Christianity, Islam, Jefferson, faith & reason, mysticism, Zen, neoPlatonism, Philo... Anselm

My ?s:

- The idea of individual salvation became the cornerstone of Christian philosophy,52 based on a story of miracles, atonement, an eternal afterlife, and the supernatural. Are there other ways of thinking about salvation? What is the most miraculous thing about our existence?

- Philo reinterpreted biblical tales as mythic statements about the human condition and humanity's relation to the divine. 53, #19 below Can we understand the idea of an inner divine spark in terms that might suggest an alternative to the idea of individual salvation?

- The assurance of God's justice is the Islamic solution to the problem of evil. 58 Should our concept of justice be rooted in specific ideas about God? Or should or ideas about God be rooted in our concept of justice?

ultimate justice

Christianity & Islam: Hijacked by Fundamentalists? Must surrender to God imply contempt for humanity and earthly existence? Can there be peaceful coexistence among people whose nations do not all observe a distinction between church and state? (See Jefferson-Baptists, below)

No one goes to God who does not go through me. Does this simply mean that the qualities of character and virtue Jesus has come to represent within the Judeo-Christian tradition - love, compassion, humility etc. - express our best understanding of divinity?

Jesus criticized those who made a great show of their holiness but who failed to show compassion.

Jefferson's Wall of Separation Letter

Thomas Jefferson was a man of deep religious conviction - his conviction was that religion was a very personal matter, one which the government had no business getting involved in. He was vilified by his political opponents for his role in the passage of the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and for his criticism of such biblical truths as the Great Flood and the theological age of the Earth. As president, he discontinued the practice started by his predecessors George Washington and John Adams of proclaiming days of fasting and thanksgiving. He was a staunch believer in the separation of church and state.Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 to answer a letter from them written in October 1801. The letter contains the phrase "wall of separation between church and state," which led to the short-hand for the Establishment Clause that we use today: "Separation of church and state."-Constitution et al online

Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists

GentlemenThe affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.

Jesus without the miracles: Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas Harper's, Erik Reece

Back when the WHAT WOULD JESUS DO bracelets were appearing on the wrists of young people all around the country, I found myself in an argument with an old friend, a fellow Virginian who, like me, is the lapsed son of a Baptist preacher. We had both fallen pretty far, far enough to spend many nights together in the local Irish pub, putting away Guinness and commiserating about how the Church had crippled our spirits and misunderstood our complicated souls. The crux of our argument was over the bracelets' merit and utility. My friend saw them as just another example of hollow piety. For my part, I said it would indeed be a positive step if Christians actually began to follow the teachings of the founder.

Something similar was no doubt on the mind of another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, when he took a pair of scissors to the King James Bible two hundred years ago. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miraclesincluding the most important one, the Resurrectionthen pasted together what was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth...

Jefferson believed that an authentic Christianity had long ago been hijacked by the Christian Church....

By stripping away the gospelers' claim that Jesus was the divine son of God, and by stripping away the subsequent miracles they invented to prove it, Jefferson boasted that he had extracted the "diamonds from the dunghill" to reveal the true teaching of Jesus for what it was: "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

Diamonds don't have to be commanded - their appeal is intrinsic.

Be just; justice comes from virtue, which comes from the heart.

Treat people the way we want them to treat us.

Always work for peaceful resolutions, even to the point of returning violence with compassion.

Consider valuable the things that have no material value.

Do not judge others. Do not bear grudges. Be modest and unpretentious.

Give out of true generosity, not because we expect to be repaid.

Jefferson had claimed Epicurus as his patron-philosopher. Two thousand years earlier, Epicurus had taught that life would be much easier to endure if we stopped fearing God and deathabout which we can know and do nothingand followed instead a program of prudent self-sufficiency.

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Compare Jefferson with Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Divinity School Address:Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man...

`I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.'

He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

The crucifixion and expiation/redemption it was supposed to achieve for humanity is indeed profound, but is just as difficult. Our ordinary notions of justice and redemption, not to mention our notions of rational will personal responsibility, and social conscience, do not illuminate it...for better or worse. The idea of individual salvation - the cornerstone of Christian philosophy - in some ways complements the rugged individualism of American democracy but it also threatens to sow seeds of animosity between believers of different stripes (let alone between believers and non-believers).

The great and divisive question in the arena of faith and reason is: when is it ever reasonable to suspend our rational intellect in favor of faith? Judaism exalts faith, but not to the exclusion of reason. Getting the mix right has always been problematic.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

Will to believe

Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.E.-50 C.E.) reinterpreted Biblical tales as mythic statements about the human condition not as the literal and uninterpreted word of God. 53

Philo produced a synthesis of Greek and Judaic traditions... IEP

The Conversion of St. Paul 1600-1601

Like Philo, Paul was a Hellenized Jew. He claimed he was knocked off his horse and saw the light of Christian gospel.

It was Paul who interpreted Jesus as the Son of God, and his crucifixion as atonement.54

Platos glimpse of the forms has suggested to some believers that mystical insight is key: Platos form of the Good is thus transmogrified, for some, into the Christian God.

In these post-Platonic versions of transcendent, transformational knowledge, faith must plug the gap between reason and understanding. The quest to reconcile faith and reason, or Jewish and Greek traditions, was especially evident in the neo-Platonism of Plotinus with his emanations of the divine mind. But his denial of the problem of evil (what we call evil is just an absence of good etc.) foreshadowed centuries of scholastic verbal niceties. An absence of good can be experienced as evil.

Plotinus' doctrine that the soul is composed of a higher and a lower part -- the higher part being unchangeable and divine... led him to neglect an ethics of the individual human being in favor of a mystical doctrine of the soul's ascent to union with its higher part.

Unlike Plato, Plotinus saw the material world as itself spiritual, the extruded thought of a fully spiritual mind... though at the lowest level. Still, for Plotinus the human soul is already in some sense divine. (compare Emerson)

Emanations

Augustine of Hippo Refuting Heretic

Augustine (354-430) In a proof for existence similar to one later made famous by Descartes, Augustine says, [Even] If I am mistaken, I am. He is the first Western philosopher to promote what has come to be called the argument by analogy: there are bodies external to mine that behave as I behave and that appear to be nourished as mine is nourished; so, by analogy, I am justified in believing that these bodies have a similar mental life to mine.

God granted us free will, and is not responsible for the abuses of free will that His free, freely-created children commit (and that He knew they would commit): a highly problematic perspective, philosophically.

Because the soul was created in the image of God, self-knowledge is divine knowledge. Hence, Augustine's contribution to the inward turn in western thought. 57

The appeal of Islam was its simplicity... (58)

Like early Christianity, there is a strong element of compassion in the defining tenets of Islam. The Islamic conception of jihad (holy war) should be understood in terms of justice, as resistance to evil... also extends to the inner life, and the struggle on behalf of God includes the believers inner struggles... People are responsible for their behavior, and God is just in punishing wrongdoers because human beings have free will.

Unlike the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions, Islam does not (officially) see the material world as inferior...

But then again...weve seen all too clearly what a motivator the Islamic heaven, however misconceived, can be for true believers.

pbs

True believers consider pictorial depictions of the Prophet blasphemous - even respectful images. Cartoons are beyond the pale.

Zen & Scholasticism: Is mind a rational or mystical organ? Does reality transcend human intellect? How would we know that it did? PW 59-69

Altered States: Mysticism & Zen (59).

The quest to achieve special insight into the supposedly hidden, exalted, extraordinary nature of reality though exceptional experiences that promise to put us in touch with higher orders or levels of Being is a mystical quest. My own preferred definition of mysticism is: the belief that reality

is systematically larger, richer, and deeper than our everyday thinking and ordinary language can grasp. Genuine reality, for the mystic, is beyond words.

A mystic believes that language misses reality top-to-bottom, and that everyday experience is hugely deceptive.

Appearances are misleading, so mystics propose various practices, disciplines, and techniques designed to displace our assumptions about everyday reality and open the way to extraordinary experiences and exceptional mental states.

This may be secret knowledge, as for the Gnostics; but it may just be a field of possible perception that our usual ways and habits separate us from.

In any event the goal is unity with something greater than oneself , and something beyond the pale of everyday life and normal routine; the means to achieving the goal is the suppression of self or ego (gnosis). It isnt always clear to us non-mystics what remains, after the ego has been cut down to size, to be unified.

Exceptional mental states (Springs 110f.)

The appeal of Zen Buddhism remains strong today, in large part because it does not treat the object of mystic consciousness as a secret or esoteric treasure but rather teaches that anyone can attain enlightenment (satori) through meditation (zazen) and its consequent subversion or deconstruction of everyday logical thinking. If we allow ourselves to be sufficiently impressed by unanswerable paradoxes like What is the sound of one hand clapping? and other koans we may succeed in breaking down our allegiance to what Zen masters consider the illusory structure of the rational intellect... the logos of Greek rationalism that western science is committed to uncovering.

(And yet, the Dalai Lama considers himself a friend of western science. See his The Monk in the Lab: Buddhist teachings stress the importance of understanding reality, and so we should pay attention to what scientists have learned about our world through experimentation and measurement...)

These koans, or parables, were translated into English from a book called the Shaseki-shu (Collection of Stone and Sand), written late in the thirteenth century by the Japanese Zen teacher Muju (the "non-dweller"), and from anecdotes of Zen monks taken from various books published in Japan around the turn of the 20th century.

Better, think the Buddhists, to embrace the pre-reflective nothingness or emptiness of things. The Buddha nature seems pretty minimal, but theres no denying the spiritual radiance and deep humanity of those whove internalized it effectively. The Dalai Lama, for instance, seems to radiate loving kindness and compassion.

The Peripatetics, admirers of Aristotle who emulated his habit of walking around as he lectured, were especially interested in the relative merits of faith and reason.

Maimonides: knowledge of science should not lead to the abandonment of religion. That view was accepted then by Islamic scholars; today, it seems fundamentalists in the Islamic world and in the west unlike the Dalai Lama - have effectively given up on Maimonides quest

Moses Maimonides (11381204) is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period and is still widely read today. The Mishneh Torah, his 14-volume compendium of Jewish law, established him as the leading rabbinic authority of his time and quite possibly of all time. His philosophic masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, is a sustained treatment of Jewish thought and practice that seeks to resolve the conflict between religious knowledge and secular.

According to the Gnostics, this world, the material cosmos, is the result of a primordial error on the part of a supra-cosmic, supremely divine being, usually called Sophia (Wisdom) or simply the Logos. This being is described as the final emanation of a divine hierarchy...

Teresa of Avila

Christian Mysticism

Anselms ontological argument was not intended to persuade nonbelievers...64 He thought faith must precede understanding. The rational doubts of skeptics are not undermined by this or other rational arguments purporting to prove the existence of a transcendent, necessary, perfect Being.

Anselm's ontological argument, traditional version:

1. Our concept of God is of a maximally perfect being, a being than which none greater can be conceived. God is perfect, i.e., God possesses all perfections: omnipotence (infinite power), omniscience (infinite knowledge), and moral perfection (infinite goodness and compassion).

2. Existence is a perfection, nonexistence an imperfection.

3. If God does not exist, God is imperfect.

4. God cannot be imperfect.

Therefore,

5. God exists.

Hundreds Of Proofs of God's Existence

TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. PRESUPPOSITIONALIST (I)
(1) If reason exists then God exists.
(2) Reason exists.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT (I)
(1) If I say something must have a cause, it has a cause.
(2) I say the universe must have a cause.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) I define God to be X.
(2) Since I can conceive of X, X must exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) I can conceive of a perfect God.
(2) One of the qualities of perfection is existence.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

And hundreds more... Plus some real proofs