FredP

Yeah, that had occured to me too. Humans do not have eternal significance to the exclusion of the rest of the cosmos. But I think we, along with whatever other sentient beings there may be, do have a certain special role and responsibility to the cosmos, by virtue of our capacities.

Picky picky. What I mean is that they don't cause awakening. Yes. To the extent that we are still asleep, grinding our wheels attempting to regain what we've never lost, we are pretty much along for the ride, I think. When the True Self awakens, however, which is Christ in us, we realize that we woke ourselves up precisely when and where and how we chose to, and that we now have responsibility for our existence in ways that we never imagined possible. There! I knew I could tie it all back in to the original topic! Hmm, I'm not sure I see how "the universe is divine" is the opposite of "God is a personal, supernaturally involved being." Different, but not opposite. I think the opposition you're getting at is between "the universe is natural" and "the universe is divine"? Yes, this is a paradox that forces us to rethink everything we think we know about who we are! And there may not be a conceptual resolution, so much as a resolution that occurs experientially in unitive awareness.

Yup, that's the situation. Wilber draws mainly on Buddhism here: all forms of striving for awakening, by way of conceptualization, meditation, activity, etc. are ultimately pointless -- but sometimes they have the side-effect of causing us to crash headlong into the paradox and realize that the problem never actually existed. Zen forms of meditation are, in fact, specifically engineered to accomplish this purpose -- to disarm logic and reason just long enough to enable us to peer into the beyond. But we shouldn't think of that disarming as an effort or an action. We must let the universe play itself out, what choice do we have? And part of the universe playing itself out is us striving with all our might until we finally explode from exhaustion and wake up. Or maybe just look at a beautiful snowfall, or a newborn baby, or the ocean, and wake up. Either way, nobody knows exactly why it happens, because nothing causes it. You can't cause the Uncaused. If that makes any sense, then I'm probably explaining it wrong.

Yup. Now we're on the same page, exactly. The word "overcome" is sort of funny in this particular situation, because overcoming is heroism, which is just another layer of ego striving. We have everything we need already, that's what's funny about salvation -- it's not about acquiring something that we don't already have. There's nothing we can do to be saved, because it's impossible to become un-saved. The ego creates the drama of fall and redemption in the first place. But what you're saying is correct, in the sense that we don't have the "ability to overcome" -- because no such ability exists. Like Alan Watts used to say, it's like trying to bite your teeth. You already are what you're striving to become. So getting out of the fallen situation is a bit of a paradox!

Heh. Well, yeah. For practical purposes, we assume that people are capable of making these kinds of choices, without delving too much into the underworld of how it all works. When I'm driving my car to work, I don't think too much about the physics of it, until something unexpected happens. I also expect that you'll personally judge whether he's capable of bringing her home sober and on time, before you let him take her out, too.

Wow, that's a rather freakish synchronicity! I've never even read any McLaren, including the post you copied over, and I had no idea that he had ever advocated Wilber's integral view. Rockin'. "Hi, I'm Fred."

No worries. Yes, there are definitely different degrees of control and choice-making capacity going on here. A person with a purely physical incapacity (severe childhood abuse or neglect that impairs brain development, a mental disorder, etc.) will have the most severe difficulty making authentic choices. A person with a psychological or emotional incapacity has a better shot at overcoming those deficiencies (with support and help), but still has a hard road to climb. But, from a transformational spirituality perspective, rationalizations based on our perceived needs, desires, and experiences -- the "twinkie defense" and its variations -- are exactly what constitute the more subtle disease known as ego-attachment! Our culture doesn't see this as a "disease" because it's our dominant level of consciousness -- who wants to call something everybody has, a disease? It's not a rationalization or an excuse; it's a diagnosis. But it's still an impairment of choice-making capacity. We can't stop rationalizing while we're still bound to the ego, because the ego persists by means of rationalizing. Sure, a better ego will make relatively better choices, but it will always make egoic choices, and there is a hard limit to how much even the best of egoic choices can help us. I'm guessing this isn't going to convince darby though.

Well, the first difficulty is that there is no "Progressive Christian View." Some PC's are strong post-modernists -- most of the Jesus Seminar types in an academic university setting would fall into this category. Some are modernists, though that set is probably a dwindling minority. I think an integral view (like my own) would also have to be considered progressive, and yet this view very explicitly rejects strong post-modernism. I think you can't answer the question about PC in general; you have to answer it about particular strains of it. If by PC he means Jesus Seminar type liberal Christianity, then I'd say, yes, his accusation that PC embraces the post-modern rejection of absolutes is correct.

I hope nothing I said sounded like buck-passing. The idea was that responsibility is always a joint effort, but we certainly have our share. In many ways, you have more responsibility in this scheme, because you are also partially responsible for the ways in which you influence the feelings and actions of others. It isn't just that other people are part of your responsibility context; you're also part of theirs.

It's probably getting lodged in there at a precognitive level when I ramble on to myself about it. I'm not sure chronology is on your side here. Definitely not with Nietzsche, whose ideas were already firmly entrenched in writing before Einstein published his first papers on relativity (~1905 if I'm remembering correctly). Maybe Sartre was familiar in a really general way with Einstein's work, but I've never heard of any connection. I think it's probably just one of those fascinating synchronicities of ideas -- like Newton and Leibniz discovering calculus at almost exactly the same time, with no interaction whatsoever between them. Yes, but there is still a deep commitment to philosophical and scientific reductionism operating in systems theories today. Ken Wilber's integralism is a notable exception, as it grounds developmental complexity in an actual ontology of being. I'm half-tempted to call Wilber the Plato of the 21st century, but that might be a tad extreme. I guess, IF there were a Plato of the 21st century, he'd have as much a claim to the title as anyone.

Nutshell? Ok, so more of a walnut than a pistachio.

Well, having defended darby against hasty misinterpretations, it seems fair that I should offer an alternative take on responsibility, just to mix things up a little. It is good to see that there has been a conscious distinction made between responsibility as "what brought me here" and responsibility as "what am I going to do about it." Probably a lot of arguments about blame, fault, responsibility, etc. take place because people are using the word in different ways without realizing it. I think it's essential in any theory of responsibility to make the distinction, and to understand that both dimensions of responsibility are important. Having said that, I will now say that I believe pure, isolated, individual responsibility -- in both senses of the word -- is a myth. In the "what brought me here" category, I think it's pretty clear that we have the distinct minority role as far as what happens to us early in life, and how we're prepared emotionally, mentally, spiritually, etc. to handle what life deals us. I've met a very small handful of radical libertarian types, who literally believe that they have completely made themselves into who they are today. I don't see how anybody can seriously make that claim; I think it mostly boils down to a justification of selfishness about one's resources and one's situation in life. We are handed a steaming pile of life, that contains a whole lot of raw material that we didn't ask for, and we have nothing to do with. Anyway, all that seems uncontroversial enough. Where the controversy comes in, of course, is in the "what am I going to do about it" category. At first glance, it seems sensible enough that we can just take this raw material and decide what to do with it, right? I mean, life may hand us less or more, good and bad, but can't we still make the best choice possible given our options? It turns out that, upon closer inspection, this "raw material" isn't just a set of "options" that we can choose to exercise from a standpoint of detachment and objectivity. Even our will and desires are part of our bequest, and many people in our culture -- this doesn't necessarily coincide with economic opportunity either -- are walking around with deformed wills and desires, and bad choices just waiting to happen, due in large part to circumstances outside their isolated, individual sphere of control. Sometimes, we can probably all acknowledge, people are so maimed by bad experiences, that, barring a miraculous intervention, their ability to make good moral choices is permanently impaired. But where some might see this as the exception rather than the rule, I believe this situation is simply the extreme and dramatic end of a continuum on which we all fall, to some degree or other. Bottom line is, we are essentially social beings, with an essentially social fabric of causality and influence. (Actually, at a deeper metaphysical level, I'm claiming that what appear to us to be isolated, individual centers of consciousness are actually wave-like patterns arising out of, and falling back into, a single unified field of consciousness; but that's not really essential to the point I'm arguing here.) We never -- we couldn't if we wanted to -- act or decide in isolation from our formation. Yes, we can take some steps to grow beyond our initial formation, and into a spiritually awakened state -- a genuinely independent frame of conscience -- and I believe God ultimately desires this of every one of us. But the freedom to do this is not unlimited: even the desire and will to grow in this way is situated in a larger formative context that shows itself to be far beyond our own isolated, individual sphere of control, whatever that might be. This is really the sociology side of the "self is an illusion" claim I keep harping on. Well, that's enough for now. Let's see how this flies.

Wow, it's been a busy day around here! Ok, in a nutshell: Modernism -- which is roughly synonymous with "The Enlightenment" in Europe, beginning around 1600 -- is characterized mainly by the turn away from tradition and authority, and towards reason and experience; and the twin dependence on clear and distinct ideas -- rationalism: Decartes, Spinoza, Leibniz -- and demonstrable sense data -- empiricism: Locke, Hobbes, Hume. Essential to philosophical modernism is the concept of foundationalism -- that we can, via deduction and induction, demolish all hearsay and superstition, and arrive at certain unquestionable foundations, upon which the whole superstructure of knowledge can be erected. Progressive optimism at its finest, really. Postmodernism -- which comes up in proto-forms as early as the mid-1800's in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and comes to full flower in folks like Sartre and Camus in the early 20th century, and the "pragmatist turn" with Davidson and Rorty in contemporary philosophy -- deconstructs the grandiose claims of modernism, and claims that they are nothing but human will masquerading as scientific objectivity. But, rather than being simply a return to a naive premodern trust in authority and tradition, postmodernism adds to modernism's suspicion of authority its own suspicion of reason itself. Now even reason and logic cannot be trusted to arrive at the truth in any form -- indeed, "truth" is just a marginalizing word anyway, meaning whatever those in power believe. PM stresses tradition, and community, and experience -- but not as truth-bearing entities. They exist to engender solidarity, to enrich lives, to embody a shared sense of belonging, etc. Sheesh, I actually came up with three E's totally by accident! Bizarre. Anyway, I think that's probably it in a nutshell. Personally, I would say that there are important insights in both modernism and postmodernism, that need to be taken seriously in any account of knowledge. In premodernism, truth and power were wedded together in an undifferentiated form. Modernism -- which, despite its distrust of religion, actually inherits its faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe from classical theism -- differentiated truth from power in a widespread way, for the first time in human history, allowing science to progress independently from religion. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this step in human development -- even as we recognize the dark side inherent in our unbridled optimism about progress. Postmodernism, at least in its non-self-collapsing forms, integrates them back together in a more subtle and consious way, allowing us to see how, despite being conceptually distinct, they are really inseparable in practice. Consequently, we should be confident with modernism that we can make good rational sense of the world -- while, at the same time, with postmodernism, recognizing that we always bring our own horizons, limitations, and self-deceptions into the mix when whenever we try to grasp it. And that goes for institutional forms as well as individual ones. Complete certainty, for reason and tradition alike, is a fantasy. Ok, that's all for now.

He happened to be wearing this again tonight, so I made sure to look at the caption. It says, "Ready to start a new adventure."

Can we start a cell church? Utah is a helluva commute though.

Thanks! Hey, it's never too late.

This isn't isn't even close to what darby is saying. He knows as well as anybody that terrible things happen in conservative Christian churches, when people go astray, and can often drive people away for life. His point was that you seem to be saying that all extreme left-wingers are nothing more than ex-extreme right-wingers -- in other words, that behind every rabid athiest humanist God-hater is someone who got burned by a conservative church. He's not saying that the ones who actually did get burned are lying. He's concerned that you're blaming the extreme right for the extreme left, rather than allowing the extreme left to take responsibility for its own actions. Does that make sense?

As an aside, I think it's difficult for our generation to understand how recently, and how quickly, the authoritarian and fundamentalist resurgence within Islam has occured. From the Middle Ages well into the twentieth century, Islam has been among the most progressive religions on the planet, politically and scientifically. Sure, it's always had a conservative pocket, but it wasn't until the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in the 1970's that we've seen anything resembling "Islamic fundamentalism." Before then, you never even saw the traditional Muslim garb, headdress, etc. This resurgence is a very recent phenomenon, and can't be retrojected back into the past, to make judgments about the Muslim approach to education.

On the contrary, flow, I think this is exactly the type of gods our native brothers and sisters, by and large, were familiar with. That's not an insult, it's simply a developmental observation. Now, the Native American conception of gods and spirits certainly involved a whole lot more balance and harmony with nature than many other primitive spiritual systems that were built around domination and the brokerage of power. No argument there. But that doesn't change the fact that they still had an essentially magical, totemic type of spiritual understanding. To borrow from Wilber, it was an undifferentiated, or pre-theistic, conception, rather than an integrated, or trans-theistic one. This is precisely the type distinction that can't be grasped by pre-theism or conventional theism, and requires the development, cognitively and spiritually, of a transtemporal perspective.

Maybe I was projecting my mom, who can't even fall asleep without the tender glow of the tube bathing her body in its incandescent glow. But I definitely understand that TV has some positive value. I commend you for trying to make music lessons work on an adult schedule! It's hard enough to keep up on practicing when you're in junior high and all you have to worry about is your homework and whether Jenny knows that you have a crush on her. We already sing and play the piano to John, and we like to sit him in our lap and let him plunk on the keys. So much fun to watch!

I do understand what you're saying, and have made my share of harsh comments against people for doing exactly what you're saying. It just seems to me that there is a kind of pendulum effect going on here, and if I were a betting man, I'd bet that, in the development of society and culture and religion, extreme authoritarian rigidity showed up before extreme anti-authoritarian rigidity. (You can't have an anti-X before you have an X, it's a basic law of nature.) But that's just chronology -- both sides are at fault for perpetuating extremism, it doesn't matter who did it first, or who is reacting against whom. I thought the last sentence of the post made that pretty clear: "The point is don't become the flipside of the extreme right by becoming a left intolerant answer to fundamentalism." Just my $.02...

I'd kill for a Ken Wilber meetup! Every couple months I seriously reconsider relocating to Boulder to join IU, but then I wonder what I'd do to buy myself things like clothes and food.

Thanks a lot for posting this. I can really empathize with this feeling of anti-theism and anti-Christianity in UU, because I also experienced it myself for a few years. For an organization that is ostensibly so tolerant of all religious and spiritual views, this visceral hostility towards theism in just about any form is embarassing. I probably enjoy bursting people's bubbles way too much with this, but the highest pinnacle of classical pagan philosophy (Platonism) was staunchly rational, spiritual, and theistic -- not related in any way to the contemporary forms of "neo-paganism," which seem to me (for most people, anyway) to be little more than a romantic revival of pre-theistic forms of nature-worship. Anyway, I find it ironic and bizarre that a religion whose heritage is theological Unitarianism has such an uneasy relationship with any form of deity. On the other hand, however, I do understand the distaste, not just in UU, but in culture at large, with conceptions of gods as beings of intelligence and power that manipulate the cosmos -- which is, in a nutshell, the conventional understanding of the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim God. The Platonic and Gnostic conceptions of God were much more subtle and profound than this; and while a few Christian theologians seemed to have grasped the true profundity of the divine transcendence, it seems most Christians down to this day haven't been able to cogitate God beyond the level of Potentate of Potentates, and Jesus as his Prince and Heir. Part of me is secretly hopeful that there may be a place in UU for this more subtle and profound conception of divinity. I've actually been contemplating UU again recently, knowing that I will probably feel strongly pulled in opposite directions about it, and wondering which pull will be stronger.

Hope you don't mind if I migrate this post here, since it seems more on topic, and plus, I wanted to respond to it.....

I KNEW it had to be the Christian fundamentalists' fault in the end!! Actually, darby, I think Beach is making a pretty accurate observation here. I don't know too many violent anti-theists or anti-Christians who aren't reacting against some kind of extremism of belief in their own backgrounds. Why else would they react so violently? Why not just chuckle and let them do their own thing? We're talking specifically here about rigid, authoritarian types of backgrounds here, not just any old conservative Christianity. Even a well-adjusted liberal can respect a conservative Christian for embodying the very best of their beliefs and ideals, and for making the world a better place. I think the point that was being made is that we often become the very type of thing that we are reacting against, and it is our responsibility to move beyond that kind of adolescent rebellion, and into a constructive spirituality.