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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (68707)	10/8/2015 12:02:49 AM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 69300

Roger Williams, founder of the state of Rhode Island when the Puritans were hanging Quakers, was our earliest champion of separation for church & state. He certainly deserves far more laurels than we give him. It was his belief no one religion speaks for who or what God is. A true libertine, he declared, "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." history.com

To: Solon who wrote (68707)	10/8/2015 11:38:39 PM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 69300

Joseph Campbell Mythological Roundtable ..........Tarnas: The Christian tradition compared to the Buddhist tradition seems to lack a certain understanding of mythic symbols. Now I'm wondering whether that would be true only of orthodox institutional Christianity, and whether there's in Christianity itself some sort of core of mythic understanding that is just as valid as in Hinduism or Buddhism. Campbell: The problem here is that in Hinduism or Buddhism the historical reading of the symbols is quite secondary. The accent in Hinduism and Buddhism is the relevance of the symbolic forms to your own life. You understand these references inward to yourself. For instance, most the Buddhas had no historical existence at all; nobody thinks they ever had. To the Chinese, Kuan-yin, or to the Japenese, Kannon, the great Bodhisattva of inexhaustible compassion, is a purely mythic figure but represents something. Whereas in the Christian traditions the accent is on the historical understanding of the terms, of the images. If you say to a Christian, Jesus did not resurrect from the dead physically, did not ascend to Heaven, that's a challenge to what he regards as important in his faith. With the Jews, if you begin to question the whole thing of the Exodus and Moses going on the mountain, coming back with the law, and then breaking it, and going back for a second edition; if you express doubt about all this, this is a direct hit. The importance for the Hindu would be not what happened two thousand or three thousand years ago somewhere else, but what's happening to you now. What is the symbol doing to you now? Now since both Judaism and Christianity are mythologically structured orders of symbol, they are susceptible to the other kind of reading. And that comes breaking through every now and then with a prophet or mystic, when he suddenly sees the symbol as saying something totally different. And it's something that has to do with an immediate attitude of you to life. For instance with the Crucifixion, if you think of this as a calamity that is the result of your sins and Adam's sin and all that, that Jesus had to come down, the Son of the Father, give himself up on the cross for death, and look sad there - that's one reading. But you can read it another way: as the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time, which involves the breaking up of the one into the many and the acceptance of the suffering of the will as part of the organic delights, the Wisdom Sheath and rapture, the bliss - he is in bliss. St. Augustine says this somewhere, where he says, "Jesus went to the Cross as the bridegroom to the bride." That's a total transformation of the idea. Another one: the idea of the end of time. The end of time as a historical event. That's nonsense! And what does it matter? The importance of the end of time is a psychological event. Then you have to render it and experience it that way. When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time, and it's the function of art to make that visible to you, then you have really ended life in the world as it is lived by those who think only in the historical terms. This is the function of mythology; that's a mythological reading of what was otherwise a theological statement. Tarnas: So in some ways the Christian institutional religion has erred on the side of historical concretism? Campbell: Radically... ...What I know is that all of these mythic images are metaphors. And they're metaphors for what? A metaphor has a connotation and the mythic metaphors have connotations of the spiritual powers within the individual. And when one is preaching religion, if you're not preaching the connotation of the metaphor, you're preaching pseudo-history or sociology or something of that kind. So there's very little true religion in the world.