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Dissident Heart 
Embodiment of Reason
Bronze Contributor
Joined: 29 Aug 2003
Posts: 1426
Gender: 
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 Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 11:06 am Post subject:
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| RT2:The challenge should be to accept the world view of modern atheist science and ask what Biblical resources can add to that. This is more eis than ex. |
Why should we accept the worldview of the modern atheist scientist...or any for that matter? I don't deny the value of science and its methods, but I certainly don't think their extension into entire worldviews should go without challenge. I think the Bible should challenge all of our worldviews: unsettle, disturb, confront, expose and ultimately...well, perhaps I should slow down a bit here. I am not exactly sure what the Bible is ultimately about: I think it has something to do with getting things right with God and each other. I don't think the Bible is entirely clear or consistent about what it means by God, or how to treat each other. Although I do think it's clear that we, meaning the human race, usually get it wrong: terribly wrong. This is a complicated issue, no doubt.
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| RT2: Yes, the universe is loving, but no, wrath is not simply a distortion. |
Rabbi Lerner's point is to challenge those who utilize the Right Hand of God in the Bible to justify their own personal and political wrath: a vengeful and punishing God establishes my obligatory vengeance and martial attitude towards those I deem fallen, outsider, sinful, etc.. The wrath of God is left to God and God alone, not to those who claim to represent divine demands on earth. The only exception that Rabbi Lerner makes is when oppressed peoples imagine a vindicator and protector in God, and they utilize the punishing hand of God as fuel for justice: God is not on the side of the terrorists and tyrants, but with those who suffer their abuse. God chooses sides, and it is with the victims of injustice. Still, their is danger in anybody utilizing God as their violent protector, even if they are deserving of it. Thus, the necessity to approach eisegesis in a spirit of hope and not fear: fearful eisegesis will find plenty of reasons to annihilate one's enemies in the text; hopeful eisegesis will see a more demanding alternative...something that doesn't destroy your enemy, but loves them instead.
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| RT2: Jesus represents the cosmos as Gaia, the challenge is for us too to represent Gaia in order to understand the path of cumulative adaptation for humanity. If we can represent Gaia, we are living in love, and on a path to increased complexity. |
So, Abba for Jesus is best understood as Gaia for the contemporary scientific mind? More Biblically, the Kingdom of God is the Gaia we must understand, and in this understanding, humanity will attain a cumulative adaptative niche of loving complexity? For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was largely presented in parables: extravagant dinner parties where the guest list includes anyone off the street, lots of children, healed minds recently exorcised of demons, healed bodies with new mobility, like a mustard plant that once planted is never esily removed, blind folk seeing, prisoners released...and ultimately, even crucifixions lose their power, tombs release their dead and a new kind of life is introduced to existence: a resurrected life- something radically and profoundly outside of the parameters of creation to that point. Something no one imagined possible, completely impossible, becomes the only real thing. Maybe I've lost my point....what was the point?
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| RT2: So wrath can be a purely Darwinian concept: at the scale of human civilization, failure to adapt to our ecological niche inevitably means humanity will incur the wrath of a God who is loving but who must work through the laws of nature rather than against them. |
If we don't observe the laws of ecological necessity, we will be punished by rising coastlines, burining forests, drought ravaged farmland, polluted air, poisoned water and contaminated soil...and all of the accompanying social and political chaos that will follow. It will be hell. In many places, it is hell already.
But, why not work to eliminate the risk in natural selective terms? I mean, why not work to get rid of the major portion of human population that cannot be sustained and will not adopt sustainable lifestyles? Seriously, why not sterilize the mass of women and men, eliminate the worst off, force the surviving few into highly restricted areas where any behavior that deviates from sustainability will result in death? If survival is the issue, then those who don't want to survive can be helped off the stage: those who get in the way can be eliminated. This is wrath in a way that perhaps you aren't willing to engage: nor is it survival of the fittest as most scientific naturalists are willing to pursue.
Why not? If the goal is some sort of cumulative human adaptative point in evolutionary terms: what keeps you/me/us from eliminating threats to its success? |
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Robert Tulip 2
Eligible to vote!
Joined: 19 Nov 2007
Posts: 13
Gender:
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| Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 7:42 am Post subject:
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| Dissident Heart wrote: |
| Why should we accept the worldview of the modern atheist scientist...or any for that matter? ...I don't think the Bible is entirely clear or consistent about what it means by God, or how to treat each other. |
Hi again. May I say, I appreciate being able to have this conversation, which is a rare pleasure. My outlook is ‘atheism plus’. Science is necessary not sufficient. We should start from modern empiricism as the foundation of thought, while recognizing that (i) there is immensely more to the human spirit than can be seen in a laboratory; (ii) modern rationality has basic errors in confusing human knowledge with ultimate truth; and (iii) any spiritual speculation should be compatible with the self-consistent logic of science. Spirituality gets a bad name by promoting claims which science has proved impossible. The Bible is not consistent, but it is a human document. My claim is that a consistent salvific theology can be extracted from the dross of Biblical error.
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| DH: Rabbi Lerner's point is to challenge those who utilize the Right Hand of God in the Bible to justify their own personal and political wrath: a vengeful and punishing God establishes my obligatory vengeance and martial attitude towards those I deem fallen, outsider, sinful, etc.. The wrath of God is left to God and God alone, not to those who claim to represent divine demands on earth. |
Yes, this is a very good point which again illustrates why fundamentalism is anti-Christian. American fundamentalist idolatry imagines it knows the mind of God when it is simply wrong, and headed on a path to destruction. I just read this http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20813 great article in the New York Review of Books about Paul Krugman and how Ronald Wilson Reagan appealed to the most base and racist instincts of the American people. Fundamentalism is very dangerous.
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| DH: fearful eisegesis will find plenty of reasons to annihilate one's enemies in the text; hopeful eisegesis will see a more demanding alternative...something that doesn't destroy your enemy, but loves them instead. |
Well said. This illustrates how real security derives from love and trust rather than fear and hate. The trouble, as I noted in my previous comment about the new covenant, is that fearful eisegesis is anti-Christian, relying on ideas which Jesus specifically rejected.
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| DH: So, Abba for Jesus is best understood as Gaia for the contemporary scientific mind? More Biblically, the Kingdom of God is the Gaia we must understand, and in this understanding, humanity will attain a cumulative adaptative niche of loving complexity? |
Yes, this is a great summary of a possible Kingdom of God. I have a rather Johannine take on the Gospels in terms of a scientific integration of theology and gaian cosmology. The real metaphysics of Christ which supports this Darwinian theology is in the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. So for example John’s ‘I am’ statements: when Jesus says ‘I am the true vine’ he is indicating that a connection to the divine source is the basis of salvation, that we need real cosmic understanding as a basis for strategic vision and progress. I interpret this in Gaian terms, with the wholistic reality of our planet as the local instantiation of the divine source, and the sense that when humanity becomes too cancerous, people will arise who will speak powerfully on behalf of the planet.
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| why not work to eliminate the risk in natural selective terms? I mean, why not work to get rid of the major portion of human population that cannot be sustained and will not adopt sustainable lifestyles? |
Such a bleak option would produce a negative spiral to extinction, whereas a loving path is affordable, adaptive, necessary and immensely fruitful. Our planet can support ten billion people and increased biodiversity. I wrote a short story explaining a small part of my vision of a positive generous future, in which security derives from science and the spirit rather than the gun, at www.ascm.org.au/jgOnline/jg2007Autumn.pdf |
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