Sounds like what this story could have been writen without "using" peoples beliefs, faith, and strength to write it...

Christian, or not, being "spiritual" is a part of just being human. This book\movie, begs the question of why the author needed to suggest a reason to doubt and therefore undermine these peoples "engines" of strength?

I would think a healthy society would encourage people to be uniquely spiritual, NOT provide arguments against it.

Oh well...Thanks for the article Steve.

Peace.

RTB

Sadly the underlying message of the TRUTH has been corrupted by the "spin-doctors" past and present for political and financial power.
Fear of the unknown have the optimists hedging their bets by professing but not adhearing to the "WAY." Much of the lack of Church attendence can be reasoned as the rejection of dogma and the return to personal spirituality.

Excellent concise review.

In an era of paranoid conspiracy theories, perhaps it's fitting that pop culture has resurrected the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, dressed up in the corniest way possible.

There is nothing original in the premise of the Da Vinci code. Dan Brown has cobbled together a patchwork of half-baked theories that have been floating around seemingly forever.

Unfortunately, for many this will be their first exposure to some of the issues underlying the whole shenanigan. Generally speaking, I blame our religious leaders for being too coy about the fundamental difference between the introductory children's faith (stories, imagery, allegory, magic) and the mature adult faith (i.e. acceptance of basic precepts undelying the children's faith). Once you reach the latter stage, arguments over the Da Vinci Code become merely amusing & occasionally exasperating, but hardly damaging.

I've just read both The Da Vinci Code and the prequel Angels & Demons. As pulp fiction it was okay (Angels & Demons contained glaring factual errors about Catholicism, the Vatican hierarchal structure, and the protocols governing Papal conclaves). But both were pure crap if you try to take them as pseudo-factual expositions of historical phenomena.

I don't mourn for the Fundamentalists, who have given religion a bad name with their obstinate stupidity. I mourn for people like my aunt: an emergency room nurse for the past 37 years who works 15 hour shifts (working well past her official retirement because she has to). Her faith has kept her going in her occupation, and has been a constant source of renewal for her in the face of career exhaustion. This book has torn her apart. People like my aunt need the imagery & the magic to cloak their belief-system. They get by better because of it, they keep contributing because of it, and they hold themselves together because of it.

As for the improvised evolution of Biblical texts, theologians have always known that. That doesn't necessarily make their core messages untrue. They are human reflections on the nature of the divine, the unknowable. What's far more fascinating to me is how "subversive" reflections have gone underground and somehow survived millennia of suppression only the resurface in totally accidental and fashion (case in point: the Gnostic Gospels, buried by a dissident monk in Egypt c. 400 A.D. when all copies were ordered destroyed, only to be unearthed in the 20th century by peasants digging for fresh clay. Pages were unknowingly used at fire-starter & toilet paper until the collection eventually found its way to an antiquities dealer). What serendipity.

What's to be surprised at? Clearly a lot of people in our country are desperate to believe in "hidden agendas" everywhere. As in, "we're not making this up, we're not allowed to make this stuff up".

I have read the book and found that some of the situations put forth were plausible to my way of thinking. While others suggest that this is all crap and stacked bullshit and defend the church wholeheartedly without question I might suggest that they take a walk outside their minds. Collect a few facts that they apparently never retained about the Holy Church. Murderous popes, buggering priests etc. Collect all the information you can then come out and defend the institution. It always amazes me how people will immediately put down an idea so forcefully without getting all the facts. Thay shout from the highest rooftops how wrong others are but do not tell us why, or with what reasoning they think this way. Give us your arguements, not just rhetoric.
I for one do not beleive that Jesus was the Virgin son of a Virgin mother. This is only because with today knowledge I cannot fathom a woman getting pregnant without being fertilized. But, hey, I could be wrong. JMHO

Hey Burgess:

I thought this was supposed to be a review of a movie, not a diatribe against Christianity.

One could use that as an argument against the author of any history text, or against most journalists. How many writers actually witness the events that they are writing about?

Which political agenda is that? The one about loving your neighbor? Perhaps the one about helping the sick or poor?

One problem with Christianity today is that some of the people who call themselves Christians behave as if they've never read the Gospels. This hypocracy turns other people off. Another problem is that people like you in the media, with your own axe to grind, never find anything positive to say about Christianity.

Stick to movie reviews, OK?

To anyone who finds the Da Vinci Code anything more than an amusing diversion, including Gary above who seems to actually find it plausible as a factual historical argument, I recommend Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

I grew up around this stuff (my Grandpa was a Free Mason & my Dad is an avid conspiracy buff, especially anything that "debunks" Christianity). Rosicrucianism, "Holy Blood/Holy Grail" and arguments over the Greek word for "Virgin" were all part of the package.

Umberto Eco wrote a complicated satire of the nature of recurring conspiracy theories in popular culture through the ages...and how they appeal to the closet crackpot in all of us. They all follow the same pattern, right down the the ubiquitous "secret cabal" of illuminati who allegedly pull the strings. It's all the same, whether we're talking about Jesus, JFK or Elvis. Silliness.

Stan - that's why it's important to separate the politics from the core message. I don't think Burgess was attacking the core message of Christianity. The core message is actually quite apolitical. However, I do agree that sometimes the media disingenuously uses the fundamentalist literalists as a foil to promote their own liberal secular humanism ("See how crazy they are, and see how reasonable we are? Now c'mon, who are you gonna listen to?"). That gets tiresome, especially when it's really disguised neo-Protestant Catholic-bashing. But I don't think this is Burgess is doing here.

Of course one should respect the faith of others, be they Christians, Moslems etc. Being an atheist doesn't give me the right to put down Da Vinci believers or Gospel believers. Quite the opposite, I spend a lot of time reading the various pros and cons of various theories and the whole question of the historical Jesus. All quite fascinating.

Dan Brown's book was a good read. Fiction. Every chapter is a cliff-hanger just like an old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. The subject of course was copied right out of Holy Blood, Holy Grail but what the hey, why not?

I thought Holy Blood, Holy Grail was a great read 20+ years ago. Flaky, some arguments that looked like they were dreamed up in the middle of the night and held together with a thin piece of string but overall it told some good stories and raised some interesting issues and I still have a copy.

I can see why Dan Brown would use it as a resource, the theory is compelling for a lot of people who believe in Jesus but not in the magic surrounding the story. So if 17% of the population believes in the scenario in the Da Vinci code or Holy Blood, Holy Grail then good on them. Its 17% who had rejected Catholicism or whatever anyway and it sounds just as plausible to me as to what Paul came up with.

As Nightbloom says above about his aunt, people need to believe in something and if a human Jesus and Mary were married and had a child and people find that more believable than all the miracles and magic stuff then why should anyone have a problem with it? Unlike the new pope I don't think the Church has never made a mistake. In fact I think its hypocritical to wax poetic about Christians being fed to lions when the same church set fire to "witches" across Europe. That seems like a little mistake to me but the Pope disagrees I guess.

As for Baigent, he strikes me as a flake and his Jesus Papers runs the gamut from really interesting to really weird. Okay, maybe I'm the only one that finds reading about him meditating in the dark in an underground chamber inside a pyramid to be weird. But he spends so much time building an argument on flimsy reasoning its easy to overlook the odd nugget he throws out there without following it up. I haven't finished it so maybe he ties it up well at the end.

I like to remember when reading this stuff that there's conservatives who believe in Chicago-school economic theories which I think have less factual basis than anything the flaky St Paul or the flaky Baigent ever dreamed up. Compared to NAIRU-theory believers Baigent and Brown look like serious scholars.

As for poo-pooing conspiracy theories, I fail to see why someone who believes in miracles and resurrections can put down someone who thinks Rennes-les-Chatteau has unanswered questions surrounding it. Its all on the table in my opinion, but I understand that is just my opinion.

nightbloom
So true. And not restricted to proponents of the rapture and pope-bashing either. Witness the recent spate of conspiracy enthusiasts who've added 9/11 to their 'gospel truth'. Actually I thought Name of the Rose was a much better book.

I'm not sure I agree that the media, as a class, cares more about promoting or debunking these things though. Seems more likely to me that they're just in the business of selling cheese.

As interesting as it is, more interesting than the Da Vinci Code phenomenon (of revisionist theology)is Scientology because we can actually look at the "messiah" and his writings to take them with the grains of salt they deserve. When you realize how scandalously ludicrous some of the ideas are and the deep-seated need people have to suspend their disbelief and believe them anyway, it speaks volumes about the kind of species we are. Dogged dogmatism bites. And you can quote me on that.

speedo, Scientology is a farce? The guy that wrote science fiction but declared he could make a lot more money by starting a religion and then did wasn't on the up and up? I better cancel my cheque for "advanced training"...

Next thing you know you'll be telling me QE2 isn't a giant green lizard like a certain distinguished UK philosopher has opined :-)

But don't cherry-pick your examples of this phenomenon, speedo. Much of the self-help and homeo/naturophathic industries rely on this as well...not to mention the peddlers of ideologies right across the spectrum. The way non-specialists (i.e. almost everyone) receive statistical information of any kind is also very similar (and statistics are the modern dogma that confers legitimacy today). Do you have any idea what a leap of faith, what suspension of disbelief, that much statistical data out there requires? Do we actually research all the unexamined conclusions that are fed to us via these statistics on a daily basis?

You talk as though you're totally in control of your perception of reality, and have the inside-loop on all the b.s. floating around out there, and that this shows you "the kind of species we are". That's kinda cute.

I can see many a poor and desperate screenwriters racing to adapt a film for 'the Gospel of Judas' as we type. In that one, Jesus tells Judas to betray him. This 'Jesus as revolutionary with-a-death-wish-for-everlasting-fame' makes him sound more and more like Che Guevara every day. There's money in that book I tell ya.

1/3 Accurate details
1/3 Time-tested Conspiracies
1/3 Pure unapologetic fiction

Sounds like a recipe for a whole host of movies to come.

Conspiracy therories are rooted in the distrust we have for people who are attracted to positions of power. I think they are a healthy manifestations of deserved skepticism.

As in science, the search for proof sometimes follows inquiries brought about by observations. Sometimes they are right, most times they are not, but they are important nonetheless. Unfortunately, religious history or politics are not subject to the controlled testing that would allow us to settle the veracity of conspiracy theories in these areas.

ModernSerf - That's part of it (distrust of power) and the paranoia that comes with living in a mass society surrounded by strangers, but I think Speedo also may have touched on a relevant factor: the need or desire to suspend our disbelief and invest ourselves in something extraordinary, in defiance of our own grey and uninspiring rationality. Conspiracy theories could be a vulgarization of this impulse. Who knows.

One persons "belief" is just as likely to be untrue as anothers. I believe in the power of that big jesus rock out there, in the plowed north 40. (The one with the glacially cut image of a guys arse taking a dump. What? Ya can't see it? Here drop this tab of acid.)

Prove me wrong. It's my "belief" and I'm sticking to it. 8-D

To be honest, I can't stand reading crap like the Da Vinci Code. But put that junk in the theatre — I'll be there openning night.

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm arrogant enough to believe I'm in control of perception of reality nor would I want anyone to think that spirituality is bogus. Indeed I think most of us need to feel immersed in an oceanic sense of meaningful mystery as I think Freud called it. And that in itself is fair enough. What is lamentable though, is the tendency most of us have to ignore plain and tedious facts that should force us to discount chunks of our cherished worldviews.

At this point, I shall fold my hands and say no more.

I admit that something had to start the universe but the whole story of creation that is told by the bible is bullshit (in my opinion).
So what's the big deal about a movie?

i would love to see a geraldo rivera special about what's in the the vatican's vault. do you think they might have accumulated some neat junk over the centuries?

Jack - it depends how you read it. It's says something significant about the nature of creation, sub-creation, and human knowledge & creativity. But nevermind the universe - What's really fascinating is the tension between orthodox and unorthodox narratives concerning the origin and creation of Eve and her encounter with the Serpent at the Tree of Knowledge. The Gnostics got particularly subversive with this part of the narrative.

I think that this is a very good review. Burgess is free to advance secular humanism -- it's not an irrelevant consideration given the subject material.

The overarching thing that the audience will take away is that Biblical scholarship is as riddled with politics and other distorting factors as any other historical topic. There's no "divinely revealed" text. From there it is but a short step to concluding that there isn't any divinity.

It is often said that every people yearns for spirituality. I think it is more likely that spirituality is what they are encouraged to consume, when seeking intellectual challenge, community support, awe and wonder, and non-trivial, non-quotidian perspectives.

Yammer said: "It is often said that every people yearns for spirituality. I think it is more likely that spirituality is what they are encouraged to consume, when seeking intellectual challenge, community support, awe and wonder, and non-trivial, non-quotidian perspectives".

Hummm...I wonder if the evidence of "spirituality" is the hunger for it...much as the evidence of "food" is the hunger for it... Perhaps food and spirituallity are just a part of what it means to be human. One feeds the physical, the other...well Yammer, you know what I mean...

Peace.

RTB

To which you are entitled after making a really good point.

And something or some process either "started" the universe, or it has simply always been in one form or another forever. I mean, some of us make that assumption about a "God", with little or no real evidence other than some "ancient" pot smokers "revealed truth". (I've had a few moments like that myself, in my time.)

On the other hand, one could make the same assumption about "the universe"-, and we have the "material evidence" at least, to hand and study.

Show me "the beef"!

Which reduces the awe of the mysteries that remain, not one whit. It is magnificent enough in its complex materiality without the "divine intervention" of any "guiding hand" that created all the diseases and plagues, creepies, crawlies and flawed human beings, when He/She could have made it perfect, were He/She truly God or Goddess, the first time. Why fuk us around like this?

Fairy tales deepen neither the mystery, explain it, nor enhance any worthwhile "spirituality". It is like the belief in Santa Claus, real only for so long as one can hang onto "the belief". It is still really bullshitt all along, whether we believe it or not.

What is, is enough for me. Significant enough of itself without the artificial "explaining" mythological constructs.

I mean, is sitting around adoring God and singing the praises of some Lord your idea of the "Heaven" in which you want to spend Eternity? Sounds more like a Hell to me.

I think most people chanting their mantras ,gives an idea of the communion ,we can have with the spiritual entities.

In the seventies,i spent some time with a stunning native woman,peyote and a large parcel of desert.TODAY,I am a better human being,because of that excursion.

RELIGION,is what others call it,those that live it,call it ,life .
another book and movie to titilate the bored masses ,to lazy to get off their ass and live a real life .

Thomas49 said:"In the seventies,i spent some time with a stunning native woman,peyote and a large parcel of desert.TODAY,I am a better human being,because of that excursion".

Thanks you for this Thomas49. I too feel an elevated sence of my lifes purpose after spending time with traditional people (F.N.) as in the people on the central west coast.

I am not sure how people can have a clear perspective on the direction of "man" without spending time both physically, and spiritually in the natural world. Too, if you do not have a clear perspective, how can one be effectively responsible living in a "democratic" society?

I believe in "conspiracy theories", as humans have proven to be "oh so capable", but to attempt to catagorize "spirituallity" to be a "tangible" thing only, and to put energy towards undermining its credibility, I don't understand this.

Is it an exercise of "ego" to perhaps look as though you "know best"? If that is it, that is sad and shows little respect towards the spiritual uniquness of humans in general...

I think, get what one can from the book, as without it having been written we would have nothing to reflect here, but be aware of its weaknesses... I guess that is how we should approach all information eh...

Peace.

RTB

Well, I think the animism beliefs and Sun God worshippers amongst the ancients and the still remaining aboriginal peoples, even though I'm not all "New Age" sentimental over it myself, were actually in many ways closer to a "spirituality", for want of a better word, that I could have accepted and related to, than for example, much of the what passes for Christianity or Muslim "faiths" that I observe around me. It remained rooted at least this much in real materiality; being living nature, critters and such.

But anyway, even though I have my own views on this business, and have a strong sense of connection with the whole of nature, it's like I say, we have about the equal likelihood we are wrong in our "belief" systems. (To the degree they are not rooted in real knowledge of material reality anyway.)

And eh, I did my time doing annual spring acid trips, up on what we called Elephant Head mountain on our old ranch, to greet the dawn and contemplate our plans for the development of the place, and how we were connected to the rest of the space around us. Very trippy and very "spiritual" no doubt, and I think actually did benefit me in what I used to call a mental bowel movement kind of way.

And I have no problem working with or embracing folks who are "religious", so long as they don't expect me to jettison my crasser preference for a "science based" world view, which is the more common experience of athiests such as myself. I insist on my right to speak my "mind" as well, with no holds barred. And I am no less in awe and amazement at nature and its infinite complexity than any of the so called "spiritualists". And I accept that there are many things we are likely to never know. That fact just doesn't lead me to a "God Head" theory is all.

What we have to agree on is the here and now, the mess we have ourselves created, and how we are going to get back to a more mutually beneficial and serving arrangement with the rest of nature. (This connection which it is that Capitalism is most wantonly destroying with its greed dynamic of never ending growth.) And that involves hard political, economic and other material choices and action, at least as much, nay more I would say, as chanting "spiritual" ones.

(Though we may have some different views of what constitutes "spirituality" in play here too. A tomatoe, tomatoe, potato, potato kind of thing.)

It's just that I would like to think, and prefer, that I have an evidence based and "accurate" view and relationship with nature. (Even though errors in assessment, action and conclusions seem to be a part of human life too. The learning curve that never ends thing.)

Though "spirituality" could be good for getting "some" ladies out of their panties, no doubt. :-)

Peace.

CBC just reported that four more Canadian soldiers were killed today in the Pashtan territories of Afghanistan. (In the heart of the most warlike tribal people of them all in Afghanistan, doing what the Amerikans were too chickenshit and unable to do themselves. These Pashtans have been fighting off foreign invaders since time immemorial.)

What the fuk are we even there doing this dirty business for the US Empire for anyway?

Get our young soldiers out of there now. I don't give a damn how much they "believe" in their mission over there. When I was their age, I was all gung ho and didn't know jack shitt either.

Peace, now.

Well I see we've got ourselves a lovely little local news war going on....
http://republic-news.org/archive/136-repub/136_kevin_potvin_2.htm

Hurry children, rush to someones defense.
I'm deeply humoured to see that all the little lefties here are getting their pablum fed back to them.
Hypocrites.

just a couple of boys,seeing,who can piss farther...

never been to a pissing contest ?

Little wingnut Godschild, breaking my heart with his broken neocon heart. Suck it up doofus, and quit your whining. Hypocrite.

I can't believe people are actually basing beliefs on The Da Vinci Code. That book was the worst piece of trash I've read in a long time. It was an action novel like a made for TV movie. In fact as I was reading the book I became convinced that was what the author was aiming for. The scenes, the action and the characters were all written like a bad movie.

I know that media hype can create a bestseller but do people not read more critically than that! I guess people are actually stupider than I give them credit for. That's a shame as I thought I was already pretty cynical about the average level of intelligence.

I don't know warpengi, but it makes no less sense to me than one basing their beliefs on any ancient texts of dubious and unprovable origin, written by dubious persons, across many rewrites and translations, and passed off as the word of God speaking "revealed truth" through "chosen" men-, at least almost invariably men seems to be the bias. (Maybe its because men do more mind altering drugs 'n things?) Damn poor foundation far any really credible "evidenced based" theory concerning the origins of humans, all critter kind and the universe.

One mans likely fiction is anothers "revealed truth" apparently, if one is desparate enough for a "belief system". Maybe I've just never been that desperate, such that I can understand.

So it seems to me.

In a way religion and the desire for some kind of meaningful or transcendent relationship is just another example of the pathetic fallacy: The notion that nature and the natural world have any human emotions whatsoever.

That delusion is at the centre of every 'god' ever created by any human society.

Humans seem genetically programmed to find and express meaning where and when there is none.

All the more reason they should spend more time on the reality of the world and human relationships and less on the hypothetical 'meaning' of the obvious facts behind the deterioration of the environment that sustains us all.

The answers never have been 'out there'.

For a very interesting perspective on the complex Jesus Christ, check out the reknowned translator and Aramaic (the laguage which Christ would have been raised speaking....well, raised the first time, anyway) scholar Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus, in which, for example, is the little nugget that a 'virgin birth' was a contemporary local euphemistic slang term for a out-of-wedlock child born to the village hooker (a point made more convincing by Christ's coldly disconnective shunning of his mom at the Cana marriage feast). There is also Mitchell's explanation that the phrase 'a camel passing through the eye of a needle' was actually based on a clever Aramaic pun and may not make a whole lot of sense in a literal translation, among other such goodies.

Re Conspiracy Theories: they're seductive because, without exception, they all assume that: 1.) someone somewhere knows what's going on and 2.) someone somewhere is in control of events. If only either or both were true. Sorry. Dull reality may not have the whizbang drama of a Hollywood conspiracy, but it's certainly a lot more grown-up and, aside from typically small-potatoes criminal or politico/military conspiracies, it's usually all we have to work with.

I enjoyed the book (me, an atheist), and the main thing about it, to me, is that the romantic angle was refreshingly muted, in fact, there were no torrid bedroom scenes (I'm not a prude, either). It was fiction of course, but we are always intrigued by the conspiracy theories that abound, especially when the contemporary Catholic writers are furiously issuing denials and rebuttals, right and left, in order to protect the Holy See and their doctrine. That Christ walked the earth, is acceptable to me, but like Ghandi, he was just another outstanding human being, whose message is being spun by the corporate shamans in order to further their profit and privilege.

Coyote wrote: "What we have to agree on is the here and now, the mess we have ourselves created, and how we are going to get back to a more mutually beneficial and serving arrangement with the rest of nature. (This connection which it is that Capitalism is most wantonly destroying with its greed dynamic of never ending growth.) And that involves hard political, economic and other material choices and action, at least as much, nay more I would say, as chanting "spiritual" ones".

Right on Coyote, as I could not agree more... To address the "pathetic to nature" Capitalistic materialism\greed, does require hard political, economic and other choices to change this me-me-me-ism that we are witnessing today. We do agree on that and without taking away the importance of science, we agree on perhaps recognizing the importance of the '"intangible" as well...

BTW- Your right about the "pantie thing".

Peace to you.

RTB

Gwest - Interesting comments. I disagree & agree. You're correct that humans are driven by a need to push the envelope on what is known and what is unknowable. When the Delphic Oracle told a young Socrates that he would become the wisest of all men, he wryly explained that he immediately set out to prove her wrong. Then when he sought out the wisest men of his age, he realised he was indeed the wisest of them all....because he was the only one who seemed to be aware of his own ignorance. "I don't know" is the beginning, not the terminus, of knowledge.

The compulsive pursuit of the unknown (which you suggest may be genetically programmed - I've referred to this eupemistically as the "god instinct" on other threads) is one of our greatest driving forces (along with sexual forces, and the Freudian drive for personal hierachal status-power). It will never go away. The fact that this impulse often gets tied up with the other two doesn't invalidate the higher outcomes of that search. The higher outcomes of that search (life & community-nourishing philosophies & belief systems) are preserved through institutionalization and popularized (and therefore vulgarized) through ritual. Ritual is a deep-seated need for structure and framework. Hence in the West have the institutional Church and their dogmas. Fundamentally, you have Platonic philosophy married to the the Judaic religious Convenant under the rubric of a "New Covenant" that asserts this basic synthesis: (1) God is Love; (2) God became Man; (3) Man became God; (4) Man's divine nature is Love incarnate, which is the essence of creation and the "Kingdom of God on Earth".

It's seems fairly simple and unobjectionable to me. The fact that the message was coopted by hierarchies & oligarchies, imperialist & patriarchs; crudaders & national socialists, doesn't invalidate the meaning of the original message. The standard rap-sheet doesn't wash (inquisitions, genocides, burnings). That's the evil of human nature, with or without the message & symbols.

As for the other by-products necessary to the transference and preservation of intact organized religion (hierachy, dogma, ritual), they are constants that people will seek out irrespective of the social engineering attempts of the ideologues. That's why we're in such a virulent evangelical backlash. The traditional, moderate, mainline religious structures forgot this lesson and lost touch with the elemental nature of their "product". Look at Catholic Latin America: clumsy attempts at modernization and ideologization have induced parishioners to flock to the more charismatic evangelical churches. It's a pervasive pattern.

If you want to preserve moderate religion, you have to accomodate it. Otherwise the visceral impulse will run around you and manifest itself in undesired ways that lack the evolved controls of traditional belief systems.

nightbloom
So religion, or moderate religion as you put it, since you've eliminated the more objectionable forms of the category by a naming exercise, is okay, normal and ‘natural’ as long as it observes your four essential but paradoxical characteristics. Is that fair? You seem, pardon me, not capable of getting beyond the circularity of your argument so, let's continue. You and your co-religionists will, no doubt, see some mystical and faith based meaning in the contradictions of the four points you cite; I maintain they are nothing more than evidence of logical failure.

The foregoing notwithstanding, I see no evidence that preserving just this 'moderate form' of the pathetic fallacy is achievable given the record of history. Why would I now accept that such a thing is possible today in light of what I see going on around me?

Better, in my opinion, to acknowledge the fact we're in this alone and find a way to build real humanistic and social connections between all and all rather than continue with the current delusion, which does little more than establish the terms and details of a continuing contest about who has a monopoly on the "truth".

You're twisting my argument beyond recognition. I've noticed this is a common pattern when debating the place of organized religion in society with the "co-religionists" of the dogmatic Left. I'm not debating content - I'm talking about form. The forms have evolved the way they have for a reason, and they are relatively moderate and have been for a very long time. Has anyone tried to chop off Dan Brown's head for suggesting the Bible has an alternate version? No--? Quelle surprise.

We've ackowledged that it is a universal impulse pervasive in human societies. We've acknowledged (more or less) that it has had both positive and negative outcomes. I'm saying what I've always said about this issue on these threads: our programme over the past thirty years has undermined the positive outcomes while maximizing the negative ones. The mass appeal in the U.S. of the evangelical fundamentalism that has raised the ire of ideological liberals and resulted in the current political lay-of-the-land is a direct result of the more intrusive and arrogant assumptions of the liberal programme. We're simply in phase II of the Culture Wars (in my opinion). That's why G.W.B. is in the White House and why the Dems have had to spend the last half-decade soul-searching to figure out the basic questions of who exactly their core constituency is and what their core values are.

Which record of history are you talking about? More burnings and inquisitions? Shall we also discuss Stalin's purges and all the other inhumanities that demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of these abuses? How far back do you wanna go - the genocide of the Neanderthals at the hands of roving packs of Cro-Magnons (our ancestors)? Puhleeeze. We're a nasty species - shoulder that one yourself and stop projecting it onto whatever incidental factors you happen to dislike.

And no, I don't have any "co-religionists", to my knowledge. I've been up-front about my Roman Catholic upbringing, but neither my belief system nor my lifestyle would be considered acceptable for a Roman Catholic, by any stretch of the imagination.

nightbloom
I have no problem with acknowledging that godless communists, if that's a term you'd accept, have an ideology as perverse as that of religious extremists. If you want to ignore the character (I thing lack of character might be more appropriate) of a significant proportion of right-wing Christianity it's fine with me too - but don't expect me to do so as well. Nor to ignore the current state of internal relations between the various shades of orthodoxy in the other two monotheistic Abrahamic religions either.

I'd suggest our current state of relative world peace (a questionable assertion, but I think you know what I mean) is less a result of religion and its practices than it is a consequence of the Enlightenment and the beginning of an awareness of Man's essential aloneness and disconnection from the idea of a creator. I don't want to get into a comparative slanging match about how much ‘good’ the god-centered delusion has provided mankind over the centuries but I would remind you that every army in history has always carried some kind of religious book in its saddlebags.

Recognizing there is no god hardly means that mankind will fall into some kind of nihilistic funk and start killing each other for the first time. I’d also have to say, in fairness, that you should accept that atheism is hardly the sole preserve of the left any more than that all Christians are right-wingers or conservatives.

that is a real understatement if i ever heard one

the only god,is power

one group ,over the other,back in the dawning of time it was sun worshippers fighting moon worshippers ,later on with languages(the tower of babel) it became a little more dedicated to personal beliefs,the prophets

politics and religion are no different , they both live on the subjagation of the weak minded and weak willed

the EMPTIENESS IN OUR LIVES is self induced and being the egoistic creatures we are,we look out there for answers,never inside,because we already know the truth

this is it,make the best of it

I don't know, but it's been my observation that throughout the ages of all "class structured" societies, that it is BOTH religion and politics in the control of a ruling class, in league with a privileged "clergy heirarchy" which serve the same/similar ends: control of the underclasses and the instruments and institutions of, as thomas489 says, power.

In all ruling class dominant social orders both religion and politics come to serve similar to the same "demonic" ends-, being dominion over "the masses" in the service of their own material enrichment and the exercise of their power over society and its underpinning economic base.

A falsehood remains a falsehood, regardless of whether it is an extreme or moderate one. One is but merely more "tolerable" than the other.

religion is nothing more than politics with religiousity added with a faux spirituality to make it more palatable for the masses

real spirituality is something people find within themselves

then again,to some,navel gazing is a religion

i think,i will navel gaze in the sun today and listen to the birds chatter at the cat

Sounds like a religious experience to me. :-)

thomas49

Spirituality does not spring entirely from within.

Religion is merely a set of symbols, a language if you like, that can act as a container for spirituality, politics, philosophy, and other aspects of culture.

People have always built institutions of one kind or another, benevolent or not, around "language". And people no more find spirituality than language entirely within themselves.

If you want to see some flagrant abuses of "spirituality" tap into the many self-help books on the market and ask yourself what institutions,what languages, etc generates such "spirituality".

I can't believe the Da Vinci Code got published. It's full of some of the crappiest writing I've ever read, and hardly has the markings of a best seller on the level of a Grisham novel.

I felt sick to my stomach after reading it.

I think I know what nightbloom is trying to articulate - but I think it beyond the limitations of language to bring to light. My ability to relate is due to the similar "dogma" under which I was raised - neo-
Platonic Ismaili (who adhere somewhat to the gnostic interpretation of Sufis), and we have some connection to the the freemasons as I understand - though I'm not sure if nightbloom is cognizant of the link.
Anyhow, I don't think there would be peace if there was a lack of religion - as war predates religious fervor. Power, oil, and the human need to dominate would ensure that war - whether with nukes or slings and arrows - is a habit we have a hard time parting with.
When it comes to religion and political structures - indeed they serve a similar purpose. They unite a group of people under a united perspective. The real power comes from an organization that moves with a common purpose. We have evolved (for a lack of a better word) to the point the new religion (our consumer based economy) is what the old religion held in distaste -(the old dogma was driven by a socialistic ideology - the Vatican is noted as being the highest taxed organization). The difference between the exoteric (organized religious practices) and the esoteric aspects of religion should be noted - the first varies as widely as the languages that we have to communicate, and the latter is of the same essence throughout. Monotheism is the eventual evolution of polytheism (instead of everything having "god" in it - there is one "god" - similar to describing each of your cells as many parts of you to taking "you" in the singular. The problem we really have is actually defining who or what "you" are.)
Getting back to the da vinci code, I think it is interesting that the plot line is of the very argument which divides the Christian and Muslim view of Christ. Muslims view Christ, not as the son of God born of immaculate conception, but a human they see as a "prophet". They also believe he was not crusified - which is the crux that drives a pragmatic wedge between the two theologies. This conception of Christ was passed on from Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages to the Christian gnostics (the Templars, freemasons and the like) with whom they mingled - and therein was born the "secret societies" of the West. So what one believes now is neither here nor there really, the main thing to focus on is to consider the fact it's a good thing that the prophets of eras gone by weren't walking the earth today - or else they would be promptly institutionalized and given their fair share of modern pharmaceutical intervention.

thomas49 said: "real spirituality is something people find within themselves"

Thank you thomas49 for this. Spirituallity is within all of us. I feel it is a soft voice that encourages us to experience our uniqueness, and our truth...

We live in a Capitalist society. It supports the alienation of people from the natural world, or basicly, the truth of who they truly are. Capitalism promotes justifyed scepticism within it's citizens. Sadly it supports competition over love\encouragment ",as a norm or a "standard". It too encompasses incomplete communities (humans only), over extended communities(all species and forms of life)...

We have been encouraged to not be fully human. Why would we wonder why so many do not request "spiritually" in their lives?? Fear of the "intangible"...hmmm? No faith...hmmm?

Our bodies are unhealthy, our enviroment is unhealthy, our spirits are unhealthy. Where is the Prozac...Oh, there it is...

I wonder if perhaps we need to SIT STILL regularily in the woods, by a stream, and shut down a bit. Perhaps then we can discover one vital part of what it means to be fully human. I have a feeling this is one time in our lives we do not have to "struggle" for "it", but it will gently land on us...Cool.

Peace...

RTB

Now that's a gem. A true pearl of wisdom. My chuckle for the evening. 8-D

"Night all." I say, momentarily removing my own tail from my mouth.

Nope, gotta tell ya. I had Jesus on my bus, once, driving a False Creek bus on Granville. He didn't pay the fare but his story was too good to miss.

Two Virgin Marys. One doing a Main St, who said they'd had he in Riverview. and the other on a Davie bus, at Denman there, across from the MacDonalds-, if it's still there.

The Virgin Marys didn't pay the fare either. I ws really lax.

Does anybody really think anything, especially spirituality, springs from a vacuum? Surely, you cannot deny that we are embedded in our environment, etc.

It seems so naive to talk about "genuine spirituality." What is "genuine spirituality"? Is it a feeling when you get when sitting beside a bubbling brook on a mountain in spring time or when you gaze upon a peacefully sleeping infant? Is it a set of ideas? What prompts the ideas? Do you not think Nazi's also had spirituality? What criteria would you use to evalute what spirituality is genuine and what is not?

Do you not question the origins of your beliefs and perceptions? The role played by social, cultural and geographic environment? Health?

This article was lacking one crucial element.

"Opening up serious discussion of the Gospels -- their historical and cultural context, how they were written, what they were intended to accomplish, what they can tell us about the first century church -- is a worthy and important goal. "

The author didn't provide any really evidence that it would be a worthy and important goal. What difference, other than to devout Christians, will it make to our secular lives? The Hallmark versions of Christmas and Easter do not need a real Jesus anyways. And the political climate of the first century is even less relevant.

The Da Vinci Code was an easy and interesting read. I feel sorry for those that looked at the book as anything but simple entertainment. However, people will believe what they want.

Josephine wrote: "Do you not think Nazi's also had spirituality?

Perhaps we all have spiritial potential, AND perhaps our potential lies within our spirituality.

I think of spirituality as personal, and being as we are not "the Creator" himself(or ones interpetation thereof),...how would we know the hearts of these people such as the Nazi's and otherwise. How do we know what their hearts are like before, after, and during the war, or how about, throughtout their whole lives? Where are they spiritually...how would we know?

I think it was the bible that said "Sufficient to the day is the evil therein." I would take this to mean that we need only deal with the states of our own hearts, NOT attempt to adjust the heart of another.

It is not to say these historical tyrants, were anything more than just historical tyrants,but at some point we have to abandon "it" before "it" becomes a"god-like" judgement...

"Jo", "a vacuum"... I don't know, but I did say earlier on this thread that a great mind once said that the evidence or food is hunger...

Peace Jo.

RTB

"Sufficient to the day is the evil therein."

Sorry about that (early...yawn). What I meant to say was "wipe the log out of your eye, before attempting to wipe the smite out of someone elses".

Anywho...peace.

RTB

This discussion has been ongoing for a very long time. In a very real sense, the mainstream is only just catching up to what theologians have been working on. The "improvised" nature of Gospel authorship has been openly acknowledged and taught in Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic seminaries for literally generations now.

I still find the perspective on religion conveyed on this thread to be reductionist and incomplete. That such a complex cultural and philosophic phenomenon can be reduced to nothing more than simplistic power equations is a naive perspective. Pardon me for saying so, but the left has done the same thing in its treatment of everything from sex to to the family. As a continuous allegorical narrative that reaches from Neolithic times to the present day, the Judeo-Christian mind warrants a little more than that....then again, this is a blogger thread, so we're limited by the medium in addition to our own personal perspectives (or lack thereof).

nightbloom
While it may be fair to suggest the ubiquity of a creator narrative 'means' something more than that there is a common need among all peoples for some kind of 'understanding' myth, it is certainly unfair for you to continue to ignore the fact that the opposite tendency is not just a characteristic of the left.

Your predilection for slamming those whose dialectic doesn't happen to agree with your own politics is no reason to ignore the strong influence of firm 'believers' who have helped form and are still busy animating the left in this country and around the world.

To characterize the left as being somehow the sole preserve of 'godless' socialists is as nonsensical as my suggesting that there are no devout believers among the ranks of the conservative right wing.

Why do you persist in posting such nonsense?

Okay, but the academic Left does reduce culture (language, religion, tradition, sexual mores, etc.) to a simple power equation, and then uses this reductionism to carve out new constituencies for itself. This ideology-driven process doesn't tell the whole story. Discussion of a 5,000+ year synthesis of Hebraic Creation and Historical Narrative; Greek Platonic-Aristotelian-NeoPlatonic Philosophy; Medieval Scholasticism; and Enlightenment Philosophy now overlaid with Postmodern interpretation can't be simplistically dismissed and lumped in with nonsensical pop culture analogies or ideologically-loaded power dichotomies.

But getting back to Da Vinci Code, the Jesus story and the Gnostic Gospels (bona fide documents that help form the backdrop to the Da Vinci Code story), and also getting back to Burgess' point about generating meaningful debate on Biblical authorship and how the Da Vinci Code may have missed the mark....

While I enjoyed the book for its entertainment value, the author's expectation that we take his theories seriously is laughable. His allegation that 5 million women were killed in the years of the inquisition is ridiculous. Brown appears to be enamoured of Wiccanism or some variant of New Age goddess worship. There is no evidence (other than in the fertile imaginations of Brown and his ilk) of Jesus marrying or producing children, but even if it were true, it would detract nothing from his message. The "controversy" over Brown's thesis is a tempest in a teacup.
As for the suggestion that religion is for the weak minded, some of the most powerful minds and personalities of history have been religious leaders (Martin Luther King, Aquinas, Ghandi, Calvin, Mother Theresa, etc.)

The love of power, I think always operates out of weakness. Any truly strong person I have ever known has never wanted or cared for it...ironically their lack of need or want of it...is exactly what makes them truly powerful individuals regardless.

As for Mother Teresa...much controversy there....I think of her as more willful than saintly...

as was the militaristic Joan of Arc and her visions...

Prophets and power are curious things...as Avicenna alludes to her in her wonderful quote above.

nightbloom
I don't think that's true either. Your apparent ignorance of the history of the social gospel in this country and liberation theology in Latin America is as appalling as your attempt to paint the whole left with a gloss about reducing its objectives to a simple power grab. The struggle to change peoples’ minds about what is happening to them and their children, as well as the world around them and under their feet is structured in ‘power’ terms because, obviously, that is the currency of the modern corporatist state – would that it were otherwise. Prayer just isn’t going to get it done. As a matter of fact, your criticism would actually be more appropriate leveled at Mr. Harper, given his current unwillingness to entertain any serious discussion or adaptation of his own power-centered view of things.

You can’t have missed the classic – ‘it would be irresponsible to question or fail to support ‘my’ sentencing reforms’.

On the other subject, the fact that an enormous structure of academic endeavor and intellectual seriousness has arisen around the shaky armature of what is to some a sustained belief in a pathetic but all too human failing is hardly unusual; nor is it in any way persuasive if the belief in the idea of a 'risen' Christ is factual nonsense. The fact that a delusion began 20 centuries ago is no evidence that it was not a delusion.

These are, after all, matters of belief and belief, like faith can be false. In the 19th century some Americans who followed Joseph Smith began to believe what seems to me to be an equally unlikely delusion about disappearing golden tablets written in a new and unknown language. The fact that the Mormon Church has grown to number 10 million or so does nothing to make its founding myth any more persuasive as a ‘real’ event in the minds of skeptics like me.

It seems to me that the essential shakiness of the central idea behind Christian theology is the reason, as bottom, why the organized church would much rather its adherents eschewed such fictional theories as Brown espouses in his book. It may indicates that they, after all these years, are finally beginning to think for themselves and may begin, to look for other reasons than the fear of almighty damnation to begin to do the right thing in the here and now.

Further. As for an appreciation of the Gnostic point of view, I find we have quite enough trouble with one God rather than postulating seriously the existence of two of them.

First sentence of the penulitimate para above should state 'at' bottom (rather than 'as') and, in the second sentence, the 's' should be struck from 'indicates'; there is no need either for a comma after 'begin'. Sorry.

Gwest, you remind me of the kid who sat in the back of my freshman Greek Philosophy class scoffing loudly at Aristotle's "stupidity" for theorizing the cosmological order that he did.

The purpose of ruminating over 5,000+ year old narratives on the creation myth (and their fascinating variations) is not to sit back in our 21st century intellectual armchair and expound how much smarter we are than the those poor Bronze Age fools.

The purpose is to try to understand where they were coming from based on their circumstances at their stage of development. And in the process, we might even learn something about how we got to where we are today. You seem to want to just piss all over the whole thing, and are perturbed that others don't feel the same. The Judeo-Christian narrative still represents the longest-running oral-the-written history of a human culture(s) (since it picks up shortly after the establishment of the earliest known human settlements in the Levant & Northeast Africa). As such, the Judeo-Christian narrative will continue to be a foundational artifact of the origins of human culture (a large and formative segment of it, at any rate) even thousands of years from now, irrespective of your apparent contempt for those origins.

As for my alleged ignorance of Liberation Theology in Latin American...You picked a near-perfect example of attempts by the Left to colonize the West's religious narrative and belief system by reading Marxist ideology into Scripture and fuse the political with the religious. The Vatican was correct to reign them in (after an ordained Priest had the temerity to accept a cabinet post in a Marxist government).

You have to try to step beyond the simplistic power dichotomy and recognize the cultural synthesis embedded in all creation & salvation narratives. As I said above, what we've got in Christianity is a fusion of Judaic sky-cult with Greek philosophy (borrowing heavily from Plato & Aristotle). It's actually much more complex than the way you've painted in. In a way, I find your perspective to be the flipside of that of the fundamentalist literalists, and scarcely more informed. But that's just my opinion.

LOL - I just re-read my post. Well la-dee-da!

Yes, and mea maxima culpa on the spelling & typo front.

nightbloom
I was actually thinking something pretty much along those lines....the la dee da I mean

Well, that much was obvious.

Anyone who hasn't read and learned a lot from the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews and, of course more recent philosophers and writers on up and through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas would be ignorant indeed.

Since I never said any such thing, I won't bother to reply. As to your attitude about the Vatican’s quashing of liberation theology I'll clutch Laborem Exercens to my chest and salute what some of its priests and other religious have been and are continuing to do for the poor and dispossessed of Latin America despite your disapproval. Faith without works I've always said. As to priests in government, I’d sooner see a few more of them and few less lawyers any day. The Vatican’s attitude toward getting involved in the day to day mucking about of living in the modern world is quaint at best given its record prior to the 16th century.

In the end, you totally ignore the central point of everything I've written. The need for a Transcendent god or a son of god is as nothing compared with the ethical obligation of Man to live in a proper loving relationship with his/her fellow man. The rest of these things are pleasant, often challenging stories and intellectual exercises in the historical search for knowledge, nothing more.

Most people, including yourself no doubt, seem to take a consumer's approach toward religion these days anyway; accepting what they like and rejecting or ignoring what they don't.

That's disingenuous. The vast majority of the Church's activities have been directed towards the poor throughout history. You're practicing the very fallacy which the Marxist historian decry: the misleading fixation on the "Palace History" of the upper echelons. In fact, the religious heirarchy of the West has always been more-or-less reflective of the real layout of the society from which it's derived (aristrocratic minority leadership at the top, bourgeois middle tier, and majority peasant class as its popular base). I'm not defending the abuses that have occurred in the name of religion - I'm just asserting some balance over your remarks. By and large it's a reflection of the hopes & flaws of the society in is composed from.

The fact that you object to a unification of Church & State when it benefits conservatives, yet applaud an unhealthy fusion of Church & State when it benefits the political Left only demonstrates the casuistic nature of your perspective on this issue (ref. the appropriation of religion by Marxist ideologues in so-called "Liberation Theology").

Not sure what you're getting at with the rest of that post. I'm on-side on the whole 'ethical obligation' issue....I simply accept that for many people that has to be more than a simple intellectual exercise - they need narrative, imagery, ritual, and the simple faith that they are loved. That's all I'm saying. I wasn't necessarily debating the content of the Judeo-Christian tradition, beyond the fact that it is a fusion that emerged serendipitously from the historical co-incidence of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy & Roman Empire that continues to make an awsome impact on lives in the present day.

That fushion was by no means accidental or haphazard. It was carefully worked out. That's the core of Burguess' critique - that we have a mass popular success on our hands (The Da Vinci Code) that managed to barely graze a few key controversies but didn't offer up any profound insights.

If anyone's interested in sifting through some specialist commentary on The Da Vinci Code, I can suggest the following website:
http://www.thedavincidialogue.com/

I haven't had time to peruse its contents at length, although one of the writers is a moderal liberal journalist I respect, John Allan, who writes credibly on these issues for popular media all the time.

Cheers.

Actually, maybe not....the commentary looks a little thin now that I look at it (ref. the weblink I posted). Perhaps someone can suggest additional sources of critical thinking on the issue...?

nightbloom
Discussion is pointless if all that's required of you is to ignore whatever happens to be inconvenient: I didn't have to go back to the Reformation to point out that holy mother church has a mottled record when it comes to getting involved in political intrigues. Surely, you're not suggesting that the Church's record with respect to governing isn't a lot more conflicted than the odd priest sitting in a Marxist government?

Calling my remarks disingenuous while ignoring the role of the church in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Germany and Quebec (to mention just a handful of examples) where it was not infrequently in bed with regimes far more noxious than the Sandinistas in Nicaragua is the kind of thing that's given the bloody institution such a bad name. Disingenuous my ass – ‘Old man take a look at yourself!’

As to the complexity of the superstructure of Christian philosophy, I freely acknowledge it is a wondrous edifice and a very important element in the evolution of modern thought. If built on sand, wondrous though it is, it will soon be a magnificent artifact and a wonderful curiosity. A place one visits nostalgically, like a museum.

Further, not once did you take the time to respond to one of the most interesting facets of the whole Da Vinci controversy - the fact the Church has gone out of its way (especially in respect of Opus Dei) to involve itself in the controversy at all. Don’t you find that just a little bit perplexing?

Acknowledging the book as a piece of escapist fiction would have been, one might have thought, all that was necessary were the church entirely sure of the foundation of its own orthodoxy.

I've actually read a good deal of criticism about Brown's book, as well as everything he's published to date, it is all remarkably formulaic and nearly identical in its plot structure from book to book - I will look at the link you've posted.

As to the idea that mature adults, in this culture at least, require the comfort of… narrative, imagery, ritual, and the simple faith that they are loved…is just another example of succumbing to the pathetic fallacy, in my opinion. Nothing to be very proud of.

There is a medical condition known as Stendhal’s syndrome. You may or may not be familiar with it. My understanding is that extended contemplation of works of art, in Florence for instance, has been known to cause illness and swooning among certain susceptible individuals.

Cheers.

nightbloom
you're not impressed by Hollywood Jesus then?

LOL. Ooooo. You do see inside the real Pope Nightbloom, don't you?

Chuckling. No, I will resist the temptation to say any more. He is amusing merely to read in conversation with himself. 8-D

Mr. Burgess:

Your lack of knowledge about the nature and purpose of the biblical Gospels is appalling. You make historical faux pas that are laughable. Stick to writing about things you know about. You certainly know very little about early Christian origins or Temple period Judaism. That is clear enough.

For a good recent scholarly read, try Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's "The Last Week" (Harper San Francisco, 2006). It chronicles the last week of Jesus' life in historical, political and spiritual context. It is but one book written by people who have made a serious life-long study of these things.

You might learn something and stop embarrassing yourself.

Another suggested title for interested readers is
Jack Miles's intriguing God: A Biography

That's just a tad 'superior' of you, don't you think? That's not the topic of this article or this thread, Gwest. You keep wanting to debate the value of religion, but that's a whole other issue from what Burgess is getting at. Besides, if it prompts people to live better lives, isn't it better than creating a vaccuum that is all-too-easily filled by runaway consumerism and toxic ideologies?

Yes, the Church has manifested all the human flaws and weaknesses that are out there, and then some. I always acknowledged this, so you're using a straw man to prop up your non-argument. My response to that, you may have noticed, was to point out that the institutional Church has by-&-large reflected the strata that exist in mainstream society (i.e. aristocratic minority, bourgeois centre and "proletarian" popular base). You point to various historical examples of local or regional Church leadership (i.e. the aristrocratic governing minority) being in bed with various regimes. Do you really find that surprising? The vast unsung majority of men & women religious have a long track record of solidarity with the poor. I can't think of a more radical and self-denying life that is totally and authentically antithetical to the ambient modern world around us than that incarnated in the three religious vows of absolute poverty, chastity & obedience. It consitutes a complete self-abnegation - a denial of ego - that is more radical than anything the Left has yet conceived of, really.

I can't think of anyone living a more radical life than, say, the Carthusians of Vermont, U.S.A. http://www.laycarthusians.homestead.com/TRANSFIGURATION.html

Or a more radical rejection of property and devotion to the poor as the Franciscans of Western Canada:http://www.franciscanfriars.ca/

Or a more all-embracing commitment to working for peace & justice than the Benedictine Sisters of Erie: http://eriebenedictines.org/

There have been highly visible failures, to be sure - but also an overwhelming number of uncelebrated success stories. Are you so sure your life and work is so much superior to theirs? Are they really as misguided as you seem to suggest?

The fundamental point underlying Burgess' commentary is the difference between belief and fact and their tension and complimentarity when it comes to formulating the personal truths which motivate our lives. I think it's possible for believing Christians to embrace the synthesized and evolutionary nature of the narrative and the doctrine while simultaneously embracing the fundamental philosophic, altuistic & community-building truths that are illustrated and upheld by the texts.

That's what I try to tell people like my aunt who have been negatively impacted by the screed that has attended the success of The Da Vinci code.

Incidentally, an excellent & highly readable synopsis of the "synthesis" of ideas I'm getting at is contained in this book:

The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas The Have Shaped Our World View
by Richard Tarnas

The chapters dealing with the early doctrinal disputes (Gnosticism, Arianism, etc.) and how their outcomes influenced the subsequent evolution of Western thought and beliefs are particularly relevant to this discussion (Dan Brown borrows heavily from Gnosticism to develop the backdrop of his story). Of notable interest for modern politics is Tarnas' point that the tension between a closed fundamentalist brand of Chistianity and an open cosmopolitan Christianity was inherent from the get-go, with St. Paul's early doctrinal battles to establish an inclusive faith that branched away from Jewish exclusivism (this included a big dust-up over male circumcision which is some ways is strikingly similar to modern arguments over the issue...plus ça change...).

nightbloom
actually, those words "narrative, imagery, ritual, and the simple faith that they are loved" -are yours - I just added a conclusion.

As to the genesis of the debate between us, it all started with your attack on the left if I remember rightly.

I'm all in favour of people treating their friends, family, neighbours, community and the rest of the world with generosity, love, compassion, fairness and equity - it's the 'charity' I'm not so keen on.

Charity has the stink of superiority about it. A kind of apology for having behaved badly that's as much or more about the donor's feelings as it is about actually assisting the marginalized.

I'm busy today so I'll get back to the rest of your current post later. I'll just in passing say that the exercise of 'taming' the Yahweh of the Old Testament, which you assert is what Christianity is all about, has, in my opinion, made 'him' pretty much invisible and irrelevant.

- and I was clearly commenting directly on that conclusion.

My "attack on the left" is a reasoned argument, which you have not actually dealt with in your tangential responses. If you were presuming to defend the Left from my rapacious "attacks", you haven't been very effective.

And the state-mandate variety is the preferable option, I presume...?

Gwest, let's get away from debating the uses & abuses of organized religion in & of itself - it's not actually the topic of Burgess' original commentary.

nightbloom:
So, my disagreement with the way you think about religion is a reasoned argument too. I think it is a naive but understandable reliance on a misinterpretation of the relation to the natural environment and Man's place within it, period. I think your attacks on the left have been neither rapacious nor particularly effective nor even very consistent.

Ironically, the church is most helpful to the people it says are its main concern when it behaves selflessly and in the interests of all - not very different from how I see the left at its best. Your determination to deny that the idea of Christian activism isn’t alive and well on the left is obvious nonsense. Just because I don’t accept what I take to be childish reliance on cultural artifacts seriously is no reason to deny the good work that religion does and could do more of.

When we've fixed up conditions down here on earth, I'll be more than willing to worry about the state of heaven. You seem to hate the left a lot more than I hate the church, after all. I'd make common cause with most decent folk if the objective were something other than the nourishment of my 'immortal soul'.

I have a hell of a lot more respect for the residents of convents and monasteries who actually 'saved' Jewish children in Europe during the second world war than I do for the ones who spent those years praying for the salvation of anyone's soul.

As to Brown’s book and Burgess’s article: What more really, is there to say? Surely you wouldn’t deny that both ritual and dogma include a lot of pagan resonances and not a few historical anomalies. Whether or not the world is a better place because of the belief that Jesus Christ was actually the ‘Son’ of a Jewish God, Yahweh, who is ‘himself’ (I know that the Gnostics would disagree with that term) the accretion of another series of myths and legends, transcriptions and retranslations – at least partly and possibly, according to some theories, written by a single identifiable female writer denoted ‘J’ is an esoteric subject. A subject not very different from art history.

The mental gymnastics, the learning and the scholasticism of Jewish, Christian and Moslem writers in establishing the structure and the principles and practices of philosophic thought and analysis is the true gift of religion to mankind, science and the world, in my opinion.

For those things, I am greatly appreciative. As to whether or not Christ was the son of God; it is of no more concern to me than the obvious conceit behind Brown’s little theatrical thriller.

In this format, we really can't say much more than that and I'm too busy, as I said, with other things.

Cheers.

My my my. Interesting how the style, form and content of this "thread" has evolved from a simple revue or "opinion" about a book, and a soon to be released movie of the same name, to a series of claims, counter claims, statements, and refutatations, invectives, counter invectives,and culminating in "a slather" of personal attempts at insult and perhaps "one up man ship", reminding me of the famous line from "Macbeth",
"Like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". What is is what does. Another image comes to mind from another author, Japanese, whose name I can't remember: "All I saw were two mouths moving". All of this to do with the extrapolation of "opinions" and their co-instigator "beliefs". Into this context I would like to interject some thoughts based upon eastern ideas that have at times been erringly referred to as a "religion".

To wit:

Pay Attention>
Expect nothing.
believe in nothing.
Hold no opinions.
Take nothing personally.

Breathe.

What is, is. What isn't, isn't.

As "Lord Buckley" used to plead "Cool it, Babies"

The rest of the rhetoric seems to be a product of the workings of the "mind" which loves to tell complex, involved stories, come to conclusions, make judgements, and then in a triumphant flourish, blame somebody.

There's really only one thing we can know anything about, and that's ourselves, and that is an ongoing and difficult process, God knows.(snicker)

And of course, you must realize that every thing I've just written is really written for myself, not for you. You have the dubious honour of witnessing my personal clarification
and edification meandering processes, in public.

Amen. Ahem. Etc.

Gwest, I don't "hate" the Left. I'm not personally committed enough to politics to invest those kinds of personal emotions in it. If the Left stuck to its stated goal of moderating the excesses of our "default" system of hierarchal exploitation, I'd be happy. My critique of the Left has always concerned its more nihilist, culture-destroying, anarchic manifestations and the often-contrived "Oppression Narratives" it uses to create and consolidate new constituencies for itself.

Gwest, that's what I've been arguing all along you boob. It's a sythesis of different currents that came together seredipitously, and was subsequently worked-ouyt & defended against "corruption" by resurgent undercurrents. You got so caught up in your anti-religion tirades that you didn't even read what I was actually stating.

But thanx for comin' around all the same.

jevning sez ...

haraldkann sez ... all that empty rhetoric to let us know you have an opinion as well ?

WQW !ain't you smart

Sorry, but you did post this nightbloom. And it's with that I can't agree. It is as egregious an exaggeration as your slamming of the left, dummy! (You really should get over yourself, la dee dah!)
Here's a little bit of poetry in honour of the Church's humanitarianism:
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT

by: John Milton (1608-1674)

VENGE, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,

Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow

O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundred fold, who, having learnt thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

Furthermore, to suggest that the church hasn't been set all a titter by Dan Brown's little fiction is nonsense. Just another indication that the fisherman has no shoes – because he’s been busy walking on water, no doubt.

To conclude, I’ll bet you’re as attracted and in love with the ritual and beauty of the Mass as your cherished relative is.

Gwest, grow up. You usually manage to be more level-headed in your posts (and your reading of others' posts) than you're current being on this thread.

On a totally unrelated but more immediate topic: Jane Jacobs died this morning.
http://sympaticomsn.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060425/jacobs_obit_060425

The one comfort to be derived from the passing of influential thinkers like Jacobs is that it often proves to be an occasion for an appreciative review of their ideas & writings. I hope the Tyee editors avail themselves of the occasion.

nightbloom, you grow up. It's perfectly ok for you throw around cheap shots but I'm not allowed to, how come?

While I agree Jane Jacobs was an important and influential thinker about humans and the way they live together, especially in big cities, it is somewhat ironic that when she died today, at 89, most of the laudatory things she wrote when comparing Toronto with American mega cities are no longer true. Our own Canadian megalopolis has become nearly as dysfunctional and broke as most of the models she used as comparators.

Wow, this got really complicated.

I'm no learned philosopher. In fact, I find most of that kind of stuff to be a mind-bending waste of time. But I have taken the time to know what I believe and why.

I'm a Christian. I believe Jesus was a real person, and the son of the God who created everything. I believe the stories and letters in the New Testament part of the bible are reliable and truthful. I have weighed evidence for and against those conclusion and my faith is not shaken. If you would like to get into an e-mail discussion over this, I would be happy to oblige. My e-mail is

And I believe that although the Da Vinci Code has revived public interest in an ancient conspiracy theory and renewed interest in mystery religions, philosophy cults and secret knowledge, none of it is new or worth getting excited about. The only thing that's new is that Dan Brown is making a ton of money.

It's too bad people can't use this intense popular scrutiny of Jesus Christ to look at what he actually said. Jesus' message was simple and direct: "Come with me if you want to live."

That's the starting point. All the rest of it, the philosophy, the gnosticism, the religion, the great thinkers, is vapor.

Because G-zuss sez 'turn the other cheek'.

G-west, are you even aware that you've led the thread in a big circle, only to finally agree with the basic points I asserted at the outset? Has that even occurred to you?

GJW
But if Christ wasn't the son of God and he didn't rise from the dead then he's just one of a whole long line of influential 'thinkers' of greater or lesser importance from Thales to Moses Maimonides to L. Ron Hubbard who've had an angle on how humanity should live this life, the only one any of us have - so far as I know.

I'm not surprised you noticed, nightbloom, it's a tactic I've frequently noticed you employ to similar effect.
Ta Ta.

C'mon nightbloom, that advice from you sounds a little hollow and disingenuous. When you stop posting ridiculous things about the left and its objectives then I'll 'turn the other cheek' as you put it. In the meantime, this is a battle and I'll engage it in any way I see as appropriate. Fundamentalists of all stripes, including Christian, are a big part of the world’s problems and I'll point out that their beliefs are as silly as the ideas Dan Brown bases his 'fictions' upon any time I have an opportunity.

You still haven’t justified or proved this, though: The vast majority of the Church's activities have been directed towards the poor throughout history. Why not?

Gotta go, I’ll leave it with you!

Alcibiades - Give me one example where I U-turned on my argument after leading the thread on a tangent.

nightbloom:
You started out with this:

Which is the same thing, really, as accepting the 'truth' of the biblical, god-centered universe; then moved on to here:

And when you couldn't come up with any data to support that claim; you concluded by agreeing with G West that the whole God thing is basically nonsense - a comforting fiction for old ladies and children...which was the point he'd made from the beginning.

I don't think you actually believe in anything, mon ami. I think you're a lot like those deracinated youngsters lying down on the lawn in protest.

Sorry.

Alcibiades - That's nonsense. I fail to see how your cut-&-past job constitutes a U-turn on my part. The first quote you selected referred to the core altruistic messaging (i.e. love your neighbour as yourself, etc.), and the second quote is simply an assertion that the whole picture was always much bigger than your favourite anecdotes concerning abusive Popes, corrupt Bishops and wenching Priests. There's a whole other history there that Gwest started to acknowledge towards the end of the thread.

I won't bore the other readers with a re-cap of my argument. If you scroll back, you'll see what I mean.

You've grossly mischaracterized my position. I said no such thing about the Judeo-Christian narrative or its belief system.

I also find it funny that my critique of the Left-wing constituency-building was construed as an "attack" imbued with "hate". Although I've always admitted to having fun with the bombastic broadsides (who doesn't?), I didn't use them in this thread. I was fairly sincere in my criticism. Are you sure that isn't the real issue here?

And I'm sorry but it is true that the ideological Left has always had an extremely problematic intellectual relationship with organized religion and the traditional-cultural belief systems it upholds....and the Judeo-Christian salvation narrative in particular. Marx himself singled it out for particular excoriation before providing a temporal "Salvation Narrative" of his very own. That's at the crux of the issue (but not at the crux of Burgess' original article, which we're supposed to be discussing).

I've been pretty consistent in my stated opinion, boys - You might not like it, you might not agree with it. But I've been consistent in my point of view on this and every other thread I've participated in here.

Alcibiades,

Thanks for your comment.

The important word there is "if", isn't it?

If Christ wasn't the son of God, and didn't rise from the dead, and is just another wise but dead thinker, then as a Christian, I am of all men, the most pitiable and pathetic, as Paul put it.

Being wise never saved anyone from death.

And if Jesus was not the son of God, and didn't rise from the dead, he was nuts. He wasn't just a wise teacher, he didn't just tell people to be nice to each other. He turned religious beliefs on their head. He made a lot of enemies. He told people to love their enemies – not just tolerate them. He made outrageous claims about his divinity. And most of what he said was predicated on his confidence he would die and come back to life. If he did not come back to life, he was just another wild-eyed wacko.

Nightbloom
On the contrary, the first reference, which came from your first quote on this thread, implied, in academic weasel language it's true, that you were not an "unbeliever".

You might like to pretend that's nonsense but it's not what you said and you've studiously avoided it ever since, ny friend. As to your disaffection for the left, suggesting that all progressive writers accept Marx as their lord and savior is as nonsensical as anything else you've ever said.

And further, you deny the other essential position at the heart of what G West said about the role of the Christian message at the centre of much leftist thought. Your dislike of the left colours everything you write and clouds your judgment, in my view.

As for what we're 'supposed' to be discussing; I've never heard you object to taking things off the beaten track before.

GJW
I don't think it makes you pitiable at all.

Christ's message about the value of love is hardly a worthless aphorism. The idea that our behavior here on earth will be primarily justified in heaven IS a worthless saying, in my view.

Further, it has been all too easy for Christians throughout history to ignore responsibility for their fellow men and continue to practice their selfishness because of the excuse that the poor and the poor in spirit will somehow cage 'their' rewards and recompense in other life.

Christians have sat on their hands too often for me to have much patience with them. A few saints harldly make up for it.

Why is it that I always feel like I'm in an episode of Star Trek?

Read (former Anglican priest and Toronto Star religion writer) Tom Harper's "The Pagan Christ" and you will be as convinced as I am that Jesus is simply a myth. Everything that has been produced by Christian organizations, especially the Catholic Church, is predicated on fiction.

I cannot believe that, in the 21st Century, humans insist on believing in these fairy tales and actually slaughter one another in the name of "God" or "Allah" or whatever deity they choose to worship.

Mass hysteria, as far as I can tell.

No, Alcibiades, there's no "weasel language" in what I said.

Gwest was shadow-boxing with himself, as I was never debating the verity of what I called the "magic" in the narrative - the resurrection, the miracle stories, etc.). Gwest kept brining it back to that, proclaiming how pathetic I & everyone else was. Both of you were simply projecting your own knee-jerk preconception on my viewpoint.

The core of my argument (on this and every other thread touching on the issue - ref. the interminable "War on Christmas" thread) is that Christianity is much more than its critics (usually on the Left, let's face it) make it out to be. It's a cultural repository, and an evolved synthesis that emerged from our common history. Gwest seemed to come around on that point when he acknowledged finally the intellectual and scientific contribution. It doesn't stop there, of course. The Church is the only thing that held it together for the millenium & a half between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the beginning of the Renaissance. Of course it intermarried with power structures - it had to - and it's the only reason we're not all speaking Arabic and praying to Allah five time a day in the wake of the Invasions...Geez, and you on the Left thought the Easter Bunny & Santa Claus gave you license to complain....Just imagine.

It has had inherent uses to society, and will continue manifest itself in moderate or extreme forms depending on circumstance. My argument (here & elsewhere) is that its moderate manifestations should be accomdated to diminish the appeal of fundamentalist literalism. I've said this so often I can type it out blindfolded. Where have you been?

As far as my alleged "hate" and "dislike" for the Left, I've been consistent in my opinion that the current fundamentalist literalist backlash we're current caught up in is in large part a reaction to more invasive and arrogant aspects of the liberal-Left programme over the past 30 years or so. As I explained near the top of this thread, it's my belief that we have simply entered Phase II of the Culture Wars when it comes to these issues.

"Academic weasel language" indeed. It's not that hard to follow. You don't have to agree with me, but don't make up shit about me being inconsistent in my opinions.

This is what I actually said in my very first post, boys.

As for the improvised evolution of Biblical texts, theologians have always known that. That doesn't necessarily make their core messages untrue. They are human reflections on the nature of the divine, the unknowable. What's far more fascinating to me is how "subversive" reflections have gone underground and somehow survived millennia of suppression only the resurface in totally accidental and fashion (case in point: the Gnostic Gospels, buried by a dissident monk in Egypt c. 400 A.D. when all copies were ordered destroyed, only to be unearthed in the 20th century by peasants digging for fresh clay. Pages were unknowingly used at fire-starter & toilet paper until the collection eventually found its way to an antiquities dealer). What serendipity.

nightbloom

Moreover, G West said he thought that was just another expression of the pathetic fallacy.

Also correct, no?

All the rest, aside from your reluctance to acknowledge two other things is superfluous, in my opinion.

First, you cling to the assertion that the Church's record of 'caring' for the poor is significantly greater than its crimes and ‘errors’ throughout history; and second, (kind of strangely, given your first 'belief'), you refuse to acknowledge that there is a strong tradition in leftist politics that stems from and continues to build upon a Christian tradition.

To me at least, all the rest of this is superfluous.

nightbloom
It’s not surprising you've typed this stuff many times.

It doesn’t make your writing any less conflicted but it is certainly facile. I’ve never disagreed with the role of the church in preserving knowledge through medieval times but I think a convincing argument could be made for ascribing almost as much influence to Jewish thinkers, and in fairness, to Muslims writers as well for the survival of civilization and culture. Your focus on a western point of view is understandable given the rest of what you believe.

And I think you are a believer, which is fine too. However, you want to have it both ways. You want to be critical and skeptical and modern, perhaps even post-modern, in your outlook but at bottom, you’re as much a ‘believer’ in the pathetic fallacy as your aunt is, in my opinion.

That’s not a bad thing in itself but it is a little schizophrenic given some of the rest of what you've written, don’t you think?

I’m also curious how (or if) you’ll respond to the points Alcibiades made just above. Moreover, I really do think you have a problem with appreciating that the modern democratic left is no more monolithic than Christianity and that it includes a great many ‘believers’ who interpret the Christian message as the animating force behind their activism.

As I've said before, that pervasively obnoxious, patronizing and unnecessary attitude on the liberal-Left is one of the reasons we're in such a virulent backlash right now. Your own nihilist secular fundamentalism almost justifies the critique of the religious fundamentalists, Gwest. Has that never occurred to you?

You can believe what you want to believe about me, but you still haven't countered any of the points I've made. You've mischaracterized my critique as "hate" speech (a big wimp-out on your part....I've never used that sop) yet you haven't responded to my argument on a rational level. All you can do is make silly slurs about the Mass, my Aunt, and your assumptions regarding my belief system. You can't accept that someone would defend the Western faith tradition on its own merits, because you refuse to accept that it has objective merits (altho I'll grant that you did give ground on this towards the end). You've got a lot more ground to give, btw. But instead, you've wasted our time simply trying to categorize me on a tangential issue which actually has little to do with the subject matter.

As for me being a True Believer or any such thing, I've stated before on these threads that I am only able to identify with the Western faith tradition as an historical and cultural artifact - I can only relate to the salvation narrative and the resurrection, etc., on a symbolic and philosophic (Aristotelian, Neoplatonic) level.

But enough about me - What makes the Left's laborious Oppression Narratives and its mediochre central Salvation Narrative such an addiction for you, Gwest? And why the compulsive froth-at-the mouth loathing for Western Culture and your own cultural roots, that you must blackwash it so mindlessly and recklessly, and with so little heed to historical balance?

If anyone's frothing, nightbloom, it's you.

Just analyze your choice of words.

You are still pretending the left is monolithic and has had no common cause with christianity...whose central salvation narrative - when actually put into practice as part of a system which has itself frequently exloited and victimized human beings - has no worse record than your ill-defined left. As for my own views of you. I try to call them as I see them. Again, as I look back over what you've written here in the past couple of days I can't help but conclude that's it's your own anger clouding your vision. That's really too bad. As for the personal things, if you mention them, why should I be constrained from bringing them up.

Your memory, with regard to the blood spilled in this continent alone, on behalf of the 'christian' ideal of bringing the salvation narrative to North American First Nations (to name just one of many possible objects of its blessings throughout the world) is extremely selective. I'd put the obvious and deplorable and unforgiveable effects of one or two particularly offensive varieties of Marxist evil up against that record any time.

This is getting surreal. I’ve been acknowledging the abuses all along. Go back & read. I haven’t been selective at all. I’ve simply been resisting the pervasive blackwash that focuses exclusively on the abuses. It's all Inquisitions & witch hunts to you. And yes, I have indeed argued that the Left takes a reductionist approach in its critique of religion, culture, sex - indeed any of the human forces out which continually escape its ideological compass. That's a reasonable point for me to make (altho you may not agree). If that’s “hate” and “frothing at the mouth” then it seems that anything contradicting your point of view can be characterized as such. How rational is that?

And you still haven’t mounted a clear defense of your position, or provided a forthright critique of my own stated opinions (beyond your silly labeling). All you’ve really said from the very start of this is how “pathetic” the Western faith tradition is, and how stupid anyone who subscribes to it. You can’t seem to get past that & delve into the actual subject matter of the thread. I think it’s pretty clear at this point why: you simply don’t really know anything about it.

nightbloom
I'd actually prepared this and was about to post it and refreshed before doing so to see your bombast above. Which I will ignore and go ahead with what I'd planned to say:

Just a little bit more, since I see you've not responded yet to what I'd written above. Hoping you’re not still angry, which, truth to tell, has been somewhat evident in your last few posts and which I had never had any intention to engender.

Don't normally quote things since I've always felt most of those who do exhibit their own failure to grasp ideas themselves. I've certainly never quoted Bruce Lee before and I don't suppose I ever will again, but, there you go, there is always a first time.
He said, which seemed rather something for a man who only lived some 33 years or so, that "The key to immortality is first to live a life worth remembering."

And, very quickly, another small favourite of mine, perhaps yours too as a Germanophile, Heine: "It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all."

And finally, by way of summing up, one of my personal, leftist favourites (wouldn't you know it), Eleanor Roosevelt’s "Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality."

This is rather where I came into this debate.
Cheers.

Thanx for that Gwest - And no, I'm not angry or any of the other adjectives you've bandied about on this thread (frothing, pathetic, hateful, etc.). You're funny when you do that.

I am still waiting for you to advance a bona fide argument, or finally offer up a rational critique my own argument, however.

But don't let me rush you. Take your time...

You know, nightbloom, I've watched this little debate for some time now and I think I've pretty well got your style figured out. You make a comment, number 4 in sequence above here, which sets out your basic position and then decide to take on all comers. Alright with me, but this hardly means that others don't start their questioning from different premises. This is not 'your' graduate seminar any more than it is mine or G West's so your pretence that he, or me, for that matter, are somehow obligated to accept your premises or vice versa is nonsense.

You clearly believe, in my view, that there is a lot more to the legitimacy, in this day and age, of human reflections on the nature of the divine, the unknowable(which is the way you put it) than G West does.

If that's his fundamental point, and he's made it clear several times that he has no scorn for the philosophical foundations of western thought, why should he feel at all constrained by your contention that he has not dealt with your posts. He doesn't believe. You, apparently do.

If you don't actually believe, if you don't accept some transcendent role for the divine in your own life, why would you expect G West to prove a negative for you. He already says that a error hardwired into all human beings is the proximate cause of religious and metaphysical speculation throughout the ages. He accepts that the fruit of that speculation is an important component of the intellectual progress of mankind; but that's as far as he goes. Why should it be necessary for him to prove a negative.

To my way of thinking and especially in light of developments in human biology and neuroscience since the Enlightenment (and particularly since the end of the 19th century, I would have thought the onus was all yours.

But that's just me.

nightbloom
I decided I wasn't going to say anything else on this subject and in fact, I'm not going to. I will, however, post the following after reading your latest riposte.

I did write that you seem to 'hate' the left; the other adjectives you post are yours. I've very carefully re-read all my words on this thread to this point and the things you mentioned are part of what you've written, not what I have.

So, if you find the words funny, enjoy yourself, they are yours. As to using the word ‘pathetic’, I used it in conjunction with the concept of the 'pathetic fallacy' as you well know and it was not meant in any sense to be derogatory. I assumed you knew what the 'pathetic fallacy' was.

Using the kinds of personal insults and slurs you seem to employ so readily, and reading your other posts addressed to others, I'll freely admit you do throw them around at others besides me, is a tactic of your style, not mine.

Holy mother of god Nightbloom and G West - we get it. You two are amazingly intelligent, your views are infallible, and we are all terribly impressed. Now stop it.

Jevning - amen.

They want to have a PISSING MATCH ...let them alone ...

Another psuedo intelectual control freak on the loose...tighten up those sphincters folks

To some of us ,true intellectual debate is the reason we are here...to enjoy, learn , participate and eventually teach .

Instead of Wheaties tommorow morning,try Websters Unabridged Dictionary for breakfast and at coffee break,instead of yapping about your newest aquisition,try chewing on Rogets Thesaurus...some day,you may be able to sweep up after these two...

Like I Just Did !

Go Geeks...go !

haraldkann,

To whom were you referring as the pseudo intellectual control freak? To whom were you suggesting the study of a dictionary and thesaurus?

I supppose spelling, punctuation, and grammatical composition don't matter that much to some people anymore.

cmtara sez ...

haraldkann ...sez
THIS IS A FRE FORUM OF OPINION ,NOT YOUR STUDENTS STUDY PAPER ...YOU MORON .

GO,GEEKS ! go !

and SCREW THE PEANUT GALLERY !

and if ya wanna be real ANAL...

??????????????????

warning ! stump ! is this one of your students?

CM Tara - Thanks for the reprieve. Feel free to contribute to the substance of the debate.

GWest, I find your last commentary to be dishonest. First you pull a U-turn, then you don't even own up to your own posts, then you pin the authorship on me when I simply quote your own silly words & name-calling. Nice one.

And your characterization of my participation on these threads is dishonest as well. Personal insults & slurs have never been my approach (although I've occasionally found myself the target of them). Only the emotionally immature see personal insult in rational arguments that contradicts their own viewpoint.

You've contributed nothing substantial to this thread, Gwest. All you're done is given voice to your own uninformed anti-Christian bigotry. You haven't addressed the topic of this review article, and you haven't actually responded to my own arguments either.

We've missed an great opportunity to discuss Gnosticism, the suppression of the "Sacred Feminine" in the Western faith tradition, and the power-struggle that was underway in the first & second centuries which caused the whole Jesus Story to be scripted in the ways that it was.

Too bad, Gwest.

I said above I wasn't really interested in a further elaboration of this attenuated dialogue between us and I'm not. This post is pretty typical of your style so I'm not really surprised to find you thought it necessary to further add insult to injury this morning. I'm going to try to avoid being drawn any further into the imaginary world you apparently inhabit with what follows.

Afraid I'll have to stand by my posts, as well as my opinion of the way you've refused to acknowledge just above the words you actually used and the attitude you've taken toward this discussion. I have every confidence that readers (if any of them have taken the time to follow) of these comments, from whatever angle, will be as aware of your anti-progressive prejudice and bias against the left as they are of your imagined impression of any bigotry or offensiveness on my part. I wondered why you 'hate' the left; I still do - is that so offensive? Nowhere, not once did I express similar sentiments toward christianity.

As others have already noted, setting the terms, limits and purview of discussion(s) on this, or any other thread is neither your province nor mine. The fact that I was never interested in discussing your fascination with the good god - bad god dichotomy of Gnosticism or your obsession with the sacred feminine is irrelevant, in my opinion. It interests me not at all. Given my views about the whole business of transcendence, you can hardly be surprised about that. My views and beliefs have been formed because of what I've read, the evidence of physical and behavioral science and my own experience of life itself for more than a few years. That is my bias, which I have readily admitted from the beginning. The only thing that's too bad is your own inability to acknowledge your personal biases, to own up to your status as a believer and to come clean about your unwillingness to recognize that the left and its adherents are as diverse and widely motivated in their beliefs and Weltanschauung as they are.

For my own part, I have no doubt that my Christian brothers and sisters on the left, along with members of Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other faith-based communities who share my hopes for actually making the world a better place will have no problem with the methods being used to accomplish this noble objective.

If they do have any problems, we on the left will discuss them with an openness and lack of personal prejudice that may well be something new to you but hardly is for those of us who’ve shared our progressive ideals for more than 4 generations in this country. They will, as I do, continue to wonder why you and so many people of nominal goodwill like you who accept the Christian message are often so paralyzed when it comes to actually living the kind of life and working actively toward creating the kinds of communities of which Christ has always been the best avatar.

Perhaps I should ask them to pray for you: Not bad at all, nightbloom.

Oh - GOOD GRIEF, Gwest.

If I understand you correctly based on your most recent post, you really had no intention of discussing the actual subject at issue matter when you joined this thread. In fact, it's become fairly evident you don't even know what the Da Vinci Code is about and the issues underlying it, as this demonstrates:

My "obsession" Gwest--? Sorry kiddo, but the sacred feminine and its suppression is what the Da Vinci Code is all about.

Why even bother, Gwest, if you're not going to deal with the subject matter? All you've done is sat on this thread like a stinker, pissing incontinently on the Western faith tradition and anyone who doesn't adopt the same blanket condemnation of it as yourself, while disingenuously mischaracterizing my own statements as hateful, etc. Then you refuse to back up anything you've said (not a single thing, Gwest), and now (surprise, surprise) you don't want to talk about it anymore.

Forget the "grow up" part Gwest: just grow some balls.

nightbloom
Of course I've read Brown’s 'Da Vinci Code', also his 'Angels and Demons', 'Deception Point' and 'Digital Fortress'.

If you'd actually take the time to read everything I'd posted here you wouldn't make such a ridiculous statement. You might want to consider these sentences, which were part of your 2nd post in the thread as the beginning of my interest in 'your' attitude:

If you'll take the time to scroll back, you'll see I had posted absolutely nothing at that point and that the first thing I did post (after you'd essayed a few more commnets), which pretty clearly sets out my views a day or so later was this:

That delusion is at the centre of every 'god' ever created by any human society.

Humans seem genetically programmed to find and express meaning where and when there is none.

All the more reason they should spend more time on the reality of the world and human relationships and less on the hypothetical 'meaning' of the obvious facts behind the deterioration of the environment that sustains us all.

The answers never have been 'out there'.

I'd submit I've backed up that view consistently. In addition, I'll acknowledge you've tried as best you can to continue your personal attack on 'secular humanism' and the left from your second posting. Your tactic of throwing around outrageously exaggerated comments about others, amply exemplified by the kinds of personal things you say about me above, is entirely typical of what I've seen from you in a number of other posts on this site over the past 3 months during which I've been reading you closely.

Again, your post is more notable for the tactics you'll stoop to and your refusal to acknowledge your own biases than it is for much else. When it comes to throwing insults and trying to demean other's views, you have no rival.

I am not at all interested in your fascination with the exoterica of creation myths and the sacred feminine. I am interested in why modern, highly educated human beings would continue to waste their time arguing about anything so arcane and unimportant, in my view. My only interest in the subject is to find a way to understand from a psychological point of view why mankind has misspent so much of its time and effort worshipping what to me is a delusion; when it could have been creating something other than an excuse to divide people and continue to justify the subjugation of about four-fifths of the world's people.

Oh, I see - more "personal attacks" on secular humanism and the Left from nightbloom. Gwest, do you actually know the difference between the words attack and argument; insult and critique; critical commentary and ad hominem slur?

Clearly you don't.

In any case, I'm obviously wasting my time with you.

In any case, since you're not interested in discussing the subject matter, let me try my hateful, pathetic, obsessive best to get this thread back on track....(when I have a moment)...

As I understand it, the premise of the Da Vinci Code (and the whole story of Gnosticism) is that Christianity began as a ecumenical (i.e. “everyone’s welcome”) movement that made a self-conscious attempt to totally erase ethnic, social and gender barriers, to assert a new and radical equality for all men & women before God. The doctrine was an unprecendented creative combination of the influences then flooding into the Middle Eastern crossroad at the time: Judaism, Greek pagan philosophy, and Eastern fertility cults and Mother-Goddess worship.

According to this version of the story, Jesus’ ministry was not run by 12 Apostles, but rather by a whole assembly of men & women. Chief among the women was Jesus’ wife, Mary Magdalene, with whom Jesus had a normal conjugal heterosexual partnership (so the story goes). It was she, not Peter (Peter “The Rock” upon whom the scriptural Jesus conferred the leadership of his movement) who was his Number 2. She wasn’t a whore at all - She was the wife of the heir of David and the chosen successor to Jesus.

According to the Da Vinci Code (and Rosicrucian conspiracy theories, some Gnostic texts, etc.), after Jesus was drugged (“I thirst” he said, and was given vinegar) then taken down alive from the cross (after only three hours – people usually took days to die), he and his wife went into hiding (he made only a few discreet appearances afterwards - to his mother in Jerusalem and to Paul outside Damascus, for example) and his movement subsequently became co-opted as a result of a pernicious power-play by an ultra-conservative cadre among his followers. The narrative was re-written. Divinely-mandated authority was concentrated on the 12 male Apostles we're all familiar with, who alone could confer and pass on religious leadership (still referred to as the Apostolic Succession among Catholics and Eastern Orthodox – the “laying of hands” on the ordinands by the Bishop, an uninterrupted line of succession going right back to the first laying of hands by the original Apostles).

The re-birth or resurrection was re-scripted to be taken literally, not symbolically as in the sense of becoming a “new man or woman”. Mary Magdalene was written out of the narrative, and turned into a whore rather than the wife of the heir of David. The Pagan & Far-Eastern Female Principle (i.e. earth-cult, as opposed to sky-cult; fertility-cult as opposed to Neo-platonist Creation-cult) which until then had been a fully integrated theme of the “Jesus Movement” was totally purged and made heretical, often identified with Satan himself.

Thus, Christianity was gradually consolidated – “incorporated” - into a doctrinally solid bulwark that could be institutionalized and preserved....but that would also prove to be an unprecedented and devastatingly successful mote of power.

Then fragments of the original story started surfacing - first at Qumran (where the Essenes had settled by the Dead Sea...hence the "Dead Sea Scrolls)...then the findings at Nag Hamadi in Egypt (where the Gnostic Gospels were unearthed). The Gnostic gospels refer principally to the texts attributed to Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Judas - three "villains" of the orthodox narrative, given that Thomas was "the Doubter", Mary "the whore", and Judas "the traitor".

Unfortunately, nightbloom, it's you who should be embarrassed. Go back and actually read the ad hominem stuff you've posted, just today, about G West. He's done none of that, not once. I could care less about this argument, but when it comes to making it personal and calling people names, I'm sorry dude, but you're the problem.

Thanks for bringing us back to the nonsense after my effort to get it back on track, Alcibiades.

You're both out to lunch. Where's my name-calling, my slurs & my hateful ad hominem attacks? I just don't see it.

You asked for it.
from 52 minutes ago:

and, a bit of dripping sarcasm:

now stir in an ad hominem attack:

want some more:

now how about a little pot calling the kettle black:

and:

Do I need to go on - and that's just from this morning?

I could easily post a lot more of your own one-sided attacks on the the 'hateful' left but surely that's not necessary is it?

If you can't see what I'm getting at then you need to take a cold shower and read back over your own overheated emotional writing because I've just scratched the surface. Obviously G West has gotten under your not very thick skin in a pretty comprehensive way, dude.

Alcibiades, I could easily do the same, but I'll spare you. It takes little effort to cut-&-paste out of context.

I just read through the entire thread. I did spot two instances right near the top where may have miscontrued something Gwest had written and therefore jumped the gun. So I may have also had a hand in getting this thread off track.

However both you & Gwest have grossly mischaracterized my argument. My critique of the Left (Liberation Theology, appropriation of religious narrative, methods of constituency-building through inventive Oppression narratives) are not "hate" - they're legitimate points to introduce in a debate on religious narrative.

Equally valid was my point that the ideological Left takes a reductionist approach to Christianity (and religion), routinely reducing it to an unending catalogue of genocide, residential schools, burnings & inquisitions. That’s a reasonable assertion too - hardly "hate". Historically, the Left has always had an extremely problematic relationship with organizated religion - that's undeniable. Just look at the historical record - I didn't make it up.

However, I do acknowledge the contribution of the liberal wing of Christianity (which, as I’ve said so often, should be better accommodated by the secular liberal-Left in an effort to diminish the influence literalist fundamentalists).

You make a reference to reading me closely over several months & noting the same pattern -These are all legitimate arguments I've articulated before. Could it be that what your observing is simply the consistency of my critique?

In any case, I posted something just above (4 posts above this one...?) that was an attempt to re-introduce the original subject matter to the thread.

nightbloom
Choose to ignore, to quote a biblical analogy, the log in your own eye if you wish. I won't.

I don't think G West was ever interested in debating what he thinks is a waste of time. He was interested in drawing you out for possessing what he obviously feels is an intolerant attitude toward something he believes in quite strongly. I'm sure he will, in the end, be glad to see your grudging admission that people of faith have made important contributions to the ideas and achievements of progressive programs in the west.

You obviously prefer lecturing on esoteric subjects to a rapt audience; he, clearly, was more interested in an actual debate about ideas. As to your assertion about being consistent, I don’t think I have any problem agreeing with that idea either. Who was it that wrote ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?’

What else can I say, the evidence is there before us?

I, for my part, will read your post about the ‘sacred feminine’ and decide if I want to take that conversation any further, or not.

nightbloom,
I've got 20 minutes or so available so here goes:

My reading sees Gnosticism as much more concerned with the separation of matter, which is evil by its nature, from spirit which is good. The Gnostics hold that something evil - matter - could not have been created by a good God so 'that' God could not have created the world. They therefore postulate the existence of another god, a kind of false god, who is responsible for the creation of all the evil 'matter' in the universe - including humans' bodies.

Somewhere out there is also a true God; but the God of the old testament, the creator of fallen man, is identified with the Yahweh figure of the Hebrew Bible and he is either incompetent or malevolent.

Hardly a stretch for some readings of that text, imo.

Somehow, working behind the scenes, a figure called Sophia (your divine female) implanted her own essence into some men's souls. This is the Gnostic idea of a spark of the divine, sometimes called the pneuma.

I think Gnostics would believe that most humans don't actually share this spark of the divine and are doomed upon death to oblivion. Kind of a variation on the doctrine of the elect and also inherent in the Mormon cosmology. (Not far from what I see the gospel of Judas saying, from the material I've read about it - which isn't surprising since it is a Gnostic text after all.)

The main problem for the historical church with Gnosticism, in my opinion, has less to do with its rejection of the sacred feminine and far more to do with the idea that Christ could have ever had a body made of evil flesh from which he needed to be freed, as for example, the Judas Gospel suggests. The early church, basing its central myth upon the corporeal resurrection of Christ's body, needed early on to make certain that the ideas of those early Jewish or proto Christian adherents of the new religion got with the program from the start and stamped out or discouraged the Gnostics where and whenever possible. Opting for the dual nature of Christ as God and incorruptible man; a man of course who could not, according to those lights, have succumbed to the weakness of the flesh.

As to the business of the partially-crucified Christ, which is a necessary conceit for the ideas behind the Mary Magdalene/Christ union, I am aware of no serious scholarship anywhere that suggests the Romans were in the habit of using their preferred method of executing Jews in anything other than a comprehensive and life-extinguishing way.

However, if one wishes to be gullible, I can see little reason why the notion behind Brown’s book should be any less believable than the founding myth of Christ’s corporeal resurrection. I believe I’ve read passages from Josephus which describe many crosses hanging with their strange fruit of both Christians and Jews – but never any suggestion that a traveller ever returned alive from his sojourn on the cross.

Grimms Fairei tales,Hans Christian Anderson,Mother Goose,The BIBLE ...

Like , the Da Vinci Code ...written by humans with an imagination ...

So do we follow your imagination,my imagination,or what is provided by science

SIMPLETONS...willing to be thrown to the lions for a dream .

A concept ... unproven ... only , the words of the converted to go by ... like reading one of these threads and saying , i just spoke to god .

What planet are you living on, exactly?

That's always been my argument, which you'd know if you'd been reading me as closely as you say you have over the past several months. Regardless, since both of you have invalidated their (i.e. the moderate faithful's) contribution as "pathetic" and misguided (or at least their motivations), it's more than a little hypocritical on your part to bolster your non-argument with their example.

However, I will take your (somewhat late) mutual concession of the inherent usefulness of the progressive "moderate" wing of Christianity at face value. I also appreciate the acknowledgment that there's a rich intellectual, philosophic & philanthropic tradition there (and not just a catalogue of burnings & inquisitions). You have to admit that this is often totally glossed over in favour of blanket ideologically-motivated condemnation & blackwash.

As I've said so many times on this and other threads, that progressive wing should not be marginalized any futher, and should be brought back into the public discourse. I've provided the concrete example of the U.S. Democrats making this very effort after the 2000 loss.

I'll admit to being a little hard on Gwest, but your take on our exchange is totally one-sided and (I would argue) motivated by ideological partisanship. Moreover, you still haven't rebutted my reasoned critique of the Left's approach which the two of you have slurred mischaracterized as hateful & ad hominem. You should put your money where you mouth is, as I have done.

Thanks for finally responding to the subject matter of the thread, btw.

nightbloom
I give up. You live permanently in Aristophanes Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Not only do you refuse to admit your own part in personalizing our discussions during the past week but also you pretend I've been doing nothing but attacking Christianity.

If you had actually read our exchanges you couldn't possibly write what you've written this morning. I have been trying, by several means, to get you to admit that the left, and especially the left in this country, has a strong tradition of working through and with Christian activism. Why else would you think I was continually bringing it up and pointing out that your view of a monolithic left was a misapprehension?

As to your inability to confront your own intellectual blindness, as pointed out by Alcibiades yesterday - that's no surprise.

For my own part, again if you actually had taken the time to read what I've written you'd note I have never said I had a problem with the central 'love' theme of Christ's message. I disagree with what I think is the delusion that that message has anything to do with what I see as a false belief in anything called the 'divine' - whether that is called Yahweh, Allah or the sacred feminine. It is precisely the reliance on 'guidance' from some authority 'outside' history and time and space, again in my opinion, that has led to the terrors of the Crusades, the butchery of colonization in the Americas and Africa, including a ‘Christian’ justification of slavery among other things, and the current evil of Islamic terrorism and its polar opposite, western economic hegemony. If you know anything of Holocaust studies, you’d also recognize that there is a strong argument among scholars that the traditional animosity of the Church (in its several manifestations) toward the Jews is frequently seen as central to the line of causation which has led from the crucifixion to the ‘final solution’.

Anyway, too bad this discussion couldn’t have moved along lines that would have been a bit more satisfactory for each of us.
Cheers.

Yeah, not our best thread. I’ll assume some of the blame. But I don’t inhabit a “Cuckoo Land”, as you suggest.

To be fair, I did try to highlight the progressivist element when I linked the Franciscans of Western Canada and the Benedictine Sisters (who have been very outspoken on social justice issues) as examples. The Franciscans in particular are often identified with the liberal and environmentalist applications of Catholicism (St. Francis can be credibly called the first “environmentalist” as well as the patron Saint of animals and wildlife). That fell by the wayside, however (and I’ve talked about all that stuff at length before - again, let’s be fair here).

Whether the motivating reasons underlying their contribution is fallacious or “pathetic” is immaterial. I see your point, but I don’t see any more verity among the prevailing modern ideological dogmas now motivating altruistic endeavours and “good works” (and “bad works” too – plenty of those). Whatever tools we use to craft our personal “big picture” is ultimately pure contingency, be they of a religious, ideological or psychological-self-help variety. The secular humanists have no more of a monopoly on truth than anyone else, and same goes for the liberal end of the political spectrum. I’ve been over-sensitive about perceived attacks on the faith-based contingency, and you’ve overdone your response to perceived attacks on your ideology-based contingency. We’ve been talking past each other.

I’ve tried to render up a clear defence of both why accommodating moderate religion is important for a healthy secular society, as well as a defence of why I think the liberal-Left has gotten carried away over the past thirty years or so, to the detriment of both political discourse and society (ref. my comments regarding “phase II” of the Culture Wars, and the relatively new brand of evangelical fundamentalism that has emerged as a result in North America).

You have criticized my viewpoint on this as somehow hateful & unreasonable, but haven’t actually engaged it. Alcibiades was quick to jump on the bandwagon, but he also has refused to justify his response to my criticism of liberal politics on this issue.

In any case, I know you had no intention of doing so initiatially, but I nevertheless encourage you (as I did Alcibiades) to take a stab at the subject matter of this article.

nightbloom
That, in my opinion, is dialogue. No name-calling, no dismissiveness of the other side. Finally, at long last we're getting somewhere. Thank you.

I think you've been burned by what I'd freely admit is a certain blindness typical of some members of the academic Left (and here I will, for the purposes of comparison, use the capital L). UBC is, or at least was, a very intolerant place when it comes to religion. It was years ago when I was there and doing most of my studying in what was then a very decent small library of medieval Christian texts at St Mark's College that I learned about how single (and narrow) minded academia there could be.

I sympathize. Belief in either god or ‘no god’ can be a terrible burden. Moreover, there is always a tendency for it to push one in a direction better avoided.

Anyway, as I said earlier, cheers. I have no interest in the minutiae of further discussing a subject (Christian myths of various provenances) upon about which I have already spent too much time and effort.
Onward and upward.

It’s possible you’re correct about how my perspective was shaped, although my whole milieu was and remains radically different from yours. You need to take that into account.

My “formative encounter” with the Left was as an undergraduate at Carleton University, where the prevailing motto was “Be Political, Not Polite”, and the AIDS epidemic was in full swing. Like most adolescent gay men I was a “natural” leftist simply by virtue of the fact that it was the only conceptual framework that seemed offer an explanation, a niche, and an identity we could finally grasp onto. And it seemed to validate and tap into the deep-seated alienation we all felt. I went through a homoactivist phase (I wasn’t a real radical, although I certainly kept company with the real ones - ACT UP was in its screeching heyday then). It was a militant and misanthropic environment which encouraged rejection of anything that threatened the fragile construct.

The fallacy underlying our assumptions only insinuated themselves very slowly. I watched a lot of friends undergo a kind of incremental collapse, usually through a combination of drug-&-sex addiction and a sustained long-term emotional deprivation that in my opinion is totally unique to the gay male experience. The improvised identity and conceptual “toolbox” we’d been provided with had failed to equip us with what we needed to create a liveable paradigm. It was riddled with half-truths that didn't stand up to the pressures a lot of us were exposed to. Some people managed to make it work, so I don't want to imply that the experiment was a total failure, but there’s no question that a lot of people didn’t.

When I started to undergo the same yucky “wearing-down” process (which started as an ugly high-octane nihilism driven by serial stranger-sex and club-drugs), I had my crash - which thankfully occurred much earlier in the downward curve than some of the messes I've seen - and eventually began a process of “ressourcement” – a return to the roots of things to recover what was good & healthy & life-sustaining within the frameworks I and my cadre had previously rejected in its entirety. I learned that a new paradigm had to somehow be improvised out of what conceptual tools I'd been provided with.

For me, that’s probably the emotional anima behind my “conservatism” - although it may surprise you that I actually have always voted NDP provincially, and Liberal in federal elections, with one exception on the latter score when Joe Clark came back to lead the Tories in the 2000 election.

nightbloom
Very different to be sure: My politics is all prairie populism; community based - people helping people and working together toward common goals within the structure of a family-oriented social life - a relic of the past now in the place where that tradition started.

I won't comment about your own experience, it would be neither fair nor helpful. It sounds a bit like an attempt to write your own story on a tabula rasa and while I've had some desperate and lonely times in my life I cannot imagine what that must have been like, so there you go.

I don't much need or believe in paradigms outside of academia..., I see all that as a kind of formalistic game. Something that can be spun or twisted pretty much any way you want in accordance with the circumstances and the specific requirements of the job being done. I sensed some of that in you. Was I wrong? There’s a Richard Russo novel called Straight Man about academia that you should read if you haven’t already – better (well at least more up to date) than Amis' Lucky Jim which I’ll assume you have read.

Don’t mean this to sound as though I’m giving you advice; seems to me you’re getting things figured out on your own. Life and the way I think it ought to be lived - and the things that give it meaning - is just what works for me - I don't look for nor pretend to be a model or an exemplar for anybody - ever. I suppose a lot comes from what I think I know and what I've read but a good deal of it also comes from what I feel so it has an emotional side too.

Any politics that treats the opposition as the ‘other’ is problematic.

It’s a problem for both the left and the right. I think that's the core of the Christian message, just as it is the essential kernel of humanism and all the rest is superfluous.

Without empathy, there can be no community and without community, the idea of humanity loses its strength. Harper’s seeming lack of empathy is the single most important element in my activism.

In the end I cannot put myself in a place where what I do (apart from self defence and caring for my family's simple needs) could ever be a justification to deny some other human being what they might also need on a collective level. The way we live now in the West does that to four fifths of the world - it must be stopped. I will be a leftist now because it has corrective as its primary goal. Bill Gates notwithstanding, the lip service of the right to actually caring about anything other than hanging onto its advantage is, to me, such an obvious lie that I can see no honest man accepting it. The justifications are simply a way to make the compromised feel better.

And that is why I wrote some weeks ago about what I saw as the undischarged duty of every honest intellectual in the American military. Thankfully, it seems, more military men are experiencing that kind of an epiphany with each passing week. One ought never be a tool of a lie either.

I'd admit the Left, just like the Right - when it becomes an end, instead of a means to an end, can be blind and dangerous and dogmatic - as can the church whenever its mission has become its own hierarchy and not all the people of God. For my own part, right now, I see the pendulum as having swung so far to the right that an effort to get re-involved on my part (something I haven't done for years) has been a conscious choice. The Tyee is just one small step in that process; a way, as it were, to try and identify a community with which, I hope, more can be done.
Have a good weekend.

Geez, gone a week and the place goes to hell...

Anyhoo, nightbloom, I read your overview of the Da Vinci book and that pretty well sums it up I think.

One thing I disagree with is I think the story says Jesus was removed from the cross at night so he was probably on it for more than a few hours. Also, that he was probably crucified on private land so that spectators couldn't get close enough to see the details.

I don't know about the revealing himself to Paul thing near Damascus but isn't there a story that Jesus went either east to india or south to Egypt while Mary and their offspring went west to France? And that there was a medieval Jewish leader in southern France, Narbonne I think it was, that traced his lineage back to the line of David. The idea being that that lineage was traced through Jesus's and Mary's offspring.

I will admit I found Holy Blood, Holy Grail to be a much better story than Da Vinci what with the Templars, Godfroi de Bouillion, Cathars and Merovingians all running amok but I might be alone in that.

Conspiracy Alert : Okay, not really a conspiracy but a little "out there". I was fascinated about the story of Oak Island when I read about it at the age of 10 and have always wondered if that's where the Templar "treasure" is.

Someone above mentioned Tim Harper's book. I like Harper's columns, I do, but I can't buy the idea that Jesus was a myth. I realize we know very little of who he was but even guys like Titus and Josephus mention him. I don't know why he would get the admittedly rare mention in Roman writings if he was just a myth.

Oh and I finished reading the Jesus Papers. Turns out Baigent has seen proof that Jesus got off the cross alive but can't produce it because its in the hands of a private collector. Nuts, ain't that always the way? :-)

Yes, I would agree with the tabula rasa analogy in the sense that it represents a subjective ex post facto ordering of a string of occurances & events. That imposed ordering is based partly on emotional response and partly on retrospective reasoning. I didn't have a clue what was going on what all that was actually happening.

Those events could otherwise be seen as a random & inert series of points in time. All such attempts at self-conception are necessarily distorted, like cartoonish reflections in those warped carnival mirrors. It approximates our real appearance, with some areas magnified to exagerration and others truncated or omitted altogether. I think our relative sanity can be gauged in part by our individual ability to minimize the inevitable distortion between our contingent self-image (or self-conception) and the real thing.

We probably all go through that process on an ongoing basis, although most people are smart enough not to try to summarize their synthesis in a couple paragraphs on a public blog (!!)

Interesting point regarding the pendulum. You think it's swung out too far to the Right. It probably has in a global sense. I always felt it was still way out on the Left, because I occupy one of the few remaining "bubbles" in which the discourse of the Left still exerts a kind of hegemony.

Interesting post, Frank. I read some of Barbara Thiering's stuff on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which could also be of interest. Being a non-specialist myself, she seemed like a credible commentator, although when I mentioned her name to a friend of mine (a Theology graduate of St. Mark's at UBC) he just scoffed. Something tells me a lot of this stuff is still going to be argued about five hundred years from now.

nightbloom and, hopefully, Frank.
This is, of necessity, totally off subject. Once again the lack of some kind of an effective bulletin board here upon which to post things worthy of note and discussion that do not naturally fall under one of the existing available categories is a serious Tyee shortcoming. I post this here largely because I suspect you'd be interested generally, nightbloom; and, for Frank, given your earlier contributions to the debate about recent events in France, this will almost certainly be interesting since it more or less completely confirms what you (and I, incidentally) had been writing on the subject at the time those two threads were still active.

In any case, this is a link to a long and useful review article from the May 11 issue of the New York Review of Books entitled : France: The Children's Hour by William Pfaff.

You two and anyone else who's interested and stumbles by this thread in passing can find it here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18978

nightbloom - thoughtful words this morning. I'd still urge you to move away from the academic jargon a bit more - that's not criticism, just think it gets in the way of meaning. I'm a disciple of Orwell's I guess. Check out the Russo book if you get a chance; you'll find it's worth a chuckle.
later.

Thanks for the link - Interesting article. "Declineism" seems to be an ongoing theme for France at least since German Unification, if not prior to that since Napoleaon's final defeat.

But the notion that France is the canary in our collective mine shaft is an unsettling one. Perhaps their anxieties are what awaits us here in the "Anglo-American" world as the power shifts decisively far-Eastward over the next generation, while demographic flows bring the East into Western urban centres in increasingly overwhelming numbers.

...and while we're posting interesting (but off-topic) links:

http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/harris.html

Perhaps not 'that' much off topic. Thx.

http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/ohanlon.html

This was a good one too, imo.

nightbloom
Don't you find that Harris's argument about the value of the marriage tradition, given what we 'know' as opposed to what we 'say' about it, to be rather over-gilding the lily?

He makes a lot of claims about the value of Christian marriage tradition without actually making the case that individuals who grow up to be moral exemplars are necessarily products of that tradition or, contrarily, that they are not what they grow to be (at least I would argue this) as a result of a wide range of often poorly understood factors.

Seems to me he starts from a position (about the marriage institution) that may not withstand close historical analysis and makes unproved claims about its “transgenerational” value or its status as part of a “uniquely reliable visceral code.” If you're going to claim something is philosophically reliable you have to do a lot more than give it a name. You have to prove that it is reliable and not necessarily visceral at all. My first reaction to the smell of parmesan cheese as a young child was to conclude that it was viserally unpalatable; now I love the stuff.

Further, given the ‘traditional’ attitude toward homosexuality in western culture, who can really say what a ‘traditional’ gay marriage would be all about anyway or what its ‘transgenerational’ value would actually be, say three generations from now when several tens of thousands of children raised in such families have had (or not had) families of their own? Like most arguments against extending civil rights to new groups of individuals who had formerly been excluded, about all Harris really has to say (not all that differently from, for example, white middle class soldiers in the US Army during the second world war who said that all blacks smelled) is that he feels uncomfortable and holds strongly there is something ‘wrong’ with gay marriage. The essay is a long, redundant and carefully constructed argument for continued discrimination, nothing more, and not very convincing in my view.

Well, the article's thrust can be seen in a number of different ways. Setting gay marriage aside for a moment, the article pivots on the question of the nature & utility of tradition - the notion that tradition can evolve in response to needs that are not necessarily obvious or apparent (this doesn't necessarily discount the invention of political tradition, like the modern monarchy...re. Eric Hobsbawm's argument, which is essentially Marxist, but this time the Left gets it right...pardon the pun). The proposition that Harris is putting forward with regarding to gay marriage is the development of a new tradition (cemented over time) rather than the co-optation of a pre-existing one which may or may not fit. It's been my experience that Harris' take on this particular issue is (perhaps surprisingly) the majority opinion among gay men outside of ideologically-mobilized (i.e. liberal-social democrat-Left) circles. Organized interests have simply used the issue as a spearhead to further their programme, irrespective of the manifest ambivalence of the actual constituency they're claiming to represent.

I'm a slightly ambivalent supporter of gay marriage. Ambivalent, because like a lot of my peers, my argument in favour is actually a negative one: marriage will help provide an alternative to some of the vicious circles we get funnelled into en masse. Gay culture is replete with traditions - unfortunately they're traditions most of us now want to get away from. An institutionalized, sanctioned counter-weight to encompass the aspiration for a stable and committed life is what we're seeking - and marriage is what we've latched onto. But let's face it - the notion that marriage is the solution is an untested hypothesis. We just hope that it will have that result - we can't claim to know it. The whole area is experimental, and anyone who tries to say otherwise has watched far too much Will-&-Grace. To apply the "civil rights" discourse is to take the debate in a whole other direction. Not only is the application of "civil rights" to sexuality a highly questionable proposition, but most would say that the demands of "civil rights" were met with the extension of basic common-law benefits to same-sex couples on par with their hetero equivalents. The state fulfilled its duty. "Marriage" is something else entirely, sacramental and symbolic, over which the state originally had little or no purview. The state's role vis Ã* vis marriage was strictly reactive for most of our history.

Of course, all this conveniently side-steps the proverbial gorilla in the bedroom. The assumption underlying the pro gay marriage argument is that homosexuality is simply the other side of the coin - the alter-ego of heterosexuality. But this too is an untested and unproven hypothesis (although I don't disagree with it, personally). We still don't know what homosexuality is. It's not a choice - we know that. We can assume it is a complex mixture of innate predisposition and an early (first two or three years) response to ambient signals and stresses. Sure, there's the whole "spectrum" we all fit into...but what is normative? And how should policy - a blunt instrument - be used to reflect normativity while accomodating the many variations of non-self-destructive and non-anti-social human sexual behaviour?

I hope we get it right. But your commentary above - which I do actually agree with in the end - makes a lot of ideologically-motivated assumptions. We should acknowledge that.

But let's not get into gay marriage now - What I really appreciated about the article was Harris exposition of the nature of tradition, which provides a strong counterpoint to the prevailing deconstructionist or neo-Marxist interpretation.

nightbloom
It's interesting you found his discussion about the value of tradition useful. I did too. In fact, I thought the whole gay marriage debate was kind of a gorilla in the closet. He introduced it at the start, with an ad hominem slap at Beverly McLaughlin and then brought it up again in his conclusion as part of what was really an emotional plea for preserving only his own kind of "Christian" marriage (with another whack at Madame Justice).

I know nothing about the state of gay politics but I do have a bias for human rights - that's the source of my position on the subject; that and the belief that, whatever else homosexuality is, it is not a choice. What gay people do with 'marriage' is up to them. Whether or not it will have some normative value for the 'community' is unimportant to me since I'd expect even the idea of a 'gay community' might wither and die as gay people begin to see themselves in different roles within the broader culture; as immigrants and their families always have when they travel to a new land.

The interesting part of the essay, and his argument, was how difficult it actually is to make anything but an emotion-based case for hanging onto most traditions. That, and his decision to ignore the fact that traditions themselves are far from constant. New traditions of various normative values are being created and dropped all the time. Some of them, like marriage, are evolving into something very different from what they started out as being.
I think the 'value' he places on hanging onto the kind of marriage that's meaningful for his community is perfectly reasonable; his attempt to urge society as a broader entity to use the blunt instrument of policy to freeze the evolution of the whole institution is a mistake that will, ultimately, fail.

If marriage only survives as a Christian artifact it will have lost, in my opinion, whatever normative worth it once had as an exemplar for the culture as a whole. In fact, as a sociological artifact, given how many heterosexual couples behave around the ‘idea’ of marriage now, I wonder if gay relationships may end up being more of an exemplar for the institution’s values than heterosexual relationships. There is a whole debate here about the role of hedonistic sex in society which I'd suggest is far more vital to the continued stability of this culture than anything we've talked about concerning marriage - but that's another question.

Even his points about the usefulness of marriage as the only ‘recipe’ for the way in which the current generation manages to pass its traditions and ethics on to its children and grandchildren doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We’ve both noted, more than once, the rootlessness of the current crop of young people. Is this solely a consequence of the atomization of the family? I doubt it. It is a huge nut that won't just be broken with the nutcracker of traditional marriage.

The point for me is that public policy should not be afraid to have objectives: things like a decent life for all citizens, good health care at all stages of life, opportunity provided for everyone independent of their background. Focusing too narrowly on the role of a particular set of artifacts in working toward these general objectives creates, in my opinion, more problems than it solves. Mothers (or fathers) caring for babies and children need help to see their role as part of something greater, something unselfish and concerned with the future, in my opinion. Community can be encouraged in all kinds of ways, not just as a function of the idea of traditional family. As an example, Harper’s budget today is guaranteed to fail on this score since it comes from exactly the same mistaken place as Harris’ essay – in my view.

Yes, Harris is definitely presenting a solid conservative argument in favour of evolutionary change rather than government-mandated dirigisme, and he is undoubtedly drawing on conservative sources to do so. Some of the counter-arguments you raise are actually addressed in his article, which may not be satisfactory to you since they are from a decidely conservative perspective.

In the end, ideologues on either side will probably have to accommodate themselves to fact that the truth of the matter will likely be found somewhere in the middle. For my part, I actually think our whole take on sexuality is only beginning a huge fluctuation right now, and any legislated adaptations we take now to adjust to that flux will be overtaken by developments as the decades turn over. This is why the Ancients’ view of sexuality is actually much more sophisticated than our own in a lot of ways. Sex was about behaviours, not identities, and therefore our current monocular focus on sexual identity would seem totally foreign to them. Sex was something you did in a perverse variety of ways, not something you channeled your whole self through. That change can’t be blamed on post-modernism though – it's a by-product of Romanticism and the way that era (which some say we’re still caught up in) altered our collective self-consciousness. In some ways, there’s a logic to fundamentalist arguments that "marriage" should be entirely predicated on reproduction, with the state doing whatever else it has to do to take care of the property-rights aspect of new partnerships. But if that’s the case, we’d have to go way back to the Essene model of community, marriage and heterosexual relations to make it credible, and that just ain’t gonna happen.

Question: do you actually believe the perspective on the issue that he is articulating is antithetical to the advancement of human rights per se?

If so, this represents a radical shift in how we interpret human rights. Is not the rubric of “human rights” then being used in an ideologically ‘interested’ manner to spearhead something for which it was never really intended? I actually don’t know too many people who regarded gay marriage as a “human right” outside of the ideologically mobilized circles I mentioned earlier. Once common law recognition was extended across the board (resolving salient issues relating to property, access, parenthood) it actually becomes a very difficult argument to hold together from the "human rights" perspective.

nightbloom
I have virtually no knowledge of gay politics or gay issues. I always thought it was a human rights issue and I'm the only one I speak for, I'm no avatar of or for the left so I can't say how I came to that view either. It just seemed to logically fall into that category and I moved on from there. If anything, it probably grew from a legal and ethical stand than from anything else...certainly not a Christian one.

I recognize that there is a case to be made for holding 'religious' marriage (at least one view of what that means) as a separate good and creating another category of relationship, both hetero and homo-sexual, which does not take that into account. It's here that I'd tend to agree with Harris from a traditional, if not a Christian, point of view. I think the 'institution' of marriage is worth saving and I think it can provide a useful vehicle for socially and culturally worthwhile ends - through things like grants, tax advantages and the like - which make all society a better place. I see no reason why extending the purview of whom marriage applies to is inimical to that objective. I think shattering whatever is inclusive about the practice by subdividing it into a range of categories: gay; childless; Christian; non-Christian; economic; etc. would be far more dangerous to its future and its utility in the event anyway.
I am not, I'd hasten to add, a promoter of the idea that marriage can only be Christian and am perfectly sanguine about all the other ways currently available that two people can become hitched.

On the other hand, the - to me obvious - drawbacks of continued (or a return to in the Canadian context) marginalization and discrimination against a minority are far more harmful than any possible damage to the general cultural norms that gay people marrying could ever deliver.

I still disagree about Harris's interpretation of history. I just don't accept his point of view (and I decry his lack of evidence) about the role of Christian marriage as a fundamental element of our western culture. What he says, for example in the context of the slave/master relationship for about 250 years of American social history, is just not sustainable without a lot more support than he provides. We aren’t, and haven’t been, living in anything more than a nominally Christian society for generations; today, despite protestations to the contrary, is no different.

It looks as if this thread will soon disappear. Perhaps we can take it up later in another location.

Yeah, I'd be just as happy if he'd chosen a better example to develop his ideas regarding the nature of tradition. That was published in the Spring-Summer 2005, so I imagine there were editorial pressures to do something on the gay marriage shennanigan. The history of marriage has been pretty varied, with many high & lows. It has by no means been a universal institutional constant through the ages and across the classes in the West. Go back far enough & we're all the descendents of bastards - now there's an edifying thought.

It sounds like our viewpoint is fairly similar on that issue (the place of marriage today). I'm vaguely committed to the idea of gay marriage, but I totally understand some of the more cool-headed conscientious objections. Who knows - maybe it is a human right to have intimate adult partnerships recognized by the state, above on beyond simple common law entitlements. But I do have a confession though: I cringe inwardly to no end whenever some big bearded bloke introduces me to his 'husband'. We've gotta find another word, boyz!

I agree with the last point. Historians will likely refer to our current patch of history as the beginning of the 'Post-Christian era' - in fact I think they already are. What will replace it, I have no idea....David Beckham's Immaculate Complexion, the Olsen twins' Bodily Consumption into Heaven, and the revelation that Paris Hilton is the last living descendant of Jesus Christ - the Holy Grail incarnate.

I have to admit that is a little much - the ‘hubby’ label. Seems like everyone's busy using 'partner' these day in all kinds of connotations left, right and centre so I expect that'll be de rigueur for all relationships soon. Sullivan seems to prefer fiancé or boyfriend.

Did you read the Todd Gitlin piece posted on the sideboard somewhere here - 'The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the Academic Left' from the Chronicle of Higher Education? It's an awful essay/review in my opinion, an anarchic and discursive mess. Makes Harris's piece, despite its shortcomings, look like holy writ in comparison.
Until next time; btw, whatever means available to get rid of the Olsen twins I'm all in favour of. Paris Hilton I’d keep around – for her delicious tendency toward totally non-ironic self-mockery if nothing else. Somehow, I see her and Anderson Cooper as bizarre twins – strange, but still oddly compelling fruits of too damn much money and privilege.

It's link location is actually called "How baby boomers burst their own legal bubble" on the sideboard - just realized my reference was maybe too enigmatic.

Everything written here is predicated on the "belief" that someone named Jesus actually existed as a real person.

Baloney, writes Tom Harpur, in The Pagan Christ. A former Anglican priest and longtime religion writer at the Toronto Star, he makes a convincing argument that the entire Jesus story is an elaborate myth invented by "Christians" and is a ripoff of ancient paganism.

Read it yourself, and weep, for this whacked out world in which fundamentalists of all stripes are forcing us back into the Dark Ages. I long for the day when facts, not myths, rule our world and we can advance as a civilization. Doubt it will happen in the next 1,000 years given the track record.

From the travel and tourism industry's point of view, The Da Vinci Code film is an opportunity to bring increased tourism and travel to the UK. But how sincere is this and what should Christians think about it?

This author's point of view is practical: sometimes 'bad' publicity is better than no publicity. Millions of people will see the film and many of them will come to Europe to visit locations used in the film. They will enter genuine holy sites and while there perhaps they will put aside the film's mixed message and have time to consider the beauty of the sites and think about God.

We at HolidayKeys would certainly recommend spending time near each of the sites. There are lots of bed and breakfasts and holiday cottages for rent around Lincoln Cathedral and Rosslyn Chapel. Even the north-west of Paris where Chateau de Villette is, there are French holiday villas.