The Church of the Negative Christ
Or, God is a sick puppy
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JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
This is a 'long comment' in response to a point made by preacherman on my 'Real Angels aren't faggots' thread. [Link] However, it's worthy of a name of its own because it rapidly stopped being a direct response and became a reflection instead. As a reflection on issues raised there, commenting here is disabled.
preacherman:
As I said, I keep this going because it provokes new reflection on old concerns. Had I ever been 'born again' I might be tempted to agree with you. But it's occurred to me a number of times that I identified my first conversion experience as a Christian rebirth (and I did indeed identify myself as a 'born again' Christian for many years) primarily because of the context in which it occurred.
At that time, in my early twenties, I was largely unacquainted with my own spirit and its needs. Certainly I was looking for something. I fell in with a group of charismatic Christians: their fervour touched and ignited something in me, something that had been deeply asleep till that moment. I became aware of need, and the desire to have that need met. And something answered. At the time, the only explanation I had as to what had answered came from my Christian friends. For a time (a brief time) I was content in my new found joy. But as I progressed in learning (I burnt every book I then had in the house and read nothing but the Bible for the next several years, I must have read it through several times over by now, though never in consecutive order) I noticed both the contradictions within the Bible itself, and in my teachers' explanations of them.
To take only the first and most obvious of them:-
If the mind of Christ is present when two or more believers are gathered together; and if the mind of Christ is revealed through prophetic scripture - why is there such division of doctrine? To which they replied that division is the work of Satan, the tempter and corrupter. Then Satan must be greater than God, I said, because the Spirit of God through which the mind of Christ is manifested cannot reveal the truth - or there would be no confusion.
Satan is God's servant they said, because he was sent to test Job. If Satan is God's servant, I replied, then he isn't a rebel. If he isn't a rebel now (being an obedient servant) then he never was a rebel, because Angels are of Eternity as God is and like God their nature does not change. If he isn't a rebel now he can't have been a rebel then.
They looked at each other and said, Satan is a rebel but also an obedient servant, and God uses him to test the faith of men.
If he is a rebel, I said, he wouldn't go. If he goes he isn't in rebellion. If he goes, he goes to do God's bidding, and God is responsible for the deaths of Job's family, not Satan. If God sends Satan to test Job it's because the outcome is not known to God (so that God is not omnescient and therefore not God; or he knows it in advance. If God knows Job will fail then God has entrapped him. If Job succeeds through God's grace the test was never a test at all but an exercise in cruelty.
God is Love - Hateful shit Happens. Either God has a rival, and no one can rival a God except another God, or God does some mean perverse shit to people. In which case God is not love.
It all gets a lot simpler when you recognize that everyone has their dark side, including God. Which is only logical, since we're made in his image. And my Jesus, if I still had one, would look a lot like Loki, his virtue all vice, perversion and lust.
It's bad philosophy to argue from an effect to a cause, to deduce from the nature of man the nature of God - even if it is justified by the statement that we are made in the image of God. And it's bad theology to build into the foundations of your faith contradictions which have no resolutions - unless you take standing that faith on its head to be a resolution. In the end I grew tired of a faith that could neither embrace its contradictions (which is why it is dying, at least in Europe and the West generally) nor find any way out of them other than asserting that they are not contradictions.
And by 'standing on its head' I mean this: Christianity could embrace its contradictions, its inherent dualism, by asserting that just as there is a Christ for the meek, the temperate, the merciful and just, so there's also a Christ for the vicious. A Christ for the lustful, the wilful, and the proud. A Church of the Negative Christ, in which virtue is sin and sin is virtue, where salvation means to be baptized into hell, not rescued from it. And Jesus's better-looking, better hung, evil twin brother as Head over it.
I'll admit that it's not going to happen any time soon.
To go back to your original point, preacher man, that "When a man is born he can not be unborn. It is not only true in the physcial, it is true in the spiritual. When an individual becomes a child of God, he/she does not unbecome by unbelieving." This might well be true of me had I converted to Christianity in the first place. But I did not. I had an experience which I explained in Christian terms because those were the terms available to me.
Those terms never really made sense to me, even at the height of my enthusiasm, and I always wondered why. Now I know its because they don't make sense at all.
preacherman:
As I said, I keep this going because it provokes new reflection on old concerns. Had I ever been 'born again' I might be tempted to agree with you. But it's occurred to me a number of times that I identified my first conversion experience as a Christian rebirth (and I did indeed identify myself as a 'born again' Christian for many years) primarily because of the context in which it occurred.
At that time, in my early twenties, I was largely unacquainted with my own spirit and its needs. Certainly I was looking for something. I fell in with a group of charismatic Christians: their fervour touched and ignited something in me, something that had been deeply asleep till that moment. I became aware of need, and the desire to have that need met. And something answered. At the time, the only explanation I had as to what had answered came from my Christian friends. For a time (a brief time) I was content in my new found joy. But as I progressed in learning (I burnt every book I then had in the house and read nothing but the Bible for the next several years, I must have read it through several times over by now, though never in consecutive order) I noticed both the contradictions within the Bible itself, and in my teachers' explanations of them.
To take only the first and most obvious of them:-
If the mind of Christ is present when two or more believers are gathered together; and if the mind of Christ is revealed through prophetic scripture - why is there such division of doctrine? To which they replied that division is the work of Satan, the tempter and corrupter. Then Satan must be greater than God, I said, because the Spirit of God through which the mind of Christ is manifested cannot reveal the truth - or there would be no confusion.
Satan is God's servant they said, because he was sent to test Job. If Satan is God's servant, I replied, then he isn't a rebel. If he isn't a rebel now (being an obedient servant) then he never was a rebel, because Angels are of Eternity as God is and like God their nature does not change. If he isn't a rebel now he can't have been a rebel then.
They looked at each other and said, Satan is a rebel but also an obedient servant, and God uses him to test the faith of men.
If he is a rebel, I said, he wouldn't go. If he goes he isn't in rebellion. If he goes, he goes to do God's bidding, and God is responsible for the deaths of Job's family, not Satan. If God sends Satan to test Job it's because the outcome is not known to God (so that God is not omnescient and therefore not God; or he knows it in advance. If God knows Job will fail then God has entrapped him. If Job succeeds through God's grace the test was never a test at all but an exercise in cruelty.
God is Love - Hateful shit Happens. Either God has a rival, and no one can rival a God except another God, or God does some mean perverse shit to people. In which case God is not love.
It all gets a lot simpler when you recognize that everyone has their dark side, including God. Which is only logical, since we're made in his image. And my Jesus, if I still had one, would look a lot like Loki, his virtue all vice, perversion and lust.
It's bad philosophy to argue from an effect to a cause, to deduce from the nature of man the nature of God - even if it is justified by the statement that we are made in the image of God. And it's bad theology to build into the foundations of your faith contradictions which have no resolutions - unless you take standing that faith on its head to be a resolution. In the end I grew tired of a faith that could neither embrace its contradictions (which is why it is dying, at least in Europe and the West generally) nor find any way out of them other than asserting that they are not contradictions.
And by 'standing on its head' I mean this: Christianity could embrace its contradictions, its inherent dualism, by asserting that just as there is a Christ for the meek, the temperate, the merciful and just, so there's also a Christ for the vicious. A Christ for the lustful, the wilful, and the proud. A Church of the Negative Christ, in which virtue is sin and sin is virtue, where salvation means to be baptized into hell, not rescued from it. And Jesus's better-looking, better hung, evil twin brother as Head over it.
I'll admit that it's not going to happen any time soon.
To go back to your original point, preacher man, that "When a man is born he can not be unborn. It is not only true in the physcial, it is true in the spiritual. When an individual becomes a child of God, he/she does not unbecome by unbelieving." This might well be true of me had I converted to Christianity in the first place. But I did not. I had an experience which I explained in Christian terms because those were the terms available to me.
Those terms never really made sense to me, even at the height of my enthusiasm, and I always wondered why. Now I know its because they don't make sense at all.
