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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 1:33pm

Maybe 99% of the idols we set up as "God" are just immature projections?  That's why God needs to be so forgiving right?  Because as humans, we only get it wrong.  That's what we're best at (being in error, i.e. sinful).  https://youtu.be/qVr3ZaYEi94  (apropos).

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 6:37pm

sI think most of those concepts spring out of leaders' desires to control their followers.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 7:25pm

Where do 'projections' come from? Wouldn't this be the same process we use to 'model' other people's minds, to know how they'll probably react, to imitate, etc?

That's a pretty old learning mechanism. It isn't just a form of psychopathology; one can observe babies in a lab, making the transition from 1) Thinking that everyone knows whatever they've been watching -- to 2) Realizing that the 2nd person to walk into the lab really doesn't know where the first one hid the cookies. People learn to model each other's minds and feelings very well and very early -- or we couldn't get along as well as we do, even.

The process gets out of whack when people stop talking (and listening) -- when the model in their heads blocks their contact with the actual person in front of them.

Also, it distorts that person the most -- when you're modeling him on your own bad qualities. (People say we do this to keep from recognizing that we're like that ourselves... but that suggests a lot more intentionality at work than we should assume. Suspecting the worst probably works, much of the time -- even more so when it becomes self-fulfilling.)

Okay, there's lots of side benefits to a theology that says we're going to blow it and be forgiven; as G. Fox pointed out, that's a theology that encourages people to wallow & enjoy... But do people choose a theology from a cost-benefit analysis?

I'm guessing, rather, that people come up with scary images of God from having experience with scary people.

Any Being that can change the conditions of your life in a moment, knock you out of the game entirely -- and resurrect you at His convenience -- is intrinsically scary.

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Um, James -- Would you say, then, that some people become religious leaders because the way they see people behave offends them? -- and that they therefore hope God will Thump the offenders? Or something else?

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 8:13pm

I'd say the projections well up from a deep source of archetypes within the psyche, and agree we're talking about a natural / essential process, not necessarily pathological. Having access to such a well comes with being human.

The wisdom traditions speak of a "unity of opposites" dynamic, an underlying complementarity.  Rather than "either / or" a "both / and" logic is closer to what's so.  Pathologies arise from becoming "too stuck" on the one pole (e.g "punishing father") at which point we're more likely to demonize and externalize, discovering a host of blameworthy others.  "The devil is tempting me with bad thoughts" or whatever.

The pilgrim / alchemist seeks, in microcosm, to become attuned to the macrocosm, God's projection.  "Created in God's image" means we're embedded within the Image of Creation, amidst oceans and deserts, not that we "look like Him" in some literal manner (as if God were a biped).

I like to characterize our humanity as a relative slowness, next to an instantaneous and eternal now.  We need time to experience and think through, to reconsider.  To quote some 20th century esoterica:

Asymmetry is a consequence of the phenomenon time and time a consequence of the phenomenon we call afterimage, or "double-take," or reconsideration, with inherent lags of recallability rates in respect to various types of special-case experiences. Infrequently used names take longer to recall than do familiar actions. So the very consequence of only "dawning" and evolving (never instantaneous) awareness is to impose the phenomenon time upon an otherwise timeless, ergo eternal Universe. Awareness itself is in all these asymmetries, and the pulsations are all the consequences of just thought itself: the ability of Universe to consider itself, and to reconsider itself.

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 10:29pm

Forest:  I'm not sure what a religious leader is.  Most religious organizations are just that - organizations and their leaders are often a slave to the organization's needs.  The ones who get upset with the Hypocrisy of people claiming to know God either become the fanatic who goes on a shooting rampage or a voice crying out in the wilderness.  They don't have the patience or gamesmanship to work their way up the ladder within an existing religious org.  However if they are very gifted they can become cult leaders or start a whole new movement such as George Fox and others have done, which movements either survive on their own or merge with others. 

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 28, 2016 at 11:43pm

Kirby, the last time anyone explained to me what an "archetype" was supposed to be, it came out something like:

"a psychic ecological niche for personalities and fictional characters"... which somehow also meant a personification of the traits associated with that role, which could show up in people's dreams & otherwise influence whatever it was people would become, or aspire to , or etc...

which seems to overlap considerably with notions of what an 'angel' (or a 'god', or a 'daimon') might be. Entities invented by God, as William Springfellow described them -- "made by God for God's own pleasure."

Maybe these would be something like 'clothes for the naked ego'? -- made for us so we could all dress up in costume and have something to do? Interesting notion -- but why would we or God pick that outfit?

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Whatever we might mean by a religious "leader" -- I'd be talking about theologians & founders of sects, etc, the sort of people who articulate & diseminate theological ideas -- but in any case, people living a religious style of life that would be intolerably boring to anyone without a strong interest in religious matters.

I wouldn't ordinarily expect to find such people putting forth an idea of God -- solely for the purpose of controlling them better.

And if they did -- why would such ideas resonate so strongly with their followers?

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 5:11am

I think you have to break down the theologians into groups.  I would suggest one group who was into study for the sake of study - that's what they do.  If it wasn't God they were studying it would be music or math.

Another group would be like Paul who got knocked off his horse and wanted to know how the hell that happened along with the blindness and restoration of sight.

The first group is going to look at everyone's concept of God that he or she could find and then try to formulate a consistent relationship between those concepts.  So if they read the old testament they would see that God paddled us every time we got out of line and to make that consistent with the NT he might pick a father image who would pick and choose which child he would love especially since there are several examples of that in the OT.

The second group would look at his or her own cultural concept of God and then mold it to their own experience and as time went on and their experience of God grew they would expand their theology accordingly.

The main difference between the two would be that the first never personally experienced the love of God and/or understood His Grace as it applied to all of us while the 2nd group did.  However, among the 2nd group some of those people (maybe a majority) thinking that what they experienced was because they were "chosen" of God much like Moses and Joseph of the OT they seized on scriptures that limited God's grace in forming their theology while others recognizing their unworthiness (being chief among sinners) decided grace was there for all and there was that of God in everyone.

And of course there are multiple variations amongst the groups depending on how much control they personally believe God would maintain over his "children" (does a father ever give up his crown to his son before he, the father, dies?) and what, if any, limits are there to our free will?

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 8:37am

An angry punishing God helps wire up cause and effect into moral teachings.  A plague of locusts takes on more meaning when it's "because we were bad" i.e. disobedient in some way. Didn't pay our taxes?  Didn't tithe?

If you're a potentate / manager, like a Pharaoh, wouldn't it be a wasted opportunity to not turn a calamity into some kind of moral teaching? 

Like when Jerry Falwell spun 911 as God's punishment of America, for tolerating Falwell's political opponents. 

When something bad happens, isn't that the ideal time to demonize "bad people" and make them scapegoats?

Scapegoating works best when people have only weak notions of cause and effect to begin with.  Sure that plague of locusts was because the courts allowed gay marriage, sure it was.  That made God angry.

Probably an angry God who expresses Himself by throwing temper tantrums works best in "I told you so" religions, those in which the prophets are always saying "there, you see what I mean?" every time something unfortunate occurs -- especially on a large scale where God is clearly in command.  Only God can cause floods and pestilence, earthquakes...

The rise of science has been corrosive to "I told you so" religions as it subverts the cause and effect narrative.  How are we gonna blame X next time Y happens if science attributes Y to Z instead?  There may still be important lessons to learn, but who get to tell us what they are? 

The preacher caste would often prefer to keep science out of the schools, leaving it to God's anointed to tell us who's to blame.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to have all those docile sheep again, who would never think of mocking the hireling priests for their self-serving narratives?

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 12:47pm

I don't know that our "projected" model of the evil/dumb/misguided person we try to understand... necessarily resembles Our Evil Twin, as psychopontifferous people commonly take for granted.

I do know we have to watch out for "Them dumb!" and "Them wicked!" in modelling  how other people think and feel -- particularly when their thinking really is dumb and their motivations are clearly wicked...

Does this make sense? When somebody thinks stupidly, they may simply lack intelligence -- or they be thinking quite correctly from wrong assumptions -- But far more often, they're being stupid about one subject because their real interest lies elsewhere; because they're devoting 1/2 their mind to it, 1/2 the time, and thereby missing a lot!

I certainly agree with James that it makes a big difference -- whether one is just shuffling concepts, or trying to figure how/why "I just got WHACKED! Why me, God? What was that about?"

The Jews got "chosen" as a focal point for humankind's fudging and mistakes -- not from being better or worse, but because "Somebody had to do it, and Abraham volunteered." They had a language that translated eloquently (a rich collection of metaphors) if not always well; they made the same mistakes that anyone would have made in their place; and therefore they could serve as an object lesson.

They formed their identity living in the hills of Judea, a precarious refuge from larger civilizations, a place where everyone clearly depended on God sending rain -- and suffered famine when it didn't come.

They dreamed of glory but didn't get much -- Hey, they could be a model for most of us! They set up a system in which everyone was to have enough -- and then immediately set out to subvert it. (This was typical of ancient Near-Eastern empires back then; The King would declare a jubilee so his indebted peasants could get back to raising food and would be available the next time he needed an army of spear-carriers -- while the local landowners & nobles would keep conspiring to keep their poorer neighbors enslaved and indebted, while they went on acquiring all of their land they could snatch....

and in Israel, the prophets kept saying that this was bad karma waiting to happen!

There's clear socio-economic cause-&-effect relation at work in this: If you have no peasants, but only slaves, your army will feature a few expensive professionals, but you won't field a mass of infantry...

But karma is, after all, the manifestation in physical terms of cause-and-effect in a different causal domain. We kvetch (like the Psalmists) about "When are The Wicked going to get their comeupance?" -- but we also have a deep-down sense that 'Cosmic justice is real, even though it doesn't look like you'd expected.'

Jeremiah stood up in the gates of the Temple and gave everyone hell! People thought about stoning him, but concluded this would be a bad idea. And still they went on doing the things he said would lead to Trouble. The Babylonians came in, grabbed the loot & burned the Temple -- carted the local leadership off to Babylon, where they took to reconsidering and reformulating their religious traditions. "We got WHACKED! Why us, Lord?" -- & etc.

Jesus stood up in a prominent part of the Temple and echoed Jeremiah, for many of the same reasons. Unlike Jeremiah, he was killed for this, but on the same day (of the Jewish calender) as the first time, that Temple was burned, knocked down, everyone carted off to exile & slavery...

and various variant forms of the Judean religion caught the imagination of people all over the world. That doesn't really look like a accident, but like "Somebody is trying to tell us something!"

And yes, much of what appealed to people was the glamour of feeling themselves Chosen -- without the realization that being "chosen" may include some liabilities, might come down to wondering "Why me?!" more often than they'd like. (America has certainly fallen for this vulgar notion of being Chosen without needing to really behave better than the other kids... and it still afflicts us.)

Still a lot to be said.... [later, I hope!]

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 4:14pm

The sense of responsibility that comes with being Chosen does make religious sense to me.  The Angels, especially Lucifer, think Humankind was a gross mistake and reproach God for His experiment.  As humans, God's chosen next project (maybe angels were ETs on a previously key-focus planet, far away and long ago?), it behooves us to make God the proud daddy, not the angry frustrated kind.  We do so by reflecting His glory.

Thanks to continuing revelation, we're clearer now than we've ever been that Planet Earth is but a micro-spec in a vast cosmos, its biosphere as thin as the morning dew on a grapefruit.  She's a beautiful planet, pre-stocked with everything we'd need, sustainably (at least for some millions more years or so), and as such is our Promised Land.  Earlier prophets were more confused about the Biblical message and filtered it through their cultural matrix, what choice did they have?  Jews, highly literate, ahead of their time we could say, took on the challenge more than most, and have paid a high price for their courage.

Of course with the wisdom of hindsight, it's now obvious that our Israel is Planet Earth itself, and our destiny, as one humanity, is shared.  We are the Chosen and it's up to us to make a relative paradise of our Promised Land.  Not that everyone is up to thinking in this way.  It's easier to stay mired in nation-state politics and say "continuing revelation be damned".  It's the Chosen I'm talking about though, the ones who get it.  We'll show those skeptical angels that God was right to squander his Divine Attention in our direction after all.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 6:22pm

Oh! -- You mean, we who get it? Um!

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If I start talking about the referent of 'angels', I suspect you'll start insisting that the word don't mean nuthin. (We just like to use it cause it sounds pretty?) But there seem to be various usages, ie

1) a (seemingly) external form that God can 'take' for appearing-to and talking-with human beings. (Abraham's guests.)

2) a messenger useful for making Divine announcements (without incurring the mind-boggling concept of The Whole Big Kaboodle in a localized package)

3) something else. A spirit, god, demon, etc, in any & all senses ranging from some generic disembodied personality -- to a virtual 'embodiment' of some abstract quality -- to what my guy Stringfellow concluded the NT writers meant by 'Principalities and Powers.' :

"There is nothing particularly mysterious, superstitious, or imaginary about principalities... The realities to which the biblical terms 'principalities and powers' refer are quite familiar to modern society, though they may be called by different names. What the Bible calls 'principalities and powers" are called in contemporary language 'ideologies,' 'institutions,' and 'images.'

"A principality, whatever its particular form and variety, is a living reality, distinguishable from human and other organic life. It is not made or instituted by men, but, as with men and all creation, made by God for his own pleasure."

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There's something metaphoric about that last usage, as in phrases like 'in the spirit of' etc -- but it's a compelling metaphor for anyone who's ever taken on a policy, ideology, or institution -- and found a vast inertia, seemingly 'will of it's own' quality, quite beyond the individual human beings 'possessed' by that peculiar ideal...

I don't think ET quite qualifies...

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 29, 2016 at 8:06pm

Good to bring up what "angels" means, where and when.  That all meanings are context-dependent would seem a non-controversial way of restating my thesis, a corollary of which is it's beholden upon each author ("authority", "voice") to spell it out (what the context is).  

Piggy-backing on "global meanings" i.e. "what everybody already knows" is just lazy, though we can't always be expected to reinvent every wheel, either.  Religious talk especially, however, is a God-given imaginative clay, our birthright.  To forfeit one's freedom of religion in favor of buying it ready-made...  that's not Quakerism is it?  We're a DIY hands-on kind of sect.  Sure we'll talk theology, just don't think that means sitting at anyone's feet necessarily.  Theology is not the sole property of theologians, that much is obvious, and there's no law against rolling one's own (what we all end up doing anyway -- with only some choosing to accept responsibility for so doing (mostly it's just "go along to get along" where "angry fathers" are concerned)). 

That's why long books are needed, and/or wordy journals, or movies, because pithy summary definitions are not sufficient, even if necessary.  What I mean by "angels" or "Satan" is up to me to make clear, and if I work with the grain, not against, I'm more likely to get heard.  In using the word "angel" over and over, I'm piling up the use cases.  If I'm curious what another believes (very often the case), then I'll need use cases from that person. I should not "just assume" that I know what God means to so-and-so, or Presence or whatever. There's a learning that has to happen and learning meanings takes time.  Sometimes short cuts don't hack it.

Apropos of ETs being latter day angels is Carl Jung's speculations that all these UFO sightings and abductions, rather new in his lifetime, were taking over from earlier narratives regarding visitations from seemingly super-human beings, non-terrestrial in origin.  People used to see angels and demons but today they're seeing more through a lens tinged by science.  Could the "collective unconscious" have anything to do with these self-updating projections?  Inquiring minds wanna know. [1]

I resurrect the moribund angels meme as a way to creatively and constructively channel my own misanthropy.  We all have a mean streak I guess, or at least I do. My philanthropic Coffee Shops Network, more a business model than anything, sets philanthropy as its goal, encouraging customers to tackle challenging computer games, like what Oregon calls "video poker", where the winner gets to allocate the winnings, not the State. A long story, the short version being:  helping humanity is my overt goal.  

But then how should I channel my Evil Twin?  At Princeton we read Paradise Lost by Milton and were encouraged to get into the mindset of his Satan.  What exactly is he so exercised about, that guy?  What indeed?  Empathy for the Devil is a doorway into many a fruitful meditation, no?  Lots of authors have gone there.

Given my background and training, I'm used to the idea of needing thick tomes (e.g Heidegger's), lots of writings, to repurpose our words.  Few were as spare as Wittgenstein, and I don't blame them.  Creating a context:  how is that done?  I've been wondering on that topic for awhile now.  I used to write about "word meaning trajectories" to E.J. Applewhite in the 1990s, author of Paradise Mislaid.  How does meaning change over time?  "Stink", in Shakespeare's day, was a positive attribute.[2]

What is the meaning of "Pepsi" for example? I'd choose that deliberately in my philosophical writings because so jarringly crass and commercial.  "This can't be philosophy if it mentions commercial products!"  Oh yeah?  Says who?  Anyway, Pepsi, what does it mean?  We know advertisers spend millions to control the spin on their brands.  Pepsi is not just a dark sugary liquid meant to be imbibed in a chilled state.  On the contrary, it's the "choice of a new generation".  The logo looks like the Obama campaign's.  What Pepsi means is a "continuing revelation", carefully planned.

At least Madison Avenue comes out and admits it, in the form of MAD, at least originally, or as Hidden Persuaders.  I loved the genre as a kid.  "Motivational psychology", "preying on insecurities", "creating memes"... wow, if only religionists could be so honest, about how they've achieved their special effects.  I almost admire advertising more, and then I remember:  it's not either / or (it rarely is).  Yes, it's all about branding, Quakers in particular.  It's more transparent in their case than just about any other, thanks to a certain oats company.  "Manipulating symbols" is the name of the game (with or without any "glass beads").

So when it comes to "angels", "Promised Land", "the Chosen" and so on, please stand back and allow me to amplify. I'll cop to being a spin doctor, if that helps.  Go ahead and give your cynicism free rein, as I apply my craft and bring you the Many Meanings [tm] that I'd like to convey.  I'll even make it worse and say one orthodox Jew I know calls me Rabbi.  The urge to put me in my place will be strong.  But I do think I'm an effective teacher, at least in some walks of life.

More about Coffee Shops Network:
http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2009/12/quaker-view.html

[1]  I haven't read this yet, and may never, but it looks to be in the same ballpark:
http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Aliens-UFOs-Mythic-Imagination/dp/0449...

[2] actually that "stink" example is a bit hard to prove, though I found one link that looked promising.  I'm remembering some high school English teacher saying that I think.  But one may dredge up any number of similar examples.  Or just read something penned a really long time ago, ostensibly in English, and see if it makes ready sense.  Language keeps turning to dust in that way (Ozymandias nods); we presume humans two centuries from now will not furrow their brows and look lost, when reading our deeply cogent religio-political-econo analyses.  If history is any guide, I wouldn't count on it.  Belief systems have a half life -- a rule of thumb.  And God made it that way by design.  Any attempt to create a Tower of Babel in language is foredoomed, and for that fact I am grateful.  Future generations deserve to create newly, freed from our nonsense.

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