Happy Solar New Year!!!
May everyone experience blessings.
In 1263, in Barcelona, a "disputation" occured. In which, as is often the case with disputations under authority, was rigged so that the Christian side of the debate had nothing to lose and everything to gate, while the Jewish side of the debate had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Robert Chazan reports in an article
"Deliberations were undertaken with the lord King and with certain Dominicans and Franciscans who were present, not that the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ -- which because of it's certitude cannot be placed in dispute -- be put at the center of attention with the Jews as uncertain, but that the truth of that faith be made manifest in order to destroy the Jews' errors, and to shake the confidence of many Jews...Friar Paul proposed to the said rabbi that, with the aid of God, he would prove from the writings shared and accepted by the Jews the following contentions, in order:
According to the report, the truth of Christianity was not to be put in question;"
This was not a fair way to debate the subject. Because if Christian sources can't be used or put to the test in the debate, then there is no incentive for either side to come to a compromise or "synthetic" position. The best that can happen is that the Jewish side survive to debate another day. At the worst, the Jewish faith would be unfairly savaged and yet another excuse for pogroms and persecutions found. And indeed it is reported that the debate led to Friar Paul Christian, a convert from Judaism, to try to repeat his successes in France and to induce the King of France to require Jews to wear a badge on their dress to identify them.
But what interests me is that he casually disputed the "aggadic" texts of the oral Mishna that were being used by Friar Paul. When the report of the debate was shared later, other Jews refused to use this line of debate, but that he was willing to do this in the first place says something about the difference in understanding of religion that is an important key to understanding both religions and perhaps finding a way to resolve religious disputes in our own age.
As a sage he was in love with the stories of the "aggada". Yet he disputes it saying "I responded and said: 'I do not believe in this aggadah, however it is proof for my views.' Friar Paul responds according to his version 'Behold he denies their texts.' I said: 'Truly I do not believe that the Messiah was born on the day of the destruction of the Second Temple. Thus either this aggadah is not true or it has another meaning related to the mysteries of the sages.'"
This indicates a deep awareness of the four types of religious inquiry; Literal, figurative, interpretative and inspirational. In other words, it indicates a deep grasp of "upaya" or skillfulness.
For Christians however this was something very strange and fearful. For Christians, religious texts were "auctoritates" and to deny their literal veracity was "blasphemy." But in truth, religion has to be treated this way to be useful, creative, to change with changing circumstances and if people are to ever grasp the true general principles of life without getting confused by all the myths and confusing and often mixed messages of religious texts and stories. It is also the reason why many Jews could become Buddhists without stopping being Jews, while most Christians have felt compelled to apostasize in order to get involved with other thoughts even a little.
There is still a lot of this authoritarian and literalist tradition around. And as a result there are a lot of confused religious people. Their teachers so love the doctrines of their sect that they force themselves into contortions and to go to great lengths to "prove" that a story that is told for figurative reasons (and thus is very 'true') is somehow literally true. This leads to cynicism, hypocrisy and "false-belief." If one preaches something as literally true when one knows it is possibly not true literally at all, one is engaging in psychically unstable behavior that can even lead to evil behavior. Witness here the inquisition, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; and the Nazis. This also twists the underlying truths one is trying to get across. This is as if the story of the Fox and the Grapes had to have actually happened for someone to get the message of the story. As a result folks never recognize when they have their own "sour grapes." The roots of this confusion are in notions of the sacred that establish "heresy" arbitrarily and declare it an absolute evil, or that make texts so sacred as to be unquestioned. It establishes either/or choices where the answer is elsewhere. And it basically deifies individuals, hierarchies or committees of human beings which is the sin of presumption and arrogance.
Unfortunately this literal-minded and twisted mindset is present in spades elements of "orthodox" Christianity, Islam and to a lesser extent in Judaism and some Buddhist, Hindu or other circles. The people encouraging the literalism often know better themselves but they seem bound by the "groups" they are in to keep "on topic".
The model Nachmonides used to approach the Aggadic texts is a correct one. Even authoritative texts should to be treated as the opinions, stories and thinking of the author and never taken out of context or held as so sacred that common sense, evidence and reason must be suspended. It is not appropriate to take any text out of it's appropriate contexts of study and inspiration. The tradition of Buddhism says this explicitly. And the doctrine of the PaRDeS, which was known to Christians and Moslems, restates the same doctrine in a logical manner.
Source: Originally published in Speculum Vol 52, No 4, (Oct 1977).
The Earth Moves,
It rises and it sinks,
It trembles like a young girl beholding her first love.
It heaves beneath the sea
and sends out waves of energy at five hundred miles an hour
The waves slow,
they bunch, they rise.
They move toward the land,
unstoppable, Grand.
From space, they look like ripples.
From space, warning could be given.
Alarms, sirens, warning!
For death is on it's way.
People on the shore see the sea,
Do a thing it does but rarely.
The sea withdraws from the shore,
and they look out and see only land.
Perhaps a miracle this is?
Is this what happened to Moses?
From space, they look like ripples.
From space, warning could be given.
Alarms, sirens, warning!
For death is on it's way.
The sea withdraws and paths appear
where paths had never been
and are not meant to be.
The curious, the foolish,
are drawn to the ocean to explore.
But that is a mistake,
From space, they look like ripples.
From space, warning could be given.
Alarms, sirens, warning,
For death is on it's way!
The sea, piled up, returns in a massive wave,
and rises and breaks on the shore,
travelling far inland sometimes
in a wrath of destruction.
Oh, to bury the children,
who once were tempted to play in the sea.
Oh, to bury wives and loved ones,
who were taken by this phenomena, tsunami.
From space, they look like ripples.
From space, warning could be given.
Alarms, sirens, warning!
For death is on it's way.
Mourn Tsunami,
Mourn the stupidity of humans and their governments.
Who refuse to pay attention.
Who will use any excuse to avoid responsibility.
And then blame the results on others.
Mourn Tsunami,
That monster is not the evil.
Warning could have been given.
But the leaders chose expedience over caution.
No warnings were given.
They claimed that Tsunami's were rare,
though the last one they had; Krakatoa.
had been as deadly.
Chris
When Tomorrow Comes,
there will be no more sorrow,
The Sun will always shine,
and no one will need to borrow,
For all our fortunes will be fine.
When tomorrow comes,
Today will be no more,
At last the past will be vanquished,
and all sorrows forgotten as lore.
When tomorrow comes,
When tomorrow comes.
We will weep no more.
When today is done,
Another today arises,
Oh where is tomorrow?
That day that never sorrows.
That day of eternal sunshine?
Yes I weep for yesterday.
That day that is no more.
Oh the paths I could have taken.
But the path I took led here.
Yes, the waves have erased my footsteps,
and my castles have melted in the tides.
Oh I weep in sorrow,
For all those vanished tomorrows.
The nights I lay in fear and trembling,
at what tomorrow would soon bring.
Those tomorrows never came.
I have only another memory of a today.
That I call yesterday.
I tremble before tomorrow,
That day with no today.
When "I" shall eternally sleep.
No "eye" to visit with the light of the day.
No more promises to break or keep.
Oh I fear you tomorrow,
If you ever arrive without today.
For if there is no "this" moment?
What on earth will I say?
So, I live in sublime gratitude.
That for now, at least, it is today.
Chris
Reference: Article in New York Times: New F.B.I. Files Describe Abuse of Iraq Inmates
When a country is full of scared people, that is the time when the wolves, tigers, jackels and thieves take advantage. Like with the classic tale of Chicken Little. A single acorn drops on the head of a stupid chicken and next thing one knows the entire barn-yard is agaggle with panicky animals. Only human animals are dangerous when they are afraid. They are likely to forget that they are human. The world of animality is a world of brutality; A world that forget's it is human. A world where it is entirely possible for supposedly civilized people to act like Brutes. And that is why it is all the more important during times of crises to remember that we create civilizations....
....That for all the fear that we feel, compared to a real "fin de sicle" event, the attacks of 9/11 were an acorn. More importantly, when a threat is real one has to correctly identify where it is coming from and how to meet it.
One response that does not past muster is the panic response; the Brute response; the tribal response. Reports of "detainees' being beaten and choked and having lit cigarettes placed in their ears" are not funny. They are not acceptable behavior. They are not an appropriate response. And they are no way to resist Islamic fundamentalists. For the US to openly embrace policies based on brute force and repression in our foreign policy is to set us up to use brute force and recession at home. And that is why these things need to be stopped.
These behaviors are clear and simply criminal. The FBI is coming public with these accusations because they are accusations of illegal behavior that has nothing to do with professional interrogations and law enforcement. They know that the American people, and our leaders, have to recognize that not only do these kinds of behaviors not work; for all the neo-Nazi Berretta, Rambo and Terminator films to the contrary, they don't even get results. One cannot touch evil without it contaminating the hand that touches. A "Berretta" with his gun shooting "bad guys" is apt to eventually become a bad guy himself; perhaps shooting his own wife eventually. The way of anger is a bad way. It is not patriotism, it is prelude to fascism. It is not law enforcement, it is law-breaking.
In reading further on Georges Sorel I had to absolve him of the cynicism I accused him of earlier. He comes across as a surprisingly warm and insightful man as one reads his letters and writings. He lived long enough to see the rise of the man Mussolini to power. And he admitted in private letters that Mussolini had absorbed his ideas. But one doesn't see him as pleased by the ideas. It appears he'd been a supporter of democratic and free institutions and found Mussolini's anti-democratic and totalitarian bent something horrible to him.1
In his conversations with Jean Variot (this is from the Western Political Quarterly: vol 3, No 1, page 24)
"Did Lenin have to be a reader of Sorel in order to become Lenin?"
"Frankly, I don't believe it."
As to Mussolini he is reported to have said:
"...my works have been more read in Italy than in France... It is possible, it is even probable that Binito Mussolini has read me. But attention! Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin.... He is not a Socialist a la sauce bourgeoise; he has never believed in parliamentary socialism; he has an amazing insight into the nature of the Italian masses, and he has invented something not to be found in my books: the union of the national and the social -- something I have studied..."
But Sorel was aghast at Mussolini and his brutal followers. He was friends with many of the victims of Mussolini's violent rise to power. Mussolini had acted on the premises of his logical dissection of man's predilections towards myth and carried their conclusions into reality; where Sorel had noted the reality with his fine logic. Sorel was a "moralist" and a "syndicalist and disinterested servent of the proletariat," but also a historian. The article says "as a partisan of the defeated working class, he could not help being resentful and dejected; still the old engineer and student of the Industrial revolution was able to do Mussolini justice." But as a Historian he couldn't help but acknowledge reality.
Sometimes we don't get to chose our disciples.
The threads of our existence are what bind us together. Some threads exist in space, like the clothes we wear, but our most important threads are spun in time. The ancients compared them to the work of the "Norns" three old blind women who incessantly wove the cloth of time. One warping, one wefting, and the third one knotting the threads and cutting them. Birth and death knot us together. What seems like a multitude of lives is woven out of one string. Hence it is just illusion to see our "selves" as seperate from one another. The Moslems are right that the unary experience of spiritual life is non-dual -- Or to put it in their terms "God is one." We are all sharing the same fabric of life.
And yet, the fabric of faith time is complex enough that it has room for other patterns besides there pattern. Jews are right about a surprising number of things. The Bahai have some things right. The Sikhs others. Christians yet others. The universal things that are true may speak different languages but they convey the same truths.
When they seem to contradict that is a matter of perspective. All us humans like blind men trying to figure out this fabric covered "elephant" which is life. And all of us busy weaving away on our part of the interlocked threads -- until the time for that cut. Snip Snip. Do I dream? No a new thread is knotted.
In fashioning a better world, it pays to know when to keep with traditions and when to be heretical. Today is the last day of Hannukah, and in a few days it will be the first day of Christmas. Both are festivals of lights. Americans' readily make the connection, though the religiously sensitive tend to want to keep a distance between the two. But basically the core archetype is that this is the time when the solstice is here and we need the lights of candles to remind us that it won't be dark forever.
None of what we are going through is all that new except maybe the technology with which we do the things we do. There have been dark times before. Hannakuh celebrates when those dark times were at their worst for Jews in Israel. Israel had been allowed to return to it's homeland, but the Greeks and "Hellenizing Jews" had decided to mess with the religious freedom of Jews in Israel, and so they had to struggle to keep their faith. That struggle involved violence. The religion they were upholding was not the same religion as either the Rabbinical Judaism of the present nor Christianity but they managed to uphold it. Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity would be rebirthed after the Romans first raised hope for freedom and then utterly quashed it with their armies in two wars that were statistically as effective with more elemental means (swords and crosses) as Hitlers efforts to kill every Jew in Europe.
The Romans were killers. Their symbol was the wolf. This Jesu character, his symbol was the lamb. How can the lamb be transformed into a wolf? It takes the wonderful deviousness of those who have selfish faith. But Christians managed to do this with 1700 years of systematic replacement theology and anti-Rabbinical Judaism traditions and teachings -- starting with Jewish self criticisms by a Jewish teacher and using those as justifications to kill his people. But Hannukah symbolizes the hope that even that persecution will end and that "God" will spare a remnent to be a witness to better days and kept promises.
On the eighth day of Hannukah it was traditional to celebrate the apocryphal story of Judith-- who saved a whole town by cutting off the head of a "bad" Syrian-Greek General who was camped outside it with an army. Traditions can always be found to emphasize the positive. There is always hope if people uphold hope rather than fear. The Judao-Christian religions do not have to be anti-feminist, anti-semitic, nor anti-enlightenment or foolish groups. Hannukah symbolizes that enlightenment can be found even in the darkness.
The motiffe of light is important in religion. The motiffe of Christianity is also about the "light". The term for enlightenment is about light. The founders of various religions such as Nichirenism, "Sun-Lotus" made their central motiffe light. Often we simply need to have faith in the light that is somewhere to be found even in the darkest moments. The Buddha promised enlightenment to those who wake up to the nature of life. Rabbi Jesu promised salvation to those who had faith in salvation. The promises will be kept. We will light candles and dispell the night.
From a dialogue:
"There is one master, the Lord Jesus Christ, the one leader who died, but you find his bones, 'cause he is alive again and is still alive to receive as many as who want to come to him."
I assume you mean you won't find his bones because he is walking around still. If so could you be talking to him now? Would he say the nice pat easy things you want to hear or challenge you to think, to break through surface thinking to deeper wisdom, to reach the state of awareness of the unity of all things, of the truth of what is called God by Christians and Samadhi by Buddhists?
Having done a lifelong study of this religious teaching with it's legendary elements, it's mythic elements, the history of their development and the reality of what they have meant through the ages. I've come to understand that most believers in these things don't really know what they are talking about and their teachers are often worse. They are taught to have faith first and to never think about what that faith actually means or is about. As a result their faith in things they don't have the slightest understanding of leads them to actually have "incorrigable disbelief." That is a kind of death while living. To believe in lies is the worst sin of all. And to believe secretly, inwardly, that one's belief is founded on what others believe -- and oneself might in the dead of night suspect -- are lies -- is to sin grandly. To pretend belief when in fact what one has is unbelief. Better to be "observant" and keep one's promises.
Hmmm, If a person is dead in sin, then how can they be living.
Do you know what it means to be "dead in sin" or to be born again? No I'm not talking about the visceral experience of conversion. I'm talking about the deep thought and psychological insights behind that experience, the universality of it, the reason that true mystics, saints and awakened people have no trouble walking among the varying paths of religion. While those who have turned themselves into zombies, the ones who think they are more alive than others but have a faith that is dead; dead to growth, dead to reason, dead to logic; Those people know the "words" of their faith but they have no heart for spirituality. Their "kindness" is tainted with intolerance. Their belief is counterfeit and thus is in reality unbelief -- anti-belief.
I've been born again several times, though not in the sense you mean it since I was a child. To be a "child again" -- to be open to faith - - is to suspend disbelief, to open the mind, to be open to possibilities. What it is not is to clamp the mind shut with some pre- digested dogma. Breaking that dogma leads to awesome and awful moments when one sees the reality of life in all it's grand incomprehensible drama.
There is awe in punishment too. You can't break "God's Law" -- called by Buddhists dharmas. It is written in time. It operates through what we perceive as time. And we have all the choices in the world -- and pay for every one of them. To sin is to "miss the mark." To not follow the guidances of elders and those who came before them. Those elders sin as well and so we are the blind or half-blind leading the blind until we each wake up a little. Born again, one can challenge the prejudices and stuck attitudes of one's parent's generations, but one had better understand them first.
But you tell me if you understand the general principles of your faith or not. There is only "one master" but many humans who can guide and teach us; wake up to some portion of that master's teachings, channel some portion of that masters message, in effect "incarnate" or "reincarnate" that spiritual message in his flesh. And we are all "incarnations" (in carnal flesh) of something that is complex, grand, and as complex as the universe around us. Thus there are great people who try to help us. These people should be respected as masters and taught from. But that teaching is not complete until we ourselves become the masters of our own minds. And that is the mission of Buddhism.
Jesus did not make himself "God" that was the error of the church hierarchy that reinvented and rewrote Christianity as it passed from mouth to mouth and hand to hand. The church you know is the creation of Constantine, for whom Jesus was synonymous with Apollo and complex God heads were the rule of the day. In that ultimate deification of a teacher, Jesus becomes part of God and is no longer human. Not just because he is defined so, but because he is turned to myth. And once he is turned to myth he is abstract and no longer the same person who might have walked the earth. All this requires reinterpretation and misinterpretation of the Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures -- because for God to become incarnate in human flesh is not a one-time occurance. We all have a drop of the divine in our own fleshly bodies. But to turn a man into a God, is to break the most common of all the laws of the Judeo-Christian/Moslem orbit.
The man "Salvation" died so that others could be saved through his name -- which literally means Salvation (Jeshua means salvation in hebrew). Confusing the figurative meaning of these things with some actual thing that happened in the actual mundane world is to confuse the matter -- he is not of "this world." But of the world to come. If one is saved in one's heart, then one is already mentally and figuratively in that world to come. But if one gets stuck on a superficial understanding or a light-duty faith in the matter, then one is not really saved but just mouthing the words.
Salvation is simply a first step in life. It is an initial enlightenment/awakening. From there the work of making the world really a place where humans can live in peace begins. We have to live awake lives and not simply go back to sleep thinking we've done a good thing when we in fact have done nothing. The teachers all teach that their way is the only way. And it is -- for them.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hannukah
Todays Post has this article: http://tinyurl.com/5djw9 On the systematic way that the US has violated human rights, and engaged in torture since since before the Iraq war started and since. All the while denying that it is doing anything wrong and claiming that the abuses were the work of a small cadre of miscreants:
"The June 25 report -- sent by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone -- is among dozens of documents made public yesterday that allege brutal and sometimes illegal military interrogation methods employed against prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
Previous reports had criticized the former head of the Justice Department, John Ascroft for his role in justifying such abuse. But his replacement, is no better. He is the man who as white house counsel wrote the justifications for torture that the US has been using to justify it's illegal behavior. This is awful stuff. And it directly contradicts other reports by the Government such as this one:
http://tinyurl.com/6zenh
That seek to put the blame for abuses on non-existent guidance. It is clear from the documents that there is plenty of guidance, but the Government doesn't want to admit that it is using torture as an instrument of state terror abroad in it's effort to "fight terrorism".
"In the documents, government witnesses describe the regular use of violence -- much of it inflicted on prisoners by a top-secret task force devoted to capturing "high-value targets" in Iraq -- more than seven months after a fact-finding mission reported to senior defense officials that the unit was beating prisoners."
This is evidenced by the report:
"There is no record, among the documents made public yesterday or previously, that makes clear whether the abuses -- separate and apart from the highly publicized incidents at Abu Ghraib -- have stopped or whether anyone has been held responsible for them."
If the administration were serious about stopping the abuse it would put out clear guidelines on the subject and punish those responsible. But as evidenced by the promotion of the very people who originated the guidelines they deny they follow it is pretty clear where they really stand and that they are lying about it:
"The Bush administration, which continues to portray prisoner abuses as isolated events and the Pentagon's response as swift, fought vigorously to keep the new documents from public view. The American Civil Liberties Union released 43 of them after compelling the Bush administration to provide them -- many still heavily censored -- in a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act."
If these guys keep up, we can pretty much expect that act to be repealed soon. Along with most of what we think of as our constitutional protections. The ACLU is already suing to find out just how much these methods -- justified as applying to the war on terrorism -- are being applied to domestic groups with no terrorist agenda.
As Lawyer George Mickum said:
"To detain anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, indefinitely, under any rules they devise, that just can't be -- must not be -- the law of the land," he said."
http://tinyurl.com/53zwk
And it is not law -- it is outlaw behavior.
In my last blog entry I talked about Georges Sorel. I quoted from Oswald Mosley's website because that was readily available. Well what drew me to read about Sorel was curiousity and not from Mosley but from reading a book about Fascism. "Mediterranean Fascism 1919-- 1945" which has this quote:
A unanimous universally accepted theory of Socialism did not exist after 1905, when the revisionist movement began in Germany under the leadership of Bernstein, while under pressure of the tendencies of the time, a Left Revolutionary movment also appeared, which though never getting further than talk in Italy, in Russian Socialistic circles laid the foundations of Bolshevism. Reformation, Revolution, Centralization -- already the echoes of these terms are spent -- while in the great stream of Fascism are to be found ideas that began with Sorel, Peguy, with Lagardelle in the "Mouvement Socialiste"...
He namedrops. And natural curiousity sped me to find out who these people were and what they were talking about. It pays to study "the enemy" if one is to oppose something ugly. And who these guys were says a lot.
Georges Sorel (1847-1922) according to the book I am quoting from 1 Was the guy we previously talked about. "French theorist of Syndicalism." Charles Peguy was a French Marxian Socialist who became a convert to Roman Catholicism. And Hubert Lagardelle(1874-1958) was a theorist of Revolutionary Syndicalism and editor of the "Le Mouvement Socialiste." But it gets more interesting if one traces down who these people were in more detail. And it gets chilling.
For most people politics seems like a "football game." In a very real sense it has that element. But for strategists politics is like a complex chess game in which each "Player" is like an entire football team. The "strategy" of football is all within one hour long game. But the strategy of chess is one of multiple iterations, and that of life is not just an entire football season, but an entire football league over multiple seasons. Such people think of themselves as Machievelli, but in fact are more like Dr. Faustus.
In truth life has elements of all the games out there -- but is very serious. Football, basketball, baseball, all the sports teach us things. Some even interpret their religion using sports allegories. I was once in sequence at a Bar Mitzvah and listening to some American Buddhists. Both used the identical allegory to explain their religious convictions. In America we worship at the shrines of Mammon, Baseball, Football, Basketball, and increasingly Soccer. This is a good thing. Games are a proxy for male warfare. At least few are literally murdered in a game. And one of those lessons -- is no one gets to win them all. One should never get too attached to the particular game -- it will end eventually and it's just a game. A winner is someone who can like the "Gambler" pass out of the game peacefully.
And in politics, the key is to make sure that when one plays the game no one dies either.