Here's another saying of Jesus from the gospel of Thomas, which could put me out of my job as a psychiatrist if people took it to heart and really understood it:
"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."
Is GT-Jesus talking about... pooping? Or is there a canonical 'true understanding' of this saying? Or can it mean pretty well whatever you want it to mean?
Thomas Jefferson was a man well ahead of his time. An early advocate of freedom of religion and freedom from it.
"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck."
Thanks, this is very interesting! At this chaotic fearful time, many people are looking for an understanding of God and Christianity that is free from centuries of manipulation and power mongering by religious leaders and other power brokers. (Naomi Wolf's public reading of the Geneva Bible is another manifestation of this collective desire.)
In short, many of us are currently trying to excavate truth from beneath layers of dogma that served those in power rather than God or humanity. Much of what is traditionally believed, appears to have served political ends rather than spiritual ones. It's an eerie reminder that propaganda has existed for millenia.
Well, yes, propaganda has existed for millenia, because language and thought have existed for millenia, and thought is essentially propagandistic, if we take the word in its neutral etymological sense -- language/thought is 'propaganda,' 'to be propagated' (that is the straight meaning of the Latin word, which was directly borrowed into English); i.e., learned, communicated, passed on: spread the word, folks! It develops as and out of and into various traditions, which are always (always!) situated in socio-political and (at the same time!) spiritual contexts. But be not deceived: there is no such thing as abstracting out a purely spiritual essence from the politically fraught. The groundless gnostic BS found in the thought of people like Thomas Jefferson (or David Strauss, or Bart Ehrman, or Geoffrey Clarfield) is not somehow mystically elevated and freed from 'layers of dogma' or from political ends or from having an essentially propagandistic character. To believe otherwise is to fall for the essential and perennial gnostic con.
There is no such thing as "abstracting out a purely spiritual essence" from ANY human endeavor.
No one said gnostic ideas were free from anything. Again ... human endeavor. All we can do is study and interpret. The favourite interpretations simply became the more widespread religions we see today. But it's taken us thousands of years and many iterations to get here. The journey is indeed at least as fascinating as any pretense that we've somehow arrived at the truth about God and our place in the universe.
For those of us who are open minded and non-judgmental, following the development of the world's 3 main monotheistic religions and their off-shoots, the ideas that flowed from them and the people who developed those ideas is freeing. (Yes, even gnostic ideas.) Learning when and why belief systems developed, when and why the Bible was "edited", etc most certainly does help distinguish propaganda from truth, as your highly informative, etymology-lesson style, introductory run-on-sentence highlights.
And thanks for the etymology lesson! It's been a bit.
What we lack is a convincing existential narrative that will carry us through what is very likely to be a disturbed and turbulent period.
What we have lost in the welter of indulgences that consumer societies have built around themselves, is a grasp of the fundamentals that secure us when all goes ill; i.e., the basics of what makes life worth living and the desire to build sociability on that basis.
People like Jesus provide some important lesson plans on how we might approach such matters. However, I no longer believe that that is enough, because we have to first retreat from the road we have gone down. As it turned out, unlike what we had been told, it wasn't the road to paradise after all.
We have to retrace our steps and revisit their vital junctures, and then deconstruct them, so that they no longer weigh down our long accumulated judgement. It is like trudging our history in reverse and winning back what was lost at every critical juncture that energized and propelled us in the first place, towards what turned out to be a blind alley.
Abandoning an economy and culture of disciplined needs and wants, and responsible adult agency, in favor of fantasies of desire and and their instant realization, regardless of the long term cost, has devastated everything in its path and ravaged the commons, turning them from a tragedy into a catastrophe.
There is nothing easy about such a retreat. It is going to be struggle for everyone, because everyone will obliged to make that effort if they are going to make it through what I think is coming at us. Unloading cultural baggage is always a very tough business. One can't just buy into a new existential suite. It does not come off the shelf and it isn't for sale.
There is desperation in the air in relation to these matters. People are grabbing onto anything that might float in a storm. Look at the way the wretched Woke are trying to access and ape 'the secrets 'of indigenous 'wisdom'. The pathos is palpable and the abject existential (alright, 'spiritual if you must) fear is dangerous.
There is absolutely no chance that we can return to some mythical primitive state of innocence. In Afghanistan, a village blacksmith can make a serviceable AK47 from scratch in a week.
I have been struggling with this for the last 50 years. The result is a set of connected essays called 'The Secular Fundamentalist'. It isn't prescriptive. It only serves to signpost the journey back from where we can no longer stay. That place is no longer sustainable on any level and if we do not move, we will be destroyed.
The madness that seems to beset so much social thinking is just the beginning, as if the characters who were born in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books have escaped through the mirror of narcissistic reflection into our world, colonized it, and now want to take it over.....
P.S. In the (canonical) Gospel of Luke (17:20-21) Jesus says: "The kingdom of God comes unwatched by men’s eyes; there will be no saying, See, it is here, or See, it is there; the kingdom of God is here, within you." But that Gospel of Thomas/Jefferson-Jesus is just so much more earthshatteringly reasonable and spiritual and unpolitical and unpropagandistic (like somehow or other, eh?)...
Christianity partners well with stoicism. Thank you for the interesting article!
I second that.
Thank you for this. Very thought-provoking.
Here's another saying of Jesus from the gospel of Thomas, which could put me out of my job as a psychiatrist if people took it to heart and really understood it:
"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."
Is GT-Jesus talking about... pooping? Or is there a canonical 'true understanding' of this saying? Or can it mean pretty well whatever you want it to mean?
"If people took it to heart and really understood it." For everyone else, we have Prozac.
Thomas Jefferson was a man well ahead of his time. An early advocate of freedom of religion and freedom from it.
"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck."
Thomas Jefferson
Is it possible for a man to be well ahead of his time?
(Are you perchance one of those adorably naive expectant progressivists? Here's a brilliant little essay from a fellow who prefers thinking to advocating: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-pervasive-belief-in-the-eternal)
Very interesting, thank you.
Thanks, this is very interesting! At this chaotic fearful time, many people are looking for an understanding of God and Christianity that is free from centuries of manipulation and power mongering by religious leaders and other power brokers. (Naomi Wolf's public reading of the Geneva Bible is another manifestation of this collective desire.)
In short, many of us are currently trying to excavate truth from beneath layers of dogma that served those in power rather than God or humanity. Much of what is traditionally believed, appears to have served political ends rather than spiritual ones. It's an eerie reminder that propaganda has existed for millenia.
Well, yes, propaganda has existed for millenia, because language and thought have existed for millenia, and thought is essentially propagandistic, if we take the word in its neutral etymological sense -- language/thought is 'propaganda,' 'to be propagated' (that is the straight meaning of the Latin word, which was directly borrowed into English); i.e., learned, communicated, passed on: spread the word, folks! It develops as and out of and into various traditions, which are always (always!) situated in socio-political and (at the same time!) spiritual contexts. But be not deceived: there is no such thing as abstracting out a purely spiritual essence from the politically fraught. The groundless gnostic BS found in the thought of people like Thomas Jefferson (or David Strauss, or Bart Ehrman, or Geoffrey Clarfield) is not somehow mystically elevated and freed from 'layers of dogma' or from political ends or from having an essentially propagandistic character. To believe otherwise is to fall for the essential and perennial gnostic con.
There is no such thing as "abstracting out a purely spiritual essence" from ANY human endeavor.
No one said gnostic ideas were free from anything. Again ... human endeavor. All we can do is study and interpret. The favourite interpretations simply became the more widespread religions we see today. But it's taken us thousands of years and many iterations to get here. The journey is indeed at least as fascinating as any pretense that we've somehow arrived at the truth about God and our place in the universe.
For those of us who are open minded and non-judgmental, following the development of the world's 3 main monotheistic religions and their off-shoots, the ideas that flowed from them and the people who developed those ideas is freeing. (Yes, even gnostic ideas.) Learning when and why belief systems developed, when and why the Bible was "edited", etc most certainly does help distinguish propaganda from truth, as your highly informative, etymology-lesson style, introductory run-on-sentence highlights.
And thanks for the etymology lesson! It's been a bit.
What we lack is a convincing existential narrative that will carry us through what is very likely to be a disturbed and turbulent period.
What we have lost in the welter of indulgences that consumer societies have built around themselves, is a grasp of the fundamentals that secure us when all goes ill; i.e., the basics of what makes life worth living and the desire to build sociability on that basis.
People like Jesus provide some important lesson plans on how we might approach such matters. However, I no longer believe that that is enough, because we have to first retreat from the road we have gone down. As it turned out, unlike what we had been told, it wasn't the road to paradise after all.
We have to retrace our steps and revisit their vital junctures, and then deconstruct them, so that they no longer weigh down our long accumulated judgement. It is like trudging our history in reverse and winning back what was lost at every critical juncture that energized and propelled us in the first place, towards what turned out to be a blind alley.
Abandoning an economy and culture of disciplined needs and wants, and responsible adult agency, in favor of fantasies of desire and and their instant realization, regardless of the long term cost, has devastated everything in its path and ravaged the commons, turning them from a tragedy into a catastrophe.
There is nothing easy about such a retreat. It is going to be struggle for everyone, because everyone will obliged to make that effort if they are going to make it through what I think is coming at us. Unloading cultural baggage is always a very tough business. One can't just buy into a new existential suite. It does not come off the shelf and it isn't for sale.
There is desperation in the air in relation to these matters. People are grabbing onto anything that might float in a storm. Look at the way the wretched Woke are trying to access and ape 'the secrets 'of indigenous 'wisdom'. The pathos is palpable and the abject existential (alright, 'spiritual if you must) fear is dangerous.
There is absolutely no chance that we can return to some mythical primitive state of innocence. In Afghanistan, a village blacksmith can make a serviceable AK47 from scratch in a week.
I have been struggling with this for the last 50 years. The result is a set of connected essays called 'The Secular Fundamentalist'. It isn't prescriptive. It only serves to signpost the journey back from where we can no longer stay. That place is no longer sustainable on any level and if we do not move, we will be destroyed.
The madness that seems to beset so much social thinking is just the beginning, as if the characters who were born in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books have escaped through the mirror of narcissistic reflection into our world, colonized it, and now want to take it over.....
https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist
Jesus's message was simple " Harm No One". If it gets more complicated, manipulation is afoot.
Clarfield: "To my untrained theological mind it asks us to look inward and find the kingdom of God that is inside each and every one of us."
Yet: "In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says, ... the kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you."
Earthshattering stuff? Right. Earthshatteringly banal, sophomoric, oxymoronic.
P.S. In the (canonical) Gospel of Luke (17:20-21) Jesus says: "The kingdom of God comes unwatched by men’s eyes; there will be no saying, See, it is here, or See, it is there; the kingdom of God is here, within you." But that Gospel of Thomas/Jefferson-Jesus is just so much more earthshatteringly reasonable and spiritual and unpolitical and unpropagandistic (like somehow or other, eh?)...