Spiritual Pollution

Check out Richard Beck's web site, Experimental Theology and Spiritual Pollution series on the role of Disgust in our moral and religious outlook.

from part I

Growing up in my small church in Erie, PA, I often heard that, as Christians, we were to "hate the sin but love the sinner." As a catchy aphorism, the formulation isn't bad. It nicely captures two treasured Christian commitments: Holiness and love. But as we observe Christendom, it seems that this formulation frequently fails us. That is, it seems to be very, very hard to balance a fierce commitment to holiness with a call to radically love a broken world. Churches that emphasize maintaining "holiness" seem culturally marginalized, fearful of the world and often despising the people participating in the larger culture. Some of these churches can seem downright hateful. By contrast, "relationship-oriented" churches seem soft on sin, tempering the ethical message of the gospel to "connect" or "reach" a variety of populations. And each church "type" seems suspicious or judgmental of the other.


In the following posts I'm going to suggest that this balance between holiness and love is hard to achieve when we structure facets of Kingdom living with the emotion and logic of what is called sociomoral disgust. Looking ahead, I'm going to argue that certian sins, such as sexual sins, and certain aspects of church life, such as worship and doctrine, are often structured by a contamination logic, a logic that activates a disgust psychology that creates interpersonal distance and irrational emotions.

Idea Progression- Bible - Gospel of Thomas

Quotes from Bible Gateway

Deut 30.

11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, "Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

Romans 10

5Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law: "The man who does these things will live by them." 6But the righteousness that is by faith says: "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?'" (that is, to bring Christ down) 7"or 'Who will descend into the deep?'" (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming:

Luke 10

8"When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. 9Heal the sick who are there and tell them, 'The kingdom of God is near you.' 10But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, 11'Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.'

Luke 17

20Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Thomas (Layton's translation) - Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings Site

(3) Jesus said, "If those who lead you (plur.) say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in heaven,' then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. But the kingdom is inside of you. And it is outside of you.

Early Morning Thoughts while Thinking about the Gospel of Judas

I have been fascinated by the gnostics for some time and I'm not really sure why. Well now that I think about it:

1. They are a mystery and mysteries, some of them anyway, beckon me to investigate.

I was excited when I first heard of the Gospel of Judas, hoping it would give us some juicy new knowledge. Alas, on the first read, I'm disappointed. There is not much in it that is new. It is a typical piece of Barbelo Gnosticism from the 2nd century. Further scrutiny may turn up a few things but we won't get any bombshells.

2. How could they believe such wild and depressing things?

I believe in the fundamental honesty of religious belief by people. Most people aside from a few televangelists, faith healers, and similar charlatans really do honestly believe what they do. The gnostic writers were writing what they honestly believed. I don't take them as folks who desired on purpose to be heretics. So where did they get such strange ideas? Bart Ehrman has a good explanation in Lost Christianities which I will relate some time in another post.

3. Maybe if I dig deeper I'll learn something.

Its been hard work but I believe I have derived some insights from the gnostics. To use a technical term, the signal-to-noise ratio is low.

4. Some things I've learned.

The belief of some gnostics that an evil god created the world as a mistake has, thankfully, gone by the wayside. The accompanying belief was that we should deny ourselves pleasure, that God's creation is not good, and that we should be life-denying ascetics. Well, you know, such a thing has been around right up to the present. I can recall lot's of sermons about how bad we are and how this life doesn't matter (pun intended), and how the only thing that we should think about and work on is getting to heaven.

It took another thousand years before people started climbing mountains and inventing science and starting a renaissance.

A student at a local preacher school was telling me about all their rules. (Conversation circa 1979). This fella was pretty well grounded and was confiding in me. He thought they went too far. His young children were definitely impressed. Evidently they were getting the point that pleasure is wrong and so they asked their Dad if riding a motorcycle was a sin.

Learning about the gnostics has been a useful way, by examining contrasts and similarities, to better understand my version of Christianity.

Then there are a few gems that are fun to ponder. There is something about cosmology in the verse below. Let's assume the Big Bang is true. Were not we all there together in that moment of creation? And didn't we come from the light?

Gospel of Thomas verse 50

Jesus said, "If they say to you (plur.), 'Where are you from?' say to them, 'It is from light that we have come - from the place where light, of its own accord alone, came into existence and [stood at rest]. And it has been shown forth in their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say 'We are its offspring, and we are the chosen of the living father.'

The Spectrum of Consciousness

In the opening to Ken Wilber's book The Spectrum of Consciousness, he quotes William James.

Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness..... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question. . . At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.

He's right. And one type of consciousness that I never experience anymore is when I was a child and when we would visit someone's house and play for hours. It was a timeless bliss that I remember. I wasn't thinking about 10 things at once. No worries at all. Purely in the moment. Purely focused and a being suffused with joy. Hadn't thought about that in a long time.

Physics and Consciousness

So little time and so much to do. What is discomforting, as a physicist, about my narrative below is that it is only an argument from analogy. What we'd really like to do is derive an equation that shows what conscious experience is and how it works. But we don't know how to do that. We are not even close. And no one really has any idea. People like David Chalmers acknowledge this and at least state the problem correctly. Understanding the brain is difficult enough. But even knowing the physiological correlates of consciousness do not tell us what it is. We may know something about how the electrical impulses move about as I lift my arm. But we have no idea how it is that I can do that. I can lift my arm, change my heart rate, and change my body chemistry. If I were a young man again, research in this area might be the path I'd take.

Physics and Emergence

I'm going to ramble along the lines of the conversation that Rob and I have been having in the responses to recent posts below. I'm not sure exactly what I'm gonna say but let's get started.

The way one is trained in both physics and engineering is by learning from simplified examples. Concepts are taught from the most basic, fundamental representation. Then the problems at the end of the chapter are just one or two steps of complexity above that. For instance, to learn kinetics, what happens when two objects collide that are going at different speeds and directions, we start with infinitely hard billiard balls that are perfect spheres and do not absorb energy from each other. There are other background assumptions we won't go into. There is no spin involved and no friction with the surface on which they sit. Everything is idealized. There is good reason for starting in this way. We must start first with the simple and get practice in order to learn the concepts and make sure we understand what we are doing.

There is a well known joke about this. A physicist was once asked to consult with a farm regarding a herd of cows that was not producing enought milk. After studying the problem and determining his solution, the physicist went to the blackboard to explain to his customer, saying "First, we assume a spherical cow..."

That's the end of the joke and everybody laughs.

But, when we get jobs and go out into the real world to solve real problems, all the easy things have been done. The equations get complicated. The machines we work with are not ideal spheres or cylinders and cannot be described by simple equations. Mathematical models are constructed. Data collected, the models are corrected and provided with "fudge factors" to make them work so they make the right predictions enough of the time to be useful.

The problems to be attacked in this way are many. But, we can only do simple machines and circuitry this way. And some simple fluid dynamic problems. Mechanical and fluid flow devices follow the rule's of Newton's mechanics. With electrical devices we use not only Maxwell's electromagnetic theory but quantum theory as well.

But, as great as physics and its subset of mechanical and electrical engineering is, it is pretty useless for telling us what a living cell is doing and what it will do. With such a complex, higher order system, new laws apply. I'm guessing emergence theory tells us that the with the higher complexity, new order and new phenomena have emerged which exert control over the lower. When we progress from single cell life to multicellular life, the next level, the new entity exerts control (supervene's) over it's cellular constituents. At some point in the appearance of life, consciousness appeared, that is, the ability to feel and experience. Now, it is the highest level.

postscript: I watched the special on the Gospel of Judas on the National Geographic channel last night. Enjoyed that. But, can't say that GJudas has anything new to tell us either about the real Jesus or the real Judas. Perhaps, it highlights that we really don't know that much about the latter.

Music and the Meaning of Life

It has always been a mystery to me why music is so important to me and to others. Music reaches way down deep.

I led congregtional singing twice Sunday. Dorothy and I drove 80 miles north of here to a small church in Speedwell, TN. for a morning service there. The scenery of the rolling hills with the mountains as backdrop was oh so beautiful and comforting. Tonight I led at the West End Church of Christ. Several commented that I'd sung some of their favorites. That was my good fortune to have picked what so many wanted. Some remarked that they liked it because I picked older songs that they knew. One person said a new song to him was one he learned in college. I reckon that was about 30 years ago for him.

Yes, music is something that goes way deep inside of us. What we hear becomes part of us and even who we are. The music of our youth helps to form our personal identity. When I was a teenager, I don't believe they used Led Zeppelin or the Who music to sell cars or as introduction to television shows. Back then they used something more appropriate to the buyer's age group.

I once read about a doctor in Vienna who treated spinal injury patients. He claimed that playing music that was popular during a person's puberty produce noticeable effects in healing. It got their juices going in a special way that music from other era's in their could not. I read that twenty or so years ago and don't know if anyone has followed up on that but it rings true with me. The Beatles hit the scence as I was going through puberty and they and the other bands of the British Music invasion of the sixties stir things up inside me in a way that other music doesn't.

I love all kinds of music. Recently, I bought a couple of Lone Ranger episodes on DVD from Cracker Barrell just so I could hear the background music, the William Tell Overture and other pieces. An older man at church gave me a CD of his favorite: Dixieland music. It is great. Each type of music takes one to a different time and place. One can be transported there to smell the smells experience the scene. Reggae music can change one's mood after the first few beats and induce feelings of relaxation and ease. I could ramble on about the different feelings produced by different musics. I love classical. There just is too much good music to keep up with these days. I don't dislike Rap. I just haven't had much exposure too it. Can't Touch This by M. C. Hammer was a work of genius I thought. Too much music and so little time.

Yep music is important and I'm not sure why. Don't know how it has evolutionary value or how it arose in our brains. Exploring that issue could be fruitful for understanding the mind body problem. Who knows?

Process Theology

Am exploring process theology by reading Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin. The book was published in 1976 and is oriented mostly toward the influence of Alfred North Whitehead. This is interesting on page 24:

We have had the view that the ultimate constituents of the world were like tiny billiard balls. Any changes brought about in the world involved only the rearrangement of externally related bits of matter. Since they did not permeate each other, no irreversible changes could be effected. If some combination of things is found to have unfortunate consequences, the combination can simply be undone, and things will be returned to the state they were in before. Ecology, as the study of the interrelationships of things, has taught us that this view is false. Interrelations are internal to things. Whitehead's thought is throughly ecological. It involves extending to the status of a universal truth Paul's insight that we're "members of one another."

This book is now thirty years old but is amazingly contemporary in its emphasis on relationship and emergence and other things.

Worldview

Have been reading Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi by Drusilla Scott. Am finding out about the idea of emergence as it is applied to the development of life and evolution. Perhaps, I'll have to check, Ken Wilber was influenced by Polanyi's work and others cited, like Arthur Koestler. The latter is an author I've been meaning to read for years but have never gotten around to it.

On page 105, Drusilla quotes from Koestler's book The God That Failed in regard to K's communist upbringing

"My party education had equipped my mind with such elaborate shock absorbing buffers and elastic defences that everything seen and heard became automatically transformed to fit a pre-conceived pattern."

That describes a lot of us doesn't it?

Current Readings

1. The Amazing Law of Influence by King Duncan - a positive upbeat book about people influencing other people. My friend and boss invited me to hear this man at a local Methodist church recently and I like what I heard.

2. Mapping Postmodernism by Robert C. Greer - A survey of christian approaches to postmodernism by a former missionary. Pretty deep. Still soaking it in.

3. Restoring the First-century Church in the Twenty-first Century - Essays on the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, In Honor of Don Haymes, ed. by Warren Lewis and Hans Rollman. Lots of good stories here.

4. Evangelicalism and the Stone-Campbell Movement - ed. by William R. Baker Essays on whether or not SC churches are evangelical or not etc. I have never identified with evangelicals.

Stephan's Quintet - Galaxies in Collison

Explanation from Hubble Site. And Science Daily.

Jesus Parables

Back when I was a student at the University of Virginia, I heard a weekend lecture from a prof in the Religious Studies Department by the name of Dan Via. He discussed Jesus' parables from a literary perspective using the categories of Comedy and Tragedy. Subsequently I read his book The Parables and then one of his sources, Interpreting the Parables by A. M. Hunter. What I learned in the latter book has stayed with me all these years. I will follow with a post on it eventually.

This week I did some reading in Via's book for the first time in over twenty years. Now, I am just beginnng to understand some of it that I hadn't earlier. It approaches Jesus from an existential direction and it seems quite contemporary in some ways as it fits with my recent reading regarding postmodernism and foundationalism.

The very fact that Jesus compared the kingdom of God to ordinary, everyday people and activities suggests some kind of analogy between God and man. p. 104

he says regarding the parables,

Because of their aesthetic nature they are in certain ways more effective than propositional statements could be, and because of their realistic and dramatic subject matter they give a particular content to our understanding of our relationship with God and tie it to human experience. p. 65

And this statement has stayed with me all of these years,

It may be agreed that the biblical text transcends the author's self-understanding...the author of artistic works says more than he knows he is saying... p 39

Relationship

"The way to save the world is not through more rules to live by, but through right relationships to live for.
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Relationship is the soul of the universe. "(p 1)

Out of the Question ...Into the Mystery by Leonard Sweet


We need to move from Protestantism's propositional, fact-based, science-objective orientation to relationality. Life and reality: its all about relationship.

I say this even though I'm a research and development engineer, a nerd who's loved and lived science and technology all of his life.

The Christian and Meditation

Meditation and christianity have long been partners, although it has not been at all prominent in Protestant tradition. I would like to learn more about it. Millions of people, of all religions, find value in the contemplative life.

Here's link to an interesting site devoted to a modern, er postmodern christianity and meditation and mysticism.

Ekstasis June 3 2005

Ekstasis Main

A Campbellite selects a quote from a Campbell

"It is a law of our subject, proven time and time again, that where the orthodoxies of the world go apart, the mystic way unites. The orthodoxies are concerned primarily with the maintenance of a certain social order, within the pale of which the individual is to function; in the interest of which a certain "system of sentiments" must be instilled into every member; and in the defense of which all deviants are to be, one way or another, either reformed, deformed, or liquidated. The mystic way, on the other hand, plunges within, to those nerve centers that are in all members of the human race alike, and are at once the well springs and ultimate receptacles of life and all experiences of life."*

*from Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology pp.448-9, Penguin Books, 1987 edition.