... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
I've often thought about the idea of people who confess by words a religious conviction also promoting tolerance, and how absurd it truly is. On the one hand, any correctly reasoning individual should understand that it is impossible to assert one objective case while also admitting the potential validity of another. On the other, any individual who has any experience discerning the subtleties of human emotion will recognize that tolerance is but a cheap, easy, bastardized, and perverted form of a more ideal method of relation--empathy. Yet Christians, and in fact the entire religious community of the world, do not want to admit the fact that they only have two honest options: either they can entirely assert the objective, isolate themselves from the rest of society, consider any that will not join their cause as an enemy, engage in warfare to promote their dominance, and eventually either conquer or fall, in either case becoming ineffable; or, they can entirely commit to empathy, propagate their own paradigms, assimilate the paradigms of all around them, and eventually sacrifice their individuality to become a corporate entity. In my own opinion, this is a basic psychological (and perhaps spiritual) dilemma, and exists in shadow prior to the many issues that have arisen within human society to provide it with a corporeal cloak. Most humans witness this looming figure and respond with an understandable measure of cowardice, self-delusion, and outright terror. This is why they cannot permit themselves to come to an honest decision between the two, and instead must cling to the fence, even if doing so renders their actions absurd. They must constantly sway back and forth, and if they lose their balance for a moment, in a moment of excessive conviction or exceptional doubt, they must hop back upon the fence as fast as they can possibly manage.
So I suppose I agree with your assessment. Rob Bell is promoting a concept of heaven and of the divine plan that is essentially opposite of an orthodox Christian interpretation. Under an orthodox Christian interpretation, heaven is a place/thing/reality of ultimate ineffability. It is the culmination of Christian societies' separation with the rest of humanity and of their fusion with the objective concept that they assert. Heaven under this interpretation is the epitome of exclusivity, and it is no wonder, if we were to examine the issue from a psychological perspective, that John speaks of those attaining this state as being given new names. Under this paradigm, it is absolutely unthinkable that any other, any outsider, any heretic could be admitted into this holy, ineffable reality. Yet this is precisely what Rob Bell promotes as a concept of heaven, a place where all are welcome, where all are desired, where all shall find acceptance and peace, regardless. Rob Bell probably is honestly talking about heaven, but it is the heaven of a very different type of human, one that has swayed a little too far to one side of the fence, and it happens to be the wrong side for him to sway to if you're an orthodox Christian. Rob Bell believes that the future of humanity lies not in ineffability but in assimilation, even if he isn't conscious of this basic distinction. And he isn't alone:
So, only a few things left to say. Either we must commit to the fence and the delusion and absurdity we find there, or commit to integrity and the ineffability that it brings, or commit to assimilation and the loss of self that it brings, or discover a way to transcend the bounds of this apparent dilemma.
But in the meantime, what I am curious about is, which are you? A fence rider? A believer in Grant Horner's heaven? Or a believer in Rob Bell's heaven?
And why?
"The greatest trick man ever pulled was convincing himself that god exists."
No comments:
Post a Comment