the Bible is a book written backwards and forward in time (not in order)
The idea that all humans are made in the image of God is a crazy and magnificent idea
- This idea is at the cornerstone of our legal system; everyone is equal
- This is an opposition to the main belief of ancient pagans like Greeks, etc, who said they were essentially the ‘play-things’ of the gods
A fundamental way to define belief: that which you act out
God the father is the God of tradition and structure, who uses the Son, who is an active force that is associated with speech, not thought
- Speech is different than thought; speech has a public element, people can criticize it
In an old Mesopotamian myth, it was the union of chaos and order that gave birth to everything
- This is the basis of genesis 1
Betrayal is the worst sin (said by Dante)
- Because trust enables long-term cooperation between people
- In countries where the basis of business partnerships is trust, the economy tends to do a lot better even if they are lacking natural resources
Trust enables order; if trust breaks, chaos comes through
A good piece of fiction is more true than reality itself b/c it is a distilled/extracted version of reality
Everyone has at least 1 thing very wrong with them
- And if you don’t, you will one day
Things need names to ‘exist’ or be part of reality
- This ties into the importance of speech in the bible
speech/language separates us from animals
The world described in the bible is empirical (based on observation)
- “on a disk of land, dome on top, water comes from dome, fresh water underground, salt water surrounding the land” - A child walking out into a field may also describe the world like this
- This was the way the authors of the bible saw the world
God rested one day to show us a rest is needed from work
3 - God and the Hierarchy of Authority
The bible should be interpreted metaphorically
perception is tied to action
Christianity insists on the divinity of the body, not just the spirit
Moral values are simply not just based on society, but engrained in our biology
- Rats don’t play with each other unless they play fair; principle of fairness
God is an abstracted ideal, formulated in large part to dissociate the ideal from any particular ruler/man (back in the day, rulers would claim to be the ideal/god)
- When the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into the biblical Egypt (tyranny)
- You have to divorce the ideal from any particular power structure, but it is still a real thing that governs everyone’s behavior, including the ruler
Trends with men
- Crime: peaks at 15, goes down at 27
- They marry at 27
- Creativity peaks at youth, goes down at 27
- This has to do with testosterone (biological thing)
God sent his son (Jesus) to create habitable order out of chaos
- This is precisely the role of a father; to encourage their sons to go out there to the world and confront it, make something out of it, etc
Ideas came out of our actions
- when philosophers were coming up with these ideas, they weren’t investing them, rather they were ‘telling the story of humanity’; they are our actions articulated
Study: Lobsters fight for dominance. The loser feels depressed. Give them anti-depressants and they are ready to fight again. They have the same brain chemicals as humans.
Study: Giving ADD medication to rats stop them from playing, which leads to their pre-frontal cortex’s not being developed properly
kids need to be civilized by the age of 4, or else they turn out violent, aggressive, etc
why pyramids? Pictures of God with pyramid hat, pyramids all over the world, etc
- Pyramids are associated with the hierarchy of authority
- If you reach the top, you are not really part of the pyramid anymore (eye of Horus isn’t attached to the rest of the pyramid)
- What is needed to be at the top? Ability to pay attention. Eye of Horus represents paying attention
What do you do when your life isn’t in order? Pay attention
Attention vs thinking
- attention: watching for what you don’t know
- thinking: pondering on what you know
Study: Kids can play a game together without fully knowing the rules. If you ask the kids individually, kid #1 will give you rule 1 and 2, kid #2 will give you rules 3 and 4, and so on. So the rules are known collectively and they can extract it as they get older, and at that point they can actually play by the rules. Some kids even learned that you can create the rules
the actions come first, then the rules come later, as extracted from the actions, otherwise you would follow arbitrary rules
Nietzsche said that morals come from a super long process, thousands and thousands of years
there are an infinite ways to interpret the world, but not every interpretation is correct
the universal laws must be obeyed. That’s why in these old pictures people are prostrating to the 10 commandments tablet. If these are not obeyed, you better watch out cause bad things will come your way
- In JPs clinical experience, his patients have either broken some universal law, or someone around them has, which is why they are at JPs clinic. Breaking these laws leads to bad things
Nietzsche Was a fan of the old testament (not the new testament). He saw the OT as being an accurate representation of the phenomenology of being (speak properly, be honest, etc, or watch out cause bad things are coming)
Pride comes before a fall. I.e. you have pride, you will eventually fall
- That’s why they say ‘fear of God is the beginning of wisdom’
You can’t get away with doing bad (twisting the fabric of reality), cause it will eventually snap back.
OT is about controlling yourself, lots of prohibitions, etc.
Jung said everything horrible has been done by humans, and you’re one of them. You could have done those horrible things to. You must understand this to become enlightened
Jung said you cannot be a good person until you know what evil is contained in you
- Why pursue the good if you do not know the consequences of evil?
Study: When your favourite team wins, your testosterone levels go up, and when your team loses, the opposite happens
Yin & Yang represents chaos and order
sovereignty (kingship) is an evolution of the idea of God
there’s a strange alliance between feminists and radical Islamists
- maybe they desire dominance? cause they’ve removed it from the west, and subconsciously desire it from Saudi?
4 - Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death
Becker’s critique on God (and religion): it was a way to recreate a quasi-infantile state of dependency, to rely on an all-knowing father, and thus to recover the comfort we had when we were young when we had an ‘all knowing’ father
Marx’s critique on religion: it was the opiate for the masses. Keeps the masses busy and pacified so their corporate overlords can continue to exploit them.
JPs response to above critiques: looking at religion in a uni-dimensional way (like the above critiques) is wrong. It is foolish to reduce a complex human structure like religion to a uni-dimensional view. You simply cannot reduce religion to psychological infantilism (like Becker’s critique) or political conspiracy (like Marx’s critique)
JPs view on religion: they are collective repositories of the wisdom of the human race
Our brains have a right and left hemisphere. Luria (Russian neuropsychologist) said that one side is for order, the other for chaos. This is evidence our world is made of order and chaos like most religions allude to.
monotheism came from the idea of a plurality of gods, hence why the OT sometimes uses god in the plural and singular. Also plurality of gods creates chaos. You must have a pyramid hierarchy to create order, thus having one god only.
Even in polytheistic societies, the gods had a hierarchy, which shows the natural tendency towards order
tree of life, and tree of knowledge of good and evil - these are the 2 trees planted in Heaven by God in Genesis
These trees bear not food, but information
Gnostics believed the old God to be something else
Things require a name to be real. Hence why God told Adam to name all things
When your in a relationship and there is a problem, many people say as long as we don’t name it, it’s not really there
Verse about husband and wife become 1 flesh. This means your parents have to come secondary. Those who do not do this, their marriages typically fail
the fact that most men stay committed in long-term marriages/relationships is the object of mystery, NOT the fact that some men leave, as this latter one makes more rational sense (in the animal kingdom, you impregnant and run)
When Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, they realized they were naked and covered themselves (Genesis)
What does this mean? What does it mean to be naked? It means they realized they were vulnerable
Evolution wise, snakes were a big enemy to us, and they caused us to have better sight and bigger brains. This explains the snake being present in all old traditions and religions in a negative sense
When God asks Adam and Eve if they ate from the tree, Adam immediately blames Eve and blames God that you gave me Eve.
Similar to some of the modern incel men who bash women and blame them for everything
What were their punishments for eating from the tree?
Eve: child-bearing
Adam: work, which is sacrificing the present for the future. Why do you work? Cause your awake and you know your vulnerable. So it doesn’t matter how many problems you’ve solved, cause you will have more in the future, so all you’re gonna do from now on is be careful of the future, and that is the price for waking up, and the end of paradise
So to sum up, Adam and Eve eat from the tree, are punished, opened their eyes and realized they are vulnerable, heaven is no more, they now must give birth and work. But what about the knowledge of good and evil?
The Mesopotamians believed that humans were made from the evilest monster the god of chaos ever created, so there is something deeply demonically flawed about humans
So what does opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerable have to do with the knowledge of good and evil?
When your vulnerable, you know what hurts you. That also means you know what hurts others. Once you know this and can use it, you have the knowledge of good and evil
Once a human is self-conscious and aware of his own nakedness, then he has the capacity of evil
Once you get rid of the snakes, and the potential snakes (kill them while they’re young), you would think its over… but its not. Now you have human snakes (enemy tribes, etc). Once those are eliminated, snakes start to develop inside your tribe/kingdom. Why? Cause snakes aren’t just the snake in the garden, or the enemy snake, but the snake can also be your friend, because your friends can betray you. But it gets worse… YOU can also betray yourself, so even if you eliminated all the outside snakes, you have a snake inside you, and God only knows what it’s up to.
This is why the snake in the garden of Eden is associated with Satan (evil), cause it’s the enemy of mankind. But that is very basic. For us complex humans, there’s a step further: the snake lives within us, so therefore our own human propensity for evil is the greatest enemy of mankind.
So what’s the whole point of the tree and snake? It’s a question of, do you protect those you love, or do you try to make them stronger (through tests)?
Maybe it’s the perfection that lies as a potential in the future that has to be earned rather than given
Maybe the purpose of life is to distinguish between good and evil now that we have the capacity to actually apprehend them.
5 - Can and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
what did we learn over thousands of years? The successful among us delay gratification (i.e. make sacrifices)
Study: marshmallow test. Put kids in a room, tell them you can eat this marshmallow, or wait 10 mins to get 2 marshmallows. It’s a test to see if the kids understand the concept of delay gratification
results: the kids who delayed gratification ended up being more successful later on (SAT scores, BMI, educational attainment)
Gods of many traditions require sacrifice. But sometimes God goes over and requires a sacrifice of what is loved best (like Abraham and his son)
Why? Sometimes, things do not go well. That’s self-evident. But here’s the rub: Sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s precisely that which is most valued that is the cause
In JPs clinical practice, sometimes he gets depressed patients, and they have a super close relationship with a family member, and it simply isn’t working. Why? this family member is usually making the patients life miserable
What’s the sacrifice? Distancing yourself from that person… the ultimate sacrifice
If you stop taking responsibility, and instead place responsibility on God or society, etc, then things only get much worse
You shouldn’t let the ‘deadwood’ accumulate in a forest cause if one lightening strike hits, the whole forest will burn. Similarly, don’t let the chaos within you accumulate without addressing it. Cause one small thing may happen and it will cause you to drown so deep. Why is this?
Firstly, cause when you address it, you’re doing it on your own terms, thus have control over the situation
Secondly, its easier to deal with issues in small doses
If you have extra suffering (more than usual), many times it’s cause you are doing something wrong
If your life isn’t where it should be, you have a primary responsibility to do something about it, and the place to start looking is to your own errors and fix them
Mary is the archetypal mom who says ‘yes’ to bringing kids to this world and putting them out there despite knowing fully well the dangers. This is good. Kids need to be put in the line of danger to learn and grow
JP left home at 17 and his mom approved of it. Cause ya, there is suffering in the world, but you need to face it. His mom said ‘you are a lot tougher than you think’
The supreme sacrifice is when the parents and the child are all making a sacrifice
the opposite of this is bad. If the mom or dad won’t make the sacrifice of letting their child go out into the world to be broken, betrayed, and all of those things, then the child won’t ever grow up, and if the child isn’t willing to do that (cause he isn’t grown up), then who is going to shoulder the responsibility?
There’s 3 things you don’t know yet until you have a baby
You didn’t grow up yet. Because you can’t grow up until someone is more important than you
It’s a relief not to be the center of attention, cause now the baby is the center of attention. If you are a narcissist, you may hate this and not even allow it to happen
You learn things about other people, cause other people really like babies. JP was with his baby in Montreal and some thug looking people were walking and immediately came over and their faces lit up at the sight of a baby. If you don’t respond this way, there’s something wrong with you.
There’s a special relationship between parent and child. The baby has not been ruined yet, so you can have a perfect relationship with it. Also, babies are like pets, they are happy when you arrive home. How many people in your life are happy when you arrive home?
Some say the idea of sacrifice to God (like Cain and Abel sacrificing wheat and sheep to God) is a primitive idea. This is false. Its rather very sophisticated. If we don’t have sacrifice, what’s the alternative? Murder and theft. Civilization is built on sacrifice. Cause remember, sacrifice is what you need to do to build the future.
And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering’ Genesis 4.
God liked Abel’s sacrifice? Why? It doesn’t specify. Most will say cause Abel’s sacrifice was of a higher quality, but maybe it was simply cause God liked Abel more for no reason. As we know, these things and life in general can be very arbitrary
Cain was angry about getting his sacrifice refused. This is very normal and common. JP gets clients whose life isn’t going their way for no apparent reason, and they are in despair, and they are angry
A good question to ask yourself every morning: What should I sacrifice to make things better?
In Genesis 7, God asks Cain, “if you do well, shall you not be accepted?“. This is the key. Clearly Cain is not doing well, whatever that means
Basically God is telling Cain, this is your own fault. This only makes him more angry
Regardless of Cain’s circumstances, he still went down the path of malice and resentment. He was in control of himself, and he chose to do that.
The first 2 true humans: Cain and Abel. “The resentful bitter failure, taking an axe to the admiral success”
To sum up, there was the fall from heaven, then the discovery of sacrifice as a medication for the fall, and then the counter-position of the emergence of malevolence as the enemy of proper sacrifice
The trolley cart problem (would you flip a switch to kill 1 person if you are saving 6?) in philosophy is a stupid question for 2 reasons:
You cannot reduce ethics/morality into such a simple problem
You cannot prove that the way you answer the problem is the way you will act
6 - The Psychology of the Flood
What is chaos? the underlying complexity that can manifest itself at anytime. It is as if you are standing on thin ice, and when something bad happens, that ice breaks and you are thrown into the world of chaos
Ex: you wake up one day with slight pain in your body. Go to hospital and they tell you have cancer and have 6 months to live
When you ignore things, they do not go away
When the tax collector calls, ignoring it won’t make it go away. Instead, ignoring it will make it worse
What’s the way to prevent chaos? Attend to the issue, do not simply ignore it
It is better to confront issues as soon as possible (i.e. on your own terms), rather than waiting for it to come to you, cause it might come to you at a horrible time, i.e. a time when you can’t deal with the issue (maybe cause of having a lot on your plate already, or poor mental health, etc)
This can be hard especially if the issue is a tough one. If there is a 90% chance of failure when confronting the issue, you still need to confront it, cause if the issue confronts you first, the chance of failing is much higher
You need structure and predictability to keep sane
But this isn’t the whole story. To be truly sane, people around you must be able to bear your presence for long periods of time. If they can’t, there’s something wrong with you
‘The purpose of being a parent for very young children is to make your children exceptionally socially desirable by the age of four, b/c if you can do that, they’re set, cause everyone wants them around and want to play with them and cooperate with them. So the door is open. And they stay sane because they’ve got all sorts of people who actually like them that are helping them out.’
This doesn’t mean to make them obedient without spirit. This is what tyrants do. They say “never do anything wrong”. This is only half true. You must also teach your kids to do right things.
All social structures have inherent tyranny. They simply are not perfect. But at least the social structures we have in the west (like the patriarchy) is better than a place where they have a pure-tyrannical social structure (ex China, NK, etc)
How to keep chaos under control? Cooperation.
Example. You can only become an expert in a few things during your life. But there are hundreds of things that run our societies. Sure you can be an expert mathematician, but what if your bathtub is leaking? You need to call a plumber
One of the problems is that people (mostly uni students) don’t have any idea, or a vague idea, of where they wanna be in the near future.
Some people are hesitant to make a plan for themselves. Cause when they don’t follow it or fall short, they know they have failed, and no one likes to fail. Those who don’t make a plan, when they fail, they won’t know they have failed so they feel good about themselves. But this is just willful blindness
To make a plan, you must know:
where you are
where you’re going (where you want to grow)
how to get there
The plan is very similar to a GPS
You don’t get happiness from achieving goals, cause at that point your mind starts to think, what’s the new goal? Rather happiness comes from encountering things on the way of achieving your goals that move you along your way.
Your goal gives relevance to your world/reality.
The higher your aim/goal, the more positive emotion you get. So you may say why should I bother trying to do something lofty and difficult? It’s cause its worth it. What’s the alternative? You suffer. Cause suffering is the default. If you just lay there, not doing with your life, you are suffering.
When planning, only plan 3 to 5 years in the future
Many ancient civilizations had flood myths
Everyone will experience a personal flood. And you can be sure they are coming. Some questions to consider:
Are you prepared? (i.e. will they be catastrophes for you?)
Do you have your act together well enough to see them coming?
Everyone will go through bad times. The only thing we can do is prepare ourselves so that bad time has the least effect on us
When the flood comes, you want to be the person who built the ark (i.e. prepared in times of tragedy)
An main theme of every religion is that end-times are near and you will be judged. And that is true. YOUR world is coming to an end (through tragedy and tough times), and when it does, you will be judged on how you handle it cause you’ll be pushed to your limits and shown where your weaknesses lie
7 - Walking with God: Noah and the Flood
We always inherit a broken/corrupt world/system
So young people are justified in being upset with current affairs
In the above image, you can see how our current world has a broken wall. How do we fix it? Keep reading this note!
Your role should be to make things better wherever you are
It’s better to be on an uphill trajectory rather than being at a good place already, b/c one of the things that gives life meaning is the realization that you are heading somewhere better than where you are now
The more you confront the unknown/chaos, the more ‘you’ you become, i.e. the more there is to you, like building character. This is because you are learning new things when you do that
One of the reasons people don’t aspire to the highest good is that they are ashamed of themselves and their insufficiencies
This is tied to the Adam and Eve story. When Adam eats from the tree and awakens, he hides from God when God asks him to talk with Him because he is naked and ashamed. Walking with God is the ‘highest good’
Don’t be scared to confront the chaos/unknown because you are fragile. Guess what, that’s the point! We are all fragile. If we weren’t, there’d be nothing heroic about confronting chaos and the unknown. Therefore, fragility is NOT a valid reason for avoiding confronting with the unknown, in fact, fragility is even more of a reason to confront the unknown
When we do this (confront the unknown), we are rebuilding the broken wall! But that isn’t the end goal, instead we want to transform ourselves to become the person who can continuously repair the broken wall.
We live in a corrupt world, and unfortunately we are aiming down, not up. The flood story is a warning that if we continue this trajectory, and enough of us do it, then everything will degenerate into chaos
When Cain killed Abel, and got punished, Cain complained to God that my punishment is too much. And this makes perfect sense, cause Cain destroyed his ideal (Abel), and once you destroy your ideal, what is left? There’s no more going up, you are only going down from then on
In places where catastrophe happened like Mao’s China, Soviet union, etc, the root cause was the degeneration of individuals in those societies, who turned a blind eye to the catastrophes and participated in the lies, then they went downwards from there
The conditions exists where if men have it, God will withhold his grace. This means that under these conditions, the divine impulse towards good will abandon you because of things you have done
If you aim to do the highest possible thing, your day-to-day life will work out better than if you were to aim to anything else
Doing something meaningful daily is what will keep you afloat when the chaos/flood come
The reason many people fail is they don’t define the parameters for success
The only way to improve society is for individuals to fix themselves, become more honest, etc
Walking with God, aiming high, can not only save and help you, but also help and save your family and even society (Noah’s ark saved not only him, but also his family, and even the animals)
7.5 - Background to Lecture 8: Abrahamic Stories
no notes
8 - The Phenomenology of the Divine
Have respect for your culture. Criticism is fine, but don’t burn it to the ground. The purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff, not to completely destroy
The rational mind that produces an idea and worships it as if its absolute, immediately occupies hell.
Basically the case with communism
When systems/things get so big, they have to fail. This is why in Capitalist societies, the 1% is always changing. People get really big/rich, then they fail.
Human made systems/organizations that become too large/unwieldy/deceitful are bound to collapse
Set yourself straight first, then your family, before you try setting the world straight
Fixing the world is a lot harder than fixing yourself/family
to induce transformation of consciousness:
fasting
dancing
isolation
many peoples problems are associated with their inability to break free from their family. They are consumed by the family drama. They’re stuck in the past
the negative aspect of the feminine can trap a man, but the positive aspect of the feminine can free him
In the OT, the presence of God decreases as the book progresses, and the presence of individual personality and responsibility increases as the book progresses
9 - The Call to Abraham
Abraham marks the beginning of the ‘historical’ stories
Genesis can be separated to 2 chunks: ‘early’ and ‘historical’
Abraham is a man; unlike the previous prophets who were almost like divine figures
clean your room!
this means to start with yourself; fix your life, fix your problems.
The secret to a meaningful life: truth and responsibility
today, we are fed rights and freedoms, and this is so wrong.
Abraham is a person, in the real sense. I.e. he makes mistakes. Yet he does completely fine, and so do his descendants. This gives us good news. It reassures us that we can try our best and even if we make mistakes, its ok, because the good we do overwhelms the mistakes
Sarah (Abraham’s wife) is introduced as barren early on. This teaches us that even if things are not going ok, they can still end up ok if you put your mind to it. The human potential is virtually limitless. We can accomplish great things if we truly try. There is no need for nihilism.
You must grow up. That means getting away from your family enough in order to establish your independence
you must get away from dependency in order to learn
There is something in you that pushes you forward (do you really pick your own interests?). LISTEN to this inside mechanism
When you start with little, you have more room of possibility. So in a sense, having little means is better than having a lot
Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing; you are not truly committed to something until you make sacrifices
How you orient your nature inside of you can affect how nature outside treats you
i.e. if you strive to be a good person, nature will be good to you
The universe works through us, not for us
When you are writing an essay, its ok to write a bad first draft. The point is you will fix it in following iterations. Similarly, make your life like this. Its ok if you make mistakes, just DO IT. Then as you go things will become clear
You aim for the star, and on the journey you may come across blackholes. Get past those obstacles, then look for the star again (it most likely moved) and aim for it once again. This star guides you forward
When on your journey to the star, you CANNOT stand still. Cause the world moves away from you when you stand still. So if your not moving forward, you’re moving backwards
Abraham took Lot (his nephew) as his own son (Lot’s dad died), as Abraham at this point had no children. This is the way we should be. Some people would refuse to take Lot as they are bitter that they don’t have their own children. Bitterness will lead you to hell/chaos
The state became corrupted because each individual allowed themselves be corrupted
This is what Frankl, Solzernitsyn, and all the others who survived the holocaust and gulags said
This means that even our own individual actions can have great consequences
Greek word for sin is derived from ‘missing a bulls eye’. So you can interpret sin as veering off from your aim (purposefully), or doing something wrong when you know its wrong.
too much order can drive you insane
‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ - NT
commonly explained that if your so meek that you’re harmless, things will go well for you. This is completely wrong
it should be: ”Those who have weapons and know how to use them but still keep them sheathed will inherit the Earth”
Jesus says “for those who were neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth”. This is a negative thing
Wht does it mean? The worst punishment is for those who sat on the fence. I.e. those who know good and evil but did nothing. In otherwords, did not commit, and did not make any sacrifices
There are certain truths you can only know through experience, not by simply reading about it or learning it through a teacher, etc
This is why you must go out and find your own way through the world, cause you will learn by experience
Q&A:
If your dad is yelling at you, shut up and listen. Even if 90% of it is false accusations, 10% are true. Therefore he is telling you partly why you’re wrong. So listen. It is a great gift for someone to tell you why you’re wrong
Thinking only starts in your head. It thrives in freedom of speech, i.e. talking it through with smarter people.
10 - Abraham: Father of Nations
Its not easy to learn why you’re wrong, because a part of you must die
we are more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion
we are more motivated by the chance of a catastrophe befalling us rather than the chance of becoming successful
ex: If your eating a cheesecake everyday and want to stop, there are 2 motivators. One, you will physically look better (positive), two, you may get diabetes and get a stroke/heart attack (negative). The second is a stronger motivator
This is why you should try to put your fear behind you rather than in front if you so you can that fear to motivate you
Beauty is a path to God
even nihilistic people are obsessed with rock music
If you want to go up, you will experience a period of going down first.
in the path to enlightenment, you will experience the obstacles heavily at first, then you will proceed with going up
Carl Jung said one of the reasons why mankind let go of tyranny and slavery (obvi mainly cause of the industrial revolution - but other than that…) is that we made ourselves our own slaves… we go to work and exploit ourselves for our own survival instead of forcing someone else to do it
The more trust between citizens of a country is a cause of how wealthy that country is.
Japanese are very conscientious and truth worthy with each other, that’s why their country, a place of zero natural resources, is so wealthy. Meanwhile South America, having an abundance of resources (like Venezuela), is full of corruption and poverty
Trusting when your not naïve is an act of courage. This is good. But if your naïve, trusting people will bite you in the back
Life isn’t about happiness. Its about purpose
If you live life to be ‘happy’, you are completely done for if tragedy happens, like you get cancer or your loved one gets a disease
11 - Sodom and Gomorrah
Circumcision is a form of sacrifice
It’s necessary to make sacrifices to move ahead in life
i.e. give up something in the present, to get something in the future
When faced with an inescapable challenge, take it with grace. Accept it. Then you use the part of your brain associated with approach and challenge
If you cower away from it, it is still there, i.e. you can’t escape it, and you’ll just be using the part of your brain in charge of defensiveness and aggressiveness, and this is harder on your brain and body
If something is holding you back, no matter how dear it is to you, you got to let it go, cause there’s nothing more important than progressing forward
The more you put your house in order, the more the ‘impossible’ will happen (good things)
Forest fires are actually a good thing. Dead wood collects as time goes by, so if we rarely had forest fires, they’d be so much dead wood, then if we got a forest fire, the fire would be super huge and burn the entire forst cause there’s more flammable material
Analysis
My Notes
Humans are Made in the Image of God
The idea that all humans are made in the image of God is a crazy and magnificent idea
- This idea is at the cornerstone of our legal system; everyone is equal
- This is an opposition to the main belief of ancient pagans like Greeks, etc, who said they were essentially the ‘play-things’ of the gods
Christianity insists on the divinity of the body, not just the spirit
Underlying Sources
In an old Mesopotamian myth, it was the union of chaos and order that gave birth to everything
- This is the basis of genesis 1
Logos / Speech / Words
God the father is the God of tradition and structure, who uses the Son, who is an active force that is associated with speech, not thought
- Speech is different than thought; speech has a public element, people can criticize it
Things need names to ‘exist’ or be part of reality
- This ties into the importance of speech in the bible
- this is why Jesus is associated with speech, because he is a being that exists, just like God
Things require a name to be real. Hence why God told Adam to name all things
When your in a relationship and there is a problem, many people say as long as we don’t name it, it’s not really there
Order and Chaos
Trust enables order; if trust breaks, chaos comes through
Our brains have a right and left hemisphere. Luria (Russian neuropsychologist) said that one side is for order, the other for chaos. This is evidence our world is made of order and chaos like most religions allude to.
monotheism came from the idea of a plurality of gods, hence why the OT sometimes uses god in the plural and singular. Also plurality of gods creates chaos. You must have a pyramid hierarchy to create order, thus having one god only.
Even in polytheistic societies, the gods had a hierarchy, which shows the natural tendency towards order
What is chaos? the underlying complexity that can manifest itself at anytime. It is as if you are standing on thin ice, and when something bad happens, that ice breaks and you are thrown into the world of chaos
Ex: you wake up one day with slight pain in your body. Go to hospital and they tell you have cancer and have 6 months to live
What’s the way to prevent chaos? Attend to the issue, do not simply ignore it
When you ignore things, they do not go away
When the tax collector calls, ignoring it won’t make it go away. Instead, ignoring it will make it worse
The more you confront the unknown/chaos, the more ‘you’ you become, i.e. the more there is to you, like building character. This is because you are learning new things when you do that
Don’t be scared to confront the chaos/unknown because you are fragile. Guess what, that’s the point! We are all fragile. If we weren’t, there’d be nothing heroic about confronting chaos and the unknown. Therefore, fragility is NOT a valid reason for avoiding confronting with the unknown, in fact, fragility is even more of a reason to confront the unknown
When we do this (confront the unknown), we are rebuilding the broken wall! But that isn’t the end goal, instead we want to transform ourselves to become the person who can continously repair the broken wall.
God is an abstracted ideal, formulated in large part to dissociate the ideal from any particular ruler/man (back in the day, rulers would claim to be the ideal/god)
- When the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into the biblical Egypt (tyranny)
- You have to divorce the ideal from any particular power structure, but it is still a real thing that governs everyone’s behavior, including the ruler
When Cain killed Abel and got punished, Cain complained to God that my punishment is too much. And this makes perfect sense, cause Cain destroyed his ideal (Abel), and once you destroy your ideal, what is left? There’s no more going up, you are only going down from then on
Serpent
Evolution wise, snakes were a big enemy to us, and they caused us to have better sight and bigger brains. This explains the snake being present in all old traditions and religions in a negative sense
Once you get rid of the snakes, and the potential snakes (kill them while they’re young), you would think its over… but its not. Now you have human snakes (enemy tribes, etc). Once those are eliminated, snakes start to develop inside your tribe/kingdom. Why? Cause snakes aren’t just the snake in the garden, or the enemy snake, but the snake can also be your friend, because your friends can betray you. But it gets worse… YOU can also betray yourself, so even if you eliminated all the outside snakes, you have a snake inside you, and God only knows what it’s up to.
This is why the snake in the garden of Eden is associated with Satan (evil), cause it’s the enemy of mankind. But that is very basic. For us complex humans, there’s a step further: the snake lives within us, so therefore our own human propensity for evil is the greatest enemy of mankind.
Sacrifice
Some say the idea of sacrifice to God (like Cain and Abel sacrificing wheat and sheep to God) is a primitive idea. This is false. Its rather very sophisticated. If we don’t have sacrifice, what’s the alternative? Murder and theft. Civilization is built on sacrifice. Cause remember, sacrifice is what you need to do to build the future.
A good question to ask yourself every morning: What should I sacrifice to make things better?
In Genesis 7, God asks Cain, “if you do well, shall you not be accepted?“. This is the key. Clearly Cain is not doing well, whatever that means. His sacrifice was not sufficient.
Basically God is telling Cain, this is your own fault. This only makes him more angry
To sum up, there was the fall from heaven, then the discovery of sacrifice as a medication for the fall, and then the counter-position of the emergence of malevolence as the enemy of proper sacrifice
Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing; you are not truly committed to something until you make sacrifices
It’s necessary to make sacrifices to move ahead in life
i.e. give up something in the present, to get something in the future
Suffering
If you have extra suffering (more than usual), many times it’s cause you are doing something wrong
If your life isn’t where it should be, you have a primary responsibility to do something about it, and the place to start looking is to your own errors and fix them
The higher your aim/goal, the more positive emotion you get. So you may say why should I bother trying to do something lofty and difficult? It’s cause its worth it. What’s the alternative? You suffer. Cause suffering is the default. If you just lay there, not doing with your life, you are suffering.
suffering is basically the symptom of doing nothing
Evil
The conditions exists where if men have it, God will withhold his grace. This means that under these conditions, the divine impulse towards good will abandon you because of things you have done
This means that essentially when people are so evil, they usually brought that onto themselves cause of what they’ve done. Lets say they’ve done so many bad things, and eventually that impulse towards good abandons them and they become evil.
My Thoughts
Jesus is associated with speech, thus it makes him exist or be part of reality (as mentioned by JP above - speech = existence)
according to Wahdatul-Wujud, nothing exists but God. The point is to eventually become one with God therefore having some sort of existence. The Bible tells us that Jesus already has existence (he’s the logos afterall) therefore is “one with God” already. This is why it makes sense that Jesus is God.
if monotheism is rooted in the desire to have order and get rid of chaos, why were humans okay with the chaos of their world? I guess as JP said they still had a hierarchy, maybe they were okay with that? But allowing polytheism allowed them to remain in touch with the chaotic side which is necessary sometimes
The snake tempted Eve, not Adam, then Eve tempted Adam.
Maybe the snake couldn’t tempt Adam? Maybe men are more stronger against evil such as snakes/satan, and are weaker against women (easily tempted by them). On the other hand, women are not so easily tempted by men, and more curious/intuitive, which is why Eve was the one to be tempted by the snake and not tempted by Adam
