Posted by The Happy Tutor
Such is the fruit of the Reformation. Would that Luther had been less headstrong. Once you start drawing differences and making a church around them you can never again be Catholic, in the best sense. It seems to me that as punishment for heresy all the prostestant denominations should be made to live with one another making common cause, rapture and all. You can't solve the craziness of Protestantism, all these sects of enthusiasts choosing their doctrine as if it were a consumer durable, by just shunning your brothers and sisters in apostacy. Embrace them, Rev Jerome Jowells and all. Either that or denounce them, but please do not leave it with these passive aggressive strategies of endless exclusion. Catholicism is one, whole and entire. As soon as we had two, then we might just as well add "etc." Where does it end, but with each sinner his own church? Don't you agree. Akma? This whole notion of Protestantism is, as Weber noted, just consumerism writ large. Once you countenance this business of the inner light, you are stuck with these Rapture Ready zealots. They are your brothers and sisters. You either embrace and correct them or they will bring disgrace to the whole of Protestanism.
Sadly, Im not sure what the remedy might be, sir. I doubt that we honor the Artisan by smashing the shards into ever-smaller bits. And backward-gazing regret for whats lost wont restore anything.
Weve inherited the crystalline shards of an exquisite chalice, now shattered. Each shard may hold in its arc a bit of the wine that once would have brimmed the cup but what would hold the pieces together, even if we had the will to reunite them? It would take a miracle.
Posted by: AKMA | October 09, 2005 at 03:40 PM
Wow. Thanks, AKMA. A wonderful parable. Yet the logic is so weak. The Artisan crafts a perfect cup. To smash the pieces ever smaller dishoners Him. Yet - what of the first blow, from which all Protestanism descends?
The sects, since they disagree, can all be wrong, but cannot all be right, if they speak of a God who is One.
What has happened in the Church(es) that they are so unwilling to discuss openly their disagreements? It reminds of Doctors who close ranks when any one of them are sued.
Don't the Protestant denominations have an obligation to the rest of us, let alone to the Maker, to reign in one another's excesses? Surely, you are a specialist in the nuances of sin. And the sins of pride are so flagrant. Why it that the high church tolerates the low? Why not include them, if only to cast them out gain in some ritual fashion? How can common decency and public morality have come so far apart from the Church(es)? Where can we turn for moral leadership if not to the Church(es)? The postmodern humanities?
I think maybe we have brought peace at too high a price. It would seem, from their covetousness, spritiual pride, and worhsip of false gods (like the market) that many of the Rapture Ready are in peril of their immortal souls. Don't men and women of the cloth have an obligation to speak up lest these lambs, admittedly of an adjacent flock, be fleeced, sold, and butchered for wordly ends? While their Shepherd leads us all to slaughters.
Posted by: Tutor | October 09, 2005 at 04:00 PM
Parsifal gets up in the morning and, obeying his instructions to follow the sun, moves steadily eastward.
At noon he rests. Then mounts again, and travels to the west.
Here we go - here we are.
A miracle that happens every day loses its charge and tingle.
We take much for granted, now, that having gone without we'd accept as a divine gift with trembling awe.
The humdrum sky, the so-so flight of birds, the inconsequential sound and rhythm of children's laughter.
Also now there rises an adolescent worship of entropy as the excuse for spiritual onanism, its cynical heresies that mirror older dead-end paths.
The emptiness out there into which we stick our glued-together wooden swords and slash blindly, just to see what happens.
Without a center the universe may indeed come flying apart; but that doesn't mean that just because we can't find it there is no center there.
And meanwhile the tree of life is intellectual property, patented, branded, proprietary - only for the elect.
Too much gold, too many jewels in that chalice as it was. It was heavy, and empty - more valued than the wine it might once have contained.
Too much of the hive's buzz in the cathedral vault.
Too much fat stored in the priests' buttocks.
Court intrigue and politics and pragmatic compromise saturate the dogma. Strip away the polluted cant and you have the village idiot's random bits of sense nonsense and inspiration. Strip away self-interest from the catechism and common prayer and you have nothing tangible. Promises. Fantasies. Wishes.
Whispers of immortality soundtrack an image that might be only our collective face, reflected in the opaque windows of heaven.
But all this is miraculous, that's undeniable. We're just used to it is all.
And wishes and fantasies have as much substance as the infinite regress of physics offers.
Posted by: Juke Moran | October 09, 2005 at 10:18 PM
What judgment was passed on the Laodiceans again? I forget.
Posted by: et alia | October 09, 2005 at 10:55 PM
And wishes and fantasies have as much substance as the infinite regress of physics offers.
Nice post, mostly I agree. Do these have a little or a lot of substance? Physics and science generally do have methods for devining wisdom from bunk and quackery, but the same is not true of religion or art. Or maybe it is, but we are still in an era when quackery passes as truth in too many quarters. Science was not very "scientific" only a few centuries back.
Posted by: Gerry | October 10, 2005 at 07:31 AM
Religion has had a love/hate relationship with that which is knowable. The scholars of religion know how to debunk, and have many tools with which to do that, but instead turn their hands to sophistry in service to political goals. As they have done since the time of Pharisees.
Your call, Tutor, echoes and resembles one T.V. made to the libertarians a while ago: embrace the think tank scholars in their privatized nanny statelets, or declare them phonies.
Posted by: Harry | October 10, 2005 at 08:18 AM
Gerry - I'm sort of an acolyte of science, maybe a lay volunteer. Like I said somewhere last year - if it's a street fight I'll be with the science guys.
But it's a sticking point that keeps me from converting and taking the vows, the idea that nothing can really be said to exist until it can be proven so.
Yes, pure science doesn't say that, but most of our contact with science isn't with the pure but with the applied and interpreted, and there's a sizable bunch of the community whose basic p.o.v. is exactly that.
It's forgivable and understandable that they'd feel picked on considering the institutional treatment of Copernicus and Galileo and many others - Kepler's mother was tried as a witch, acquitted yes but still...
And yet the danger of losing things that can't withstand that glaring scrutiny is discounted.
So you get the snarky ridicule of "sensible" partisans, against the superstition and frantic denial of the "believers".
What I'm concerned with is what's lost in between those armies.
I like mysteries, I like the idea there are mysteries I'll never solve. I resent the assumption that the unexplained is somehow inferior to the known. You get that from both sides, really.
A bunch of corollaries from the scientific stance - that the universe is finite at its outer boundaries, that there's a place or state out there past which nothing can go; that there'll be some ultimate thing down at the sub-quantum level, or whatever it's currently called, past which nothing can go; the bullshit that's been a kind of applied-technology from the big dark unknown - that we're insignificant here because the reach of what's around us is so vast - when obviously what's within us is equally vast, both realms being infinite and therefore immeasurable and therefore equal, even though one has micro and the other macro qualities of scale; that we're morally vacant because what we're composed of can be demonstrated to have no substance beyond the mechanical hither and thither of electromagnetism etc...
I think it will prove to be what so many of the fierce battles have been in my lifetime - bogus, diversionary, false conflicts of polarities behind which third parties squeal and cackle with accumulative glee as the combatants generate more wealth and thin each other out at the same time.
Science and religion were once the same thing - priest and alchemist - and before that even more inseparable. Unified.
We've been hoodwinked into believing they're not reconcilable, but of course they are - everything is. This universe is one place and one place only. The nature of it, and its infinite permutations, are what makes these false divisions possible.
Science in my view begins from the self, or the selves, and works outward, advancing on the stepping stones of the provable and known.
Religion has as its organizing principle being communicated with from outside the known.
Those seem perfectly nice divisions of labor, and I have no problem with either one of them - until they start asserting their respective, non-existent, superiority.
Posted by: Juke Moran | October 10, 2005 at 07:48 PM
Well said, my perspective is very similar. I really liked this:
Science in my view begins from the self, or the selves, and works outward, advancing on the stepping stones of the provable and known.
Religion has as its organizing principle being communicated with from outside the known.
Those seem perfectly nice divisions of labor, and I have no problem with either one of them - until they start asserting their respective, non-existent, superiority.
The scientists who don't start from the self often think they are studying something separate and independent of their selves. The scientist is unavoidable in the world in every way.
On the religious side, doesn't the main question become how one validates the communication received. Is it Jesus or the devil? Every great religion has a mystical tradition where the connection to the devine is taken seriously. The public church is always a primarily political aperatus.
Posted by: Gerry | October 11, 2005 at 07:28 AM
Be interesting to hear AKMA on validation. I think he would talk about a tradition of belief within a community, and the responsibility of the preacher to the congregation, to his own teachers, to the Church hierarchy, and ultimately to God as experienced in a way that for AKMA is as self-evident as sunshine. To him those without his gift for religious experience are like the color-blind. The example of men like AKMA and the lives they lead, bearing witness, is to me the closest thing to a proof of God.
Posted by: Tutor | October 11, 2005 at 08:33 AM
Be interesting to hear ROVE on authority. I think he would talk about a tradition of dominance within a community, and the authority of the deacon over the congregation, over his own preachers, over the church hierarchy, and ultimately over God as experienced in a way that for ROVE is as self-evident as sunshine. To him those without his gift for poltical intuition are like the power-blind. The example of men like ROVE and the lives they lead, overbearing the witless, is to me the closest thing to a proof of
Posted by: klaus | October 11, 2005 at 07:51 PM
Shit! They got Klaus!
Posted by: rollo | October 12, 2005 at 03:51 AM
Church hierarchy, and ultimately to God as experienced in a way that for AKMA is as self-evident as sunshine.
Here we have the question of validation again as it pertains to establishing authority. One thing that has always interested me about Judaism is the absense of a single authoritative stance. Remember the Rabbi talking about how the Talmud is commentary upon commentary sort of like blogging? The truth is established in conversation.
The problem I have with hierarchy relates to whether it is established by force or merrit. One is top down and the other bottom up, it makes a big difference. The difficulty of fundamentalist sects is that convinced of their moral superiority they would seek to convert the rest of us by force or else kill us. The liberal impulses that have given us the ideal of complete religious freedom contain the possibility such deviance, but to be stable it has to find a way to sequester sects that become dangerous to continued religious freedom for the rest of us.
Returning to science vs. religion as practices in pursuit of different kinds of truth, think about how authority is established in science. From the bottom up, everyone reads the same papers and converses with the community about the quality and correctness of the work. Some commenters are more read than others, but not because they are holding a particular post or position, because they have a track record of good work and critique.
Posted by: Gerry | October 12, 2005 at 07:18 AM