Category Archives: rants

Christianity redeems itself

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Christianity (as a culture, or civilization – as whole)
redeems itself of its manifold doctrinal errors in the practise of its religious duty (Praxis).

My reasoning lay in another understanding :
It is neither doctrine, kerygma, ekklesia or tradition/religion that bring salvation – but the Holy Spirit, which is received into man – and from man extends outwards to others, and to the entire cosmos, established upon Wisdom (Sophia).
The Wise, then – according to doctrine,kerygma,the life and ministry of the Katoikon of God (Ekklesia) and its tradition – endeavour to “Seek the Kingdom first“, whereupon all that is necessary and we are in need of – follows with its finding. This Kingdom is established on the Redemption of Wisdom itself, through the reception of the Holy Spirit.
What follows is that the entire cosmos, established upon Wisdom unredeemed, is in need of redemption, and so are we.

What then of the role of Christianity?
It is a continual point of dissension between us humans, when we have received word of the kingdom, a breath of the Gospel, a whisper of the wisdom;
and with gratitude absorbed it and applied it in life – we make sacred within a confined space of ourselves what has already been made sacred in a universal sense.
If we inspect our use of language about such matters as a personal or inherited, “formal” adherence to a religion, we find we expect identification with it will change the way we receive the world and are ourselves received by it – we invest the power and authority over salvation into it, wherever we see it expressed, wherever we expect it, we think of our religion as the domain and agent of God Himself.
You and I might disagree about this quite strongly, yet it is still my understanding that identification with a religion does not necessarely mean that either how we are perceived or how we perceive the world changes. Another argument would be that it _should_ or _ought_ to do so, in order to have been
received itself correctly. We might feel this so strongly that we insist upon it, rejecting all inquiry or
criticism.

The potentional of Christianity is tremendous, it is vast –
The praxis of Christianity has continued through two thousand years, apart from the strain which it has put on any individual, living in any century of – on a secular; societal and familiar level – it has availed millions towards a more conscious and humane lifestyle. Whatever the controversies have been, whatever indeed has been the inconsistencies in Kerygma,self-identification,even identification of the Praxis/duty of individuals
and whole denominations of Christians have been throughout two thousand years, the wholeness of this religion has exhibited unprecedented fruits and abilities – which many other religions and traditions have absorbed or emulated. Christianity, throughout the trajectories of late antiquity, served as a mediator of this light and its spirit
penetrated through the inert and subconscious layers caused by the degeneration of ancient cosmologies and their analogous intiatory and cultic institutions.

Therefore this writer can attest that the role of Christianity presently has been underestimated and misinterpreted for the good part of three centuries, and that consequently the rapport of certain innovations within occultism and
freethinking, still in the same perspective – falls short of their most coveted mark.

But we shall not be allowed, as Gnostics, to forget what has occasioned it, through Christ, to rise up and out of people like you and I – and why it is _still neeeded_: it has to do with what has happened to our Wisdom,
who were, are and will be – although changed dramatically – the foundation of the cosmoses.

Hiroshima!!

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Yesterday was a charged day.

It is 60 years since USA sanctioned the bombing of Hiroshima.

Jungian Psychologist Gerhard Adler said in a lecture April 1946:

“Don’t we all still remember the one morning last year when we woke up and found the world changed with one word, “Hiroshima”? Don’t we all remember the shock, the giddy feeling as if the bottom had dropped out from underneath somebody’s feet, and each of us was this somebody just as much as the wretched men, women and children far away on an island in the Eastern hemisphere? Tragic and strange as it may be, isn’t it true to say that for the first time since endless days mankind had felt and rediscovered its common fate? Had felt and rediscovered the fact of communion, the fact of the Indian “Tat twam asi” – of the “This is you”? Alas! Our seat had become very hot indeed to make us jump!”

It’s such a long walk – from the trenches of The first world war, from the horrible inhumanities of the Holocaust; to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to where you and I are today. Have we become more sensitive towards eachother and our common plight, as this thinker of the last century thought and hoped?

We have no reason to expect as much, only the closest catastrophe in the vicinity, only the most local atrocity – only the closest threat to our own lives, stirs us and awakes us, perpetually alienating us from the perceived “others”.

Quite recently, from a brief perspective of this very century – two airplanes were forced into collision with a high-rise skyscraper in New York, 9-11-2001, a date not a name, but everyone feel something quite conflicting and disturbing once it is brought up and really pondered. Then came wars,terror and a new darkening of the mind. Moral philosophers remind us again and again that there are no default difference between this flesh of mine and this flesh of yours, this kind and family of yours, and mine – and we nod, silently, for just the amount of time it takes for us to stack it away somewhere else.

But I was born into the decades of panic, of unsubstantiated horror, the aftermath of a great troubled time; the mushroom clouds of the Bikini Islands test bombing and the two Japanese cities reduced to dust in that fateful few days in August 1945 were a common symbol of imminent dissolution, we were told our own generation would not see itself succeeded. 1984, the Orwellian year, I joined the army of the damned and out, the kids who would shout back at the news reporters, the important know-it-alls of academia, the morally perturbed parents and relatives, who would smash anything, thrash anything and make as much noise they could – there’s no holding back when you know you have been cheated out of life, out of the privileges of all the former generations. My generation was already dead. I dressed the kind. We were heading for all-out televised Nuclear Holocaust. That’s what we were fed. Just Duck! The flimsy translated educational films they showed, there were air-raid drills every month – when I was in school. Old people felt sorry for us, and told us, but reminded us that nothing matched their horror of seeing the uniformed hordes marching on the main streets of our major cities at the German invasion of Norway, nothing matched the humiliation of eating pets and roots, nothing matched the fear of being ratted on by profiteering neighbours who wanted to mouth and lie themselves into the pockets of the German “overlords”..living in cellars.

I read dystopic science-fiction novels, kept for myself or at least to the little tribe of punks,hooligans and rebels and listed to anthems from the last decade, shouting “No Future!”.

But all that didn’t happen, what happened were that history opened up, didn’t it? What happened were that we gradually got used to this much shit and it kept going – genocides,civil wars,conflicts of every hue and colour, diplomatic idiocy, world leaders running around without their head on their shoulders -in the general populace the reaction was cynicism,crass materialism, pop culture going totally overboard – Punk Rock became trend and pop, the new guard wanted more thrills and trimmings, the grandaddies of the left wanted everyone to march the same direction. How I grew up to hate that scene. All the while, that iconic presence, that looming symbol of doom – the mushroom cloud, haunting me.

Now,I am 32. Yesterday I could not turn on the television.

On every second channel, a memorial in full cinematronic glory, recontructions,montages,scraps and fragments – a hundred mushroom clouds in slow motion, skin dangling from the terminally damaged bodies of the Hiroshimites who was smitten by the invoked Angel of Vengeance, children evaporating in the arms of their festering mothers… a slow, elaborate blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

I know it is construed, at least intellectually, that every contemporary inhabitant of Western “civilization” needs to watch until their eyes bleed tears of blood the atrocities done in their name, but I could not bring myself to watch.