Science and Religion

Curtis Hoffman in his book the Seven Story Tower pulls out a couple of interesting quotes from a Scientific American article titled Beyond Physics: Renowned Scientists Contemplate the Evidence for God (August 1998).

"The inability of science to provide a basis for meaning, purpose, value and ethics is evidence of the necessity of religion."

"I have experiences that cannot be expressed in any language other than that of religion.  Whether the myths are historically true or false is not so important."

It would be interesting to track down the article as whole, rather than reading a few cherry picked quotes.  I'd be curious to find out which "renowned scientist" said what.

Jung on Freud

"He was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon."

C. G. Jung: Word and Image

Improbability

"Our picture of the world only tallies with reality when the improbable has a place in it."

C. G. Jung: Word and Image

Parallel Readings 4

           After ending his first chapter with the emotion laden (and rationally suspect) phrase “Religion poisons everything,” Christopher launches his second chapter with the simple statement “Religion kills.”  He goes on to offer a list of places starting with B where either religious violence (or violence at least tinged by religion) has recently erupted: Baghdad, Beirut, Belfast, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Bombay.  He focuses on the religious divides and largely downplays other aspects of any conflicts that are (or have) occurred there.  He tells the Irish joke of the atheist stopped by the IRA being asked if he is a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist, but deliberately insists on missing the point.  Emotionally, religion HAS to be the culprit. 

           The arguments he makes are rhetoric, not logic.  A list of violence perpetrated by blacks is not proof that blacks are inherently more violent or dangerous than others.  That priests and ministers blessed  and encouraged the soldiers on either side of World War II does NOT make World War II into a primarily religious conflict.  Yet that is the very argument he attempts to make about the ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia.

            It is certain that Religion IS one form of tribalism that is capable of launching violence and war.  It is by no means the most common nor necessarily the most potent.  When wars arise for whatever reason, religion is often used to unify sentiment and commitment among warring population.  Religion is a human phenomenon and as such is touched by both the basest and the noblest of human capacities and intentions.  Christopher seems capable of focusing only on the basest potentialities exhibited by religion.  In doing so he oversimplifies many of the conflicts he tells of and is unable to see literally ANY positive or peacemaking potential in a religious individual without denying that religion could have anything to do with it. 

            War and violence usually requires the psychic construction of the enemy as a dehumanized “other.”  What worries me about Christopher’s intensity here, is the efficiency with which he has converted his religious enemy (at least in his rhetoric) into the very type of “other” against whom organized oppression, violence or war would be justified.  If religious people and ideas are really as evil and dangerous as he claims, why would violence or state supported suppression NOT be justified?  His particular style of atheism seems to be as potentially dangerous and virulent a form of religion as any found in his cities that start with a B.

Science and mythos

"Since most physical anthropologists agree that the human psychological constitution (as reflected in both the brain's size and organization and in the manifested products of its ruminations) does not appear to have changed substantially for at least the last 40,000 years, I suggest that in a real sense myths reflect upon that which is always true about the human condition and its place in the natural and social world.  As numerous mythologists and anthropologists have argued, the same rules which govern the operation of myths at least partially govern our perception of reality.  As much as we would like to believe in our ability to view the world objectively, our cultural background places constraints upon our thinking which we take for granted and from which we therefore cannot easily free ourselves.  Gregory Bateson presents cogent arguments that this kind of conditioning also characterizes the scientific world-view.  In his opinion and that of numerous other cultural anthropologists, the view we have of the world is a social construct which we project onto our observations, whether they be expressed in mythic or scientific terms."

Curtiss Hoffman
The Seven Story Tower: A Mythic Journey Through Space and Time

Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Bridgewater State University
Past President of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society

Unfinished Business - Jung and the Inherited Task

"It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished."


Carl Jung
quoted in C.G. Jung, Word and Image
by Aniela Jaffe

Parallel Reading 3

In Peter's first full chapter he tells of his conversion to atheism.  He covers the usual sense of superiority, of belonging with other sophisticated and knowing minds, the rush of feeling truly free, the thrill of being virtuous without being obligated and the warm trust in human reason and science and human progress as well as the feeling of contempt or even hostility towards believers. It really isn't much different than Christopher's account of his own conversion in his first chapter, except that it is told in past tense - as a phase he eventually grew out of, which Christopher obviously did not.  They both have a very British reticence about opening up too much about personal events and feelings.  Something that, as an American, in a culture where we open up very easily about both, I find refreshing.

A few striking quotations from the chapter:

"And then there were the things I thought and wrote and said, the high, jeering tone of my conversation, the cruel revolutionary rubbish I promoted, sometimes all too successfully, with such conviction that I persuaded some others to swallow the same poison.  I have more or less recovered.  I am not sure they all did.  Once you have convinced a fellow-creature of the rightness of a cause, he takes his own direction and lives his own life.  It is quite likely that even if you change your mind, he will not change his.  Yet you remain at least partly responsible for what he does.  Those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say.  Someone is bound to take them seriously, and it is really no good pretending that you don't know this."

...............

"During a short spell at a cathedral choir school...I...experienced the intense beauty of the ancient, Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong.  This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity.  The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossibly old building are extraordinarily potent.  If you welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort.  If you suspect or mistrust them, they will alarm and repel you like strong and unwanted magic, something to flee before it takes hold."

................

"I had spotted the dry, disillusioned, and apparently disinterested atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age.  I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness, and their air of finding human credulity amusing.  I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgment.  It did not cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief."

Again, the initial contrast I sense between the two brothers is this.  Peter is introspective of the non-rational foundations of his beliefs.  Christopher has an almost naïve lack of awareness of the psychological springs of his own attitudes.  He is less in touch with his heart and with his depths.  Note, I'm not saying he is unemotional.  If anything, he is more passionate and emotional in his argumentation than his brother.  He is simply less introspective, less in touch with his heart and his depth.

Can you stay in Grace?

"The dance is necessary because we cannot stay inside the Grail chamber.  But neither can we stay outside in a state of alienation.  All we can do is stay in the dance back and forth between inside and outside.
     Gerald May says the same thing in his book Addiction and Grace.  We cannot stay in a state of experiencing grace every moment.  That's a pseudo-tower.  It will only inflate us, and then make us rigid.  The best we can do it seems is to persevere in the two-step: the dance between grace and addiction, where God always leads and we sometimes follow.  We are, in fact, all fighting little addictions.  Maybe it's some little mental pattern.  Some small vanity.  Or some little way of having our way.  We try to be in charge, to grab a moment of control in a chaotic world.  Those addictions can eat us up, those process addictions - even more than the drinkable addictions.  The only way to give them up is through pain.  We will not abdicate being central and important and right until pain forces us to do so.  Until there is blood."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

Repentance

"Most of the major crises in our lives are confrontations with our shadow selves.  Invariably these are encounters that show us something about ourselves that we'd rather not see.  They are therefore, most painful, most distasteful, and we do everything we can to avoid them.  We seek some cocoon of security and tell ourselves we're in good shape and therefore do not need any more 'metanoia.'
     This metanoia is an elusive concept.  It means a turning around.  But this raises the question: How many times can one, or must one, turn around?  Can't we just find the truth and stay with it?  How can the Gospel ask for repeated, ongoing turning around?
     The answer lies in our very human tendency to find another comfort zone.  We faced one shadow, we're proud of our effort, and we think we're converted for good, so we rest on our laurels.  Then the Gospel orders us again, turn around.  Again?  We're addicted to this self-image we worked so hard on and we want to keep it.  But we must let go of it.  All right, so we build another castle and settle down.  Then the Gospel says once more, turn around.  It's always about letting go, a perpetual series of turning around."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

"There is the personal shadow, which I would call the flesh, the collective shadow, which I would call the world, and the archetypal shadow, which I would call the devil.  I am not denying a personal devil here - but simply making a point.  The world, the flesh, and the devil were always called the three invitations to evil."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

The Wounded King

"He's caught in the middle.  Many will recognize this predicament at once: we cannot live because of our wound (the tragic flaw at the center that seems to be keeping us from our life), but we cannot die because of our unfinished dream.
     The Grail says that there is still something there - radical grace - and that there is something good at our core, that life is okay; it is the universal presence of the risen Christ.  It will not let us die, it will not let us hate ourselves, it will not let humanity self destruct, despite all the crucifixions."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

Vocation

"So many men fail to distinguish between a job and a vocation.  If they do examine the difference, they realize t hat what they had all their lives was a job but what they want is a vocation - something that gives them a vision of not a part of the castle but of the whole castle, some arrangement by which their work names who they are....

Yet it remains only a desire in most men's souls today, to find their vision, what they were created to do, what they want to do, even if it doesn't earn as much money.  If we are not willing to ask the economic question, to take a decrease in salary, for example, we are not really serious about going on the quest.  That's why Jesus told the fishermen apostles, 'leave your nets' - and that's the only livelihood they had (Matthew 4:19-22).
     Family and job often keep us from the quest.  They're the most sacred things in most of our lives, and often it's the most sacred things that hold us back.  "Leaving the boat and their father, they followed him." (4:22)."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

A Glimpse of the Preexistence and the Veil

"Let me tell you a true story.  A family with a four-year-old son had another baby.   They brought the new baby home and put it in its crib.  The older boy said to his parents, "I want to talk to my little brother."  They said okay.  He said, "I want to talk to him alone."  That surprised them, but they went outside.  They did, however, stop to eavesdrop at the door.  The little boy went up to the crib and said: "Quick, tell me who made you, tell me where you came from.  Quick, I'm beginning to forget.""

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

The Castle

"The castle is the image of the whole self.  A big house with all the rooms - the turrets, towers, bedrooms, kitchens, dungeons: it is the whole house where the totality is held together."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

The Hero's Surrender

"Jesus constantly told people to be awake (see Mark 13:33-37).  That's all the hero can do-is be ready.  If we set out to plan and create our own heroic path, it will be no more than our own heroic path, what we call ego.  That's the false hero, finally the anti-hero.  The real heroic path is created for us.  We know someone else is preparing it....
     When, finally, we are able to be open-and it takes work to be open-and when we can be awake-and it takes work to be awake, too-then we are on the true heroic journey of what we usually call the saint.
     What evolves is less and less control.  We sense that, more and more.  Someone else is for us, more than we are for ourselves.  All we can do is get out of the way.  We realize that this is a radically benevolent universe and it is on our side, despite the absurdity, despite the sin, despite the pain and the dead ends.  It will feel more like letting go than taking on.  Maybe that is why it is hard to accept."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

The Grail Experience

"Here we have a contained Grail experience.  It's a moment in life that feels like an insertion into life, as if it came from somewhere else....It's not like the rest of life.  It's a once-upon-a-time event.  It's not mere chronological time anymore (chronos), but time as significance, threshold, and epiphany (Kairos)....Both space and time are different here."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

At the age of 55

"People such as Angea Merici, who founded the Ursulines, and Junipero Serra had religious experiences at seventeen and eighteen that told them what they were going to do, and neither of them did it until they were fifty-five.
     From eighteen to fifty-five was the unfolding.  Then, when it happened at fifty-five, they knew what they were born for.  When that moment comes, it is great and it is all synchronicity.  We know then that grace is at work and we are not manufacturing our own lives."

Richard Rohr
Quest for the Grail

Shunryu Suzuki

"Each of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way.  This is a mystery.  When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything."

Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Suzuki came to San Francisco in 1959, just before the "great awakening" of the 60's.  He founded the San Francisco Zen Center and the Tasajara Zen Mountain Center.  He is the second great introducer of Zen Buddhism to America.

"Two Suzukis.  A half century ago, in a transplant that has been likened in its historical importance to the Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century and of Plato in the Fifteenth, Daisetz Suzuki brought Zen to the West single-handed.  Fifty years later, Shunryu Suzuki did something almost as important.  He sounded exactly the follow-up note Americans interested in Zen needed to hear."

"Whereas Daisetz Suzuki's Zen was dramatic, Shunryu Suzuki's is ordinary.  Satori was focal for Daisetz, and it was in large part the fascination of this extraordinary state that made his writings so compelling.  In Shunryu Suzuki's book the words satori and kensho, its near equivalent, never appear."

Huston Smith
Preface
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Zen and Nothingness

"So it is absolutely necessary for everyone to believe in nothing.  But I do not believe in voidness.  There is something, but that something is something which is always prepared fro taking some particular form, and it has some rules, or theory, or truth in its activity.  This is called Buddha nature, or Buddha himself."

Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Soto Zen on Naturalness

"There is a big misunderstanding about the idea of naturalness.  Most people who come to us believe in some freedom or naturalness, but there understanding is...a kind of 'let-alone policy' or sloppiness...but naturalness is, I think, some feeling of being independent from everything, or some activity which is based on nothingness."

"....This naturalness is very difficult to explain.  But if you can just sit and experience the actuality of nothingness in your practice there is no need to explain.  If it comes out of nothingness, whatever you do is natural, and that is true activity.  You have the true joy of practice, the true joy of life in it....So we say...'from true emptiness, the wondrous being appears...'"

"....If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice.  That is naturalness.  Whatever you do, this attitude is necessary.  Sometimes we say...'soft or flexible mind'....a smooth, natural mind.  When you have that mind, you have the joy of life.  When you lose it, you lose everything.  You have nothing.  Although you think you have something, you have nothing.  But when all you do comes out of nothingness, then you have everything.  Do you understand?  That is what we mean by naturalness."

Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Nothingness is a tough term to the Western Mind.  We picture Nihlism and despair.
I wonder, from the context, if the Taoist "emptiness" is a better translation.  When we empty ourselves we are ready to be filled with the joy of life.  Jesus is recorded as saying

"Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it."
Luke 17:33

Gnosticism and the Divine Feminine

"From Thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother, the two immortal names, Parents of the divine being, and thou, dweller in heaven, humanity, of the mighty name...."

From Hippolytus, Refutationis Omnium Haeresium

The God of the Gnostics

Colorbasus...said that when God revealed himself, he revealed himself in the form of Anthropos.  Still others, Irenaeus reports maintained that "the primal father of the whole, the primal beginning, and the primal incomprehensible, is called Anthropos...and that this is the great and abstruse mystery, namely, that the power, which is above all others, and contains all others in its embrace, is called Anthropos."

Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Gospels

This passage evokes for me both Adam Kadmon from the Jewish Kabbalah and "Man of Holiness" from Moses 6:57.

Some Gnostic sayings

From the Gospel of Thomas (sayings attributed to Christ)

     "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

    "You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized the one who is before you, and you do not know how to read this moment."

From the Gospel of Phillip

     "Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images.  One will not receive truth in any other way."

Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Gospels