Christianity remade as a religion of power, or of escape

It often seems that there have never been very many Christians in the world; because so very few people - even among the religious - seem even to want what Jesus offered: i.e. resurrected eternal life in Heaven, attainable by following him.

What the mass of religious people want most, is apparently a deity of power.

God/s whose own power is so great and irresistible, that service to the God/s can guarantee that those who serve him/them will win (eventually). 

Naturally, when such people call themselves Christian, they make "Christianity" into an instrument of power, serving a God defined in terms of power in this mortal life and world. 

An influential minority find "winning" to be no more than a temporary palliative; because these people are irresistibly-aware that evil pervades all Men, winners as well as losers; and because disease, degeneration and death make our mortal life a tragedy. 

What such people desire most deeply is escape from the tragedy that is mortal life on earth. 

Naturally, when such people call themselves Christian; they make Christianity into a religion of escape; a religion of palliation in this temporary and illusory mortal life and world; escape into complete absence of all suffering (perhaps bliss) in the next, and real, world. 

It is natural, and probably inevitable, that people will make their religion into a vehicle of what they most want; but it is confusing for those who instead want what Jesus offered.

When the overwhelming mass of Christianity actually is about power; and its "advanced" practitioners primarily desire escape - and when power or escape fill most of Christian discourse - it becomes difficult, or perhaps in practice impossible, for someone who innately wants what Jesus actually offers to recognize "Christianity" as the place he can find what he desires. 

This is why I think we are compelled to seek fundamental knowledge concerning our deepest wants in a manner that is direct and personal, intuitive and simple. 

If we do not, or cannot, find the necessary knowledge for-ourselves and validated by-ourselves - in faith that the true deity will guide the sincere searcher sufficiently for the purpose; then I see zero possibility of actually finding Jesus's offer by a process of sifting through the colossal and growing archives of public religious discourse. 

 

Note Added: The above analysis suggests why Christianity has declined, and is declining. 

If you are religious, and it is power you really want in the 21st century; then Christianity is not the place that somebody would seek a share of power. The obvious power religions are not in Christianity but in the plainly-monotheistic world religions. 

Affiliation with power might be sought by supporting or converting-to the global monotheism which has been growing so rapidly in zeal, numbers, and nations over the past century. Or else a power-seeker might seek affiliation with to the global racial monotheism that has such a disproportionately large share of world power, wealth, and influence. 

As for religions of escape: a much purer and simpler and more escape-orientated religion than Christianity can be found among the Western philosophical (and Theosophy-derived, "perennialist") versions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism. And (overlapping with these) there is a large, growing (and socially-acceptable, Establishment-supported) Oneness spirituality of the New Age. 

In sum; both for those who seek power, and those who seek escape; there are more straightforward and "effective" alternatives to be found outwith Christianity.

Explaining the origin of irredeemable, never-incarnated, demonic spirits

Following from yesterday's discussion; I shall put forward here an explanation for those beings who are traditionally regarded as demons in orthodox Christian theology:

The definition of which is that they are spirit-beings, that have never incarnated, and which are eternally committed to evil such that they cannot be redeemed or saved. 

There are several other kinds of being that might be termed "demons"* - and these might include currently-incarnated beings, or beings that have previously been incarnated and died (analogous to evil ghosts)...

But here I am focusing on beings that have always been spirits - and I am trying to understand and explain how any being might be outwith the scope of the salvation of Jesus Christ.   

I will first outline my metaphysical assumptions: those who want to cut straight to the explanation of demons will find this after the break: indicated +++

My metaphysical understanding of reality is that it comprises beings in relationships; and that beings have attributes such that they are alive, conscious (to some degree), purposive, self-sustaining and so forth. 

Beings are eternal, always have existed - including before creation.

All beings are unique: that is important. Some Christians (perhaps influenced by oneness spiritualty) assume that all Men are originally equal, and diverge - and then spiritually develop and converge towards becoming very similar, or even identical. 

But in contrast I assume that all beings began as unique (and un-cooperative) and God's plan of salvation is a matter of progressively achieving harmony. At first a partly-imposed and temporary harmony, but a process that is completed by the Second Creation, of Heaven; where each resurrected being has chosen to be remade such as to live wholly from-love, and harmony between unalike beings is then innate and spontaneous**.

That is: living-beings are the primary unit of reality; and "beings" include humans, animals, plants, as well as what are usually considered to be "mineral" entities and materials. 

Everything primary in reality is thus either itself a being, or part of a being. 

A further assumption is that all beings were originally spirits. 

Only later, and only for some beings, there may be incarnation into some material form. 

Many spirits have never been incarnated.  

Originally (before creation) beings may have been aware of each other, to varying degrees, and with varying attitudes - but each being is assumed to have been autonomous, separate, pursuing its own goals. 

Before creation, reality was a "chaos" of beings. 

Divine creation happened when God's love became the means of "coordinating" or harmonizing these already-existing beings. 

However, to become a part of divine creation, a being must first be capable of love; then secondly a being-capable-of-love must choose to live by, or from, this love.

(Because it is love that harmonizes the disparate beings, and this harmonization is creation.)

Hence the formulation "God is love", and the great commandments to love God and fellow Men - which can be interpreted to make the choice to embrace the loving purpose of God as ideal, and to aspire to live wholly from love of other beings. 

+++

Now I will explain the origin of demons:

All beings are unique. To participate in creation, a being must be capable of love; but not all beings are capable of love. 

A love-incapable being happens to be constituted that way. Such a being will not be part of creation, and cannot ever become a part of creation. 

Demons are here regarded as spirits that are incapable of love. 

For a being to be saved or redeemed includes death and resurrection such as to live entirely from love. 

It follows that any being constitutionally incapable of love, cannot undergo salvation, indeed, such a being cannot even want salvation.

Some love-incapable beings might remain passive, detached from creation. But demons are assumed to be those love-incapable beings who have chosen to oppose creation - for various motives. 

For instance; demons may aim to exploit creation, or may seek to destroy it. They may be motivated by their own pleasure, by negative resentment, or sheer spiteful desire to inflict suffering. Or mixture of motivation; and demonic motivations may change over time. 

But although capable of changing their behaviours; a love-incapable demon can never become part of creation, and can never seek or attain salvation through following Jesus Christ. 

The above scheme may explain the occurrence of those demons - traditionally-defined: demons that are spirits, have never incarnated, and are eternally outwith even the possibility of salvation. 

*(And some of these are capable of choosing salvation.)

**(An analogy is that the first creation is like a State ruled by a loving creator God with a mixture of coercion and consent; while the Second Creation is a perfectly loving family.) 

The Easter problem, the fake-virtue of humility; and the false ideals of obedience and altruism

Easter seems to be a time when the confusion, incoherence, and errors of mainstream Christianity become most evident; as mainstream Christianity finds ever more way of being wrong, of misdirecting attention, and sowing confusion! 

Perhaps one root of this is the un-Christ-like, fake-virtue of humility.  

This leads to the preaching of two kinds of error:

1. Unselfish ego-annihilating obedience to God's will

2. Unselfish altruism 

Mainstream Christians are always saying things on the lines that all good which they enact is "not from me, but from God-in-me.". They claim that the highest Christian aim is for us to become nothing-but a channel for God to work-through. As a commenter put it: "I did nothing on my own God did everything". 

Christians repeat this without considering its implication that such an attitude depicts humans as unthinking and utterly-obedient slaves of deity; and what is worse, slaves to the kind of God who wants humans to desire nothing higher than to cease being themselves - and instead become mere tools. 

Such an attitude ultimately renders the creation of free and creative Men utterly futile - a divine mistake. 

Mainstream Christians are always preaching that we cease to be selfish and instead live to serve; that we ought to set aside considerations of self-interest, and instead help other people. 

But this is merely utilitarian atheistic materialism under a Christian disguise!

Of course, it can easily be seen what the preachers are getting-at: they are trying to combat sins such Pride and Lust. 

But the problem is that humility Just Isn't a virtue; and indeed is something close to the worst possible attitude to inculcate in a pervasively evil world of totalitarian domination of all social institutions - including the mainstream religions and churches. 

The opposite of Pride is not anti-pride; the opposite of selfishness is not doing what other people want (or "need"). 

The opposite of psychopathic gratification is not to become a non-person, one-with-God: a hollowed husk in human shape, an instrument rather than a divine Son of God, and a participant in divine creation.   

To recommend humility and living for the "benefit" of other people; is therefore to preach something other-than what Jesus did and taught - it is to preach another religion. 

There are Religions that are rooted in the oneness of God and the delusional unreality of The Self. There is a religion based on negation of the self, and absolute submission to God will. 

But these are not Christianity. 

From a Christian point-of-view; to recommend humility and altruism is, in the context of The West in 2026 - pretty much to guarantee a chosen damnation via assimilation to evil societal norms. 

Instead; the proper virtues by which to resist sins such as pride, selfish-short-termism and so forth; are the Christian virtues: 

Love of Jesus in thanks for his divine creation of Heaven, and his continuing guidance and comfort; Faith in his offer of the possibility of resurrected eternal life beyond death; and confident Hope that this shall be our personal "destination". 

Thoreau in Walden - emergence of modern consciousness

Thoreau by Wyeth - depicting one of the earliest spiritual adolescents

I have been re-reading HD Thoreau's Walden (1854) - starting at the very beginning with the chapter "Economy". (I've been reading this book, on-and-off, for fifty years!)

First, I was struck afresh by the muscular brilliance of the writing - this is prose of the highest level! 

But secondly, it struck me how modern is the expressed perspective of Thoreau. He writes from the position of mainstream modern alienation, one which looks-out upon the world and deliberates how to get the best deal from our interactions. 

And Thoreau's idea of a life-well-lived is rooted almost wholly in feelings; in his own responses to ideas and situations. And, much like New Age spirituality; Thoreau seeks to engineer his environment, and himself, such as to achieve the highest possible level of personal gratification - and minimize the inevitable degree of personal suffering. 

The chapter is called "Economy" because it focuses on how to get the most gratification from life - which for Thoreau entails as much unstructured time as possible, to be spent in and around Concord and often alone; while paying for this with the least investment of of time and unpleasant-effort in "work". 

This attitude was something new in mid-nineteenth century USA when the book was written and published, because so individualist; even Thoreau's direct-mentor RW Emerson (just c. 14 years older) was much more communal and social in his perspective.  

Yet nowadays the argument of "Economy" is (more or less) what almost every adolescent considers at some point; although the conclusions most modern Westerners reach are typically very different from Thoreau's idea of reducing his material needs to the lowest minimum, so that he needed to perform the least amount of paid labour.

I would call Thoreau's attitude to the world "instrumental" - he was trying to use the world to attain his ends - to get as much as possible back from the least possible investment; even though Thoreau used his freedom to pursue a Romantic agenda - and it is as "a poet of nature" that he is most remembered. 

And Thoreau is a pioneer and exemplar of the "hedonic" morality of mainstream modernity, in which goodness is calibrated against the current feelings of the observer. 

Only in terms of a kind of pantheism does Thoreau depart (somewhat) from mainstream modernity - I mean that he seemed to assume a deistic, ordered, and therefore meaningful (although not purposive) backdrop of ultimate reality. 

Consequently, because reality is not a creation, nor is it going anywhere; Thoreau was a "contemplative" - which we might term a "consumer" rather than a creator. 

His aspiration was to enjoy nature; not to participate in creation. 

He saw no role for himself or other individual persons in shaping reality - because that reality was going nowhere. 

Therefore his highest spiritual experience was to forget himself and time and the world in extended-moments of ecstatic bliss: each of which was understood as an epiphanic-revelation of the ultimate stasis of oneness - the realization that he was part of this oneness, and had re-joined it, for a while. 

Of course, I am exaggerating the simplicity and clarity of Thoreau's perspective and aspirations; because he was of course a mortal Man - and one who had been brought-up and educated in a Christian nation, town and city that retained considerable Theistic Calvinistic elements, as well as a more recent deistic Unitarianism. 

Nonetheless, Thoreau is a strikingly modern figure; although his early death somewhat prevented the full implications of his world view from working themselves out in his life... 

Post-Civil War USA - which Thoreau did not live to experience, starkly revealed many of the unpleasant consequences of Thoreau's perspective and assumptions - although he may of course have denied and ignored most of these ill-effects, as did most of his circle. 

But I feel that Thoreau's mind-set was an inevitable phase in human history; one analogous to the arrival of adolescence. 

Thoreau was, then, an expression of the adolescence of Mankind - emerging, in his era and culture, for the first time in a recognizable form. 

And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with spiritual adolescence! - so long as it is indeed a phase, leading towards spiritual maturity; and does not become (as it has in the modern West) a lifelong state.

*Why* should we affiliate with God the creator?

Why should we affiliate with God the creator?

Is it because we believe God to be powerful - by far the most powerful, infinitely powerful?

Is that why we should affiliate with God?

Is it instead (or as well) because we believe there is nothing-else-but God (and divine creation) - so that it is insane and irrational not to affiliate, because there is literally nothing-else? 

These are reasons that some people have, or give, for affiliating with God (as such people understand God). 

But it seems to me that the Christian reason for affiliating with God, by-far and essentially the main reason: 

Is that - from the depth of our being, insofar as we know it - we approve of God.

Because we know and love God's loving nature. 

Because we desire to join and ally our-selves with God's hopes, and plans, and methods. 

Thus, for a Christian we ally with the creator not because of his power or oneness or totality; all of which are uncertain and debateable - but instead from our own love of who God is and what God is doing and aiming-at - and the desire to join our efforts, join our selves, with that nature and purpose.

"AI" is the reductio ad absurdum and revenge of "Truth is Out There"

There is a fundamental, integral, by-assumption incoherence of Western thinking; that was described by Rudolf Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom (1894); then further elucidated by Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances (1957). 

These deep errors have not been acknowledged so could neither be analysed* nor be reformed, therefore have remained; and now are wreaking their revenge in the strategically destructive nonsense that is the post-November 2022 totalitarian global project of "AI". 

Such metaphysical assumptions have led Western civilization to the apparently-inevitable conclusion that, since truth has nothing to do with the active thinking of living, conscious, purposive beings (such as human beings); "therefore" truth can be more efficiently and impartially "discovered and done" by computers.

For the AI-dolaters; Truth is something that can be built-into a logical system; and it is the job of rational humans to submit to... whatever that logical system tells us is true. 

For AI-dolaters - "AI" is just a mechanical tool for discovering, and perhaps implementing, those self-explaining and objective truths - "truths" which are implicitly regarded as floating around "out there", waiting to be discovered and used...

For the Truth Out There gang; Truths are like pre-cut diamonds mixed into a vast heap of useless rubble - and they regard AI as merely a machine for sifting through trash and extracting the valuable elements.  

There is widespread acceptance (among the managerial and intellectual class) of the false mantra of "Truth is Out There", objective, independent of what we think about it; with its implication that rational men therefore ought to submit to that external truth...

And because this nonsensical assumption is integral to the functioning of bureaucracy and functional discourse; the demon-serving powers-that-should-not-be - most of the middling people of Western society have ended-up supporting (by word and deed, even when there are vague mental reservations) an insanely-dysfunctional but mandatory project to "replace" human consciousness with machine algorithms in as many kinds of socio-economic activity as possible. 

This happens because it is lazily assumed that the only alternative to the fake reasonableness of Truth is Out There is the solipsism of Truth is in My Mind.*

Such vague ideas of the subjectivity of truth have been floating around the counter-culture for many decades, indeed a few centuries: e.g. "my truth" notions such that ultimate truth is wholly-subjective, is whatever I currently assert it to be. 

Such subjectivist "relativism" is just as incoherent as "Truth is Out There" - but in addition it is upfront socially subversive and destructive. 

So it seems that mainstream "responsible" opinion - which cannot/will-not reject the exclusive dichotomy of conception; it has doubled-down on Truth is Out There. 

Consequently; it is routinely pretended (but aggressively!) that real truths are objective, independent of minds and consciousness; and have nothing to do with what humans (or anyone else) thinks...

It is important to recognize that "external truth" assumptions, are shared across the divide between mainstream materialist-atheism and mainstream-church-Christianity.

Therefore; the totalitarian assumption that it is the duty of individuals to submit to external truth - is also shared by totalitarians of secular and Christian types. 

This, I suggest, is why the "Truth is Out There" Christians have so often embraced and celebrated the totalitarian AI Project. 

Church-rooted, or "systemic", Christianity on the one hand, and materialist-secular-atheism on the other hand; are in this respect two sides of the same coin of "Truth is Out There"-ism. 

And this explains their analogous failure to discern the fraudulent and evil-motivated nature of current "AI". 

The main difference between church-Christian and secular AI-dolaters, seems to be that the Christians want their AI systems to be "trained" on a somewhat different data set. 

Other than that; church-Christians seem to be eagerly anticipating a system of AI-religion - a fusion of bureaucracy and computers - that they hope will become objectively valid, and to which they believe we ought then to submit obediently.   

*Note added: the reason for the apparently exclusive dichotomy of truth as either wholly subjective or wholly objective; is that Western philosophy has assumed this separation and division into place - then finds that it cannot be bridged. Most who realize that the result is a choice of two incoherent possibilities then assert some version of Oneness spirituality - which also does not make sense, since it provides no basis for creation or human existence; and there is no basis in it for any distinction or discernment of life. The only coherent basis I have found is to assume that the fundamental reality is of pre-existent/ eternal living beings, and this is the basis of true distinction and discernment. We start with Beings. And divine creation is a matter of developing relationships and creating cooperation between such Beings. This means that the baseline is that all knowledge is a product of the relationships between conscious Beings - so that detached subjectivity and objectivity are alike meaningless. 

The middle nineteen-sixties was the inflexion point of a vast and strategic psychic attack on Western Civilization

The style and persons included in this image are significant - 

particularly the gratuitous presence of black magician and British intelligence operative Alisteir Crowley - back row second from left. 

The cultural changes in the West that happened in the middle 1960s - especially in the UK and USA - were stark; and shocking at the time. 

Although still at a rural English Primary School; I was very aware of these changes, they impinged upon me. 

I now regard the middle 'sixties as the inflexion point of a vast and strategic psychic attack on Western Civilization, mounted (mainly) by means of the mass media. 

Up to the middle 60s the mass culture was very positive in tone; all about people opening their minds; about embracing everything with discrimination, welcoming the new, looking forward to the future...

Change happened suddenly; beginning in summer 1967. 

For me it was marked by the surprising change in our cultural leaders The Beatles with their Sgt. Pepper album - the change in their fashion, behaviour, style of music, beginning to espouse of "radical" politics and alien spiritual stuff.

Things very quickly began to go sour, to lose innocence and optimism...

From the cheerful primary colours and plastic miniskirts and bobbed haircuts and Union Jacks of "I'm Backing Britain; then suddenly it was all about dirt, long-hair, drugs, violent "protest", Indian gurus, the Vietnam War etc. 

From light to darkness; from us to them, from hedonic materialism to satanic spirituality. 

In retrospect; I think the whole thing was a strategic psychic attack. That is, an evil-motivated attack on a person's soul. 

People were first encouraged to open themselves and welcome the future; then when this was achieved - all kinds of sickly stuff was poured-in. 

From shallow relentless cheerfulness; suddenly it was about fear and resentment, the pseudo-seriousness of ignorant philosophizing about remote matters; and the hedonism took on a self-destructive quality as it styled itself as a revolutionary activity.   

This is a pattern: first encourage open and uncritical acceptance and positivity; then when this achieved take rapid and powerful advantage of it to attack with demoralizing despair. 

And the pattern has recurred in culture, or at least this has been attempted, several times since. 

For instance the UK Blair government in 1997 explicitly tried to replicate the sixties optimism and openness and fun ("Cool Britannia" - pass the sick-bag please....); before suddenly transitioning to massive bureaucracy, pervasive corruption, globalism and wars. 

...Which had always been the whole point and purpose of the exercise. 

Again: this can be understood as a psychic attack. 

And, as well as at the mass and cultural level; the same sequence happens in individual persons:

First get them to open-up, and drop their guard, and welcome everything because all-is-one, all-is-good...

Then pour-in the nasty stuff - which they will at first welcome (i.e. they will invite evil into their hearts...); and try to overwhelm and dominate - before they can understand what is going-on.  

This can be understood using Owen Barfield's categories of the child's and tribal Man's enchanted state of Original Participation - which is what gets aimed-at by the phase of open acceptance...

Contrasted with the modern condition; which is the alienated Consciousness Soul - cut-off from its earlier immersion in the spiritual and communal. 

The effect of the civilization and personal psychic attacks is either that the person remains open and gets overwhelmed by the torrent of dark influences - like the casualties of the 1960s. 

Or else, when the individual experiences the torrential inrush of dark side: the barriers of alienation are re-erected and strengthened.

This large increase of psychological-and social alienation is what actually happened overall in Britain post 1960s and after the Blair-era attempted replication. 

In a crude form of emergency psychic self-defence; people became more less spiritual, more materialist - and bureaucracy grew and continued to grow. 

The naïve and brief utopian optimism about a wonderful future was replaced by dystopian fantasies ad the negative-fleeing escapisms of intoxication, the distractions of virtuality, fantasies of death as peaceful annihilation...

And as optimism became impossible (and spiritual hope was ruled out by atheistic materialism) the prevalent aspirations became and remained oppositional, negative: anti-men, anti-racism, anti-CO2 etc - a psychic world dominated by fear, resentment and despair. 

Part of the PSYOPS is to restrict options to these two - going back into a spiritual state of open-immersive passivity and oneness, like the early 60s; or going forward into a cut-off, impersonal, anti-spiritual, anti-human, anti-life-itself world - as with the current global totalitarian "AI" project. 

These psychic attacks continue...

Unless you personally are happy to pick and live-by one of these available and "approved" options - then you might to well to reflect on your underlying metaphysical assumptions that appear to make these two possibilities inevitable and exclusive.

You might do well to explore the only coherent alternative of which I am aware: which is something on the lines of Owen Barfield's Final Participation. 

Are traditionalist-orthodox Christians contented Not To Know how salvation works for the massive majority of (outside of the church) foetuses, children, non-Christians?

I am much more confident of the goodness of God the Creator; than I am of any theology; such that it seems obvious that Christians ought to fit theology around the goodness of God, and not vice versa. 

I am also much more confident that Jesus was the Son of God, God was his Father, spoke with God person to person; and taught that we can and do know God by knowing Jesus - than I am confident about metaphysical assumptions regarding the nature and operations of "the Trinity". 

Put together: I am much more confident that God the Creator's goodness is fundamentally like Jesus's goodness, and like the goodness of Men (when we are good) - much more confident of this recognition and knowledge of God's goodness; than I am confident of the theological explanations that posit a God whose "goodness" is alien and incomprehensible to me, and therefore a God whose "goodness" has the human appearances of evil. 

(Thus I solidly believe that God is good; not that good is God.) 

From this perspective I perceive that most Christian theologians have always seen things the other way around to myself. 

They insist on trying (and failing) to explain the goodness of God in terms of (what seem to be prior and extra-Christian concepts of) monotheistic oneness, and dogmas concerning the "omni" attributes of the Creator.  

And consequently, they insist upon their inference of the utter unbridgeable difference between God and Men, and the unknowable nature of so infinitely-different a being as their God is from ourselves. 

This, I believe, lies behind the problem of the possibility of salvation "outside of the church" - which has apparently plagued thoughtful orthodox Christians as far back as there are records, and still does. 

On the one hand; strict orthodox-mainstream Christian church theology typically excludes the possibility of salvation from those outside of the church, and/or those who die unrepentant (e.g. the Protestant idea of "as the tree falls, there it shall lie" - meaning it is the state of mind at the moment of death that determines our eternal future).  

Both of these ideas seem to imply that the mass majority of humankind through history and still today are doomed to damnation. 

Yet those who assert salvation-for-all ("universalists") deny the reality of freedom, of agency, of choice* - and/or make this mortal life a needless hazard to salvation. 

Caught between the monstrous idea that most of humankind are doomed to damnation by an inscrutable God (He must be inscrutable, because he is Not  understandably good and loving) - and the robotic- determinism of universal salvation - most Christians will affect ignorance.  

They will say some version of "we do not know, because we have not been told" (meaning told dogmatically by their church, or the Bible as interpreted by their church) what happens to that (I say it again!) massive majority of Men throughout history who died in the womb, or as young children, or in places and times when there was no Christian church. 

This affectation of ignorance concerning such a colossal question strikes me a grotesque if sincere, and wicked if insincere. 

How could so many self-identified Christians be contented Not to know what happens to most people alive or who ever have lived?

Are they really only concerned about the magic circle of people within their own chosen church or denomination? 

My point is that this is an extremely important matter, and Christians ought not to allow themselves to profess ignorance on such a vital matter. 

They need (are duty-bound) to find a coherent answer that accords with their fundamental understanding God, Jesus and what it is to be saved. 

And this further means, that they ought carefully to examine whatever answer they come-up-with and commit-to; to ensure that their answer is essentially coherent with what needs to be affirmed for Christians.

Because... most of what most churches/ denominations say on this extremely important subject is very obviously incoherent. 

* Salvation must freely be chosen, it is opt-in. This means that the Mormon idea that all children before eight years old, the year from which they regard baptism as valid, will be saved - is also incoherent. 

AI-dolatry among Christians is the flip-side of fundamentally anti-personal metaphysical assumptions

I have commented before about my dismay at AI-dolatry among so many self-identified Christians - specifically their failure to recognise and grasp that the current iteration of "Artificial Intelligence" (which was top-down launched nearly three years ago, at the end of November 2022) is primarily a totalitarian - hence evil - strategy; designed for the accelerating corruption and damnation of Men. 

But vulnerability to AI-dolatry is the other side of a coin which in practice asserts and assumes the abstract impersonality of God and created reality - despite that Christians are supposed to recognize God as a person, as our Father, and we his children. 

That this is "in practice" and almost indifferent to theological theory, is evident from the official Mormon church's positive response to AI, describing it as: "a rapidly developing technology that has significant potential to assist the Church in accomplishing God’s work of salvation and exaltation." 

This despite that the CJCLDS officially regards God as an exalted and embodied Man; indeed as two Men - a Heavenly Father and Mother; which is an explicitly non-abstract primary understanding of the creator and creation that, one might have supposed, should have protected Mormons from AI-dolatry. 

But no. 

The fact is that modern Christians get their fundamental metaphysical assumptions from mainstream society, not from their religion; and our society is bureaucratic hence fundamentally anti-personal, anti-human. 

We have, for many decades, denigrated individuals and their personal judgments and evaluations; and instead given primary moral authority to the impersonal: to system; laws and regulations; process and procedures; voting and committees. 

(And all churches operate internally by these same assumptions; all churches are bureaucratic, procedural, deploy committees and voting at their fundamental levels of decision-making etc. - which of course affects their evaluations.)

It has been a "natural" extension of this abstract-impersonal way of thinking; that the human element ought ideally to be minimized or eliminated - such that computers, robots, "AI" are by their nature potentially superior to humans... 

Supposedly superior because less prone to corruption, error, variation; and (by our false but common mainstream understanding of these terms) more informed, more knowledgeable, more intelligent - hence wiser and authoritative; than any possible human or combination of humans.  

In short: the assertion is that "AI" is potentially superior because (and insofar as) it is not human.      

In theory, Christians ought to be immune to such self-destructive and deluded foolishness - but in practice they are qualitatively as bad as everyone else! (ie. Any measured differences between modern Christians and the mainstream - e.g. in surveys - are merely quantitative, and insufficient to make a qualitative difference.) 

My understanding of this, is that Christians are now reaping the consequences of ancient errors in their metaphysics - in particular of rejecting our spontaneous knowledge that reality is plural and animated: in other words that the ultimate reality includes many living, conscious, purposive and eternal beings - and these are the basis with which divine creation has worked. 

(That is; God created from and by-means-of many pre-existent Beings.)

There was, very early, a capture of the Christianity of Jesus Christ; by a metaphysics of oneness (hence monotheism) - and the adoption of multiple abstract assumptions (which became dogmas) such as: creation from nothing; omnipotence/ omniscience, omnipresence; and the conceptualization of God's creation as including unalive/ non-living aspects such as minerals...

This metaphysics imposed itself upon the simple teachings of Jesus (essentially, the promise of resurrected eternal life in Heaven to those who followed Him) to make a complex systemic religion of this-world and its institutions - in which the essential teaching became obscured, distorted... 

(And indeed all-but denied at times and in some places, such that salvation became so complex and contingent-upon-this-world, as to be regarded as actually impossible for some/ many people.).  

Many centuries downstream; and in the unique and unprecedented actual conditions of our modern society; these have led to underpinning assumptions that dominate (often unconsciously) most Christians - and almost everybody else. 

We see physics or mathematics as the primary reality, and the unalive as existing prior to (what we regard as) living beings - and as life and consciousness as having been made-from and/or added-to dead materials.   

In a nutshell; even those who believe in creation imagine God as starting with non-living materials; then making plants, animal, then Men by adding life, movement, consciousness etc. 

Whereas we ought instead to imagine everything created as alive (and outside it, only incomprehensible chaos); spirit as coming before matter; with matter "condensing" from spirit - so that spiritual life and consciousness are basic, have always-been - and always shall be. 

I think this is how we spontaneously (but mostly unconsciously) come into this world understanding things; and that young children still think this way. And I think the reason for this is that God implanted such knowledge in us, as innate knowledge which we (nearly always) need in order to live well and attain salvation. 

The discarding of our innate animism and pluralism did not matter much when Men spontaneously retained "participation" through into adulthood. 

Because in effect these Men (e.g. in the Classical and Medieval times) continued - but unconsciously and unavoidably - to perceive the world in the same way as young children, or could return to this way of thinking via the methods of religion (ritual, symbol, scripture etc). 

But now we all become alienated through adolescence; becoming cut-off from this innate knowledge and the spontaneous sense of being part of a living world - and from this state of alienation; modern Men therefore consciously need to choose to return to our innate knowledge and understanding. 

And we need to do this conscious act of return for-ourselves, because there are no institutions - not even churches - that will teach or encourage us to do so. 

Not just for-ourselves; but from-ourselves; because it is actually contradicted by many of the actual, here-and-now dominant and mandatory, Christian church teachings. 

And therefore church-orientated Christians (those who regard a church, or any external source, as having primary authority over Christian understanding) are stuck in delusional materialism; including AI-dolatry... 

Which, unless identified and repented at some point, has the potential to lead to their self-chosen damnation.   

My take-home message here, is that anyone who hopes to escape their own self-chosen damnation - which will eventuate for those who follow external "authority" in this actual world, including church authority; would be wise to bring to consciousness, and reflect deeply upon, their most fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality. 

 

Distinguishing Final Participation from Original Participation

It was Owen Barfield who defined  Original Participation - characteristic of young childhood and the early states of Mankind's development of consciousness (roughly, the nomadic Hunter Gatherer stage); and Final Participation - which was the divinely-intended future development of consciousness that was posited to come after the modern alienated consciousness which is cut-off from participation. 

But Barfield perhaps never made it really clear how one might distinguish these types of participation - at any rate, confusion on this matter seems to be rife; and it seems usual, in my experience, for those who have encountered Barfield to list instances of what is actually Original Participation, with the claim that these are Final Participation.  

Here is my understanding of the distinction, as these states occur in modern Man:

Original Participation is experienced as a stillness, dreamlike, a trance-state - as if time is slowed or stopped or the individual has moved out of time into eternal simultaneity. 

As immersion in "the world" or divine consciousness - with loss of boundaries between individuals.

As a blending into "being-ness" - during which the individual "self" dissolves-into the larger or other consciousness. 

Ultimate reality is felt to be a state of oneness, unity; variation is only superficial because the deepest truth is singleness. 

For Original Participation we seem actually to inhabit an ocean of one-consciousness; from-which our individual consciousness sometimes emerges, briefly; rather like a crest among swirling waves that randomly gets shaped into a degree of illusory and temporary distinction and self-awareness - just long enough to realize this, before again dissolving-into the infinite sea. 

Final Participation is a dynamic state of consciousness, associated with directionality and movement of thought. 

The "self" is intensified, thinking is afoot; and consciousness absorbs into itself awareness of "the world", other people, other beings.

Awareness becomes wider and deeper - and this is awareness of other and different consciousnesses.

Ultimate reality is - at its best and highest - a state of friendship, harmony between different beings; between different but allied consciousnesses. 

Final Participation is likely to happen when we are enacting some strong and good inner motivation. When we are propelled by a creativity that is aligned and affiliated with divine creation. Perhaps while we are gathering insights that are being intuitively confirmed; or when actively-engaged in enchanted doing, or making. 

In summary - for us modern people: Original Participation happens in a state of rest or stasis, while Final Participation happens when mentally active; OP includes a loss of the sense of self, while FP includes an intensification of self; OP leads towards a sense of oneness and timelessness, while FP is a dynamic and connected form of "ongoing" consciousness.

Reading mainstream Christian theology nowadays, I am amazed I converted!

I have just been reading an exposition of mainstream Christian theology - the theology common to Western and Eastern Catholics and the major Protestant denominations; and I am struck by how it nowadays strikes me as utterly unsatisfactory - being over-inclusive; and consequently incoherent, and evasive. 

It would really have repelled me from becoming a Christian, had I realized that I was signing-up to commit-to believe in such stuff.

From my current understanding, the deep problem seems to be at least twofold:

One is recurrently trying to fit Christianity into oneness philosophy - which leads to a recurrent compulsion to talk of unity as our aspiration and ultimate goal; and thereby to dissolve away individuality, freedom, evil, and indeed Time.  

The other is trying to make Christianity into a this-worldly religion, suitable for incorporation in a church, a method for improving human behaviour, and to serve as the basis for a nation. 

Part of this was making Christianity into an historical religion, provided with an arc either of spiritual decline or spiritual progress. And a this-worldly end-point - including a "second coming" of Jesus. 

   

By trying to provide for too much, Christian theology ends-up making itself into a species of abstract nonsense. 

Whereas Jesus's teaching (as seen in the IV Gospel) is actually very simple and clear; but it is next-worldly. 

The reality of Jesus's "religion" was neither about making better-people nor a better-world - either immediately or in the long term - so the fact that this evidently did not happen, and shows no sign of happening, is not a refutation.  

Jesus offered individual people the chance to follow him to resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

It is by resurrection (by being born again) that better people are made, and it is post-mortal Heaven that is the better world - the world which Jesus actually promised. 

So really, the Christianity of Jesus Christ was next-worldly, and its societal effects on this world, are derivative from the individual consequences of personal confidence in Jesus's promises about the next world.

 

But, unsurprisingly, most people want palliation and happiness now, they demand that their religion promises a better mortal life, an improved society and civilization, they want justice on earth far more than the promise of Heaven. 

And (apparently) from soon after Jesus ascended; the theologians and philosophers have made valiant attempts to construct a "Christianity" that provides what various people, at various times, have demanded of a this-worldly religion. 

By passing itself off as this-worldly when it actually is not; and by trying to satisfy people's demands for a better mortal life and a more congenial social situation - official Christianity became bloated, distorted, and non-sensical. 

Which is a terrible shame indeed, because all this is a significant obstacle to the intellectually honest. 

I was only able to become a Christian by persuading myself that I was not thereby committed to believing everything that people officially told me - any more than in my life as a scientist and academic I was bound to believe everything written in textbooks, or indeed everything said or written by even the best in the field.

Eventually, I did find the truth in Christianity, and only in Christianity; but the real truth is of a different kind - than the this-worldly promises which I - like most people - were seeking and hoping for...

Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to live a better life in a better world; but we need to be clear that at best this can only be a temporary and local palliation of the fundamental human condition. 

The lesson of Jesus Christ is that we really can have what our hearts most desire; but only on the other side of death, and only in Heaven but not on Earth.  

  

Q: Do you believe in God? A: What do you mean by "God"?

If somebody asks: Do you believe in God? 

Then the true answer depends on what is meant by "God" - and there are very wide divergences indeed between understandings what is meant by "God" - even among Christians. 

The only valid answer would be some version of: First; what do you mean by God? 

So, you cannot, and indeed should not, answer the question without getting clarification of what the enquirer is assuming about (what he is calling) God.

Otherwise, by saying "yes", you are assenting to buy a Pig in a Poke. 

For example, my understanding of God, the God in whom I believe;  is one that many/most Christians, Jews, Muslims would not consider to be actual God at all - or, at best, only a selective sliver of what they believe God to be. 

To such people, because I regard the Omni-God as false (and indeed incoherent), I am a kind of pagan - whatever my attitudes to Jesus Christ, whatever my desire for salvation.  

While to me; the Omni-God believers (insofar as they are real Omni-God believers, rather than those who are merely parroting forms of words, in obedience to the authority and doctrines of their church); are all de facto monotheists...

Monotheists whatever their Trinitarian protestations; and as such they do not really regard Jesus Christ as essential to anything (not even salvation) - nor do they believe in evil or freedom.   

And I regard all Omni-God monotheists as metaphysically indistinguishable from proponents of Oneness spirituality - and therefore their many practical differences are varieties of incoherent with their metaphysics.

I mean that the Omni-God is reducible-to/ metaphysically-indistinguishable-from the "deity" of "Deists" - which is not a person, but Just Is. Such a God-Deity is The Way Things Are.  

Answering "yes" to "do you believe in God?" therefore means very little or nothing - and a "yes" is more like to mislead than enlighten. 

Of course, in the West hardly anybody believes in God of any kind - so a negative reply to "do you believe in God?" is usual, and informative.   

But before assenting to belief in God we ought to be clear what we really mean by this - what we regard as vital to our understanding of God. 

Once someone has honestly (and without veiling-abstractions that serve to disguise incoherence or incomprehension) explained what he means by "God" - he has gone a long way towards explaining how he regards ultimate reality. 

He has also, potentially, done himself a big favour - because it may be that, once he has explained what he means by God, in terms that he himself can clearly grasp - then he will discover that this God is not really what he does believe or desire: in his heart of hearts. 

Even Heaven isn't ideal... Total and perfect completion is not even conceivable - let alone achievable

One of the reasons that some people do not want salvation and post-mortal eternal life in Heaven; is that Heaven is imperfect and incomplete. 

For example, not everybody gets to Heaven, so that some people we want to be-with in Heaven, will not be there. 

A related imperfection is that some of those who won't be in Heaven will be suffering - and this can be seen as an imperfection - in that we can imagine a reality without suffering, and yet some kind of hell will continue to be forever. 

So, for these and other reasons Heaven is incomplete and imperfect, and may be rejected on these grounds. 

Yet if Heaven is rejected as a goal for such reasons, then (presumably) this is because something better is imagined and desired?  

However; all conceivable situations are incomplete and imperfect. We cannot coherently conceptualize a state of perfection and completion, and therefore cannot really desire it. 

For instance; the idea of oneness spirituality is an attempt at conceptualizing a state of perfect completion - the idea that in reality all is one and there is nothing lacking.

Yet this is incoherent because there is, at least, the fact that we recognize a lack of oneness in our yearning for it - and if all is really one there could be no such lack, or yearning, or even self awareness. If our dissatisfaction is put down to delusion, then how could there be delusion in a state of oneness? 

If reality really was one, there would be nothing else. 

If the incompleteness of Heaven, the fact that it leaves-out some (or much) of reality, is to be solved by conceptualizing a future state of the perfection and harmonization of every being, including every being and thing left-out of heaven; then the necessary (divine) power to perfect and complete reality is being assumed to be constrained by delay... for some reason. 

And that reason is itself a breaking of oneness/ perfection/ completeness.

If all is one, why has perfection and completion not already been achieved? 

(Why must we and others continue to suffer its lack?)

For that matter - if perfection and completion really are attainable by God, then why create anything else that perfect completeness? What is the point? 

Why should deity create this imperfect and intermediate world with its entropy and evil, and where all gratifications are incomplete and temporary?

That itself, whatever the answer proposed, is a break of perfection and completeness.  

My point is that, although we may imagine and desire perfection and completion of all reality; this wish is incoherent and cannot - even theoretically - be attained. 

The insistence on total, perfect completion is indeed, a disguised form of double-negative ideology. 

I mean that "perfection" is actually the negation of our divine impulse towards creative love; which is a dynamic and developing thing, future orientated. 

Instead of regarding this fundamental quality of being as an attribute of reality - the lack of a permanent state of perfect completion is re-interpreted as a problem. A problem that is insoluble, because it negates creation, life, consciousness, love... 

The same for completion. Completion is a negation of the potential for eternal growth, development, increase of love. There is no end to creation... But this possibility is being re-interpreted negatively, as a current state of incompletion. 

The insistence upon completion is, again, a denial of the most profound nature of reality - which is why it leads nowhere but paradox. 

In sum: when people reject Heaven because it is incomplete and imperfect; they have fallen into a trap - a spiritual prison that has no escape... 

Incoherence is a reductio ad absurdum - a conclusion revelatory of false premises. 

No escape except by becoming aware-of, examining, and rejecting their most fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions regarding the nature of reality. 

 

"The problem of evil" just won't go away for Christians

It's remarkable that mainstream orthodox traditional Christian theology has been wrestling with the "problem" of explaining evil for the entirety of its recorded history*. 

Officially the origin and presence of evil has long-since been explained, to the complete satisfaction of theologians; who cannot understand why people continue to harp-on about it. 

Yet - somehow - it just won't go away! 

It seems that everybody who accepts the definition of the Christian God as omnipotent and omniscient, and creator of everything from nothing - rapidly and unavoidably crashes-up against the problem of explaining how this-God is also supposed to be wholly Good and loving of each and every one of his children - all the time.  

Again and again, later if not sooner, people find that - in this collision of principles included in the definition of "Omnipotent plus Good" something has-to give-way. 

Again and again, people insist that to be "God" - God must be omnipotent and creator from nothing; and this primary and prior assumption inevitably makes people realize that therefore God cannot be "Good" in the same way that human beings understand Good...

For Omni-God to be Good either pushes us towards a redefinition of Good as it applies to God - so that our human evaluations become irrelevant, and we must just submit (preferably uncritically) to God's incomprehensible Goodness...

(Christianity tends towards Islam...) 

Or else we are pushed towards a version of Oneness spirituality in which everything that has ever happened or could happen is actually Good - if only we could understand it; and again our own personal evaluations are declared worthless.

(Christianity tends towards Hinduism/ Buddhism...)    

Again and again; thoughtful people are pushed away from Christianity, because they recognize that their own profoundest understanding of Good and evil is being declared irrelevant. 

Of course there is the alternative of challenging the definition of God as omnipotent - but that has been declared not-Christian by nearly all the major Christian churches. 

And since most people believe that Christianity is derived from (one or another) Church - and the individual person's understanding must be subordinated to (one or another) external authority; then redefinition of the nature of God is disallowed.

Something must give-way - and something does give-way - and what gives-way is (nearly always) the possible validity and human desirability of Christianity itself.   

   **

*It is not a problem to explain evil if one regards the Fourth Gospel (John) as the prime and unique overall-valid source of Jesus's life and teachings. Jesus's depicted relationship both with his Father and his disciples are personal and loving - human-like; but raised to an ideal and eternal degree. God is stated and assumed to be wholly Good; but in the IV Gospel's substance, there is nothing to insist upon God's omnipotence and omniscience. Consequently; Jesus and his followers do not seem troubled in the slightest about how to explain evil. The problem of evil apparently comes from post-Jesus theological and philosophical definitions of God, and is apparently related to the development of Christian churches - including the notion that to-be-a-Christian (to follow Jesus, to attain salvation) one must be a member of the true Church.

NOTE: Mormon theology does not posit the Omni-God, nor creation from nothing; and evil is easily explained by Mormonism's pluralist metaphysics. It should be noted, however, that the extremely radical and distinctive qualities of Mormon theology and metaphysics do not much impinge upon the CJCLDS - where the emphasis is very much on doctrines and practices.

The killing-curse of Mundane Thinking; versus living life in a strengthened, deepened, reality-connected thinking

The thinking of typical modern Man, and indeed of everyone here-and-now for most of the time; is a mundane business - a shallow, superficial, and malign affair. 

Mundane Thinking consists of little more than semi-automatic processing of materials given us from externally (eg from mass and social media, or some other form of totalitarian propaganda) in accordance with theories and ideologies given us from these same sources. 

Mundane Thinking persists relentlessly to fill our consciousness because it is easy, because it is what fits into the nature of public discourse - and from some mixture of sheer habit with addiction.

But Mundane Thinking is a curse - a killing-curse of modern Man; all the worse for having become largely spontaneous as well as imposed by the conditions of officialdom. workplaces, and friendship groups alike.  

If offers us nothing substantive, it cuts us off from people the world, and matters of the spiritual and the divine. 

We moderns "live in our thoughts"... but these thoughts offer - at best - transitory stimulation or palliative therapy from fears and despair; but without even the possibility of profound fulfilment or hope. 

Mundane thinking is, indeed, a kind of living-death, or death amidst Life. 

Consequently, there is a powerful urge to escape Mundane Thinking - somehow. But mistakenly or with deliberate intent to subvert, mundane thinking gets equated with thinking-as-such. 

Therefore; most of modern spirituality is concerned with getting rid of thinking - the escape route of stopping thinking-as-such; one way or another. 

At its highest, the method is to practice some kind of oneness spirituality by rigorous meditational training - this derived from Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism or the negative theology type of Christian mysticism. 

The goal is to Stop Thinking and Just Be; to stop the relentless internal chatter of everyday matters; to reduce responsively- and attachment-to external stimuli...

Also to reduce awareness of the Self -- to seek silence, peace, contemplation, passive immersion in reality, or assimilation to "the divine" when the divine is conceptualized as everything-that-is.     

But I regard the ideal of stopping thinking as itself an evil. It is to seek a kind of suicide, or not-being. 

It is to go against what I understand to be God's primary creative will, of creating children of God and enabling these children spiritually to grow us to God's level of loving goodness and consciousness, by following Jesus Christ to salvation.  

So that anyone who personally desires to follow Jesus Christ to post-mortal resurrected eternal life in Heaven, cannot do so by the suppression then elimination of thinking. 

But given the nigh-intolerable horribleness of Mundane Thinking - what can instead be done? 

If Not not-thinking - then What?

The answer (first discerned by Rudolf Steiner, I think) is that we accept our destiny to live in our thinking - but seek to to transform that thinking...

To strengthen our thinking so that it become deeper; more powerfully motivating and emotionally evocative...

To recognize that this thinking is connected directly with other people, other Beings of many kinds; including connected with divine creation itself. (Because creation consists of many living and conscious Beings, with whom we can connect in thinking.) 

Connecting in our thinking with Jesus Christ/ the Holy Ghost.

To conclude: In recognizing the intolerability of a life spent trapped in Mundane Thinking; instead of trying to escape thinking altogether, we ought to accept and embrace that thinking is basically Good. 

Thinking is Good in the sense that we modern people are destined to live in our thinking.

God wants this from us, in this time and place, and has set-up our situation thus. 

Our goal ought therefore be to work on our thinking: which means better to understand what thinking can be and should be; and then to work on the nature of our thinking in hope of making it align with God's creative intentions and our intent of salvation.

Including a conscious relationship with reality - a relationship that happens in our thoughts.

Primarily; to live in our thoughts: and make those thoughts worth living-in. 

Crossing a threshold into a New Age of consciousness at the Millennium - its unexpected fulfilment

I continue to cycle back to consider that the New Age of human consciousness, so eagerly anticipated by "spiritual" people of the late 20th century to be coming-upon Mankind at about the millennium - and by which we would cross a kind of threshold into a qualitatively different relationship with reality... actually happened; yet not-at-all in the manner hoped-for. 

There has been a transformation of consciousness, but it hasn't been of the kind that was so optimistically envisaged. 

People are not more spiritual; alienation, egoism, and awareness of separateness are stronger than ever. There is not a spontaneous sense of oneness, nor of attunement with the universe. 

The change did not make us better people, nor has it made us happier, nor has it led to a kinder human society with diminished suffering. 

Neither do people in general have either a closer relationship with nature, or a closer sense of personal involvement with ultimate reality. 

So much for what didn't happen - but if I believe there was a millennial transformation, then what did happen; and why did it go so wrong? Or at least, so very differently from what was envisaged? 

What happened was pretty much as predicted by Rudolf Steiner and confirmed by Owen Barfield - in that the changes of the past several centuries reached a threshold after which we were each required consciously to choose the basic assumptions on the basis of which we would understand our lives. 

The residues of innate, unconscious, spontaneous spirituality; that had been dwindling for centuries, finally became so weak and feeble that they ceased to operate. The progressive "disenchantment" became so extreme that social life ceased to be humanized, personalized and sweetened by it. 

Everything became materialistic and mundane; explicit, procedural, bureaucratic. Experience divided into the subjective and the objective - and the objective was impersonal - a realm of entertainment and exploitation, and exploitative entertainment - it became "politicized" and systemic. 

And - because we are alienated, nowadays we all know this; and insofar as we regard the public/ institutional, social realm as objectively real - then this is the reality we have chosen. 

Meanwhile, everything else, is regarded as subjective hence arbitrary - and relevant only to our private emotions*.  

21st century Man has chosen his assumptions, then chosen to assert that these assumptions are inescapable reality; and painted himself into this corner of purposelessness, meaninglessness and hopelessness. 

 

That is the nature of the millennial threshold and the New Age. 

Yet... if this can be understood, and if we choose to take ultimate and personal responsibility for what we regard as the nature of ultimate reality - instead of assuming that this is "a given" to which we can only submit passively...

Then we may consciously choose another path by which we each-and-all may individually participate in divine creation; and each bring to it something unique and irreplaceable. 

And that would be the threshold to a New Age, a new consciousness, which is worth living.  

**

* Note: I should also record that there is also an assertion of subjectivism - that because it is only in the subjective and personal that we can find purpose, meaning and enchantment, we ought therefore to regard the subjective as reality. Well, this is "easy to say" - but I have never come across anybody who remotely does it: either in their speech, or observable actions! Such a recommendation is (whatever its merits in an ideal sense) un-real and un-motivating, even to those who most vehemently espouse it. 

The self-chosen false dilemma of 21st century Man is therefore between an objective public discourse that is death and despair; and a subjective personal world that is experienced as unreal and unmotivating.

The (obvious?) conclusion is apparently a case of "back to the drawing board" to discover on what basis these (supposedly exclusive) alternatives were formulated. 

And, it turns-out, that means going back a very long way down - deeper than almost anybody else has been or is prepared to go...

Which is, in a nutshell, the reason for our current situation. 

  

If God is already and necessarily triumphant, and everything is alright already - then what are we waiting for?

There is a strong thread in religion of several kinds that asserts everything is alright already - e.g. because God is good and God is omnipotent therefore good is triumphant: here, now, already.

To which the obvious rejoinder is: In that case, what are we waiting for? 

If we are already living in a world of good-triumphant, why isn't this made obvious and explicit? Why doesn't everybody realize it? 

(And as we don't experience things as always good - then surely that of itself means that God is not really triumphant?)

Among some Christians, this triumph is asserted as having been the work of Jesus Christ. Asserted that what Jesus did made the triumph of God complete, or at least inevitable: that by Jesus God has "already" won. And the devil has already lost - but will not admit it. 

There are similar assertions (or so I see them) from oneness spiritualties - assertions that everything is beautiful, virtuous and true - the only problem is that we fail to recognize it. 

For instance, New Age type people often favourably cite the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: 117 [113]. 

His disciples said to him: "On what day will the kingdom come?" "It will not come when it is expected. No one will say: 'See, it is here!' or: 'Look, it is there!' but the Kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it."   

That is; we already live in God's Kingdom - but don't recognize the fact. 

But such assertions leave us exactly where they find us - or, rather, someplace worse.

Because, if this-world-now (including entropy, death, evil) really is the triumph of Good/ Paradise/ Heaven and already "the best of all possible worlds"; then we are surely utterly depraved creatures. We Must Be - as evidenced by yours and mine and humanity's universal and chronic inability always and under all circumstances to recognize and live-by this fact. 

Yet it is hard to see how this-world-now can really be good, if Men are not. 

It is pretty extraordinary to imagine the Christian God creating a good world to be inhabited by evil Men... (Especially when these Men are made such as to fail to recognize the goodness of the world.)

Of course, such contradictions and incoherences may be explained-away by stunning and confusing people with soaring abstractions, especially about Time... 

Stuff about things being imperfect for creatures like us living in Time, while past-present-future are perfect for the creator God who is outside of Time (when past, present, future are simultaneous)... 

But surely, as "explanations", these just kick the can regarding why a God asserted to be good and also capable of creating perfection chose Not to, and instead chose to design gross imperfection and evil-proneness - and consign creatures to illusion, decay, death, and evil*.

Either such a God would be not-truly-Omni- or not-truly-Good; yet for such Christians, God is defined as both Omni- and Good. Hence the need for so much ultra-complex and abstract hand-waving... 

I can see the short-term and immediate psychological appeal of these kinds of "all actually is well" assertion. 

They provide a kind of confidence, of being on The Inevitably Winning Side - even though we will personally lose - i.e. we are actually sin-full, and shall suffer evil, get sick, die. 

And I can see that some of this is a kind of garbled understanding of the reality of Heaven 

But really, it's nonsense! Heaven is real, and anyone who wants it can have it, by following Jesus - but Heaven is on the other side of death. 

As for this world; God is the creator, but God is not triumphant here and now, in mortal life, on this earth... 

Obviously God is Not triumphant! If He was triumphant, there would be nothing to discuss. 

That's why Jesus Christ was needed, and why his message was of resurrection.

And Jesus was a Man, who lived (like all that lives) In Time and in a place - so Time is real.

And it is because God is not triumphant in this mortal world and never can be; that we needed Jesus, and why Jesus's message and gift was one of eternal resurrected life. 

To recap: The defects of this mortal life are not illusory, nor can they be removed by adopting a different attitude or making contradictory assertions. 

In sum; the defects of this mortal life are ineradicable.

...Which is why Jesus Christ was needed, why Heaven lies in our future, and why Heaven is on the other side of death and resurrection. 

*I feel that this kind of argument applies to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Jesus's Mother. If God could make a Mary without sin, and if she could attain eternal Heavenly life without dying and resurrecting; surely such a God would the same for all Men? - thereby eliminating the need for Jesus Christ's life and work. The Immaculate Conception refutes the necessity of Jesus. yet I think I can see "what it is getting at" - which is that there really is a divine feminine creator; God really does include woman.

NOTE: The above arguments are what I personally find compelling, or even decisive - but I recognize that they will not work that way for others - especially when fundamental assumptions are not shared. So I am stating how I see things, not really trying to persuade others to agree. 

Perhaps a womanly and procreative aspect of God is necessary for a solid belief in eternal life?

I am re-reading Geoffrey Ashe's fascinating study The Virgin (1976), which is focused on Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ (Ashe was a Roman Catholic) - but takes in the broader perspective of goddesses throughout history, in a non-hostile - indeed sympathetic - fashion. 

He makes the stimulating suggestion that a Goddess was primal in ancient spirituality, because she was the assumed basis of the procreative hence creative; and that some form of female deity is needed for Men really to believe in a life beyond life. 

The idea is that a supreme male deity cannot sustain belief in a full life beyond life. So that when the ruling Goddess goes; the afterlife becomes very partial, ghostly, and all-but irrelevant. 

Male deities could never bestow life of their own nature as the Mother had done. Zeus and his colleagues were immortal, but they did not transmit that quality to their human subjects... 

Through most civilized and semi-civilized lands... death ceased to be a passage to a future life... the dead were no longer pictured as significantly existing. They were reduced to feeble, bloodless shades in a gloomy underworld. For the Greeks this was Hades...

With the fading of the Eternal-Womanly, with her cutting-down or anathematisation, [for the vast majority, with extremely few exceptions] death had become the end with no prospect of rebirth. 

Israel's shift was similar... The Old Testament has no doctrine of survival or return... the dead become shades. They do down to an underworld called Sheol, The Grave.

The sole Israelite immortality is collective... God's chosen community...  

I think it likely that Ashe is "on to something" here. 

In the book; Ashe is preparing the ground for an attempted explanation of the rise of Mary the mother of Jesus as a more and more important focus of Christian faith - recognizing that this phenomenon cannot be accounted for by Scripture, or by the practices of the earlier generations of Christians. 

With Mariolatry (Ashe says) we seem to be dealing with some kind of deep and direct apprehension of spiritual reality, probably coming from grassroots, bottom-up, the "masses". Christian leaders and theologians seem merely to have been trying to explain and validate theoretically something that already was beginning to become important in practice. 

From my own experience; I find it striking that Mormonism included a very strong element of the "Eternal-Womanly" with its dyadic deity composed of Father and Mother in Heaven. 

And - perhaps in consequence? - the "Mormon culture of salvation" was (at least until fairly recently) probably the most vividly lived and believed-in form of Christian afterlife among the major Christian churches. 

The spiritually unsatisfactory and unconvincing nature of one-sidedly masculine, Christianity is something I find very striking. I mean the monochrome hardness, negativity, heartlessness, legalism and this-worldliness of Mary-rejecting forms of Protestantism is something I feel is very evident. It is one reason why England ceased to be "Merrie" with the reformation.

But there is something of this in all of Christianity. 

(And this defect has not-at-all been ameliorated, let alone cured, by the dominant trend towards secular materialism in all the Christian churches, which comes-in on the back of leftist ideology. Spiritual problems can only be made worse by "liberalization" - which is actually and always covert apostasy.) 

Insisting upon the non-sexual nature of God does not work either - this is just an attempt to escape contradictions absences and by raising abstractions; which has the effect of confusing people - and thereby impairing motivations.

Furthermore, the idea and ideals of ultimate transcendence of sexuality point away from Christianity (rooted in Jesus, the divine incarnate mortal Man) and towards Oneness spirituality, where (eventually) every-thing merges with everything else - in a timeless stasis.   

The problem is that it does not really make deep theoretical and theological sense to insert Mary alongside the (masculine) Trinity; and she is therefore always accorded an ultimately secondary and intercessionary" role in creation - no matter how central is her position in everyday worship (eg. devotion to the Rosary, or Marian icons). 

But even worthwhile degrees of habitual lifestyle and provision of psychological comfort are insufficient motivations in a world so dominated by evil-affiliated institutions. 

In our unavoidably self-conscious era; these inner contradictions about Mary have become nigh-lethal to strong Christian faith - as is evident all around us.

 

This is why I regard Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Mariolatry as "on the right lines" but ultimately insufficient and unsatisfactory. 

And, as Ashe described , this requisite kind of development can only come from directly apprehended knowledge - it is not already existent. 

To emphasize: what is required is not something that can honestly be derived from existing Scripture, theology or history.

Furthermore it needs to arise bottom-up; which means from individuals, not institutions.  

If modern Men are to grasp and retain the needful structuring-focus on resurrected eternal life; if we are to live-by knowledge of Heaven; then we will need explicitly to discover and embrace what will be new truths of eternal verities concerning women in relation to creation and salvation. 

We Are Not Alone, objectively - but subjectively, we are alienated

The alien Marvin (the Martian), asserts objective reality 

Modern alienation is a very real thing: which is to say the experience of being cut-off from God, reality, this world, other people... is inescapable as a subjective experience, and this has profound religious, social and political consequences. 

Yet alienation is an inwardly-caused phenomenon. Alienation is not a reality imposed by the external nature of things.

We were all spontaneously and involuntarily (and most unconsciously) immersed in "everything else" at the early phases of our existence - and that is the primary reality of divine creation. 

It could be called a complete web of "interconnectedness" - except that "connect" assumes that we begin as separate, and must overcome separateness by connecting. The reality is the opposite - we begin as only partially separated in our awareness from the oneness of divine creation. That is the baseline.  

We modern Men are now alienated because in the course of human development we have each cut ourselves off from that spontaneous immersion in "everything else": the barrier arises from within us. 

That barrier which cuts-off modern adults can be, and is at times, dissolved (or demolished); for instance by dreaming sleep, mental illness and brain disease, intoxication - or sometimes by meditation.

But all of these make us dysfunctional, and none of them succeed in restoring the natural spontaneity of an earlier phase of consciousness.

The earlier phase of spontaneous immersive consciousness is like the childhood phase of development - such that once an individual has developed beyond childhood, childhood can never wholly or healthily be re-established.

In other words; we should take the cut-offness of modern alienation as a fact-of-life and the basis for further developments - yet we also need to bear in mind that the ultimate reality is, as it always was, one in which we are naturally and inescapably immersed in reality - including the reality of the divine, of the universe, of other people. 

Therefore we do not need to "re-connect" because dis-connection is not the problem. 

Instead; the problem is in our own consciousness - which is "stuck" in a phase that denies the reality of its immersion in the whole of divine creation. 

What we need to work-on is our own personal consciousness of reality: we need to become conscious of that we we are currently not conscious. 

Modern Man usually denies the reality of that of which he is not spontaneously conscious - such as the divine. (That is: we deny the reality of God because we Moderns are no longer spontaneously and continuously aware of God, as was once the case.) 

I am saying that we need, instead, to acknowledge the reality of our connectedness-to/ immersion-in the divine; and from that conviction strive to become conscious of the actuality of this link.

Acknowledge reality: then strive for awareness of that reality...

To put it differently; we Modern men have (under God's will) developed alienation, which is an increasing individual independence from the whole - and this development has happened because this is also a greater freedom and agency*. 

In other words; the "universal" awareness that was once spontaneous and inescapable, is now voluntary and chosen.

What is needed is not a return but a development. So, this voluntary and chosen acknowledgement of connectedness to other people/ the world/ God is a new thing - a deliberate step forward - not a surrender or relaxation backwards..

A doing, not an undoing.

Because new, the needful awareness is subjectively experienced differently from the old childhood or child-like consciousness - we need to be self-aware, aware of our own awareness. 

This is not under compulsion nor necessity; this is something that we are aware that we have-chosen (and that it could have been, could be, otherwise). 

From such a perspective, all looks different. We know what we know via our subjectivity - that is; our subjectivity is part of all possibilities of knowing. 

Subjectivity makes everything possible, and a change in the nature of our subjectivity affects everything. 

So a deliberate attention to developing consciousness makes a profound difference to everything - including our experience of Christianity.   

**

*Modern alienation is therefore meant-to-be just a phase; en route to a higher - more developed, indeed more divine - form of consciousness. 

Why can't our life have a "magical" or transcendent quality at all times?

It seems like, even when life is going well, we cannot experience it at the best and highest level "on demand". 

We sometimes experience the "romance" of this-life, a magical moment, or even magical hours and days; but this state does not become continuous - nor can we have this magic whenever we want it, nor even when we may feel we most need it. 

There are always mundane periods, and these may be normal; there is of course suffering, illness, ageing, and the prospect of death all around and about. But even when we are not immediately affected by such things, life may be experienced as mundane; that is dull, everyday, trivial, niggling... just stuff that happens. 

And sometimes, oft-times, we cannot snap ourselves out of this, nor can we do anything that genuinely works in attaining that magical and romantic state we may desire or even crave. 

The question is whether this inability of ours is something that might in principle be overcome. The question is whether or not it is theoretically possible that "life at its best" could become everyday life? Whether and/or when we feel most trapped in everyday life, or most in need of elevation and enchantment - we could learn how to rise from that dull situation to live life at its best, again?

I think we tend to go one way or another, and end-up claiming something that is untrue or impossible. 

Mainstream secular materialism has it that this life is really mundane; and that the romantic and magical is illusory, a temporary subjective aberration merely - and this is also the view of "oneness" spiritualties such as Western Buddhism. 

On the other side are claims that the romantic, magical, enchanted life of "higher consciousness" can (and should) become either permanent, or else available on demand - perhaps by some kind of spiritual self-improvement, or by practice of some kind of technique, method, skill - or maybe by adoption of a right attitude. 

But the basic idea is that this-life in this-world could and should become a paradise. 

For me, neither of these one-sided extremes are valid. It is an evil form of despair to assume that the bad things in life are real and the good experiences are illusory. Yet, there is nothing solid (just wishful thinking and unsubstantiated claims and rumours) to indicate that it is possible to live a magical life at all times or on demand - nobody ever seems to have done it. 

Christianity is the only form of understanding that I know, which takes both sides into account - both the reality of the romantic, and the inevitability of the mundane; and which goes beyond them.

Jesus Christ knew that paradise is real but temporary, and never available "on demand" because of the nature of this life and world (which is both entropic and evil); therefore the only really-real and actually possible paradise is by resurrection to life in Heaven, which lies outside this world, beyond our "biological" death. (And which, of its nature, can only occur by personal choice.) 

Only Heaven is "romantic" on-demand and eternally; and that only because Heaven has left-behind both death (entropic change) and evil, which are intrinsic aspects of this-world. 

It is exactly because Heaven on earth is real, that Jesus was able to create Heaven and make it possible for us to want and choose Heaven; and it is exactly because we cannot have a permanent or on-demand Heaven in mortal life and on this earth, that Jesus enabled resurrection and created the sustained and everlasting romantic-reality of Heaven.