Andrew Cort's Blog, page 32

NEWT'S CHURCHGOING IMMIGRANTS

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I listened with interest to the Republican Debate the other night, and was especially struck by Newt Gingrich's comments on immigration. Despite being of a very different political persuasion, I often find Gingrich's comments to be thoughtful and intelligent, and far prefer to listen to him than to the others.

When he first began to speak, I appreciated the fairness and decency that he was advocating. He said he wouldn't favor kicking out an immigrant "If you've been here 25 years and you've got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law…" So some illegal immigrants ought to be sent home, but others – who have lived here peacefully for many years, who have taken care of themselves and their families, who contribute to the country and their community and are good friends and neighbors – have earned a little humane consideration, and "I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out."


So far so good. As a loving father myself, and without obsessing about all the smarmy moralism of the ultra-right-wing, I certainly appreciate giving value to the family and keeping children safely with their parents. As a citizen, I appreciated the underlying acknowledgement that the American legal system has always included a tradition of fairness and Equity as a balance to the concept of strict adherence to the letter of the Law. Also, as we have always recognized, America needs new influxes of immigrants - to stimulate the economy, to stimulate culture, to bring new ideas, new innovations, and new life.

But there was one other thing he said, more than once, that really turned me off. During the debate, and in several interviews that followed it, Gingrich kept repeating that one of his criteria for deciding if an immigrant was a good enough person to remain in this land of the free was if they'd been attending church .


I really hate this kind of off-hand "Christian nation" stuff. I suppose I'll be accused of nit-picking, but I don't think that's it. What if an immigrant has been attending a Synagogue? What if (God forbid!) an immigrant has been attending a Mosque? What if (horror of horror to good Republicans) an immigrant has been a peaceful, loving, contributing member of American society for many years, but happens to be an Atheist? Would Gingrich recommend any special consideration for them, would he allow them to stay in America?

Actually, if pressed (which no news commentator did so far as I am aware), I'm fairly certain he would. I don't think this was an example of overt bigotry so much as yet another example of the nonchalant presumption many people have that America, despite the Constitution and the statements and efforts of the founders of the country, is somehow nonetheless a "Christian Nation". It's just this laziness of thought, this rude, dangerous, unquestioned (and inaccurate) assumption, that I object to.

In the new 'Forum' I'm hoping to get going on this site, I've introduced a 'Church and State' thread by saying: "Religion is playing such an important role in the current election cycle. What do you think of this? For my part, I believe that to maintain freedom and equality the spirit must reject dogmatism, and religions must remain within their proper bounds! On the other hand, I'm a fervent supporter of a spiritual renewal  in contemporary life, and I find that traditional religions as well as all spiritual traditions, eastern and western, have much to offer. But as a long-time high school teacher, I can think of nothing worse for religion than to leave it up to the schools to teach our children about spiritual matters, and as an attorney and a Jew I have the greatest respect for the American Founders' decision to separate church and state. In fact, I am convinced that the increasing vibrancy of religion, faith, and spirituality in America can be traced precisely to the fact that religion is not imposed on our citizens and the government is not allowed to put its foot in religious matters. It sickens me to hear people claim 'this is a Christian nation', and so forth."
I invite you to share your views.
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COMMUNION, SALVATION, & MYSTICAL UNION

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Jesus tells his followers that "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…. [F]or my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink."
The ritual of Communion is a ritual of sacrifice and rebirth, a renewal of the binding compact between the people and God – the ancient Hebrew covenant – whose symbolism of circumcision always included the cutting of flesh and the letting of sacrificial blood. This is not a new covenant, but a renewed understanding of the covenant, with new multifaceted symbols. There are many levels of meaning, e.g.,
The flesh, the 'Bread', is the outer, the material. 
The blood, the 'Wine', is the inner, the spiritual. 
The flesh also symbolizes the life of Action , the domain of the Lesser Mysteries: the descent into this realm. The blood symbolizes the life of Contemplation , the domain of the Greater Mysteries: the ascent back to God. All of this will be 'fed' (taught) to the initiate. The two sublime principles will then blend and reunite within the soul, and the results will permeate the entire being. The initiate, like Christ, can then 'die' to this world and return to the upper realms. 

The Sacrament of the Eucharist, notes Frithjof Schuon, serves two distinct purposes, one for the ordinary churchgoer and another for the initiate: "[I]n the first case their end is salvation pure and simple, and in the second it is mystical union ." This dual usage sheds light on the distinction between exotericism and esotericism. As Schuon goes on to point out, all of Christ's efforts to refresh our understanding of the ancient teachings, so that we can begin to think and see in a new way, illustrate and confirm his clear conviction in the superiority of the esoteric to the exoteric.
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OUR NEW "FORUM" PAGE

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I've created a new SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION FORUM (see "Forum" Tab above). I hope you'll participate and start spreading the news. 
I've started it off by initiating 4 Threads ( by all means, start more topics of your choice! ). The four so far are:
(1) Introductions: Share something about you, your interests, your work.
(2) Church and State: This is an election year and religion-in-politics is an increasingly important and noisy subject. What are your views?
(3) Fundamentalism: Whether Christian, Islamic, or any other type, fundamentalism is playing a major and growing role in our lives. Where do you stand?
(4) Meaningful Gifts for the Holidays: We all complain about the excessive commercialism, but we love our children, families and friends, and we're probably going to buy gifts. Do you have any good suggestions?
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ARE ALL RELIGIONS REALLY TEACHING THE SAME THING?

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"Isn't this idea offensive to many adherents of different faiths and sects who believe they are following the only 'real' teaching?"

First of all, I would say that they are right, they are following the only 'real' teaching. Because there's only one real teaching – just different ways of expressing it .

Here's an example of what I mean: When Jesus tells his followers that the "only way to the Father is through me", it's absolutely true! But this is not because Christianity has an exclusive path to God. It's because the Level of Being that the Bible calls "Father" can only be attained through the Level it calls "Son". The 'Son' symbolizes the Mediator between the highest divine state and this material world, and this means that we are connected to God only through this very high Level of Being which is represented in Christianity by the Christ. You can't get around it.

But needless to say, there are countless other "Father and Son" stories in the various traditions – Abraham and Isaac, Uranos and Cronos – as well as "Mother and Daughter" stories like Demeter and Persephone. They are all teaching the very same inner Truth.

Even St. Augustine said, "That which today is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and has never ceased to exist from the origin of the human race until the time when Christ himself came and men began to call 'Christian' the true religion which already existed beforehand. "

All inner spiritual teaching, whatever the Tradition, is aimed at preparing the eye of the soul to open, so that Divine Light can enter and we will be able to 'see' Reality – above our sense perceptions, above our foolish prejudices, above our narcissistic 'reason'. This actual preparation, however, is precisely what is missing from our modern versions of religion. "With a truly tragic delusion," Carl Jung noted, "these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing."

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IT'S BLACK FRIDAY! WHY ARE YOU SURFING THE INTERNET? LET'S GO SHOPPING!

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In the years immediately following WWII, a remarkable shift occurred in American economic life. For the first time in history, we reached a stage of prosperous development in which we could produce far more goods and services than anyone needed. Various factors combined to create this new situation, including advanced industrial technology, wartime expansion of the economy, the destruction of Europe's industrial base while our own remained unscathed, and women added to the workforce. 

To sustain all this growth, to continue paying wages and continue expanding profits, it was deemed necessary to stimulate our habits of consumption, to artificially increase the public's appetite for what was being produced. No longer were manufacturers content with simply determining what people wanted and needed. Thenceforward, to a degree never witnessed before, it became necessary to learn effective ways of persuading people that they wanted and needed all sorts of things that they had never wanted or needed before. As a result, the public was soon being bombarded with non-stop messages to fall into line and do what we were being told: the duty of Americans, it became clear, was to go shopping! The 'good life' had been confused with the 'goods'.

So c'mon. Race you to Walmart!

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ARLO, "ALICE'S RESTAURANT", AND A VERY HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

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I know, it's a little off-topic, but we do talk about Peace and Getting Along here. So here's a Special Post of a Thanksgiving Tradition: Arlo Guthrie reprises his incomparable 'Alice's Restaurant'.




HAPPY THANKSGIVING!








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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS - SOLVING THE WRONG MYSTERY

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"The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C."
There is "big news" today on Yahoo about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved
Owen Jarus | LiveScience.com, on YAHOO NEWS, 11/22/11. The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.***There's more of course, but in my opinion all of this is beside the point!

I am certainly not of the opinion that God literally picked up a pencil and wrote the Bible, or that Moses sat down and wrote every word of the Torah before he died. But I find it sadly amusing to watch all these experts obsessed by the madness of frantically worrying about "who really wrote this part", "when was this part really written", and other useless intellectual wild goose chases. 


Long after the events that are related in these parchments, Socrates will teach his pupils that only those things that help to perfect one's soul can be called 'moral' or 'good'. Moses and Jesus would certainly agree. Knowing the actual name of the person who wrote this or that passage in the Bible, contributes nothing to the perfection of one's soul. Proving that a passage was written in this or that city on such and such date, contributes nothing to the perfection of one's soul. Even finding the archeological remnants of a boat on a mountain in Afghanistan, and proving beyond any possible doubt that a man named Noah built it, would still contribute absolutely nothing to the perfection of one's soul. Similarly, if we found a marriage certificate in one of these buried jars, signed by Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth, this discovery would contribute nothing to the perfection of one's soul.

Quests of this sort can be intellectually stimulating, and they can certainly be a great deal of fun – heaven knows, there are far worse things with which we could occupy ourselves. But they have little or no spiritual significance. In fact, they often just hypnotize us and drag us away from what is really important – the inner effort to perfect our own soul . 


I am fully convinced that the people who wrote down these ancient myths and stories knew exactly what they were doing. They were consciously and deliberately designed and recorded by brilliant and enlightened initiates. Within the mystery of their symbolism, they contain the precise blueprint of the Creation, and the path of the human soul – the microcosm of the Creation – as it fulfills its destiny and returns to God. We should put aside the scientific demand for 'proof' and the academic fascination with textual criticism, and ask ourselves more important, human, and relevant questions:



What are these stories trying to tell me? How can these words help me with my life? How can my struggle to unveil their inner meaning help my soul evolve? What are they telling me to do, and how can I do it?

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AFTER THE FIRE AND THE STORM

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"After all the fire and storm of the historical process, the struggles between good and evil, progress and reaction, the long and difficult climb from barbarism and slavery up into the light of civilization and finally of free civil society, at last and at length we struggle up to the peak of the mountain to encounter the culmination of generations of human striving: Homer Simpson…. The world turns into a big mall, and we all go shopping: forever…. Were all the heroism of the past, all the suffering, all the passionate faith, the sacrifice, the religious and political contests, simply to build a shopper's paradise?"- Walter Russell Meadin God and Gold 
In conceiving his famous symbolic allegory of humans as slaves chained to their seats, staring forever at images flickering on the wall of a cave, Plato could never have imagined how fantastically real his vision would one day become in a world where people sit for hours each day in their chairs staring at images on their television and computer screens. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that television and internet programming and advertising assume an audience of morons who each have an attention span that can be measured in milliseconds. Tocqueville warned us that art in a democracy could easily become crude and shoddy and facile. Even he would never have dreamed that we would be so willing to stare all day at an endless procession of brutal, obscene, degrading, and smarmy shows and commercials that focus chiefly on over-consumption and titillating entertainment.
Imagine a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in his living room doing his homework, plugged into his earphones and watching MTV. "He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism," notes Allan Bloom, "consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially packaged masturbational fantasy."
Anyway, or so we say to comfort ourselves, the schools are teaching them healthy values and it is not the job of parents to inflict their morals on their children.

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TODAY'S SATURDAY. LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO DO?

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If you're looking for something to do today (Saturday, November 19, 2011), and happen to be in or near the Western/Central Massachusetts area, I'll be giving several talks as part of the "Changing Times, Changing World" Conference at the UMass Amherst Hotel at the Campus Center in Amherst. Come Join Us!

Here's what I'll be talking about:

10:30     THE SACRED FEMININE IN THE BIBLE


12:00     THE TORAH AND GOSPELS AS A RITE OF INITIATION

2:00       THE UNDERLYING UNITY OF RELIGIONS 

JULIET SCHOR'S 'E. F. SCHUMACHER LECTURE'

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In her beautifully delivered lecture, Juliet Schor describes the current "bankruptcy of macroeconomics" and proposes a new path for economic development in the North: shorter work hours and greater collaboration in the workplace combined with high-tech applications -- all presenting a "transitional strategy for an exit from highly destructive large firms that now dominate the economy." She goes on to praise the newly emerging, self-providing, cooperative economy -- detailing a picture of personal action and possibility.



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