Dear George,

I am concerned with the propensity for violence in all religions I am familiar with. When visiting my daughter in August she told me she recently discovered she has always been a Buddhist. We discussed it, but I didn’t bring up the violence in the Buddhist record.

At present there is not much heard about the conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and the Hindu Tamils. It doesn’t get a play since nobody most of us identify with is involved. From my reading of the matter the greatest obstacle to peace is the opposition by the Buddhist monks to any peace deal. The Japanese officer corps in WW2, almost all Buddhist, was a very violent group of men. There have been warlike Buddhists through history such as those who established the Karakhitai Khanate in 1141. On the other hand the descendents of Genghis Khan are now peaceful Buddhists. Unfortunately fundamentalist Christian missionaries have gone into the Gobi. They should go by the Gobi.

I don’t know whether there would be a more peaceful world without religion, but it’s possible.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with ‘betraying one’s belief system’. If a person’s conscience is at variance against one’s belief system it is reasonable to abandon that belief system. If we can retain our connection with our belief system while incorporating views from other belief systems that’s even better.

We are moulded by our surroundings. Karl Marx was converted to Lutheranism at the age of 6 and received a Lutheran education. He then moved from that into the socialist milieu of the time. Both the Lutheran and socialist milieu incorporated hatred for Jews so Marx was a Jew hater. Lustiger was a Catholic at a time when the Catholic Church was going through a period of self-examination. At Vatican 2 the Church examined its past relation with Judaism and changed liturgy and other practices in that regard so Lustiger along with other Catholics sought reconciliation. Sometimes people go against the current, but the above didn’t.

Relda wrote:

“There is strong synergy in Martin Buber's famous words, and undoubtedly ring true in many Jewish ears today, “From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother ... and to-day I see him more strongly and clearly than ever before..””

Dear Relda,

Buber believed in the Messiah. I assume he also believed the Bible was a reliable document. I think the New Testament Jesus never existed but is a composite of various wonder-working legendary figures of the time. I appreciate Buber’s concern for the non-Jewish people living in Palestine. However, I find it difficult to relate to his writing.

I have read Augustine’s Confessions and was impressed by the depth of his intellect as shown in his speculations on time and space. He seemed childish in being preoccupied with unreasonable guilt in stealing pears from an orchard and dealing with sexuality. Pelagius in believing that we are born with a clean slate and death is a natural conclusion to life seems much more reasonable than Augustine with his Original Sin and death as a punishment for sin. Pelagius was exiled for heresy, and Augustine’s views were adopted. Sad.

I am glad that Spong offered nothing particularly new or astounding in the light of those you mentioned. That means to me that many other Christians share those views, and I find that comforting. Some Christians I have talked to get very angry when I mention Spong. “He’s not a real Christian!”

The current prime minister of Augustine wrote two very good essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer which impressed me greatly so I was most enthusiastic when he took office. Unfortunately he seems a better essayist than a prime minister.

I wish I knew more about the people you mentioned. I have not even heard of Rahner. I think it is difficult if not impossible to learn about mysticism from reading and discussion. It is something one has to practice. I’m sure I have dismissed out of hand ideas that might expand my life and affect those I relate to positively

david f,
I agree, and think our PM is a good essayist but also a little less versed in the practical translation of ideas into coherency - something I figure all bureaucratic ‘types’ suffer. The human psyche often seems unable to fully integrate both the ‘intellectual’ and the practical (not impossible, mind you). It is a principle of relevance, and as you so appropriately allude to, that an idea, thought or belief untested, perhaps no matter how potentially ‘great’, is merely useless and bound for irrelevance.

I quite agree with you on the subject of Augustine’s ‘unreasonable guilt’. He described himself as sinking further and further into his own depravity, because there was no one around who could put "measure on [his] disorder.” Augustine's often "neurotic verbal flagellation" and his take on ‘sin’ appears more a measure his own private, deep mental and spiritual contortions, not unlike Luther’s. Due to my mother’s mental illness, I can certainly recognise that such a terrible ‘flagellation’ of the mind and soul do actually exist.

It appears Judaism has always adhered to a concept of redemption, which sees it as a process taking place publicly, on the stage of history and in the medium of community. It essentially takes place in the visible world, and cannot be thought of except as a phenomenon that appears in what is already visible. Christianity, on the other hand, understands redemption as a happening in the ‘spiritual’ sphere, and in what is invisible. It takes place in the ‘soul’, in the world of every individual, and effects a ‘mysterious’ transformation to which nothing external in the world necessarily corresponds. A chiliastically interpreted Christian ‘empire’ of this kind, however, is bound to interiorize ‘salvation’, leaving everything external for the Christian ‘emperors’. This Christian imperium , or "thousand-year Reich," gave the saints reign with ‘Christ’ to judge the nations. In this millennium, resistance to Christ was intolerable, Christian imperium sacrum allowed no justice for the dissidents, people of other beliefs, especially the Jews.
cont’d..

...cont’d
Enforced political Christianization solved the problem of the heathen and the ‘mission’ to the Jews was to solve "the Jewish problem." The Inquisition was designed to solve the problem of the heretics and the appalling "final solution" of the Jewish question was finally projected by "the thousand-year Reich" - performed under Hitler’s pseudo-messianism.

The historical atrocities committed by Christians have obscured much, including the differences between Judaism and Christianity. Buber understood the "incompatibility of Sinai and Golgotha" but for Judaism, he wished to reclaim the "historical” Jesus and not the doctrinal Jesus. The faith he preached was not the Greek pistis, faith in a proposition, but the Jewish emunah, 'that unconditional trust in the grace which makes a person no longer afraid, even of death, because death is also of grace.’ This is far from a ‘faith’ where redemption will come at some future date.

A central concept in Judaism is overturned with the confession, "Jesus is Lord” and exudes a replacement theology – an antithesis of Judaism. Jesus the Jew died hoping for the coming of the ‘Kingdom’, an "unfulfilled messianism". The ‘one door to salvation’ is not Judaic in concept, but idolatrous in nature - the immediacy between God and man is abolished.

The "3L" argument, formulated by C.S. Lewis, where the Jesus of the Gospels has to be one of three things, i.e. , Lunatic, Liar, or Lord is like, "Given the choice, would you rather be blind or give birth to the Anti-Christ?" Lewis here, gives little option for the Jew but for impoliteness, and say to their Christian friends, “we think your ‘savior’ is both a fraud and delusional.”

Buber says that we come to face each other across "a gulf which no human power can bridge." Yet, we have some important things in common, a book and an expectation. This gulf “does not prevent the common watch for a unity to come to us from God…". Jesus is entirely a Judaic proposition, where we find him now is of something quite ‘beyond’ even my own imagination.

Dear Relda,

You referred to “Hitler’s pseudo-messianism”. I think it was a very real messianism. Once history is set up as a linear construct leading to an apotheosis history is given a meaning and direction. When it is given a meaning and direction those who oppose or do not recognize that meaning and direction are on the wrong side of history.

The bourgeoisie, the middle class as opposed to the proletariat, those who stand in the way of manifest destiny, the ‘lesser breeds outside the law and others who stand in the way of the fulfillment of history can be eliminated. Messianism leads logically to murder.

Messianism and the Chosen People are both harmful ideas. To the best of my knowledge every tribal culture regards themselves as chosen. Now we adopt the name tribal cultures give themselves such as Inuit instead of Eskimo we find such names mean ‘the people’. This has the clear implication that the rest of humanity is something less than the people.

The two harmful ideas interact. Those who are not chosen are also on the wrong side of history. Lustiger in writing a book showing that the mantle of the Chosen People now extends to Christianity took a harmful idea and gave it wider scope. The proletariat was the Marxist Chosen People and the Aryan race was the Nazi Chosen People. The classless society and the British Empire are examples of the millennium.

The idea of stages of history as something predictable and redemption on the stages of history again gives a meaning to history which isn’t there and justifies the persecution of those on the wrong side of history.

One result of seeing the Nazis as the ultimate evil and a historical aberration is to ignore the fact that important ideas in Nazism are a logical outcome of basic ideas in our culture.

C. S. Lewis’ formulation of Jesus as lunatic, Lord or liar omits mistaken as an option. Pascal’s wager is an early formulation of game theory applied to religious justification.

Dear Relda,

We can reject both messianism and the Chosen People idea and still have an idea to motivate us.

Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means "repairing the world" or "perfecting the world." Instead of grandiose ideas of an ultimate apotheosis or fulfillment of history we can try to remedy problems and make the world a little better. We can try to make the gap between rich and poor smaller. We can try to live in balance with nature and not destroy the environment. We can try to bridge the gap between ourselves and those we disagree with or think of as the Other.

Karl Popper wrote “The Open Society and its Enemies”, Volume 1 dealt with Plato and Volume 2 with Marx. He saw the grandiose visions of both leading to totalitarian disaster. He advocated piece-meal social engineering. One tries a change that will make the human lot better. If it doesn’t work simply abandon it. If it does work keep on with it.

If one points out to either Christians or Marxists the abuses that both ideas have led to a common response is, “Christianity/Marxism has not really been tried.” Since we have no one but humans to try out these ideas they have been tried and don’t seem to always work very well.

Even getting rid of the fear of death is unreasonable. I am aware of and afraid of death. Therefore it is reasonable for me to take steps to prolong my existence as long as possible.

We have two basic drives – self preservation and carrying on the species. Fear of death and sexual attraction express these drives. Religion can be a mechanism of control, and the expression of these natural drives may make it more difficult to maintain control.

The early Christian Donatists believed that by killing themselves they could attain martyrdom and go to heaven. The Donatists were eventually declared heretics and the Christian church declared suicide a sin. The Donatists were a logical consequence of overcoming the fear of death and postulating a pleasant afterlife.