Lead Us Not into Translation....

 

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Earth Angels

 

Somewhere during the 19th century, something strange happened that nobody else seems to have noticed. 

Before this time, angels in art were almost always shown as male. After this time, angels are always female. This can be confirmed by a quick Google image search for “18th century angels,” then “19th century angels.”

This seems to me to show a tectonic shift in our cosmology, in our sense of the sacred and the good. It corresponds to a shift from a spiritual religion to materialism. Women represent the physical world, the world of being born and dying. “Earth” is always a mother goddess, in every culture, “Gaea” or “Mother Earth.” “Nature” is always portrayed as a woman: “Mother Nature,” “Artemis,” “Demeter.” In the East, “Maya,” the mother illusion of diverse things, and “Mae Toranee,” Mother Earth.

This reflects and expresses the turn to Scientism during the 19th century, to putting our faith in “reeking tube and iron shard.” The turn to materialism is as well a turning away from moral values, represented by the “sky father,” the eternal order of the celestial spheres, the father within the family.

With it comes the worship of “nature,” “ecology,” “the environment.” Our eyes are directed downward.

With it also comes an elevation of women to leadership within civil society. Hence “first-wave feminism” and all that has followed.

Although “first-wave” feminism would hardly have predicted it, with it inevitably comes a breakdown in “conventional morality,” the many gentlemen’s agreements on which society peacefully functions. Nature knows no moral law; it is red in tooth and claw. Science takes no account of values or morality. Angels are just nice, and carry no swords nor trumpets. Like indulgent mothers.

The Subconscious

 

Freud shows us his imaginary phallus

I have lost two of my best friends to psychiatry. 

The first, whom I had known since first year university, through think and thin, unfriended me emphatically in insult and anger when I questioned psychotherapy. To be clear, these were the words which he apparently found unforgivable:

“You believe you have been helped by psychotherapy. I admit that this is possible. Some people were helped by joining Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, too. But overall… not such a good idea. This may be an extreme example, but it makes the point. And I am not sure it is extreme, actually.”

My being concerned with his welfare was not held in my favour.

Another friend, whom I had cherished and admired for a good thirty years, unfriended me and declared me immoral for scoffing at Maslow and existentialist psychiatry. My argument was that they claimed depression was caused by a sense of meaninglessness, and then affirmed that there was indeed no meaning in life. So going to an existentialist therapist could not be helpful.

I cannot imagine any religious person having a similar reaction over a similar criticism of religion. Certainly not cutting off such longstanding friendships. Among the religious, it is the reverse: they are eager to discuss the issue. They will even knock on the doors of strangers in hopes of doing so.

So I must conclude that the average person who believes in psychiatry holds to his faith more fervently than if it were a religion.

This does not speak well of psychiatry, given that it claims to be scientific. It is obviously something else. Not religion; more like a cult.

As a general principle, if one believes one has the better argument, one enjoys an argument. If one suspects one’s beliefs are untenable, one will refuse to discuss them. Especially if there is something personal at stake.

I think this “true believer” phenomenon is a symptom of the incoherence of materialism. It is our dominant world view: we believe in “science.” But scientific materialism fails to account for the larger portion of human experience. If one is not a total zombie, one discovers this. And then what? Then depression or mental illness occurs: one is out of step with what “everyone knows” is true. At best, one is alienated. At worst, one concludes one is incurably insane. One is experiencing impossible things, things that do not exist.

Psychiatry rushes in as the attempt to reconcile one’s experience with materialism. And partly as Inquisition, rooting out heresies by declaring insanity. 

People then cling in desperation to their chosen psychology, because from their perspective, if they doubt the therapist, they go mad. 

In objective terms, however, it is the psychiatry that is making and keeping them mad.

My first friend accepted that Freud, the founder of psychiatry, was mostly wrong. Of course; he has, after all, been disproven in detail in scientific terms. However, Freud must still be honoured as the man who discovered the subconscious. The subconscious explains everything.

But the subconscious, or Jung’s similar “unconscious,” is actually nonsensical. It is a self that is not ourself, a will that is our will yet not our will, a consciousness of which we are not conscious. 

These are all contradictions in terms.

The obvious truth is that these strange messages or intimations or urges or images are not coming from us. Indeed, they are not by definition. There is a spiritual world. And it is no more a part of us than is the physical world.

A Few Matters on My Brain

 

Dine in? Entree at the zombie cafe

Our school textbooks generally reinforce a foolish materialism and hedonism. This goes on in the background, in their assumptions, as much as explicitly. One wonders if the indoctrination is intentional, or if the authors just don’t themselves know any better.

A text I’m currently using to tutor high school students includes in passing the example sentence

“Before we continue the discussion that was interrupted yesterday, let me begin by explaining that pain is something that is felt in your brain.”

Pain is something felt in your arm or other body part, or, more accurately, in your mind. One does not have pain receptors in the brain. 

The problem is, of course, the confusion of the brain, a lump of meat, with the mind or spirit.

“On hearing the word vacation, most people react positively.”

Webster’s 1913 dictionary, or the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), offer for “positive” a variety of meanings: definite, legislated, existing in reality, greater than zero, optimistic, and so forth. For this reason, the term should be avoided. It is ambiguous. But even then, no traditional meaning of “positive” applies here. 

Why this now widespread misuse of the term? 

My sense is that it is an effort to obscure or erase the distinction between “desired” and “good.” Either is vaguely glossed with the term “positive.” Confusing moral issues; seeking to deny morality.

We all just do what we want… and that is good.

I’m not positive that is right.

The Whore of Babylon

My Jehovah’s Witness friend Hadassah is convinced the scarlet woman in the Book of Revelations, aka the Whore of Babylon, represents all religions except her own.

I respond: the great harlot has to be identified firstly with the city of Babylon, because the Bible says that expressly. She is named. “On her forehead a name was written, ‘MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF THE PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.’" “The kings of the earth, who committed sexual immorality and lived wantonly with her, will weep and wail over her, when they look at the smoke of her burning, standing far away for the fear of her torment, saying, 'Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city!’” Revelations 17: 18: “The woman whom you saw is the great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth."

But the passage was written in the time of the Roman Empire, and the woman sits on seven mountains—the seven hills of Rome.

She therefore represents temporal power in general—the urge for power, the urge to dominate. She declares herself “Queen,” and all kings fornicate with her: she is the consort of all kings, the thing they lust after—power.

She is adorned with gold and precious jewels—the urge for material wealth. When she falls, she is mourned by merchants and traders; she also represents then what they most desire or lust after—wealth, worldly goods, material possessions. 

As a prostitute, she also represents the sexual urge. 

The beast on which she rides “was, and is not, and shall be present.” This is not a vision of the future, then, but of something present in both past and future. The mystery is why John says the beast “is not,” although he is writing during the Roman Empire, and the beast appears before him.

I suspect his meaning is that the beast is only temporarily obscured by the prostitute, her diadems, her beauty, the city. That beneath all these seemingly desirable and sophisticated and “civilized” things, is the beast, man’s bestial nature. If one pursues these things, the beast will emerge. For they are founded on the beast; they ride it.

Hadassah associates the scarlet woman instead with religion on the strength of one passage, Revelation 18:23, which she reads as “by her spiritistic practice all the nations were misled.” “Spiritistic practice”? Does that sound a little contrived? The NIV gives that as “magic spell.” Most other English translations have “sorcery.” But the actual word in the original Greek is “pharmakeia.” You may note the similarity with the English “pharmacy,” the preparation and administration of drugs, medicines. And notice that she is holding a poisoned cup: “a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication.” 

The simplest interpretation is that physical lusts are like a drug, like wine or some stronger hallucinogen, clouding our perception of reality, poisoning us spiritually. All major religions are opposed to sorcery and casting spells; certainly including orthodox Christianity. None are keen on drunkenness. Instead, it is actually what we now call science that emerges directly from the magical or spellcasting tradition, and from the Babylonian tradition of astrology, mages, and “magic.” “Scientist” literally means the same thing as “mage.” The earliest “scientists” or “empiricists” of Europe were physicians who claimed to be able to heal illnesses with potions. Chemistry, in turn, emerged from alchemy. And one of its first successful products was the distillation of alcohol.

This raises the interesting possibility that the scarlet woman can be interpreted to represent, inter alia, modern scientism: the pseudo-religious creed that science can explain all things and accomplish all things. Which is pretty much shared these days by all nations.