ken meece's List: Spirituality & Doubt & Mysticism

• the capacity for religious thought may have bootstrapped a primitive human brain into its current, socially sophisticated form.

  • religious / symbolic / empathic / transcendent "thought" related to / outcome of / source of social bonding?
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• NS: Back to issues of faith and reason—your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magesteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.

   

  TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position. What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous. They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason. Then theologians can say anything they like. They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument. They’re now released from the tenets of science. Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism. But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason. The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason. Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself. But that’s a false way of arguing. Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.

   
• It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid. That betrays what’s wrong with this particular kind of new atheism: it casts the arguments largely in intellectual and propositional terms and doesn’t see that a great deal else is involved here.
• Advanced capitalist societies do not normally call upon their citizens to believe very much, as long as they roll out of bed and do their work. They are pretty post-metaphysical. In a sense, Britain is a post-metaphysical society. A very small minority of people go to church. Religion is not part of a public and political discourse in anything like the way it is in the States. The States is peculiar because it is, on the one hand, the most rampantly capitalist society in history and, on the other, deeply, deeply metaphysical. Really, those two things are inherently at odds. Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing, and secularizing. But to prop them up, to defend them, and to legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values. That may be why there are a lot of psycho-spiritual stockbrokers around.

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• "There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments."
• So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.

• The gospel which apostles like Paul preach is likewise never said to have had its source in Jesus or his ministry. Paul constantly refers to the “gospel of God” (Romans 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 2:2); 1 Peter 4:17 condemns those “who refuse to obey the gospel of God.” Occasionally, Christ is the object of the gospel (1 Thessalonians 3:2), but its source is consistently God himself, and it comes to the minds of apostles like Paul through the channel of God’s Spirit.
• And since neither Paul himself, nor anyone on his behalf down to the present day, has ever claimed that his “seeing” of the Christ was anything but a vision of a spiritual figure, this has to imply that Paul regards the other appearances as being in the same category. In other words, they were all revelatory experiences; none were thought of as encounters with a bodily-risen Jesus of Nazareth.
• the “seeing” may not refer to actual sensory or mental perception. Rather, it may simply be “an encounter with the risen Lord who reveals himself...they experienced his presence.” If what we have here is more an experience of Christ’s “presence” than a full-blown hallucinatory vision, this would make it easier to accept that so many individuals and even large groups could imagine they had undergone such an experience.
• It is far from clear, therefore, that Paul in 15:5-8 is describing anything more than a series of experiences in which many people, most of them within a group already formed for a religious purpose, felt a conviction of faith in the spiritual Christ, experiences which may well have grown in the telling.
• I might point out in passing that this not only eliminates Easter, it means that there is no necessary chronological proximity between Jesus’ “raising” and the list of visions, in fact no sequential connection at all. The death and resurrection (and even the “burial,” though it has been suggested, e.g., by Jean Héring, that this phrase may be a later addition) can be entirely mythological, revealed through the sacred writings; Paul’s repeated phrase “according to the scriptures” could be so interpreted. These people, at the time of the beginning of the movement, simply experienced a revelation of or about the Christ and his spirit world activities.
• For I delivered (paredoka) to you . . . what also I received (parelabon) . . .

   The first verb in the Greek is the past tense (aorist) of paradidomi: to hand over, to pass on, to deliver; the second, of paralambano: to receive, take over, learn or acknowledge. Commentators are quite right in pointing out that this pair of words is often, even usually, technical language for the receiving and passing on of tradition along a human chain of teaching and transmitted heritage. This sense is unmistakably present in the first verb of this passage. Paul is passing on his teaching to the Corinthians, and to everyone else he preaches to.

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