Theophobia

[norton ash]

C_W
Here's something from another poster, since I don't want it to appear that there's just one:



2ndguy wrote:

Quote:
Again, *******, I ask you, is this your faith? I'm just wondering so that I may adjust my phobias accordingly. Also: that seems pretty vague.




*******'s a theist, deist, pantheist adherent of the Church of What's Happenin' Now.

Or as the blind man closest to the ground in the big shadow said 'An elephant is soft and mushy.'

You're quoting me AGAIN as an attacker of a person of faith? The matter at that point was your refusal to clarify what your faith was to the few who asked, and why you thought people of 'faith' (like you) were treated harshly here. I was calling elephantshit.

Your faith as so vaguely described sounded more like open-minded, theist-leaning agnosticism-- I have faith in something larger and deeper than all we know empirically, therefore I can't know what it is, but I intuit that it's there. And it leads me to do the right thing.

Defender of the faith is one thing. Defender of the if-you-don't-know-then-I-can't-tell-you is quite another, and you were just as vague when it came to who exactly was being ill-received at RI as a 'person of faith' ... because many of us don't see that happening at all.

Anyway, good weird discussion of a bad weird premise, and I only dinged you for being so vague... yet so vehement.

I have no problem with people of faith, I only take issue with the dangerous ones, or with dangerous memes like the 'culture war' that seek to divide by playing on resentment and suspicion.

Namaste... go in peace to love and serve whatever works.

[barracuda]

In other words: I believe god exists but I think it's bullshit.

LOL. Not making fun of anyone at all. But that did make me laugh out loud or in the aging but modern internet parlance "spew coffee all over my screen".

I got a chuckle out of that myself at first, but then upon more sober and honest reflection I had to admit that it's very nearly what I truely do believe.

[Laodicean]

Even Einstein would agree that we are all full of it. So dig deep.

[eyeno]

So the Christian Right brought us Bush? Well blow me down Popeye...I could have sworn that London money and AIPAC money and influence did that.

But I am found wrong every day and obviously I am wrong again. (not)

Who knew that the Christain Right did that all by themselves with no provocation?

I had no idea that the American morons did that by themselves without influence. Learn something new every day...

They were obviously LED to give us Bush. By whom is not a mystery...geeshhhhh

[barracuda]

You talkin' to me, Bluto? Start a thread about it if yer so ex-kited.

[The Consul]

Mozart, I think it was, said shitting and believing were two very different things. A quote I am reminded of quite often. Somewhere in the tragectory from Parmenedes to Badiou something is lost in translation. Spiritual & intellectual flatulence have evolved to the point where opinion exculpates explication with such routine precision that one can shit to it in standards weight & measures as well as 3 decimal digital time pieces. And yes, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde all these opinions are just somebody else's ideas anyway, so why care we? Raw fish covered in chocolate smeared on our death masks to a soundtrak of La Traviatta backwards. But are you so devout that if the devil himself thrust an upside down toilet plunger in your face, one from the dirtiest bar in Scotland, and filled in with the blood of Christ - could you drink it? And could you do it while Helen of Troy dropped her robes and threw herself at your feet begging you not to? And what does Job say at the end of it all, the worst day in his life, when he goes into the crapper and there is no toilet paper? Is it perhaps like that mad Frenchman said (ah, which one, you murmer, there are so many...) yes, yes...I believe it was Cocteau, how did he put it? something like...if there is a god I imagine him having a childlike omnipotence wherein he places a chameleon on a plaid fabric just for shits and giggles. The sorrowful and the joyful mysteries together or dissolved can elevate or cramp the center of one's star. What wish would god grant you in a form of unimaginable shape? That ancient indecipherable echo in your dreams. Angels falling in black fluttering droves to hell. Uriel falling asleep on the moon. How long can we be watched before the universe explodes from boredom and our stench gets us banished to another dimension?

[Belligerent Savant]

.

At times, it seems as if we are like fish swimming, breathing, relying on the ever-present water, never realizing they are perpetually surrounded by it: without it, they wouldn't exist in their present form.

Or maybe we're like rocks: a product of millions of years of a variety of environmental/natural stresses that ends up resting somewhere on the earth's surface, perhaps one day randomly picked up and thrown somewhere... or skimmed across a pond... or tripped over.

or not.


This entire piece is worth reading, even though it's an adaptation of a commencement speech by Dave Foster Wallace [the transcript has been removed from most sites as it is now available within his last publication]; happened across this while looking for a picture of a fish questioning its surroundings:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1221782 ... %3Darticle

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

[eyeno]

You talkin' to me, Bluto? Start a thread about it if yer so ex-kited.

No. But if you are ex-kited enough to believe I am I suppose you could start a thread of your own.

[brainpanhandler]

From a recent interview between Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Michael Lerner (the whole thing is worth reading):

...


ML: But it’s not just issues of epistemology. because there we could have a good debate; it’s that there is a climate or a culture in the Left and the liberal arenas that simply assumes that anybody who would have a religious position must be intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown, or some other psychologically reductive analysis. That approach — a kind of ridicule of anybody who could possibly think that there was a spiritual dimension of reality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying.

...

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcomin ... am-chomsky

But it’s not just issues of epistemology. It’s that there is a climate or a culture on the Left that rightly observes that many who would have a religious position are intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown. That approach — a psychological critique of those that pretend to possess a moral superiority based on their ignorant adherence to this or that dogma while hiding behind an amorphous faith based claim to spirituality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying. The intelligentsia on the left just cannot comprehend the cognitive dissonance most religious folks are capable of maintaining and not falling to pieces under the weight of their hypocrisy. It's a real problem, because how do you reason with people who clearly are not capable of reasoning. And if you can't reason with them how can you ever hope to persuade them that they are harming their own interests by supporting the political right and failing to follow the precepts of their own religions. This is particularly glaring in American politics. Take for instance the right to life issue. Religious fundamentalists on the right consider life a sacrosanct gift from the heavenly father; to be defended and clung to without regard to any other concern. The Terri Schiavo case being an example. And yet these same people will whole heartedly endorse the American military and it's murderous rampage around the globe. What is the left supposed to think of a contradiction like that other than that the marriage of church and state, as many American christians would like to see, would be the final nail on the coffin of any pretensions to democracy at all and that the religious right are intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown?

There. Fixed.

[Canadian_watcher]

From a recent interview between Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Michael Lerner (the whole thing is worth reading):

...


ML: But it’s not just issues of epistemology. because there we could have a good debate; it’s that there is a climate or a culture in the Left and the liberal arenas that simply assumes that anybody who would have a religious position must be intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown, or some other psychologically reductive analysis. That approach — a kind of ridicule of anybody who could possibly think that there was a spiritual dimension of reality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying.

...

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcomin ... am-chomsky

But it’s not just issues of epistemology. It’s that there is a climate or a culture on the Left that rightly observes that many who would have a religious position are intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown. That approach — a psychological critique of those that pretend to possess a moral superiority based on their ignorant adherence to this or that dogma while hiding behind an amorphous faith based claim to spirituality, when it’s pervasive, pushes people away even if they agree with much of the rest of what the Left is saying. The intelligentsia on the left just cannot comprehend the cognitive dissonance most religious folks are capable of maintaining and not falling to pieces under the weight of their hypocrisy. It's a real problem, because how do you reason with people who clearly are not capable of reasoning. And if you can't reason with them how can you ever hope to persuade them that they are harming their own interests by supporting the political right and failing to follow the precepts of their own religions. This is particularly glaring in American politics. Take for instance the right to life issue. Religious fundamentalists on the right consider life a sacrosanct gift from the heavenly father; to be defended and clung to without regard to any other concern. The Terri Schiavo case being an example. And yet these same people will whole heartedly endorse the American military and it's murderous rampage around the globe. What is the left supposed to think of a contradiction like that other than that the marriage of church and state, as many American christians would like to see, would be the final nail on the coffin of any pretensions to democracy at all and that the religious right are intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown?

There. Fixed.

well there we go again. Thanks, BPH. I think up to this point sunny thought it was just about me being an asshole or a fucking idiot.

[brainpanhandler]

You're welcome. Your reaction is your reaction. Perhaps you should not presume to know what others' reaction might be.

I thought I was already clear that I believe a great deal of the basis of christianity in particular centers around fear of the unknown and the need for a father/mother figure. Another prominent basis is a desire for justice in the form of revenge. It should gho without saying that this says nothing about any particular christian. I think Sunny probably does not feel oppressed because if the shoes don't fit she doesn't wear them.

Just out of curiosity, why did you pick that particular piece for the OP? It's got some problematic baggage, don't you think?

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

she googled theophobia

[Canadian_watcher]

she googled theophobia

are you stating that based on faith or critical thinking... it can't be both, you know.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

I intuited it then googled theophobia myself and found http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblaw ... hobia.html as one of the topresults (top of page 2, most of page 1 are simply definitions)

[Canadian_watcher]

You're welcome. Your reaction is your reaction. Perhaps you should not presume to know what others' reaction might be.

I thought I was already clear that I believe a great deal of the basis of christianity in particular centers around fear of the unknown and the need for a father/mother figure. Another prominent basis is a desire for justice in the form of revenge. It should gho without saying that this says nothing about any particular christian. I think Sunny probably does not feel oppressed because if the shoes don't fit she doesn't wear them.

Just out of curiosity, why did you pick that particular piece for the OP? It's got some problematic baggage, don't you think?

let's make this clear for people who are really struggling to follow along (not just you, apparently): I don't feel oppressed.

the shoes don't fit me, either, but I know that that's not the opinion of the world at large. Are you having trouble grasping the way your mocking of the intellect and level of self-esteem of people of faith in general might impact the people of faith in particular who might be one of the 'exceptions' you allow for?

If you were to, for example, inadvertently make this statement:

"But it’s not just issues of epistemology. It’s that there is a climate or a culture on the Left that rightly observes that many who would have a religious position are intellectually underdeveloped or psychologically stuck, needing a father figure or scared of the unknown."

in front of Simone Weil, would you retract it? Would you feel embarrassed? Would you insist that it's true? Or would you do what other people on other issues have done when their prejudices were exposed, secret-agent style?

******

Here's an imaginary exchange:

It's heading into the final moments of a fancy dress party for a large Corporation. People have broken off into groups and are winding it all down. Bill, our hero, has had a couple of drinks. Not that it matters, really, because Bill is always Bill anyway. He keeps a pretty tight reign on new experiences. Bill is a little put off because one of the new Board Members - an African American - wants to influence a few changes in the organization - changes that don't sit well with Bill.

"Blacks," he begins, "oh.. excuse me, People of Colour" he pauses here to make the air-quotes signs and delivers to his audience an exaggerated eye-roll, "should just come to grips with the fact that they are never going to be a real part of US culture, because they just aren't real Americans! They are different from us, they don't come from here!" He takes a swig of his drink, waiting for the accolades he's become accustomed to. He's in his milieu, after all. He's comfortable. Long ago he stopped worrying about whether or not he could say such things and longer ago stopped caring whether or not he was right.

As he swallows, though, he notices a strange silence. It's taken a little time to dawn on him, and he considers quickly making an exit. Before he can complete the turn, however, he hears the following:

"I disagree, Bill." Bill has no choice but to turn back.

"Pardon?" (It's all he can manage?)

"I disagree, and I'm hurt by what you've said. I'm a person of colour." Bill is looking at a colleague he's known for years. How had this not come up until now? he wondered. His mind goes over the things that this newly revealed person of colour has done in the past... does this wash? Can he detect traces that he is right about people of colour being 'not like himself?'.. or.. ? His colleague is brilliant. His colleague and he have discussed baseball. His colleague even likes country music.. and gospel... and .. But wait. His colleague has said a few stupid things in the past. And there was that time at that meeting.. what *was* that, anyway?

Bill does what any coward does in this situation:

"Oh well.. you know what I mean. People ... everyone's unique. You are an exception! You're as American as I am! You shouldn't take it personally if it doesn't apply to you."

****