Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“I worry a bit about the glorification of consciousness as the pinnacle of all Creation…there is…a seductive, but deceptive, seeming move away from anthropocentrism in the ascription of consciousness to all things, but what this really does, I think, is to say “oh right, all things are like us, or all things have this awesome…
“In this one image of the world as God’s body, we are invited to see the creator in the creation, the source of all existence in and through what is bodied forth from that source.” –Sally McFague Below is a comment I left on a thread in the radical theology fb group (a very good…
“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from…
“Moral and religious authority will always tip toward the blood of the martyrs, and military service is the only martyrological option available to Americans…In America, the weight of blood tips the scales of sacred authority toward the state and away from the church. The nation state is elevated above the church by the sacred authority…
“It is certainly the case that many cultural traditions with their varying modes of reasoning are already embedded within Christianity. The Bible alone contains texts that celebrate different and sometimes conflicting accounts of the world, exposing a range of rationalities that are expressed in a variety of genres. But even more important for theology’s work…
“Finally there is nature, the physical world proper. Here esotericism differs radically from modern science, which regards consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a kind of side effect, of neurological processes. For the esotericist, consciousness is primary; matter comes after.” –Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition I’ve been reading Richard Smoley’s book, Inner…
“That biblical vision of a world-for-all did not come from our modern ideas of democratic power or our contemporary claims about human or civil rights. It did not come from liberalism, socialism, or communism. In recognizing its challenge we are not retrojecting any of that modernity back onto antiquity. A world-for-all came, if one needs…
“Peterson’s writings are a hodgepodge of Christian existentialism, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and E. O. Wilson. But the main philosophical issue is his Nietzschean conception of power. Only a strong will, exercising itself against a contingent and meaningless world — and against the weak — can ever hope to flourish […] Peterson’s…
“All tribes unite at the Godhead and then walk away with their differing tribal missions: that is the aim of the 21st century, to achieve that realization and walk from the whole toward infinite fracturing into communities that reflect what its members actually believe. It is the only way to purge ourselves of guilt and…
I may certainly be misunderstanding the concept (or understanding it incompletely) but for me, as a process-relational thinker, the pejorative ontotheological criticism/dismissal has never bothered me much in the first place, and as a panpsychically-oriented, panentheistic religious naturalist I again don’t care. A) in the process-relational conception of things the “ontic” category isn’t really meaningful,…