Author: jwhorton

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ECKHART TOLLE AND CHRISTIAN SALVATION

What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?

What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future?  If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.

Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence.  This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain.  We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically.  But this is something Tolle does not do.  He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.

For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one.  It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive.  To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly.  The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.

What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego?  It would mean the ego’s death.

Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction?  Where would one experience God’s love?  In the present, and the present only.  But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events.  Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.

We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.

We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.

Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people.  But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.

Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today.  The Christ of the Now is too frightening.  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.

If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future).  Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past).  No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice.  Alas!  Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back.  We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come.  Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.

Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives.  Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved?  Is she saved?  Am I saved?  How do we know?  What do we do?  Have we done it enough yet?  For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.

It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.

The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego.  The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone.  How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?        

It can’t.

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REVENGE IS THEOLOGICAL

Revenge is theological.  To be abased or abused by another causes one to see one has lost value in the eyes of that other.  But who is that other?  Why does he or she have authority?  If the other is the other and no more than that there is no especial reason to elevate the other’s opinion of oneself to a higher status than one’s own opinion of oneself.  Suppose I think myself a worthy fellow.  Then someone treats me as if I am unworthy.  Why should I believe him rather than myself?  But it happens that we do tend to respect the other’s opinion not simply as a judgment on us, whether an accurate judgement or not; the other’s abuse of us is not simply an expression of a judgement.  The abuse is experienced as a making of that judgement the truth.  To pronounce guilty, in this sense, is to make the object of that pronouncement guilty.  This is no case of “guilty as charged,” but “charged, therefore guilty.”  Just as God’s “fiat lux” does not express a wish for light or the expression of a truth that light would be a good thing, but does in fact cause the existence of light, so the abuse we receive makes us deserving of it.  This perception or feeling, however irrational, is the experience of abuse (leading to desire for revenge) no matter how truly we may argue the abuse was undeserved and does not pay due respect to our true self.

The abuser, therefore, is treated as being the manifestation of God’s power and authority.

God, therefore, has proclaimed us into unworthiness via his messenger.  What are we to do?  We cannot “prove” our innocence as one might do in a trial, or in the appeal of a faulty verdict.  Or rather, on a rational and evidential basis we might indeed prove our innocence, but such proof is rendered null and void by the idolatry that treats the abuser as a manifestation of God.

Therefore, we must abuse, even kill the messenger.  If we can do this, we can show to ourselves that he or she was not God’s messenger to begin with.  If his power to hurt us indicates God’s authority, our power to hurt this messenger negates him as God’s messenger.  The authority of the abuse against us is vitiated.  To get revenge is to say to the abuser “no, you are not the voice and power of God.”

But perhaps, at the darkest level, to get revenge is to unseat the offender from being the voice and power of God, as if the offender really had been that.  Note that this is not a case of proving the abuser to be a false prophet.  Prophets are not killed because they are false but because they are true (or seen as such).  Likewise, the abuser is believed (at some deep level at least) to be the true power and authority of God.  However, the avenger aspires to change this state by the injury or destruction of said abuser.

Convicted by The Truth (regardless of the fact this “truth” may be a blatant falsehood) one therefor assaults The Truth, assaults God through assaulting his “prophet.”  One therefore treats God like a puppet who can be forced; this action is tragic.

Perhaps, therefore, when God says, “revenge is mine” he may well be not only delineating the difference between human and divine responsibilities but saying that he shall not be our puppet.

Revenge, therefore, is unfaithful and idolatrous.  But it also reflects a belief in God, a passionate need not to be rejected by him.  Perhaps it is the case, therefore, that those who can be greatly provoked without experiencing the desire for revenge are either people of great faith (whether or not it is linked to a specific religion or set of doctrines) or very thoroughgoing atheists.  Revenge, in effect, is for believers who lack faith.

So, revenge is not a matter of “tit for tat” as it is usually conceived: a spiritual or moral Newtonian motion where an action demands an opposite and equal reaction.  If you hurt me and I therefore want to hurt you, that is not the same as the firing of a gun causing recoil.

Revenge is not a matter of justice, not even retributive justice, but an attempt at the justification of the self.  This justification is attempted through an assault on God, the source of all justification.

Indeed, if there is any truth to what I have said here, it might illustrate in some way the Christian belief that we cannot justify ourselves.  Only God can do that for us.  “Revenge is mine,” he says in Romans and Deuteronomy.

Revenge is inspired when one first commits the idolatry of taking another person’s judgement of oneself as coming from God, and ends up assaulting God himself to achieve the justification ruined by this very idolatry.

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THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”

Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):

“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it.  In other words, no identity can do without otherness.  The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness.  The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.”  (20-21)

(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)

Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other.  Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary.  But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.

Here is where the tree comes in.  The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one).  “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance.  That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.

This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.

But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism.  Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise.  The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect.  The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall.  So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified.  The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance.  The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie.  It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates.  We cannot even imagine this truth.  We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.

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WRITING AS AN ACT OF FAITH

What if you spent your life writing: let’s say short stories, essays, and novels.  And what if you seldom published any shorter works and never published a book?  What if the success you achieved was very small compared to the time and effort you put into your works?  What if you never “made it”—even posthumously?

Such writers and artists are the people who are permanently lost to artistic history.  We hear a lot about those who were almost lost, but whose books or paintings or whatever finally gained recognition late in the artists’ lives or after their deaths, and so we get the impression that quality is usually recognized eventually.

I doubt that very much. 

There are those who would say, “write for the love of it.”  And perhaps this is the best motive, and the most creative motive for writing.  It may well be best to have no eye to publication while in the midst of the creative act.  And it may well be best that those who love writing but are not very good at it should not concern themselves much with publication.

But if, once the work is done, the writer has no interest in its publication regardless of the work’s quality—no interest in the work’s going out into the world to be read and do what good it can–is there not a contempt shown here for writing, a base abnegation of the dignity of the creative act, a gesture not of the writer’s humility but of lack of confidence?

Nobody tells any sort of professional, other than writers or artists, not to care about success.

And yet (this is my main question) is there value in writing books that in fact are never published despite all attempts to make them so?  Is there some way in which God knows these works and ensures that they somehow, at the last day even if never before it, like their authors arise from the dead?  books which, in a way, were never alive to begin with except in the minds of the authors and maybe a few beta readers?

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”  If a writer writes excellent works which are published but fall into immediate obscurity or which are never published at all despite the writer’s efforts, has he or she borne fruit or not?  And if not, then is that writer’s career therefor a failure?

This is not a rhetorical question.

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ON “REALISM”

In the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher says,

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, exluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.”  Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications.  The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics.  As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.

“Realism” is a deeply ideological word, and in a very negative sense.  “Realism,” in other words, says more and other than what it pretends to say.

“Realism” pretends that it refers simply to “that which simply is, or that which is possible.”  But we all know, given the countless times we have heard the word used and in its usual contexts, that what is or what is possible as designated by “realism” always has to do with what we wish were not real, that which thwarts our desires, or that which simply can’t live up to them.

“Realism” is invariably linked to some reality (present or possible) that cannot be what we wish of it.  “Realism” has to do with telling us we cannot get what we want, and that we may as well accept this fact.

What are we saying if we tell someone to “be realistic”?  We are almost certainly not telling him or her to see that the situation is or will become much better than he or she imagines.  Almost certainly we are trying to say that things are worse than this person has imagined, or will be worse than our addressee hopes.

So what am I saying?  Simply this: that “realism” is a subtle, powerful, and very commonly used ideological battleaxe deployed not only to diminish hope in a given context—indeed, in the name of honesty, one might well be justified in doing this sometimes—but to assault hope in principle.  The sinister and dishonest ideology of “realism” is that it equates reality with thwarted needs or desires; it subtly curses the positive, the good things in life, with the label of unreality: if something is good, even if it is undeniably extant (and “realism” is always very reluctant to see the good, literally blinds itself in its presence) that good is somehow not real.

In effect, we have what might be described as a kind of dystopic Platonism.  Only the negative, the regrettable, is entirely real in this rhetoric.

And what could be more useful to a society that wants to destroy hope at every turn?  What could be more useful to a society that wants millionaires and billionaires to be in charge and desires that no one will ever question this self-evidently absurd and unjust situation?

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TWO WAYS WITH GOD

Christianity seems to present us with God’s good books and his bad books.  How do you tell which one you are in?  Christianity seems to present us with either a great thundering about how sinful we are because we are disobedient, unloving, too unconcerned with the poor, etc.–in other words, we are faced with God’s justice–or Christianity presents us with a God saying never mind, I love all my broken children, and I know you can be nowhere near what I want you to be on your own efforts.  Relax.  I always love you no matter what.

The young rich man is told he must give all he has to enter the kingdom of heaven–an apparently impossible task.  Later in that tale we hear that with God all things are possible.  I always wonder what, exactly, is it that is possible?  Is it possible for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God without having given his riches to the poor?  Or is the meaning instead that God will help the rich man to give up his riches in order to enter the Kingdom?

Which one is it?  How does God look upon me right now?  Can one be in the good books and the bad books both at the same time?  How do we get into God’s good books and know we are there?  It is very well to say here are the commandments, or here are the two great commandments upon which all the law hangs (love God with all you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself) but we know we are going to fall short here.  How close to the mark must we get before we are in the good books as opposed to the bad ones?  Or are our efforts here irrelevant?

Christianity has tormented us for two thousand years with such questions, and with no answer that I can see, except for those who have been given one on some mystical level.

When we say that God welcomes sinners, do we really mean it, or do we just mean “sinners” in an ironic way.  It seems to be the conservative way to be highly censorious of those society already treats as garbage, putting temptation before them and then blaming them when they fall.  The liberal way, on the other hand, is to treat “sinner” ironically and dishonestly.  All too often what is meant here is simply a person who is a sinner in a conservative’s eyes but not in a liberal’s.  Let’s get over a sentimental idea of “sinner.”  It is easy enough for liberals to castigate conservatives for being harsh on prostitutes, for example, or drug users, the poor, and other underdogs.  When the liberal says “sinner” he doesn’t mean literally “sinner,” but actually “those whom conservatives falsely label as guilty.”

Well, if God welcomes those people, it’s not such a big deal, is it?  Why would he reject helpless innocents, if that’s what they are, just because conservatives do?

When Mary Magdalene wept and washed Jesus’ feet with her own hair, she presented us with the quintessential image of the repentant sinner.  Personally, I am not inclined to judge prostitutes harshly.  The chief cause of their situation, as far as I am concerned, is poverty caused by economic injustice.  I’m not even sure that prostitution, as such, is always and inherently immoral.  But if the whole message of this Biblical incident is taken to be that prostitutes are not such bad people as the world makes them out to be, I think we have missed something.

And for the pharisee who said “I thank you that I am not like other men” there is always another pharisee thanking God he is not like the first pharisee, and another pharisee after that one . . .

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from THE RAGAMUFFIN GOSPEL by Brennan Manning

Consider this: if Jesus sat at your dining room table tonight and laid out your whole life story – the miserable, recurring sins, the hidden agenda, the skeletons in the closet, the dark desires unknown even to yourself—you would still experience joy, peace, and acceptance in His presence.

Why?  Because you would finally recognize the being of inestimable value that Jesus sees in you.  And because you would hear him say, “Your sins go over here.  It’s you that I’ve come for, My friend.”

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CELEBRITIES AND ARISTOCRATS

Perhaps in some ways celebrities are what has replaced aristocrats in a largely republican world (in the non-American sense of the word “republican”).  But celebrity is more cleverly dishonest than is aristocracy.  Aristocrats claim superiority as a function of birth.  This claim is now easy to see through.  But celebrities claim superiority as a function of earned worthiness.  What confounds the rejection of the power of celebrity is that from time to time, unlike in aristocracy, a given celebrity may well have earned some measure of his or her exalted regard.  Aristocrats, conversely, are always aristocrats only because of birth, no matter how worthy some amongst them may be.  Aristocracy can be rejected as nonsense across the board, for no aristocrat is superior by right of birth.  The needed annihilation of celebrity as such is handicapped by the occasional truth of this or that celebrity’s perceived earned superiority.

One can therefor reject aristocracy untainted by one’s own personal envy, self-loathing, or other dubious motive.  To reject celebrity in the same sweeping manner is much more difficult if one is wary of one’s motivations.

This is all the more tragic since the motivations of a given individual hostile to the idea of celebrity as such are not relevant to the overall need to annihilate the deceit and injustice of celebrity.  But we doubt ourselves and hesitate.  And for some, becoming a celebrity may be a genuine (if unlikely to be fulfilled) hope.  The same is not true of aristocracy since it is decided at birth whether one will ever be a member.

What I have said here about celebrity is also similar with regard to plutocracy under capitalism.

Could this be the secret of Donald Trump’s power? the persistence of his fan base and the incredible leniency shown him despite whatever he does?  There are many business people who are not celebrities.  There are many celebrities who are not business people or even particularly rich.  But Trump is a businessman, and a celebrity.  Nobody in the culture is more thoroughly both than he, and nobody more thoroughly combines the most odious capacities of both: the imperious sense of entitlement, of being the special case that the worst celebrities display; the parasitical nature of capitalists at their worst, who produce nothing of value and are instead vampires of money.

The combination of capitalist and celebrity makes for the most dangerous sort of spiritual vampire.

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THE POLITICS OF CHAPTERS BOOKSTORE

I was in a Chapters bookstore not long ago and noticed a problem: no, I am not talking about the fact that what used to be a bookstore with a large number of gift items has now turned into a gift store with a large number of books.

I am talking about an interesting section of books called “Culture and community.”  This was divided into four parts with the following labels: “Black Voices,” “Gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Indigenous.”

It is this sort of thing that makes conservatives bleat that liberals run everything.  But this is like complaining women run the world because there is a preponderance of females leading the feminist movement.

No, the real problem is there is no section on class.  And this, briefly, is the problem with much progressive politics.

The supposed liberal hegemony that conservatives complain about is nothing which in fact threatens them very much.  What is truly thrust into the shadows, as if there is a quiet understanding amongst all good people that the neocons are right in saying Marx and everything connected to him is both outdated and hopelessly wrong, is a class-based understanding of our current situations.

I would not simplify history in the manner of a vulgar Marxism and reduce it to a mere playing out of property relations.  But whereas there is little or no inherent power accruing to race, gender, sex, or sexual orientation, there is power inherent in the control or ownership of the means of production.  In other words, such power as men have had over women, for example, has been based not so much on some inherent power in being a male, as that men have managed to have more property rights than women in many times and places.

It would be a mistake to get into a competition between a class-based analysis and these other types of analysis.  In struggling with each other, advocates of all kinds for oppressed and marginalized people would only weaken each other and strengthen the oppressors.  So my point is not to decrease the attention paid to current ways of understanding injustice.  Rather, I would attach an understanding of class to these issues.

For is not class power central, perhaps even essential, in the oppression of various groups?  Consider some of the following observations.

A key factor in the oppression of women, historically, has been in making it difficult or impossible for them to own property.  Materially, they have been dependent on fathers and husbands.  In societies where they can get the same jobs as men, they often get less pay.  In other words, control of the means of production is restricted in their case.

Indigenous people in North America were opened to oppression largely by losing their land: that is, their means of production.  In the late 19th century the buffalo of Western Canada were opened up to massive over hunting by white people, causing literal starvation amongst the indigenous people of that region.

A common incentive for sexual and gender nonconformists of all types to stay in the closet is fear of job loss or harassment on the job.  Yet again, a threat to one’s means of production (keep in mind that employees do not own the means of production to begin with) is a key factor in maintaining injustice.

African people not only lost control of their means of production when removed from their land and forcibly exiled: they could not own property in North America and became literally the means of production for others in becoming slaves. 

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“HOW CAN UNIVERSALISM BE TRUE IF…?”

Under the breath of many Christians who raise objections to universalism you can hear them say, “but universalism has always been a minority tradition.  How can all the infernalist greats like Augustine and Aquinas be wrong?  How can so many pastors, priests, and ministers—including some who are hardly of the intolerant, fire-breathing sort—be wrong?”  Indeed.  (In fact, according to David Bentley Hart, for the first few hundred years of Christianity universalism just might have been more than a minority position.  But let that go for now.)

Well, we should not forget what a shock it must have been to the Roman Catholic world to be confronted by some obscure German monk in the early 16th century and told that the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ, was wrong, terribly wrong, in a number of very serious ways.  Besides, is Christianity or is it not a revolution?  If it is, (and it is) it should not be too surprising to expect it might change drastically in a number of ways over the years, that it might teach us things that either are in scripture but have never been seen there, or which might not be in scripture at all.  (I am leaving aside for the time being the question of whether universalism is scriptural or not.)  But must the truth of God be small enough that it can be packed in one book and tied up in a bow with no significant, new developments for almost two thousand years?  How were Jews during and shortly after the time of Christ expected to follow Jesus if religion is simply a matter of following extant texts in ways that were already prescribed?  Wasn’t Jewish scriptural tradition always evolving anyway? And were not its ways of reading far more creative than some of the arid Christian fundamentalism one encounters?  And what of the pagans?  Were they not being asked by Christianity to throw over—contemptuously even—certain of their beliefs and practices that had been held dear for countless generations?  If Christianity upset the apple cart of history some two thousand years ago, we should not be too surprised if within Christianity itself old certainties are to be overthrown.

Or are we to believe that it is only the hallowed “us,” the Christian tradition, which has no need of revolution?

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen,” is not a reference to human understanding, even of the most enlightened sort.