Start Here -- Why Not?
The Parable of the Shoplifter at the King's Banquet
The Sense in Praising God
Proclaiming the Gospel
The Good News and the Bad News
Is God Knowable?
I. Do we want to know?
II. What is there to know?
What Does the Bible Mean?
I. Why Do I See It This Way?
II. Why Is It So Weird?
III. How Can a Message Mean Different Things?
Monday, February 16, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
What More Does the Bible Mean? -- III
The deal with Abraham seems to be multipurpose. For one thing, it gives Abraham a legitimate son, Isaac, one his wife Sarah can't object to. (For a patriarchal society, the women in these stories seem to have plenty of chutzpah and a remarkable degree of influence.) And then Abraham decides to 'do the right thing' -- probably in accord with the customs of the time -- and sacrifice this first son to his god.
Another reason God often uses stories to convey Hsr messages: the meaning of a good story will be appropriate to whatever message a reader is ripe to understand. To a literalist 21st Century reader, this looks like a flaw: "It might mean anything!" Or at least, such a reader will prefer a plain statement -- and then fail to realize how much his interpretation of such statements is influenced by his culture and personal assumptions. To Paul, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is a sign of his great faith. To a contemporary young Jewish kid -- It looks like typical parental indifference to what he wants, ie to not be a doctor or a lawyer or get sacrificed like that. To the pious Christian -- God was 'testing' Abraham; and when Abraham 'passes' the test, relents by providing a substitute sacrificial candidate.
Another reading: Abraham's faith is shown, not by his sheepish compliance with what he thinks God demands -- but by his finally listening to God, looking for the ram caught in the thicket nearby, realizing that God would really prefer some nice roast mutton. As Jewish readers have observed, Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain, leaving their companions below -- but only Abraham comes back. Perhaps this is what his servants are expecting -- but offstage, Abraham has maybe whispered: "Sneak back through the bushes to Sarah; no one's going to complain to her you should have been sacrificed!"
Isaac really doesn't add much to the story, except to marry Rebekah, and beget two inconvenient sons; perhaps being trussed up like a roast has traumatized him? He travels like a nomad, suffers famine, but obeys God's instruction not to go to Egypt for relief. There is considerable delay and family drama before his grandson Joseph arrives in Egypt under inauspicious circumstances, becomes Vizier to Pharaoh, draws the whole family there after him.
This seems like a very indirect way to give Israel to Abraham's descendants. They're all going off in the wrong direction, and there doesn't seem to be a clear message... Okay, Joseph's misfortune becomes their salvation, and makes him the number two man in Egypt. That switch from calamity to blessing is a typical motif, but Joseph's clever service to Pharaoh leads to disaster for Egypt. It isn't just 'a success story' because it renders all of Egypt slaves to Pharaoh; and that eventually becomes the fate of the Israelites there as well.
Another core message develops: God really doesn't like slavery!
This message wasn't clear to 19th Century defenders of black slavery in the United States; it was perfectly clear to the slaves themselves. And so we have another explanation for the Israelite detour into Egypt: There are important things about slavery that many people don't catch on to except by being enslaved.
This is crucial to overcoming the alienation between God and humanity, because the overwhelming reality of human history has always been slavery.Despite the differing names and institutional arrangements people have used to describe and rationalize that reality, the various means of denial and justification, this is where the curse of Adam really takes hold on a daily basis.
The fear of death is seldom directly manifest, while slavery is everywhere. Ignominious death is the ultimate weapon in slavery's arsenal, but ultimate weapons lose their power if used too freely. Toil and pain -- mitigated by small rewards -- reconcile slaves to their misery, masters to their comforts. Anyone might sympathize with a slave -- but few people want to do their own toil. Anyone might prefer to believe that people suffering more and enjoying less must be somehow less deserving than they themselves. The story that God intervened to rescue the Israelites from slavery -- implies a different scale of human worth, in which God, despite appearances, favors the underdogs.
Various peoples have conceived of a universal Spirit as the creator of this universe. What made Israel unique was that this people knew God as their liberator. Unimpressed by civilization, they settled in marginal areas of Palestine -- refugees from the slavery-based civilizations of Egypt [perhaps from colonies once established along the coast] and of the local Canaanites -- finding refuge only in the hills where the chariots of their enemies couldn't operate effectively.
Initially, they lived in small, relatively egalitarian villages without a centralized administration or a standing army.
And this, early on, was their alternative to the hierarchical, empire-building ways of what we call civilization. YHWH was 'their king;' they had no one to oppress them but each other; and their customs worked to keep it that way.
However many ways they'd escaped the dominant cultures of their richer neighbors, the most obvious point of their legendary beginnings was that their ancestors had been enslaved, and God had broken them free.
Another message, implied by all this, is 'tension': The writers have different understandings of what is happening and what it means, along with loyalties to different institutions with conflicting interests.
Liberation from slavery is not stable. What's stable, under that 'Curse', is not liberation. God breaks us out of slavery; we screw up; then we start reducing ourselves to a kinder, gentler slavery -- something with padding and euphemistic justifications. Constant threat of death gets replaced with a hovering insecurity.
To enforce liberation, Israel introduced a compulsory Sabbath.
Even when "There was no king in Israel; everybody did what was right in his own eyes", there was custom to tell everybody what should be "right in his own eyes", and how he'd better behave if he wanted the help of his neighbors when life got tight.
Priests, Kings, isolated villages -- all had different interpretations -- one lineage of priests vs another, Kings of Judah vs Kings of the secessionist kingdom of Israel.
Times change; eternal commands shift. When the Israelites go to Samuel, asking him to choose a king for them, he tells them how any king other than YHWH is going to oppress them. They are tired of being oppressed by priests, tired of relying on their tribal, ad hoc army to defend them. God tells Samuel that by choosing a human king they are rebelling against God -- Yet before long Nathan, another prophet, is blessing David's monarchy as if it had been God's idea all along.
In regard to slavery, ancient Near-Eastern kings had an ambiguous significance. They added royal taxes and tributes to the toil and precarious survival risks of subsistence farming -- but they served to deter foreign raids and offered a court of appeal against local inequities. Along with being war chiefs, they could and did issue Jubilee edicts, cancelling debts and freeing peasants enslaved for debts. Without such powers, they could not have raised peasant armies in emergencies, because peasants were continually falling prey to bad weather, moneylenders, and royal taxes.
When the customary Law is finally codified and written [probably under the monarchy] a priest 'finds a book of the Law' in the Temple, which adds that "When you do choose a king from among you, he must not be a foreigner." Kings serving foreign gods -- like Ahab in his alliance with Jezebel's family -- might not consider themselves obligated to their poorer subjects -- hence Ahab's theft of Naboth's vineyard and his conflict with Elijah. 'Ba'al' meant 'Lord' as much as 'YHWY' did, but his rules were different.
Solomon, David's son, institutes 'forced labor' for all the tribes but his own native Judah -- which leads to the breakup of the monarchy when his son promises to be harsher than Solomon: ~"My little finger is thicker than my father's whang!" Subequent kings of Israel [to the north] and the rump state of Judah continue to be oppressive; their cronies get rich at the expense of poorer farmers -- so unofficial prophets begin to denounce their regimes and the popularity of 'foreign gods.' Probably the nation never had been unified under one god until after the Exile, when its monarchies came to their prophecized doom -- but YHWY's prophets stood for the national diety and the national Covenant with 'God who brought you out of Egypt' [ ie 'slavery'] -- and that Covenant demands that the Land belongs to God, is only loaned to the Israelites so that all of them, even the least of them, can be nourished by it. "Woe to you who join field to field until you live alone in the midst" -- because those fields were supposed to remain in the hands of their original small-farmer owners.
Jeremiah induces the king of Judah, facing a Babylonian threat, to call for a Jubilee. But when the threat peters out, the big landowners force their liberated slaves back into servitude; and Jeremiah has no hope left. The Promised Land becomes the Land that Israel is exiled from... and when their leaders return, years later under Persian rule, Ezra and Nehemiah are blaming that exile on marriages to foreigners.
Prominent ancient Israelites build altars and sacrifice to YHWH wherever they please; and Passover is initially a family celebration at home. But priests in Jerusalem 'find a book' -- traditionally attributed to Moses -- which forbids sacrifices anywhere but in their Temple, and demands that Passover be celebrated there.
'Contradictions' can be laboriously and dubiously explained away, but 'God's Book' has clearly been written with a wide variety of tendentious human fingerprints. This, too, must be part of the message. That we humans don't always get it right, the whole Truth and nothing but, in one handy sound-bite. That this book can point to the Answer, but shouldn't be mistaken for it.
Another reason God often uses stories to convey Hsr messages: the meaning of a good story will be appropriate to whatever message a reader is ripe to understand. To a literalist 21st Century reader, this looks like a flaw: "It might mean anything!" Or at least, such a reader will prefer a plain statement -- and then fail to realize how much his interpretation of such statements is influenced by his culture and personal assumptions. To Paul, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is a sign of his great faith. To a contemporary young Jewish kid -- It looks like typical parental indifference to what he wants, ie to not be a doctor or a lawyer or get sacrificed like that. To the pious Christian -- God was 'testing' Abraham; and when Abraham 'passes' the test, relents by providing a substitute sacrificial candidate.
Another reading: Abraham's faith is shown, not by his sheepish compliance with what he thinks God demands -- but by his finally listening to God, looking for the ram caught in the thicket nearby, realizing that God would really prefer some nice roast mutton. As Jewish readers have observed, Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain, leaving their companions below -- but only Abraham comes back. Perhaps this is what his servants are expecting -- but offstage, Abraham has maybe whispered: "Sneak back through the bushes to Sarah; no one's going to complain to her you should have been sacrificed!"
Isaac really doesn't add much to the story, except to marry Rebekah, and beget two inconvenient sons; perhaps being trussed up like a roast has traumatized him? He travels like a nomad, suffers famine, but obeys God's instruction not to go to Egypt for relief. There is considerable delay and family drama before his grandson Joseph arrives in Egypt under inauspicious circumstances, becomes Vizier to Pharaoh, draws the whole family there after him.
This seems like a very indirect way to give Israel to Abraham's descendants. They're all going off in the wrong direction, and there doesn't seem to be a clear message... Okay, Joseph's misfortune becomes their salvation, and makes him the number two man in Egypt. That switch from calamity to blessing is a typical motif, but Joseph's clever service to Pharaoh leads to disaster for Egypt. It isn't just 'a success story' because it renders all of Egypt slaves to Pharaoh; and that eventually becomes the fate of the Israelites there as well.
Another core message develops: God really doesn't like slavery!
This message wasn't clear to 19th Century defenders of black slavery in the United States; it was perfectly clear to the slaves themselves. And so we have another explanation for the Israelite detour into Egypt: There are important things about slavery that many people don't catch on to except by being enslaved.
This is crucial to overcoming the alienation between God and humanity, because the overwhelming reality of human history has always been slavery.Despite the differing names and institutional arrangements people have used to describe and rationalize that reality, the various means of denial and justification, this is where the curse of Adam really takes hold on a daily basis.
The fear of death is seldom directly manifest, while slavery is everywhere. Ignominious death is the ultimate weapon in slavery's arsenal, but ultimate weapons lose their power if used too freely. Toil and pain -- mitigated by small rewards -- reconcile slaves to their misery, masters to their comforts. Anyone might sympathize with a slave -- but few people want to do their own toil. Anyone might prefer to believe that people suffering more and enjoying less must be somehow less deserving than they themselves. The story that God intervened to rescue the Israelites from slavery -- implies a different scale of human worth, in which God, despite appearances, favors the underdogs.
Various peoples have conceived of a universal Spirit as the creator of this universe. What made Israel unique was that this people knew God as their liberator. Unimpressed by civilization, they settled in marginal areas of Palestine -- refugees from the slavery-based civilizations of Egypt [perhaps from colonies once established along the coast] and of the local Canaanites -- finding refuge only in the hills where the chariots of their enemies couldn't operate effectively.
Initially, they lived in small, relatively egalitarian villages without a centralized administration or a standing army.
And this, early on, was their alternative to the hierarchical, empire-building ways of what we call civilization. YHWH was 'their king;' they had no one to oppress them but each other; and their customs worked to keep it that way.
However many ways they'd escaped the dominant cultures of their richer neighbors, the most obvious point of their legendary beginnings was that their ancestors had been enslaved, and God had broken them free.
Another message, implied by all this, is 'tension': The writers have different understandings of what is happening and what it means, along with loyalties to different institutions with conflicting interests.
Liberation from slavery is not stable. What's stable, under that 'Curse', is not liberation. God breaks us out of slavery; we screw up; then we start reducing ourselves to a kinder, gentler slavery -- something with padding and euphemistic justifications. Constant threat of death gets replaced with a hovering insecurity.
To enforce liberation, Israel introduced a compulsory Sabbath.
Even when "There was no king in Israel; everybody did what was right in his own eyes", there was custom to tell everybody what should be "right in his own eyes", and how he'd better behave if he wanted the help of his neighbors when life got tight.
Priests, Kings, isolated villages -- all had different interpretations -- one lineage of priests vs another, Kings of Judah vs Kings of the secessionist kingdom of Israel.
Times change; eternal commands shift. When the Israelites go to Samuel, asking him to choose a king for them, he tells them how any king other than YHWH is going to oppress them. They are tired of being oppressed by priests, tired of relying on their tribal, ad hoc army to defend them. God tells Samuel that by choosing a human king they are rebelling against God -- Yet before long Nathan, another prophet, is blessing David's monarchy as if it had been God's idea all along.
In regard to slavery, ancient Near-Eastern kings had an ambiguous significance. They added royal taxes and tributes to the toil and precarious survival risks of subsistence farming -- but they served to deter foreign raids and offered a court of appeal against local inequities. Along with being war chiefs, they could and did issue Jubilee edicts, cancelling debts and freeing peasants enslaved for debts. Without such powers, they could not have raised peasant armies in emergencies, because peasants were continually falling prey to bad weather, moneylenders, and royal taxes.
When the customary Law is finally codified and written [probably under the monarchy] a priest 'finds a book of the Law' in the Temple, which adds that "When you do choose a king from among you, he must not be a foreigner." Kings serving foreign gods -- like Ahab in his alliance with Jezebel's family -- might not consider themselves obligated to their poorer subjects -- hence Ahab's theft of Naboth's vineyard and his conflict with Elijah. 'Ba'al' meant 'Lord' as much as 'YHWY' did, but his rules were different.
Solomon, David's son, institutes 'forced labor' for all the tribes but his own native Judah -- which leads to the breakup of the monarchy when his son promises to be harsher than Solomon: ~"My little finger is thicker than my father's whang!" Subequent kings of Israel [to the north] and the rump state of Judah continue to be oppressive; their cronies get rich at the expense of poorer farmers -- so unofficial prophets begin to denounce their regimes and the popularity of 'foreign gods.' Probably the nation never had been unified under one god until after the Exile, when its monarchies came to their prophecized doom -- but YHWY's prophets stood for the national diety and the national Covenant with 'God who brought you out of Egypt' [ ie 'slavery'] -- and that Covenant demands that the Land belongs to God, is only loaned to the Israelites so that all of them, even the least of them, can be nourished by it. "Woe to you who join field to field until you live alone in the midst" -- because those fields were supposed to remain in the hands of their original small-farmer owners.
Jeremiah induces the king of Judah, facing a Babylonian threat, to call for a Jubilee. But when the threat peters out, the big landowners force their liberated slaves back into servitude; and Jeremiah has no hope left. The Promised Land becomes the Land that Israel is exiled from... and when their leaders return, years later under Persian rule, Ezra and Nehemiah are blaming that exile on marriages to foreigners.
Prominent ancient Israelites build altars and sacrifice to YHWH wherever they please; and Passover is initially a family celebration at home. But priests in Jerusalem 'find a book' -- traditionally attributed to Moses -- which forbids sacrifices anywhere but in their Temple, and demands that Passover be celebrated there.
'Contradictions' can be laboriously and dubiously explained away, but 'God's Book' has clearly been written with a wide variety of tendentious human fingerprints. This, too, must be part of the message. That we humans don't always get it right, the whole Truth and nothing but, in one handy sound-bite. That this book can point to the Answer, but shouldn't be mistaken for it.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
What Does The Bible Mean? II
When I say 'The Bible must be understood poetically', this is not a put-down. Poetry connects: meaning to meaning, spirit to thought and emotion and flesh & back again.
Metaphor is the most basic form of human thought: "I know how this works so I can understand that by comparison" -- so far as two things really are alike. Metaphor was extensively used in Biblical Hebrew, a language with few individual words, so that complex thoughts usually needed to be built up metaphorically from these, or suggested by the similar sound of words based on the same root.
Poetic forms... are not essential to poetic modes of thought. They are used in much of the Bible, however, as in most ancient literature. Books were unwieldy and literacy expensive to teach. To 'read' generally meant to 'recite' -- scrolls being best suited for use as a sort of 'sheet music for public liturgy', a memory aid for someone who knew the score already -- who would not have been able to 'sight-read' such without considerable familiarity with its contents. For a work to be memorable 'by ear', the language had best flow eloquently and be conceptually linked by any means available, like the common Hebrew device of pairing two or more lines of similar meaning:
"Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt the foal of an ass."
[When one tries to take something like this too literally, one can fall into absurdities like 'Matthew's reading of this, where Jesus comes into Jerusalem mounted on two animals. Details matter, but need to be understood in larger contexts.]
Systematic theologies tend to read the Bible like a philosophical work incorporating technical terms, where 'the same word' should normally mean 'the same thing.' This builds up structures of human thought with little relation to what a passage meant to its authors or -- as I see it -- to the message(s) God intend(s) to convey to us by the existence of the Bible.
But the Bible is present, in this Creation, where I'm led to believe that nothing is accidental or without purpose -- and despite some evidence to the contrary, inclined to consider it intended for human good.
Aside from (but not altogether excluding) what I consider common misreadings: What is this anthology meant to tell us? Certainly not -- as some people evidently read it -- that "We're special because we understand this book; but everybody else is doomed!" If it's Good News, it's good news for everybody, even if not necessarily the particular news we had in mind.
One initial message is human alienation from God.
For Christian readers, the story of Eden introduces death, labor -- and Sin! Jewish interpretations differ from Christian ones at this point; both takes illuminate human experience in different ways. Clearly [as Jewish readings tend to agree] this story describes the development of a new kind of wisdom we could not have acquired without some experience of this sort -- and equally clearly [as Christian readers decided quite early on], that development has been traumatic and productive of many evils.
Even if we didn't Fall -- but were Pushed -- humanity soon begins misbehaving: jealousy, murder, the building of cities. Soon after the founding of cities comes vengeance... and by Noah's day, the Earth is said to be so 'full of violence' from us that God determines to drown the lot.
In the next story, humanity has started to build The Tower, striving to reach Heaven without an invitation. It is not clear whether God then 'confuses our languages' as a hostile act, or it's more as Alan Lew sees it: Given this perfectly harmonious world, we weren't satisfied. Since we were trying to take our fate into our own hands, God (for our sake) made us misunderstand each other's words. Another thought: people were given a multitude of languages so we could discover a wide variety of different ways to understand life -- And that incidentally kept us from getting trapped into a premature agreement that would actually have hampered further development. Whatever God's motive, He stops the project without one word of prohibition or explanation; by this point in the story God is evidently not even talking to us.
One thing we continually observe in the human lives around us: People are not explicitly aware of the spiritual dimension of the universe; we generally deal with problems by physical, social, or technical means first, then pray about them, if at all, as an afterthought. In general people learn to evade questions of God's existence and nature: first, because traditional concepts of God have frequently been punitive and harsh -- frightening and repellent to the most sensitive souls -- and second, because the real nature of God seems 'too good to be true' to people who don't know God, or who know God only by hearsay.
To the extent that anyone knows God directly, the Bible serves mainly as confirmation and reminder. It's also a reminder that God is vast, bewildering, and scary -- that Divine/human relations have long been subject to misunderstanding, disappointment, mutual complaints of betrayal: Human betrayal because people are largely unenlightened in what we consider our self-interest, and a sense of Divine betrayal because human expectations don't match what God intends for our ultimate good.
For the atheist, of course, to expect anything whatsoever from God is simply insane; so the book reduces to one massive incitement to insanity, interspersed with a few nice ethical sentiments among a host of cruel and oppressive injunctions.
And to the extent that anyone imagines God as a vast, Authoritarian Father, for them the Bible is a truly wonderful book. That's the image that most people love or hate: "Boy, are you going to be sorry when your Daddy gets home!" If you marry the Hebrew scriptures to the Christian notion of Hell, that description makes a perverse kind of sense -- except that doing that distorts the image of God Jesus found in those same Jewish scriptures and described from his own convincing intuitions.
Since most human beings are a complex mix of inconsistent feelings, ideas, and intuitive realizations... the Bible is a better introduction to God than you would otherwise expect. That is, if you read the Bible, thoroughly and critically, it frustrates, confuses, says things you don't want while not quite saying what you'd like -- It deals in hints and mysteries but all the same confronts you with a radical revelation you need to come to terms with somehow; this does happen to be the sacred book Western Civilization was given.
Meandering right along from a cluster of myths and legends, it develops through a deepening appreciation of God's nature and character, eventually reaching claims that through this book and the people who came to write it, God intends to somehow rectify our estranged condition.
In hindsight, Abraham's call looks like an initial step in that endeavor. God doesn't, as we see, go about this the way we might normally attempt making peace with an estranged family of our own. If God wanted to announce a peace offer more to all of us, make an official record of some sort -- He might have approached someone more prominent. There was a whole civilization back home in Ur, where Abraham's father came from. They were literate; they wrote on clay tablets that could have lasted for millennia.
Instead God picks a seventy-five year old man and tells him to wander into a land he's never seen, which God intends to give to his descendants. He travels as a herdsman, who if he'd even known writing would do it on portable but perishable sheepskin, into a place where contracts are made orally and confirmed by cutting dead animals in half. When he arrives in Canaan, there is already a priest of God Most High at Salem; what can Abraham's wanderings possibly add to that?
Well, they lead to Abraham's nephew Lot travelling to Sodom -- where he settles down to live a comfortable life, only to find his neighbors corrupt, xenophobic, inhospitable -- and according to the Midrash later Jewish commentators added, a place where the laws were unjust and it was a capital crime to help a beggar survive. This is also a place about to be destroyed, not by human but by Divine violence.
The existence of Divine violence seems to be another message of this book.
That's disturbing; anyone who really likes the idea of Divine violence is likely to make us nervous. But a reader with authoritarian values will take it as a matter of course. Believing there are times when violence is necessary and right, particularly for supporting and imposing his authorities' kind of order -- He will also assume those authorities know and recognize [even if we simple folk don't] such situations.
Does this make God an Authoritarian? Jesus depicts God as 'our Father', certainly as an authority figure -- but as being parental in a nurturing way. Many people of primarily liberal values hence see "the Old Testament God" as violent, even evil, as opposed to "What Jesus Really Taught."
But God in the Hebrew scriptures is more than an idealized Oriental despot; while Jesus in the Christian scriptures speaks to Israelites in the context of their traditions, pronounces Divine judgement against the Temple and Jerusalem much as Jeremiah did before him. It isn't that human concepts of God aren't developing throughout the course of the Bible (and afterwards) but that those concepts are being modified, in many of its stories, through direct interaction.
The Bible is not about how people would like things to be, but about how things are -- not that it's entirely accurate about science, history, or anything else -- but that it represents the world as people in a particular civilization saw it, with violence as much a factor for them as it is in our world. They saw the hand of God in all events -- While the typical modern belief is that things happen only through physical causes, and are thus meaningless except to the extent that human intentions are involved. We say 'an act of God' means 'a meaningless disaster;' whereas they saw disasters and blessings alike to be meaningful acts of God.
The ideas are different, but one is no more a 'prejudice' than the other unless subject to confirmation or correction -- which in spiritual matters, cannot come from physical measurements or from anyone else's beliefs, but through God directly.
Yet another message of the Bible is that such direct communication is not only possible, but has happened many times to people who weren't otherwise different from anyone else. Are such messages subject to error and misinterpretation at the receiving end? -- So far as we are finite beings, that seems inevitable; and to my eyes, much of the Bible serves to confirm this.
Abraham, of course, makes a deal with God. All this contract seems to require of Abraham is that he and all the males of his household, and any male descendant to be covered by the agreement -- get circumcized. In return, his descendants are to receive the land of Canaan, delivery date to be arranged... It's not, on the surface, the most cogent condition ever attached to a land title; but then again, the long-term effects of this simple requirement are probably incalculable. In the story, it leads to Abraham and Sarah, both of them very old, receiving the message that in one year she will have their first child.
And the next thing that happens -- is that Abraham objects to God's intention of obliterating Sodom. "Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right?" He dickers about it; he's polite, but he dickers: "What if there are fifty good men in the city?" -- "Forty-five?" -- "Fifty?" He argues God all the way down to ten. One begins to see what God likes about this man.
His family stories go on, very strange stories. There are no police; and the customs are very different from ours.
The Greeks wrote fables; they attached brief 'morals' at the end. But in this holy book, we get stories. They don't come with morals; and they don't necessarily even make sense. They do serve to illustrate how God does the more important tasks. Kings give orders, make laws, send vast numbers of people vast distances to slaughter and pillage. God uses narrative devices, speaks quietly to people we might not have chosen, hints at long term benefits but seldom finds us ready to understand Hsr full purposes or how they are to be accomplished.
Metaphor is the most basic form of human thought: "I know how this works so I can understand that by comparison" -- so far as two things really are alike. Metaphor was extensively used in Biblical Hebrew, a language with few individual words, so that complex thoughts usually needed to be built up metaphorically from these, or suggested by the similar sound of words based on the same root.
Poetic forms... are not essential to poetic modes of thought. They are used in much of the Bible, however, as in most ancient literature. Books were unwieldy and literacy expensive to teach. To 'read' generally meant to 'recite' -- scrolls being best suited for use as a sort of 'sheet music for public liturgy', a memory aid for someone who knew the score already -- who would not have been able to 'sight-read' such without considerable familiarity with its contents. For a work to be memorable 'by ear', the language had best flow eloquently and be conceptually linked by any means available, like the common Hebrew device of pairing two or more lines of similar meaning:
"Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt the foal of an ass."
[When one tries to take something like this too literally, one can fall into absurdities like 'Matthew's reading of this, where Jesus comes into Jerusalem mounted on two animals. Details matter, but need to be understood in larger contexts.]
Systematic theologies tend to read the Bible like a philosophical work incorporating technical terms, where 'the same word' should normally mean 'the same thing.' This builds up structures of human thought with little relation to what a passage meant to its authors or -- as I see it -- to the message(s) God intend(s) to convey to us by the existence of the Bible.
But the Bible is present, in this Creation, where I'm led to believe that nothing is accidental or without purpose -- and despite some evidence to the contrary, inclined to consider it intended for human good.
Aside from (but not altogether excluding) what I consider common misreadings: What is this anthology meant to tell us? Certainly not -- as some people evidently read it -- that "We're special because we understand this book; but everybody else is doomed!" If it's Good News, it's good news for everybody, even if not necessarily the particular news we had in mind.
One initial message is human alienation from God.
For Christian readers, the story of Eden introduces death, labor -- and Sin! Jewish interpretations differ from Christian ones at this point; both takes illuminate human experience in different ways. Clearly [as Jewish readings tend to agree] this story describes the development of a new kind of wisdom we could not have acquired without some experience of this sort -- and equally clearly [as Christian readers decided quite early on], that development has been traumatic and productive of many evils.
Even if we didn't Fall -- but were Pushed -- humanity soon begins misbehaving: jealousy, murder, the building of cities. Soon after the founding of cities comes vengeance... and by Noah's day, the Earth is said to be so 'full of violence' from us that God determines to drown the lot.
In the next story, humanity has started to build The Tower, striving to reach Heaven without an invitation. It is not clear whether God then 'confuses our languages' as a hostile act, or it's more as Alan Lew sees it: Given this perfectly harmonious world, we weren't satisfied. Since we were trying to take our fate into our own hands, God (for our sake) made us misunderstand each other's words. Another thought: people were given a multitude of languages so we could discover a wide variety of different ways to understand life -- And that incidentally kept us from getting trapped into a premature agreement that would actually have hampered further development. Whatever God's motive, He stops the project without one word of prohibition or explanation; by this point in the story God is evidently not even talking to us.
One thing we continually observe in the human lives around us: People are not explicitly aware of the spiritual dimension of the universe; we generally deal with problems by physical, social, or technical means first, then pray about them, if at all, as an afterthought. In general people learn to evade questions of God's existence and nature: first, because traditional concepts of God have frequently been punitive and harsh -- frightening and repellent to the most sensitive souls -- and second, because the real nature of God seems 'too good to be true' to people who don't know God, or who know God only by hearsay.
To the extent that anyone knows God directly, the Bible serves mainly as confirmation and reminder. It's also a reminder that God is vast, bewildering, and scary -- that Divine/human relations have long been subject to misunderstanding, disappointment, mutual complaints of betrayal: Human betrayal because people are largely unenlightened in what we consider our self-interest, and a sense of Divine betrayal because human expectations don't match what God intends for our ultimate good.
For the atheist, of course, to expect anything whatsoever from God is simply insane; so the book reduces to one massive incitement to insanity, interspersed with a few nice ethical sentiments among a host of cruel and oppressive injunctions.
And to the extent that anyone imagines God as a vast, Authoritarian Father, for them the Bible is a truly wonderful book. That's the image that most people love or hate: "Boy, are you going to be sorry when your Daddy gets home!" If you marry the Hebrew scriptures to the Christian notion of Hell, that description makes a perverse kind of sense -- except that doing that distorts the image of God Jesus found in those same Jewish scriptures and described from his own convincing intuitions.
Since most human beings are a complex mix of inconsistent feelings, ideas, and intuitive realizations... the Bible is a better introduction to God than you would otherwise expect. That is, if you read the Bible, thoroughly and critically, it frustrates, confuses, says things you don't want while not quite saying what you'd like -- It deals in hints and mysteries but all the same confronts you with a radical revelation you need to come to terms with somehow; this does happen to be the sacred book Western Civilization was given.
Meandering right along from a cluster of myths and legends, it develops through a deepening appreciation of God's nature and character, eventually reaching claims that through this book and the people who came to write it, God intends to somehow rectify our estranged condition.
In hindsight, Abraham's call looks like an initial step in that endeavor. God doesn't, as we see, go about this the way we might normally attempt making peace with an estranged family of our own. If God wanted to announce a peace offer more to all of us, make an official record of some sort -- He might have approached someone more prominent. There was a whole civilization back home in Ur, where Abraham's father came from. They were literate; they wrote on clay tablets that could have lasted for millennia.
Instead God picks a seventy-five year old man and tells him to wander into a land he's never seen, which God intends to give to his descendants. He travels as a herdsman, who if he'd even known writing would do it on portable but perishable sheepskin, into a place where contracts are made orally and confirmed by cutting dead animals in half. When he arrives in Canaan, there is already a priest of God Most High at Salem; what can Abraham's wanderings possibly add to that?
Well, they lead to Abraham's nephew Lot travelling to Sodom -- where he settles down to live a comfortable life, only to find his neighbors corrupt, xenophobic, inhospitable -- and according to the Midrash later Jewish commentators added, a place where the laws were unjust and it was a capital crime to help a beggar survive. This is also a place about to be destroyed, not by human but by Divine violence.
The existence of Divine violence seems to be another message of this book.
That's disturbing; anyone who really likes the idea of Divine violence is likely to make us nervous. But a reader with authoritarian values will take it as a matter of course. Believing there are times when violence is necessary and right, particularly for supporting and imposing his authorities' kind of order -- He will also assume those authorities know and recognize [even if we simple folk don't] such situations.
Does this make God an Authoritarian? Jesus depicts God as 'our Father', certainly as an authority figure -- but as being parental in a nurturing way. Many people of primarily liberal values hence see "the Old Testament God" as violent, even evil, as opposed to "What Jesus Really Taught."
But God in the Hebrew scriptures is more than an idealized Oriental despot; while Jesus in the Christian scriptures speaks to Israelites in the context of their traditions, pronounces Divine judgement against the Temple and Jerusalem much as Jeremiah did before him. It isn't that human concepts of God aren't developing throughout the course of the Bible (and afterwards) but that those concepts are being modified, in many of its stories, through direct interaction.
The Bible is not about how people would like things to be, but about how things are -- not that it's entirely accurate about science, history, or anything else -- but that it represents the world as people in a particular civilization saw it, with violence as much a factor for them as it is in our world. They saw the hand of God in all events -- While the typical modern belief is that things happen only through physical causes, and are thus meaningless except to the extent that human intentions are involved. We say 'an act of God' means 'a meaningless disaster;' whereas they saw disasters and blessings alike to be meaningful acts of God.
The ideas are different, but one is no more a 'prejudice' than the other unless subject to confirmation or correction -- which in spiritual matters, cannot come from physical measurements or from anyone else's beliefs, but through God directly.
Yet another message of the Bible is that such direct communication is not only possible, but has happened many times to people who weren't otherwise different from anyone else. Are such messages subject to error and misinterpretation at the receiving end? -- So far as we are finite beings, that seems inevitable; and to my eyes, much of the Bible serves to confirm this.
Abraham, of course, makes a deal with God. All this contract seems to require of Abraham is that he and all the males of his household, and any male descendant to be covered by the agreement -- get circumcized. In return, his descendants are to receive the land of Canaan, delivery date to be arranged... It's not, on the surface, the most cogent condition ever attached to a land title; but then again, the long-term effects of this simple requirement are probably incalculable. In the story, it leads to Abraham and Sarah, both of them very old, receiving the message that in one year she will have their first child.
And the next thing that happens -- is that Abraham objects to God's intention of obliterating Sodom. "Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right?" He dickers about it; he's polite, but he dickers: "What if there are fifty good men in the city?" -- "Forty-five?" -- "Fifty?" He argues God all the way down to ten. One begins to see what God likes about this man.
His family stories go on, very strange stories. There are no police; and the customs are very different from ours.
The Greeks wrote fables; they attached brief 'morals' at the end. But in this holy book, we get stories. They don't come with morals; and they don't necessarily even make sense. They do serve to illustrate how God does the more important tasks. Kings give orders, make laws, send vast numbers of people vast distances to slaughter and pillage. God uses narrative devices, speaks quietly to people we might not have chosen, hints at long term benefits but seldom finds us ready to understand Hsr full purposes or how they are to be accomplished.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
What Does the Bible Mean? I
I have God, and know that I do.
This is not because of who I am, but because of Who God is. Some people live on mountains, some in deep shadowed valleys, some are too rich and some too poor -- and thus one can tell us apart.
As a later rabbi put it: "When Caesar stamps his image on 1000 coins, they all come out alike. When God puts His image on 1000 people, they all come out different." But God does well by every person, even if not always visibly so in any one life in this world.
So why do I need the Bible?
To answer that... I'll need to talk about my life; because that is what's brought me to the perspective I have.
Nothing in my life has been an accident; and the Bible is here. Abraham didn't need it or have it; but I have it. Nothing in it is an accident either, and I need to come to terms with it; just as sometimes I need to come to terms with difficult people. Sometimes I need to come to terms with being a difficult person!
I read some good chunks of it in my childhood; some of it served to enlighten me and some just scared me for no good reason I know, except that it helped me understand why some people find it so repellent.
So did listening to my atheist father, and reading Mark Twain's rants against the absurdities of American Protestantism in his day.
So I was an atheist -- but kept looking over my shoulder for the One I didn't think could be there, but wished could be there -- and talking to Him defiantly in the name of all He truly stands for...
It isn't easy for me to explain how I came to recognize God taking a hand in my life, because that recognition was a gradual process.
My first love played a crucial role: a deep and thoughtful woman who struggled for words to explain to me what the word "God" meant, but whom I couldn't dismiss with any of the stereotypes I'd associated with religious people until then. Not only was I in love with her, but I saw she was aware of something real I hadn't known.
A certain patterning of events became gradually apparent to me. A "Skeptic" would have said these were merely coincidental, nothing that couldn't easily be explained, and at first I used to think about the odds of each such incident.
But this [early 60's] was a time of powerful spiritual awakenings, when people were starting to talk openly about the spiritual realm and to use drugs that could heighten one's awareness, sometimes to a shattering extent. [In the years to come I lost several good people to heroin and methamphetamines, which were quite unrelated to the kind of spiritual exploration I'm talking about. But there was as much indiscriminate approval of drug experimentation as there was indiscriminate disapproval in the respectable population.]
Until this time I'd been an incomplete human being. I could want love intensely; I could feel love intensely... and I was too emotionally injured to maintain love for anyone whatsoever.
I was idealistic and well-intentioned; I might have given my life for some good cause with a snap of my fingers... but I could not have put in a year at any boring job -- and my mind had a mind of its own. Anyone who'd known about high-functioning ADD cases [see http://www.scatteredminds.com/about.htm ] could have diagnosed me all too easily.
So I suffered, and had a wonderful time, and met some very good and holy people over the years. Somewhere in that time I met the doctrine that God is our teacher, and learned to look for such teaching in everything that happened, learned to 'feel' my way to where I was 'supposed to' go next, to which book I could take from a shelf and find my next lesson in. There were many friends who would feed each other without question, lend enough to tide each other over, welcome each other in need, to sleep on the floor for awhile. People who'd say "It will all work out" because we knew it was true.
One day when my college town was empty after summer; when the sky was red from wildfires; and the National Guard had been shooting kids in Ohio -- When it was looking like the world might end at any moment... I took it into my head to visit my parents, to make my peace with them and hope there might be some small constructive thing I could still do while the world went all to hell.
My mother, unduly alarmed by the slight sore throat I was feeling, took me immediately to her doctor. "Mononucleosis," he said. For the next month or so, ages would go by during the time I'd glance at a clock, fall into oblivion, open my eyes again to find the time unchanged. The two-block walk to a neighborhood bookstore required a rest along the way.
I got a letter from a woman who'd been taken off to jail in Utah for a tiny pot transaction she'd done as a favor... "Some of us," she said, "are doomed to live alone all of our lives." I wrote her back -- the beginning of a long, doomed marriage. A good woman whom I liked very much -- but we were entirely unsuited for each other. Meanwhile, however, I went back to school nearby.
Feeling loved (and with any reputation for brilliance shredded) it became easy to finish a math degree at a State College with one semester's work added to the credits from my occasional good quarters at UC Berkeley. Feeling loved (for an ADD person especially) was key.
But I was aiming for the local nursing program, and that was hard to enter. I think the prevailing horror at our war against Vietnam, the feeling that our own nation was starting to disintegrate in blood, was driving many to want to learn how to heal and repair, however we could. There was a waiting list; and classes to take in preparation, and time to take classes in Religious Studies.
I'd gone back to reading the Bible while I was still in the turmoil of 1970 Isla Vista, where a feeling of apocalyptic imminence seemed to have possessed the local zeitgeist...
Until then, I'd found my religious nourishment everywhere but in Christianity. I'd continued to be fascinated with anything promising I could find about Jesus, whatever he'd actually been doing and preaching -- but back then there wasn't much worthwhile available. The popular 'Christian' books were repellent. But I'd found a copy of Lamsa's New Testament and started searching for any way I could read this stuff that didn't simply reek of condemnation and sheeply self-congratulation.
Back home, I started reading the Bible from the top... and devoting each Sabbath to rest, recreation and religious reading. After the degree, I had time for classes on 'New Testament', 'Old Testament', and 'African Religions' [very interesting, that one!] In the NT class, where I'd given the [Episcopalian] prof an [unassigned] account of my experiences and my efforts to interpret the doctrine of 'Atonement' in some way that didn't make God look like a mad bastard... I was surprized to learn that he considered me 'orthodox'!
Whenever circumstances forced me to choose between adherence to my then-wife, and observance of my Sabbaths, I did what she felt "had to be done" -- and felt guilty, disloyal to God, fearful of Divine Blame... Marrying her in the first place, had resulted from reading a passage on the proper way to treat female slaves: If she's been with you a year, marry her or let her go. Even after it [later] became clear that she was fundamentally conventional, and angrily contemptuous of my best qualities, I was resigned to an affectionate but estranged life-sentence together. And almost ten years later I was roused from my dutiful slumbers by her announcement: "You know, Forrest, we've really got nothing in common...!" We went to marital counselling from Kaiser, where I came to see that we could negotiate a better way of living together... but that it would be pointless.
So much for my initial way of reading the Bible. I couldn't just go on loving a "wife" in a dutiful spirit -- and clearly God had just freed me, granted me a new life to mess up in a new way.
I'd never entirely forgotten God; but there'd been long times when the so-called real world felt all too much like the reality I'd been consigned to, when the occasional flashes of SynchroniciDaddy-at-work were only oases in a long desert wandering. Now the planets were returning to a new ten-year realignment, in the recurring dance of Jupiter's enthusiasm vs Saturn's long endurance. It was 1980; and Jupiter was returning to power on the very degree of my birth. Whatever that meant -- I could feel it breaking loose in my life, in the chaos of new-found loves & rejections, in my sudden blooming into poetry.
This is not because of who I am, but because of Who God is. Some people live on mountains, some in deep shadowed valleys, some are too rich and some too poor -- and thus one can tell us apart.
As a later rabbi put it: "When Caesar stamps his image on 1000 coins, they all come out alike. When God puts His image on 1000 people, they all come out different." But God does well by every person, even if not always visibly so in any one life in this world.
So why do I need the Bible?
To answer that... I'll need to talk about my life; because that is what's brought me to the perspective I have.
Nothing in my life has been an accident; and the Bible is here. Abraham didn't need it or have it; but I have it. Nothing in it is an accident either, and I need to come to terms with it; just as sometimes I need to come to terms with difficult people. Sometimes I need to come to terms with being a difficult person!
I read some good chunks of it in my childhood; some of it served to enlighten me and some just scared me for no good reason I know, except that it helped me understand why some people find it so repellent.
So did listening to my atheist father, and reading Mark Twain's rants against the absurdities of American Protestantism in his day.
So I was an atheist -- but kept looking over my shoulder for the One I didn't think could be there, but wished could be there -- and talking to Him defiantly in the name of all He truly stands for...
It isn't easy for me to explain how I came to recognize God taking a hand in my life, because that recognition was a gradual process.
My first love played a crucial role: a deep and thoughtful woman who struggled for words to explain to me what the word "God" meant, but whom I couldn't dismiss with any of the stereotypes I'd associated with religious people until then. Not only was I in love with her, but I saw she was aware of something real I hadn't known.
A certain patterning of events became gradually apparent to me. A "Skeptic" would have said these were merely coincidental, nothing that couldn't easily be explained, and at first I used to think about the odds of each such incident.
But this [early 60's] was a time of powerful spiritual awakenings, when people were starting to talk openly about the spiritual realm and to use drugs that could heighten one's awareness, sometimes to a shattering extent. [In the years to come I lost several good people to heroin and methamphetamines, which were quite unrelated to the kind of spiritual exploration I'm talking about. But there was as much indiscriminate approval of drug experimentation as there was indiscriminate disapproval in the respectable population.]
Until this time I'd been an incomplete human being. I could want love intensely; I could feel love intensely... and I was too emotionally injured to maintain love for anyone whatsoever.
I was idealistic and well-intentioned; I might have given my life for some good cause with a snap of my fingers... but I could not have put in a year at any boring job -- and my mind had a mind of its own. Anyone who'd known about high-functioning ADD cases [see http://www.scatteredminds.com/about.htm ] could have diagnosed me all too easily.
So I suffered, and had a wonderful time, and met some very good and holy people over the years. Somewhere in that time I met the doctrine that God is our teacher, and learned to look for such teaching in everything that happened, learned to 'feel' my way to where I was 'supposed to' go next, to which book I could take from a shelf and find my next lesson in. There were many friends who would feed each other without question, lend enough to tide each other over, welcome each other in need, to sleep on the floor for awhile. People who'd say "It will all work out" because we knew it was true.
One day when my college town was empty after summer; when the sky was red from wildfires; and the National Guard had been shooting kids in Ohio -- When it was looking like the world might end at any moment... I took it into my head to visit my parents, to make my peace with them and hope there might be some small constructive thing I could still do while the world went all to hell.
My mother, unduly alarmed by the slight sore throat I was feeling, took me immediately to her doctor. "Mononucleosis," he said. For the next month or so, ages would go by during the time I'd glance at a clock, fall into oblivion, open my eyes again to find the time unchanged. The two-block walk to a neighborhood bookstore required a rest along the way.
I got a letter from a woman who'd been taken off to jail in Utah for a tiny pot transaction she'd done as a favor... "Some of us," she said, "are doomed to live alone all of our lives." I wrote her back -- the beginning of a long, doomed marriage. A good woman whom I liked very much -- but we were entirely unsuited for each other. Meanwhile, however, I went back to school nearby.
Feeling loved (and with any reputation for brilliance shredded) it became easy to finish a math degree at a State College with one semester's work added to the credits from my occasional good quarters at UC Berkeley. Feeling loved (for an ADD person especially) was key.
But I was aiming for the local nursing program, and that was hard to enter. I think the prevailing horror at our war against Vietnam, the feeling that our own nation was starting to disintegrate in blood, was driving many to want to learn how to heal and repair, however we could. There was a waiting list; and classes to take in preparation, and time to take classes in Religious Studies.
I'd gone back to reading the Bible while I was still in the turmoil of 1970 Isla Vista, where a feeling of apocalyptic imminence seemed to have possessed the local zeitgeist...
Until then, I'd found my religious nourishment everywhere but in Christianity. I'd continued to be fascinated with anything promising I could find about Jesus, whatever he'd actually been doing and preaching -- but back then there wasn't much worthwhile available. The popular 'Christian' books were repellent. But I'd found a copy of Lamsa's New Testament and started searching for any way I could read this stuff that didn't simply reek of condemnation and sheeply self-congratulation.
Back home, I started reading the Bible from the top... and devoting each Sabbath to rest, recreation and religious reading. After the degree, I had time for classes on 'New Testament', 'Old Testament', and 'African Religions' [very interesting, that one!] In the NT class, where I'd given the [Episcopalian] prof an [unassigned] account of my experiences and my efforts to interpret the doctrine of 'Atonement' in some way that didn't make God look like a mad bastard... I was surprized to learn that he considered me 'orthodox'!
Whenever circumstances forced me to choose between adherence to my then-wife, and observance of my Sabbaths, I did what she felt "had to be done" -- and felt guilty, disloyal to God, fearful of Divine Blame... Marrying her in the first place, had resulted from reading a passage on the proper way to treat female slaves: If she's been with you a year, marry her or let her go. Even after it [later] became clear that she was fundamentally conventional, and angrily contemptuous of my best qualities, I was resigned to an affectionate but estranged life-sentence together. And almost ten years later I was roused from my dutiful slumbers by her announcement: "You know, Forrest, we've really got nothing in common...!" We went to marital counselling from Kaiser, where I came to see that we could negotiate a better way of living together... but that it would be pointless.
So much for my initial way of reading the Bible. I couldn't just go on loving a "wife" in a dutiful spirit -- and clearly God had just freed me, granted me a new life to mess up in a new way.
I'd never entirely forgotten God; but there'd been long times when the so-called real world felt all too much like the reality I'd been consigned to, when the occasional flashes of SynchroniciDaddy-at-work were only oases in a long desert wandering. Now the planets were returning to a new ten-year realignment, in the recurring dance of Jupiter's enthusiasm vs Saturn's long endurance. It was 1980; and Jupiter was returning to power on the very degree of my birth. Whatever that meant -- I could feel it breaking loose in my life, in the chaos of new-found loves & rejections, in my sudden blooming into poetry.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Is God Knowable? --
II. What is there to know?
One defining characteristic, for most people and religions, would be 'Creator of the Universe.'
Exceptions? For some Gnostics, this particular physical construction we dwell in was evil -- at best a mistake, a lapse akin to playing with mud pies, something only an inferior deity could have perpetrated. That necessitated a 'Real God' in a higher, more spiritual reality: either God seen as the creator of lessor spirits, or as the one from whom they just emanated -- at the least their ultimate superior in power and character.
A common flavor in many religions paints this world as a place of suffering or futility, which we do best to escape from, no matter its origin. I've got to agree with the Jewish tradition that God made it and called it 'good', that God could at least say that about the original product.
There isn't much point trying to argue that with anyone who's finding this a bad place, aside from the obvious fact that most people, most of the time, don't actually kill themselves. People find some beauty (we're told) even in utterly ghastly situations. We want to know how it comes out, we want all we can get of this life -- or we realize on some level that we don't have the actual power 'to be or not to be'. We're in this thing called Life and had better deal with it.
However you decide that one, the world is the first, most pressing evidence we get as to what God is like. That isn't so much the abstract things we know about science and history and the current condition of the world -- but what we experience of living. Not so bad, not so good... but then we find, if we're lucky, that Something less obvious is at work in all that, is seeking to get our attention.
Some of us are more lucky in that sense; this isn't fair! And so it isn't, on that level. This follows from the inferred, observed fact that God isn't easy to get to know!
Some people insist that God isn't in fact knowable, that any divinity we can know must be some lesser being. That's a convenient view: gives us a lovely conception to contemplate while kicking any immanent version of God safely upstairs. It may even be true; but it's moot. All that we can know is the One who's striving to be known. And that One is elusive by Hsr very nature, and by our very nature, and that tricky relation between us.
There's this physiological thing called 'the blind spot.' Every human eye has one; there are techniques you can use to 'see' that it's there (although of course you never see anything there; that's why it's called a blind spot.)
Of the two most logical ways to design an eyeball, our eyes grow in one form while a squid's eyes grow in the other. You can have 'retina inside, nerves outside,' -- or you could potentially have, like a squid, 'retina outside, nerves inside.' Our human version is a design flaw... but it does provide a useful metaphor. In the very place where we have the most retinal neurons, where all these little fibers are coming together to plug into our brains, there is no room for the light-sensitive rods & cones. That's our blind spot, right in the structural center of what we see by.
God is hard to see because God is what we 'am' by.
Elijah found that God was not in the fire he saw, nor in the strong wind, nor in the earthquake, but in a quiet 'voice' inside. That's the best place to 'look'.
Where is this "inside"? In our heads, in our hearts -- our tummies? If you must have a physical location, there seem to be many possible starting points -- but if you consider the real place to be in the very 'looking' you're looking with, you get a hint of what makes for that 'elusive' quality!
Is this another 'convenient' view? -- Does it place 'God' safely inside where He can't get out to make trouble? Some people think so, find it so -- but if you keep on meditating, that pesky 'inside-vs-outside' distinction gets problematical.
Does this view make us God? Won't it tempt us to run around loose imposing our Divine Whim on everything & everyone? Well, consider what the word 'you' means. There certainly are a great many things going on in your head -- and your heart and various other places -- that may not entirely represent your best self, what you truly (eventually, if it isn't so very much trouble) want to do. All of it is you. All of it is a manifestation of God's ongoing life living you. Everything you did as a baby wasn't charming, nor is everything you've been doing since; but the process is life; and it grows in wisdom and in stature. (With some setbacks, sure. But what you 'are' is eternal.)
So God is striving to be known, and need not be in a rush about it. What about us? How urgent is our need? That sounds like the subject of another post.
Exceptions? For some Gnostics, this particular physical construction we dwell in was evil -- at best a mistake, a lapse akin to playing with mud pies, something only an inferior deity could have perpetrated. That necessitated a 'Real God' in a higher, more spiritual reality: either God seen as the creator of lessor spirits, or as the one from whom they just emanated -- at the least their ultimate superior in power and character.
A common flavor in many religions paints this world as a place of suffering or futility, which we do best to escape from, no matter its origin. I've got to agree with the Jewish tradition that God made it and called it 'good', that God could at least say that about the original product.
There isn't much point trying to argue that with anyone who's finding this a bad place, aside from the obvious fact that most people, most of the time, don't actually kill themselves. People find some beauty (we're told) even in utterly ghastly situations. We want to know how it comes out, we want all we can get of this life -- or we realize on some level that we don't have the actual power 'to be or not to be'. We're in this thing called Life and had better deal with it.
However you decide that one, the world is the first, most pressing evidence we get as to what God is like. That isn't so much the abstract things we know about science and history and the current condition of the world -- but what we experience of living. Not so bad, not so good... but then we find, if we're lucky, that Something less obvious is at work in all that, is seeking to get our attention.
Some of us are more lucky in that sense; this isn't fair! And so it isn't, on that level. This follows from the inferred, observed fact that God isn't easy to get to know!
Some people insist that God isn't in fact knowable, that any divinity we can know must be some lesser being. That's a convenient view: gives us a lovely conception to contemplate while kicking any immanent version of God safely upstairs. It may even be true; but it's moot. All that we can know is the One who's striving to be known. And that One is elusive by Hsr very nature, and by our very nature, and that tricky relation between us.
There's this physiological thing called 'the blind spot.' Every human eye has one; there are techniques you can use to 'see' that it's there (although of course you never see anything there; that's why it's called a blind spot.)
Of the two most logical ways to design an eyeball, our eyes grow in one form while a squid's eyes grow in the other. You can have 'retina inside, nerves outside,' -- or you could potentially have, like a squid, 'retina outside, nerves inside.' Our human version is a design flaw... but it does provide a useful metaphor. In the very place where we have the most retinal neurons, where all these little fibers are coming together to plug into our brains, there is no room for the light-sensitive rods & cones. That's our blind spot, right in the structural center of what we see by.
God is hard to see because God is what we 'am' by.
Elijah found that God was not in the fire he saw, nor in the strong wind, nor in the earthquake, but in a quiet 'voice' inside. That's the best place to 'look'.
Where is this "inside"? In our heads, in our hearts -- our tummies? If you must have a physical location, there seem to be many possible starting points -- but if you consider the real place to be in the very 'looking' you're looking with, you get a hint of what makes for that 'elusive' quality!
Is this another 'convenient' view? -- Does it place 'God' safely inside where He can't get out to make trouble? Some people think so, find it so -- but if you keep on meditating, that pesky 'inside-vs-outside' distinction gets problematical.
Does this view make us God? Won't it tempt us to run around loose imposing our Divine Whim on everything & everyone? Well, consider what the word 'you' means. There certainly are a great many things going on in your head -- and your heart and various other places -- that may not entirely represent your best self, what you truly (eventually, if it isn't so very much trouble) want to do. All of it is you. All of it is a manifestation of God's ongoing life living you. Everything you did as a baby wasn't charming, nor is everything you've been doing since; but the process is life; and it grows in wisdom and in stature. (With some setbacks, sure. But what you 'are' is eternal.)
So God is striving to be known, and need not be in a rush about it. What about us? How urgent is our need? That sounds like the subject of another post.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Is God Knowable? I. Do we want to know?
Do we want to know God? Agnostics seem most comfortable being sure they can't know. Atheists are simply sure that there's nothing/no-one there to know. "God", from those viewpoints, looks very much like a person's Imaginary Friend. And that isn't really what anybody wants.
People want God to be real and 'not a monster'. But so long as people don't know God, their Imaginary Friends can be both unreal and monstrous. When we say we know God, we're claiming that our Friend is real... and that claim can easily disturb people. "Will he take his kid up the hill for sacrifice? Will 'God' tell him to slaughter the neighbors?" There could be political complications.
We don't want God to be a monster, yet when we consider the news-world it's all about events that only a monster or a human being could find entertaining. This isn't just an artifact of the media's focus on bizarre and frightening situations; these events are usually real, no matter how distorted. There are bizarre and frightening situations the media won't even consider for public display.
So, one critical element of our traditional idea of God is downright scary: That God created the world and determines what happens here. First off, we can't easily trust an entity we don't know to do that! Furthermore, look at the sort of show God puts on; consider that we aren't just 'audience' but could readily find ourselves unhappily onstage.
We have this abstraction called "Good" -- and also we've got this world that doesn't fit into that. But is it a good show? "Yeah!" That answer tells us something a little strange about our own nature, doesn't it? I remember in high school, going to see a movie of 'Romeo and Juliet'. I knew this was all very cultural, yet here I was on my way to watch a young couple fall in love -- and then have awful things happen to them. Wasn't there something downright sicko about that? If the Romans could have done it in the arena with real people, certainly! Yet isn't it wonderful, to be a young fool in love?
The point is, we wanted a 'Realistic' world; and we needed the sort of world which would produce us, the people we are as we are. Then we kvetch that such a world isn't 'Good'. Of course we do! It's as pointless to blame us for doing that as it is to blame God for making a world that suits us.
So God is no more monstrous than we are, even better, by my experience! But is God 'real'? -- Are we permitted 'to believe in' God? [See next post!]
People want God to be real and 'not a monster'. But so long as people don't know God, their Imaginary Friends can be both unreal and monstrous. When we say we know God, we're claiming that our Friend is real... and that claim can easily disturb people. "Will he take his kid up the hill for sacrifice? Will 'God' tell him to slaughter the neighbors?" There could be political complications.
We don't want God to be a monster, yet when we consider the news-world it's all about events that only a monster or a human being could find entertaining. This isn't just an artifact of the media's focus on bizarre and frightening situations; these events are usually real, no matter how distorted. There are bizarre and frightening situations the media won't even consider for public display.
So, one critical element of our traditional idea of God is downright scary: That God created the world and determines what happens here. First off, we can't easily trust an entity we don't know to do that! Furthermore, look at the sort of show God puts on; consider that we aren't just 'audience' but could readily find ourselves unhappily onstage.
We have this abstraction called "Good" -- and also we've got this world that doesn't fit into that. But is it a good show? "Yeah!" That answer tells us something a little strange about our own nature, doesn't it? I remember in high school, going to see a movie of 'Romeo and Juliet'. I knew this was all very cultural, yet here I was on my way to watch a young couple fall in love -- and then have awful things happen to them. Wasn't there something downright sicko about that? If the Romans could have done it in the arena with real people, certainly! Yet isn't it wonderful, to be a young fool in love?
The point is, we wanted a 'Realistic' world; and we needed the sort of world which would produce us, the people we are as we are. Then we kvetch that such a world isn't 'Good'. Of course we do! It's as pointless to blame us for doing that as it is to blame God for making a world that suits us.
So God is no more monstrous than we are, even better, by my experience! But is God 'real'? -- Are we permitted 'to believe in' God? [See next post!]
Monday, May 5, 2014
The Good News and the Bad News
The jokes probably go back to ancient times... because life is like that; because we're like that.
Back then, whenever the Authorities told you something was Good News, that was really bad news: "There's a new kleptocrat in charge of keeping you people down!" The only thing good about it was: "We aren't fighting over who's in charge!"
We need to hear both aspects to really get either of them. Who's going to believe good news if they aren't hearing the bad? Who can face the horror of the bad news if they don't see it's part of a situation we can live with?
There are some awful difficulties: Most people these days, if you start talking about God, say: "Oh no! Someone else wants to tell me where I mustn't put what!" Or "Somebody else wants to tell me there's something more I should be doing!" That is, they think 'God' means 'Guilt' and they don't need guilt; they've got all the guilt they can handle and half of it about stuff that doesn't matter!
Hope is even harder to bear, for anyone with eyes and ears and mind keeping score. The Earth is terminal; our country has gone corrupt and blind crazy -- and even if we're just talking about our own bodies, the warranty is subject to expiration without notice.
People can accept that bad news about our bodies... because "The good news is that there's no Bad God to send me to Hell when I drop dead!" Hey, hey, look at that fine print! The bad news is, you're supposed to die! I know, it's a trade-off; but that's a lousy deal.
Some people take the deal because it's the only one they can believe. "So I'll be lying in my last hospital bed, full of wires and tubing with all the gauges reading 'empty' -- and your guy will just zip by on a white cloud and take me to choir practice? That's your opinion; and we Postmoderns are too sophisticated to imagine that anyone's opinion is really about anything, except of course ours."
I can't say about "most people". Maybe most people know "We aren't supposed to believe in anything anymore" but do it anyway? Inconsistency is better than being consistently wrong, but still -- At some point we want to reach agreement between mind, heart, and how-things-are.
How do I know there really is actual 'Good News', that you can know it and walk on it and trust it not to drop you in a hole?
I really do know this... and hope to explain (later) how you can know it as well. But for now, just entertain the notion that the Life who's living you has something it's working to teach you. Open the eyes, mind, heart; look for a bit of 'Maybe' waving at you between the cracks...
Back then, whenever the Authorities told you something was Good News, that was really bad news: "There's a new kleptocrat in charge of keeping you people down!" The only thing good about it was: "We aren't fighting over who's in charge!"
We need to hear both aspects to really get either of them. Who's going to believe good news if they aren't hearing the bad? Who can face the horror of the bad news if they don't see it's part of a situation we can live with?
There are some awful difficulties: Most people these days, if you start talking about God, say: "Oh no! Someone else wants to tell me where I mustn't put what!" Or "Somebody else wants to tell me there's something more I should be doing!" That is, they think 'God' means 'Guilt' and they don't need guilt; they've got all the guilt they can handle and half of it about stuff that doesn't matter!
Hope is even harder to bear, for anyone with eyes and ears and mind keeping score. The Earth is terminal; our country has gone corrupt and blind crazy -- and even if we're just talking about our own bodies, the warranty is subject to expiration without notice.
People can accept that bad news about our bodies... because "The good news is that there's no Bad God to send me to Hell when I drop dead!" Hey, hey, look at that fine print! The bad news is, you're supposed to die! I know, it's a trade-off; but that's a lousy deal.
Some people take the deal because it's the only one they can believe. "So I'll be lying in my last hospital bed, full of wires and tubing with all the gauges reading 'empty' -- and your guy will just zip by on a white cloud and take me to choir practice? That's your opinion; and we Postmoderns are too sophisticated to imagine that anyone's opinion is really about anything, except of course ours."
I can't say about "most people". Maybe most people know "We aren't supposed to believe in anything anymore" but do it anyway? Inconsistency is better than being consistently wrong, but still -- At some point we want to reach agreement between mind, heart, and how-things-are.
How do I know there really is actual 'Good News', that you can know it and walk on it and trust it not to drop you in a hole?
I really do know this... and hope to explain (later) how you can know it as well. But for now, just entertain the notion that the Life who's living you has something it's working to teach you. Open the eyes, mind, heart; look for a bit of 'Maybe' waving at you between the cracks...
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