A Sleeping Pill Called Heresy
Sept 13, 2021 2:40:49 GMT -5
Post by bloodbought on Sept 13, 2021 2:40:49 GMT -5
September 12, 2021
A Sleeping Pill Called Heresy
By Anthony J. DeBlasi
My late brother, a World War II veteran, had a talent for getting at the heart of things and a knack for expressing his thoughts forcefully on his feet. In the Brooklyn, New York of the 1930s, he could boast that he argued with priests and took them down in face-to-face debate. In spite of his Catholic upbringing, he managed to make his family wonder what had gotten into him.
The scholar in my brother induced him to read Thomas Aquinas and other luminaries of Christianity, presumably to debunk church teaching, and when he discovered the depth of his ignorance about life and about the true nature of Christianity, the turncoat of the family soon dedicated himself to following Christ.
The spiritual journey of his kid brother, me, not less dedicated to seeking truth, led to a study of other religions. I read Alan Watts instead of Aquinas. Sal got to know one religion well; I got to know several well enough to appreciate “where they came from” and to see the gap in thought and feeling between East and West, a gap that many 20th century theologists tried to bridge with Western rationales, to little avail. Even Watts, who knew East and West perhaps better than any other soul, stumbled when, in comparing their respective metaphysics, he thought that Western religion was flawed in uniting God with the moral principle.
This to me was a tacit surrender to the “principle” that might makes right, after all, a de facto dismissal of the value and the reality of human life.
My own “research” told me that separating God from the moral principle is like separating body from mind, the very dualism shunned in the East where notions like matter/mind, up/down − tolerated for convenience − need to be grown out of, on the way to becoming mature adults. But in the West, where polarity dominates everything including thought, the separation of God from the moral principle becomes a detour from the road to growing fully into a human being.
Continued at link
A Sleeping Pill Called Heresy
By Anthony J. DeBlasi
My late brother, a World War II veteran, had a talent for getting at the heart of things and a knack for expressing his thoughts forcefully on his feet. In the Brooklyn, New York of the 1930s, he could boast that he argued with priests and took them down in face-to-face debate. In spite of his Catholic upbringing, he managed to make his family wonder what had gotten into him.
The scholar in my brother induced him to read Thomas Aquinas and other luminaries of Christianity, presumably to debunk church teaching, and when he discovered the depth of his ignorance about life and about the true nature of Christianity, the turncoat of the family soon dedicated himself to following Christ.
The spiritual journey of his kid brother, me, not less dedicated to seeking truth, led to a study of other religions. I read Alan Watts instead of Aquinas. Sal got to know one religion well; I got to know several well enough to appreciate “where they came from” and to see the gap in thought and feeling between East and West, a gap that many 20th century theologists tried to bridge with Western rationales, to little avail. Even Watts, who knew East and West perhaps better than any other soul, stumbled when, in comparing their respective metaphysics, he thought that Western religion was flawed in uniting God with the moral principle.
This to me was a tacit surrender to the “principle” that might makes right, after all, a de facto dismissal of the value and the reality of human life.
My own “research” told me that separating God from the moral principle is like separating body from mind, the very dualism shunned in the East where notions like matter/mind, up/down − tolerated for convenience − need to be grown out of, on the way to becoming mature adults. But in the West, where polarity dominates everything including thought, the separation of God from the moral principle becomes a detour from the road to growing fully into a human being.
Continued at link