Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Via Robotwisdom: The ongoing evolution of Christianity:

In her new book, “Beyond Belief,” Pagels draws on further study of the more than 50 discovered texts – but particularly the Gospel of Thomas – to reveal a diversity of early teachings about Jesus that will resonate with many people today.

“Although later denounced by certain leaders as ‘heretics,’ ” she writes, “many of these Christians saw themselves as not so much believers as seekers, people who ‘seek for God.’ ”



Pagels, who teaches religion at Princeton University, points out that the Gospel of John is the only one in the New Testament that actually promotes the idea of Jesus as God in human form, and she argues, based on research, that it was written explicitly to counter the Gospel of Thomas, which said otherwise. Thomas’s gospel, she writes, teaches “that God’s light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone … and encourages the hearer … to seek to know God through one’s own divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God.”

Thomas teaches that one’s affinity with God is the key to the kingdom. A quote from the gospel reads: “Jesus said, ‘Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled; when he becomes troubled, he will be astonished and will rule over all things.'”



The gospels of John and Thomas share striking similarities, however. Both encourage people to look toward “the beginning” not the end of time, and both emphasize, unlike Mark, that the kingdom of God is not to be expected in the future, “but is already here – an immediate and continuing spiritual reality,” Pagels says.

In her graceful, illuminating exploration of various works – including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which shows that women were also early teachers, and the Gospel of Truth, which speaks of God as Father and Mother – Pagels explicitly raises the question of how different Christianity might have been had these works not been banned.

I’ve been reading this book, Authority, by Richard Sennett, and consequently have found myself looking up information and articles by or about him in the hopes of coming across some juicy ideas.

Guardian UK: Inner-city scholar:

But if he is rarely critical of individuals, he holds nothing back in his criticism of the new economy in which “to make it you really have to plunge into much more superficial social relations. It is dysfunctional to feel loyalty to an organisation. The notion of accumulating a life history with an institution or a person doesn’t work in this economy. The boom gave people the impression that the class divide was going to end – that there would be no losers. In fact, it has made it worse.”

He is currently overseeing a research project in New York which involves interviewing young people in their 20s, who have gone into financial services, IT and the new media. They are confused, he says: “Everyone thinks they are going to be the next Martha Lane Fox but they are learning very quickly that all these fantasy worlds just aren’t going to happen. Don’t commit, don’t be dependent, stay loose. Loyalty is very low on this list. But if you think dependence is bad, what you produce is a damaged human being.”

Ruth Levitas of the University of Bristol describes The Corrosion Of Character as a “wonderful description of the way in which insecure work has taken away the basics for a certain kind of character”. But she also thinks there’s something about the thesis “that doesn’t work in relation to women, something that’s not quite right. Ultimately, I felt the book doesn’t address gender”.

Guardian Book Reviews: Integrity rules: Richard Sennett’s unusual memoir, Respect, is also a meditation on self-worth and self-respect:

Sennett knows this better than anyone. The Fall of Public Man was scathing about the way self-absorption kills off one’s ability to pay attention to others and function in the public realm. Sennett’s memoirs are not at all narcissistic in this way, but neither do they lend themselves to exploring the experiences of people on the receiving end of welfare. The argument, as a result, seems to become more abstract and abstracted the further it gets from Cabrini Green.

“Treating people with respect,” Sennett writes in his conclusion, “cannot occur simply by commanding it should happen. Mutual recognition has to be negotiated; this negotiation engages the complexities of personal character as much as social structure.” What exactly does this mean? The only moral Sennett is prepared to offer has to do with what he calls “the psychology of autonomy”, which involves “accepting in others what one does not understand”. By allowing of someone that you do not understand them, you grant them their dignity; by granting them their dignity, you thereby strengthen your own. It’s an ethical win-win.

Christians Hail Rightist’s Call To Oust Arabs:

A spokesman in DeLay’s office rejected the claim of religious exclusivism, citing many occasions when the Majority Whip spoke out in favor of religious tolerance. The spokesman declined to comment on Elon’s remarks.

During his speech last week, Elon quoted from Chapter 33 of Numbers, in which God tells Moses that the children of Israel are mean to inherit the land of Canaan. God then instructs the children of Israel: “Ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you… But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that ye let remain of them be as pricks in your eyes, and as thorns in your sides, and they shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.”

Drawing loud cheers from the audience, Elon said, “I know, we always have to be politically correct, but it is very, very complicated to be politically correct when you have to correct so many political mistakes.”

To correct such mistakes, said Elon, an Orthodox rabbi, “Let’s turn to the Bible, which says very clearly… we have to resettle them, to relocate them, and to have a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.”

I probably have posted something along these lines before, but I have been chewing on these ideas again lately in my normal pattern of bubbling, pulsing angst so I thought some of you might find them interesting as concepts.

Personality Theories of Otto Rank

Life and death

Another interesting idea Rank introduced was the contest between life and death. He felt we have a “life instinct” that pushes us to become individuals, competent and independent, and a “death instinct” that pushes us to be part of a family, community, or humanity. We also feel a certain fear of these two. The “fear of life” is the fear of separation, loneliness, and alienation; the “fear of death” is the fear of getting lost in the whole, stagnating, being no-one.

Our lives are filled with separations, beginning with birth. Rank’s earliest work, in fact, concerned birth trauma, the idea that the anxiety experienced during birth was the model for all anxiety experienced afterwards. After birth, there’s weaning and discipline and school and work and heartbreaks…. But avoiding these separations is, literally, avoiding life and choosing death — never finding out what you can do, never leaving your family or small town, never leaving the womb!

So we must face our fears, recognizing that, to be fully developed, we must embrace both life and death, become individuals and nurture our relationships with others.

The artist

Rank also tackles the difficult issue of artistic creativity. On the one hand, Rank says, the artist has a particularly strong tendency towards glorification of his own will. Unlike the rest of us, he feels compelled to remake reality in his own image. And yet a true artist also needs immortality, which he can only achieve by identifying himself with the collective will of his culture and religion. Good art could be understood as a joining of the material and the spiritual, the specific and the universal, or the individual and humanity.

This joining doesn’t come easily, though. It begins with the will, Rank’s word for the ego, but an ego imbued with power. We are all born with a will to be ourselves, to be free of domination. In early childhood, we exercise our will in our efforts to do things independently of our parents. Later, we fight the domination of other authorities, including the inner authority of our sexual drives. How our struggle for independence goes determines the type of person we become. Rank describes three basic types:

First, there is the adapted type. These people learn to “will” what they have been forced to do. They obey authority, their society’s moral code, and, as best as they can, their sexual impulses. This is a passive, duty-bound creature that Rank suggests is, in fact, the average person.

Second, there is the neurotic type. These people have a much stronger will than the average person, but it is totally engaged in the fight against external and internal domination. They even fight the expression of their own will, so there is no will left over to actually do anything with the freedom won. Instead, they worry and feel guilty about being so “willful.” They are, however, at a higher level of moral development than the adapted type.

Third, there is the productive type, which Rank also refers to as the artist, the genius, the creative type, the self-conscious type, and, simply, the human being. Instead of fighting themselves, these people accept and affirm themselves, and create an ideal, which functions as a positive focus for will. The artist creates himself or herself, and then goes on to create a new world as well.