newtype_alpha

I think the paradox is best illustrated in the article here:
Basically, the paradox is the result of something I have pretty much always known about Christianity: it is not a religion designed for mass consumption, and it is certainly not a message that can be preached or embraced by everyone (and Christian preachers who expect everyone would or should accept it are deluding themselves).

Or, think of the world's fastest, most powerful, most over-engineered car--call it the '07 Christos. It has Onstar, a GPS system, an AI-controlled auto-drive, four-wheel steering, road-mapping radar, a fuel-cell engine, can accelerate from zero to sixty in two seconds, is bulletproof, fireproof, and amphibious, and has any other feature anyone could possibly want. The 07' Christos is, hands down, the greatest car that has ever been made anywhere, so of course everyone wants one. The paradox is that the only way for everyone in the country to have an '07 Christos is to start stripping down some of its features to make it easier to buy, since--fully loaded--the car is so expensive and so difficult to drive that you'd have to be a millionaire NASCAR driver just to be in the same room with it. So remove the fuel cell engine, the speed, the power, the radar, the four-wheel steering, and all the other little gadgets, and finally you end up with a version of the 07 Christos that everyone can afford -- except that now that you're removed all the other special features, the Christos is basically a stripped-down Buick, and all the things that made it such a great car in the first place aren't even included anymore.

Same deal with Christianity. The message of Christ was a message best suited for the hardcore, ultra-spiritual whirling-dervish types, and is not at all suited for mass production. The only way to get the majority of the people in a nation to accept Christianity is to dilute the gospel into a pre-packaged "McJesus", devoid of all the features that set it appart in the first place. The best examples of Christianity--the kind Jesus preached--can be found in secluded monestaries and convents that most people have never heard of and most middle-class evangelicals would scarcely bother to visit more than once a year.

That's the paradox, actually. You have Christianity--which has become an institutionalized power structure--preaching the message of a man who had nothing but disdain for institutionalized power structures. That's a little like a white supremacist invoking Martin Luther King Jr. in a pro-segregation ralley. Paradox might not be the word for it.... irony, perhaps?

In any case, I think all this might tell you something about Jesus/the Gospels as well. Christians like to propagandize that most all non-Christians go to hell, which is why it is imperative to convert everyone to Christianity so NO ONE will go to hell. This, too, is contradictory to the gospel message since Jesus came only for "the lost sheep of Israel." It seems to me that the Gospel message was originally meant to be strictly a radical reform to Judaism, meant entirely for Jews, for some purpose in Jewish society and heritage not unlike the Essene movement of the same period. In that sense, it can be said of Christian prophecy (assuming it is true) that the worst we can expect from Jesus when he returns is banning all non-Jews from living in Israel after God sets up his kingdom there.
Once again, that's hardly the kind of message that wins alot of converts, now is it?

Yahzi

Sounds like bad engineering... one could even go so far as to say "unintelligent design."

Seriously, of what value to society is a religion for whirling dervishes? Perhaps it keeps the dervishes occupied and out of our hair, but so does lithium. And frankly, the religion isn't doing so well at keeping them out of our hair.

newtype_alpha

Oh, the design is very intelligent. It's just not very economical. There's this unwritten rule in engineering that if you only have to do it once, you can make it as fancy as and over-amped as you like. The more times you have to do it, the simpler it has to be.

Approximately similar to a religion for poets, actors and musicians. Assuming the dedicated mystics contribute something to their society (ideally, represent a respected moral conscience of that society) then not everyone needs to be a Christian, they just need to at least pay attention to the moral judgements of Christianity. As it stands, Christianity is no longer in a position to act as the moral compass for any society, because the moral and philosophical hallmarks that made it so powerful have been irrevocably diluted for mass consumption.

Or, to use another engineering metaphor, it's similar to what happens when software engineers modify a UNIX-like operating system to be more user friendly. UNIX is an amazingly powerful operating system, but if you want to make it easier to use by the common man, you inevitably have to sacrifice some functionality. And the easier it is to use, the less useful it becomes.

Actually, the nice thing about dervishes is that they keep themselves out of your hair, and only pop up from time to time when they have something important to say. Christianity went the other way and became a religion of fast-talking blowhards who feel obligated and privelaged to have an opinion on just about everything--as such, it is the perfect religion for the American public.

Steven Carr

But I thought Christians were guided by the Holy Spirit , and by a God who wanted to lead them to truth.

How can God allow believers to believe falsehoods?

newtype_alpha

Probably the same reason the board of education from your high school allowed a signifigant number of your class to graduate with the "knowledge" that Christopher Colombus knew the world was round at a time when most people thought the world was flat...

Yahzi

But entertainers a) modify their entertainment to please their audience, and b) don't use suicide bombs against audiences that don't appreciate their work. This makes them radically different than mystics.

More to the point: entertainers are immersed in our culture, and hence their comments are relevant. Dervishes are, by design, as far from culture as they can get, and one has ask how their pronouncements can be distinguished from random brain firings. Nobody would remove a thermometer from the desert to the mountains, and then ask what the temperature in the desert is. The idea of removing a person from culture so that you can get a more "pure" viewpoint is the old fantasy of the "noble savage."

Only by accident. There is nothing inherent in the dervish that keeps them from bombing society; there is only the accident that most dervishes never concieve of such an act.

The problem with religion is not so much that it is innately evil, as that it has no method whatsoever for avoiding evil (having explicitly rejected the one method - empricism - that the rest of us trust for every other arena).

newtype_alpha

I've never heard of a mystic using a suicide bombs against his critics. This might just be a case of loose semantics, since "mystics" and "theists" are not the same things. Secondly, alot of the more well known mystical religious schools--notably Sufism and some of the the more colorful Rastafarians--are actually well known for changing their beliefs to suit the times they live in, and have been credited with alot of rich and vibrant poetry and music. But as I said, Sufism in principal is not a religion that can be addapted for a particularly large society, neither are the Rastafarian mystics, for exactly the same reasons that not everyone in a society can be an entertainer.

Partly true. Dervishes are detached from society, not removed from it. In the Ottoman period they were practically ubiquitous, and filled their own niche in Islamic society that was as often misunderstood as it was romanticized. They frequently ran afowl of the jurists and authorities, primarily because of a chronic inability to keep quiet when they had an issue that they wished to address. The same role in secular society is generally filled by more secular occupations--actors, authors, poets, directors, painters, etc. In a culture where religion is little more than a component of society itself, this same niche is filled by a more mystical (and sometimes not-so-mystical, in the case of Lao Tzu) sub culture.

Not quite. To be sure, honest self evaluation is a very difficult thing for people who are extremely proud of themselves. The role in society commonly filled by mystics is reserved for people with nothing but disdain for pride, glory, convention, and just about anything society considers "normal." From that vantage point they are able to see all the flaws or otherwise bizzare aspects of their society that other, more comfortable members of that same society would be unable or unwilling to confront on their own.

How about a secular example: often times in the midst of some heated political controversy, many Americans have been finding (and this is nothing new) that some of the most poignant appraisals of the situation has come in the form of satire, usually presented by people with no political or social expertise of any kind. Or, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, "You can't see it because you're too close."

I suppose I should consider it an accident that most atheists never never concieve of the same.:huh:

I'm sure by "the rest of us" you mean "atheists," but that's water under the bridge for the moment.
There is nothing in empiricism that has a built-in method for avoiding evil either, since an empiricist who happens to be a sadistic asshole is still a sadistic asshole even if he examines his sadism empirically.

In any case, for the sake of drifting back to the OP: Christianity was, originaly, not well suited for mass consumption. With Jesus' message fully intact it would have functioned perfectly as a smaller religion, concentrating its doctrines on an elite band of adherents who gravitate to the faith by their very nature. Properly expressed, such a religion would have acted (or sought to act) as an ever-present and highly competant new sect of Jewish society, serving a purpose paralell to the pharisees and sauducees, rather like a small but highly influential political party. The transition into a more secular society would be alot more difficult for a group like that since that position is already filled here, which I find rather ironic; Jesus came only for "the lost sheep of Israel" after all, but somehow ended up getting dragged into all kinds of nations and cultures whose customs and histories were so alien to Judaism that much of the flavor of his original message may actually have been lost forever.