Maggie's Farm

What's today's application?

Difficult to imagine that the sum importance of human soul for eternity is a special knowledge that hinges on willing yourself into a belief. Unless I miss your (rather vague) point, does that sound particularly wise? Transcendent? Important?

What is the click the rote believer is so convinced he heard when he adopted whatever it is he thinks he believes, and how isn't that a salvation by a work he had the magnanimity to bestow upon himself?

As for your closing sentence, it's just as difficult not to take that as a dismissing judgement. As in a greater/lesser ranking based on a handful of sentences between complete strangers? Or do I misread that too, as vague as it is?

I'm trying to understand the Catholic experience, assuming that's the gist of this place. Because it makes little sense in a philosophical context, what of it I've seen, yet it holds whatever it holds with equal parts casual lifestyling and ironclad habit of belief. I'd think it should replace both with a sensibility that actually rings true on some fundamental level.

And that takes us back to application. Not rhetoric of slogan; meaning.

I've addressed your points elsewhere on the page, such as they are, but I'll also point out the flippancy of 1) taking a position not based on anything that can be - or at least, has been here - elaborated on with fact and reason to the point that it constitutes the purported Christian go/no-go salvation gauge, and from that 2) posing a blanket assumption about a stranger per that philosophical vacuum.

Do you see the point? It's the casualness of a comfortable purported Believer issuing some sort of veiled promise, threat, or eternal condition based on something he himself can't define.

Hammer's last line, in my view, was simply a statement of a supposition that, based on your comments, you'd likely be in a community that would reject the disciples' message.

What message is that? At best, and by its very conveyance, the "disciples' message" is as indistinct as anyone purporting to use it as a yardstick. The sum, the essence, the core of the disciples' message, for what it's worth, is the abolition of self. But that philosophy is found throughout the spiritual world. In other words, the actualized soul (best I know how to put it) realizes what the other side is having already traveled to the other side.

And I highly suspect that is the message of the whole ball of wax. By grace you contain what you've found - or even been gifted - and are encouraged to share it. But if that's it, not one formal, textbook Christian in a hundred can elaborate thereof. Many prefer to erect a structure and see who measures up to it.

It's precisely that technique that has Convicted Believers putting genuinely seeking minds off the CB's, yes, rote personal dogma. Better that if you don't know it, don't say it. And if you can't defend it as such, prepare for questions.



To do what, exactly? Believe? I believe in all sorts of good things, not least among them transcendence and the permanency of the soul. Am I judged accordingly? By what singular mechanism?

The conviction one professes that both allows and in many cases empowers him or her to speak at others as if from an elevated platform of intellect and status is evidently invalid. It's quasi if not downright pharisaical. To think that it stems from organized religion is less than encouraging.

In his little book The Journey Kreeft has a Traveler go with Socrates to visit all the lesser philosophers along the road. One by one they're debunked. The final chapter does indeed have the Traveler consciously realizing and accepting surrender to the principles of redemption, however there is not one shred of preconception or ego in the entire trip. The net result is at least as mystical as it is classical - the latter flows from the former. And as Rumi said, the eventual silence is the thing.

It just seems that if you're going to make a claim - any claim, even tacitly - that erects some vague religious test, it should stand to as much specific reason as the Claimant is willing to delve fully into himself. That ratio seems lacking more than not.

I didn't say "it" didn't make sense to me - in fact I could write paragraphs on the higher ideals of at least two spiritual pursuits, one of them enlightenment-based and the other thought-based, both of which ultimately depend on the virtual abolition of self in favor of accepting the great unknown of what's an intuitive, "DNA-level" understanding about the nature of soul, so to put it. I could write such from a personal perspective, not necessarily from any classical, philosophical platform although I'm sure they'd overlap in places.

What I don't understand is the apparent flippancy and dismissiveness of so many ostensible Christians I've known, that coupled with what one eventually has to conclude is a pig-headed ignorance and arrogance about what they think they know but deliver none of the fruits thereof.

And no, I'm not painting with either too broad or too specific a brush - I've been an apologist for fifty years and never even considered with any seriousness all the false cartoons of Christianity we see in the world.

But these ostensible, lifestyling, condescending, smug "Christians" would do better to examine their various basis to see if they really make authentic sense of if they're just trappings. That, I think, was one of Christ's fundamental messages - lukewarm water and vainly taking his name and so on.

There ain't no 'Murica in Christ. No lifestyle, no temporal alignments, no politics, no smug defensiveness, and certainly no unthought presumptions.

A few points: What are those teachings? Nobody can say. How do you believe in a G-d you cannot, by definition, know, comprehend, explain, or define - the Alpha and Omega, the Word? Blessed are those who believe what? Again, nobody knows. And why belief?

Is it plausible that this degree of impossible mysticism is the Path? That the Bible's circular references as to its own literal infallibility are reasonable?

No, as alluded, I have not let others destroy my faith, because I don't find human faith particularly relevant, per se. That goes to the previous comment - what is the merit of this faith in things not seen? Is hope the thing? Is willing yourself into something the thing? Is being moved from outside the thing? Again, nobody knows. We can't even deduce what an act is in this context, or a predestination of the human robot yet this is fundamental to the whole belief matrix.

Is Jesus G-d? The wisest, most generous and thoughtful Christians I've ever known - deeply educated and thoroughly degreed - say the Trinity is an invention of theology. Theology makes those claims, and theology derives first from interpretation and then from politics, they being the means that brought assembled Bibles into the modern era down through the various wreckages the Church has bestowed on its many victims. Is that mysticism adequate?

Am I being pedantic? Needlessly difficult? Not at all, for this is a drop in the bucket compared to what theology has been put through over the centuries, looking for answers that do not exist. I have seen all sorts of needless schisms and factions and denomenational warring and ruined families and it can and does put anybody off their feed to a degree, but the apologist persists in finding the essence; the core or nub.

So what is it? M Scott Peck once wrote about truth and mental health. I found that work, as noted in the dust jacket, the greatest gift to modern man written (paraphrasing there.) The fundamental truth was that only the relentless, self-sacrificing pursuit of truth brought the intent to do right, and that drive was the only pertinent metric, just as in successful psychotherapy.

Indeed, Jesus could be virtually overlaid with that device and the fit would be nearly perfect. Jesus was a man, after all, that much we know.

Where does this leave us? It leaves me wondering how much of modern religion is sheer, happy bullshit. I'm not being cynical or indulging the usual cheap anti-religious cartoons; it's just the only conclusion you can come to when you explore the ways and means claimed without a shred of reason or credibility to be the literal, purported difference between being accepted by the Creator of the Universe or being lit aflame forever. It's a bizarre metric, that thing Christians do; this mouthpiecing and this spokesmanning when their own lives are so routine and un-thought.

Rumi says silence is the truth, and indeed, to speak of something is to sully it. "What is the truth, Master" asks the monk and the master simply smiles. The way is the truth and narrow is the path, Peck's Road Less Traveled. I've lived in the peaks, alone, and I know what knees are for. I see virtually no connection to much of what passes for this magical redeeming faith and yet sadly, by their works are many, many known.

That's on them, sure. Would they had the courtesy to put far less, then, on others.

That's not a Trinity, per se, it's a list.

I'm not making any specific argument except to repeat what I've observed by minds I find far more advanced than how I came up.

I just don't see belief for belief's sake as such a big deal that I go around challenging others to also accept it as their entire reason for being, especially if I'm casual and flippant about the rest of my life. There are other more useful views, I think, end even those I cannot suss out as being so important that they put oneself at the very fulcrum of critical choice.

Why is "the sum importance of [the] human soul for eternity" being based on "a special knowledge" that one can choose freely to accept or disregard a problem? (which isn't all that special since it's been proclaimed the past 2K years).

What should the fate of the soul be based on?

I'm not certain, either, what a "rote believer" is.

...you'd likely be in a community that would reject the disciples' message.

And what message is that, exactly?

A couple points, none of them related to this blog's propensity to issue a week's full of lifestyling and what some could warrant as posh materialism before these unedited, unexplained., mystical Sunday lectionaries, the sort that one could and should very legitimately ask for clarity on.

I'm more than aware of the text and the theologies, the Lewises, the Chestertons, and the Pauls and Peters and even the Kreefts and Kirkegaards thereof. In fact to that point there one cannot but realize that there is a world of theory about centuries of the Jewish scripture and Christian gospel and their purported theology and yet not one person can or ever has identified the trigger; the switch that allegedly sends the immaterial soul either to bliss or to agony for eternity, that being either the direct charge or the vague connotation - and everything in between - regarding belief for half a dozen thousand years.

Se we're left with, as you say, this belief that a deity inhabited human form and the belief switch relates to accepting that, for whatever inherent merit it may have without direct personal experience of events of 33 AD as the soul's ultimate endeavor and its sole reason for being. I'd say that's kind of a big deal, one there should be support of somewhere.

An explanation for the earnestness of this act of works said to be an article of faith exists nowhere in the associated text, although it's constantly referred to as at least an adjunct condition. Again, no theologian can suss this out; it's simply stated - usually in stark but vague certainty - as The Condition. You've just done it and the guy above had too.

From this apparently one cannot and must not find that belief is, so far anyway, "rote" but one can, without personal knowledge or even so much as a direct question - among polite society which would otherwise certainly be deemed presumptuous and rude, notwithstanding this lack of invitation, theological specificity, or intuitive philosophical standing - categorize and tacitly patronize a presumed interlocutor to the degree that he's found unworthy and presumably doomed to an eternity swimming in fire.

What are we left with. It seems to me we're left with a religion - not a faith and certainly not a well-formed philosophy - where a member can claim great merit, offer no supporting thought, and yet damn others on the merest and weakest of evidence, all in a social setting where, presumably, the primary task had been to message a spirit of great veracity, special insight, supreme merit, and the highest and most complete love and compassion.

Well played? I'm not so sure.

Let me put it another way, having come this far on the greatest of quests: Who is Jesus and what was he on about?