(January 16, 2019 at 10:10 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I figured I'd tell you, since you are one of the reasons I am motivated to make this reassessment.
Uh-oh! I never meant to be influential or anything...
Romans is hard. It makes sense to read it, since it has had such a huge role in the formation of Christianity. But since the debates among Christians have largely come about due to disagreements about Romans, and since many of those Christians were smarter than I am, I don't expect to reach any conclusions about it.
Quote:Any opinions on Romans 1:24-32? It's rather hard for me to find any value in it.
For us moderns, it reads like a condemnation of homosexuality. And of course I have no interest in doing that.
I guess there are two ways to go about it that rise above simple "gay is bad" thinking. The first is Platonic and the second is Aristotelian. I don't know how much the Greeks were in Paul's mind when he wrote the letter. It is aimed at a very specific audience: Jewish converts to early Christianity in the year 58 or so. Paul has his audience in mind, so he uses Jewish sources and phrasing. But as an educated Roman citizen in the Hellenic world, he would have at least some knowledge of basic Greek thought. So I don't think I'm completely anachronistic in reading through that lens. And as always, the importance of the book isn't just what he wrote; it's also all the interpretations that have been made since.
The Platonic reading will be familiar to you. God is the Good -- the form of the Good, which is impassible and eternal. It is the goal of all good people to aim constantly toward that Good and as much as possible approach it. So it isn't homosexuality which is the error here; it's giving in to drives that pull us away from the path to the Good. So phrases like "they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" mean that they swerved away from the Good and took lower goals. The "dishonorable passions" would be, for Plato, something like misdirected Eros -- aimed not at the Good but at short-term reward. You know this from the Symposium -- falling in love with a beautiful boy is fine for a beginner, but we are supposed to graduate to higher things. In this case the short-term poorly-chosen goals may involve homosexual genital contact, but that isn't what makes it bad. What makes it bad is that they're satisfied with Erotic goals that they should be going beyond. That whole list of bad stuff in verses 29-31 are just the stuff that people do when they ignorantly choose goals other than the Good.
The Aristotelian reading has to do with the fulfillment of potential based on the kind of animals we are. Modern intelligent people sometimes still use this to argue against homosexuality -- such arguments aren't simply limited to "God says it's bad." Again, I don't wish to make this judgment.
Here the idea is that when we are conceived we have a specific set of potentials, and our goal is to fulfill those as much as we can. A human's potentials are different from an elephant's, and if a human attempts to fulfill an elephant's potentials instead of a human's, he is being unnatural. The reasoning is that human potentials include child-bearing, and so it is natural and good (flourishing) to do that. So what Paul is condemning here is, again, not homosexual playing around per se. It is that people have turned away from the things that people are, by nature, set to do. As if an acorn refused to become an oak tree and instead set its mind on being a platypus.
Now, an inability or disinclination to fulfill one's potential isn't necessarily evil. Priests aren't supposed to have kids, after all. And if my health or my social situation works against children, that's not a crime. It's like an acorn which fell in a shady place, and grew into a short oak tree -- not 100% what it could have been if it were lucky. And since no human being can fulfill 100% of his or her potential, failing to do so isn't a cause for negative judgment. But still, purposefully aiming at things that humans don't have the potential for is a waste, and the bad stuff listed in 29-31 is intentional effort against the full flourishing of which we are capable.
So, as with so many things in the Bible, one can read it on different levels. How many levels Paul intended is a question of interest to historians, but to people who want to be good, the readings which are best, even if they come later, are best.
Quote:I did read some Blake, though. Again, because you mentioned him. "Auguries Of Innocence" and some others. Now that's good stuff.
Yeah, Blake can't be beat.
And he has two advantages which Paul doesn't have: 1) he is readable and charming, and 2) so much of what he says is beneath the surface, and so few people take the time to understand him deeply, that he remains popular with people who would hate him if they knew him better.
If you want to start following what he called "the Golden Thread" in his work, you could read German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme.
Quote:Jacob Boehme wrote that “When I take up a stone or clod of earth and look
upon it, I see that which is above and that which is below, indeed [I see] the whole
world therein.”98 Blake wrote of the ability “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And
a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in
an hour.” [E 490]
Boehme said “if … thy Eyes were opened, then in that very Place where
thou standest, sittest or liest, thou shouldst see the glorious Countenance or Face of
God, and the whole heavenly Gate.”99 And Blake insisted that “If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would / appear to man as it is: infinite.” [E 39]
And since Hegel said that the modern world begins with Boehme and with Francis Bacon, Blake's thought begins to seem more important in the grand scheme of things.
