Pharoz

This week marks the start of the first sitting in Parliament for the Rudd Government.

Today Prime Minister Rudd gave the apology to the Stolen Generation.

So, that’s about it for this Pharoz blog.

[Can't quite say that it was fun though]

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I will continue to write posts on the Becrux blog.

Hope to see you there…

Here’s a train of thought that is sort of difficult to express.

The monotheistic religions start with an all powerful God which sort of provides a clean slate for creation, as with in the first chapter of Genesis. This idea of creation out of apparent formlessness has a parallel with some kinds of human action – the claim of terra nullius in colonial times is a strong example, but also for more mundane acts of creativity. It could also allows for free will, but there are many other cultural ways of doing this as well.

Such an absolute claim made by anything or anybody other than God must be followed by a Fall of some kind, a realisation of limits.

But even so, even after the Fall there is still the result of the intended action without consequence. Something is broken and it is difficult to point out what that is. It traditionally goes by the name of original sin and is assumed to be with every person born after the Fall. (These ideas are a discussion using some religious concepts.) But perhaps rather than being based in a flawed humanity, the original sin may be based in an unrealistic concept of God as omnipotent. The Fall transfers the blame away from the concept of a perfect God. And that precious idea, the omnipotent God, remains as it was originally.

There is perhaps a sense that sacrifice is sometimes a consequence of an initial audacious stepping out. The creative act may have been audacious and the person paid for it, but the consequences remain and the assumption of a clean slate within which that initial audacious action may have taken place becomes confirmed in some way. It’s like a disruption to the natural order that becomes solid through irreversible consequence and sacrifice.

But then in Christianity, what would it mean that God would be sacrificed in the person of Jesus? It is like a more humble concept of God, even while maintaining the original concept of an omnipotent creative God. There is still the possibility for creation and free will in human life but the blame, so to speak, for the Fall may not be all due to original sin in humanity.

And then again, the creative potential is still there and more honest and realistic. You could say that Christianity also tries to redeem God, even if that would not be admitted. It is difficult to express this idea properly. It’s not taking the mickey. The twentieth century ground on after Freddy’s claim that God is dead with the quick-fix failure of an idea to try to substitute Man into the role of omnipotent God. Twentieth century history and postmodernism have thoroughly ridiculed that idea.

So what does the Christian story have to say about the nature of God? The conventional Christian story is that Jesus redeemed humanity through his sacrifice, but could the Christian story also be about redeeming God? Now that would be a strange twist in the story! But ideas take a while to take root, if there is anything to this new perspective.

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There are obviously different cultural contexts for the phenomena of sacrifice. In the Judeo-Christian religions it has various meanings, possibly related to the way God is understood. I think that in some ways of living, as with Buddhism which does not believe in an omnipotent God, there are different notions such as generosity and meditative practice. It’s a difficult topic to talk about but it is important because a notion of God is still part of our culture. In a way the Christian approach brackets [God] , unless of course they make out that Jesus of Nazareth was something of a triumphant Uebermensch. That would be missing the point in my opinion.

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3 Jan 08

And creation here is meant as a cultural act by a person. The natural world changes continually with some aspects of things changing while other aspects remaining constant (such as mass/energy, momentum, etc). A creative act by a skillful person can have an effect in the physical world but that is more through something like guiding impersonal physical processes to create some thing or situation that may have been imagined. It would be nearly impossible for any person to construct even a biological cell or a strand of hair from the raw elements, but everything that goes into reproduction, eating and keeping a person healthy is covered through culture and the ways we live. Creative action is not about literally placing every atom in place from moment to moment, which couldn’t be done in any case.

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4 Jan 08

These are not value judgments or opinions. The posts in this category are about seeing these topics about western religion and modernity in a different way. Whether I like it or not,  or whether you like it or not, is beside the point. What is important is that the ideas have consistency and that the ideas hold together. It is very difficult to explain a different paradigm and it is possibly something that can only be evaluated over a few generations.The point made in this post is that the problem of evil is related to the way that God is understood. The way a culture defines The Good will impact on the way that the culture defines what it sees as being not that Good. With the Judeo-Christian religions God is all good and all powerful so that prevents analysis to an extent. In pre-modern times you could not criticise directly the way that God was conceptualised for fear of excommunication, exclusion or worse. Even so, there also seemed to be something culturally unconscious, a sense of justice or truth maybe, that over time corrected for the nature of the problem.

Translating the Bible into local languages and the printing press had a profound effect on the cultural understanding of God within Europe. The Reformation was also about things such as the relation of the church to the people, the nature of authority, reading the Bible and its stories for oneself, having religious services that people could understand, and so on. The mystery in pre-Reformation religion was not just theological but through ignorance and the power relations of the clergy to the people.

Perhaps our problem today has to do with -  being stuck with the need for an ABSOLUTE Good without really acknowledging it. And being too clever and sophisticated to admit to such a cultural need. Think of nationalism, ideologies and totalitarian states, greed and consumerism, the fuss about perfection in our bodies and looks, fundamentalisms of all shades and colours, the way the public and media places celebrities in the public spotlight and then criticises every single perceived imperfection, as with Diana. God hasn’t died, He’s just gone kitsch. And it’s not a Good look. We still hanker for perfection, or carry on as if we expect it, somewhere; but still rip anything to pieces that we momentarily set our collective hungry gaze upon.

The ambiguity is in the way that God is conceptualised in our culture. The churches don’t really understand what is going on.  They seem to be stuck repeating tired formulas or else tarting up their image of God and church to match the times. It’s difficult to explain…

One of the main differences with this new interpretation is about recognising the context and limits of individualism. It’s difficult to describe succinctly, and this is making a very crude attempt of it too.

In pre-modern times the church and local community did provide a context and limits within which most people lived. I suppose that the Enlightenment ideals grew over a long time out of that solid understanding of society and people’s place in it. Yet the Enlightenment with it’s industrialisation, science, migration from rural communities to large cities, and occasional crises and revolutions also undermined that social context where people can live safely and contentedly.

Pre-modern life was certainly not idyllic. Yet you also find with some of the revolutionary ideologies that they idealise aspects of that pre-modern life. Rousseau could be a source for a quote at this point. You could include some kinds of religious fundamentalism, national socialism and communism as ideologies that tried to turn the clock back or that try to harness modern science within something like a pre-modern social order (that just happened to also be authoritarian). Personally I think the reality of communism had nothing to do with a classless society. The people in the dominant political party of one party states constituted an elite class for those societies. Marx deliberately tried to find a way to reconnect workers in modern societies with the product of their labour as was the case in pre-modern societies, at least in theory. Communism may be a world apart from pre-modern society, but there are some important threads that link the two, so the claim made above is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear.

The Enlightenment did, however, emphasise the Individual; the rational individual. In the popular mind there is still a strongly negative connotation to some of the Enlightenment ideals. I think part of this is because science and industry can appear indifferent to human society and a person’s place in it. It is really tricky to untangle these ideas. Modernity does not in general pay due attention to society and community, and that may be part of the cause for cynicism about science and industry.

All I wanted to say, or am asserting, in this post was that the pre-modern world view is based more around narratives of people and how they live in communities. The fundamentalist religions seem to be harking back to a pre-modern world. Modernity grew out of a pre-modern world, obviously a tautology, but it initially took some things for granted, such as society, in ways that we no longer even consider or may be aware of these days. I am not saying that the social context in those early modern days were all good, or even that good for most people. It would have been a hard life. Perhaps what I am saying is that the problem may not be with modernity and the Enlightenment ideals, but that we have over time lost the social context and that we have to consider that in theory as well.

The left and right political divide has formed in an ambiguous way where the left champion society but with Enlightenment ideals, while the right champion the Individual but more in a pre-modern conservative context. There is a strange twist in the old way of dividing left from right. Both sides of the political divide could claim to represent people in communities, and yet both sides could miss the point.

An alternative, as stated many times through this blog, is to recognise the difference between public and private. The public world is about testing knowledge, while the private world is more about affirming others in our immediate circles. You can have both, but there is a structure that separates the two modes. Science as well as narratives. That approach is usually found at the centre of the political spectrum. Does that make sense?