← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · TexasAnarch
Thread ID: 4520 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-01-19
2003-01-19 14:02 | User Profile
After circa 1600 certain things were discovered about nature not previously known. 1. oxygen -- undermining previous explanation of material cahange when fire burns wood, for instance (replacement of alchemical occult elements by atomic-molecular theory)
This basically refutes the doctrine of trans-substanton, that the sacramental wine actually gets transformemed into Jesus' actual blood
(while the sense qualities remain those of wine, after proper blessing said by a priest).
2. causal theory of perception. What we call "sound", if the word is used to refer to personal human experience -- the quality of sense resulting from stimuli reaching the brain from ear-membrane vibrations -- does not exist in the external world (therefore, not when the tree falls unwitnessed). Qualities of sense are caused by, not identical with, events in the external world. (cf Bertrand Russell, Our Kowledge of the External World, 1912, approx.) Metaphysically, qualities of sense are all *subjective*: not identical with material processes.
3. quality-producing stimuli reach the brain from two sources: internal, as well as peripheral (sense organ). Thus, we experience bodily processes -- impulses, pain-pleasure gradients, etc., as well as objects during perception; when we communicate, even by remote e-mail, these other stimuli find expression. Religious word like "faith" are used for this purpose, in fact, and cannot be defined for another, until a point of reference in inner experience is found for what they are supposed to communicate. (Plato's Meno problem -- come a long way since then). "Belief" already connotes a definite cognitive content, true or false, whereas "faith" textualizes over into an attitude, then, finally (perhaps -- for Protestants who experience it, and say its enough for salvation, having been given by grace) an experience. One doesn't argue for, or "prove" it or anything about it. People who haven't tasted oranges can't be expected to understand what a juicy, sweet one is like, as a natural product. It isn't intellect that completes nature, as Aquinas said, following Aristotle: its spirit.
Protestants aren't too hot on "belief", true or false, hair today, gone tomorrow, that's why they can be objective scientists. The Church tried to silence Galileo, we recall. Neverless, it moves.
4. Re-birth repetition-compulsion is the basis of child sacrifice. This is only very recently discovered, by psychohistorian Lloyd deMause, who has seen that it amounts to re-interpretation of the basis of human history. Throwing children into fires to propitiate gods, from Carthage to Washington, goes with the universal history of: exposing, raping, torturing, goading, systematically terrorizing children, and anyone who doesn't know this doesn't know the history of childhood. The motive was to propitiate the "God in their head", of adult parents, who turned on their children in a cycle of revenge for how they were treated -- and survived. "YOU WANT TO KILL ME, DON'T YOU!" -- said the distraught mother, waving a butcher knife at a "rebellious" 3 yrs old screaming kid (actual case -- many of them daily). It comes from trying to "Get born", due to "pressure" of birth-canal process repeated in present stressful situation -- this is the protype "time" of terror-anxiety for the fetus, as it learns by gong through the subsequent very painful (no matter how "natural' the childbirth is -- it always remains the largest trauma endured in life -- the crushing abyss, poisonous hydra-headed monster).
5. At the psychological level of shared unconscious group-fantasy*, (*fantasy each one retains from pre-natal development) Jesus is the Fetal Hero, sacrificed to the (retro-jected "FATHER/PLACENTA"-King, Pharoa, "Almighty One") to win "freedom", and "(re-) birth" for "all". Who identified with his act.
("All of us", or "humanity" is the fantasy of a universal womb-surround containing fetuses connected by unbilici as siblings.) The first flags were Pharoes' actual placenta's, mounted on poles and carried into battle. Wars are ancient re-birth rituals in which the God-in-the-head of sinful adults get together and start throwing their "rebellious" children who are "out to kill them" into the flames. Jesus' death was supposed to put an end to that, for any who got the message.
6. Jesus was a Jew only on his mother's side. As to his father's, one would be required to consult the disciple Thomas on that. It was a way of saying: if you are asking, you can't be told. Thats the Second person of the Trinity revealing the First, if, indeed, one follows the connections through the mixed fantasy-textual template grammar (according to which Sons have Fathers, and we pass from Freud over to Jung to pick up the story -- never forgetting the original jealously and latent enmity between them over the Mother, however, as Jung was perhaps wont to do).
7. The third Person of the Trinity made its presence felt historically in the Reformation, reviving Greek models of humanity, originally; defeating the Old "Holy" Roman Empire legions, and pushing off to establish a New World -- at least in North America. To continue cruel domination, where the Conquistadors went.
8. The religion built around salvation by grace, through faith, and that not of ourselves, it is a gift of God, lest any man should boast, is that of the spirit the US constitution was signed under. It is the only authority for legal use of force against a citizen of this country.
9. The reason a Roman Catholic must never be president, again, or sit on a judicial bench without swearing an oarth of no higher allegiance than to the Constituition and its God, is becaue they do not distinguish gravitas, appropriate as respect for the state apparatus, including punishment, from the majesterium, therefore think the force used even by the state is (their) Gods, and ought to be respected as such. This is unAmerican. The statement on church and state by the Southern Baptist Convention reflects this.
10. Human psychology cannot be read in medieval terms by moderns. It is repellant to try to do so, since it has built-in falsehoods preventing objective self-observation. The data of objective self-observation is necessary "oxygen" for the higher being-blood, however. Without it, the spirit falls into the sea of burning oil, and suffocates.
2003-01-25 14:19 | User Profile
You need to get out more.
2003-01-25 17:43 | User Profile
Oy, vez.
Check out my post in this forum, "Bishop Sheen on the Web."
Good luck, my friend.