Yesterday on the metro Enoch was musing about the polytheistic nature of our society. For many, YHWH is just one in a pantheon which includes Mithras, Venus, Mars, and many others, consumerism, nationalism, celebrity.... sure, for many Christians he is like a Zeus figure, "in charge"of the other gods and godesses. But for many he is not. How many Christians have Jesus as a kind of lucky charm with which to better procure the real blessings of fortune, success, wealth, pride?
And for the non-spiritual, is the consumerist/ nationalist/ militarist package of the conservatives really worse than the consumerist/ idealist/ reactionary package of the liberals? Aren't Liberal and Conservative just pagan religions worshipping the pantheons listed above?
But our quarrel is more with the Christians, because we name ourselves after the one who's career and effforts were to save from these idle/idol distractions and instead to feed and clothe the needy, while at the same time we fall into the same traps of religion that 10 000 years of (recorded) generations have fallen pray to.
How can I turn my back on religion? I'm pretty involved in the cults of reactionary ideology, of intelectualism/rationalism, I'm a high preist of defensive pride. Where do we find out how to dump these things? I know it's there in Jesus but I'm reading with religion-goggles I don't know how to take off.
Thomas Cahill compares modern religions like Republicanism and Individualistic Hedonism to pagan ancient Greece very succesfully, in Sailing the Wine Dark Seas: Why the Greeks Matter.
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It's tough because then we are religious... like atheists and secularists are "anti-religious", yet are often the most dogmatic, fundamentalist extremists you can meet. So where do we find that middle-ground, where we identify those small-minded, idolatrist attitudes, but at the same time don't hold people in judgement, blame, inferiority, if they are engaged like that?
The fact that it's difficult, challenging, and appears to be paradoxical gives me the sneaking suspicion that there's something to it, since the gospel is that way too.....
yes. It's almost as if we must "emerge" from the constraints of judgmentalism, modernism, idolism, religiousity...ism into something new...something different. We could call this movement the "Emergent movement" but we wouldn't really debate about it. We could engage in "conversation"...the "Emergent conversation", if you will. Except those on the outside of the "conversation" would be old fuddy duddies...throw-back modernist, conservative relics who can't see the forest for the trees. They'd be OUT for sure. No, that's a silly idea...we'd just be emerging into a new form of the old system. It's weird how when you put a name on something, immediately people are there to separate who's in and who's out. I'm certainly guilty of that. I'm just not sure this whole Jesus thing was ever supposed to be organized at all. Human's capacity to organize anything is only surpased in their ability to develop caste systems once everything is neatly ordered.*
*I may be guilty of this very thing by even thinking and posting this.
The relativist instilled in me by my generation would say, of course, this is just another step which will make lots of sense at the time and then become stale and conservative and stifling to future generations who will then have to buck it off in favour of something else.
But I fight my relitavism with all I've got, and I feel that if I can't be idealistic about something then why be involved in it at all? Which is why I hold that just maybe, this represents some small step towards something which, in it's very organic and fluid shape, will automatically exist in that state of flux in which all new feelings, fashions, and whims of subsequent generations can be accomodated, learned from, adopted, without sullying the underlying truths of Jesus.
It is a preposterous beleif to state that something could happen that has never happened before, something completely new, something totally better and different that what has come before. Because everything about the universe around us teaches us otherwise: that karma rules the day, that there is nothing new under the sun, that what goes around comes around, that what seems great today will eventually be topped tomorrow, and that it is arrogance to assume otherwise.
Problem is, that's exactly what followers of Jesus beleive: that he was not just "one of those guys" that comes along every so often, but that he was a monstrosity, a completely unique thing that had never happened before. That's why we can beleive that we could be part of something that has never been done before, something better than what has been done before.
However preposterous the idea.
preposterous!!!!
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