Saturday, March 24, 2007

Are You A New Christian Rabbi?

ARE YOU DEAD YET?


Secular humanism, metaphysical naturalism and atheism are Myths too!

All rational thought occurs through the medium of language, in one form or another. All language is metaphor. So, all dogma and doctrine, all religion and philosophy, is metaphorical in nature. Metaphorical expressions of truth systems are Myths in the Joseph Campbell sense if they have survived in the human collective psyche for a very long time. If they have indeed survived, they reflect deep and fundamental facts about humanity and her needs or desires. These facts must be respected. To ignore them or to diss them is to diss essential truth itself.

There is no such thing as atheism. If truth is your God, the logical extreme to which it is put, reductio ad absurdum, is that Truth is a kind of substance, an ultimate universal essence. This quintessence is responsible for all that we perceive as being real, whether it is really so, whether we admit to existential rationales or whether we wish on ourselves some kind of scientism. Truth is God.

Being responsible, as a sort of ground of all being, this Truth may just as well be regarded as a theistic Being. So what, if it is a Myth? Joseph Campbell extolls the power of Myth. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and all the others compose their own Myths. So, Quod est demonstandum, Mythologies cannot be ignored.

The Myth of Theistic God will always be with us. The challenge is not to debunk this God, it is to channel Him into useful rivers and canals that aid human survival. This is what humans do: we constrain God. We try to bind Him. Even when we try to deny His existence, we merely confirm Him. There are no atheists.

Humanity should survive. This is the first principle of scientific evolutionary morality and a rational sociobiological ethic. All other pronouncements of how we should believe or what we should do derive from this assumption. Whether it is true is not the point. Some might think that Homo sapiens is a cancer in the body of the whole Earth. It should be cut out and destroyed.

But, if we believe this, we also believe that a cancer will eventually destroy itself by destroying its host. So, we should support it, nurture it, respect it and GROW it. It will collapse and die that much more quickly!

Too bad that the host will die as well.

The Queen is dead! Long live the Queen!

Vive!


Sing to the tune "If I were Free":

IF I WERE FREE (AGAIN)

(chorus)

If I were free
To blow your mind,
I'd fry the world
And all Mankind
In boiling oil
Bubbling asphalt too,
To make a vast
And gruesome stew.

(verse 1)

This weary world
Is full of swill!
And of its rot
I've had my fill!
The time has come
For terror's day,
'Cause horror wins
and Terror pays!

(verse 2)

If you should see
That mushroom cloud
Rising above
A French fried crowd,
Don't try to run,
Just kneel and pray.
You shall have seen
Our very last day!

et cetera


As one of our most cherished Myths, Christianity has its uses. It is a very effective channel wherein we constrain God and make Him conform to our will. It is an antidote for Terror. It is an emolient for Horror. It may yet save us from ourselves!

I do not know whether fundamentalist and orthodox Christians are truly becoming Green these days of Gore. But, if one has a sense of any value in the traditions of Jesus and the Myth of Christ she might consent to a course of action that may help to break down further the rusty bulkheads and crumbling walls between Christians for the sake of humanity herself. It is not the Bible, Christian dogma nor doctrines of Faith that are the enemy. It is ministers, priests, pastors, bishops and popes! The Satanic architects of our hellish divisions glibly preach to us every Sunday morning. They write puffy essays on popular personal websites, too!

If you feel this is true, you may indeed be a New Christian Rabbi. You are one who is literate in some of the matters of Christian Faith, you have become a scholar of sorts. And, you have not been diced, chopped and crammed into myriad pink, green, yellow and blue little boxes by any type of university professor on the hillside in some stuffy, formal, ticky-tacky establishment divinity school. And, you certainly are not ordained! Still, it is your wisdom, your concern, your learning and your intelligence that qualify you as a RABBI.

Run with it!

See my website at http://hometown.aol.com/nuchristianrabbi/