The Serpent's Wisdom

A while ago i offered "a meta-neo-marxian semiotic principle" but left sorta fuzzily undefined what i meant really by "meta-neo-Marxian." What i wrote then, was:

"Neo" because we have progressed quite a bit in the last 150 years, in understanding the sociology of oppression and the intricacies of economics, and "meta" because i am not a subscriber to a philosophy, but merely a critic whose views are inspired by the trajectory which Marx played a role in laying out.

It dawned on me yesterday that i have to take this to its logical conclusion. I have to. And so, i offer for your consideration, meta-neo-. I will define this more fully in a moment, but for now i will leave it sorta fuzzily undefined and let you ponder what i mean by it.

I make no claims to originality or uniqueness. In fact i hope there are a million other people out there with similar but not exactly identical ideas.

Meta-neo- is not a philosophy. One does not become a subscriber or an adherent to meta-neo-, but merely perhaps, i dunno, a listener. Meta-neo- is an affinity, not an identity. I'm sick and tired of identity politics ruining my friendships and threatening my relationships and demolishing my political coalitions and causing me to lose sleep.

Let's throw all this crap out the window: "You're not 'X' enough." "You're not a true 'X'." "I want to do W, but if i do, i'm not an 'X' anymore and my X friends will reject me." "I'm not X, but i'm Y, let's call this the 'XY' coalition." "Hey, i'm a 'Z,' you left me out."

Meta-neo- is analogue, not digital. There's no "Meta-neo- vs. non-meta-neo-." You can be a little meta-neo-, you can be a lot meta-neo-, your affinity with meta-neo- can vary from subject to subject or even from mood to mood or day to day.

The prime directive of meta-neo- is simple: When it becomes widely recognized that there is a need for a meta-neo-meta-neo-, those who pay any attention to it at all are urged to declare it dead and come up with something else.

Still need me to define meta-neo- or should we just leave it there and run with it?

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

A few weeks ago i finished reading Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper. This novel examines an interesting question, first posed about halfway through: what would be the effect on religion if we had a God who actually worked?

She means of course outside of cosmology, because of course either God has created/is creating the whole universe, or not. The question concerns the direct and clear involvement of God in our individual lives.

I wonder what people point to as evidence, to them, that God has been involved in their lives?

In my case, there have been hints of a presence which i've felt in moments of stillness. But i don't know whether this presence is God, or my own self reflected back at me, some kind of cosmic mind, or an illusion created by my brain responding in its limited way to qualia it doesn't know how to handle otherwise.

But from a certain practical perspective, my conceptual interpretations don't matter. It doesn't matter if the presence is God, or my self, or the cosmos, or a neurochemical chimera, because i react to it the same way regardless. What matters is that i feel the presence there and it affects me, it calms me and makes me feel connected to something larger than myself.

More "direct" evidence of God, gods, deities, divinities, spirits, fairies, ancestors, poltergeists? There's been none in my experience. People's experiences vary widely in this regard, though, and it does not disturb nor hearten me to hear of more concrete sorts of experiences with the numinous.

So here's part of what i think happens. The following is, of course, just a theory. But tell me if it resonates with you.

I have come to suspect that people who latch very strongly onto dogma and doctrine and scripture do so because they don't otherwise have a strong link to the divine. That is, the only glimpse they've had of any sort of divine presence is the glimpse they get by way of doctrine and scripture. I can't say this for certain, but it is something that i have come to suspect in many cases.

(Of course there must be exceptions; frankly i find it puzzling that i ever have to say that a general statement has exceptions, but i daren't leave out that disclaimer!)

But what i have found is that people with a sense of connection to the divine seem to find a way to see eye-to-eye, even if they disagree about many of the particulars. It's like they can sense and acknowledge this connection in one another, and they grok that talk about doctrine or scripture is just that -- it is talk about concepts, and does not usually "cut deeply" to the connection each has with the divine.

Suppose God was a part of our lives just as plainly and clearly -- and doubtlessly -- as our friends or coworkers or classmates. Suppose God heard our requests and perceived our needs and acted on them. Then there wouldn't be room for doubt the way there is now.

In that case, sacrifices and rituals and other observances or obeisance would be nothing more than a kindness; it wouldn't be sacred in the way we think of it, because it would not be "set aside;" if we were following a request or a demand from God it would be the same as if we did so for a friend or supervisor.

Moreover, we wouldn't pour over scripture and engage in endless niggling debate about doctrinal details, because God would be right there to answer the question. Any debating we did would not seem like "theology" or "philosophy," it would be imminently practical.

Could the social edifice and prominence of religious institution survive? I do not think it could... in a recognizable form at least. A good chunk of religious practice is an unending attempt to stave off bad things from happening, under the assumption that bad things happen because gods get angry and punish us. If God was right there with us to give us clear input on what to do and what not to do, there would be no need to speculate on what God finds morally objectionable. If bad things happened, we would know whether or not it came from God.

People who perceive some sort of connection to the divine tend to take religious edifices, and people who piously rely on religion, less seriously than they should. I think this is part of why the piously religious are occasionally able to grab power, especially in societies where large segments of the population are psychologically damaged by cannibalistic oppression and are spiritually stunted.

While Jesus had many words of condemnation for different types of people, it occurred to me today that Jesus is rarely critical or harsh to anyone who is actually in his presence. For example, he is critical of "scribes and Pharisees," the rich, the Sadducees, and so on, when speaking of them abstractly. But it is truly unusual for him to be shown having a harsh word for someone in his presence. Often the people in his presence include those who would have been shunned by most.

Even when he addresses aloud the sins of people around him, his tone is matter-of-fact, as if he is not very concerned with their imperfections or transgressions. The only people who see his wrath directly are the moneychangers in the temple. Next to that, the sharpest rebuke was directed at "the Jews" in John 8, accusing them of being the children of the Devil (a passage which some scholars believe was added later). (Edit. But even then, it was not a criticism leveled at specific people for doing a specific thing.) To the adulteress he says merely, "Now go, and don't do it anymore." A Pharisee who asks him about paying taxes to Caesar is asked, "Why do you test me?"

Many people who grew up as Christians can tell you about fear and guilt which was instilled in them regarding their least transgressions. But it seems to me that Jesus was far less concerned with the transgressions of ordinary people than he was with oppression and exploitation. By far his strongest criticisms were saved for people who were rich, or those who were espousing certain religious codes which contributed to social stratification.

For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan was meant as a dig at the priests and Levites, who would walk past a man left for dead by robbers in a ditch in order to preserve their precious ritual cleanliness.

If we read the words of Jesus as if he were focused primarily on social or cultural evils, and less on individual transgressions, the meaning of his ministry looks very different. If he truly meant for people to walk around in a cloud of fear about their transgressions, he would have spoken directly to people in a much more critical way. Instead, he 'suffered' the presence of people who would have been shunned by most (tax collectors and prostitutes and so on), and was not shown being critical of them. It is sometimes implied that these people were accepted by Jesus because they had "reformed" and changed their sinful ways, but this is nowhere stated, and if it were important to the Christian message, I think it would have been.

This has come up twice in the last two days; once in an email from an LJ user (anosognosia) and also in a link to this page ("The Fallacy in the Theory of Predestination and Divine Election") by angelicbbw.

Predestination and elect-elitism is one of the primary issues that drove me away from Christianity, and so it is a matter I have spent a lot of time examining. Some of this is old ground for me, some of it is realization that finally sank in this morning.

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Earlier this morning I wrote this as an extended answer to a post in challenging_god and wanted to recorded it here for posterity and reference.

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To put this in perspective. At the time of Jesus there was a movement, represented by figures such as Rabbi Hillel, to interpret "Torah" to mean not so much the physical manifestation of the Law in words on paper, but rather the process whereby divine guidance comes to humankind and the cosmos.

To describe this using the helpful language of programming, this would make the written Torah an instance of class "divine guidance and governance." How else could Hillel have claimed to teach the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot ("That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor; the rest is commentary")? The written Torah contains the key elements that defined Jewish identity and Jewish religious practice. Hillel's summary of Torah doesn't reflect that at all; instead it reflects a teaching that has arisen in all cultures in all times and places.

Hillel is not the only rabbi to have argued along these lines; similar thought was expressed by Akiva and other influential rabbis of the period.

My argument, then, is that Jesus was a rabbi of this tradition -- and so was Paul.

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I don't want to focus on what is bad about one set of teachings or another, I want to focus on teachings which are good and constructive and inspire us to grow as individuals and in fellowship with one another.

As a starting point I begin with the manifesto I wrote some time ago:

We the members of the human race demand spiritual teachings that:

1. Direct us towards compassionate action.
2. Nurture our psyches and spirits.
3. Heal the rifts within and between us.
4. Challenge us to think.
5. Push us to confront that which is unethical.
6. Exemplify that which is noble about humanity.
7. Can withstand the scrutiny of reason and experience.
8. Drive us from complacency and guide us as we become more than we already are.

Alright, several of you have asked me in your responses to my post yesterday about why I give any weight to scripture or to particular religious tradition. Your question is good and valid and I didn't want to leave it unacknowledged, but I thought instead of writing a few piecemeal responses, I would write one big one, and put it here where everyone can see it.

Firstly, I don't look into any book first when I'm seeking to connect to Spirit. That connection has already been very firmly developed. To some extent I feel the divine presence with me at all times, at some times more than others. I am in love with the Mystery of it, the fluidness of it, the calmness of it, its ineffability. It gives me a wellspring of stillness and strength that I remember at one time I was without.

That said, there are many reasons why I look to scripture of any sort. I am fascinated by the different levels at play therein -- historical context, cultural priorities, the interplay of spirit and humanity. I am also fascinated by the different ways people have chosen to express their experience of the divine presence, or the ways spirit affects their outlook.

Also, scripture represents an important link with tradition. Calling upon that tradition, and its "colonies" in the psyche, is a strong way to link with certain aspects of the mind that cannot quite be accessed any other way. By that I mean, saying "Jesus said such and such," or "Buddha said this that and the other," elicits an emotional, archetypal, primal, and psychological reaction that can be of immeasurable use when trying to explain the depth of mystical experience. The creation of "new" scripture in the absense of the "psychic colonization" afforded by tradition means sacrificing these opportunities.

Scripture also provides an invitation to Mystery, in a way that nothing else does.

One of the mysteries afforded by Christian scripture is the interesting counterpointal interplay between the different viewpoints -- the synoptic viewpoint, the Johannine viewpoint, the Pauline viewpoint. To say that they come together to give us a unified spiritual message is a very powerful assertion that provides a great deal of fertile ground for psychic and mystical exploration.

There is more, much more, that I could say in addition to this...

Just wrote some thoughts for challenging_god that I wanted to post here for posterity.

An ongoing discussion about Biblical rules on marriage with aarondarling spurred some thoughts that I want to expand upon and record here in my journal for posterity.

The perennial question facing anyone of any religious tradition is, how do I live out these teachings in practice? Some of the teachings make no sense in modern contexts. Some of the teachings even give differing, vague, or contradictory guidelines.

Where the scriptural teachings are very old, there is the additional question of how to live by these teachings in the modern world. How many of the moral proscriptions were really meant to be eternal? This question is compelling especially when we consider that most scriptures reveal an evolution of moral codes over time. Buddhist moral codes were meant as a reformation of Hindu moral codes. Christian moral codes were meant as a reformation of Jewish and Roman moral codes.

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