Demythologizing JesusGodGoddessMaleFemale

Forgive the banality of this statement, but Goddesses are awesome.  Most religious schools portray a God who is androgynous and anthropopathic, a god who has emotions, feelings, sensitivities.  However I understand the Divine, if I describe God as emotional then I cannot really call it a "man."  It is equally right and wrong to see God as Male or Female.  For me,  God as "Father" or "Mother" are simply different ways of describing our relationship with that which we seek, which serves to begin to de-mythologize Jesus.  When we take out the supernatural and the politics then what are the messages trying to say?

If Jesus existed, and many scholars have made compelling cases of that fact, it appears to have been handed down that he was a man.  Duh.  So we look at the male humanity he was.  Only his masculinity has been handed down and has overpowered his feminine side.  Sadly, and once again missing the metaphorical boat, the contemporary theological trend is an over-correction of the masculine to the feminine.  For me, the best of both worlds is Jesus as the Compassionate Judge, the appropriate balance of both masculine and feminine or Humanity and Divinity.


As for the human side...I bet he had kids...c'mon now.  When he was done walking on water and feeding many with the loaves wouldn't it have been nice to go home to the goddess?  These miracles show that Jesus was power in the world, walked through it but wasn't brought down by it.  Metaphysical interpretation of these events leads to their applicability in my life- concretizing the metaphor in a literal way elides its power, reduces it to the absurd and makes a mockery of the transcendent power it is.  When we look at the human Jesus, we also see markers as to the nature of the Divine, which is why I see him as a "wayshower" to the nature of my highest good.  Professor Shepherd stated that in medieval iconography, Jesus was pictured with both a lilly and a sword- balancing both gender approaches.

Unfortunately, the metaphor becomes concrete and thus politicized into competing camps (kind of like the Copernicans and the Ptolemaics- and we know who won that game eh?)   The way we see God is shaped by the window of Jesus- if we "see" a warmongering radical then we will find that.  Paul Tillich noted that any symbol of God must be "affirmed and denied" at the same time.  I proffer this:

So the above image would be affirmed and denied in the sense that the affirmation is that Jesus stands by his beliefs and denied in that he never took up arms (right?).  Unity defines the "Trinity" as "Mind-Idea-Expression."  This is Modalism: God as Divine, as God-Idea-as-Me, and as Activity Expressed (me and the universe).  "I can see God in XYZ way" (modalism, quantum perspective= is it a particle or a wave (depends on how you look at it)) vs. "God IS this way." (organic, 3 leaf clover, pretzel, all three aspects are required). 

So, Is Unity "Trinitarian"?  Jesus, a .45 and a shotgun?   Are we saying what God is? Or are these simply ways of organizing our thinking about the divine mystery that is God?  We have borrowed some terms from Christianity to express these issues just as the Catholic church made those same choices after several centuries of debate in antiquity and made the choices concrete in the Nicene Creed.  I would agree that it is possible to believe in Jesus Christ as the Second Person of the Trinity while remaining faithful to One Power/One Presence and to the biblical witness.  BIG qualification though: I do not believe this at a literal level- these are metaphors of my deepest primordial Self.  If as Professor Shepherd suggests that Jesus "represents" each of us in the Trinity, the perfect-man idea, the "offspring of God-Mind," then I can palette the idea.  Can palette be a verb?

Each of us is Divine.  God is not "out there" somewhere- God is everywhere, in/as EVERY HUMAN. HELLLOOO.  Wake up!  God is within each of us, is us, as us, through us.  Jesus shows the way to our own divine potential.  Thanks for the Joan Osborne reminder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CdDUJpAe98

Tongue Twisted

"When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." (Acts 2: 1-4).

Um, this is scary stuff.  I think if that happened to me I'd be curious and maybe a little concerned.  This is the original passage upon which contemporary Pentecostals rest their claims to receiving the "gift" of glossolalia- speaking in tongues.

My first observation is that the passage says that the Apostle actually SPOKE LANGUAGE, simply different ones.  In other words if this happened to me today I'd be speaking in Russian or Japanese- languages with which I have no relationship.  Well, I guess I know "sayonara."  Anyway, even a plain reading of the text without recourse to advanced literary theory clearly states they were speaking languages.

Every review I've ever seen, which Professor Shepherd acknowledged, notes that contemporary Pentecostals, when "fallen out" make guttural sounds, gibberish, and non-linguistic pre-language.  This affords the individual an opportunity to receive the "gift" and thus complete an intricate social system of baptism that indicates the difference between an insider (called a "Saint") and an outsider (called a "Sinner").  The possession by the loa of the Vodou devotee functions in much the same way- to provide an individual a subjective way to experience god and to cement one's insider status.  

I have never experienced this form of prayer.  I am leery of the fuzzy margins of where the individual ends and God begins because of course in my tradition there is no separation of the two requiring a reunification of any kind- certainly not in a public dramatic way.  To me this type of display is a detachment of the brain from an animalistic sensory experience and is thus grounded purely in physical expression.  When the politics of initiation and social status are layered on top of that issue then the "authenticity" comes into real question.  My former Ph.D. dissertation adviser, Dr. Elaine Lawless, writes

"Specialized language serves further to mark the group to outsiders, to delineate boundaries that keep groups distinct, and to intensify group cohesion and solidarity. A special language must be close enough to the mother language to make sense to the members of the group and simple enough for the novice to pick up fairly quickly. No tome is set aside for the teaching of this specialized language, but its constant and repetitive use in the verbal messages of the group members serves to teach the newcomer what the words mean and where and how it is appropriate to employ them" ("The Special Language of Pentecostalism" in God's Peculiar People, University of Kentucky Press, 1988).

For me, too many levels of questions lead to avoidance.

Dr. Sherpherd's Questions:

1. What is “speaking in tongues”? See above.
2. Have you done it? No.
3. Do you do it now? No.
4. Would you be comfortable with it during your Sunday morning services? Absolutely not.

Spiritual vs. Religious: Another Useless Dichotomy

So much time seems to be spent in the Medieval practice of determining how many angels fit on the head of a pin as  a way of discovering the ontological nature of God.  Today there appear to be a couple of camps devoted to the nature and practice of belief in God, the traditional "Religious" track and the somewhat reactionary response to the track, the "Spiritual."

Adherents to the traditionalist system (mostly) take an approach to God that stresses structure, dogma,  social church context, and a system of belief that usually stresses God "out there" somewhere (with some small exceptions such as panentheistic religions).  This group seems rather suspicious of the historical newcomer group and its view of them can be seen here: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/29/my-take-im-spiritual-not-religious-is-a-cop-out/

The "reactionary" camps consists of those who see themselves as practicing a spiritual perspective but who don't adhere to a traditional religious path to do so.  The reasons for not doing so are as varied as the stars in the sky.  Perhaps some fall into the laziness outlined in the blog above.  Others are emigrants fleeing whatever pain was inflicted upon them in their experiences with the larger organized structures.  Whatever.

To me the distinctions are irrelevant and both sides have things to offer.  Much of this has more to do with our obsession to label and categorize and control than it does about experiencing authentic relationships with ourselves, our deity(ies), and finding the practices that bring us to happiness, satisfaction, enlightenment.  For me that is the bottom line- what is advancing me?  What can I glean from X experience?  Religions offer history and thousands of years of experience in the nature of metaphysical ideas.  Spiritualists for lack of a better terms offer the ideas of freedom from structure and invidiual thought.  The whole thing is kind of like a mini-Reformation.  For me the truth lays in transcending both and incorporating the underlying lessons.

Pragmatic Idealism and MEMEME

     In exploring the multi-faceted arena of epistemology, Dr. Shepherd explicates a system of truth-testing he calls Pragmatic Idealism, based on his reading of Charles Fillmore and other mystical Christian thinkers.  He notes that Idealism is the belief that everything in the world has its origins in spirit, and that idealists are supremely optimistic about the nature of reality.
 
Positing a somewhat radically practical approach to an epistemology of theology and its study, Dr. Shepherd writes:

 “[William] James would never push his system this far, but could we say that true religious ideas are those which demonstrate good results in the real world?... True religious ideas are those which demonstrate good results in the real world.  Religious ideas which are demonstrated true by existential reality have inner-personal validity. You prove them true when they work for you.”

 

I won’t quibble of the use of the term “religious” although I think what may be meant is “spiritual.”  I think that spiritual principles trump religious beliefs or ideas in that they are the underpinning universal Truths that are filtered through religions.  It’s much easier to beat up on the notion of “good results” as applied through that filter- surely the priests of the Inquisition fully knew and felt that they were having “good results” by ridding the world of apostates and sinners just as radical Muslim terrorists know they are having “good results” by eliminating enemies of [their verson of] Islam.

 

 

Come on- really?  Am I misunderstanding here?  If the filtered Truth of an ideal spiritual principle is passed through a lens that is completely subjective in nature then the lens becomes the all-powerful determinant of “good results.”  If I want to hurt people I can justify it 1. Existentially- yeah it works for me and is cleansing for them; 2. Comparatively- yep my radical buddies all agree that it’s fine to hurt others to advance our philosophy; 3. Holistically- violence promotes spiritual growth by rearranging the beliefs of the afflicted to conform with my Truth; 4. Christologically- Jesus deployed violence in clearing the Temple of those pesky money changers.  I shall embark on my campaign of knocking Truth into people’s heads immediately. :)