Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Love, Loss and the Uncoupling of Our World

 


by Peter Rollins
September 2, 2012

I am currently reading Slavjo Zizek’s latest book Less Than Nothing. It is a profound and systematic work (though I must warn that if you don’t have a background in continental philosophy it is difficult). Anyway, the following reflections are directly inspired by his writing on Malebranche, Occasionalism and the Big Other found there.
 
Descartes famously theorised that the human being was made up of two different substances: a body and spirit/soul/mind. In order to understand how these interacted he postulated the existence of what he called the Pineal Gland. This was, for Descartes, the physical location where the two substances united.
 
The problem however was that these two substances were so different that the idea of a gland uniting the two made no sense. It simply acted as a type of black box solution. Somehow, something happened in the gland that meant our thoughts could impact our body and visa versa.
 
As a result of the problems raised by the idea of the Pineal Gland the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche argued that, for the mediation to occur between mind and body, a third (true) substance was required to intervene. For him this was God. The argument was that, at every moment, God was at work ensuring that whenever we went to pick up a glass, scratch our nose or smile the intention would correspond with the act. Without God intervening at every moment in this way our intentions would be revealed as ultimately impotent. Like experiencing anastasia awareness we would find ourselves locked inside an inert body, unable to do anything at all.
 
This philosophical idea was called “Occasionalism” and worked with the idea that what we take as immediate (the interaction between our intentions and acts) is really mediated by God, who listens tirelessly to what we want and manipulates our body seamlessly so that it would appear the two (intention and act) are one.
 
Bizarre and outdated as this philosophical idea might seem it can actually help us to make sense of a very human experience. Take the example of things that we might enjoy such as travelling, fine dinning, time with friends or certain sports. The enjoyment of these things is experienced as direct. Biting into a chocolate, for instance, and experiencing the pleasure of the taste is analogous to the connection we feel between intending toward a glass of water and the act of lifting it up. They are not felt to be two separate things, they are experienced as one.
 
However, if we lose the people we love, we discover the truth that the relationship between the act and its meaning were really coupled via a mediator: the presence of the beloved. Without them we experience a strange uncoupling of what previously seemed whole.
 
This can be a deeply traumatic event because of the way that we experience our hobbies as pleasurable in an immediate way. However, after the loss of someone who bestows our life with meaning things change. We might still go to a fine restaurant and eat some delicious food like before. But now the act is devoid of the seemingly innate pleasure it once possessed.
 
No matter how special the food, it has now been reduced to inert matter with no function other than a basic biological one. To experience the uncoupling of our acts from the seemingly implicit meaning they have is not unlike the experience of sleep paralysis, in which a person wakes up to find that their body no longer acts in conformity to their intentionality. The psychological impact of experiencing the uncoupling of such a whole is traumatic.
 
Is this not what we witness in films such as Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers? Here we are presented with Don Johnston (Bill Murray) a man who undergoes this radial uncoupling in his own life after his girlfriend ends their relationship unexpectedly.
 
It is for this reason that many end up in psychoanalysis. Not because of some desire to change, but because the individual no longer really desires anything at all. They have entered into a surreal, Daliesque world in which things have become disconnected from themselves. It is as if we have just discovered that we inhabit a virtual reality world that, all of a sudden, is indifferent to our movements.
 
In Broken Flowers Johnston’s neighbour embodies the role of the analyst by helping Johnston try to find meaning once again (through the attempt to track down a son who he never knew he had).
 
It is in the loss of our mediators that we learn that what is worse tha[n] losing something that we desire is losing those who enabled us to desire.