An Approach To Comparative Religion As Restoration And At-One-Ment

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

For another thread, I recently re-watched Bill Hamblin's excellent presentation on Ezekiel's Chariot Vision:

 

 

Thought-provoking as usual. I've noticed from various comments he's made on the boards that Professor Hamblin seems to have a long-standing interest in Hinduism, as his fascinating and rather brilliant comparison between Ezekiel's Chariot and the portable Temples of the Jagannatha [Lord of the World; cf. 'juggernaut'] Festival shows. (See also Nibley's speculations in The Ancient State on the portable Temples of the steppe nomads, as well as the iconographic evidence related to hypocephali in One Eternal Round.) 

 

(Frankly, as a quick aside, I predict that connections with Hinduism are going to bear a lot of fruit in Mormon studies in the coming years - instead of dismissing the derogatory comparisons made by folks such as the Tanners, I think we should embrace many of them and instead question the negative connotations attached to such comparisons, which are too often based on trying to conform to a post-apostasy view of what orthodox monotheistic 'Christianity' should look like)

 

But one off-handed remark stayed with me in particular: a quick reference to the similarity between a representation of Christ and pagan iconography depicting Apollo. 

 

One of my long-standing pet peeves is the dismissive labeling of other cultures which I often encounter (not that Professor Hamblin did so in this video; his lecture merely led me onto this train of thought). Perhaps it comes from growing up in Hawaii, which was an extreme melting pot of all sorts of cultures and religions. In particular, it has always driven me crazy when people posit an extreme gulf between 'paganism' and Respectable Religion. (Maybe it's because I lived in the country, the pagus, the heath.) 

 

Perhaps this is just a question of semantics, but in my opinion, we should clear away our learned aversion to 'paganism' or 'heathenism'. Like 'cult', their technical meanings have become so diluted -- and their derogatory polemical usage so prevalent -- that they have ceased to be helpful or even meaningful terms. 

 

Zina Peterson, in her excellent Interpreter review Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (and in a phrasing which, if I'm not mistaken, she picked up from her late father) puts the predicament this way : 

 

The equation becomes this: if not the One God, then polytheist; if polytheist, then pagan; if pagan, then condemned/condemnable. Then: if not pagan, then monotheist. If monotheist, then the One God; if the One God, then no Goddess. 

 

If human Intelligences have divine potential and are coeternal with each other and all other Gods, and if, being in the form of God, it is not robbery to be equal with God, and if we are each (male and female, black and white, bond and free, etc.) to inherit all the Son has by taking on His name (Christos, Messiach, meaning to be anointed with the oil from the olive tree of eternal life), then we have a paradigm of the nature of God which makes for an interesting blend of both 'history' and 'mythology', of 'atheism' and 'religion'. It blurs the distinction we've long drawn between these categories, it proves contraries and, in my opinion, makes truth manifest. 

 

(Remember: "Mormonism is truth, in other words the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth. […] The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.")

 

As Brigham Young taught:

 

"It was the occupation of Jesus Christ and his Apostles to propagate the Gospel of salvation and the principles of eternal life to the world, and it is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church (Jesus, their elder brother, being at their head,) to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, to mechanism of every kind, to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, and bring it to Zion.

 

The people upon this earth have a great many errors, and they have also a great many truths. This statement is not only true of the nations termed civilized - those who profess to worship the true God, but is equally applicable to pagans of all countries, for in their religious rights and ceremonies may be found a great many truths which we will also gather home to Zion. All truth is for the salvation of the children of men - for their benefit and learning - for their furtherance in the principles of divine knowledge; and divine knowledge is any matter of fact - truth; and all truth pertains to divinity."

 

Brigham Young, "Intelligence, Etc." (Journal of Discourses 7:283-284)

 

The question isn't just whether or not particular Gods - particular historical human personages - existed, but rather what kind of Gods - people - they were. In the Restoration, we have scriptures which teach that only the people who follow the laws of justice and mercy are to be considered/named 'Gods'. That a God would cease to be God if they did not follow such laws agreed upon by common consent. But that doesn't mean the personages we would not name Gods never really existed (though of course that is also a possibility, what with nationalistic mythmaking and grasping for authority, etc.) 

 

Godhood, then, becomes what kind of archetype we choose as a model for our own social behavior. One model of Godhood might be an untouchable aloof disconnected God who cannot be stained with mere depraved humanity; one model may be an embodied suffering servant who was once a child and who weeps even in Heaven. Godness might be good parenthood, a Father and a good Mother who respect the free choices of their children, who do not have the power to protect them from all suffering, but who nevertheless use their wisdom to teach them as much as they can as quickly as they can bear it.

 

Note, however, that both of these philosophies (and of course others) can be found within (ostensibly) separate religions which both name themselves 'Christian'. 

 

Once we recognize the overwhelming scholarly work that shows that Christianity and Judaism were -- before the reinterpretation provided by later Hellenistic philosophy -- just as polytheistic as any other ancient religion (early Greeks and Hindus and Egyptians, Scandinavians and Polynesians and Native Americans, etc), then the supposed barriers between 'East' and 'West' are collapsed, and we are thrust into an even older worldwide tradition based on such concerns as fertility, on basic primal concerns of life and death. 

 

In this older paradigm, the distinction between 'pagan' and what we would now consider 'orthodoxy' is really a question of diffusion. Where did the stories and rites come from, the differences between rites and Sacred Calendars and architecture preserved among technologically advanced civilized centers versus those in outlying provinces, the accommodations and tweaks necessary for different geographies and environments. 

 

But here we are hindered by language. Despite the interrelatedness between Proto-Indo-European languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, etc., words we're not immediately familiar with seem exotic and alien to us, foreign, and so we sometimes condemn their speakers as Strangers before understanding them. But when we examine concepts rather than sounds, we find a wealth of similarities.  

 

Yes, there are of course uncountable distinctions between religions that I don't wish to minimize or flatten out into a bland homogeneity. The differences are important and real and necessary to acknowledge (in, um, a longer essay that isn't being written after 11pm). But in Darwin's Lumpers versus Splitters quandary, I'm afraid I'm much more of a Lumper. The reason is that while there are obviously distinct differences, I find them to be variations on a theme rather than clean breaks from the past. That is, historical evidence of diffusion. We have uncountable Christian Churches here in North America with minute and tiresome doctrinal disputations, but they are clearly all branches from the same tree.

 

Orson Scott Card, in his recent book The Gate Thief, has a character say: "Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed." Rather than looking at who is right or wrong doctrinally speaking, I want to concentrate on a bird's-eye worldwide historical view of lineage and descent. That is, Restorationists like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Seventh Day Adventists, while clearly distinct entities, are nevertheless descended from the same Christian source. Protestants and Catholics, while divided into separate streams, are still flowing from the same river. 

 

People's Temple, Scientology, Heaven's Gate, Nation of Islam, Golden Dawn, Church of the Subgenius, Theosophy and Western Esotericism ... 

 

... they are descendants, derivatives, of earlier philosophies, often quite close conceptually in a worldview sense, though varying quite radically in the sense of the social history of the believers. Even parody religions like Pastafarianism or Discordianism preserve aspects of earlier philosophies, albeit in mirrored, inverse, or otherwise humorously distorted form. The differences between these branches are a result of a Galapagos environment driving a sort of speciation where different aspects of older doctrine are modified in answer to the hungers of the people who create them, the needs of the local community. But again, they are clearly still different clades branching off the same tree, despite differing doctrines.  

 

That is, if a religion teaches that we dissolve after death and another teaches that we retain our individuality, we're still debating about what happens after we die. One can choose to divide the different branches based on the former distinction, or group them together based on the latter similarity, but whether they are grouped as separate or combined together is in either case a product of our own mind and choice. So what I propose is that instead of focusing on the branches and conceiving of all these religions and philosophies as separate, we instead focus on the trunk and conceive of them as growing from the same root.  

 

This is where modern scientific findings and deep history come in. If our religions and the distinctions between them are based on linguistic constructions formed around a 'slicing' or 'dividing' heuristic, then clearly we had to have a voice to give rise to the Word, our various Gospels and stories. Our voices had to exist previous to our using them to tell stories.  

 

The distinctions which lead to civil war are a product of our voices. We name each other as separate tribes, and therefore Hebrews can kill Canaanites, Jews can kill Christians, Christians can kill Jews and Native Americans, Muslims can kill Christians and Hindus, Nephites can kill Lamanites, non-virgins can perform virgin sacrifices, heterosexuals can kill homosexuals, people named under the tribe Religion can kill those named as the tribe Atheist, and on and on and on in as many permutations you can think of. The names - the labels - the sounds, the music - are the basis for the killing. (Yes, sure, there are factors like resource scarcity, economic disparities, sexual/biological rivalries, all sorts of other incentives, etc., but such circumstances do not lead nearly so inexorably to violence as different naming seems to.) 

 

But note: Islam = submission to God's peace. Christianity = Chrism, someone Anointed. Judaism is from Judah, a name of a prominent tribesman, just as Confucianism is named for a wise man. The various religions found in the catch-all term Hinduism are denoted by the sindhu, the River (Jesus was baptized in a river, too). Buddhism = bodhi, Enlightenment first found under a sacred tree. Shinto = shin tao, the Way, the Tao of the Gods (see all the references to 'Ways' in the Bible and the Book of Mormon). We have the Australian aboriginal Dreaming (somewhat analogous to premortal existence?), we have different Gods like Agni (same root as 'ignite', a God of Fire - our God, too, gives us a Baptism of Fire). We find Sacred Sevens in all sorts of marriage rites all over the world. We find Sungods in Native American religion that might as well come from the Psalms or the D&C. We study philo-sophy, the Love of Wisdom, the Goddess Sophia. We have worldwide viewpoints and comparisons and triangulations of the Council in Heaven, the Creation Hymn, the Garden Story, etc. Sometimes us Westerners think only pagans have 'priestesses' while respectable monotheists have priests, but each title (Lama, Presbyter, Episkopos, Sage, Rabbi, whatever) is, at root, naming someone who takes responsibility for their community. Some might call it Masonry, etc.  

 

Whatever aspect of life/existence each religion - each tribe, each subgroup of the human species - emphasizes to name or symbolize their community, their tribe, if they have any power in them at all, they are stories dealing with human universals: love, sex, hunger, death, the possibility or impossibility of life after individual death, the primate desire to belong. 

 

So if all these schisms are branches off the same human tree, then how can we heal this infinite separation between each other? We can conceive of ourselves not as separate, but rather as a whole [Holy, set-apart, etc]. When we think of ourselves as a family, it doesn't erase our distinctiveness, our individuality; what it does is forge a binding link between us that makes us bigger than ourselves. We don't have to throw away what good - what history, what philosophy, what art - we have, only add. 

 

Since we come into this world dependent on a preexisting society in which learning has been decoupled from DNA-coded instinct and instead entrusted to an external repository of experience (ie, books, which contain various stories of religion, science, etc) we need Messengers to bring us into the web, the social fabric. We need initiation rites and agreed-upon ceremonies which ascribe symbolic meaning upheld by common consent. In other words, we need hierocentric states, we need Temples of whatever design, we need ritual and semiotics and the shared memories of stories transferred from mind to mind through the intermediary of Bibles (biblion, books) in order to function as a community in which love between individuals and the larger whole can be planted and flourish. 

 

The One and the Many are bound together by the freewill choice of all Uncreated Intelligences - instead of a thousand fractured warring tribes, we instead think of ourselves as part of the same body, the same massive human tribe spread out over the world in our waves of migration. 

 

In other words, an At-One-Ment. 

Edited November 13, 2013 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

"Although I was going to say I am not a Universalist, but I am, and I am also a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic, and a Methodist, in short, I believe in every true principle that is imbibed by any person or sect, and reject the false. If there is any truth in heaven, earth, or hell, I want to embrace it, I care not what shape it comes in to me, who brings it, or who believes in it, whether it is popular or unpopular. Truth, eternal truth, I wish to float in and enjoy."

 

-- John Taylor, "Motives and Feelings of the Saints, etc." (Journal of Discourses 1:155)

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

By the way, all you sleeping people, my needy ego finds it extremely annoying that none of you are awake right now to respond to this blabber.

 

Ah, the joys of the 1:05 AM precis. 

[Tsuzuki]

I couldn't agree more, and this has been the cornerstone of my own Mormon experience.

[volgadon]

By the way, all you sleeping people, my needy ego finds it extremely annoying that none of you are awake right now to respond to this blabber.

 

Ah, the joys of the 1:05 AM precis. 

 

Jeremy, read Elliot Wolfson, even if you've got to starve to do so. =) He has explored one of the near-universal "mystical" ideas, that of a "path beyond the path." Boundaries are erased, but the unity of all existence lies paradoxically in its diversity.

 

http://vimeo.com/24132743

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Hey, check this out, Simon E. Davies actually made a tree! Clearly he must lurk here, and I take all credit. >_> Coooool. 


As Nibley said in his 1986 Pearl Of Great Price lectures:

"This theme of the Creation and the world before the Creation is that of the Pyramid Texts. You will find it in the Book of the Dead. You'll find it in the Greek and Roman Temple inscriptions. You'll find it in the Old Testament. You'll find it in the Babylonian literature. You'll find it in the Rig-Veda. You'll find it in the Vedas and the Sanskrit literature of India, of course. You'll find it in the Old High German. You'll find it in the Gothic Wessobrunner Gebet, and in the Voluspa of our Scandinavian ancestors. And we mentioned the passages from Hesiod's Theogony, the oldest Greek work that talks about how it all began. We also mentioned Mircea Eliade, who has done the greatest comparative work of all, bringing the primitives together with the early religions and the modern. He says there is always this central myth which describes the beginnings of the world, including the origin of plants, animals and man -- of marriage, family, death, etc. Taken all together these myths of origin constitute a fairly coherent history. You'll find them the same wherever you go. It isn't the sort of thing any primitive would make up, or that you'd make up to tell a child. Or you think that if you go back to the primitives throughout the world, you find a vast variety of strange exotic rites. You don't. You find the same story everywhere. That's what James Frazer showed in The Golden Bough. He looked all over the world and he found these things everywhere. [...] It was just in the 1930s that the Cambridge School started what they called Patternism. Wherever you go in the ancient world -- ancient, primitive, or modern -- you will find the same pattern being followed. [...] it appears that they do have a common origin and do go back to a particular thing."

As Joseph Smith taught: "We cannot believe that the ancients in all ages were so ignorant of the system of heaven as many suppose, since all that were ever saved, were saved through the power of this great plan of redemption, as much before the coming of Christ as since."

The cool thing is, this map helps to see that our superficial terminology that divides different religions is basically predicated more on geography and tribal division/names than underlying structure. Diffusion. There really is only one human religion; we're all the same species, we've all evolved to perceive reality in similar ways, we all feel the same universal hungers and emotions. We just use different sounds to communicate. Next we should come up with a diffusion map that traces the permutations of world religion just like they trace other kinds of migration: 

Edited December 13, 2015 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Also, combine Nibley's Hierocentric State with Hamlet's Mill, and we get an understanding of "creation" stories being about the Demiurge's functional creation of a sort of cosmic Temple-Observatory, a Timaean planetarium, not the absolute out-of-nothing ex nihilo creation of matter and time only a few thousand years ago. As Santillana and Dechend put it: 

"The Precession took on an overpowering significance. It became the vast impenetrable pattern of fate itself, with one world-age succeeding another, as the invisible pointer of the equinox slid along the signs, each age bringing with it the rise and downfall of astral configurations and rulerships, with their earthly consequences. Tales had to be told for the people about how successions of rulerships arose from an origin, and about the actual creation of the world, but for those in the know the origin was only a point in the precessional circle, like the 0 = 24 of our dials." 

"In the myths of the Kalmucks the world mountain—Sumeru, Meru, alias Mandara— appears as the means of creation. The world came into being, when four powerful gods got hold of Mount Sumeru, and whirled it around in the primordial sea, just as a Kalmuck woman turns the churning stick when preparing butter. Out of the vehemently agitated sea came, among others, Sun, Moon, and stars. The same significance has, doubtless, the story of the Dorbots, according to which once upon a time, before Sun and Moon existed, some being began to stir the primordial ocean with a pole of 10,000 furlongs, thus bringing forth Sun and Moon. A similar creation is described in a Mongolian myth, where a being coming from heaven—a Lama it is supposed to have been, see Holmberg, Finno-Ugric Mythology, p. 328—stirs up the primeval sea, until part of the fluid becomes solid. These "creation stories" are more or less deteriorated survivals of the Amritamanthana, "the incomparably mighty churn," in the course of which one constellation after the other emerged from the wildly agitated Milky Ocean. And the same goes for the "creation" brought forth by the Japanese "parents of the world," who, standing upon the Celestial Bridge, stirred with the celestial jewel-spear the primordial sea until parts of it thickened and became islands. The Amritamanthana survived also in Greece, in the beginning of Iliad 8, and in the myth of Plato's Statesman, and Plutarch spotted it in Egypt: but this subject would make another book."

 

In other words, every shrine or Temple based on an image like this:

 is talking about the sacred calendar/year-rite of this:
 

[hagoth7]

On 11/13/2013 at 2:02 AM, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

...If human Intelligences have divine potential and are coeternal with each other and all other Gods, and if, being in the form of God, it is not robbery to be equal with God, and if we are each (male and female, black and white, bond and free, etc.) to inherit all the Son has by taking on His name (Christos, Messiach, meaning to be anointed with the oil from the olive tree of eternal life), then we have a paradigm of the nature of God which makes for an interesting blend of both 'history' and 'mythology', of 'atheism' and 'religion'. It blurs the distinction we've long drawn between these categories, it proves contraries and, in my opinion, makes truth manifest. 

 

(Remember: "Mormonism is truth, in other words the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth. […] The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.")

 

...In this older paradigm, the distinction between 'pagan' and what we would now consider 'orthodoxy' is really a question of diffusion. Where did the stories and rites come from, the differences between rites and Sacred Calendars and architecture preserved among technologically advanced civilized centers versus those in outlying provinces, the accommodations and tweaks necessary for different geographies and environments...

...Orson Scott Card, in his recent book The Gate Thief, has a character say: "Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed." Rather than looking at who is right or wrong doctrinally speaking, I want to concentrate on a bird's-eye worldwide historical view of lineage and descent. That is, Restorationists like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Seventh Day Adventists, while clearly distinct entities, are nevertheless descended from the same Christian source. Protestants and Catholics, while divided into separate streams, are still flowing from the same river....

...But again, they are clearly still different clades branching off the same tree, despite differing doctrines. 

Great commentary. And what does Jacob 5 and similar passages promise about those different branches?

(Sounds like I need to watch Bro. Hamblin's presentation tonight.)

Quote

Once we recognize the overwhelming scholarly work that shows that Christianity and Judaism were -- before the reinterpretation provided by later Hellenistic philosophy -- just as polytheistic as any other ancient religion (early Greeks and Hindus and Egyptians, Scandinavians and Polynesians and Native Americans, etc), then the supposed barriers between 'East' and 'West' are collapsed, and we are thrust into an even older worldwide tradition based on such concerns as fertility, on basic primal concerns of life and death. 

 

Quote

So if all these schisms are branches off the same human tree, then how can we heal this infinite separation between each other? We can conceive of ourselves not as separate, but rather as a whole [Holy, set-apart, etc]. When we think of ourselves as a family, it doesn't erase our distinctiveness, our individuality; what it does is forge a binding link between us that makes us bigger than ourselves. We don't have to throw away what good - what history, what philosophy, what art - we have, only add. 

Jeremy - awesome post. Thanks for this.

[Ahab]

I don't understand why you think it would be helpful to understand divergent views of the one true religion of Adam and Eve, but I can see how it might be interesting.  You'd be seeing how each group got their idea from a true idea and mixing a false idea with it. But personally I'm satisfied with the true religion as it has been restored in our day while knowing further light and knowledge from our Father is still to come.

[hagoth7]

4 hours ago, Ahab said:

I don't understand why you think it would be helpful to understand divergent views of the one true religion of Adam and Eve, but I can see how it might be interesting....

Passages in scripture suggest, at least as I read them, that acquiring such understanding would be helpful in fulfilling the Father's promises.

Quote

But personally I'm satisfied with the true religion as it has been restored in our day while knowing further light and knowledge from our Father is still to come.

Further light and knowledge often comes from inquiry, pondering, seeking, knocking.

Merely waiting is an option, but I'm not sure how productive that approach is.

And as to being grateful for what we have, I agree that doing so is really important.

A helpful follow-up question might be, what do we need to learn on top of that in order to better help others? Latter-day scriptures provide a number of answers to that question.

Edited December 13, 2015 by hagoth7

[Ahab]

I still don't understand how divergent views of the one true religion of Adam and Eve would help someone to know that one true religion.  Divergent views being those that diverge from as in lead away from that one true religion. Okay for one who likes hurdles I suppose but I prefer the truth over the stuff that diverged away from the truth.

[hagoth7]

1 hour ago, Ahab said:

I still don't understand how divergent views of the one true religion of Adam and Eve would help someone to know that one true religion.  Divergent views being those that diverge from as in lead away from that one true religion. Okay for one who likes hurdles I suppose but I prefer the truth over the stuff that diverged away from the truth.

That depends which direction one is swimming, and why. Teach someone to look or swim upstream, and they might begin to acknowledge that God's plan and compassion are far more encompassing than any single denomination or faith tradition.

[mfbukowski]

On 11/13/2013 at 1:02 AM, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

For another thread, I recently re-watched Bill Hamblin's excellent presentation on Ezekiel's Chariot Vision:

 

 

 

Thought-provoking as usual. I've noticed from various comments he's made on the boards that Professor Hamblin seems to have a long-standing interest in Hinduism, as his fascinating and rather brilliant comparison between Ezekiel's Chariot and the portable Temples of the Jagannatha [Lord of the World; cf. 'juggernaut'] Festival shows. (See also Nibley's speculations in The Ancient State on the portable Temples of the steppe nomads, as well as the iconographic evidence related to hypocephali in One Eternal Round.) 

 

(Frankly, as a quick aside, I predict that connections with Hinduism are going to bear a lot of fruit in Mormon studies in the coming years - instead of dismissing the derogatory comparisons made by folks such as the Tanners, I think we should embrace many of them and instead question the negative connotations attached to such comparisons, which are too often based on trying to conform to a post-apostasy view of what orthodox monotheistic 'Christianity' should look like)

 

But one off-handed remark stayed with me in particular: a quick reference to the similarity between a representation of Christ and pagan iconography depicting Apollo. 

 

One of my long-standing pet peeves is the dismissive labeling of other cultures which I often encounter (not that Professor Hamblin did so in this video; his lecture merely led me onto this train of thought). Perhaps it comes from growing up in Hawaii, which was an extreme melting pot of all sorts of cultures and religions. In particular, it has always driven me crazy when people posit an extreme gulf between 'paganism' and Respectable Religion. (Maybe it's because I lived in the country, the pagus, the heath.) 

 

Perhaps this is just a question of semantics, but in my opinion, we should clear away our learned aversion to 'paganism' or 'heathenism'. Like 'cult', their technical meanings have become so diluted -- and their derogatory polemical usage so prevalent -- that they have ceased to be helpful or even meaningful terms. 

 

Zina Peterson, in her excellent Interpreter review Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (and in a phrasing which, if I'm not mistaken, she picked up from her late father) puts the predicament this way : 

 

 

If human Intelligences have divine potential and are coeternal with each other and all other Gods, and if, being in the form of God, it is not robbery to be equal with God, and if we are each (male and female, black and white, bond and free, etc.) to inherit all the Son has by taking on His name (Christos, Messiach, meaning to be anointed with the oil from the olive tree of eternal life), then we have a paradigm of the nature of God which makes for an interesting blend of both 'history' and 'mythology', of 'atheism' and 'religion'. It blurs the distinction we've long drawn between these categories, it proves contraries and, in my opinion, makes truth manifest. 

 

(Remember: "Mormonism is truth, in other words the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth. […] The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.")

 

As Brigham Young taught:

 

 

The question isn't just whether or not particular Gods - particular historical human personages - existed, but rather what kind of Gods - people - they were. In the Restoration, we have scriptures which teach that only the people who follow the laws of justice and mercy are to be considered/named 'Gods'. That a God would cease to be God if they did not follow such laws agreed upon by common consent. But that doesn't mean the personages we would not name Gods never really existed (though of course that is also a possibility, what with nationalistic mythmaking and grasping for authority, etc.) 

 

Godhood, then, becomes what kind of archetype we choose as a model for our own social behavior. One model of Godhood might be an untouchable aloof disconnected God who cannot be stained with mere depraved humanity; one model may be an embodied suffering servant who was once a child and who weeps even in Heaven. Godness might be good parenthood, a Father and a good Mother who respect the free choices of their children, who do not have the power to protect them from all suffering, but who nevertheless use their wisdom to teach them as much as they can as quickly as they can bear it.

 

Note, however, that both of these philosophies (and of course others) can be found within (ostensibly) separate religions which both name themselves 'Christian'. 

 

Once we recognize the overwhelming scholarly work that shows that Christianity and Judaism were -- before the reinterpretation provided by later Hellenistic philosophy -- just as polytheistic as any other ancient religion (early Greeks and Hindus and Egyptians, Scandinavians and Polynesians and Native Americans, etc), then the supposed barriers between 'East' and 'West' are collapsed, and we are thrust into an even older worldwide tradition based on such concerns as fertility, on basic primal concerns of life and death. 

 

In this older paradigm, the distinction between 'pagan' and what we would now consider 'orthodoxy' is really a question of diffusion. Where did the stories and rites come from, the differences between rites and Sacred Calendars and architecture preserved among technologically advanced civilized centers versus those in outlying provinces, the accommodations and tweaks necessary for different geographies and environments. 

 

But here we are hindered by language. Despite the interrelatedness between Proto-Indo-European languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, etc., words we're not immediately familiar with seem exotic and alien to us, foreign, and so we sometimes condemn their speakers as Strangers before understanding them. But when we examine concepts rather than sounds, we find a wealth of similarities.  

 

Yes, there are of course uncountable distinctions between religions that I don't wish to minimize or flatten out into a bland homogeneity. The differences are important and real and necessary to acknowledge (in, um, a longer essay that isn't being written after 11pm). But in Darwin's Lumpers versus Splitters quandary, I'm afraid I'm much more of a Lumper. The reason is that while there are obviously distinct differences, I find them to be variations on a theme rather than clean breaks from the past. That is, historical evidence of diffusion. We have uncountable Christian Churches here in North America with minute and tiresome doctrinal disputations, but they are clearly all branches from the same tree.

 

Orson Scott Card, in his recent book The Gate Thief, has a character say: "Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed." Rather than looking at who is right or wrong doctrinally speaking, I want to concentrate on a bird's-eye worldwide historical view of lineage and descent. That is, Restorationists like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Seventh Day Adventists, while clearly distinct entities, are nevertheless descended from the same Christian source. Protestants and Catholics, while divided into separate streams, are still flowing from the same river. 

 

People's Temple, Scientology, Heaven's Gate, Nation of Islam, Golden Dawn, Church of the Subgenius, Theosophy and Western Esotericism ... 

 

... they are descendants, derivatives, of earlier philosophies, often quite close conceptually in a worldview sense, though varying quite radically in the sense of the social history of the believers. Even parody religions like Pastafarianism or Discordianism preserve aspects of earlier philosophies, albeit in mirrored, inverse, or otherwise humorously distorted form. The differences between these branches are a result of a Galapagos environment driving a sort of speciation where different aspects of older doctrine are modified in answer to the hungers of the people who create them, the needs of the local community. But again, they are clearly still different clades branching off the same tree, despite differing doctrines.  

 

That is, if a religion teaches that we dissolve after death and another teaches that we retain our individuality, we're still debating about what happens after we die. One can choose to divide the different branches based on the former distinction, or group them together based on the latter similarity, but whether they are grouped as separate or combined together is in either case a product of our own mind and choice. So what I propose is that instead of focusing on the branches and conceiving of all these religions and philosophies as separate, we instead focus on the trunk and conceive of them as growing from the same root.  

 

This is where modern scientific findings and deep history come in. If our religions and the distinctions between them are based on linguistic constructions formed around a 'slicing' or 'dividing' heuristic, then clearly we had to have a voice to give rise to the Word, our various Gospels and stories. Our voices had to exist previous to our using them to tell stories.  

 

The distinctions which lead to civil war are a product of our voices. We name each other as separate tribes, and therefore Hebrews can kill Canaanites, Jews can kill Christians, Christians can kill Jews and Native Americans, Muslims can kill Christians and Hindus, Nephites can kill Lamanites, non-virgins can perform virgin sacrifices, heterosexuals can kill homosexuals, people named under the tribe Religion can kill those named as the tribe Atheist, and on and on and on in as many permutations you can think of. The names - the labels - the sounds, the music - are the basis for the killing. (Yes, sure, there are factors like resource scarcity, economic disparities, sexual/biological rivalries, all sorts of other incentives, etc., but such circumstances do not lead nearly so inexorably to violence as different naming seems to.) 

 

But note: Islam = submission to God's peace. Christianity = Chrism, someone Anointed. Judaism is from Judah, a name of a prominent tribesman, just as Confucianism is named for a wise man. The various religions found in the catch-all term Hinduism are denoted by the sindhu, the River (Jesus was baptized in a river, too). Buddhism = bodhi, Enlightenment first found under a sacred tree. Shinto = shin tao, the Way, the Tao of the Gods (see all the references to 'Ways' in the Bible and the Book of Mormon). We have the Australian aboriginal Dreaming (somewhat analogous to premortal existence?), we have different Gods like Agni (same root as 'ignite', a God of Fire - our God, too, gives us a Baptism of Fire). We find Sacred Sevens in all sorts of marriage rites all over the world. We find Sungods in Native American religion that might as well come from the Psalms or the D&C. We study philo-sophy, the Love of Wisdom, the Goddess Sophia. We have worldwide viewpoints and comparisons and triangulations of the Council in Heaven, the Creation Hymn, the Garden Story, etc. Sometimes us Westerners think only pagans have 'priestesses' while respectable monotheists have priests, but each title (Lama, Presbyter, Episkopos, Sage, Rabbi, whatever) is, at root, naming someone who takes responsibility for their community. Some might call it Masonry, etc.  

 

Whatever aspect of life/existence each religion - each tribe, each subgroup of the human species - emphasizes to name or symbolize their community, their tribe, if they have any power in them at all, they are stories dealing with human universals: love, sex, hunger, death, the possibility or impossibility of life after individual death, the primate desire to belong. 

 

So if all these schisms are branches off the same human tree, then how can we heal this infinite separation between each other? We can conceive of ourselves not as separate, but rather as a whole [Holy, set-apart, etc]. When we think of ourselves as a family, it doesn't erase our distinctiveness, our individuality; what it does is forge a binding link between us that makes us bigger than ourselves. We don't have to throw away what good - what history, what philosophy, what art - we have, only add. 

 

Since we come into this world dependent on a preexisting society in which learning has been decoupled from DNA-coded instinct and instead entrusted to an external repository of experience (ie, books, which contain various stories of religion, science, etc) we need Messengers to bring us into the web, the social fabric. We need initiation rites and agreed-upon ceremonies which ascribe symbolic meaning upheld by common consent. In other words, we need hierocentric states, we need Temples of whatever design, we need ritual and semiotics and the shared memories of stories transferred from mind to mind through the intermediary of Bibles (biblion, books) in order to function as a community in which love between individuals and the larger whole can be planted and flourish. 

 

The One and the Many are bound together by the freewill choice of all Uncreated Intelligences - instead of a thousand fractured warring tribes, we instead think of ourselves as part of the same body, the same massive human tribe spread out over the world in our waves of migration. 

 

In other words, an At-One-Ment. 

Good stuff JO Smith. 

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Our unfortunate rhetoric of being the "one true religion" is an all-too-common misreading of D&C 1:30; if God was pleased enough with our Church [speaking collectively] at that time to give a new revelation to us, he still states that we are one of many. In other words, out of many true and living churches upon the face of the earth, we were the ones who got those particular commandments at that particular time to lay a new foundation. 

4 Nephi 1:1 says that the Disciples of Christ had formed "a" Church of Christ, implying that there exist many folds. There are only two places in the Book of Mormon that explicitly speak of a "true church"; of the two, 2 Nephi 9:2 does not actually give a description of what it is. 4 Nephi 1:26 is the one and only place in scripture where we actually get an explicit description declaring what the "True Church" of God actually is: a society which is not proud, wears simple clothing, has all their goods and substance in common so that there were not rich and poor or bond and free, is not divided into classes, and does not use religion as a pretext for personal monetary gain. in a very real way, the True Church is simply a free and charitable society. If God remembers the "heathen" (2 Nephi 26:33), and the righteous person (meaning even atheists are included in God's love, and God will save all people), then the divisions we try to draw between people are often more a function of our own lack of charity for the holy ones we know not of. 

We do not have all truth - if world religions [with all their many differences] are ultimately derived from the same source, then we too have suffered from the losses of declension just like any other "pagan" group. The doctrine that many plain and precious things have been lost makes that clear; the Articles of Faith make it clear that we still have many important things to learn, and that therefore the work of the Restoration is nowhere near "complete".

And my point is that it doesn't always have to be seen in terms of declension at all. If we believe in continuing revelation, and that God(s) will speak to all people in all times and places, then it's not the case that there was a single static deposit of Truth at the beginning which each group took and mingled with the philosophies of men so that all they have now is a mix of an original true idea now contaminated with falsity. Instead, from the original deposit, each tribe migrating away has built upon the original, adding new wisdom to old, so that while they were separated there was change and evolution, yes, but each group was not just losing things, but also learning and adding more good. A plurality of divergent views allows us the ability to pool our understanding and range over a wider area, and it is only when the testimony of two nations flow together that the truth is found.  

Rather than seeing other traditions and histories as mere confirmation of what we already believe in a sort of quest for validation, I think we should to learn and add what good we can from whatever source we find - which would necessarily include reexamining some ideas we might have. Rather than functioning as mere buttressing for our own preexisting ideas, other traditions have powerful things to teach that are worthwhile in their own right. I think that's what Joseph Smith was willing to do - it doesn't matter where an idea comes from, because we should be gathering all that are good and true. 

I think what "religion" gives us is a vocabulary for communal expression. Something that binds societies together in a co-creative act. In a way, language is a more fundamental religion that the outward divisions between sects.  

In Greek, what we've translated as "true" is alethes (a-Lethe), meaning "not forgetful"; in Hebrew, "true" was 'emeth, meaning "faithful". While we often think of truth in terms of intellectual propositions, the word having become used to mean "factually accurate", it can also mean "faithful" in the sense of trusting in a person with whom you have a relationship or covenant. I think that's a more helpful paradigm in some ways. The "true and living" Gods - the 'emeth and chay Gods - are those that are faithful and alive as greengrowing vegetation reborn in spring. 

"True" is an Indo-European word - the same word, in fact, as "tree"; they're both derived from the root deru, meaning "be firm, solid, steadfast" as an oak. (Probably, by the way, the same word as "Druid".) This, I think, is part of why so many religious (and even "non-religious") "truths" are ultimately derived from a metaphorical agricultural language. We're animals who have evolved alongside trees, so that image is deep and fundamental to our biology. Note how, above, the axis mundi around which the entire planet revolves was conceptualized as an enormous cosmic tree sheltering all people in all lands. (This might be favorably compared with Lehi's vision, and Goddess/Heavenly Mother metaphors.) There are many paths to that central tree of truth. 

[volgadon]

I think that were Joseph Smith a contemporary thinker rather than prophet, he'd be a traditionalist. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20nuTITfhko

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Hmm. I can't quite tell if you were posting that vid as support or refutation, volga.

I actually disagree with that speaker's ideas quite a bit, tho. To begin with, I guess I just get impatient with isms and classification schemata, and I'm really skeptical of metaphysics in the first place - seems more like a misunderstanding of the order of Aristotle's books than profound. (Oh, whoops, I see he's addressing that. Well, why use the name, in that case, since it's so misleading?)  

"The Sacred is what is metaphysically totally 'itself' independent of any other reality"? If it's entirely independent, how can it even be said to exist? Doesn't make sense to me, and I just don't think this kind of linguistic absolutism has much meaning.   

Totally not on board with the 'sacralization' of the understanding of evil. That seems more like a desperate scrabbling attempt to make the best of bad situations. Maybe I'm not understanding his meaning, but if sacralizing evil is an important tenet of his brand of 'traditionalism', then I can't agree that it's a good system. 

I emphatically disagree that declension is the foundation of all ethics. I don't understand why he thinks that we would not be good if we have 'ascended' - seems like if that means anything at all, it would imply that we'd become more good. 

I disagree with his characterization of respect for human life being mere 'sentimentalism' (not that there is anything wrong with such a sentiment in the first place). Gotta say, this is one of the more ridiculous things folks who think like this claim about secularism. Even if humans are 'nothing' but matter, they are infinitely precious. 

Since he doesn't actually make an argument against evolution, merely states that traditionalists have (of course) been the ones to critique it, there's not much to say except a counter statement that I think the evidence shows quite convincingly that some form of evolution, regardless of the particular mechanism, is going on. I have never quite understand the offense people take with the idea that the human species evolved ultimately from "slime" (always spoken with distaste), or that we have primate cousins. Scientism can be a problem, but I think the solution is a better understanding of scientific methodology. 

I do agree with his criticism of the hardline orthodoxies that try to place orthodoxy in opposition against universality. I guess I see 'sacredness' and 'religion' more as 'bindings' - 'ligaments', 'tendons' - a sort of language that humans use to connect with each other as they cocreate their cultures.

[mfbukowski]

18 hours ago, volgadon said:

I think that were Joseph Smith a contemporary thinker rather than prophet, he'd be a traditionalist. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20nuTITfhko

Brilliant stuff- thanks for turning me on to Nasr.

I think as a "Restorationist" clearly he was a traditionalist who returned the sacred to us.  This notion of direct experience of the sacred, as I see it, is the basis of Mormonism, we call it "personal revelation".  And I agree about Modernism and Scientism. I hope that as we move away from Postmodern thought there is not a reactionary turn back to that.

The celebration of deeds over words is wonderful.  That is what I find in the temple with also the affirmation that the "least of us" are affirmed as being capable of being touched by the sacred as we serve them through ordinances.  We have action and symbolism together participating in serving those gone on before as well as the dramas of the cosmos played out before us.  What a wonderful thing it is to have temples!

I wish we could better teach this kind of view of the sacred as direct experience of divinity rather than all the "science fiction" stories we have here on this board about the nature of God, including comic-book dramatizations of "what really happened in the Garden" and the compatibility of evolution with creation as if they have anything to do with each other.

"In the beginning was the Word"  Of course consciousness was first.  Nothing could "exist" without a mind to contemplate it.

How do we get that back?  At least we are now perhaps closer than we were 50 years ago even, coming up with rational justifications for the primacy of human experience over scientism.  And yet we have so much fundamentalism including fundamentalist believers in scientism.

Sigh.  I guess all we can do is affirm all these truths for ourselves and hope they do not disappear from the earth.

But yes- total agreement that Joseph saw the Ancient Sacred and that is what the Restoration should be.  Whether or not it can keep that might be a different matter.  I see it eroding daily here alone.  Every thread is about scientific truth with no comprehension of reality.  

Gosh I am getting myself depressed  

We gotta sit down some day and talk for a week or so.   Heck we could spend a few days just on Bob Dylan lyrics.  

Quote

 

At dawn my lover comes to me

And tells me of her dreams

Without an attempt to shovel a glimpse

Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words

But these to tell what's true

And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

 

 

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

While I'm on the topic of the Hierocentric State and religious diffusion: 

Nibley noted (way back in 1951!) that "William of Rubruck tells us that while the real holy center of the Mongols was the Ononkulitai (the ancestral burial and assembly place on the holy Altai beside the equally holy Onon River), for purposes of administration it had been supplanted by Karakorum, a centrally located roundup center to which the tribute animals could be most conveniently driven from all parts of the empire."  

Meanwhile, I'm recalling Geoffrey Ashe's brilliant book Dawn Behind The Dawn, which discusses the same possibility nestled within the Altai-Baikal stretch of Siberia. From the Kirkus review: "A lively, scholarly detective story in which Ashe turns his inquisitive eye on the possible truth of a prehistoric Golden Age. The conviction that a paradise existed in ages past is such a tenacious one in many religious traditions (as well as in legend and folklore) that Ashe suggests there may indeed be a "missing link" from our current accounts of the origins of civilization and culture. Tentatively refuting the traditional assumption that the cultures of the Middle East and Mycenae filtered northward into "barbaric" Europe and North Asia, Ashe instead suggests that at least one major seedbed may have existed in the northern Altai mountain range near the intersection of Mongolia, the USSR, and China. What began as a collection of Stone Age hunters and gatherers may have developed (according to scant evidence dating back to as far as 24,000 B.C.) into a society of horse herders who maintained a rough state of intersexual balance; worshipped nature via shamans likely to be female; sifted the Siberian sands for gold for sacred objects; and formed a center of artistic and religious diffusion that would eventually drift southward to influence the Greek and Israelite cultures and perhaps even Native American religious customs. As Ashe points out, this ancient society may have inspired such concepts as, among others, the idea of a "sacred mountain to the north," the "magic" properties of the number seven, the sacred symbolism of the bear, and the Altaic Goddess herself, who may have been the model for the Greeks' Artemis. "This discussion is not a conclusion," Ashe says, "it is a challenge." Nevertheless, he makes an intriguing case for an Altaic paradise."

The "oasis" model of religious metaphor reified in Temple Theology has great explanatory power. The cosmic Quadrata (the Circle and the Square), the Dome of the Heavens/Zodiacal/Precessional motifs, the Central Mountain of the Gods/Lord's House, Messengers/Angels as emissaries to nomadic Pilgrims, the Waters/Spring/River of Life, the Serpent/Dragon/Chaos Monster drawn to the primal Waters, the central Tree of Life as Axis Mundi amidst the Seven Stars circling the Pole, the Hieros Gamos/fertility rites, Priests and Priestesses (Pres-bous = Before the Cow) as caretakers of flocks and agricultural Gardeners, the Year Rite based around the Sacred Calendar, the great Assemblies/Panegyris, the House as Temple, and on and on.

Someone should package Hamlet's Mill, Dawn Behind The Dawn, and The Ancient State as a trilogy of ancient history. 

[volgadon]

Speaking of Altay, a favourite artist of mine - Nicholas Roerich - found it a fount of spiritual inspiration. Scroll down for some of his paintings. http://uymon.ru/exhibitions/roerich_and_altay/

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Nice! 

Someday I'll learn Russian ... 

[mfbukowski]

On 12/21/2015 at 7:04 AM, volgadon said:

Speaking of Altay, a favourite artist of mine - Nicholas Roerich - found it a fount of spiritual inspiration. Scroll down for some of his paintings. http://uymon.ru/exhibitions/roerich_and_altay/

I was in Prague in September and got immersed in Slavic mythology.  Mucha painted the Slavic Epic- absolutely amazing task. There is much richness here as well and tracking down the stories of the gods. It is wonderful that these are on the internet but the experience of seeing these "in person" is incomparable.  The canvases are HUGE, the smallest foreground figures are approximately life size and so they draw you in as if you yourself are participating in the picture.  Each canvas becomes an "event" in one's life if one wants to participate in it that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slav_Epic

The whole series can be found here

http://www.muchafoundation.org/gallery/themes/theme/slav-epic/object/212/

Click above to see each in the "One of Twenty" section

I had several "favorites" but I think this was the one that was the most emotional experience for me, depicting youth gathered in a circle under a linden tree while performing "masonic" signs.  These were variations on ancient rituals preserved by the Czech people.http://www.muchafoundation.org/gallery/themes/theme/slav-epic/object/229/

It is unfortunate that the figures are so tiny in these representations- there is much symbolism in the details of these images.  They need to be blown up to 20 feet by 20 to really see what is there. 

Slavic culture is very rich, though big brother Russ seems to like to bully the rest of the family.

Each culture is quite distinct.  I was really impressed with the Czech "Bohemian" culture based on the arts.  I think I really had no clue about that until this visit.

We also visited many synagogues in Eastern Europe- at least some of those which survived the War.  Tremendously beautiful and full of gospel symbolism as well.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Ye Gods, I love Mucha. 

Also, I deeply approve of turning this into an art thread. We need a little culture 'round these parts. 

Speaking of Art Nouveau, I really really wish that Hugo Höppener wasn't such a frickin' Nazi, because I've really been digging his Jugendstil work lately. And does it make me a walking cliche to adore Beardsley, Klimt, Schiele, Grasset, Burne-Jones, and all those guys?

Probably.  

I need to go back to art school.  

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Ye Gods, I love Mucha. 

Also, I deeply approve of turning this into an art thread. We need a little culture 'round these parts. 

Speaking of Art Nouveau, I really really wish that Hugo Höppener wasn't such a frickin' Nazi, because I've really been digging his Jugendstil work lately. And does it make me a walking cliche to adore Beardsley, Klimt, Schiele, Grasset, Burne-Jones, and all those guys?

Probably.  

I need to go back to art school.  

My two intellectual loves are philosophy and art history.  It is not a coincidence that you find affinities here. Both art and philosophy are about symbols and how they function in our lives- both visually -"art"- and linguistically - "philosophy".

Both examine reality as a human construction, an "organizing from matter unorganized".  Our lives literally create and are created from symbols which are universal.

The Wittgenstein family were patrons of the arts and indeed were active in patronizing Klimt among others. There are several portraits of members of W's family by Klimt,  commissioned by Ludwig's father Karl, a rich industrialist. 

Wittgenstein's later philosophy deals with some of the same issues in language that Klimt and the others in the groups you were mentioning were also examining visually

Here is an interesting essay on this

Quote

 

I've bracketed Klimt between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, because both teach that it is our grammar
that is decisive for our ways of thinking and acting, and both teach that the inner/outer distinction is
not at all what it seems to be. In Klimt's introduction of abstraction into his concrete
representations, he was implicitly reflecting upon precisely this, and upon how representation works
and what its limits are, and upon how representation and symbolism can be juxtaposed in a new
way not beholden to the old superstitious religion. Abstraction in representation does not gesture

toward otherworldly beings in the way, say, religious symbolism in Renaissance painting had. But
it indicates representation's limits, and shows that thinking does not stop where picturing ends. The
aim is not to reveal all, but to balance what can be made explicit with what remains implicit.
Despite all three achieving this balance only in a human-all-too-human way, all three are
paradigmatic individuals related by a very strong family resemblance.

 

https://www.academia.edu/1705355/Klimt_and_Wittgenstein

So all three here are examining what can be "represented" and what cannot.  What cannot be represented can only by understood through symbol and parable, the spirit and visions.  Science represents only one of many possible "angles" and perspectives at "viewing" and "representing" all the "pictures" we understand to be "reality"

These ideas were "in the air" in the Vienna of that era.  Much of contemporary philosophy especially in Europe has been influenced by these ideas.

Finally as a philosopher, Wittgenstein was a mystic religiously because he knew that God could not be "represented" in language, the best we can do is come up with useful paradigms which help us imagine Him and then use those as mandalas to achieve mystic understanding.

I happen to believe we have the best possible paradigm for humanity, but that is another story.

Edit

I should also say that the difference here with what the author calls the "old religion" is what we would call "creedal religion" which pretends to accurately "represent" God in "substances" and other linguistic tricks.  This objection does not apply to Mormonism which is based on the direct experience, or "testimony" or "personal revelation" of the nature of God.  We Mormons have no theology because we know God cannot be "represented" by philosophy- just experienced directly.

We have our paradigm of viewing Him as "Father" and have seen him in visions as a Man.  For me, this is the best possible way to understand God - through direct experience

Edited December 22, 2015 by mfbukowski

[Spammer]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

My two intellectual loves are philosophy and art history.  It is not a coincidence that you find affinities here. Both art and philosophy are about symbols and how they function in our lives- both visually -"art"- and linguistically - "philosophy".

Both examine reality as a human construction, an "organizing from matter unorganized".  Our lives literally create and are created from symbols which are universal.

The Wittgenstein family were patrons of the arts and indeed were active in patronizing Klimt among others. There are several portraits of members of W's family by Klimt,  commissioned by Ludwig's father Karl, a rich industrialist. 

Wittgenstein's later philosophy deals with some of the same issues in language that Klimt and the others in the groups you were mentioning were also examining visually

Here is an interesting essay on this

https://www.academia.edu/1705355/Klimt_and_Wittgenstein

So all three here are examining what can be "represented" and what cannot.  What cannot be represented can only by understood through symbol and parable, the spirit and visions.  Science represents only one of many possible "angles" and perspectives at "viewing" and "representing" all the "pictures" we understand to be "reality"

These ideas were "in the air" in the Vienna of that era.  Much of contemporary philosophy especially in Europe has been influenced by these ideas.

Finally as a philosopher, Wittgenstein was a mystic religiously because he knew that God could not be "represented" in language, the best we can do is come up with useful paradigms which help us imagine Him and then use those as mandalas to achieve mystic understanding.

I happen to believe we have the best possible paradigm for humanity, but that is another story.

Edit

I should also say that the difference here with what the author calls the "old religion" is what we would call "creedal religion" which pretends to accurately "represent" God in "substances" and other linguistic tricks.  This objection does not apply to Mormonism which is based on the direct experience, or "testimony" or "personal revelation" of the nature of God.  We Mormons have no theology because we know God cannot be "represented" by philosophy- just experienced directly.

We have our paradigm of viewing Him as "Father" and have seen him in visions as a Man.  For me, this is the best possible way to understand God - through direct experience

This exactly captures the Orthodox view, except the direct experience of our mystics, to whom God has revealed Himself, reveals God to be Holy Trinity.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Spammer

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Spammer said:

This exactly captures the Orthodox view, except the direct experience of our mystics, to whom God has revealed Himself, reveals God to be Holy Trinity.

Yeah, me too but I call it a "Family".  Pesky words.