And when Angus Buchan saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he hired Loftus Versveld and charged them money,

Saying, God gave me also this power, that whomsoever also buys the DVD of me praying and laying on hands, and possibly my book and movie, he may receive the Holy Ghost for the reasonable sum of R100 each: Cash or major credit card.

But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be sold as a book, a DVD and purchased by the faithless and lazy with money.

Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.

Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

Act 8:18

I call it a “mind blink,” where it’s seemingly so insignificant, but the whole world looks different after the blink. Perhaps it’s more clarity…. I don’t know.

Miller,

WHAT?!!? You don’t like movies?!? I am just appalled beyond description. I don’t know if we can be friends…

But it’s not like I object to other people being into sports or whatever. And I really do believe that religion would be better if it kept the god of faith and dropped the god of philosophy.

I don’t like writing about it, because writing is reductionistic.

Well, this I can relate to. There are any number of things I don’t even try to put into words but just enjoy or wonder or cringe at.

In Carl Jung’s psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises which were sometimes attempts at self reparation. Jung’s concept of metanoia influenced R. D. Laing and the therapeutic community movement which aimed, ideally, to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening their existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict.

Ponder…

An experience of a kind of mental “rebirth” it definitely was, and more adaptive, yea, also. It (hehe, objectifying my mind) had to settle back into reality, which took a little while, with post-thesis euphoria possibly also playing a role.

Ugh, I really do hate writing about this. Maybe the best way to express something like it, would be to make a film about it. Picture that: a modern reinterpretation of the story of Job. The final rush of perspective could be something akin to cramming the whole of the BBC “Planet Earth” series into a brain in 30 seconds. Hehe, dramatized, sure. But leaves you sitting back in awe, marvelling at this remarkable existence in all its glory and incomprehensibility.

If that paragraph doesn’t sit well with some readers, think of it in a pantheistic sense, maybe? (Viva a God of philosophers and scientists. )

Chew on the grit of life…

I have a friend who somewhat recently wrote a blog post about why he is not a Christian. He writes about God a lot, he is something of a “religion journalist”. He writes about Jesus as well. Why he isn’t a Christian, per se, was related to particular doctrines that he found relevant only in the context of a particular ancient tribe. But I digress.

He wrote that to him, God is more something that does not exist than it is something that exists. I think he looks at religion from something of an “elite” perspective, rather than a “popular” one. And he still prays, I think. Not for supernatural divine interventions, mind you.

How this story speaks to me, personally, is largely through the way it resonates with my own experiences. My experience (my “brief psychotic break”?) last December, is one that can be expressed in the terms of this parable. I have described it as “my meeting with God”. And a voice booming in my ear, metaphorically, or call it my thoughts about my existential crisis as I was facing “the Absurdness” of existence, said “Mortal! What more do you want?!”

The very first commenter on that post said this:

The deeper my faith gets, the less I believe in God and the more I would follow Jesus to the ends of the earth.

The parable speaks to me about the relationship between the God of Faith, and the God of the Philosophers. Richard Dawkins talks about the God of the Philosophers, in the sense that Peter lumps divine intervention into that category. I also do that (Peter’s lumping that is, not Dawkins’ talking). Dawkins rates himself, on his “Dawkins scale” from one to seven, as a six. The question then, how can one reach a seven? (This would be the kind of “atheist” the parable talks about.)

My views on the religious tradition and the striving and eventual reaching of a position a number of the so-called “elite” might have, connects with that opinion of my first friend. (That friend has some experience in Buddhism as well, having actually gone so far as to attend a monastery for some time.) I look at Dawkins’ linear scale from 1 to 7, and I think “but don’t they realise it wraps around?” I.e. I see it as something of a circle, that 1 and 7 wraps around, are somewhat adjacent, that you can find yourself on a place on that circle that is between one and seven.

Much of Peter Rollins’ work is going on about connecting to that something inside, that something from which religious convictions and “spirituality” flows, that piece or source of, um, “existentialist convictions”, inside. That which could be called the God “of faith”. Much of my own experience (aka psychotic break?) drew on things I had learned in Stellenbosch Gemeente months prior, I can identify some of the components, including experiences during a “toewydings week”. To me, it completed the circle, and left me standing in awe, having discovered “God dwelling in me”. The “God inside”. And the… um… meh.

I don’t like writing about it, because writing is reductionistic. This is something of a feeling/experience that I’m trying to write about. I feel spelling it out kinda does an injustice to the whole experience. It certainly isn’t the “KISS” way of approaching Humanism, but the journey gives something of a different perspective and angle on “life, the universe, and everything” and how to play a positive role in it all. The experience itself was pretty profound.

My favourite kind of “Christian” would be those that don’t believe in an afterlife (or alternatively, that have no beliefs about the afterlife). Those that don’t appeal to supernatural and divine intervention. Those aspects are not “necessary”, but I think they are “sufficient”: I feel those people connect to what I consider to be the “heart” of Christianity. And clearly I believe it does have heart, even if much of contemporary Christianity seems “heartless” (figuratively). In any case, I think this parable may speak to, and of, those people.

“God says: I don’t exist”… the “God of Faith”, talking about the “God of the Philosophers”. The “something inside”, coming to a conviction that is in itself a kind of leap-of-faith, that ends up intimately connecting you with your chosen way of life. Be that Jesus (ala that first commenter, who describes it well), or be that some other meaning created by someone, in an existentialist sense.

By the way, (not completely unrelated, but related in the way I make weird jumps and connections in my mind), I loved the third “fundamentalism from an existentialist perspective” post on de-conversion: Existentialism: Death and Isolation « de-conversion. At some point I’ll try to do the “reinterpretation” thing, sketching out what I might describe as “liberal Christianity for existentialists”, sketching out a “liberal Christian” tradition and its conscious and self-aware answers to the existentialist’s “big questions to ponder”.

It is a parable.

I read it. I don’t get it.

There is something that they have a personal experience of. Sure. They call that God. Sure. But does that have anything to do with the age of the earth? Nope, not really. That really is a separate issue… and if these issues can be understood separately, it may allow addressing the science-denialism without fighting every aspect of their psyche and culture.