love can change everything.
maybe jesus shows us how we already are christ, sons and daughters of god, sons of man, how we already are saved, forgiven, free, divine and whole – and that we just have to relearn what that looks like. maybe that’s what the fall was about. forgetting that all those things are now true rather than being one day true.
It’s easy not to like something. It’s easy to show disgust or disdain towards a certain group of people or behaviours we don’t agree with. Most of our reactions stem from the after-effects of our environment and culture. It’s easy to be a critic and take ‘pot-shots’, it’s easy to point the finger and say ‘its their fault!’ What’s not easy is pointing the finger back on ourselves.
I think the idea of being ‘anti’ anything demonstrates the inner need to be against something. We have been taught that if we are against something that we have purpose. Some might use the word ’cause’ to make it sound more justifiable. Being anti-something removes us from having any responsibility from the thing we might be against. It creates an unhealthy distance between us and the point we’re trying to make.
Being anti-anything isn’t really healing.
Pointing the finger doesn’t deal with issue, it just gives us someone to blame and gives us a false sense of peace that we have done something about it. But if you ever talk to someone who lost someone dear to them and ended up in court-room staring down the defendant at fault for their loss, the killer going to jail doesn’t make the loss seem any easier to bare. The loss is still there. The distance between what is and what could be seems to be an ever-widening gaping hole leaving us crying out for some repair.
What if we are for things rather than against them? What would that look like? How would that change our conversations? How would that change how we see the world?
If we are for things than we have a responsibility to provide space for those things to grow. If we are for things than it means we have hope. If we are for things than there is potential. If we are for things than God has room to still create (and so do we). If we are for peace rather anti-war than it means we can intentionally do something about rather than simply complain about it. If we are for love rather than anti-hate than it forces us to ask the necessary question of ‘what does it look like for me to love well?’; if we are for grace rather than anti-sin than it means we focus on who we are meant to be and living out of the divine spark in such a way that it extracts the very same thing out of others when we interact with them.
If we are for things, then the world can be a better place. We can have a hand in healing people, places and things. IF..
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. — Isaiah Berlin
The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. — Isaiah Berlin
Our world is in a state of pregnant perpetuation over the incessant need for information. Turning on our televisions demonstrate this quite clearly. Within a 2-minute span there are commercials telling us what we lack, there are advertisements numbing us to war-torn countries and bloated babies, there are pictures after pictures subconsciously brainwashing us to believe we need to feed the consumer within. This new era has and is being called the Information Age. It seems we depend on information to tell us what to believe, to inform us of what we lack, to direct us in our life goals. The information age has become another name for irresponsible binge thinking. It seems we have become zombies to our pre-fabricated environments. We easily accept rather than question.
We sign-on-the-dotted-line without knowing what we’re committing ourselves to. Some or most of this brain-numbing slavery is do to the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was good in that it inspired a resurrection in the art of questioning. I think where the Enlightenment has failed us is that it has now empowered us with the ability (yet with an apparent unawareness) to create information into a pantheon of deities. Even within religions across the board, this seems to be taking place. We depend upon the dissemination of ancient information to fully inform us in the now. To be clear, there is a need for information, for holy writ, even if only to challenge it. The issue is when followers of any religion transform their information into a deity that becomes the leader or structure to measure the validity of another’s life.
The Enlightenment has assisted in this movement by empowering people with the desire and capability to transform information not only into a rubric but into a messiah. Rather than seeking the messiah beyond the messiah, we have accepted the first construct as the real one. Much like the Matrix.
Yet, there is also the apparent flip-side of this dichotomy as well, some people are starting to question.
Some people aren’t okay with the hidden undergrowth of indoctrination. Some people have seen the real wizard behind the curtain. They are people of the counter-enlightenment. This was inspired by Isaiah Berlin who saw that we needed to rescue beauty. We needed to free ambiguity from its cage. That we had a responsibility to restore the need for mystery.
The counter-enlightenment is about reduction.
Reducing our answers, dethroning them and finding God beyond them.
This new counter-enlightenment denies that words alone have power and re-invites mystery to return from exile to speak to us. To teach us. To inform us of what we have been missing. The counter-enlightenment* is an all-inclusive open movement that invites any and all people, from all religions, from all spaces to come and sit and rest in silence. Rest in the reality that God wasn’t in the storm, or the lightning, or the earthquake, but that God himself was in the silence**. This is where we want to be in the silence. Where do you want to be?
*The hope is to create a real-time counter-enlightenment movement. Anyone interested, contact me.
** Rabbinic Scholars translate this story to mean that God wasn’t just in the silence, but that his voice was the silence itself.
The concept of abject is often coupled (and sometimes confused with) the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being “un-home-like”, or foreign, yet familiar. The abject can be uncanny in the sense that we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being “foreign”. An example, continuing on the one used above, is that of a corpse, namely the corpse of a loved one. We will recognize that person as being close to us, but the fact that the person is dead, and “no longer” the familiar loved one, is what creates a sort of cognitive dissonance, leading to abjection of the corpse.
We all search for home in one way or another. Home is what we know. Home is what creates a sense of safety, at times it might be a false-sense of safety, but safety nonetheless. Home is important to our development. We all search for home in different shapes or forms. The whole idea behind a child holding on to a blanket and taking it with them everywhere they go or while they sleep is this psychological need for home (or safety). To be estranged from our homes it to make us a foreigner or immigrant. This feeling of being an outsider tugs at the very idea of being rejected by others; it challenges our own value. Rather than embracing the life an outsider, we do and try things to make sure we remain the insider.
Acceptance makes us feel like we are back at home again. Acceptance seems to make sense to us in our subconscious, once we lose that feeling, we spend our whole lives trying to get it back. But, what if part of why we’re afraid of being the foreigner is because at times we still feel like an outsider. Chances are, you and I have and will feel like the outsider at sometime in our lives. Maybe we are afraid of the untruth that we aren’t valuable. At one point, the author of Hebrews talks about how we are all foreigners/pilgrims just passing through – that this world is not our home. That all we accrue is temporary. That our status is beyond what we see. That our acceptance doesn’t lie in what we do/don’t have. Our status is transient. It doesn’t dictate who we are or can be.
If this is true, than maybe we need to learn what it looks like to hold the things we might call home, loosely. This isn’t to forget or devalue the importance of the ideas we may have accrued. Let me clear something up, I am not talking about relationships. I am talking about ideas, philosophies, worldviews and personal status.
Maybe the part of being abject, is to treat our ideas and even language with a bit of abjection. If we don’t, no matter how hard we try, our ideas will never evolve – they might be re-packaged but really they haven’t changed. If we learn to hold our ideas loosely than not only does it allow space for those ideas to evolve, but it allows us the space neccessary to evolve with them. If the feeling of abjection can teach us anything, may it be that to renew our ideas, to renew our thoughts, we must hold the words we speak with a spirit of abjectivity. When we do, we can begin to learn to live in a state of perpetual change.
X + Y doesn’t equal Z.
Without getting into too much math here (I was never that good at it anyhow!) — X and Y are ideas. They can be pretty much any subject you might be passionate about. Let’s use religion as an example, but feel free to replace that with whatever interests you (football, philosophy, history, button-collecting and etc.)
X is one concept. one possible worldview. Y is another concept, an alternative worldview. neither are right, and neither are wrong. they just are. the tendency is to bring them together and try to make X and Y into Z. Z then becomes the objective goal. the end purpose in why X and Y exist is to eventually become Z. Z becomes the ultimate reality that everyone strives for. X is a hetero-concept. Y is also a hetero-concept. In this model of thinking, Z then becomes the objective place of transformed homogeneity (where Z comes to be the after-birth of X and Y together). I think the danger in this thinking is that it assumes that both X and Y have to become something else, that the only way to find harmony and peace is when X and Y have to sacrifice certain things to become Z. this process invalidates what X has to offer on its own as well as what Y has to offer too. this process says that everyone should become Z because it is the only correct way to be. it assumes also that the two subjective concepts desire to become objective. it assumes a lot.
what if there was another way to create peace and harmony within the two hetero-concepts (diverse worldviews)? what if peace could be obtained without one or the the selling out? what if another way could be that X and Y work together so then the outcome could be X and Y = XY rather than Z. That the two hetero-concepts remain hetero by nature, but co-exist in harmony. This presupposes that humanity has the ability to exist within its own God-given diversity rather than attempting to coerce mankind into a homogenous system of thought. This empowers mankind as God already has by creating us. He believes we have the ability to live in a place of direct peace and harmony by sustaining our own hetero-concepts or why would there be so many differences within creation? creation shows a God who consistently committed to diversification rather than homogenization. So, maybe by working towards this new XY model not only do we embrace diversity as a place of peace and harmony but also recognize and proclaim together that there is divinity in our differences.
man need a little madness, lest he not cut the rope and be free – Niko Kazankhis
at one time we were all travelers. the world was this new unwrapped present from the Creator. it would be like opening a window on the first morning, in your new house, to find the new scenery that was whispering for you to peek through your shutters all night long. life was a journey, it had to be.
then came settling. finding a place to call your own. colonization. survival. bills. cars. stress. a few of the things that came with settling.
yesterday, i ran into a guy who responded ‘it’s alright’ after I asked him whether he liked where had been living for the last 30 years. i heard the defeat in his voice.
life had become a chore. something that you do.
it bo ecame a list of things to ge done rather than
a ride to experience, maybe he likes his life. but his bod language and word choice seemed to betray that possibility.
maybe we can learn from those who traveled before us.
that we must keep traveling inside. that we can’t stop–when we stop, we resign ourselves to the reality that life is about settling for second best. and that we somehow believe the lie that we have been made to live on left-overs. there will be things that will try to steal away our gaze and give us the pseudo-experience that what we are doing feels like what is supposed to be. but there is more. beyond what we have learned, beyond what we have been taught, there is life inviting us into the uknown.
into the ridiculous. into the unreal. into the mystery. some say that life is mystery not because we can’t figure out, but because we were discovery. i think the first step on the journey is let go of the things that slow you down, and then learn to enjoy what is around you, whether its in your control your not.
its not always an easy journey. but its worth it. what is holding you back? what has brought you to where you are? why do you feel the way you feel?
we need to reclaim our souls. maybe this is what salvation is about. find ways to heal and rediscover who we are meant to be. it takes a journey to do that. the unlearning, the forgiving, the dreaming and the reinvention. we were made for adventure, not because i say, but because we have been invited into a life filled with beauty, despair, rainbows, storms, seas, oceans, chaos and order. life is a roller-coaster. hopefully we can enjoy the ride..
Romans 6:23 — For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
This tends to be rendered as a verse that describes this idea that all people are hidden in ‘sin’, and since all people are ruled by sin then all people die. That all people are headed to a destructive place called hell.
(Rather than dealing with a better rendering for sin as well as the mythology and rhetoric behind the ancient idea of hell, I would like to spend some time picking apart and re-contextualzing the verse.)
If you notice in this verse context, Paul is consistently making a contrast. He goes from verse-to-verse demonstrating either the destructive nature of sin or the complete and full gift of salvation. (In this context, salvation also means healing or restoration.) living as we are meant to be. living out of the best ‘us’. and so the less we spend our energy on not being ourselves the better we live out our salvation.
the word for wages is opsōnion — it is related to the wages of a soldier who deserved his pay. it was also used to describe a human to human transaction; for example, in the ancient times sometimes a debt was paid by one working for another to settle their debt. “The law was very strict in requiring daily payment of wages.” More on Wages here.
Thanatos is the Greek word for death. It tends to be defined in the bible as physical death, but i think its also important to remember that Thanatos was also a minor part of Greek Mythology. It is death personified. death in a person.
Maybe in this context, it might be better rendered as ‘the ability for a person to bring destruction everywhere they go when they are not living out the best them. The word also is connected to the idea of pestilence. which brings death. basically, the idea here is that sin and our intentional alignment with it can only bring daily destruction.
the word for eternal is better rendered as a ‘life of the ages’, or ‘life as you were intended to live out’.
So it seems Pauls is creating a contrast between two-types of people. people who align themselves with sin purposefully, will only experience and bring destruction wherever they go. those who choose to live out of the best them they were meant to be, bring healing and hope. so, then in this light it is less about how all of humanity has lost the plot and more about how all of us can choose to be people who either leave destruction or leave hope in the wake of our choices. which one are you striving to be?
So then the term connotes itself to the idea of a daily experience of sin. Sin defined as people not living out the best them.
the reason why religion needs atheism is because its good for us to become a/theists to our own constructs of God, truth, jesus, bible and others. it’s good to let go, and find God beyond what we sacrifice, maybe that is what the sacrificial system (as metaphor) was all about. laying down things to find god/ourselves beyond our sacrifice
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used.
Thought can be defined as a conclusion that we come to, but it doesn’t just include the end result, it includes the process by which we came to that conclusion. It would be like saying that not only is the view at the end of the hike the point, but also the journey to get to that view is just as important. I think its also important that our thoughts are affected by our environment, childhood, belief system, ethics and past to name a few. We can’t simply assume that we can come to an objective understanding just because it is labeled so or even because of the ‘thought’ we have inherited is proven. Thoughts evolve. The meaning of the words involved in the thought process change as we learn new things about that thought. In terms of theology, if we assume the words that have been inherited don’t change or don’t need to change than we assume that those words can only be relevant in their ancient context and solely modernised for our understanding. In this framework words than can only make sense with the historical framework in place. If we depend on the historical framework to dictate the evolution of the words we have borrowed than only history can tell us what it should mean.
For example, if we use the word salvation and coerce others along with ourselves that it can only be understood in an inherited theology than it becomes a false-dichotomy. It doesn’t allow the reality that even within that historical framework there were authors who had intentions, environments, childhoods, pasts and even enemies with which to contend with– if they were trying to offer a objective point of view. For example, Paul talks about salvation in terms of Jesus who he believed was the Christ. And so his idea of salvation is framed around this one concept. The authors in the Old Testament saw salvation as a circumstantial and as an annual practice. These are examples of how a word can evolve over thousands of years. If we post-modernise salvation now in terms of a lot of the different interpretations of salvation, than maybe a new rendering is that salvation is something that is enacted by a self-less act of sacrificial love, and that in and of itself is not only circumstantial but also alludes to the reality that we have a responsibility to assist the progress of verbal evolution.
That if we don’t allow space for different interpretations than we become the very victims of change that we say we don’t want to be. That if we leave words where they were originally used than we say that they are only relevant in those moments. Soren Kierkegaard espoused himself to subjective reason as posed by one blogger who said this:
We have to realize that we see the world through our own eyes. Even when we try to see the world through the eyes of another (ex: this is what some television commercials try to do) it is ultimately tainted by the inescapable reality that we are first and foremost subjective beings. The closest we can come to objective truth is ‘subjectivey-objective’ truth. Truth that is tainted. I also think its dangerous to simply assume that subjective truth is any less valuable of what we might define objective truth as. When we objectify anything, we are seeking to create a perfect plumbline with which to measure against our ideas of what we think is and what we think should be. It seems that a lot of our objectifying is another way to allow justification to defend our own understanding of God, the bible, truth and so much more. When maybe another option is to see that all of our subjective versions of truth and thought hold some intrinsic truth to them.
And that objective truth, if it exists, finds itself hidden in God.
And so, as we come to realize the innate limitations to our words and their meanings, may we come to realize that they barely touch the objective that we seem to want to personify in God. Objective truth isn’t the enemy, our treatment of it with others, is. We are the limited purveyors of objective truth. That isn’t a bad thing. I think we might feel powerless when we can’t define the objective because for some the objective becomes the plumbline with which to judge others by. It seems then that our need for objective truth and thought might stem from a need to be in control of our world and maybe even those around us (there are a lot of other reasons, I am sure).
We have to be willing to let go of our gnostic approaches to God and allow space for the mystical to speak. That God is beyond our understanding, words and thoughts and sometimes like Elijah we wait for the silence to speak to us. The more we recognize the limitations to our words, the less we feel the need to use theology as a weapon to prove everyone else wrong. The more we recognize that revealed truth is already influenced by being subjective beings is the moment we accept that truth is bigger than one concept. The better we learn to embrace the unknown the better the uknown can help change us.
Consumerism is an after-effect of the colonization, commercialisation, and the deification of the indulgent spirit of entitlement. The more corporate we become the less people matter. The more we take the less become, or as an unknown author once said, “He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.” Maybe the reason why consumerism is so attractive is because we have bought the lie that it effects everyone else but us.
We are consumers. But the amount we have come to consume is too much for the earth, ecosystems, time, farms and the planet to handle.Don’t worry, this isn’t an inconvenient truth all over again! There is more to consumerism than trying to guilt people into responsibility. I think we have it in us to consume responsibly, it just might mean we will have to let go of some of the things we have become comfortable with.
If the story of Adam and Eve is about sin, than maybe the sin was consumerism. They took what wasn’t theirs. I think we have to come a place where we realize that the earth isn’t mine but ours. Maybe we could come to a place where we don’t have to buy the new Honda that just came out or the new IPad that seems so revolutionary but isn’t.
In the book of Acts, the author describes the harmony that the early church had together, they were all “in one accord” and it goes onto explain that there wasn’t a need that couldn’t be met. What if the author was using that story as a metaphor for humanity, a new way for humanity to live, breath and participate in the divine act of setting things right. The less we consume, the more we become. Let’s believe in a world where consumerism doesn’t have to have the last word, maybe we can believe in a world where meeting the need of another is the same as meeting the need of ourselves.
