Posted by araucaria
(here)
I don’t think the hatred that some entities show towards us and John Lash’s hatred towards them can be equated. He is not coming from a place of fear. He states fairly clearly that it is love of life that leads to hate of non-life or anti-life: hence he can hate the one without thereby succumbing to (fear-based) hatred. The trouble is, I’m not at all sure how he intends to do this.
In
Not in His Image Lash spends a lot of time ‘badmouthing Jesus’, whom he sees as a proponent of ‘redeemer ethics’. This is not necessarily true, although he can be and has been made to look that way, and Lash has bought into that view. Here is a relevant paragraph, from page 256:
Jesus was wrong on a lot of counts but perhaps supremely so on on one issue. Of all the dubious advice pronounced in the New Testament, one commandment is particularly harmful: the famous injunction to ‘resist not evil’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. If everyone did this what kind of society would result? If everyone turned the other cheek, who would be striking the blows? Well, obviously, no one. If everyone in the world followed the command, ‘turn the other cheek,’ there would be no need to turn the other cheek, because no one would be acting harmfully toward anyone else. The principle is patently absurd and cancels itself out, but taken on faith it serves an unmistakable purpose: to give total liberty to the perpetrators.
The argument is fine, only the conclusion is erroneous. The principle is not patently absurd at all, and does not cancel itself out. It merely traces a path towards a goal, and when that goal is reached, people will be turning the other cheek only to receive another kiss. So the principle is fine as well, or very nearly. Lash’s quibble is with ‘everyone’, which for him is unachievable. He goes on, ‘To propose a code of morality that relies on the good will of perpetrators to desist from their ways is a real stroke of schizoid genius. One may begin to wonder if such a code does not originate with the perpetrators in the first place.’
‘Resist not evil’ comes from the King James Bible. It is well known that this, even supposing the original gospels to be authentic, this political version certainly is not: it is the work of the above-mentioned ‘perpetrators’ (who sound like traitors in perpetuity). And here is evidence of their handiwork: every other translation says, not ‘evil’, but ‘evil person’ or words to that effect, which changes everything.
http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-39.htm
Of course we have to resist evil; simply, we don’t resist the person. How do we combine these seeming contraries? By, counterintuitively, turning the other cheek. What is the alternative? Retaliating? Punishing? Eliminating people? We know enough about death to understand that capital punishment never solved a problem.
What is the problem with everyone (I’d prefer to say ‘enough people’) turning the other cheek is that it has hardly ever been tried. But on a smaller scale, Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa shows that it ought to work.
This issue has already been discussed on the forum, notably in terms of the rabid dog. How do you remove the rabies without killing the dog? The dilemma is predicated on the incurability of rabies for presentday materialist medicine – and the analogy works when transposed to psychopathy, which is also currently incurable. The long-term answer, therefore, is not to kill the dog but to find a cure. The cure to be found will be through enlightened spiritual healing processes, which of course rules out violence of any kind, violence being in any case a major symptom of the very condition requiring treatment.
Re: Here and Now...What's Happening?
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks