‘Articulating the Noosphere’

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will take a look at how such articulation at the level of religion slowly informs our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.

Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

• • Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
  • Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
  • Religious belief cannot be compelled
  • Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Translating this semi-theological assertion into the perspectives of our ‘Secular God’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, are our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies, we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.” 

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.  Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of the ‘reinterpretation’ process that is the focus of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to apply our approach to the ‘Secular Side of God’ as we address the cornerstone of Christianity, Jesus.

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October 29, 2020 Jesus

                From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

 

Today’s Post

 

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.

Last week we began a second relook at religion, this time from the perspective as an attempt to ‘articulate the universe’ in such a way that we better understand the laws which guide the evolution of everything and how we can best work with them to insure not only our personal growth but the continued evolution of our species.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a God can be reinterpreted from a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each of us.

We saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these secular reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.

In doing this, we also looked at the ‘Perennial Tradition’, which sees all religious expression as inclusive of such basic fundamental insights.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

 

The Duality of Christianity

 

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman empire as it expanded into Northern Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

 

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

 

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  We don’t seem to know much about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

• Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
• Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
• Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
• Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms, such as:

• Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
• What, specifically, was his relation to God?
• Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

 

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

 

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some ten years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Paul introduces a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

 

The Next Post

 

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels.  These writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.