Re: Esalen Conference on Fundamentalism: Christian
Tony Clifton
Fri 03 Jul 2009 06:30 PM PDTIronically this is from a Catholic web site, with a blind spot for it own unique Catholic fundamentalism. (aka Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) But in the Catholic's projection of the term they specifically refer to Protestantism. While I think their instances of Protestant fundamentalism prior to 1900s are arbitrary, the actual etymology of fundamentalism they describe seems to be in tact..

The etymology of the word is well worth keeping in mind when assigning it to other religious movements contingent on non European histories Although what we know globally as Fundamentalism today seems to have emerged with Modernity in the mid to late 19th century and its psychological processes appear similar across cultures in their crucifixion of metaphor, the specificity of its many indigenous movements requires attention when applying the term broadly. This is why for instance such terms as "The Semiticization of Hinduism" seem particularly useful. Anyway here is the Catholic take on Fundamentalism:

Fundamentalism: Relatively New


While the origin of the term "Fundamentalist" has a fairly simple history, the movement itself has a more confused origin. There was no individual founder, nor was there a single event that precipitated its advent. Of course, Fundamentalist writers insist that Fundamentalism is nothing but a continuation of Christian orthodoxy. According to this theory, Fundamentalism flourished for three centuries after Christ, went underground for twelve hundred years, surfaced again with the Reformation, took its knocks from various sources, and was alternately prominent or diminished in its influence and visibility. In short, according to its partisans,

Fundamentalism always has been the Christian remnant, the faithful who remain after the rest of Christianity (if it can even be granted the title) has fallen into apostasy.

Until almost 100 years ago, Fundamentalism as we know it was not a separate movement within Protestantism, and the word itself was virtually unknown. Those people who today would be called Fundamentalists were formerly either Baptists, Presbyterians, or members of some other specific sect. But in the last decade of the nineteenth-century, issues came to the fore that made them start to withdraw from mainline Protestantism.

The issues were: the Social Gospel, a liberalizing and secularizing trend within Protestantism that tried to weaken the Christian message, making it a merely social and political agenda; the embrace of Darwinism, which seemed to call into question the reliability of Scripture; and the higher criticism of the Bible that originated in Germany.

To meet the challenge presented by these developments, early Fundamentalist leaders united around several basic principles, but it was not until the publication of a series of volumes called The Fundamentals that the movement received its name.

The basic elements of Fundamentalism were formulated almost exactly a century ago at the Presbyterian theological seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, by B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge, among others. What they produced became known as Princeton theology, and it appealed to conservative Protestants who were concerned with the liberalizing trends of the Social Gospel movement, which was gaining steam at about the same time.

In 1909 the brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart, whose wealth came from the oil industry, were responsible for underwriting a series of twelve volumes entitled The Fundamentals. There were 64 contributors, including scholars such as James Orr, W. J. Eerdman, H. C. G. Moule, James M. Gray, and Warfield himself, as well as Episcopalian bishops, Presbyterian ministers, Methodist evangelists, and even an Egyptologist. As Edward Dobson, an associate pastor at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, summarized the collaboration, "They were certainly not anti-intellectual, snake-handling, cultic, obscurantist fanatics."

The preface to the volumes explained their purpose: "In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free of charge to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday school superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world."

Three million copies of the series were distributed. Harry Fosdick, a theological liberal, wrote an article in The Christian Century called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" He used the title of the books to designate the people he was opposing, and the label he originated became commonly used to designate those who adhered to The Fundamentals.

The fundamental doctrines identified in the series can be reduced to five: (I) the inspiration and what the writers call infallibility of Scripture, (2) the deity of Christ (including his virgin birth), (3) the substitutionary atonement of his death, (4) his literal resurrection from the dead, and (5) his literal return at the Second Coming.

Re: (July 3rd 1909) 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution (complete text with links)
Tony Clifton
Fri 03 Jul 2009 09:08 AM PDTJuly 3rd 1909 Sri Aurobindo's first major text on evolution. Yoga and Human Evolution Published

Re: Waltz with Bashir
ned
Thu 02 Jul 2009 09:24 PM PDTOh, I saw this in the theatre last winter. Fantastic movie! I highly recommend it. Great soundtrack too.

Re: Twenty years on: how the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has gagged our society By Anthony Drew (The Observer)
Debashish
Thu 02 Jul 2009 03:20 PM PDTIt is easy to see how the Rushdie legacy is being perpetuated in the case of Heehs and how it has left its unresolved precedent for reactionary identity politics. A likeness chart between the Rushdie and Heehs cases will bring this out clearly:

1. In both cases few of the detractors read the book and jumped to negative conclusions based on literalist readings of portions taken out of context.

2. In both cases, the argument of "hurt sentiments" of a religious identity-group has been used to justify violent and hateful responses.

3. In both cases, the books have been made into occasions for strengthening the hands of "authorities" to control subjective opinion and expression.

4. In both cases, we have seen publishers who have demonstrated their spinelessness while mouthing freedom-of-speech slogans.

5. In both cases, many public voices who could have made a difference either remained strangely mute or edged themselves towards the book haters.

To justify hatred based on "traditional" cultural responses in an era when the clarion call is clearly one of subjective authenticity of response and a collective life of mutuality based on individual realization, is a retrogression that can hardly be believed. The use of Sri Aurobindo to justify such responses is an irony, which were it not for its stark horror, would have seemed a Dadaist joke. The problem clearly is much less one of "hurt sentiments" than of the politicization of religion, which is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Once we accept the social legitimacy of such identity politics, we have paved the way for the rise of the imams in the name of whatever cultural/religious history to manipulate emotions and control opinion.

DB

The Imam (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, pp. 145-147)
Debashish
Wed 01 Jul 2009 11:29 PM PDTFloors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the moment, all the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and short-wave radios and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and speak urgently into several telephones. There is no alcohol here, nor are playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one hanging on the old man's bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central heating is at full blast night and day, and the windows are tightly shut. The exile cannot forget, and must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh, the once and future land where even the moon is hot and dripping like a fresh, buttered chapati. O that longed--for part of the world where the sun and moon are male but their hot sweet light is named with female names. At night the exile parts his curtains and the alien moonlight sidles into the room, its coldness striking his eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his eyes. Looserobed, frowning, ominous, awake: this is the Imam.
-------------------------------------

The Imam is the centre of a wheel.
Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His son, Khalid, enters his sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his right hand with his left palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every five minutes, to keep himself clean; the water itself is cleansed of impurities, before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young men surrounding him are well aware of his famous Monograph on Water, whose purity, the Imam believes, communicates itself to the drinker, its thinness and simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste.
..................

"Not for nothing do the peoples of our hot lands offer it reverence," the Monograph proclaims. "Water, preserver of life. No civilized individual can refuse it to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever so arthritically stiff, will rise at once and go to the tap if a small child should
come to her and ask, pani, nani. Beware all those who blaspheme against it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul."

The Imam has often vented his rage upon the memory of the late Aga Khan, as a result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head of the Ismailis was observed drinking vintage champagne. _O, sir, this champagne is only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns to water_. Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud. When the
future comes such individuals will be judged, he tells his men. Water will have its day and blood will flow like wine. Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. Who has not dreamed this dream, of being a king for a day? -- But the Imam dreams of more than a day; feels, emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings with which he will control the movement of history.
No: not history.
His is a stranger dream.
......................................
The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His great gnarled hands, granite--grey, rest heavily on the wings of his high-backed chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls ponderously on the surprisingly scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through the grey-black wisps of beard. The Imam's eyes are clouded; his lips do not move. He is pure force, an elemental being; he moves without motion, acts without doing, speaks without uttering a sound. He is the conjurer and history is his trick.
No, not history: something stranger.
..........................
The explanation of this conundrum is to be heard, at this very moment, on certain surreptitious radio waves, on which the voice of the American convert Bilal is singing the Imam's holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice enters a ham radio in Kensington and emerges in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted into the thunderous speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse of the Empress, with lists of her crimes, murders, bribes, sexual relations with lizards, and so on, he proceeds eventually to issue in ringing tones the Imam's nightly call to his people to rise up against the evil of her State. "We will make a revolution," the Imam proclaims through him, "that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history." For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood--wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies -- progress, science, rights -- against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day AlLah finished his revelation to Mahound. "We will unmake the veil of history," Bilal declaims into the listening night, "and when it is unravelled, we will see Paradise standing there, in all its glory and light."
.................................
"They love me," the Imam's voice says, "because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the
timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day and is terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the prisoner of her own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the revolution there will be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word _clock_ will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God."

He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment has come: the people have reached the guns. Which are silenced in their turn, as the endless serpent of the people, the gigantic python of the risen masses, embraces the guards, suffocating them, and silences the lethal chuckling of
their weapons. The Imam sighs heavily. "Done."

The lights of the palace are extinguished as the people walk towards it, at the same measured pace as before. Then, from within the darkened palace, there rises a hideous sound, beginning as a high, thin, piercing wail, then deepening into a howl, an ululation loud enough to fill every cranny of the city with its rage. Then the golden dome of the palace bursts open like an egg, and rising from it, glowing with blackness, is a mythological apparition with vast black wings, her hair streaming loose, as long and black as the Imam's is long and white: Al--Lat, Gibreel understands, bursting out of Ayesha's shell.

"Kill her," the Imam commands.
..........................................

Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upsidedown to earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her wings ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a crumpled heap. -- And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole. The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass, leaving behind only a dark stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile's return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.

One man's religion is anothers.....
Tony Clifton
Tue 30 Jun 2009 11:14 AM PDTReligion is funny stuff, one man's sacred ritual is another's (who does not share the belief) occasion for comedy:
The following is the observations of Leopold Bloom (a Jew) as he watches the Catholic sacrament of communion
in which the body and blood of Christ is consumed in a ritual in which it is transformed into bread and wine:



"The priest went along by them, mumuring, holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out the communion, shook a drop or two (are they water?) off it and put it neatly in their mouths. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat sank at once. Then the next one, a small woman. The priest bent down to put it in her mouth, mumuring all the time, Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Corpus: body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They dont seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it......

They were about him here and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: its that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them Now I bet that makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels its called. There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokeypokey penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theater, all in the same swim. They do I am sure of that. Not so lonely. In our co-fraternity. Then comes out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion and the Knock apparition statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near the Confession box, Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of the kingdom to come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. (Ulysses p66)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler
Debashish
Thu 25 Jun 2009 01:04 AM PDTR: Can you also expand on the criticism part please?

DB: Literary or art critics have to use some standard by which to judge whether a work is good or bad. Such standards tend to be "true for all time" (ahistorical) and based on certain ideas of the value of style and form (formal). Or else, they attempt a psychological reading - as you say, by trying to judge whether a writer has prejudices or not. As I pointed out, to judge personal prejudices from writing is a dangerous and illegitimate reading in my opinion, since texts are opaque regarding author intent beyond a certain point. Only in some very obvious cases, usually lacking any complexity (eg. Mein Kampf) can such claims perhaps be legitimately made (not by me though). On the issue of formal criticism, I don't believe in it. Culture prepares the ground of appreciation, though taste certainly has an intuition of beauty within such preparation. However, even this does not interest me. What is of concern to me is the way in which a text functions to take a stand in the culture of its time - this is the approach of cultural history as against that of literary or art criticism.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler
Debashish
Thu 25 Jun 2009 12:48 AM PDTA text in its own time (the writer's cultural milieu in which s/he is situated) and in present time (wrt contemporary concerns) stands as a negotiation among a variety of dicsourses. These are not merely echoes of personal voices or styles but ideological orientations which subsume a variety of standpoints. Important "authors" are like placeholders for such standpoints (author function). A text reveals itself to be a dialog with several such discourses. Texts may be conscious of their dialogic nature to different degrees - to the extent of its originality as an integrative text, one can read various clear ideological positions and the stand taken in the text in relation to them. I made the difference between a deliberate production and a creative production to point to the fact that an author does not necessarily start out knowing what s/he is going to answer and how, but through a creative act brings these discourses into focus and relates itself to them. Take The Life Divine for example. Sri Aurobindo is very conscious of the historicity of various discourses which provide different trajectories for human becoming and negotiates his integral ground by addressing all these. Outside of his own intent, contemporary thought has introduced new concerns (which are often old concerns in new bottles) which the text can be seen to have anticipated in certain ways and hence retains its fertility. The question of bias arises in a situated study very clearly. In untangling the discourses and their genealogies in a text, the biases of the text also reveal themselves.

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler
rakesh
Wed 24 Jun 2009 11:03 PM PDTI would be beneficial if you can elaborate on how you read a text and how. From what I understand is that you tend to see the social time context of the subject and discourses in the text. Is the production of a text always creative without deliberate act? What if some authors have prejudices and personal opinions?

Can you also expand on the criticism part please....

Re: Re: Re: Re: A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler
rakesh
Wed 24 Jun 2009 10:49 PM PDTMind is power that makes one feel as if one is the master the work that is being done. This the illusion of ego one has to be aware of. In fact only nature works. How to get away from this illusion of doer is the most interesting quest for me...a little bit of ego and one feels that one is doing the work in fact one is not ...only nature does it again...
This is where surrender of works and sacrifice come into picture. I love to do this yoga instead of all the illusions
that creep in the way. Egoism is such a trickster.