line of thinking about God and divine friendship in his In Equation of Being - notes on the nature of love:

It is, therefore, better that we begin to strive towards the ideal of becoming companionable to our Creator, which is the only possible desire of a God who is truly perfect in love, than that we strive to please Him in some less mature way, which is easier for us to achieve and understand, but which may still become a barrier to our response to His real nature. In the end, we are going to do nothing but disappoint and hurt Him if we do not search into the sweetest and most beautiful depths of His nature. We may even find that, rather than being a difficult and very long term thing to achieve, this change in attitude is both simple and natural to us, and with the help of our brothers and sisters, can be reinforced and made strong in us quite quickly; within a life time, or even a few years.

This attitude is, itself, the kingdom of heaven. The king will remain the king, even though as we said previously, He would be the first to be glad if one of His Friends became wiser than Himself. In this respect we must always bear in mind that our Creators position is one of supreme responsibility and not one He takes up in order to be in any way superior to us. So let us try and free ourselves from all those human aberrations that we carry around with us in the world, and let us then try to visualise the nature of a Being who is very friendly, approachable and yet deeply wise; who never stops growing and learning, even so; and let us try to be like Him. When we worship Him, let us ask ourselves if He really wants to be worshipped, or whether He really wants to be loved and befriended. Does God Himself worship anything, and if so, what is it? If we discover that God ‘gives worth’ or worship to the same qualities that we do, we may discover that we are not so far from being His companions as we thought.

It would be reasonable to suppose that if our Creator is trying to give us all the most valuable things that He possesses in His spirit, then these are qualities which He feels to be most worthwhile. If they are worthwhile to Him, then our God is, in a sense, worshipping these qualities Himself. He is adoring them as we are. We can then understand that we may reach towards an attitude that is giving worth and adoration to the beautiful and valuable things of the Divine Nature in the same way that our God is. In such a case, the adoration of the Divine qualities is one thing, and the love of the Person of God is another. But since our God expresses so many of these qualities in His ‘Personality’, we have tended to confuse the situation. We can adore the relatively abstract quality of many forms of beauty, but we can not make friends with them. We can adore many forms of Divine Ability, but not be able to make friends with them. But we can make friends with the Person of God who is trying to channel as much of the Divine Absolute Nature as He can, through, what is to Him, the focus of His Personality. If he had not taken upon Himself this limitation of Personality, there would be no personal form of the expression of love in creation. And we have seen that it is precisely at the personal end of the love spectrum that our God is harvesting His friends, and these are the chief reasons for His whole creative endeavour.

We should feel the possibility that our love and friendship matters to our God; for if He is the very wise person who we consider Him to be, then we must look carefully at the nature of such wisdom.

Both Berdyaev and Arkle recognize only subjects can form friendships. Consequently, neither thinker regards God as an abstract idea or impersonal diety. Instead, both Berdyaev and Arkle acknowledge the divine personality of God. Furthermore, they also see the existence of this divine personality within man. Thus, the communion between man and God is a communion of personalities - of subject meeting and befriending subject. Furthermore, the yearning for this communion is a two-way street; that is, God yearns for the friendship of man as much as man yearns for the friendship of God.

Does this mean all Christians need to do is declare God their "buddy" and then return to living in the same manner they had lived before the declaration? Not exactly. On the one hand, the formation of divine friendship requires a deep, inner realization of one's own latent divine spark, what Arkle refers as the real or divine self, and Berdyaev cites as personality. On the other hand, divine friendship also involves the understanding that we truly are made in God's image - that the divine is a personal being (or beings in Arkle's case).

Far from being esoteric or Gnostic in origin, the personal aspect of Christianity reflects the core teachings of the Gospels and is embodied in the life of Jesus, but it entails a dramatic shift in how we currently think and understand ourselves, the world, and God. This dramatic shift does not rely on mystery rituals, intensive spiritual training, or other abstract 'esoteric' means. On the contrary, it relies on a primarily personal esoteric realization of our true nature and the true nature of God. This personal esoteric realization is less about discovering a hidden, inner mystery than it is about rediscovering a simple yet neglected fact. Most importantly, this realization would view the friendship and communion of these two natures through love as something desirable and achievable.

Thus, the call of divine friendship espoused by Berdyaev and Arkle is not so much a new form of Christianity as it is the call for a more authentic and dynamic Christianity based on the personal and fueled by love.

Note added: To explore Berdyaev and Arkle further, I highly recommend the following online resources:

berdyaev.com maintained by Fr. Stephen Janos, a profilic translator of Berdyaev's works.

William Arkle Blog maintained by Dr. Bruce Charlton, who also wrote an introduction for the latest edition of Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness.

3 Comments

A Taste of Winter

1/18/2021

1 Comment

Cold Night - László Mednyánszky

Winters in northwestern Hungary tend to be rather gloomy, gray affairs rife with overcast skies and fog. Daytime temperatures remain close to zero, but rarely dip below, which means the air remains chilly and damp rather than cold. Snow is infrequent. When it does come, it usually melts away within a day or two, leaving behind a naked landscape scarred with tracts of mud.

Nevertheless, a taste of winter does visit here at least once every year. During these times, the daytime temperatures magically dip well below the freezing point and the nighttime air reaches virtually unthinkable double digits. Within hours the soggy earth crystallizes enough for the snow to stay, and for a few brief days the landscape is cloaked in white and silence.

At night the clouds drift across the starry sky like dark, dislodged continents while the crescent moon puncturing through the blackness spills silver across the snow-laden trees. I stand on the small bridge near my house and in the slow moving river below catch a glimpse of the moon smiling at its own reflection.

1 Comment

What We Do In Life . . .

1/16/2021

4 Comments

. . . echoes in eternity.

I've been thinking about this short scene from the movie Gladiator quite a bit lately.

There are times in life when destiny reveals itself in the lives of individuals. Contrary to popular belief, individuals are free to turn away from destiny, but if they make this choice, the thing they choose over destiny is no longer destiny but something altogether different.

Either way, the choice individuals make when faced with destiny do indeed "echo" in eternity.

Note: I am of the belief that all choices in life echo in eternity, but some obviously echo louder than others.

4 Comments

What Does a Shift in Consciousness Involve? An Example From Scheler

1/15/2021

4 Comments

In my last post, I briefly addressed the importance of as well as the current need for a dramatic shift in human consciousness. On the surface, the very act of contemplating the need for a consciousness shift sounds, at best, starry-eyed. After all, how can we possibly seek to actively and consciously change a thing we are seemingly barely able to control? Our rather limited knowledge of what exactly consciousness is and what it actually does or is capable of doing makes the matter all the more quixotic.

Nevertheless, the nebulous nature of human consciousness should not serve as an excuse to deny the sorely needed shift in how people think and understand. Without this shift, humanity faces the prospect of being completely and, perhaps, irretrievably enslaved by the material world.

The biggest obstacles to a shift in consciousness are the simple matters of not knowing what it is and what it entails. At the most elementary level, a change in human consciousness involves a movement in how people think about and understand the world. This movement transforms previously held concepts about reality and recasts the metaphysical assumptions upon which these concepts had been structured. The result is a dramatic shift in thinking and understanding that propels a comprehensive restructuring of the ultimate nature of reality.

In Ressentiment, Max Scheler presents the dramatic shift in human consciousness Christianity brought to the world through its thinking and understanding of love. Before the advent of Christianity, Greek and Roman philosophers and poets classified love as a phenomenon that belonged to the domain of the senses. Classical consciousness defined love as a need or desire that could be easily fit within the questionable ancient division of human nature into "reason" and "sensuality". Though Scheler acknowledges that Classical consciousness did make distinctions among various types of love, he stresses that these distinctions were all underscored by a rational impulse indicating an upward yearning (editing and emphasis added):

All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” the “un ὄν” towards the “ὄν,” “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium.

Thus in all human love relations, such as marriage or friendship, a distinction must be made between a “lover” and a “beloved,” and the latter is always nobler and more perfect. He is the model for the lover's being, willing, and acting. This conception, which grew from the relations of life in antiquity, finds its clearest expression in the numerous forms of Greek metaphysics.

Already Plato says: “We would not love if we were Gods.” For the most perfect form of being cannot know “aspiration” or “need.” Here love is only a road to something else, a “methodos.”

And according to Aristotle, in all things there is rooted an upward urge (an ’ορεγέσθαι and ‟εφίεσθαι) towards the deity, the Νο ς, the self-sufficient thinker who “moves” the world as “prime mover.” He does not move it as a being whose will and activity is directed toward the outside, but “as the beloved moves the lover” (Aristotle)—as it were attracting, enticing, and tempting it.

In this idea, with its unique sublimity, beauty, and ancient coolness, the essence of the ancient conception of love is raised into the absolute and boundless. The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man--a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn.

This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love.

After this explication of the ancient Greek and Roman concept of love, cap-stoned by diety that does not love but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal toward which all other love is aimed, Scheler procedes to delineate the Christian concept of love, which he places beyond the rational domain and describes as an entirely different direction of movement.

Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love.

The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans.

The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God.

The change in the notion of God and his fundamental relation to man and the world is not the cause, but the consequence of this reversal in the movement of love. God is no longer the eternal unmoving goal—like a star—for the love of all things, moving the world as “the beloved moves the lover.” Now the very essence of God is to love and serve.

Creating, willing, and acting are derived from these original qualities. The eternal “first mover” of the world is replaced by the “creator” who created it “out of love.”

Scheler utilizes the crucifixion to emphasize the vast chasm separating Classical Greek and Roman concepts of love from Christian concepts of love:

An event that is monstrous for the man of antiquity, that is absolutely paradoxical according to his axioms, is supposed to have taken place in Galilee: God spontaneously “descended” to man, became a servant, and died the bad servant‟s death on the cross!

Now the precept of loving good and hating evil, loving one‟s friend and hating one's enemy, becomes meaningless. There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements.

Indeed, the achievements of love are only symbols and proofs of its presence in the person. And thus God himself becomes a “person” who has no “idea of the good,” no “form and order,” no Λόγος above him, but only below him—through his deed of love. He becomes a God who loves—for the man of antiquity something like a square circle, an “imperfect perfection.”

But there is another great innovation: in the Christian view, love is a non-sensuous act of the spirit (not a mere state of feeling, as for the moderns), but it is nevertheless not a striving and desiring, and even less a need.

These acts consume themselves in the realization of the desired goal. Love, however, grows in its action. And there are no longer any rational principles, any rules or justice, higher than love, independent of it and preceding it, which should guide its action and its distribution among men according to their value.

The cosmic shift in human consciousness that took place as Christianity spread through the Classical world becomes even more awe-inspiring when one realizes that many of the earliest Christians were in fact ancient Greeks and Romans. It becomes even more awe-inspiring when the eventual eclipsing of the Classical consciousness of love by the Christian thinking and understanding of love are taken into consideration.

Having outlined all of the above, it must be noted that the shift in consciousness centered upon the concept of love that occurred in the ancient world was fundamentally a change from one form of religious consciousness to another, higher form of religious consciousness. I point this out not to diminish the enormity of the change, but rather to stress that the shift itself occurred on a plane in which the reality of religion and the primacy of the spiritual was incontrovertible.

The shift in human consciousness we need today is an entirely different endeavor, for the change involves a movement away from a de-spiritualized consciousness and a simultaneous movement toward a re-spiritualized consciousness.

At first glance, this much-needed change in how we think about and understand the world appears impossible, but all it requires is a change in the direction of movement of our thinking and our understanding. Though this change in direction seems improbable at the collective level, it is completely achievable at the level of the individual.

And that's exactly where this much-needed and sorely overdue shift in human consciousness must begin.

4 Comments

Why is Consciousness So Important?

1/15/2021

0 Comments

Though I am certainly no expert on the subject, I touch upon consciousness and the need for a change in consciousness quite a bit on this blog. What fascinates me about consciousness is its inherent mystery. Philosophers, scientists, artists, and theologians have been studying it for thousands of years, yet it remains a difficult phenomenon to describe and explain.

At its most fundamental level, consciousness could be described as a sentient awareness of internal and external existence. As such, consciousness is something all humans apparently possess, but, strangely enough, our awareness of consciousness is rooted more in intuition than in measurable "fact".

Needless to say, this has inspired nothing but consternation among contemporary analytical philosophers of the mind, many of whom regard intuition as nothing more than an illusion - an illusion that inconveniently serves as an affront to their firmly held assumptions about the inherent meaninglessness of the universe.

I confess, consciousness as a proverbial thumb in the eye of meaninglessness is very appealing to me because it gets right to the root of what I believe consciousness addresses: metaphysical assumptions.

From this perspective, consciousness can be seen as the conduit through which the fundamental nature of reality can be approached, interpreted, and addressed. Moreover, it's existence helps or - from a more pessimistic perspective - hinders the framing of two basic and eternal metaphysical questions: What is there? What is it like?
For the sake of this post, I will limit the definition of human consciousness to the slightly epistemological definition of "how people think and understand".*

Dr. Bruce Charlton considers the question of how people think and understand what there is and what this "there" is like to be of monumental importance because it lays the groundwork upon which all subsequent empirical and theoretical evidence is weighed. "Such assumptions," Charlton notes, "come first, are deeper than 'evidence' (because evidence is itself structured by these assumptions)."

The beef many modern analytical philosophers of the mind have with consciousness is relatively straightforward and simple - the existence of consciousness challenges their metaphysical assumptions that everything in the universe is just stuff. Moreover, consciousness is an affront to the evidence they have structured upon these assumptions - evidence which posits that the "just stuff" is essentially meaningless.

What irks moderns about consciousness is its audacity to insist that the stuff means something; moreover, that this meaning is spiritual in nature. This intolerable audacity is often referred as the religious impulse, and it is this impulse of consciousness that most moderns find so appalling.

Simply put, within human consciousness exists the power to choose meaning over meaninglessness. Sadly, our current state of consciousness at the collective level slants heavily toward the latter.

Collectively we have all but abandoned the primacy of the spiritual in favor of the primacy of the material; in doing so, we have collectively favored the material at the expense of the spiritual. The detrimental consequences of this unprecedented change in human consciousness - a long, drawn out process spanning nearly three centuries - are everywhere apparent and becoming increasingly more so.

The further we pull away from the spiritual and bore into the material, the further we pull away from meaning and bore into meaninglessness.

The situation is becoming untenable. If human consciousness continues on its current course unabated, humanity will cast itself into a pit of meaninglessness. Once there, the mystery of human consciousness dissolve into nothingness.

Analyses of how people think and understand will be rendered obsolete because there will be nothing left to think about and nothing left to understand.

*I borrowed this simple but lucid definition from Kevin McCall's most recent post at No Longer Reading.

0 Comments

Liberty No Longer Enlightens The World

1/12/2021

7 Comments

Last week, the "leftist-progressive", independent mayor of Budapest's ninth district made waves by installing this MLB-inspired, one-meter high statue in her part of the Hungarian capital for a period of two weeks. The announcement instigated a predictable uproar from the "right-wing, nationalist" government, which was immediately followed by an equally predictable defensive barrage of faux bemusement and moral self-righteousness from the ninth district mayor and her team of professional agitators.

I confess - this sort of nonsense usually piqued my interest before the birdemic coup, but when I encounter stories like this today, I tend to see them for what they are - baited hooks; nothing more. "Look at this stupid evil! Doesn't it look tasty? Come have a nibble!" Or conversely, from the opposite perspective, "Can you believe the intolerance of these people? Why can't they just "woke" up! Come take a little bite of this morsel!"

No, I'm not particularly interested in any of that anymore.

Though I find it impossible to see the monstrosity above as a piece of art, I will do my best to pretend. For the sake of this post, I will attempt to mirror the meandering process of thinking and impression-processing that works through me whenever I stop to study a sculpture or a painting, even one as garish as this.

The iconic symbol of the country and city of birth has followed me to the country of my heritage. When I left New York in 2011, Liberty Enlightening the World was an oxidized beacon, stoic and towering, golden-flamed torch in hand, but the color revolution has reduced her grandeur. She now kneels in submission, her torch-less hand curled into an angry fist raised in defiant protest against the mass-marketed sins of humanity.

Every single component of the System idolizes and promotes this new, kneeling normal. Think about that for a moment. Every single component.

Servitus over Libertas.

After the birth of my son in 2011, I dove back hard into the Catholic Church, and ordered a book called Liberty: The God That Failed by Catholic author Christopher A. Ferrara. According to Ferrara, it was the dark forces of Enlightenment that did in the Church and Christendom. Yes, it was the Freemasons and philosophes who darkened the world by enlightening it with liberty.

The Statue of Liberty was designed by a Mason, don't you know? Washington never converted on his deathbed. In fact, he never really uttered the word God at all. For guys like him, it was all Deist, Supreme Architect stuff and nothing more.

The book was well-researched and well-written, but I never got around to finishing it. At around the same time, I crawled out of the water of Catholicism and sat down on the shore, content to take a brief dip once a week.

Nevertheless, Ferrara and all the chroniclers of the Not-So-Secret-Yet-Still-Secret War between the Church and Masonry are correct about one thing - Liberty is not God.

This, however, is not an apology for the doctrine that God is not Liberty.

The original statue was modeled after the Roman goddess Libertas. Beyond that, there's not much that is religious about it. At the same time, the glow from its torch permitted varying degrees of religious liberty. Great swaths of America became what is often referred to as "a Christian country."

The current situation in the United States and the arrival of this inverted, mini statue in Budapest perplexes me. Is it a synchronicity? A personal connection specifically meant for me? An omen? A declaration?

If things go one way, Servitus will reign unopposed. At least that is what it looks like. But what if things go the other way? Will Libertas regain her pedestal? And then what? Back to normal? Democracy with a side of fries? Is that even desirable?

I yearn for a new statue altogether. Or no statue at all.

I think about Libertas in terms of consciousness - that missed opportunity in the eighteenth century and everything that has followed since. The missed opportunity created Libertas. And the culmination of Libertas has led to Servitus. Servitus strikes me as the death of consciousness. Even worse, the death of spirit - the deadening of humanity, which is also the deadening of God. What comes then? Destruction?

But I do not think Servitus has won decisively - not yet anyway.

Perhaps we will rediscover libertas again - true libertas - the kind of libertas that does not need to impose its glory upon the world with through the promise of a beckoning, light-casting statue.

The kind of libertas that can lead us from enlightening to finding the Light, if we so choose.

7 Comments

The Further Development of Christianity Depends on You - Yes, You!

1/10/2021

5 Comments

Kevin McCall touched upon a fascinating theme on his No Longer Reading blog today. In his post Christianity is Inexhaustible, Kevin makes the following observation:

Christianity can continue to develop. Christianity isn't a Red Queen religion, where most of the energy is spent trying to avoid defects. Christianity can always develop. We can always go deeper in our understanding of Christianity because we can always go deeper in our understanding of Christ.

I find the essence of what this paragraph communicates both incredibly appealing and somewhat daunting. On the one hand, it is very comforting and energizing to consider that Christianity is not an ossified religion, but can instead continue to develop and always develop. The affirmation of Christianity as a non-Red Queen religion provides an almost cosmic level of relief. On the other hand, the injunction that we can always go deeper in our understanding of Christ is a formidable one because it reveals that the further development of Christianity depends largely on us.

Yet, the prospect that the further development of Christianity depends largely on us, on individual Christians, should not seem daunting. On the contrary, we should welcome it and feel invigorated by it. Still, we hesitate. Our own perceived inadequacy and adjudged sinfulness holds us back and paralyzes us. We surmise that the continuing development of Christianity is simply bigger than us. We hesitate to enter into a contract that may end up being bigger than us and much larger than we could have bargained. We consider ourselves too defective for the task.

Though understandable to some degree, this reluctance reveals the deep state of our metaphysical confusion and malaise. Furthermore, our diffident unwillingness to engage exposes the root of our predicament. Put simply, we lack the confidence to fully acknowledge and live the reality of what being a Christian today should mean - more specifically, inspiring and activating our own latent divinity through the establishment and nurturing of a personal communion with Christ.

"Jesus is a person." Repeat that. Jesus is a person. This is not the same as Jesus was a person or Jesus was just a person. Nor is anything along the lines of Jesus was a person, but is now a spirit. Jesus is a person. Moreover, Jesus is a divine person.

And guess what? You also have it within you to become a divine person. This implies that what is within Jesus is also within you; and that what is within you is also within Jesus. This means you can establish a personal and concrete relationship with Jesus, and through this relationship, through this communion, you can work creatively to further God's creation, both here in mortal life and beyond in eternity.

A deeper understanding of Christ necessitates a deeper understanding of ourselves. I posit the further - and sorely needed - development of Christianity hinges almost exclusively on this deeper understanding of ourselves through the light of Christ. Through a deeper understanding of ourselves we will discover that the continuing development of Christianity will depend heavily on what Nikolai Berdyaev refers to as "an anthropological revelation." Christianity will move from being an unveiling of man in Christ to an unveiling of Christ in man. This shift will demand new and creative forms of active rather than passive Christian participation, the vast bulk of which will initially be internal in nature, something akin to Rudolf Steiner's concept of a shift in consciousness, Nikolai Berdyaev's ideas concerning the Eighth Day of Creation, and what Bruce Charlton describes as Romantic Christianity.

Far from being a daunting task, the initial internal nature of the unveiling in Christ in man will be easy to access, simple to comprehend, and uncomplicated to practice.

The only daunting task we face now is getting ourselves to the point where the task can begin. But begin it must; the further development of Christianity depends upon it.

Note: I highly recommend checking out Kevin McCall's insightful and thought-provoking posts at No Longer Reading.

5 Comments

We Beat Them By Not Joining Them

1/9/2021

6 Comments

If you can't beat them, join them.

I was six or seven years old the first time I encountered this expression. If memory serves me well, it appeared at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Sylvester the Cat who despondently uttered the phrase after the last of his many dogged ploys to capture and eat Tweety Bird ends in abysmal, near-fatal failure. After suffering through four minutes of high-voltage electrical shocks, falling pianos, and dynamite explosions, Sylvester finally throws in the towel. He acknowledges Tweety's ultimate victory by burying the hatchet - yes, I believe there was a hatchet in the cartoon - and becoming Tweety's devoted helper and follower.

In our modern world the phrase "if you can't beat them, join them" has morphed into somewhat of a doctrine embraced by nearly everyone including those who classify themselves as pragmatists and realists. Synonymous with expediency and opportunism, "if you can't beat them, join them" also shines a light on the modern obsession of ensuring one ends up the winning side, regardless of what this may actually entail. At its core, the "join them" philosophy sells itself as a positive doctrine because it promises to turn a potential win-lose into a win-win, which is great because there's nothing our modern world scorns more than a loser.

I got to thinking about all of this from the perspective of spiritual warfare, and I very quickly arrived at the conclusion that the "if you can't beat them, join them" precept marks the crux of the enemy's war aims. Unbeknownst to most, the enemy cannot really defeat us; it can only persuade us to defeat ourselves. And the most effective way it can ensure we defeat ourselves is to convince us to switch sides.

Though its arsenal is packed with weapons to tempt, demoralize, degrade, corrupt, entice, invert, and mislead, the enemy possesses nothing which it can actually destroy us.

Sure, the enemy has innumerable means through which it can destroy us physically, but nothing it wields from within its vast array of firepower can destroy us spiritually.

The best the enemy can do is persuade us to spiritually destroy ourselves, and the most efficient means of achieving this is to have us abandon the side of Good and consciously join the side opposed to Good.

The enemy very much wants us to believe that we cannot defeat it; that we are hypocritical, worthless sinners who don't deserve to be on the side of Good; and that joining its side represents the pinnacle of prudence and pragmatism. The enemy very much wants us to believe this because it knows it can do little else to prevent us from joining and remaining on the side of Good.

With this in mind, the best way to beat the enemy is to remain committed to the right side of the battlefield.

We beat them by not joining them.

Note added: Spiritual warfare is a confusing concept for many people, Christians included. In the brief excerpt below, Bruce Charlton lucidly and succinctly describes "the two sides" of the spiritual conflict and what it means to choose the side of Good.

*Note. It is absolutely vital to recognise that the sides of Good and evil are Not composed of what are usually termed 'Good people' and 'Bad People'; nor even of better and worse people. The essence of the two sides concerns whether a person gives their allegiance to Good (i.e. to God and creation); or joins the 'evil' side which opposes The Good (God and creation).

It is about there being only two sides, and a person's choice of which side he identifies-with. Matters of individual behaviour are a separate issue; so that some (or perhaps most) of the people on the side of evil will be better behaved, 'nicer' people than some (or perhaps most) of those on the side of Good. However, over time, those on the evil side will certainly become corrupted by their primary choice - as is currently very evident indeed.

6 Comments

An Evil System. Any Questions?

1/7/2021

8 Comments

My use of this clever Crowder meme is not meant as an endorsement of the man. In all honesty, I don't know much about him.

Back in October 2019, I wrote a brief post in which I asked the following question:

Do you see evil in a corrupted but otherwise good system, or do you see only an evil system?

It goes without saying that most modern people do not perceive any evil in the System at all. In fact, I will be so bold as to say the vast majority are oblivious to existence of the System itself. As you would expect, the question I asked in that 2019 post was not aimed at the majority, but rather at members of a small, perceptive minority whom I categorized into two distinct camps: those who regarded the evil in the System as mere corruption, and those who appraised the System as intrinsically evil.

The post was shared on several blogs and went on to be one of my most viewed of 2019. Surprisingly, the question I posed in the post proved rather contentious and sparked considerable debate - well, considerable for my blog anyway. Agreement about wholesale corruption within the System was unanimous among comments, but this consensus splintered once possible origins or causes of the corruption were put on the table.

As I mentioned above, I published the post in October, 2019. Repeating the question I posed then in light of everything that has transpired since strikes me as superfluous.

Peace be with you if you are among those who still maintain that the System is merely corrupted.

If you are among those who are inclined to think differently, be of high spirits!

Decisive recognition and acknowledgement of systemic evil was the whole point of 2020. We are now free to focus our energy and time on the Good, which, in the here and now, resides almost exclusively beyond the System.

Look there.

8 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>