Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One
Introduction
(2) Religious Fundamentalism in Christianity in Modern West
The Origin of the Point of View of the Evangelical Religious Right
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2004, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin.


We have mentioned that well over 90% of the people today who study philosophy have never understood what it is about and never know that they don't, and that just about all the students and professors in religious studies don't understand religions at all and are not aware that they don't understand them. The same thing happens in the churches: virtually no one in the Protestant worship understands the Bible and Christianity in its original form and is aware of his or her non-understanding. This is because religions and philosophy are products of past minds, and the modern mind simply does not have the ability to understand the past minds: the perspective of consciousness has shifted (in the West), as said, from the so-called "functional perspective" of the past to the "structural perspective" of the present, and the barrier between the perspectives is what blocks the modern mind from understanding the experience behind the words of the ancients rather than just the words on the surface. When the perspective has shifted, its effect is pervasive within the new culture so that all aspects of it are affected. When empiricism and positivism had since the Renaissance finally completely taken hold of Western culture, the religions and philosophies that the Westerners had inherited suddenly got mis-understood as discourse about objects present-at-hand (Vorhandenen) on the model of intraworldly objects which empiricism saw as the sole reality and which it furthermore stripped of all their original readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). This is the origin of propositional degeneration or fundamentalism in philosophy and the Christian religion and the beginning of the propositional fundamentalist misunderstanding of past philosophy and Christianity. "Fundamentalism" shall be defined below according to its perspective: seeing everything -- including value- and intelligibility-generating (i.e. noospheric) human beings and such transcendental experiences as God, Being, Brahman -- only in terms of rigid intraworldly things, but in terms of these intraworldly things only in their derivative present-at-hand aspect (Vorhandenheit).

Different authors have of course used different terms to signal the problem of "perspective". Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy) has talked about nomos: the theoretical and imaginary frame of reference through which the "world-in-itself" is filtered so that things can be what they are and none other and that it is explained why they are what they are and none other. Our notion of "perspective" corresponds most closely to this nomos: a worldview, a Weltanschauung. No one, however, seems to have talked about the "macro-shift" from the functional to the structural perspective. When one hears Thomas Kuhn talking about "paradigm shift" in relation to the structure of scientific revolution, or when Michel Foucault talks about the shift in epistème between the classic age and Enlightenment (Les mots et les choses, Gallimard: epistème as that which lies between the "fundamental codes of a culture" ("that which govern its language, its perception schemas, its exchanges, its techniques, its values") and the reflective scientific theories on them (p. 11- 12), that "on the basis of which knowledge and theories become possible" (p. 13), that particular mode of "disclosedness", in Heidegger's words: "le mode d'être des choses et de l'ordre", "l'espace général du savoir", p. 14), they are all referring to the "micro-shifts" within a single perspective (the structural perspective). When Fritjof Capra rambles about a "turning point", or when Ken Wilber is in quest for a new "paradigm", they are roughly referring to the transition from the immature stage to the mature stage within the structural perspective. (An exception may be granted to Hegel. When Hegel speaks of the universal Spirit (Geist) gradually actualizing itself to perfection -- to its self-consciousness, the perfection of its freedom -- through successive cultures ("civilizations" as the different stages of world-history), this "Spirit" at a particular stage of the course of its fulfillment refers precisely to the "paradigm" of the culture corresponding to that stage.1 But the Hegelian scheme is quite inaccurate and outdated.) Below, we'll use "paradigm," "episteme", etc., all in the general sense: a worldview, a nomos, a particular "order of things," whether "macro" or "micro." The structure of perspective-shift is thus (to take account of these other writers; the subsumption of Voegelin's differentiation (of the cosmological civilization) will be discussed in the next chapter):

                        Foucault's episteme-shift 
                        or Kuhn's paradigm-shift     
                            |      |      |
                            v      v      v
                            |------|------|
     |----------|-----------|-------------|------------->
 immature     mature    immature       mature             the direction of time
                            |                             or the "order of history"
     |------FUNCTIONAL------|-------STRUCTURAL---------->   
                                          ^
                ^                         |
                |              Capra's turning-point or
                |           Wilber's quest for new paradigm 
                |      
Voegelin's age of great differentiation           
       and Jasper's Axial Time

Since our purpose in Division One, besides laying down the foundation for a (second axial) scientific enlightenment (within the substratum of the first axial), is to provide a manual that will direct the students onto the right path, toward a real understanding of philosophy (of the first axial) and religions (of the first axial and before), and to avoid the wrong path, toward the self-unaware misunderstanding of them prevalent in contemporary academia and religious institutions -- real understanding of the first axial is the means (foundation) for the construction of the second axial -- we must, before this provision, first remove the appeal of this "fundamentalism" in which this self-unaware misunderstanding consists, by exposing the content of its relativeness to the perspective of modernity, and its destructiveness not only of the meaning of ancient philosophy and religions, but also of the mind itself. First, religious fundamentalism.

1. Fundamentalism in religion

Religious fundamentalism in the West is chiefly represented by Protestantism in all its sects. In the West: but, of course, the fundamentalist phenomenon is peculiarly American. We are not here concerned with the historical events that led to its institutional crystallizations2 but with the perspective, with the way in which to look at the world and universe, that determines the need for its institutional rise. The historical origin for this perspective has been discussed preliminarily:3 modernization or secularization, which entails first of all a certain "de-animization of the cosmos" (developed from Weber's insights) which strips the cosmos of its underlying "ethereal" ("streaming", "processual") substratum (in traditional intraworld or recosmicized religion, in the traditional "functional" perspective, this is just the atmospheric air) to reveal its composition as consisting only of "objects", and secondly the "de-worlding of the world" (developed from Heidegger's insight) which then strips of these objects of their readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) to reveal their presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) as their "true nature". Protestantism therefore forms part of the package of modernity with positivism or empirical science on the one hand, and the modern nation-state (the centralized, bureaucratically unified society) and the formative, production phase of capitalism on the other, all of which are the result of the same secularization process. And the perspective which underlies all of them is the beginning, immature stage of the "structural perspective", referred to here as "positivism".

Witherup (ibid.) mentions that although all fundamentalists are evangelicals, not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. This is because he follows George Mardsen's (common) definition of fundamentalism as a sort of militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism, or an evangelism devoted to a militant opposition to modernity, i.e. the secularization and liberalization of society, e.g. the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition; and "militant" in the sense of active participation in political change. It is because such usual approach as his is not genealogical, i.e. does not try to trace the fundamentalists' rigid adherence to the literal wording of the Bible to its origin in a particular perspective which is "modern" (i.e. positivism), that it comes to a conclusion opposite of ours (that militant evangelism is fundamentally modern and the result of secularization, as will be shown below). Attention to perspective also shows that all evangelicals are "fundamentalists" since they all share the same positivist perspective, even if some are not militant.

The defining characteristics of fundamentalist Evangelicals' outlook are: (1) the creed of Biblical literalism (the "inerrant inspiration of the Bible", "the verbal inspiration of the Bible, preserving it completely from error in the original manuscript"; E. R. S.), hence its two greatest foes: Bible criticism and evolution; and (2) premillennialism (the premillennial Second Coming of Christ; ibid.). When we below try to trace the origin, and expose the content, of the positivist perspective of evangelism, our primary aim is to uncover the precondition for the first characteristic, Biblical literalism, which brings with it a sort of "immorality" as "morality".

Thus, of the four qualities of the fundamentalist movement as such isolated by Beeman: revivalism, orthodoxy, evangelism, and social action, the following is concerned mainly with orthodoxy, although the experiential and paradigm roots of fundamentalist "immorality" could lay the basis for an explanation of its social action, too.

"Religion" is the product of an animistic view of the world proper to the immature stage of the functional perspective. When the culture has undergone a differentiation in consciousness and, with that, a whole-scale change in perspective ("paradigm shift"), the "religion" that is a left-over from the previous perspective, now incomprehensible, gets transformed in the interior so as to remain comprehensible as a product of the new perspective which, however, can no longer produce "religion" in the traditional sense. The result of such "update" of a tradition to its new form is deformation or degeneration. Protestantism is born when those religiously discontent re-interpret the Christian (Catholic) dogma they have inherited within the framework of positivism or the budding classical (e.g. Galilean) mechanics. Protestantism, emerging at the threshold to modernity, is therefore an instance of positivist deformation of the testamental religions. The effect is horrendous, because, since testamental religions' original doctrines are essentially in mythic terms, i.e. analogous images of "things" -- recalling the schema for the evolution of consciousness we laid out in the previous chapter -- they are much more suited to positivistic reformulation than philosophy can be. Protestantism is basically positivist religion, empiricist Christianity, or scientific monotheism: the remodelling of Christian symbols on classical mechanics. Positivism, or the classical mechanics that is built upon it, is the perspective that reality, or the cosmos, is a fixed, immutable, present-at-hand empty container (called "space") wherein present-at-hand objects with fixed, immutable properties or aggregated from irreducible atomic chunks change places and collide with each other as "time" -- immutable and present-at-hand just like space -- passes: this is why classical mechanics is called "the kinematics of rigid bodies" (die Kinematik des starren Körpers). The fault of all this -- what we shall later characterize as the "downward" dimension of the structural perspective -- is that, although these present-at-hand bodies that constitute present-at-hand "occurrences" in the present-at-hand "space" may be elastic, they are ultimately reducible to permanently existing material points that never change form, never "develop", remain forever "static", and never melt back into the underlying Energy-Stream as in the ancient, functional perspective, and whose motion constitutes everything that happens in the universe. Positivism is analytic and reductionist, the belief that "in every complex system the behavior of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its parts", that "all physical phenomena could be reduced to the properties of hard and solid material particles" (Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, p. 29 - 30) The world becomes like a pool table with material billiard balls moving and colliding, rather than like a River. The contemporary critics of positivism (from Fritjof Capra in sciences through process theology in religions to the cultural and eco-feminists in society), although we have made thoroughly clear in the thermodynamic interpretation of history that the alternative that they put forward is no better ideological construct, have nonetheless correctly pointed out all the defects in this positivism: the reduction of everything to the static and isolated individual material "objects", to the exclusion of integration, relation, becoming, and growth. We have already discussed the formation of the earlier Protestant sects based on the adoption of this positivism (work ethic, predestination, the New Man or the Elect as a robot: all negative and anti-spiritual). What is to note here is that the contemporary Evangelism remains fossilized in this positivist form of the 17th century, that is, in the immature stage of the structural perspective, even while the rest of the culture has moved into the mature stage of the structural perspective. Protestantism has incorporated neither the Romanticism that, with its organic holism, soon becomes a counter point of positivism, nor the important strand of electrodynamics that later branches out of classical mechanics, the Maxwellian theory which, with its quantitative, present-at-hand description of the electromagnetic field, comes closer to the traditional animistic view of reality as like a fluctuating River. Most alien to Evangelism is the recent cultural paradigm shift to the "system view" with "process thinking" (which Capra summarizes, ibid.), with which process theology branches off from Christianity (just as Protestantism branched off from Catholicism with positivism). The incorporation of any of these might just have prevented Protestantism's fundamentalist degeneration, as all the problems associated with fundamentalist evangelism's literalism (pertaining to the absolute authority of the literal wording of the Bible and evolution), listed below, essentially derive from its simple positivistic "mechanical" worldview with all the defects just listed.

1. The Biblical narrative. During the beginning of the structrural perspective, the first sign of degeneration appears when the beginning scientific minds try to formulate scientific theories of the empirical reality around in correspondence with the Bible. The study of the laws of motion (Newton) or of the organisms around (Linaeus) becomes the study of "God's work".4 The religious then start to understand the Bible in this way also, as a scientific textbook, due to their transformation by the new positivist paradigm. ("Propositional degeneration.") When the results of such scientific study can no longer be made to correspond to Biblical narratives, as in the case of evolution of organisms in the 19th century, Protestantism diverges from and becomes hostile to science. The process (of scientific positivist paradigm seeping into the religious mind reading the Bible) works smoothly because, as mentioned, the testamental narrative is of "things" (but still in their readiness-to-hand) and positive science also of "things" (but already in their presence-at-hand). So the transition from the myths of the Bible to the scientific textbook that the fundamentalists make of it consists only in (after the de-animization of the cosmos) the sharpening of indistinct, unreflected images of things to the clear and reflected notions or ideas of things; i.e. stripping them of their readiness-to-hand to reveal solely their presence-at-hand. Hence the religious, adopting the mindset of the positivistic scientists, start reading their Bible literally, as some sort of scientific or propositional narrative text book that talks about "things" and "represents", as does a mirror or surveillance camera, a chain of actual, empirical events. This is the essence of the "literal interpretation of the Bible", the transformation of a "symbolic form" teaching morals (in the traditional sense: orderly existence; below), ethnic identity, and salvational experiences through historical events, into the non-symbolic form of plain description proper to science, like F = ma. Expeditions can then be taken to seek out the "archaeological remains" of the Noah's ark, etc., as if Noah's story is just a recount of geological and climatological events in the past that can be precisely and empirically verified.

Symbolization vs. positivist description. Although myth is of world-immanent things, it is the (ready-to-hand) symbolization of the experiences of the conditions of existence through images of things. The technical meaning of "symbolic", "symbolization", is based on that of "symbol" (as explained by Daniel Guerrière): "a symbol is, phenomenologically, a double-sense the first of which both reveals and conceals the second which is available only in this way." ("How does God enter into philosophy", The Thomist, 1984) Hence, the need for interpretation appears, and the undifferentiated mind of the primitive expresses itself in myths but does not really know what such symbolization means. This is why the apparent mutual contradictions between myths never bother it. Even in Genesis of the Old Testament, the two mutually conflicting stories of the creation of the first woman co-exist, one where God made male and female at the same time (Gen. 1 : 27) and the other where God made Eve subsequently from Adam's rib (Gen. 2 : 22). (Another explanation is the cognitive mistake of "centration"; c.f. ftnt. 4, section 1.C.)

The differentiated mind of the positivists however means what it says: its articulation is non-symbolic, a pure representation or recording of a present-at-hand reality. Since the "sacredness" of nature has been lost in its experience because the functional entities (soul, gods, spirits, the ancestral ghosts) have disintegrated in face of the surfacing structures accounting for them, and moreover because nature has been stripped of its readiness-to-hand to become a mere present-at-hand container in which present-at-hand objects change places (Heidegger's elucidation of "In-sein"), the positivistic mind appears to not have experience at all of the condition of its existence, but only sees nature indifferently as like furniture or instrument for use (exploitation, domination): the I-It mode (the mode of the production phase of capitalism). The articulations of the positivists about reality are plain descriptions or ideas. Symbolizations however are not ideas, and because the positivistic mind is experientially dead (i.e. spiritually as well: no longer feeling the participation in a larger stream with all others), when it takes up the symbolizations of myth it reduces them to present-at-hand objects of representational thoughts (descriptions, ideas). This is the essence of fundamentalism. In Eric Voegelin's manner of saying, it is symbols turning opaque. Bill McCain provides an illustrative example: "suppose a group of people have a revelatory experience which, among themselves, they speak of in symbols of their 'brotherly love', that they are 'children of God', being 'equal in his sight'. Later, someone who has not had the experience overhears them and takes 'equality' as an object of thought with attendant disputes about propositions of 'equality': in what respect? to what degree? with what ethical implications? And: 'how do you know?' The once-transparent symbol has become opaque; not only has its meaning been lost, but it prevents the person who uses it from rediscovering the original experience." This of course is an example of the atheist misunderstanding of religion, but, growing up in the same paradigm, the Protestants have adopted the same view point upon their own tradition.

The "literal interpretation of the Bible" really means the "plain description or representation of objects of thoughts" such as found in a biology or physics textbook, at most in a narrative history textbook. Such plain description, representation of the surveillance camera style, is, ideally, even without connotations. It is easier; F = ma, for example, is of the same type as a statement like "the wall is white", it is de-contextualized, present-at-hand, constituting the most basic, lowest stratum of human experience (hence common to all human perspectives or paradigms, at whatever stage of the differentiation of consciousness). It requires no thinking, no interpretation as with "symbols". It is almost like a computer's receiving command inputs. In fact, in fundamentalism the old-fashioned hermeneutic exegesis of scripture proper to symbolic writings is specifically forbidden. After all, statements such as "the wall is white" or "F = ma" have no meaning below the surface for one to uncover through hermeneutics. This is why fundamentalism tends to attract the most intellectually deficient portion of the population. The increasing dependence on translation due to the decline of philological expertise in contemporary time, especially evident among the Evangelical circles, further reinforces this reduction of the thickness of meaning of Biblical symbolization to the shallow stratum of plain description. Biblical meaning is practically destroyed in the hands of the Protestants. Strangely, such reduction, which results in the "literal reading" of often just translation of the Bible, as if reading F = ma in a physics textbook, somehow enables the Protestants to believe their faith to be the restoration of the Christian faith as it had been at its beginning, while reality is just the opposite. Here is that central problem of "perspective" again: the Protestants have been blocked from the original Christian faith by the positivist perspective in which they are imprisoned and which is utterly incompatible with the original religious perspective, while they remain unaware that there could be other perspectives and theirs is only a product of modernity.

The nature of symbolization raises the interesting question: if the symbolizing mind of the primitives and the ancients is not completely aware of the referencing status of their symbolizations (myths), how would they respond when asked if (in the case of the Israelite priests 2,700 years ago) they really believe, i.e. as empirical facts, whether a being called God "created" the world in six "days"? Or if (in the case of a Chinese villager living 2,500 years ago) s/he really believes whether in the time of the beginning one local lord, or the god of water (共工), with human head and the body of a snake, fought with another, the god of fire (祝融), this one with human face but the body of a beast, riding on two dragons; couldn't win; and, in anger, bumped and broke a mountain which happened to be buttressing the heaven, causing the partial collapse of heaven and the opening of the earth, so that the goddess (女娲) had to repair heaven with the five stones and erect the four columns buttressing heaven with the legs of turtle?5 They, actually, might just answer yes. This does not mean that they believe in the historical reality of these mythic events in the same manner as a modern positivistic scientist believes in the historicity of evolution and the formation of the solar system or, similarly, a modern positivistic religious fundamentalist believes in the historicity of the creation of the world by God. (The belief of these latter is of an empirical present-at-hand reality such as recorded by a surveillance camera.) This only means that the ancients have not yet differentiated the particular functioning of referencing to the present-at-hand empirical reality of immediate sensory data from the fantastic symbolization of ready-to-hand experiences, such as the identity between the God toward which and the God from which, or the precariousness of the order of the cosmos. That is, for the ancients and primitives a speech, a narrative, is not a precise and mere representation of an empirical reality actually or potentially in sight or tangible as it is for the positivistic scientist or the (positivistic) religious fundamentalist whose mind is differentiated.6

As positivists, the religious (Christian) fundamentalists, despite their ecstasy during worship, really have an impoverished experience of God since their "belief" in God is only the representational thinking of a present-at-hand body at the center of a web of superstitions likewise objectified into scientifically measurable empirical events (e.g. miracles), and which manipulates their life like a puppeteer. Because of this lack on their part of a ready-to-hand experience of the sacred Weltlichkeit, by traditional standard they cannot really be said to "believe in God" at all, let alone be "spiritual". The shallowness of their "faith", given its basis in the great differentiation of consciousness during the Reform period ("Galilean mechanics"), is not even possible before the rise of positivistic sciences. This is an important lesson that will show up again and again: the differentiation of consciousness is not an unqualified good.

The religious' (mainly the Protestants') adoption from the atheists of the positivistic view of reality as composed of (intraworldly manu-factured-like) static objects with fixed, immutable properties also results in their conception of the Bible as necessarily fixed and immutable, given once and for all, "fallen from Heaven" onto the hands of human beings, and never as a compilation in which these human beings gradually learn of God's nature and plan in their evolving relationship with Him and grow accordingly, and which therefore "evolves," is subject to errors, and can never constitute a complete knowledge of God once and for all, as human beings are finite beings capable only of finite, imperfect knowledge of God: just as everyone only learns gradually through time about who his or her loved one "really is" and, if he or she is to compile a biography about this loved one, the book is subject to errors because he or she is merely a human being having only a limited perspective on this other person: and every other person will have a different perspective on this same person: some think he or she is thus and thus, others disagree... Multiple, wide-varying perspectives on what God's nature and the details of His plan are? The positivist-fundamentalist would never accept this, the subjective nature of the faithful's perception of God, because their subscription to positivism means that everything has to be like the rigid objects of certainty of classical mechanics: static, fixed, and without growth, be it the Book or those who wrote it. Much of the Protestant quarrels with science are just consequences of this "objectification of the Bible" -- and of the human beings that compiled it: people are no longer regarded as learning and growing through time, i.e. changing, but as fixed in their "properties" once for all. This static rigidity of the Bible in combination with its new representational nature thus results in the Protestant belief in the infallibility of the Bible as a precise representational instrument -- the origin of Biblical literalism is thus isolated.

The Catholics and Orthodox share little of the quarrels with science because they do not similarly objectify their book. The tradition most resembling the "original Christianity", the Orthodox (more on this below), has the best opinion on this matter: "Yet the Orthodox Church does not believe that every word in the Bible was dictated by God verbatim and written down word for word by the person who wrote each book. Such an approach would accuse God of using men as tape recorders... Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos... asks us to look upon the Bible as a record of truth and not truth itself... [For] truth itself is God alone... Such an approach to the Bible according to Fr. Stylianopoulos leaves room for 'other records of the experience of God, such as the writings of the Church Fathers, the liturgical forms and texts, the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils...'" One might ask if this leaves room even for other religions. "In other words, God kept on talking even after His Book had gone to press." (Anthony M. Coniaris, Introducing the Orthodox Church, 17th printing, Light and Life Publishing Co., 1982; p. 155.)

Again, positivistic over-reliance on the (mis-)translation of the Bible magnifies the problem for the Evangelicals. The passage of Tim. II 3. 16 (pasa grafh qeopneustoV kai wfelimoV proV didaskalian, proV elegmon, proV epanorqwsin, proV paideian thn en dikaiosunhi: "Every divinely inspired scripture [is] also beneficial for teaching, for checking, for rectification, for education within justice") has been mistranslated as "The Scripture is divinely inspired and beneficial for teaching, for checking..." (The 20th Century King James has, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine..." which seems correct, too) which erroneously makes it that the Bible is the only book to follow with there being no other divinely inspired books. The Protestant fundamentalists then find further justification for their sole concentration on the Book, which goes hand in hand with their objectification of the Book as static and as a precise representational instrument. There is now nothing to do except a "literal" (i.e. representational) reading and following of the Biblical words. The Orthodox, again, as expected, sees the Bible more flexibly, understanding that its words are not scientific formulas but their meaning as lessons recorded needs interpretation, and that the Book alone is not the guide to God, but that "the Church that drafted and selected the books of the Holy Bible" is. (Is it Christian, to accept ONLY what the Holy Bible says?, Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries.) It is the Church, imbued with the Holy Spirit, which is then the infallible interpreter of the Book. (Coniaris, ibid., p. 156.)

2. God In fundamentalist Protestantism God crystallizes into "an (everlasting singular) omnipotent being" that "creates" the "Universe" from outside like an engineer that designs and a industrial worker that creates (i.e. "manu-factures") according to the design, except omnipotently (hence the "Intelligent Design Creationism"); this is the positivization or empiricization of God. Heidegger complains of this empiricism or positivism when he says that the Being of a human being has been forgotten or overlooked in modern human sciences which themselves issue from the Western positivistic adaptation of the classical and Christian traditions: "The sources relevant for the traditional anthropology, the Greek definition and the theological foundation, show that, in the determination of the essence of the being called 'man', the question about his Being remains forgotten, and that this Being is rather understood as 'self-evident' in the sense of presence-at-hand of other [i.e. intraworldly] manufactured things." ("Die für die traditionelle Anthropologie relevanten Ursprünge, die griechische Definition und der theologische Leitfaden, zeigen an, dass über einer Wesensbestimmung des Seienden 'Mensch' die Frage nach dessen Sein vergessen bleibt, dieses Sein vielmehr als 'selbstverständlich' im Sinne des Vorhandenseins der übrigen geschaffenen Dingen begriffen wird." Sein und Zeit, p. 49) This not only clarifies the Protestant view of Biblical writers as static and fixed, but also its "objectification" of God Himself on the model of a present-at-hand intraworldly manufactured static object with fixed "properties", which, when re-projected as a "subject", ends in a static "engineer judge". Only with this "objectification" -- the projection of God as an object-like substance-subject -- does atheism become possible, because when it comes to material objects (and not something like the underlying "energy") that are not seen, we start wondering if they exist or not; analytic "philosophers" then, out of the "atheistic spirit", create "paradoxes", such as the "paradox of omnipotence" by J. L. Mackie, "can an omnipotent being make rules which then bind himself?"7 which assumes that God is a "substance", a "being", that has the "property" of "omnipotence". That is, atheism is possible only because God is taken as some sort of thing on the model of intraworldly present-at-hand objects; but the religious, with a mythic mindset reformulated positivistically, think likewise and have put themselves in a box, within which, only, does the "proof for the existence of God" first become possible. The fundamentalists and the atheists therefore share the same experiential foundation in understanding God as an intraworldly present-at-hand static object-substance that is somehow above the world. The atheists and the fundamentalists thus share the common womb of positivism. The process theologians that re-project the cosmos as holistic and processual and God as embodied thereby, are therefore those that have transcended the positivistic conception of God as some sort of thing to which fundamentalism is bound, re-capturing some of the religious experiences in the past, just as the mystics in the past which develop within the testamental religions, with their de-mything transiting from God as the Other to God as the Self, are the ones who have transcended the immature, mythic conception of God as some sort of person.

The question "Does God exist" is in fact only possible in modern time, that is, in the postivist perspective, when God has already been objectified into a "thing", a "substance". The real question is, "What kind of God exists?" In other words, the question concerning the existence of God presupposes, and is dependent on, the new definition of God. If, for example, God is defined in the way the pantheists often do, as "the energy permeating the universe" then no one can come and say, "I don't believe in God", because the universe clearly contains energy. Or, if one says, "I believe that God is that mathematical condition that results in the coming-into-being of the universe", the atheists can't deny this either. All s/he can ask, perhaps, is, "what is the meaning of worshipping a 'mathematical equation' anyway?" In ancient and tribal time there was no such thing as an atheist, because "gods" and "spirits" still retained their original meaning of "air", and the atmosphere clearly existed (wind blew, rain fell). Today atheists come and say "I don't believe in God" because God is defined -- by them as well as by the fundamentalists -- as that object or substance sitting outside the world ("supranatural") which is however anthropomorphic enough to get angry with us and judge us. It is just too difficult to believe something like this is true given the knowledge of science. Thus it is really the notion or image of God that people are disputing about, not the actual existence of God.

Most people, whether positivist theists or positivist atheists, are not aware of the evolution, or rather degeneration, of the conception of God within Christianity. Whereas the Protestants always talk about God as some sort of an engineer that "designs" and then "creates" all the things in the world like an engineer making an airplane (the conception of God in terms of an anthropomorphic "agent"), Catholics tend to think of God more in terms of "agency", force, dynamism, which seem closer to reality, and this is why the official Catholic position doesn't bother with "scientific creationism" and accepts evolution and cosmology. The Orthodox's treatment of God in terms of personal relationship (God the Father) seems even closer to reality, and to the "original" conception (experience) of God. Orthodox itself (c.f. John Zizioulas) has identified God as the persona of the Father, from which the Catholic tradition deviates due to St. Augustine's growing abstraction in the conception of God, resulting in an impersonal Essence God, and Protestantism, then, in its hatred for Scholasticism and any sort of theology about God's nature, and in its love for empiricism and classical mechanics under the influence of positivism, considers God only in His acts in history. It is because of their adoption of the empiricist demand for verifiability that the Protestants cast out all the Scholastic theology of God that spoke of His essence, as a worthless self-referential linguistic system that matched no "pictures" in the outside reality (in this they may have a point!), and that they consequently "introduced the principle that we recognize God through His works in Providence, in History" -- for historical events were empirically verifiable. "In this way, we always commence from History, i.e., what God did throughout History. That is our basis. We cannot have a metaphysical theology on God." (Zizioulas, Lessons on Christian Dogmatics, 2. D. "The Theological Problem of the Filioque")8

We can see clearly that the three branches correspond to the three Comtean stages of the development of consciousness: the Orthodox's notion of God is religious, the Catholics' philosophical (God as a metaphysical being) under the influence of Hellenistic philosophy, the Protestants' empiricist (God as an engineer and guider) under the influence of classical mechanics. The Orthodox's experience of God is the most concrete, preserving the original I-Thou relationship with God, Catholicism's is more abstract (philosophical, theological: Scholasticism, St. Thomas Aquinas), and, then, the Protestants', though concrete again because of the demand of empiricism, is essentially an I-It conception (as expected from its relationship with the production phase of capitalism). Later we will show the linearity of the evolution of Christianity (in terms of worldview, perspective, or paradigm), that the further removed in time and space from the original theophany (Jesus in Palestine over 2000 years ago), the more degenerate and distorted the Christian branch is, hence Orthodox the most pure, Catholicism in the middle, and Protestantism the most distorted, being virtually anti-Christian: a linear scheme of degeneration; and further that it is the differentiation of consciousness which results in such degeneration through progressive abstraction. (Hence the Protestant mind is the most differentiated among the three.)

Within the positivist perspective the very meaning of religion degenerates, the very notion of religion changes to a new form. And the positivist Protestants share the same notion of religion as their intellectual atheist critics, "as if religion were only that about which some 18th century philosophers argued (e.g. Hume and Clarke): belief in God, for example, and belief in miracles. Now that is a hasty generalization. The opinion that to believe is to hold a proposition to be true without sufficient evidence, and the further opinion that beliefs are proper to religion, are only recent phenomena... The acceptance of something without proof is only marginal in the history of religions." Indeed, this notion of religion would not have been possible during the primitive time when natural phenomena were interpreted as gods. "The belief that the God of religion is to be proven by argumentation that begins with non-God and concludes with God is also a hasty generalization." Below we'll see that the Protestants have adopted from their atheist counterparts the same notion of the "proof of the existence of God." "In fact, these arguments -- despite appearance to the contrary -- arise only in the 17th century C.E. in Western civilization. The belief that the 'miracles' affirmed in religions are putative violations of the laws of nature is another hasty generalization. In fact, 'miracles,' too, begin only in the 17th century. The philosophy of religion common to Anglophone academia falls into myriad hasty generalizations" (Daniel Guerrière, "The phenomenology of religion").

3. Morality. Sensitivity to the shift of perspective ("paradigm") in history has not only taught us that the very concept of God has changed in the history of Christianity, but that the notion of morality has as well in the evolution of society. What people in the past meant by "morals" (and "justice") and what we mean by "morals" (and "justice") today are two different things. The ancient notion of "moral" really is order of the self, while, today, after the great differentiation of consciousness in concert with the emergence of nation-state, "morality" and "ethics" are reduced to a concern with the "well-being" or "welfare" of the human persons (or other sentient life), of others (while justice has become purely a matter of "fairness", or "equality"). Within the sphere of salvational, or transcendental, religions and philosophy, "moral" as order is intimately tied up with the salvation of the soul, as its pre-condition. This remains the case today. This then has created a problem of non-understanding between the religious and the lay liberal people when they debate about "morality": whereas the former are talking about the order of society and the person's soul (i.e. the order in the person's character) in this life that is necessary for salvation after life, the lay liberal are simply talking about the well-being and happiness of people for their own sake. Hence, if we want to understand and criticize the "morality" of the fundamentalists among the religious, we need to beforehand speak a bit more about the meaning of salvation, to see how order (both at the personal and at the societal level) relates to it.

Salvation -- whose thermodynamic definition is the negation of the second law of thermodynamics by the first law -- presupposes that from which one is to be saved through it -- the condition of existence generated by the second law, or the material meaning of life. As explicated already, our thermodynamic condition of existence consists in: fundamentally, the temporal and spatial delimitations of existence, i.e. existence in the thermodynamic flux; then, consequent upon this, the necessary enslavement to the material meaning of life, to consumption and reproduction, i.e. existence as thermodynamic dissipation; and finally, the sufferings necessarily engendered by this enslavement (this is most explicitly articulated by Buddhism). The condition of finitude, of which the negation constitutes the essence of salvational pursuit, this fundamental flawedness of the temporal and spatial existence, can be negated by becoming one with the Eternal, either God in the parlance of testamental religions (e.g. Thomas Aquinas, for whom beatitude consists in the vision of and union with God) or Being in that of traditional metaphysics. Myth in intraworld religions, during the beginning of the functional perspective, has not yet achieved the full expression of salvation, nor has it yet a proper idea of Eternity, but understands it as mere indefinite temporal extension. The spatial and temporal delimitations are therefore lamented over as the loss of immortality, the inability to live forever, the failure to be gods or the ancestral ghosts -- thus so is the problem of finitude expressed -- and the enslavement to consumption, defecation, and reproduction as the fall from 'paradise', where one did not have to labor to obtain food -- and lived immortally like the gods also -- thus so is expressed the problem of the necessity of labor to merely feed oneself. These are pre-salvational expressions. People restricted to this stage attempt salvation by seeking out potions providing immortality (Exilir), i.e. the indefinite continuation of life. This is only pre-salvation, because it does not resolve the issue at all, it does not free one from the enslavement to consumption and reproduction and the sufferings engendered by enslavement to these necessities (called craving, tanha, by Buddha).9 Philosophy and the testamental religions represent the commencement of salvation proper because Eternity here is finally conceived properly as the negation of space-time altogether in some sort of singularity. But both still suffer the mythic problem; the testamental religions remain entirely within mythic form; and with philosophy, because the world view is that of the mythic, the differentiation of the proper Eternity is still the negation of temporal and spatial delimitations understood mythically, e.g. as the reincarnation cycle (Plato and Hinduism) or the Wheel of death and rebirth (Buddhism).

This condition of finitude, which occupies the spiritually oriented human mind since mythic time, is, we say, best articulated in the light of thermodynamics. The constitution of life as open dissipative structures in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics means: 1. that life is a transitional stage in the (Heraclitus' = thermodynamic) flux of Nature from order to disorder, from disequilibrium to equilibrium; that there is no essential separation between inside (organism) and outside (the external world); but that rather Nature works itself out through us (at the level of non-linear dissipation). This is why we are constituted as spatially delimited -- flawed, not co-extensive with the cosmos, and finally no longer identical with the Source of existence -- and consequently not "immortal" as the cosmos or the Source is -- but having "fallen": the Original Sin. Mortality means temporal and spatial delimitation. 2. That our necessary enslavement, attachment, to dissipative functions indicates the material meaning of life: that's what we are made for. 3. That we hence suffer through craving, desires, which Nature has instituted in us to compel us to accomplish its goal of reaching thermodynamic equilibrium.

The pursuit for the negation of finitude emerges however as two-fold. (1) Major salvation, the negation proper, or the effect of the enlightened state of mind -- in the case of the second mode -- after death as the eternal salvation beyond this world, universally defined as the re-union with or conservation back to the source of being.

(2) Minor salvation, or the temporal effect ("benefits") of the enlightened or salvational state of mind. The salvational state of mind or more often of soul (Plato), besides being enlightened, means also soul put in order. The order of one's mind or soul, usually sustained with asceticism, begets as consequences peacefulness of mind, the non-attachment to the world of the senses, to things, relationships, and bodily pleasures, i.e. freedom from the material meaning of life. Living then becomes easier, and gladness and contentment result. This is what is meant by minor salvation, the fruits reaped before one's soul enters the Eternal upon death. This is why Plato defines philosophy -- the pursuit of salvation -- as the practice of dying in view of its practitioner's gradual disengagement from basic life-functionings such as eating, reproducing, and, in today's context, the use of "consumer products"; and also why asceticism is universally regarded (in the second mode as well as in the first) as necessary for putting one's soul in order in this life in order to save one's soul afterlife.

The first mode of salvation -- the testamental religions, from the Old Testament religiousness to Christianity -- differs in its minor salvation from the second mode. This should be expected from its general structural differences from the second mode: that the testamental religions, even while having achieved an historicity which no philosophies of the second mode have attained, are expressed entirely within the bounds of the myth -- which, after its "positivization" within Protestantism, becomes an imaginary scientific narrative -- and that their salvational pursuit is collective (the salvation is either of an entire ethnic community, e.g. the Hebrew, or of the entire humankind, as with Christianity) -- this in fact hangs together with its linear historicity, remember. The implications of these differences for minor salvation are these. Firstly, the salvational state, the orderly existence necessary for major salvation, is the order of the collective, the order of society, i.e. the order of an external configuration, in addition to the order of the individual's soul. Now because salvation is a collective matter, the "religious" tend toward theocracy as the ultimate expression of their "salvational state" (minor salvation). (The philosophers in the second mode also frequently dream of theocracy, notably Plato and Confucius, but the point is that they are less so inclined because, theoretically, salvation in the second mode is and can remain merely a personal affair. Buddha for instance did not bemoan the impossibility of a Buddhist theocracy.) Secondly, on the level of the individual, the salvational state for the testamentally religious is not an "enlightened state of mind" as in the second mode. The testamental religiousness emphasizes humility and humbleness rather than meditation and contemplation (which lead to enlightenment) as constitutive of the order necessary for major salvation. Even back in the days of the kingdom of Judah when the Yahwism of the prophets was still intraworld, i.e. when religiosity was concerned only with something like minor salvation, with orderly existence in this world so as to prosper, the prophets saw disorder (anti-minor salvation) in pride, which would lead the people to rebel against Yahweh -- to dispense with him -- and to become attracted to the other gods of Mesopotamia because of the sensuousness which these possessed but which Yahweh as a desert god lacked. The story, as told in the Second Chronicles, of successive deviations by the kings of Judah from Yahweh and his commandments is meant as lesson for minor salvation: humility, humbleness, and asceticism engender order in society and will lead to prosperity, whereas pride and attraction to the sensuous are causes of disorder which will lead to death and extinction. Christianity has inherited this version of order or minor salvation, even while, through the Hellenistic influences on Paul, it has incorporated something like the Platonic notion of soul. A contrast thus develops between Christians for whom orderly existence that will lead to salvation consists in the suppression of pride and bodily desires, and philosophers for whom such orderly existence, though also involving the suppression of the desires of the body, consists more importantly in the enlightenment of the mind. Protestantism further accentuates the contrast between the first and the second mode because (as explained in A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History) its adoption from empiricism of the demand for externalization and visualization of the salvational state leads to minor salvation as a purely external matter -- orderly existence as robotic external comportment ensured through (literally) mindless discipline. Thirdly, salvation as that of the collective intersects with minor salvation as comportment- (rather than mind-) oriented, resulting in even a greater emphasis on merely the order of the external comportment of the person, without this order in the form of enlightenment penetrating into his or her mind, since the order of community is directly determined mostly by the visible comportment of the individuals comprising it, and not much by their inner wisdom. Without cultivation of the intellect, the spiritual in the first mode appears often to the spiritual in the second mode as uneducated and foolish. Fourthly, to continue this point, the order sought for by the religious is also too simplistic. The order appears simple in configuration as it consists but of few components -- and comprises what for the secular (i.e. further) differentiated mind simply appears to be aesthetics, and what for more complex-minded persons simply leaves too much un-accounted for: order as simple-minded aesthetics. Hence for people who, in modern time, are not deficient in intellect or in life-experiences, and who have already differentiated "moral" as welfare-oriented "ethics" and "justice" as fairness and equality, this "order" seems irrelevant as "morals" and oppressive in its simplicity. Consequently, the "morality" such as professed by the modern day Evangelicals (or by Islamic fundamentalists for that matter) seems more like immorality in the form of intolerance, together with their utterly "unseemly" representation of God, to use the words which Xenophanes' employed 2,500 years ago to characterize the anthropomorphism of the traditional Hellenic religion.

We have come to the center point of our discussion. Not knowing that the religious (e.g. Evangelical) fundamentalists' "morality" really refers to a simplistic order of the social collective, a complex person of differentiated mind often finds them to be people of low ethical development who project their God as likewise of low ethical development. Firstly they appear to confuse aesthetics with ethics, since their condemnation of homosexuality, for example, seems more motivated by the ugliness of an effeminate man and the disgust aroused by two such men engaged in the act (putting aside their reading of the Biblical injunctions). This is because aesthetics is conditioned by judgment about order: man should be man-like and woman woman-like, thus all functioning orderly, and beautifully. (The proper ordering of society is thus the meaning aimed at when the fundamentalists exclaim, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.") The person of secular differentiated consciousness dismisses such apparent confusion because ethics, in its modern differentiated form (concerned solely with the well-being of people), has nothing to do with aesthetics, so that an act which results in no damage to other people will be ethically condoned despite its un-aesthetical appeal. It is precisely when the modern consciousness has differentiated values from facts, that the shrinkage of the content of "morality" occurs, and that, within values, morals (actions which affect the physical well-being of sentient life) becomes separated from aesthetics (preferences which do not so affect, but are for mind-pleasing only). Such person will thus disbelieve in God's condemnation of homosexual acts, for example -- for God should at least be as clear-thinking as the differentiated person him- or herself. Secondly, the fundamentalists present God as wrathful and always ready to punish (both un-ethical and un-aesthetical acts). A person of (secular) differentiated consciousness is always less inclined to condemn, say, a rapist or murderer because he or she sees the causes, psychological or social, of the constitution, and consequently a certain inevitability, of the criminal. Such person may also be of more comprehensive ethicality and develop a less conditional (not unconditional as yet) love and acceptance of things in the manner of the Daoist. Among ordinary persons such love is for example found in a mother who still loves her son without judgment even though he turns out to be a rapist. She knows the cause -- she knows him inside out and transparently, which leads to unconditional love. A person of differentiated consciousness would then also disbelieve in God's willingness to punish anybody for anything, unethical or just unaesthetical, for God should at least match up to such Daoism in a human mother or a person of non-judgmental acceptance. On the other hand, the religious fundamentalists tend to exhibit such blood-thirstiness and to project it onto God as well, so that somehow God is this wrathful being that constantly desires to kill off his own creatures (infidels, homosexuals, heretics, "fornicators") with hurricanes or tsunamis or earth-quakes. This again appears strange to persons of higher moral development and capable of compassion: if even a human mother has difficulty in abandoning her criminal son, wouldn't God at least be capable of such almost unconditional love? The whole morality of, say, the Evangelical fundamentalists seems like a huge chunk of absurd immorality, as they, while holding onto the rock of the "sanctity of human life" in uncompromisingly protecting the aggregate of cells making up the fetus and denying the suicidal wish of a terminally ill patient suffering from incessant pains, try their best in promoting total religious war at times that would kill off hundreds of thousands of innocent people -- thousands of children included -- in order to fulfill, say, their eschatological fantasy of a "rapture". People who are not of their kind, regarded thus as inferior, "God-abandoned", they like to see killed. (Not to mention their frequent indifference to animal suffering and mockery of people who are not so indifferent.) It is almost as if they oppose abortion because they feared they may run out of children to bomb, and assisted suicide because they were afraid there might not be enough suffering in the world. More importantly, they somehow think God wanted all this bloodshed. The representation of God by the fundamentalists thus appears "unseemly", a consequence of their making God out of their own image, out of their own "morality" (i.e. their own sense of order), which is inevitable because a person does not know what he or she does not know and does not comprehend the higher level moral sentiments which he or she has not yet attained -- so that he or she will never see them in God. (Then again, a Christian who argues that an awful criminal who has recently believed in Jesus is going to heaven and a just person who does not is going to hell may be seen as speaking from such non-judgmental Daoism -- or even a comprehensive enlightened understanding that the petty injustices which humans suffer from each other are nothing in the cosmic scale -- with that religious twist of requirement doctrinally bound.)

The absurd morality of the religious fundamentalists which they project onto God as well is explained when we remember that it is reflective of more than just "morality" in the modern, well-being-bound sense, but is expressive of their experience of order in the temporal world which disengages from the salvational state of the soul achieved for the sake of the other world. This is why other people's behavior which harms no one, like consensual relationships between adults of the same sex or wearing skirts too short, suddenly becomes their business: this they deem disruptive of the order of the society and so detrimental to the salvational state of the community. The problem is not that their "morality" really refers to the proper ordering of society, or that this proper order is, for a differentiated mind, no more than ethicalization of aesthetics; this is merely "traditional". In The Nicomachean Ethics, for example, the words that Aristotle uses to characterize "good" (agathos) and "bad" (kakos) (whether it be activities: energeia, dispositions from which they originate or of which they are the exercises: eqoV, or the pleasures that accompany the activities: hdonh) and which are usually translated as "noble", "moral", "base", or "immoral", are all aesthetic terms: "beautiful" (kaloV, epieikhV) and "ugly" (aiscroV, fauloV, mocqhroV). Order and disorder have always been the basis for, and intimately associated with, aesthetics. (See The Origin of Good and Evil in the Human Experience of Thermodynamics.) Even when the traditional moralists condemned robbery, thief, or the wanton destruction of innocent human and animal life, they were really condemning the disorderly state of the "soul" inside the wrong-doer that resulted from such indulgence in bodily impulses and pleasures as manifested in the wrongful acts; the "suffering" of the victims was secondary in their concern. The religious fundamentalists' "morals" remain this type. They have simply not caught up with the modern notion of "ethics" because their goal is other-worldly salvation. The real problem is that the fundamentalist "proper ordering" is overly simplistic and superficial (external), which explains its association with sadism in readiness to punish, because such is proper to the simple mind that is the primary subscriber to the testamental mythic consciousness positivized (i.e. made even more simple, shallow!), and which, in its lack of experience of, and inability to understand, life, society, humanity, and the world at large, is only capable of conceiving that simplistic order of which the most elementary beauty standard constituted the content and wherein the full range of the complexity of life in the modern world simply cannot be comprehended. The testamental religiousness has not broken through the mythic consciousness and the modern day religious fundamentalists have their mental development arrested at the stage of the myth, made worse and easier by the positivistic tendency which they have adopted from sciences.

Thus, even those traditionalists who would find (for example) Alan Bloom's critique of the liberal, lay morality (the preservation of well-being and equality)10 agreeable, and who, thus, would wish for a restoration of morality to its original meaning of "character building" (order-formation), cannot find the evangelical manner of "proper ordering" (of society or person's soul or interior) to be much of a "proper" ordering. It's simply too impoverished.

The reason why the Protestants (or other Christians) condemn homosexuality is of course that the Hebrew Law forbids it -- and the Protestants, with their return to the Old Testament, take the Law ever more seriously. The reason for this prohibition is that the Jewish society, law, and morals at that time were all centered around the family as the instrument for the total dedication to God and the receiving of his rewards: "The Covenant itself, and the circumcision to which it obliged men, were a sign of the directing of the procreative powers toward the increase of the Jewish people promised by God.... Eroticism [i.e. sexuality, love] is [thus] totally confounded with the procreative function, and only that which contributes to it is celebrated and made beautiful." (Bloom, ibid., p. 64) In the fundamentalist theocratic order, the family (in the traditional, procreative form) remains the central component; hence "Adam and Eve" and not "Adam and Steve" is the proper ordering. This is not so in the liberal's vision of a secular society, based on equality and well-being.

Just as there is, as pointed out, a temporal succession of "micro-perspectives" within a single type of macro-perspective (e.g. the structural perspective), so there is a time-perpendicular (or spatial, if one will) juxtaposition of "sub-" or "regional" perspectives within a single "micro-perspectives", such as the juxtaposition of the evangelical positivism with the general scientific positivism and other sorts of contemporaneous "sub-perspectives" within the current, late structural perspective. The evangelical positivism comes into the current stage of the structural perspective through the persistence of a previous "micro-perspective" into this current stage, as indicated, as a "living fossil". Now, as every people need to use that "theoretical and imaginary frame of reference" (nomos) developed in their head to understand the world by filtering this world through it, this "living fossil" of evangelical paradigm -- which was formed previously through the positivization or empiricization of religious symbolism -- appears much too simplistic and inadequate within the current developmental stage of the structural perspective to account for all the things here which are more than there were in the previous developmental stages, and to explain "why they are what they are and none other"; and when those understanding only the simplest order and yet thinking of themselves as "on the right side" (the "elect") such as the evangelists frequently do, try to fit the far more complex reality outside into their simplified system of understanding, they naturally appear to the lay liberal as militantly self-righteous idiots from medieval time that are especially oppressive and dangerous. To give an example of the filtering of complex reality through an overly simplistic understanding: although the evangelical circles have recently started to rectify the problem by reformulating lay therapeutic practices into faith-based therapy, the fundamentalists still frequently regard mental illness in all its complexity and variety as caused simply by Satanic influences, because their impoverished order contains only the simple categories of "good" (order) from God and "evil" (disorder) from Satan. Another example: young college kids binge-drink irresponsibly because their behavior is disorderly without the infusion of the spirit of Christ, whereas Christian young adults live a disciplined and responsible life without indulgence because the spirit of Christ has entered them to create order in their comportment. Again, the complexities of life issues, genetic predisposition, childhood upbringing, etc., are all filtered out of this simple, black-and-white (order-disorder) binary scheme of causation.

"Simple beauty standard" has become "moral" -- or order -- for the "religious" because what they mean by the proper ordering of the community and of the person's life seems only to consist in the prohibition and condemnation of sexuality too flamboyant or deemed deviant, reinforcement of etiquettes and manners, and, within the Protestant deformation, cleanliness and orderliness of street and household, and above all -- making a good living (when Christ enters you, you become a thoughtless and emotionless robot working efficiently and making good money and doing well: "intraworldly asceticism", that ridiculous perversion of the Christian faith). The superficial and external stuff of "order", of which, moreover, none by themselves is either moral or religious issues (i.e. relating to salvation after life). The situation is akin to Socrates' dismissal of Cephalus' "justice" in the opening of the Republic: justice, order, or morality only on the level of appearance without substance, i.e. without any understanding of what justice is about. This is indeed the case with the practitioners of the testamental religions, both in their original forms in the past but more so in their degenerate forms of the contemporary (Protestant) fundamentalists. Those of mythic ("story") consciousness simply cannot match the philosophic minds and understand the idea (form) of justice, to use Plato's terminology. The combined effect of their seeking order on the level of the collective and not of the personal and their seeking order only on the superficial level of external appearance, and not on the deeper level of knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, and compassion, is that they know only to suppress conducts that may and usually, in the case of ordinary simple people, lead to a disordered soul, a soul distracted by and dispersed among earthly things and cut off therewith from major salvation after life. That is, conducts that are superficial signs of a disordered soul but not it itself, e.g. promiscuity, drug- or other addictions, sexual practices deemed deviant, or sexual relationships outside marriage that create family disorder, etc.

The testamental religiosity, in contrast to the second mode salvation, e.g. the characteristically passive and peaceful Buddhists and Daoists throughout history who have always had universal compassion for all living beings, has produced many a destructive force in history, especially the extremely aggressive and "mechanical" ("rational", in Weber's words) Protestant fundamentalist branches of Christianity: oppressive, quick to condemn people (from the Native Americans in the Puritan age to the homosexuals, the sexually "deviants", etc. of today, who do no harm but only appear aesthetically unpleasing [i.e. disorderly] to the morally immature), and eager to impose their own order even through violence. This is mainly due to their search for that above simplistic order as the salvational state. And that simplistic order itself is due to, and contributes further to, the aforementioned easy accessibility of this religiosity and the consequent mass recruitment into its rank of the lowest denominator of humanity: the most morally and intellectually immature and deficient elements of humanity, who are incapable of transcending their limited, personal, and provincial perspective, and who are too stupid to realize they are stupid; shallow people who are anti-spiritual, un-wise, narrow-minded, who can think of things, events, life-circumstances, and most importantly religious injunctions (such as the Ten Commandments or the moralistic ramblings of Paul) only in their present-at-hand aspect, but lack the ability to re-access the lost ready-to-hand experience behind these, and consequently engage themselves in literalist (present-at-hand, propositional, positivist) application of "moral injunctions" to others in a manner devoid of human empathy; who are, worst of all, able to use their belief in a drama-scenario to indulge themselves in that lowest way for one to feel good about oneself, i.e. through degrading others: feeling themselves superior to the rest of humankind by categorizing themselves as the "elect" and the rest as the "damned" -- including those that have attained the enlightened state of mind through the second mode and become the "really superior"; who, thus, acquire minor salvation through purely external signs (such as the aesthetics of cleanliness, industriousness, "not fornicating", etc.) because of their incapacity for internal means (universal empathy; the enlightened state of mind...), and so are only capable of conceiving that simplistic order.11 These explain why the fundamentalists, just like their Puritan predecessors, manifest militant aggression against others not of their kind. Ultimately, this aggression is related to their positivist tendency, that their minor salvation is formed through belief ("faith") in stories/ images of things (God and its signs and miracles) rendered moreover present-at-hand, and in immaturely developed interpersonal relationships (with God, Jesus) modelled on their intraworldly equivalents (children's relationship with powerful but immature parents who punish and get angry with them to discipline them, but who do not know how to love them with empathy and compassion). The defect of the first mode of salvation -- based on belief in a scenario, drama, of salvation, which requires little intellectual and moral development, rather than on an "enlightened state of mind" which, through intense philosophic reflection, entails the development of a most comprehensive, universal perspective and consequently universal compassion (like Zhuangzi or Buddha) -- is vastly amplified through the positivization (literalization) of this drama (now a scientific description of eschatology, i.e. a present-at-hand process of present-at-hand objects and beings), because the mechanization involved of the salvational eschatological process has further decreased the need to think and feel in order to accept it.

Why religious fundamentalism is anti-spiritual

"Spirituality", which is the budding point of philosophy, or mysticism (true philosophy is mysticism, as shall be demonstrated below), has rarely been properly defined. In terms of its intellectual and experiential content, spirituality means: the recognition of individualities to be partialities of and participation in a total, all-encompassing whole. But in common parlance it is usually defined only in terms of the psychological state associated with this elevated cognition, in terms of its "felt" content: "the meditator claims that, in her direct experience of this delta state, she is having experiences for which the word 'spiritual' seems most fitting: she is experiencing a sense of expanded consciousness, an increase in love and compassion, a feeling of encountering the sacred and numinous in both herself and the world at large." (Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything, p. 65; note that this experience is still ready-to-hand.) It can clearly be seen that religious fundamentalism embodies neither of these two characteristics.

First of all, fundamentalism manifests its anti-spirituality in its rejection of evolution and all sorts of scientific discoveries. Evolution presents us with the "Tree of Life", that great interconnected lineages of diversification which show that all species of organisms on Earth today share a common ancestry starting from some point of time in the past and, going backwards, are descended ultimately from a single "common ancestor". This is the essence of the lesson of evolutionary biology. It is an extremely spiritual experience to learn that we, all the pets we "own", the annoying insects crawling on the floor of our kitchen, the chickens, cows, and pigs whose flesh we eat for lunch, the pigeons and sparrows scavenging on the street, and even the trees in the forest that we are destroying -- these have all descended from the same ancestor; it is an extremely spiritual experience to see all life around us as our "brothers and sisters", so to speak. The "unity of life", as evolutionary biologists so frequently emphasize. The Christian religious (Evangelical) fundamentalists detest evolution because their positivist worldview (the world as a collection of immutable and irreducible material beings and things) causes them to reject the holism and dynamism involved in the "unity of life"; they enjoy the fantasy of "God creating us and all species of life separately" -- for the question is not of whether God creates, but how -- and God only creating these other species for our exploitation, for our I-It use of them (for our "dominion over them") -- because it makes them feel "superior" among the diversity of life (they consider an insult to be "related" to apes, as some say), fulfilling that base need for the construction of one's self-esteem at the expense of others; and moreover because such creationism makes for convenient justification for ruthless exploitation and killing of animals by eliminating bad conscience. Thus the Protestant fundamentalist use of the Old Testament creation myth is anti-spiritual to the extreme (while evolution is far more spiritual) and no different than the racists' use of race thinkings during the era of European imperialism to justify colonialism or American slavery.

The Protestants’ conflict with evolution is at bottom not about evolution (the complexification of species or speciation through descent) per se – for the Catholic church (and a few renegades in evangelism, e.g. Francis Collins) has already accepted evolution as precisely the manner in which God creates – but about the nature of God which bears on how He creates. The Protestants’ positivist conception of God as an object-engineer with fixed properties leads directly to their conception of His way of “creating” as in the same manner in which, as just mentioned, an engineer first designs and then an industrial worker creates (i.e. "manu-factures") a “product” according to the design: God’s creation is creation of present-at-hand objects with properties fixed once and for all, and which therefore cannot change through time, just as industrial factory workers’ “creation” of a product such as a telephone is the creation of a telephone whose properties do not change through time. What if the workers create a telephone that evolves, adapts, and improves itself through time in accordance with the changing demand of users, or even in accordance with an inner plan? This the Protestant fundamentalists cannot accept! Perhaps the fact that Protestantism emerges chiefly within the class of business men and professional artisans like shoe-makers is what is responsible for their anal obsession with the meaning of God’s creation as necessarily an object-engineer creating a bunch of other objects.

The Protestant conception of the contest between "Intelligent Design" and "science" is simply based on the outdated notion of science as it was during Enlightenment: positivism, that mechanistic view of the world. Its view of life is essentially mechanistic (that all properties and functions of living organisms are built up from physical, chemical, and mechanical causation between fundamental material molecules: the whole as built up from parts), and presumes that contemporary biology is still the same as nineteenth century mechanism. The Intelligent Design view of life is merely vitalistic, rather than organismic, which is the real paradigm of contemporary biology: "Whereas organismic biologists challenged the Cartesian [i.e. positivist] machine analogy by trying to understand biological form in terms of a wider meaning of organization [i.e. the parts are determined within the whole], vitalists did not really go beyond the Cartesian paradigm. Their language was limited by the same images and metaphors; they merely added a nonphysical entity as the designer or director of the organizing processes that defy mechanistic explanations." (Capra, ibid., p. 26) In the Intelligent Design worldview, this is either the "soul" as a present-at-hand, non-physical "substance", or God's "Design". The evangelical manner of recapturing the lost sacred and mysterious character of God's creation (the sacred Weltlichkeit) thus amounts to no more than adding a present-at-hand non-material substance on top of another present-at-hand material machine, or a present-at-hand transcendental god's extending its mechanical causation into the present-at-hand world to produce some empirical events. A typical Intelligent Design statement manifests all these, its outdated understanding of science as mechanistic and its own objection as merely vitalistic: "molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum are 'irreducibly complex.' They’re like a mousetrap. Without all of their basic parts, they don’t work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, where each step provides an immediate survival advantage for the organism. It can’t select for a future function. To do that requires foresight -- the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. That’s the positive evidence for design: Such structures are the sort produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function." (Jay Wesley Richards from Christian Odyssey)12

The Catholics usually know better because they aren't positivists (Catholicism is fossilized on the philosophical stage). Not only does the official catechism accept evolution as valid, but it also understands the problem of the reduction of the Bible to a mere instrument of present-at-hand representation. "Up to very recently, the Bible was regarded too much as s sort of scientific manual, and not enough as story written to throw God's light on the existing world. The difficulty was solved by a better understanding of the Bible. [Referring to evolution and its meaning in light of God's Plan:] And richer and richer finds showed still more clearly the great drama of the spine that slowly straightened up, and the skull that took on a greater volume, as the beast developed into man." (A New Catechism, trans. of De Nieuwe Katechismus, 1967; p. 10) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin probably had some influence in the composition of these words.

The Orthodox joins in: "The Bible is not a book of science. Its purpose is not to convey historical or scientific facts. God has other ways of letting us in on some of the secrets of the universe, i.e., geology, biology, astronomy, etc. Behind every science the faithful Christian sees God at work in the world." This is not referring to "Intelligent Design", however. "The biblical writers thought the world was flat, but that was before God used Copernicus and the space age to show us that the world is round. The purpose of the Bible is to teach not science but theology, to reveal God and His will to us. The whirling planets don't tell us that God loves us. It is in the Bible that we find the promise and the record of His love... The Bible is inerrant... when it speaks to us of God, of His will for us, and the way of salvation. It is not inerrant when it speaks of geology or biology. Its purpose is to tell us who created the world (theology) not how the world was created (geology)." (Coniaris, ibid., p. 154.)

Secondly, the fundamentalists usually maintain "faith" (i.e. the positivist reformulation of the Bible) through either the irrational attempt to deny the mounting scientific discoveries (as to how the empirical world works) or through half-way learning (e.g. the outdated notion of science or inaccurate presentation of scientific discoveries presupposed in "Scientific Creationism" or "Intelligent Design"). Ignorance is deliberately cultivated. This sort dogmatic shutting off from reality to rigidly maintain the impoverished content of one's mind is anti-spiritual since it involves an absolute assertion of individuality to the exclusion of the Whole outside rather than the loss of that individuality within the whole (the feeling of the self and the manifold things as parts of and participations in something much larger).

Even though, however, the Evangelicals have reduced the spiritually laden symbolic religious talk to a spiritless scientific present-at-hand representation, they do occasionally resort back to symbolic speech, unbeknownst to themselves. They would say, for example, that they are each "created" by God. But when confronted by someone pointing out that, if the origin of each of them be traced, it finally leads back to the womb of their mother and to the procreative acts of their parents, and not to a "creative" act (in the manufacturing sense) of God, these religious fundamentalists would have to admit that they did not mean to say "God created each of them" in the literal (i.e. manufacturing) sense, like a carpenter just created a table; but that the material they were made of originally came from God and that it was God's will which gathered their parents together to make them (the sense of "agency" found in the Catholic notion of God). In other words, their birth is providential. This is how normally the open-minded religious can eliminate the "conflict" between "evolution" and "creationism", by saying that God has "created" all living creatures precisely through evolution (the speciation of one original population of a living form into many of divergent forms through time) just as He has "created" each human being today born from his or her mother's womb. Evolution, genesis of species, by providence. This theoretically could save the fundamentalists' dilemma in face of scientific discoveries (although they may still object that Genesis specifically speaks of "creation of the world and all living creatures in six days").

The desire to be open to the external reality (to learn about it) and universal compassion (which can sublimate itself into ecophilosophy) naturally imply each other within the frame of spirituality -- and religious fundamentalists are just the opposite in this matter: the lack of interest in the external world (in learning about it) and the lack of empathy for others not of the same faith and non-human sentient beings -- because both involve the widening of the range of the self. In Arne Næss' words:

Care flows naturally if the "self" is widened and deepened so that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as protection of ourselves.... Just as we need no morals to make us breathe... [so] if your "self" in the wide sense embraces another being [= spirituality], you need no moral exhortation to show care.... You care for yourself without feeling any moral pressure to do it.... If reality is like it is experienced by the ecological self, our behavior naturally and beautifully follows norm of strict environmental ethics. (Cited in Capra, ibid., p. 12)

This will end in "Liebesakosmismus." The Evangelical spirit however is predicated upon the "narrowing of the self" (anti-spiritual), hence the narrowing of the mind with its over-simplistic order, and its malicious aggression toward others (such as toward Catholics by considering them "damned" or the Pope "anti-Christ"), both maintained through a self-proclaimed righteousness and superiority (as the "elect"), and hence also its need to separate animals and nature from humans as separate creations, and its congruence with the outdated, but easy-to-understand, positivism. The one is characterized by "eroticism" (in Plato's sense: ultimately, the longing for truth and beauty and the wholeness of All), the other, by the "will-to-power" (to domination and superiority). It is not that the Evangelicals, with their axiomatic way of reading the Scripture and conceiving the dogma, have a different notion of "true" or "false", as some have suggested; but simply that they don't care about the "truth" as much as sticking their boots in others' face, physically or symbolically.

We conclude with an observation once made by S. Angus. A true, non-fundamentalist, truly spiritual Christianity is one that Christ himself bore, a "religion of the Spirit and of Life rather than... a religion of authority." "As Judaism was pre-eminently 'the religion of a book,' Christianity too began to be regarded as such rather than as the religion of Life and of the Spirit. On the theory inevitable to that [Hellenistico-Roman] age [but also in the contemporary positivistic age], Revelation was viewed as something static, a quantum given once for all and of unalterably defined content, whereas a living religion must be dynamic and evolutional, capable of adaptation to every form of life and to every age and of expansion by its own inner laws. The letter which, by its authority, helped Christianity at the beginning, finally became baneful through abuse. The freedom of the divine Spirit was hampered even by a misuse of a venerable collection of books of sublime worth." (The Mystery-Religions: A Study in the Religious Background of Early Christianity, 1928, Dover Reprint; p. 303 - 4.) It seems that, of all the divisions within Christianity, the Orthodox Church embodies best this freedom of the Spirit.


Footnotes:

1. The Spirit, at its particular stage as a particular culture, is also referred to by Hegel as the culture's "principle".

Solches Prinzip ist in der Geschichte Bestimmtheit des Geistes eines Volkes. In dieser drückt er als konkret alle Seiten seines Bewußtseins und Wollens, seiner ganzen Wirklichkeit aus; sie ist das gemeinschaftliche Gepräge seiner Religion, seiner politischen Verfassung, seiner Sittlichkeit, seines Rechtssystems, seiner Sitten, auch seiner Wissenschaft, Kunst und technischer Geschicklichkeit, der Richtung seiner Gewerbstätigkeit. Diese speziellen Eigentümlichkeiten sind aus jener allgemeinen Eigentümlichkeit, dem Besondern Prinzips eines Volkes zu verstehen.... (Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1955; p. 167 - 8)

Such principle is in history the determination of the Spirit of a people. In it they express as concrete all aspects of their consciousness and will, of their whole actuality; it is the general imprint showing up in their religion, their political constitution, their customs, their legal system, their ethics, and also in their science, their art, their technical advancement, and the direction of their industries. These special peculiarities are to be understood in terms of that general peculiarity, the particular principle of a people...

This principle, this general imprint, is thus equivalent to Berger's nomos.

2. For a sociological explanation of the origin of religious fundamentalism, see, for example, William O. Beeman's Fighting the Good Fight: Fundamentalism and Religious Revival (in J. MacClancy, ed. Anthropology for the Real World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). The more usual (event-oriented historical) approach to the analysis of Christian fundamentalism can be found in Ronald D. Witherup's Biblical Fundamentalism: What Every Catholic Should Know (Liturgical Press, 2001) and in E. R. Sandeen's article, "Fundamentalist and Evangelical Churches" in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 7, p. 777 - 780. We see all such studies, although they are essential, as inadequate.

3. C.f. Summary of "The Feminist Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism" and "The process of secularization: a synthesis" in "The American Civil Religion and Consumerism".

4. For example Oresme (d. 1382) argued that the turning of the sun and stars in the sky was not due to the turning of the Heaven but to the earth's own rotation, the Heaven remaining at rest. But the Old Testament recorded how God stopped the Heaven in the time of Joshua, which for the emerging mechanist mind of the late Medieval became a scientific fact. "The Holy Scriptures are consistent here, 'in the manner of ordinary human speech', to the extent that they agree in many other places. Things are not 'as the letter sounds'. Thus it is said that God covered the Heavens with clouds -- 'Qui operit caelum nubibus.' Now, on the contrary, all the evidence shows that it is the Heaven which covers the clouds. Here again the words indicate appearance and not the truth. It is the same for the motion of the Earth and the Heavens... The stopping of the Heavens in the time of Joshua was an illusion -- in fact it was the Earth which stopped, and which started its motion again, or accelerated, in Hezekiah's time." (René Dugas, The History of Mechanics, p. 64) "When God accomplishes a miracle, he does so 'without changing the common course of Nature, except to the extent that this ought to be done.' Thus it is natural that the arrest of the sun in Joshua's time, and the start again in Hezekiah's time, should be the result of terrestrial motion alone" (p. 65 - 6). Though his correspondence of science with scriptures differed from the dogmatic correspondence of the Church, he cleverly escaped condemnation at the moment. "[H]e was nominated Bishop of Lisieux in reward of his work." (Ibid.) The fundamentalist deformation of the scripture began much earlier than modern time.

5. The myth is: 當其末年也, 諸候有共工氏... 以水乘木, 乃與祝融戰不勝而怒, 乃頭觸不周山崩, 天柱折,地維缺 (the first chapter of Historical Records of Su Ma Chien) Also: 往古之時,四極廢,九州裂,天不兼覆,地不周載,火爁炎而不滅,水浩洋而不息,猛獸食顓民,鷙鳥攫老弱。於是女媧鍊五色石以補蒼天,斷鼇足以立四極,殺黑龍以濟冀州,積蘆灰以止淫水 (Hui Nan Zi, chapt. 6) 南祝融,兽身人面,乘两龙。 (Shan hai jing, Ch. 6) As for 共工, he is said to have human face, body of snake, and red hair. (Ibid., Ch. 16)

6. Many have in other contexts spoken of the same distinction between the representation of, or referencing to, the present-at-hand content of the immediate empirical reality and the symbolization of a ready-to-hand experience of the sacred Weltlichkeit. For example, Guy Ménard has spoken of the distinction between logical thinking and symbolic thinking: "Les humains, en effet, disposent d'au moins deux modes de pensée: une pensée logique, réaliste, 'terre à terre' et unidimensionnelle, qui permet les opérations à la fois scientifiques et techniques sur le réel. Pour ce mode de pensée, par exemple, 'une table est une table,' 'un chat est un chat,' et l'eau se 'réduit' à sa structure chimique des molécules d'oxygène et d'hydrogène. Il existe cependant aussi une pensée symbolique, pour laquelle, pour ainsi dire, une chose peut toujours 'être autre chose.' Plus exactement: elle peut signifier autre chose. C'est bien sûr - entre autres millions d'exemples possibles - à cause de cette capacité symbolique que nous pouvons parler, écrire et dessiner, que nous nous arrêtons aux feux rouges, qu'une fleur peut vouloir dire 'je t'aime,' et que des humains peuvent accepter de se faire tuer pour un morceau d'étoffe - qui représente un idéal ou une patrie. C'est évidemment sur ce mode de pensée que repose la possibilité même du langage, de la poésie, de l'art. Comme c'est également cette capacité du symbole de signifier autre chose qui, poussée à la limite, permet à l'esprit humain de parler de son expérience du sacré..." And myth, Biblical (both New and Old testament) or tribal, is the function of symbolic thinking: "Le terme de mythe, on le sait, a souvent un sens péjoratif. Pour la langue courante, comme pour la science positiviste, le mythe, c'est précisément le contraire de la 'vérité' (rationnelle, scientifique). On comprend mieux aujourd'hui qu'une telle opposition est aussi inutile que maladroite (et malheureuse): la 'vérité' du mythe ne s'oppose pas plus à celle de la science que la pensée symbolique ne 's'oppose' à la pensée logique. Le mythe n'a pas de 'prétention scientifique.' D'une manière symbolique, il tente plutôt de dire comment les humains comprennent leur expérience du monde (et du sacré)..." ("Le sacré et le profane, d'hier à demain", 1986; see also his discussion of the literalization and fossilization of religious language -- paralleling Voegelin's in some way -- in Petit traité de la vraie religion, Ch. 2.) Fundamentalism (literal reading of the scripture or literal understanding of religiousness in general) is in this perspective the re-presentation of symbolic thinking as logical thinking, of myth as scientific or journalistic report. The transition to fundamentalism on the phylogenic level also corresponds in a certain way to the transition from the readiness-to-hand of an assertion to its presence-at-hand on the ontogenic level. See 2.B.1. Ch. 15.2, Heidegger's Notion of Truth).

Most interesting in respect to this topic is Paul Veyne's Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? (Editions du Seuil, 1983; Engl. trans. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination) As the publisher summarizes: "The real objective of this book is to show that this question, in the final instance, makes no sense. Just asking this question is to implicitly put oneself in the descent of Fontennelle and the men of the Enlightenment era, confronting what is said with facts [logical positivism, the Vienna circle: words have to refer to empirical reality to have meaning]. But precisely here such question makes no sense for an ancient; and, as Foucault has shown, truth itself is historic. In other words, the idea of truth has evolved [i.e. changed]. P. V. compares the truth of a moment to an recipient, or more abstractly, to a program which the question 'Is it true? Is it false?' poses. As for the recipient-program, it is itself a creation. Finally, it is not right to think that in the same moment, all have the same program of truth, or even that in the same individual there is but one program (hence one can not-believe in phantoms but nevertheless be afraid of them)." ("L'objet réel de ce texte est de montrer que la question qu'il pose, en dernière instance, n'a pas de sens. C'est que la poser est implicitement se ranger dans la descendance de Fontenelle et des hommes de siècle des Lumières, confrontant les dits avec les faits. Mais, précisément, cette question-là n'a pas de sens pour un ancien; et, comme l'a montré Foucault, la vérité elle-même est historique. Autrement dit, l'idée de vérité a evolué. Paul Veyne compare volontiers la vérité d'un moment à un récipent ou, plus abstraitement, à un programme que la question: est-ce vrai? est-ce faux? se pose. Quant au récipient-programme, il est lui-même le fait d'un création. En fin, il ne serait pas juste de penser qu'en en même moment, tous ont le même programme de vérité, voire que chez un même sujet n'est en oeuvre qu'un programme (on peut ne pas croire au fantôme et néanmoins en avoir horriblement peur).")

7. "Evil and omnipotence", in Good and Evil: Readings on the Theological Problems of Evil (1964), p. 57. Consider this statement by Paul Draper: "naturalism is 'the hypothesis that the universe is a "closed system" in the sense that nothing that is neither a part nor a product of it can affect it. So naturalism entails the non-existence of all supranatural beings, including the theistic god.'" (Cited at infidels.org) Or Ernest Nagel in "A Defense of Atheism" (in Reason At Work, Reading 49): "And by theism I shall mean the view which holds, as one writer has expressed it, 'that the heavens and the earth and all that they contain owe their existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-consistent, omnipresent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent being, who is distinct from, and independent of, what he has created.'" The presupposition of the atheistic position as manifested here is that the "theistic god" is some sort of a being -- a material "substance" -- that affects the universe from outside, that reality is no more than a collection of things affecting each other like billiard balls hitting each other on a pool table (they call it "causality"). Nagel is so attached to viewing this notion of God and reality as the norm, unaware of its recent historical origin, that he doesn't even consider Pantheism to be "theism", and certainly not Buddhism; and why? Because this atheistic (positivistic) presupposition is also shared by the religious fundamentalists, so that, in the end, as emphasized before, people who are deadly enemies to each other are actually just brothers under the skin, having, in this case, the same inability to understand God beyond "thinghood". Interestingly, it is precisely the Israelites' -- and then the Protestants' -- transcendentalization of God -- pushing God out of the cosmos, whereas before gods remained identical with natural phenomena within the cosmos -- which paved the way for this objectification of God into a being outside the visible world such that its existence can be questioned.

8. Circling back to the positivistic rendering of Biblical narrative: This empiricization (rendering present-at-hand and intraworldly) of providence, combined with the Protestant return to the Old Testament, eventually leads to the "literal [i.e. positivist, empirical] Dispensationalism" in late nineteenth century that figures as a part of the pre-millennialism and paves the way for the so-called "Christian Zionism". See Gary Burge's "Christian Zionism": "As Herzl was the father of Jewish Zionism, one could argue that [the Irish pastor J. N.] Darby was the father of Christian Zionism. Darby's system -- soon called Dispensationalism -- taught a literal fulfillment of prophesies in the near-present age. He used the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation to weave a consistent picture of the Last Days. The church is raptured, the anti-Christ arises, Armageddon erupts, and Christ returns to establish his kingdom on earth." The symbolism of the Last Days is now rendered into a history textbook recording of empirically verifiable events. But, remember, this would not lead to a "Zionism" without that return to the Old Testament. "But above all, the revival of Israel is the catalyst of the End Times." After Darby, Horatio and Anna Spafford, William Blackstone, and Cyrus Scofield followed suit. The Turks' handing over of Palestine to the British after WWI, and the Independence of Israel in 1948 were just the empirical verifications that literal dispensationalists needed and waited for. On the ground of these empiricist dispensationalism issues into the contemporary "prophets": "Writers such as Walvoord and Ryrie viewed modern history through this Biblical lens for a new generation. In 1970 Hal Lindsey then published The Late Great Planet Earth which popularized and dramatized the unfolding of political events in Israel and how the Bible predicted them. To date, Lindsey's original book has sold 25 million copies. More recently Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' popular Left Behind series fictionalizes this eschatology and has sold over 50 million copies in 11 volumes." It is because of the adoption of empiricism that the annoying and dangerous phenomenon of the fundamentalist meddling in national foreign policy -- in addition to the previously mentioned active participation in politics to change domestic, cultural forms -- becomes possible. "Today a movement called Christian Zionism... [has] shed much of Dispensationalism's theological program but [has] kept its eschatology. Christian Zionism weds religion with politics and interprets biblical faithfulness in terms of fidelity to Israel's future. Its spokespersons are today well-known among those on the Christian Right: Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Ed McAteer, Gary Bauer, and Kay Arthur. Those committed to Christian Zionism share the same five core beliefs: (1) The Covenant. God's covenant with Israel is eternal and unconditional. Therefore the promises of land given to Abraham will never be overturned. This means that the church has not replaced Israel and that Israel's privileges have never been revoked despite unfaithfulness. (2) The Church. God's plan has always been for the redemption of Israel. Yet when Israel failed to follow Jesus, the church was born as an afterthought or 'parenthesis.' Thus at the rapture the church will be removed and Israel will once again become God's primary agent in the world. We now live in 'the times of the Gentiles' which will conclude soon. This means that there are two covenants now at work, that given through Moses and the covenant of Christ. But the new covenant in no way makes the older covenant obsolete. (3) Blessing Modern Israel. We must take Gen. 12:3 literally and apply it to modern Israel: 'I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.' Therefore Christians have a spiritual obligation to bless Israel and 'pray for the peace of Jerusalem.' To fail to bless Israel, to fail to support Israel's political survival today, will incur divine judgment. (4) Prophesy. The prophetic books of the Bible are describing events of today and do not principally refer to events in Biblical times. Therefore when we look at, say, Daniel 7, if we possess the right interpretative skills, we can see how modern history is unfolding. This quest for prophesy has spawned countless books interpreting Middle East history through the Bible. (5) Modern Israel and Eschatology. The modern state of Israel is a catalyst for the prophetic countdown. If these are the last days, then we should expect an unraveling of civilization, the rise of evil, the loss of international peace and equilibrium, a coming antichrist, and tests of faithfulness to Israel. Above all, political alignments today will determine our position on the fateful day of Armageddon." The usual criticism can succeed simply by taking on dispensationalism on the levels of words, on their own terms, without going into the problem of empiricist distortion of Biblical symbolism (the problem of perspective). "It would not be difficult to offer fatal criticisms of this theological framework... For instance, the covenant's promises are conditional and their blessings are revoked when there is faithlessness. The Babylonian exile is the best example of this. But in addition the New Testament is making a stunning claim about genuine continuity between the covenants, that Christians are the children of Abraham and heirs of his promises. But the most important critique... is that Christian Zionism is committed to what I term a 'territorial religion.' It assumes that God's interests are focused on a land, a locale, a place. From a NT perspective, the land is holy by reference to what transpired there in history. But it no longer has an intrinsic part to play in God's program for the world. This is what Stephen pointed to in his speech in Acts 7. The land and the temple are now secondary. God's wishes to reveal himself to the entire world."

9. As an example of "pre-salvation", consider the famous case of the first emperor of China, shortly after the Unification: 齐人徐市等上书,言海中有三神山,名曰蓬莱、方丈、瀛洲. 仙人居之。请得斋戒,与童男女求之。於是遣徐市发童男女数千人,入海求仙人。 (Historical Records of Su Ma Chien, 秦始皇本纪第六) "Hsu-shi and others from Qi [the region and originally the kingdom on the northeastern coast] came to make the proposal, saying there were three holy mountains in the sea, named Penlai, Fanzhan, and Yinzhou, where holy people inhabited. He wished to obtain the permission to sustain a vegetarian diet so that he may with pre-adolescent boys and girls go there to seek it [i.e. the immortality potion]. Thusly [the first emperor] sent Hsu-shi to take with him pre-adolescent boys and girls several thousands of them, and to go into the sea to seek the holy people." The commentary describing the three islands: 此三神山者,其传在渤海中,去人不远,盖曾有至者,诸仙人及不死之药皆在焉。其物禽兽尽白,而黄金白银为宫阙。未至,望之如云;及至,三神山乃居水下;临之,患且至,风辄引船而去,终莫能至云。世主莫不甘心焉. "These three holy mountains were said by legends to be located in the Buo sea [between China and Japan], not far from people [where we were]; it is said that those who came to them [would find that] several thousand holy people and the immortality potions were all there. All land and air animals there were of white color, and the palaces made of gold and silver. Before one came to them, they could be seen only [vaguely] like clouds. Once one came to them, they were found to be under water. Just about when one approached them, stormy weather set in and led the ships away so that one could never precisely arrive at them. All profane people felt the regret."

The pre-salvation forms an essential component of the alchemic enterprise in both East and West. "Elixirs were sought after in China as early as the 4th century B.C. by the practical art of wai tan, the aim being to procure physical immortality by ingesting the preparations, which included potable gold. By the early Middle Ages it was thought that by the use of such techniques as breath control, meditation, sexual practices, etc., an adept could produce within his own body an 'inner' elixir which would reverse the flow of certain secretions and thus halt and reverse the ageing process. This physiological alchemy was known as nei tan. Arab traders most probably brought the concept to the West where it ultimately became part of alchemical lore. With the prolonging of life by good health we are witnessing extension of duration within a linear time-scale [approaching pre-salvation], and the same may be said for the attainment of physical immortality [pre-salvation as such]. To quote Arnold of Villanova again, 'Our medicine', he says, 'has also power to heal all infirmity and diseases, both of inflammation and debility; it turns an old man into a youth.' Salmon Trismosin, writing somewhere near the end of the 16th century, rejuvenated himself and certain women ranging in age from 70 to 90 years by the consumption of half a grain of tincture." (Harry Sheppard, "European alchemy in the context of a universal definition" in Die Alchemie in der europaeischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1986, p. 14) Among this pre-salvation can be subsumed the modern medical attempts, financed by the rich corporate men, to find medicine that would prolong life-span. As noted in the comparison between cultural feminism and alchemy (in The Origin of Cultural Feminism, footnote 3), the entire alchemical enterprise is simply a perhaps less sophisticated form of salvational pursuit. "Thus far we have touched upon two aspects of alchemy... [perfection of metal into gold through the Philosopher's Stone and the search for Exilir] but there are other works which appear more puzzling in that they have no apparent practical intent and display lavish symbolism hinting at a spiritual quest... [these] others of theosophical bent [of alchemy] maintained firmly that alchemy had never been other than a spiritual quest whose subject was man and the object his perfection, or redemption." (Ibid.) "Now, the attempted preparation of gold by shortening the cosmic 'gestatory' period; the attainment of longevity and even some form of immortality; and, lastly, redemption -- all imply an alteration of duration in some linear time scale. The first demands a shortening of duration, the second a lengthening [these two are pre-salvational, the manipulation of time only] and the last a complete removal from that time scale [salvation proper]; all imply the alchemists' supposed ability to control the inexorable passage of Time. Nathan Sivin has neatly classed an exilir as a 'time-controlling' substance; the ability to alter at will a period of duration represents a liberation from the strictures imposed by Time. Of course, other-worldly immortality and redemption represent the final exemption from the ravages of Time. Accordingly, for those practices which are regarded as alchemical, the following definition is offered for consideration: Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Exilir of life for human), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices.) Such definition... is applicable in a general way to all of the world's alchemical traditions. Its use may help to end the old argument over what is true alchemy -- Chinese or western, or again, practical or spiritual." (Ibid., p. 16 - 7) The first two are perfection of things and pre-salvation, the third salvation proper, which is the object of our "scientific enlightenment", or scientific "gnosis".

10 For example, in the context of a commentary on Plato's Symposium, where each type of man gives an account of his justification for performing the kind of eroticism and love dear to him, Allan Bloom writes: "[Today] whenever [students] are asked to make a judgment about the quality of Phaedrus's or Eryximachus's statements, they are inclined to say, 'Men and women have a right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms, provided, of course, one's partner or partners consent.'" A simple version of the liberal differentiated ethics: equality without judgment unless the well-being of another is affected. "This is probably true, but it is not sufficient.... Judgment, which was one of the most cherished of the intellectual virtues, has become a vice.... This change may or may not contribute to a more tolerant society, but it surely provides a ready excuse for scanting that most valuable kind of judgment, the judgment of oneself." ("The Ladder of Love", in Symposium, trans. S. Benardete, Uni. of Chicago, p. 58 - 9) Or: "In Greek moral philosophy, morality is divided into two parts, the noble or beautiful (kalon) and the good (agathon). A gentleman is called a kaloskagathos, a noble and good man. Full humanity is not attained just by being good or possessing good things. There is a certain irreducible splendor without which man would not be quite man..." Bloom is making the same observation as our earlier one that, in ancient time, "morality" is compacted of order-good-beautiful. "... and a utilitarian morality [i.e. the lay liberal morality], which does not give any status to such splendor, seems to diminish man" (ibid., p. 134). In other words, his objection is that the modern ethics prevents character-formation, which is just the content of morals for the ancients.

11. See the thermodynamic origin of minor salvation in 2.B.1, Ch. 12, on Phaedo.

12 The Intelligent Design argument, also called the "argument from design" or the "teleological" argument (together with the other two classical "proofs" for the existence of God: the ontological and the cosmological; see Nagel, ibid., for details of these two and other additional arguments), is a very old argument. A typical version of it as presented in an analytic philosophy class (from which the Religious Right's version does not differ much) is:

In our experience, we find that highly ordered complex systems (systems in which various parts work together to achieve a single end through complex orderly interactions) are typically the product of intelligent design. (That is, they result from the design -- the "calculation and planning" -- of intelligent beings.) Consider watches, cars, trains, and computers: these are highly ordered systems, and all of them have intelligent designers and makers; they are never the product of random and mindless process. Thus it seems reasonable to suppose that perhaps all highly ordered systems (including those ordered systems about which we have no direct evidence whether or not they were designed by intelligent beings) are products of intelligent design and creation. But now consider this fact: not all highly ordered systems are man-made; many of them are natural objects. Consider the human eye, or the human nervous system.... Each such natural system is awesomely intricate and complex. With these systems, as with the human-designed systems, again we find a kind of adjustment of parts to some end or goal: in the case of the human eye, all of the many parts work together to achieve sight for the human owner; in the case of the nervous system, knowledge of the external and internal world of the person is magnificently provided. But we have already established that, probably, all highly ordered complex systems are the product of intelligent design and creation. It follows, then, that natural highly ordered systems are probably the product of very intelligent design, too. Thus we have powerful evidence that God exists. (Roy Bauer, Introduction to Philosophy, Course Booklet, vol. 2; 1989.)

The typical way in which an analytic philosopher or biologist (or any other atheist) counters this argument from design is to point out that alternative explanations, such as the theories of evolution in general (which may be Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian), have already explained how every details of the natural, non-human made orderliness have come about. The fundamentalists simply ignore most of the details of these theories due to lack of education, such as Richards does above. The fundamentalists' Intelligent Design presupposes the inferiority of the unconscious nature in relation to conscious humans, that nature cannot be capable of what humans can do, and this arrogant attitude vis-à-vis nature is in turn not only the result of their Enlightenment egophany, but also based on their impoverished, limited experience of nature, or rather of the second law of thermodynamics, on the daily experience where one never sees random processes result in orderliness but only in disorder (e.g. a watch can only break into pieces, but its pieces never by themselves assemble back into a functioning watch). In other words, the Intelligent Design argument is based on ignorance of what nature can do. But the more important point here is that, behind such argument, behind this ignorance of nature, is the even more serious impoverished worldview in which (to speak like Heidegger) Dasein's manipulative (or I-It) engagement with the world of beings for a project (toward-which) -- and engagement in such a way that the beings engaged with have been stripped of their equipmental readiness-to-hand, i.e. as in the field of modern engineering -- has become the only way of be-ing imaginable, both for humans and for nature -- hence for God Himself. That "perhaps all highly ordered systems are products of intelligent design and creation" means that the mind can no longer imagine how anything can come into being except through being intentionally designed and manufactured. It is a highly impoverished mind that understands only the building of rigid machines according to blue prints, and the mechanical causation between inanimate objects, which is the spirit behind the Intelligent Design argument. The fundamentalists thus lack the capacity to imagine God to be anything other than also a intentional-intelligent engineer-being manipulating (designing and assembling) rigid material objects around for His projects. Dasein's being-with (Mitsein or the I-Thou mode of be-ing) is forgotten (although retained by the Orthodox as properly religious). We again remember in this connection Martin Buber's critique of modernity, that man has let himself be satisfied with the things which he experiences and uses, to the forgetfulness of the I-Thou experience, and this is the function of formative capitalism, as noted before, with which Protestantism is intimately connected. Evangelical fundamentalists represent the fossilized paradigm of classical (production phase) capitalism.






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