Very much so, but not just religion, I’m a proponent of “stealing” wisdom, knowledge or insight, wherever it’s found.
I begin to worry, however, if we become more loyal to ideas than the well being of the people those ideas were meant to serve… that’s when people get sacrificed on the altar of faith.
So, what you are saying is that religion isn’t free of the human factor, because it has always been the proclivity of human beings to become violent if they feel threatened, in whatever way that violence expresses itself. The malevolent person is usually overcompensating an inferiority complex or jealousy. It is a human trait, not something that arises out of religion. In fact, religion sought ways to deal with that. The fact that it didn’t always work doesn’t take away the fact that malevolence was around before religion.
I do see the inquisition as a papal institution, and as a dark episode of Roman Catholicism, the problem is though, that many spiritual people were killed as heretics, some of them famous and held high in esteem today. Others were threatened and were refugees and lived in hiding and some only avoided the inquisition because they died before they were taken prisoner. The problem as I see it, is that inquisitions are control mechanisms that can also be found outside of religion. Solzhenitsyn describes a similar interrogation method in atheist Communism, with many people interred who up until they were executed, professed to be communists. These people were accused of deviation from communist standards, another kind of heresy. The French Revolution was another example of leaders of the revolution suddenly declared traitors to the cause.
I don’t think that “mechanism” (a materialist word) is the right way to speak about what draws people to faith. Before I entered nursing, I was quite annoyed when people suggested that people only prayed when they had problems. Becoming intimate with peoples experience of the last days and hours of life, I began to understand that this experience is indeed something special. It blocks out those things that we thought were important, and helps people gain something close to a meditative state. In the quiet hours, people hold on to an open hand, symbolically holding on to life in that way. Religious people tended to send people away, telling them they needn’t sit there the whole time. They used the phrase “God-willing” (Inshallah) with regard to the future.
I pursued this meditative aspect, and learnt mindfulness-based meditation, discovering that there were similar practices in Christian monasticism, including contemplation and centring prayer. These go back quite a while and at the time I was inquiring, there was a Frère Roger in Taizé who had formed a community for young people. He wrote: “That intuition has probably never left me since my youth: A life in community can be a sign that God is love and only love. Gradually, the conviction matured in me that it was important to create a community, a community of men who are determined to give their whole lives and who always try to understand and reconcile with one another. A community that is ultimately about goodness of heart and simplicity.” This brought me further away from the modern form of church service and I looked at the history of Christian monasticism, and it brought me to the awareness that the way Jesus is described in the New Testament, he and his followers also lived in a kind of travelling community, teaching and healing people, listening and praying. I came to see this as a basic form of Christianity.
Reading about the development of monasticism, and the various people who came out of these movements, people who are esteemed for their spiritual insight, I came to realise that the Church has two strands, one that of the simple, unassuming, quiet Christians who go their way, serving their community as best they can, and the other, the official institution, that for a long time, exercised power and made the catastrophic mistakes that cost lives and caused untold suffering. The former suffered more often than one would think under the latter but was the strength of the Church. There is no way that I could claim that everything was good in the Christian communities, they too were made up of human beings with as many faults as anyone else, but at least there was a process installed to find these things out.
I think that people flocked to the communities primarily because of the dangerous times they lived in. These communities were part of the church and had to obey the pope, but for the most part they were concerned with surviving, and the communities helped them with this if they could. The monasteries were often places of refuge, but also of education and support. Unfortunately, they weren’t always able to protect themselves.
I don’t want to project some ideal, but I do believe that there was a concealed strength that the official institution Church underestimated. On the surface it may appear that the theologians and philosophers of the Church were those that made society Christian, but I believe it was the communities that made the difference, who were often ignored and overlooked, except when the church dignitaries required taxes or food.
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” —T.S. Eliot.
Wisdom cannot be “stolen”, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wisdom as “Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends; sometimes, less strictly, sound sense, esp. in practical affairs: opp. to folly;” also “Knowledge (esp. of a high or abstruse kind); enlightenment, learning, erudition.”
Knowledge can be collected, but insight is based on experience, not just a feeling or emotion or thought that helps you to know something essential about a person or thing.
The mean and abusive people I’ve seen,
were not compensating for an inferiority complex.
They were sadistic. It gave them pleasure to do harm,
because it brings control, fear, etc.
I can understand how you would feel that way, but people are complicated and often appearances are the opposite to what is behind the picture. The meanest people often have a huge chip on their shoulder, perhaps from childhood, that they haven’t overcome. Cruelty is the only means of expression they have, and they know it, which is why they revel in it, trying to disguise the fact that they know that they are the lowest of the low.
From whence comes concern for the well-being of people if not from an idea?
Religion was also preceded by kindness, solidarity, forgiveness and love. At no point does religion fly free of humanity, neither in it’s vices, nor in it’s virtues. Yet you credit it with our virtues and claim it plays no role in our vices. Either we are responsible for all of it and religion is superfluous, or it’s capable of eliciting a motive for either… be consistent and pick one, please.
Exactly my point… and yet you claim christianity is the cure to an illness it suffered from, long before it was copied by political ideologues.
Still you keep the ideas untarnished by the actions taken under their guidance. The institutions that rose to prominence, the perverse condition of having their victims proudly give them their power… all of these were motivated without recourse to christian teaching then, mere material reasons compelled us to build and sustain this circumstance for ourselves… Is that what you’re suggesting?
I call foul on your analysis, sir… you’re bias is showing.
I hear your doom and gloom prediction of the danger, the warning that a pit of nihilism and misery is around the corner of a lost christianity… Its echo is heard through history and provides a motive to combat that danger. You would never suggest we use violence or force for such a thing, you’re a good person, I believe, but you’ve provided a motive all the same. A motive another could champion, someone who dismisses your reasons for allowing such misery to take root without a fight. I believe you would be at a disadvantage to argue that he is being monstrous and not altruistic, without contradicting your own prognosis.
The enlightenment brought back and elevated the station of secular thought. By their lights the west dismissed religion and ideology as critical to our societies and consequently, our well being. No longer of paramount import to our collective welfare, such things were afforded to become personal and private… It was in no small part the religious who welcomed secular rule. Having both committed and been subjected to persecution by other sects who read the same stories as them, it’s hard not to imagine this having aided their realization, that there was peace to be had in that perspective.
It’s the enlightenment values that are being tested today, with these demands that we all subscribe to the same narrative, that disagreement is dangerous. However, those values have been subjected to such tests for generations and there is good reason to believe they will endure these young, misguided millennials, as well as it endured the religious zealots who made similar noises… but I suppose, only time will tell.
And there we are… the clash between empiricism and idealism.
The idea comes from our experience of the world, the need for it made manifest through pain and suffering… and it’s excesses, likewise.
There are two ways to arrive at the mountain top… Imagine a path to the peak, chart a course toward it and keep to the plan until you arrive, have faith that your plan was good.
Or, you take a step, measure if you’ve been elevated, if so, take another step, repeat.
We have proven ourselves time and again to be too dumb to engineer our own ascent… but we can evolve.
There is no experience unmediated by the mind that is experiencing. But, I do see that empathy and compassion are pre-language rooted as they are in mammalian inability to tolerate the suffering of another, as for example of a mother and her infant offspring.
There is no mind, without experience to shape it.
I’m afraid you misquote me, nowhere do I say that religion plays no role in our vices, only that our vices are human attributes, and that religion tries to combat that. If it weren’t a problem in the church, there would be no need for the church to combat it.
So now you are claiming that this began with religion and was just copied by others? I’m afraid I can’t even take such a statement seriously. I also never said that Christianity was the cure, but that many spiritual Christians suffered under the megalomania of power grabbing church dignitaries, for not toeing the party line. This is a problem of humanity, and it doesn’t help if you try to lump all religion over the world together, because the common denominator is humanity, not religion.
If a Christian community is struggling in a small town to survive, due to robbers, feudal conflicts, bad harvest, or drought, and in the neighbouring town a Major purporting to be a Christian, misuses his power and oppresses people, is the first community equally guilty of what the Major did? I am biased towards the peasants who were confronted with circumstances in a way that we can’t even imagine, and who tried to live a good life on Christian values.
Yes, Bishops and Cardinals, usually second sons from “noble” families, misused the Church to further their aims, and people suffered. There is no doubt about that, but I have already said that I see two strands inside the Church, which can be separated into perpetrators and victims.
I’m sorry, but that is just a rant. You consider the church or even religion as a whole, as the prime source of evil, and I would say that you need to watch your back, because today, it is the anti-religious that are taking to the streets with aggressive ideologies, causing riots and trying to rid themselves of their opposition, causing conservative people to run into the arms of the right-wing militants, who have already armed themselves to the teeth. The American crisis isn’t the crisis of the rest of the world, but there are enough people trying to make it that way.
I agree that the enlightenment brought clarification in multiple areas in life, and yes, its influence was good for western society: the greatest source of knowledge is rational thought and reason; the senses have been the most important source of knowledge; liberty and freedom under the law are superior to dictatorship of any kind; a constitutional government that is governed by a set of principles is a necessity; progression in technology, science, and society has improved people’s lives; social contracts are necessary for such a free society; government should be secular, and not governed by a church or similar institution; the best possible course of action is the one that maximises what’s best for the wellbeing of sentient entities; democracy is the best known system in the world.
Although deism has existed for a long time it was popularised by the Enlightenment. Many people have taken this attitude even today, because the concept of God has a great diversity. Except the fundamentalists of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a broad acceptance that theistic religion is the finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. Religions are pointing at a common experience and forming a global ecumenical movement to find what they have in common. Interreligious groups are calling for compassion to be their shared goal, starting movements across the globe. This is the face of religion that I support, and you won’t dissuade me.
“On a visit to a great monastery in Spain, I met a Benedictine monk. I asked him what kind of contemplation he had practiced during his years of solitude.
His answer was simple: “Love, love, love.” How wonderful! …during all those years he meditated simply on love. And he was not meditating on just the word. When I looked into his eyes, I saw evidence of profound spirituality and love. This encounter helped me develop a genuine reverence for the Christian tradition and its capacity to create people of such goodness. I believe the purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.”
Dalai Lama “The Good Heart”
Communists suffered under the communist regime, I attribute that to communism too… I don’t see how it’s helpful to ignore the role ideas played in engineering that circumstance and just say “humanity is prone to cruelty, that’s why it happened”. At that point we’ve become willfully blind to what motivated us.
Also I think you’ve lost the plot on what started this conversation. You said we were on a decline because we’d lost christian values.
That’s proscribing christianity as a cure… just reminding you everything wasn’t roses and rainbows when christianity was last prescribed.
I don’t know why you think my criticism is as dim-witted as that.
Not every act a christian performs is necessarily done in the service of christianity… when that is not the case, I wouldn’t blame christianity, nor praise it.
I don’t blame christianity for the greed of a christian any more than I blame communism for greed… greed is not motivated by either set of ideas.
But when on the subject of heresy, as an example, it cannot even be defined without the contrast of whatever idea it’s in opposition to… THAT is done in the service of ideas.
Establishing the institution of a church and empowering it with authority to then become benevolent or tyrannical, that is done in the service of ideas.
Bob, what the hell are you talking about?
When did I say religion was the primary source of evil?
That’s a very competitive market!
The hard part is trying to find something that is never or very rarely a source of evil… that’s where it gets truly difficult.
That’s great, Bob… but it’s not up to you what shape religion takes.
The holy books, the stories and ideas are what give the religions their many faces…
You’re not the god-emperor of faith and it doesn’t matter what you personally support or don’t… you don’t shape anything but your own beliefs.
And even if you did, the next guy to have your power might not be like you, Bob.
I have been consistent in that I have said that the “lower” strand of Christianity, those people without power, were the people that gave society its coherence and its strength. They were the substance that held things together and remained faithful. They believed in the transmission of the love of God through whatever they could do for they neighbour and those in need. There are less such people now, and many feel helpless and know that the scandals that have rocked the church have also sapped their strength.
Okay, then you can’t have any human institution, which is established to do good, because the danger exists that someone could misuse it. You can’t even devote yourself to what you see as good, because that is discrimination. You can’t support the poor, because it discriminates against somebody not deemed poor. You can’t agree on a set of rules, because you can’t expel someone if they are against those rules and want to make their own contradicting rules. You can’t start because you don’t know how it will end. Ideas are caught up in the maelstrom of time, we are drawn forever onwards, and we have to use the opportune time as it arrives, and move on from mistakes, because you can’t return and make them not happen. Nothing is perfect, it is all becoming …
Which is the human dilemma. There was a saying that someone coined: “If you found a perfect community and you joined, would it still be perfect?” Of course, a “perfect” community is not one that is complete, flawless, but a utopia. It is a goal to head towards, knowing all the time that at the best you are going in the right direction. This is the humility that is needed and preached in the Gospel. To quote a friend, “All I can say is I’m doing my best!”
Now you are going off at a tangent! I say, “This is the face of religion that I support, and you won’t dissuade me.” And you tell me it’s not up to me? What’s this “You’re not the god-emperor of faith” bit? What power do I have? For goodness sakes, cease your hateful attack and accept that I am critical of what has gone on in the past, but I can’t change it. Like I said above, we have to use the opportune moment, and we have no possibility of going back. But to move forward we need a direction, and the humble servants of the Church have been an inspiration to me.
But then again, looking at the Religion and Spirituality Forum, I’m possibly the only one you can rant against, who will give you an answer. I hope you are happy, but you won’t dissuade me.
That’s true of any society, though. Whether a tribe of 6 or a cluster of billions, we require care and concern for each other’s well being to remain functional… any society that disposes of that in too large a degree collapses.
This is not a “christian” value… we share this instinct with nearly every other pack animal on the face of this planet.
It’s a christian value, only when it’s motivated by christianity… and when it’s motivated by christianity, that comes packaged with a whole cluster of other motives.
You might have said the same for establishing an autocracy.
There are alternatives, beyond the ridiculous ones you list.
Recognizing the liabilities of our ideas and institutions allows us to build in safeguards or come up with alternatives.
Establishing secular values and elevating them beyond religious ones, so as to live under their rule, was a safeguard against religion.
It does not require we abolish religion… merely render it private and non-vital to society.
A concept you are rebelling against, by suggesting the health of our society depends on the masses subscribing to christianity.
A wise disposition and sage advice… perhaps best heeded by not turning a blind eye to the liabilities of religion?
Imperfection is to be expected, forgiven even, but if left unaddressed… you can’t claim to be trying your best, or trying at all.
Because this conversation isn’t about you, your character or even your faith.
I’ve nothing against you as a person, Bob… your personal tastes are irrelevant to the role religion has played in the world.
And the only way they would be relevant to what role religion WILL play in the world if elevated once again, is if you were given the power to dictate what others should take away from those stories and ideas.
The West is BEING declined - there is nothing natural about it.
The modern outlook separates faith from reason in the effort to separate scientific knowledge from theology and philosophy. Modernity is a result of the uncoupling of knowledge and wisdom in order to give theoretical knowledge of nature that is independent of religious authority and philosophically neutral. The aim is at achieving an objective relation to facts with no essential relationship to theological or philosophical meanings and no deference to interpretive authorities.
A downside of this is that reality and nature are presupposed to have no objective meaning. And if we are part of nature then we are ourselves and our language and our knowledge have no objective meaning.
In effect modernity killed theology and philosophy leaving us with only knowledge. Modern science killed wisdom.
Cosmic meaning is accepted only in the subjective realm of fantasy or personal religious belief. Welcome to the meaning crisis. If you want evidence look no further than the disenchanted, disaffected, and disillusioned, here on ILP.
MIJOT - 
There is wisdom in seeking meaning from within while remaining uncertain of the cosmic.
The delphic maxims, written on the temple of apollo were:
know thyself
nothing to excess
certainty brings insanity
but such divine insanity:
The madness which afflicts Dionysus and all those who follow him, is a divine madness.
“The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no debility in life, but a companion of life at its healthiest. It is the tumult which erupts from its innermost recesses when they mature and force their way to the surface."
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