Submitted by Acolyte (not verified) on Oct. 23, 2009.
An excellent and thought-provoking article, Jamie. Patriarchal politics and dominion theology are steeped in the rhetoric of idolatry and self-electionism. What a pair the church of Rome and the church of England make. How about same-sex marriage, if they consummate their engagement?
Self-consciousness and self-reflection are powerful virtues enabling self-advancement, but they also enable self-deception and the advance of really bad judgments calculated to advantage self over others.
Words matter. The rhetoric of idolatry and self-electionism threatens to do humankind in; it blights sensitivity and social insight, and it wrecks nature. The implication of idolatry and self-electionism in human behavior extends into deep-past evolution, and particularly, in religious culture. They are about control, the theology of dominion and the politics of patriarchy. http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?grpId=3659174697239231&articleI...
The proclivity to deceive oneself and others is an inherited tendency well ingrained in evolutionary history. Self-electionism is a bullying instinct that infects individual and group consciousness. It wages wars and regularly uses ideology, rules and violence to accomplish arrogant and misinformed purposes.
Self-justification (institutional) based on ignorance and arrogance is wasting humankind and Earth-life. Because humankind assumes self-superiority over other life it justifies the exploitation of other life, even to extinction. Self-absorbed religions conveniently ignore cultural exploitation and the wasting of web-life, and they advance a myopic and unhealthy “pro-life” ethic that concentrates on human life only, not as part of the total Earth-life ecology, but as a value sufficient in and of itself. What does “pro-life” mean? Surely it doesn’t mean the proliferation of human life to the extent that it suffocates essential ecologies.
The Garden of Eden Story has God imposing two mandates on humankind. The first is authorization to “increase and multiply;” and the second is a requirement to abstain from eating fruit from the “Tree in the middle of the Garden.” Knowledge of good and evil is what the discernment of consciousness-conscience is about. The fruit of the “middletree” is vitality itself — that which is shared commonly by all life, and which conscience discerns as necessary and right. Conscience tells that human ecology totally depends on the vitality of Earth-ecology. Wasting common vitality, the “original” means of all life, is "original sin", as true in the past as in the present.
The institutional arrogance of self-electionism (patriarchy) is idolatry for it presumes to itself dominion that belongs to God alone. The cultural dominion of males over females, over Earth resources, justified in institutional religions, is a fraudulent presumption at the heart of societal disordering, including the rape of land and nature.
Walter Brueggemann rightly assesses the human predicament when he observes that the exploitation of women and nature roots in the same religious/ cultural mindset, and that a corrective from wasting one or the other cannot happen except the common cause of both is understood and removed. http://ncronline.org/news/justice/biblical-narrative-economic-policy
I don't see the two imperial churches individually or jointly doing much to respond to the real global crisis that wastes women and nature, they are too self-absorbed with shoring up their common ideological fixations that attract them to each other in the first place. Only the women of the world, the authentic carriers of faith-consciousness can bring to bear the necessary correctives that might rescue humankind and churches from their idolatry and self-electionism.
An excellent and
An excellent and thought-provoking article, Jamie. Patriarchal politics and dominion theology are steeped in the rhetoric of idolatry and self-electionism. What a pair the church of Rome and the church of England make. How about same-sex marriage, if they consummate their engagement?
Self-consciousness and self-reflection are powerful virtues enabling self-advancement, but they also enable self-deception and the advance of really bad judgments calculated to advantage self over others.
Words matter. The rhetoric of idolatry and self-electionism threatens to do humankind in; it blights sensitivity and social insight, and it wrecks nature. The implication of idolatry and self-electionism in human behavior extends into deep-past evolution, and particularly, in religious culture. They are about control, the theology of dominion and the politics of patriarchy. http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?grpId=3659174697239231&articleI...
The proclivity to deceive oneself and others is an inherited tendency well ingrained in evolutionary history. Self-electionism is a bullying instinct that infects individual and group consciousness. It wages wars and regularly uses ideology, rules and violence to accomplish arrogant and misinformed purposes.
Self-justification (institutional) based on ignorance and arrogance is wasting humankind and Earth-life. Because humankind assumes self-superiority over other life it justifies the exploitation of other life, even to extinction. Self-absorbed religions conveniently ignore cultural exploitation and the wasting of web-life, and they advance a myopic and unhealthy “pro-life” ethic that concentrates on human life only, not as part of the total Earth-life ecology, but as a value sufficient in and of itself. What does “pro-life” mean? Surely it doesn’t mean the proliferation of human life to the extent that it suffocates essential ecologies.
The Garden of Eden Story has God imposing two mandates on humankind. The first is authorization to “increase and multiply;” and the second is a requirement to abstain from eating fruit from the “Tree in the middle of the Garden.” Knowledge of good and evil is what the discernment of consciousness-conscience is about. The fruit of the “middletree” is vitality itself — that which is shared commonly by all life, and which conscience discerns as necessary and right. Conscience tells that human ecology totally depends on the vitality of Earth-ecology. Wasting common vitality, the “original” means of all life, is "original sin", as true in the past as in the present.
The institutional arrogance of self-electionism (patriarchy) is idolatry for it presumes to itself dominion that belongs to God alone. The cultural dominion of males over females, over Earth resources, justified in institutional religions, is a fraudulent presumption at the heart of societal disordering, including the rape of land and nature.
Walter Brueggemann rightly assesses the human predicament when he observes that the exploitation of women and nature roots in the same religious/ cultural mindset, and that a corrective from wasting one or the other cannot happen except the common cause of both is understood and removed.
http://ncronline.org/news/justice/biblical-narrative-economic-policy
I don't see the two imperial churches individually or jointly doing much to respond to the real global crisis that wastes women and nature, they are too self-absorbed with shoring up their common ideological fixations that attract them to each other in the first place. Only the women of the world, the authentic carriers of faith-consciousness can bring to bear the necessary correctives that might rescue humankind and churches from their idolatry and self-electionism.