The Gnostic Gospels were found buried in a jar in 1945 by a farmer digging around in the dirt. Similarly, a reader was cleaning out some old papers when he stumbled upon an ancient scroll from 2009 called I Am Darwinian Man, Destroyer of Worlds! The maladroit title alone made me doubt its authenticity, but it turns out I am responsible. I prepared myself to wince, and scanned the content.
By the way, I only bring this up because it touches on our theme of the religion of the anti- and irreligious, for I maintain that it is literally impossible for a human being to not be religious, except in rare cases of a birth defect such as autism (in other words autism is to reading the dark side of the face what atheism is to reading interiority as such).
Now, what do I mean when I say that human beings cannot not be religious? Well, first of all, there are the mundane historical, prehistorical, anthropological, and empirical facts of the matter. Man and the concept of God co-arise, and last I checked, no atheistic culture had ever been discovered.
Yeah, well, so what: they’re primitive, and we’re not!
Guess again, proglodyte. We’ll deal with you later. But every psychologist knows -- or did know, before the discipline was taken over by woke proglodytes -- that, subjectively speaking, we all sit on a volcano of primitive ideas and impulses that can go off at any time.
Having said that, I would no longer say it that way, because it implies a division in what is by definition indivisible (or simple), AKA the soul. Still, it can feel this way, for example, when we are being goaded by impulses or lured by temptations that mean us no good.
I used to conceptualize the ego and unconscious as a boat atop the ocean. Now I would say it’s more like a cloud in the sky, insofar as a cloud is just the visible aspect of a total meteorological process.
Ultimately, I would say this complementary relation extends all the way up and into God, except it's a tri-complementarity, hence the old saying, "three's a cloud."
All deusrespect intended, but I maintain that there is an aspect of God that is “unknown to himself,” but only in a qualified way and a manner of speaking and by way of distant analogy. Nor do I expect anyone else to agree with me. Rather, this question is left to the prudence or lack thereof of the individual Raccoon.
Nevertheless, if you want to know what could be “unknown” to or "in" God, it is this: Creativity, with a capital C. Better yet, all caps: CREATIVITY. No, go boldly: CREATIVITY. It comes down to what we mean by this word, and whether the thing (or activity) to which it refers is really Real.
Or rather, just how real is creativity? Note that it can never be reduced to logical entailment, for it is a true leap of and into novelty.
Now, they say “God makes all things new.” In fact, this is said in the penultimate chapter of the ultimate book of the New Testament, and is followed by an intriguing image of a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the lamb.
I have no idea how orthodox this might be, but I like to think of God as a kind of eternal spring, or nonlocal metacosmic center from which everything ultimately flows in an endlessly creative manner.
And water itself is a key and recurrent image throughout the Bible, notably appearing in the first and last chapters. In between there are rivers, a big flood, fountains, exodus, baptism, and more. I am poured out like water, a well of living water springing up into everlasting life, etc., etc.
Lately I’ve had an idea for another book I’ll never write, called Fringe Catholicism (or Christianity, if you prefer). Of course, I am referring to this side of the fringe, not the other side, which would land one in the hot water of heresy. But the question is, just how far out can one get before one is outside the church?
Pretty, pretty far, it turns out. You might say that doctrine provides us with the chords which provide the musical structure and foundation, but that we are free to improvise within these limits. One of the surprising discoveries of my life is just how creatively weird orthodoxy can be, and I’m so sure Chesterton would agree with me that I won’t even bother quoting him.
Example. I cite this one because it goes to the seemingly repugnant idea that God “changes.” It’s from a book by Norris Clarke called The Philosophical Approach to God:
Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous “improvisation” of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now…. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but contemporaneous with the actual and ongoing development of the world.
Yes, I am well aware of the traditional counter-arguments, and there is more to my story, but I’m sticking to it. Meanwhile, I gotta run...
9 comments:
Okay, a couple of quotes by GKC:
Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.... We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
One has only to observe children whose minds haven't been stunted by too much screen time. Their entire day is constant creativity, sometimes repetitive, often puzzling, occasionally hilarious, but nevertheless a flow which ends (for the outside observer, at least) only when they fall asleep, and begins anew the moment they awake.
Be as children, and millstones around the necks of those who would harm us!
Ha - that brings forth the image of a kid in full tantrum going full spaghetti mode when an adult tries to pick him up.
But the question is, just how far out can one get before one is outside the church?
That right there IS the million dollar question, isn't it? Schisms within the Church, and questions regarding the who is in it and who is not in it, which arose even prior to the Church existing, plague the followers of the teachings of Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic church claims to hold the one key which unlocks the door to Him, and they do hold aloft a large umbrella, but not all who do not hold to Roman Catholic dogma are heretics, and I think NT Scripture, and the words of the Messiah himself, support such a contention. I look forward to further musings on the question.
Excellent:
"The people trying to purge the public square of normal debate are doing so out of fear. That fear comes from a lack of confidence and that is driven by a sharp decline in intellect. The Great Fear we are experiencing is mostly due to a growing intellectual darkness that is consuming the liberal class that controls the institutions of cultural production.
"The American university is awash in cash, so the administrators are free to indulge the whims of the infantilized faculty. In fact, all of the selection pressure is in favor of the sorts of people who fall for these ridiculous academic fads. Absurdity and stupidity have become moral signifiers on campus. Empiricism and probity are now seen as the sins of the white power structure. Acting white is now the greatest sin, so the inhabitants seek to produce the most antiwhite fads possible."
And this, which goes to the insane Religion of the Irreligious:
"This is the mindset of a primitive man, terrified of the world around him, so he embraces various rituals and incantations to provide him protection from the unknown. Instead of chanting a magic phrase to invoke the gods, the modern progressive chants 'racism' and 'fascism' to chase away the evil spirits they are sure lurk in the shadows. This is why public debate has suddenly become impossible."
I'm suddenly reminded of the occasional video or photo one comes across, of some rural third-world militia practicing driving and firing a "tank" which consists of a bunch of wood saplings lashed together in the rough outline of a tank. Or the cargo cultists who make an "air traffic control tower" out of scaffolded planks in order to summon the airplanes back to the island. Same thing, right?
Yes, a crude attempt to synthesize and reanimate the dead fragments of the very reality they dismembered and discarded.
" Nevertheless, if you want to know what could be “unknown” to or "in" God, it is this: Creativity, with a capital C. Better yet, all caps: CREATIVITY. No, go boldly: CREATIVITY. It comes down to what we mean by this word, and whether the thing (or activity) to which it refers is really Real. "
Picture a sculptur chiseling away at the marble until in time the polished face appears. Were the initial strikes that revealed only rough shapes in the marble, somehow ...'wrong'? Did the finished sculpture somehow contradict its beginning? People are fascinating.
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