Dear Rowdy

Many thanks for your contribution and thank you very much for the link. What a great experience - good on you!

Cheers
Kay

I have just a teeny problem with the main article: I don't believe in the Sellick God, or for that matter any other. I don't need it, want it, respect it or have any regard for it. Peter Sellick is welcome to it. This is a democracy and he can believe as he will, and I will always support his right to do so. But this kind of vacuous theologising is about as relevant as the old one about angels and the head of a pin.

No hell below us, above us only sky: how ironic that the author of these words was gunned down in an American street by some loon. Almost Christlike, some might say - a message of peace rewarded by death. Lennon's words aren't (repeat, aren't) scripture, they don't instantly liberate us from all wordly problems but it would - if widely believed - put a brake on religiously inspired bigotry, violence and murder. Northern Ireland. Indian subcontinent. Al Qaeda. Must I go on?

As long as we are quoting songs, how about:

It ain't necessarily so
It ain't necessarily so
The things that your preacher
is liable to teach yer
ain't necessarily so.

Mhoram

My goodness... it just struck me.. as I was reading your post Mhoram.... I"ve alread posted on this subject in response to another article...

but Lennon's song, with the haunting words "No hell below us, above us only sky"....... think... THINK about that..... I mean.. reallllly think about it...

Now.. a so called 'loony' takes that song to heart, and says in his mind "Hmm.. well it doesn't really matter whether I embrace John or blow his brains out, but in order to be remembered, to attain 'salvation/immortality to make his name endure beyond his years.. he chooses to blow Lennon's brains out".. It is so fitting in a way, it matches the philosophy of the song.

1 The words of the Teacher, [a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

Later:

1 I thought in my heart, "Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good."

4 I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. 5 I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 6 I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. 8 I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired men and women singers, and a harem [a] as well—the delights of the heart of man. 9 I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

10 I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.

11 Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun

I must thank Faustino for putting the opposite case so well. He (or she) has sketched out the path of religion. That is, we start from what we think is the good, we start with ideology. We then realize that the one barrier to the attainment of this good is attachment to the world and most importantly to the self. The religious quest then becomes a road of discipline, of freeing oneself from the urgings of the self and hopefully reaching some level of enlightenment. This inevitably leads to a dualism between the good that the self aspires to and the evil of the world.

The consequences of this dualism is that the world is neglected and this accounts for the state of disarray of Buddhist countries. A Christian parallel may be found in denominations in which the attainment of heaven after death dominates life and in Islam for the same reasons.

By contrast, when we begin with the particular experience of a people whose genius was to reflect on their history in a theological way we arrive at knowledge of how the grain of the universe runs. We do not start with ideology, or the perceived good, but with historical experience. In this way the Judeo/Christian tradition is empirical in the same way that science is empirical, they both rely on experience. Whereas theology reflects on the experience of past events (if we rely on religion we will lose the battle) science relies on the experience of the here and now. They are both in the business of searching for the truth, they are both centered on revelation.

I am interested that Faustino states in her second sentence: .”And reality has to be the basis for any spiritual development.” The question is, what is the reality that is that basis, the “reality” of wishful thinking and ideology or the actual experienced reality of the world.

Rowdy,
The universal and the particular are not polar opposites, what I am saying is that one can only reach the universal via the particular. For example, we all think we know what love is but it is not till we see the love of Christ, the love that means that you give your life for your friends, that we really come to know what love is. So often love is sentimentalized because the concept relies not on flesh and blood example but on an idea; that we must be nice to each other. It does not occur to us that love is costly, that it demands fidelity and that means that our options are automatically limited and we lose our freedom. In a society that is obsessed with freedom that does not bode well for the health of marriages.

Freedom can only be based on the particular freedom of Christ, the freedom of give oneself away.

This also applies to the idea of justice. Israel was hospitable to aliens because it remembered that it lived as an alien in Egypt. Thus the universal of hospitality is based on the particular historical experience of the nation. That is why the national memory is so precious.

The pacifism of Japan is based on the particular experience of defeat in WWII etc. Rather than being a sandwich the particular and the universal exist in a sequence

There is so much wrong-headedness in this article, it's hard to know where to start. Probably the most offensive thing about it is the assumption that non-religious understanding of the world can be somehow captured, even partially, with reference to Lennon's 'Imagine'. I would've been around fifteen when that song came out,and i recall even at the time finding it grossly embarrassing in its naive idealism. Maybe it did catch the zeitgeist of the time, but that zeitgeist has long since evaporated, surely.
Your championing of particularism is fine, though I don't see what that has to do with Christianity or religion. The 'enlightenment' philosopher David Hume long ago pointed out that our greatest bonds are with family and close friends, and that we only feel in the most abstract way for our fellow humans in far flung places. This from the philosopher whose essay 'On Miracles' is one of the finest critiques of Christian gullibility ever penned.
All of your attempts to present non-Christian or non-religious morality as somehow inferior are spurious, and could be demolished easily enough if one wanted to be tedious, but I might simply confine myself to the observation that Christianity, 'that ole time religion', has been with us a mere two thousand years, or less, whereas humans have been striving and thriving on this planet for near on a million. For this and many other reasons i think it's safe to conclude that Jesus' claim to godly status is profoundly unconvincing.
I've just been reading the bible, out of interest, and find the god described in the pentateuch to be a very particular fellow, and a nasty bit of work - a mass-murderer and state terrorist in the Stalinist mould. He seeks to excuse himself by continually bleating that he's 'a jealous god', but his only real excuse is that he's an invention of his time, clearly based upon the most all-powerful figures of the age - blood-thirsty and ever-insecure tyrants. No wonder theologians ever since have tried to soften him into an all-loving universal figure who'd be unrecognisable to the Bible's authors.