A READER WRITES!

What a Breath of Fresh Air is this Man!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 25, 2015

REFERENCE:

I am currently going through my final editing of Time Out for Sanity! 

Sanity is defined in terms of the individual taking charge of his life and control of how he thinks, why he thinks that way, and how solidly it is based on his experience processed through his distinct conscience and perspective. 

Insanity, on the other hand, is never taking the time to think, never having the courage to think other than how others’ think, worrying always if what one thinks may be out-of-step with the prevailing norm and therefore unpopular. 

When the basis of self-approval is dependent on the approval of others, when it is more important to belong, to be accepted, to be one of the popular crowd, than to be one’s own person, then one lives in a cage of his own making (see Who Put You in the Cage? 2015), while life is little more than a merry-go-round of a secondhand experiences. 

This can lead to anxiety, to trying to be everything to everybody but nothing to ourselves; often manifested in depression, boredom, self-negation, and even self-hatred as we try, sometimes desperately, to escape ourselves in some aberrant behavior that can ultimately lead to our self-destruction.   

This is a too common pattern in Western societies, which represents the pathology of normalcy where the inclination is to trust everyone but ourselves.  Yet, all trust emanates from self-trust, and not the other way around.  To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself.   

This is the theme of "Be Your Own Best Friend" (2014), as I have found befriending ourselves is the hardest obstacle to overcome, mainly because we have been led to believe it is narcissistic or egotistic, when clearly, it is precisely the opposite of such an obsession.  

In this busy busy world, we never seem to have time to stop and listen to the rhythm of our own caring souls for our attention is noisily otherwise directed.   

This is offered as preamble to this writer, a frequent correspondent, who expresses what is in his heart to express.  He writes with candor, refreshing originality of thought, openly expressing himself as his mind invites him to think, caring not whether I agree or not, as he has no other ax to grind then to gain a better understanding of himself and his time against all that daily bombards his senses, which too often obfuscates rather than clarifies the thinking and the understanding.

A READER WRITES:

From my point of view I don’t care what people believe, and I have a hard time dealing with all those people whether they be Nazis, Communists, religious or whatever who want to force their belief on everyone else. 

Religion I find particularly fascinating.  If a human being acted like the god of the old and new Testament who wants to be worshiped and feared and who condemns in Christianity and Islam all nonbelievers to hell ( reminds me of the characteristics of most human dictators ), we in this country would certainly not find such behavior as exemplary. 

The other aspect of Christianity and Islam that I find fascinating is that they both believe in an all-powerful god about whom they believe all of the following:

That he created the universe and our world all by himself, that he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden because he feared they would become like him, he destroyed his creation through a world flood all by himself, he did Sodom and Gomorrah by himself, and he used Moses to get the Israelites out of Egypt. 

However, Christians and Muslims since their inception both believe their god needs their help.  

A being who is characterized as omniscient and omnipotent would need no one’s help.  Also, if that is the case he would have known at the beginning how it would all turn out.

The other day I read that some people who have been wondering whether there was life in other parts of the universe want to try and contact areas where they think life might exist.  

Many of the individuals in the discussion were against such a move because no one knows what sort of beings might respond, and if they were anything like our species, we certainly would not want to make contact since we can’t even get our act together.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

As you know, while working on this editing business for Time Out for Sanity, I have been (at the same time) working on Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.

This has reacquainted me with many scholars that I have read rather eclectically over the years in the field of theology, history, metaphysics and mythology.  

These scholars ponder some of the same celestial topography that you discuss here.  It is surprising how little we know about these two great religions, Christianity and Islam, and yet how much they dominate our existence and our respected cultures.

My efforts are focused on Christianity, which sprung into a great religion from a very unpromising beginning.  Currently, I am reexamining the Fourth Gospel of St. John, which is blatantly a hagiography of Jesus but with some remarkable surprises. 

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke kind of piggyback on each other, telling the same story with little variance promoting the idea of the “Last Supper” and the Eucharist, which is the center of the Catholic Mass.  St. John does not mention the Eucharist.

He also gives less spectacular explanations to miracles.  

In his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, we find that the fish eaten at this miraculous meal is not ichithus, the normal Greek word for fish, but opsarion, which means “cooked fish,” or “pickled fish.”  

In other words, fish that had been prepared beforehand by a tradesman.  Incidentally, John of the Fourth Gospel was a fisherman and friend and disciple of Jesus.

The first three gospels are so similar, as to be seen as a synopsis, and therefore called the “Synoptic Gospels.”  

Moreover, not to burden you with too much detail here, John places the arrest and condemnation of Jesus before the Passover as Jews were forbidden to carry swords during Passover.  The three other gospel writers place this after the Passover.  Why should we be surprised?

The Gospels are essentially all that we have of the "Jesus Story" (except the Dead Sea Scrolls), but scholars are finding these gospels mainly fictions, the twisting and turning of events to fit Scripture rather than to confirm Scripture with events.  

Stated another way, the Gospel writers started with a set of theological beliefs about Jesus, and then they fitted their narratives into those beliefs, not the other way around.   

Matthew makes Jesus into a new Moses going to the mountain.  Mark has Jesus leading a band of followers (mimicking the Old Testament) on a trek through the wilderness to the Promised Land.  And Luke has Jesus personifying the prophets of the Old Testament. 

These authors, one must accept in good conscience, started out with the assumption that their stories had parallels in the Scriptures.  

They were not making a straight story into a myth, as Oxford Scholar A. N. Wilson puts it, but were starting with a myth, the myth that in the beginning was the Word (A. N. Wilson, “Jesus,” W. W. Norton & Co., 1992, p 54).

The Gospel of John doesn’t see Jesus as God, but the Divine Logos, which is closer to Arius, who was excommunicated for that belief at the Council of Nicaea (318 A.D.).  

Nor does John see Jesus as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Men more than 2,000 years ago differed little with men today.  The gospel writers may have been myth makers, but we have our own myth makers today, myths buried or concealed in truths no less so than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the First Century.  

For me, Jesus did exist and was so remarkable that 2,000 years later, I still can't seem to get enough of him, although he is often buried in or locked out of Christianity by ritual and dogma. 

The Old and New Testament are beautiful, exciting and vital stories of a world no less credible even if the stories are how the Mind’s Eye see us as a species.   

Klaus, we need our myths, but by a strange coincidence we are moving away from the New Testament, as literal truth, according to many theological scholars, A. N. Wilson included, towards the Greek view of man as a part of the natural order, and the universe as a whole as one of order, and not of disorder for the want of discipline. 

In the Hellenistic concept of the cosmos, gods and men are part of the same thing, not separate, vital to each other, part of the same harmonious whole.  I will conclude with a quote from A. N. Wilson:

There is a law of nature, expressed in its purest form in mathematics, but discernible in the sphere of ethics and of what we would call natural science from which none could escape, even though the Platonist would wish to escape from the bonds of the physical and ascend to the spiritual, to discard the world of nature, which is merely a shadow of that heavenly reality which can be discovered by intense thought, asceticism and prayer… 

The New Testament is not even remotely interested in concepts of mind, of mathematics, of politics, of law.  The New Testament posits a quite different way of viewing the cosmos, a way which we find in the pages of the Old Testament and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not among the Greeks.  The closest analogy in the non-theological sphere is the “imagination” as it is was conceived by the Romantics, who, of course, derived their concept as much from the Scriptures as from Kant.

Keep thinking!

Jim