sirguessalot

to add... fear and loathing of elitism seems a natural response to many centuries of punishing mythic and rational elitism 2d mythical elitism = TWI and fundamentalist hierarchies...or even family hierarchies 3d rational eltism = the elitism of specialists, professionals, academics, etc......a "darwinian" hierarchy in business models and with the birth of post-modern thought about a century ago...we have been experiencing a whole new hypocritical elitism.... "no one is better than any one else (which is partially true)...therefore there are no levels of development (which is partially not true)" ...the hypocricy being the invisible elitism of such a position when everything everything everything develops in waves, lines, stages and other stratospheres and this includes the human capacity to know..to cognate...to feel...to think...etc... heck...by the time we are in our 20s and reading this message...we have already developed through many many stages of mere existence ...and a half dozen since becoming human but rejection of stages of development (in language and discourse) has become pandemic since the advent of post-modernity and seems to have been supporting and feeding every kind of self-centeredness we can imagine ever since (if there "are" no levels of development...we cant say "hey...that guy running this company IS acting like a 2-yr old!" without being nonviolently oppressed with "who are you to judge another?") ...giving us GWB as a world-leader..for example ... and as far as upper stages of development... much like the view down...its like looking at a ladder that goes on forever though we CAN measure the bandwith of the ladder we find our selves on ... but i pray for a day when the world can look for/to leaders (political, religious, economic, scientific) who demonstrate perspectives that are worth calling "holy" (or whole..or holistic...or whole-minded/hearted..whatever) (rather than kill them...which is what we have usually done to highly developed people) but it wont happen if we do not allow our selves to distinguish between levels of development (along whatever line)

no sweat Lindy and apologies, as i am not able to engage in the long written hypertextual conversations required to cover such things but i appreciate your response, and do feel i owe some sort of reply and i will attempt to respond again as much as i can..but i am not promising any thing so here goes an attempt at a chaser for that bad taste... here are some of my favorite names in the fields of ego-development, cognitive development, faith development, moral development, values development, etc... clare graves jane loevinger james fowler lawrence kohlberg susanne cook grueter ken wilber don beck jean piaget erik erikson many more...and many of them do not even know each other...let alone agree and i think it helps to keep a few things in mind... (and i will write in the common absolutist voice so as not to sound too kooky) - most, if not all, developmental models cover a specific kind (or line) of development...and do not claim that there are "different levels of people" - there is a worldview that strongly rejects most all notions of development...but good thing is that it is a middle stage...bad thing is that it is also one of the dominant worldviews today - post-rational worldviews (at best) include a rational capacity...and so there are post-rational approaches to development that are indeed highly objective..perhaps even more objective than merely rational - some folks who study fields of development do so from a mythic worldview...and have simply adopted the language - both myth and reason are highly valuable to post-rational worldviews - what i write here is a very simple summation of what i have come to understand and experience...i am not attached to the maps and models and language-sets i use - i do highly value the nature of paradox overall...i find the entire integration of philosophical-spiritual-psychological wad of maps and languages to be a very tangled tangled tangled mess ...and not able to be reduced to simple soundbites and cliches...but a mess that can be unravelled and understood (not merely deconstructed) and i find that the most functionally inclusive way to approach any field of study/practice/experience is to include subjective, inter-subjective, objective, and inter-objective modes of knowing about them as there are spectrums of subjective development (such as stages of our self-sense in psychology) and there are spectrums of inter-subjective development (such as stages of values development in cultural anthropology) both of which are as valid as fields of study, practice and experience as objective (such behaviorism) and interobjective (such as ecology and economics) and pre-rational maps (and approaches) are very different than post-rational maps in many very significant ways.. ...for one ...that the pre-rational maps are merely subjective, often strongly attached to, and based on historic mythic and magical givens (like many metaphysics) but the post-rational is objectively measuring nature as it unfolds...whether it is interior nature, or collective interior nature not based on some preexisting ladder that we are to fill in...but based on a ladder that is always being built now and the post-rational is NOT attached to the maps (although it may be thrilled with them)...recognizing that the language is not the same as the thing being named and if done well...post-rational recognizes and includes the intersubjective nature of the researchers any science that does not include the subjective and inter-subjective perspectives in the equation seems merely rational...and half-a$$ at being rational as any objective approach that dismisses the value of subjectivity is not entirely rational anyway .. much more...but that is my feeble sloppy attempt to summarize a lot with very little time ive been hoping for years to afford to sit still for years and do the topic the justice i feel it deserves for now..i ramble semi-poetically in the back room of a cyber cafe in the off-chance some of my friends might find something in it all ... and again...as it pertains to "There is no God" i find that this statement (as it is commonly made) refers to the nonexistance of a merely mythic God as declared from a merely rational perspective but i repeat...that the conversations about the experience of God continues long after the rational worldview debunks the textual myths ...and long after the post-modern deconstructive worldview unravels all our languages though i must add.. that the "there is no God" kind of statement is also quite true ..in the higher sense that "God" "the holy spirit" is cross-traditionally experienced as pure formless emptiness...which is simply nothing ...although this pure "nothing" is "more" than it seems

hi jj thanks for being patient mostly, i'm not sure how to respond but i'm also currently unable to sit still and write very much but i'll say this... worldviews change many times in one's life one of the things i like most about ehrman's book (from what i've gleaned of it) is how he is writing of his experience of transformation .. sorry to bail out on ya Todd

yeah..even worse the many-layered dissolution of our body, of our mind, of our heart, our self, our dreams is a creshendo that can take days, weeks, months, years for every part and whole to play out and it is not entirely uncommon for people to come back from death, comas, and other altered states sometimes in response to events going in life around them sometimes from simply waking up in a morgue the will to live and the substance of soul are resilient forces within us and will often defy what the body is trying to do of course, those with mythic worldviews are going to translate these experiences one way those with rational will translate it another those with a magic worldview...yet another other worldviews...others and so forth... same kinds of events...viewed through different kinds of windows

a nibble... Gal 4:9 Strongs KJV in the light of contemplation i am finding that what the passage seems to be saying about "elements" opens quite a pandora's box of possible meaning Stoicheion seems like a significant word occurs 7 times in the NT i can only imagine how else it might occur outside the standard Bible what do you see in there, greg123?

to add... i also think that perhaps its fair to say that this perspective..as it is being interpreted by Tolle certainly seems to be some sort of abrupt "cliff" of an affair when it comes to the human ego and though it could have been wiser if our elders had known to show us such cliffs at some earlier stage of life but we are here as we are now...which is still pretty damn plenty, if you know what i mean and so maybe its also worth pointing out that while it does not seem kind to push friends off cliffs ...holding hands and jumping when everyone is damn well ready, does though obviously sometimes life its self pushes us off, as well ...so i suppose this is where experienced "cliff-jumpers" come in handy ok...maybe ive worn the analogy out already i hope someone gets my drift

very nice link during my studies in "end-of-life spirituality," i've seen how experiences/studies/practices in consciousness, spirituality, and medicine are all very closely connected some of the most insightful, most compassionate people i have ever met have spent decades working with coma patients ...and some of the most hopeful messages i have ever read/heard came from people who were dying, or otherwise suffering from some serious illness and the deeper interior experiences that come with that ...or even from people who are simply very very old and at peace and i am not surprised how someone experiencing a stroke may "fall into" other states of awareness and have incredible insights ...especially those who are already experts in other scientific and medical fields again...i believe Tolle's message is the tip of an iceberg...and perhaps one of the most relevent messages to a culture/world experiencing the trauma of many levels of dying...the seismic shift of billions of states of mind being altered by unprecedented circumstance Tolle speaks not of a mindset...but of the space the all mindsets occur in which is good wisdom for when we are in-between as we all seem to seem to be to some depth and degree

a few things... i would have to say that Ehrman would go much farther in his quest if he were to at least examine and compare his preferred scriptures (and preferred interpretations) with the scriptures and interpretations of other world traditions ("scriptures," philosophies, wisdoms, living teachers, etc..) ...or at least as many as he can comprehend and i must also add that he seems to be taking the natural necessary steps in realizing the limits of a "mythic" worldview and leaning into a more "rational" worldview but a life-altering shift in worldviews is no small event for any of us and i couldn't blame him for not immediately leaping into the worldview that i first suggested because a worldview that would dare to compare all world scriptures with integrity does not come until the limits of a rational worldview have been exhausted and one cant skip worldviews in this way, anyway as each worldview emerges from the failures of previous worldviews essentially building on the failures of previous worldviews (but hopefully including the positive aspects) but it is only natural for a rational worldview to be highly concerned with finding the holes in the logic of previous mythic interpretations, as healthy skepticism, objectivity, and critical thinking are some of the beautiful hallmarks of rational thought. but a very common mistake made by rational thinkers (as it seems Erhman is beginning to make) is how, in debunking the myths of fundamentalist, or ethnocentric view of God they tend to then dismiss ALL notions that use the word "God"...and Bibles which includes worldviews about suffering that the newborn rationalist has not experienced and ...please know that i am writing in a very simple general overview of my perspectives and obviously leaving quite a bit of detail out ... that said... the rational worldview cannot find an answer to "if a loving God, why suffering?" in part, because the answer is not merely an objective one it is, at least, all at once...objective, interobjective, subjective and intersubjective which is at least 3 times as much as a rational worldview can handle and the mythic worldview can't answer it in part, because the answer is not merely an intersubjective one such as when a group agrees that "God" is a powerful entity that acts like they want humans to act ..they will always be disappointed...and forced to continue to modify the myth to deal with the outrageous contradictions ("why would a loving God (who acts like a perfect human) allow the billions of human infants to die tragically?") eventually, one can see that the problem is not in the answer but in the quality of the question ... i, my self, would dare to say that suffering is the nature of the entire universe and from "God's" perspective...suffering is good, true and beautiful but only if suffering is truly universal...can it be so when we are focused on merely human forms of suffering or merely "why my human group suffers" and "why their human group suffers" ...the integral question will continue to elude us... the causes and effects of suffering (and therefore "blame") can only be seen if an entire chain of being ("kingdom/s of God") is included in one's contemplation of suffering when we remember how the human form has only barely recently emerged from a very long history of suffering, (big bangs...planet formation...flora and fauna finding a gazillion different ways to die...etc...) when we are NOT relying on an anthropomorphic myth of God (but on higher-wider-deeper meanings of "God" ...as known in the depths of most all traditions) we may see that there is no guarantee of earned safety and bliss for any human ego... and yet how "God" is always already also "there" to "save" the reality of who we are ...pure formless spirit ... perhaps a way to help us view "suffering" is to stop using the word "suffering" altogether (for awhile) and find other words and phrases and descriptions that more adequately describe what we are looking into..and why such as... to suffer is to exist is to change...is to transform... and to transform is to lose some thing... and to suffer loss is to experience loss and to experience transformation because our experience is always changing... our experience is as fluid as fire... and "God" is an all-consuming fire from which there is "no escape" although using negative-seeming terminology to express inevitable forces is also often mistaken for mere negativity ... ok, enough from me for now its probably not hard to see why i hang out in the dungeon feel free to contribute, comment, inquire, reflect, ignore, etc... in all curiousity, kindness, and precision +ODD

that seems a very important point, e as if ...at any step of the way our footing is stolen (to whatever depth and degree) no matter how many steps we take from there that stolen step will continue to cast a shadow like an unlit candle on our menora and so there can be individual shadows and cultural shadows .. cast by waves of individuals i dont think its hard to see how important early childhood is or how important it is to stay in touch with the pain of our past as a way to help heal from what cant be changed i would even go as far as to say that this is where the most important work of our second half of life is ...to find out how to live with what went down in the first half... i think notions of "redemption" tie in here, too perhaps the same goes for religions..cultures...worlds

just want to say that this seems so very true, dooj good way to put it seems a big part of the post-twi conflicts we experience here how some go back to "me" and some just move sideways to another "we" and some move on to other things

yeah...i think that is a good way to start looking at it and even further...is how humanity is developing through larger collective waves much like an individual does ...parallel tracks on very different scales in other words, for example...there was a time when mythic fundamentalism was the cutting edge and was a new and better alternative to the self-centered governing style of tyrannical god-kings in one sense, this was when human governmental structures and patterns first started leaving the "terrible 2s" and people started learning how to join as groups for reasons of a shared ideal just as there was an age when reason was the lapping edge of history ...once we found that mythic virtues did not do everything we needed another way to see it... how it is in the "religious season" of life (and history) that "we" and "our" first became highest priority before that, "me" was the highest value system which is also a big part of why i think there was authentic value and healing found in entering twi because in spite of how limited and distorted the doctrines and practices TWI genuinely served to help many move from being focused on "me" to tasting a deeper sense of "we" "it was the fellowship" we hear so often but the experiencing a "we" was only the first step on a much longer journey of many steps ...not the last step whether an individual or a wave of individuals ... i hope that helps see what i see a bit more as it relates to this thread... once we start to see that there IS such thing as depths and degrees of human values and interactions we can start to evaluate the quality of a religious communities values with a much wider scale ...a scale that allows for a much broader spectrum of both reasons and meanings

i must confess that your question opens a pandora's box with me touching most directly into fields of study and practice that interest me and have for a number of years but i will try to take a very brief stab at it and to be honest...until i can literally focus to sit and write about this topic for days and weeks on end the more effective way for me would be to have live conversations about it all with a transcriber in the room otherwise, i can only leak in small written spastic bursts ... and honestly...i can hardly stand writing about things i am passionate about in small spastic bursts any more that said... there is a wide range of styles and types and methods and manners and degrees and processes of human dialogue and civil discourse and the higher more effective forms involve utilization of some sort of coherent body of contracts, agreements, assumptions, etc... ...almost like having another level of conversations parallel to the other conversations so as to help us keep our bearing and from spiralling off into a free-for-all where assumptions are mostly private, veiled, distorted, unspoken, etc... and we mostly fill the air with noise i personally have come to call this din "the cocktail party" level of conversation or "trees full of birds chirping over one another" there is a time and place for it but not only do we happen to live in a mainstream that has never known much about any higher forms of civil discourse but we have this new hypertextual gizmo that we've barely even begun to teach ourselves how to use it but there is no shame in being born into such madness, imo we are all more-or-less soaking wet with the same "inheritance" but to start...it seems we would do well to lean towards creating some sort of anatomy of agreements parallel to the daily jibber jab but i also think that means we would have to use this softare a bit differently than we are used to for example...as it relates to this thread...i can see the value of having a separate threaded conversation in the doctrinal forum about how we want to have conversations in the doctrinal forum. if we could somehow pin that thread...or better yet, have the post at top always editable (or maybe even a link to something such as a wikispace for the more ambitious), we could "polish the touchstones" that we have created together. This "anatomy of our assumptions" would be like a reference point for other conversations. we would have a mutually supporting dynamic of both linear conversations and non-linear conversations without some sort of ability to create our own document this "body" of folks will have a mostly hidden "constitution" and as an example...one of the first kinds of things i would put up for discussion...something i might want to ask of everyone, something we kind of already do ..kinda ...is if we can all assume that it is ok for thread starters to set the "rules of play" for the threads they start...and participants agree to abide by those rules...and that any aggressive deviation from those requests are basically considered uncivil and disruptive. This would foster thread starters to be even more free to get creative with suggested ways, types, styles of conversational invitations and its even less likely for one to be suprised or confused if someone makes such a request ...or why someone is restricted from posting after having ignored the agreement again...that is just an example of how contracts can help alongside dialogue. and constitutions work best if they are considered to always be renogotiable with a method of re-negotiation being the same as the method of the initial negotiation which is a whole nuther subject and we dont need to be anal or dogmatic about what we call them ...such friendships can be seriously playful

if i may point out that there has been virtually no agreement...or community "contract"...as to how a (this) doctrinal thread should or should not ....happen its way too easy to assert one's own assumptions and expectations as to how things should go when writing about things of God without such an agreement...or attempt at an agreement...we are almost always putting the proverbial cart before the horse starting off on the wrong foot jumping the gun yada yada yada

id like to try to restate what i was trying to say before because i was really trying to address this kind of question: and i think this next quote really hits a very valid important point because what i am trying to say (along with what dooj said about pausing) is that we can recognize how our belief systems are moving through an entire spectrum of being wrong an entire spectrum of being fooled an entire spectrum of humiliations an entire spectrum of re-evaluating our worldviews not just 2 worldviews ...where we go from a bad worldview to a good one ...or where we wonder if our worldview is good or evil but where every worldview we experience is seen as valid for a time ...until we are done with it and discover its wisdom ...and it limitations and until we can start handling this kind of possibility in our conversations we will continue to respond to very important questions like "Was TWI no worse than other religions?" in a 2-dimensional way i am trying to suggest that we might do well to also try to locate the overall TWI value system (as well as other religions being used for comparison) on a map that has more options than mere good or evil (monochromatic) so when we look at religious history...we can see a spectrum of values at play within religions and when we look at the twi experiences...we can see spectrums of values at play within twi etc... ...a more biblical map where "the mind of christ" is often vividly described as being surrounded by a rainbow

a few things... i cant help but notice the obvious difference between an individual offering a question to a group and a group questioning an individual i also cant help but notice the many obvious differences between cman and Mike, in doctrine (as posted) and practice (as posted) ...which seems to make the comparison unfair to both of them..and perhaps unwise that aside... i do think its an and/also situation with what Jesus may have meant perhaps even speaking of the manifold layers of marriage (and sexuality) with one fell swoop of his tongue i would expect no less from him to speak of spirit and soul while also speaking of the carnal

thanks rascal, me too

thanks dooj, yeah just trying to help, rascal

i have to say that i cant bring my self to agree with these 3 points, ...but i'm also guessing it might be better for me to participate in a separate thread on the nature of suffering or something, as i havent read Ehrman's book

thanks jj that does help i'm not sure "unanswerable" is satisfactory either

being a 27th way corps drop-out reflecting on twi doctrines and practices as it relates to being toughened up for God...in general it seems we are soaking wet in the aftermath of not having taught many generations of young boys how to become wise compassionate elders and it shows in our languages, theologies, medicines, politics, business, etc... in a nutshell...we stopped teaching our young boys how to go on a quest and fail with grace robbing them of a vital life lesson and rite of passage that keeps them from becoming greedy, vengeful, paranoid, victory-minded old geezers where weakness and loss and failure is given lip-service...but ultimately treated as a dangerous condition all this gives rise to false notions that we are somehow entirely products of our own "free will choice" where suffering and death are somehow earned and deserved just as prosperity and health is somehow earned and deserved giving high priority to the "culling of the weak" is a sure sign of this where losers and quitters are treated as immoral and worth less "protecting my herd" is another sign...straight from the primal carnivorous daddy self it gets real interesting to see how ancient thinkers might represent this archetype using imagery such as... ...red dragons chasing pregant women and trying to eat their babies which is why i think it all relates strongly to the threads on narcissm and tyrannical leadership of twi cuz how vpw/pfal/twi was created in time when our post-WWII culture had really turned up the volume on our victory-only mindedness which has now fed our age of high anxiety, our age of terror all around, and our age of running from death governments and businesses and religions run by cabals of adult men who are unable to lose, unable to weep, unable to grieve, unable to process death and continue to churn our progress-only models....heaven-only maps...safety-only aims ... on all levels of life...the drives to seek, to want, to win, to achieve, to succeed, to climb, to reach, to improve, to take, to evolve, to push, to purify, to perfect, to save.... are all forms of a masculine erotic love drive on all levels of life...to fail, to give, to surrender, to fall, to accept, to discern, to notice, to witness, to see, to hear, to taste, to touch, to feel, to sense, to flow, to be saved.... are all forms of a feminine agape love non-drive imo, the tough-love only systems (whether religious or not) are the kind of homosexual relationships we are warned against in the bible as they are the ones that foster war, violence, revenge, slavery, etc... they are the ones that foster exclusive CULTures based on the prosperity gospel and culling the weak rather than the deeper older spiritual movements that were based on a balanced marriage of both kinds of love where sanctuary, solice, solitude, and community of universal grace and understanding abounds and the discipline we devote ourselves to is not in service to the maps of a tyrannical brat but to guys like jesus...who are devoted to serving the world :mellow:

cmkeon reminds me of the poor guy in the tombs as he certainly seems haunted by a legion of feelings and thoughts and whatever you wanna call em and was quite disturbed by things here at the GSC i hope he finds peace ... but i cant blame the folks at the village inn either for not being able to help him out and take his very personal very extreme perspectives i mean...who has the time and/or energy and/or skill and/or fortitude to meet his very extreme emotional spiritual demands? ...such strict doctrinal positions? i honestly dont think we are entirely equipped at dealing with such extreme attitudes he certainly seems to blame the GSC for the lack though... ... soo maybe forgive him for his lack and ask that he forgive us all for our lack maybe even ask ...can you bring your peace with you? maybe take it all a bit slower next time sometimes it seems it can take years for people to become true friends honestly... but i also dont know what went down in the back ground ... anyway...that is my clumsy stab at it

as it currently seems to my me ... that narcissm was/is one of the significant pandemics of our time ...and a historic anomoly in terms of depth, width and degree of severity and as we've not yet quite psycho-spiritually recovered from the aftermath of this cultural tsunami (if we ever really do) it seems the self-important self is one of the primary shapes in the passing away of an entire generation as well as something the younger generations have inherited as norms to comform to, rebel against or otherwise gee ... thanks again, God ;) and whether its the self-centered the "the law of believing" or the "The greatest Secret in the world today..."or some other magic spell a seed is a seed is a seed...and doctrines spread on the wind like any seed does ...even if it spreads merely self-centered salvation that said... as a person...vpw seems an archetypical blade of grass in a wide wide field of "i/me/mine" madness ...perhaps even a bit more exaggerated than some...a big-little giant in his own little fields i also feel/think the topic is quite intimately related to the Toughen you up, weaklings getting victimized thread... and i hope to post why i think/feel so some time soon... as i think it might help us all understand part of how we all got into this mess

like ive said before... there are many discernable spectrums of development in individual and group behavior and perspectives which includes spectrums of values, morals, depths and span of care and concern, intelligences, etc... but until we find a way to include these kinds of possibilities into such conversations i feel we are going to continue to be stuck in flattened patterns of reasoning that will not produce a complex enough map to disclose what is actually a complex terrain ("wilderness") causing us to go round and round in dead-end conversations about cults, cultures and religion, religions, and all the thousands of inter-religious histories of the world and by "complex"...i am speaking of counting to 7 or so ("eating of a tree/system of life"), versus merely counting to 2 all the time ("eating of a tree/system of good or evil") of course...such a conversation will also likely expose us all to our selves to some greater depths or degrees just sayin...

interesting, penworks at a glance, it seems to me that Ehrman has experienced the limits of a mythic worldview and is living in the afterglow/math of a more rational agnosticism wondering...can either you or jj summarize his answer (or find his summary online) to that age old question "if a loving God...why suffering?" i havent listened through the entire 45-minute conversation and i cant find his answer to his question anywhere else thanks +ODD

gawd i talk/write too much sometimes i hope you guys share some of your experiences of the online classes here