Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 1:40 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:58 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 4:15 pm
Ashvin,
Your response here from last month does not sit well with me. Why are you giving
all the biblical writings a free pass and granting them the status of coming from "inspired writers"? Sure they were written at a different time and we have to work hard to grasp the layers of meaning, but passages like the Numbers 31 are abominable by any ethical standard worthy of consideration. We don't need any higher cognition to make this judgement. We know that many societies of old held women to be lesser, properties of men. A blanket acceptance of all scripture as inspired is the stuff of the fundamentalists. Are not some of the influences upon the biblical writers (and all of us for that matter) aligned more with what we might consider diabolical?
Anthony,
The issue is more like this -
why does Numbers 31 matter?, as an isolated passage? It actually doesn't mean anything. Certainly not anything which sheds light on ancient spiritual consciousness and evolution. Just like isolated sense experiences, isolated concepts can be used to justify whatever forgone conclusion we started out with. You are openly starting out with your various anti-Christian evangelical conclusions, which are also wrapped up in your understanding of the Old Testament.
I'm not giving anyone a free pass, but simply asking you to keep an open mind, free from intellectual prejudments, when approaching the deepest depths of human existence. When you take the prejudicial approach, you are only using it to erect barriers to your own higher thinking development and/or derive premature conclusions, like that passages which don't sit well with your current ethical perspective must have been inspried by demons. Even if that's true, what possible value do you gain from that little factoid? It leads you no closer to a holistic understanding of the actual spiritual forces which are still working in your consciousness today. That is the aim here, and studying scripture, or any other ancient texts and traditions, should only be a tool towards that aim.
Coming back to this after yet again being confronted by the dark side of the OT/NT, it matters because passages like Numbers 31 are in no sense isolated. The bible portrays deity in a light that is in considerable tension with one's deepest moral intuitions with the condoning of genocide, slavery, child sacrifice, misogyny and disproportionate justice. I would suggest the pervasiveness of such things sheds considerable light on the ancient spiritual consciousness. And it's not all pretty.
I recognize those same dark forces acting in my consciousness and they must be transformed. The study of scripture surely can't entertain all that is depicted as deity as something to aspire to. One can understand Marcion's dualistic project to identify the good God of the NT and the evil God of the OT although Revelation has some horrific stuff as well.
Anthony,
I actually wrote a few paragraphs as an intro to the following quote, but forgot to copy it and then lost the post because I wasn't signed in. Here are the bullet points:
- The OT passages are not isolated, but our modern concepts of what they mean.
- We need to view the OT, NT, and Apocalypse as an
evolving spiritual organism.
- There are ways in which a one-sided OT 'group-soul' consciousness (or, likewise, an ancient Indian, Persian, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman consciousness) can manifest as evil in modern times, particularly in the context of race relations, tribalism, nationalism, etc.
- The remedy to this one-sided tendency is not to further
exacerbate the division of OT and NT, good and evil, or any other polar relation, but to discern how they are at work within a unified organism and how, through their harmonious
balance, our individual and collective streams of becoming advance towards Divine ideals.
- This requires a delve into the living details of our soul-spiritual history without passion or prejudice. We have to at least put on "pause" our intellectual habit of projecting modern prejudices (prejudgments) onto the objects of inquiry. We can say, "I am going to forget everything that I thought I knew about this topic and approach it with fresh eyes and pure logical thinking." This may take us in all sorts of unsuspected directions that we normally consider "tangents", so we need to remain patient and open throughout the whole process.
- It is not about grasping all the details, but the overarching ideal context in which the details appear and through which they flow.
- We shouldn't expect to understand this context immediately, but can hold it fluidly in our consciousness, soaking it in.
-The below will be hard to follow at first, but we can simply try to perceive the overall ideal context and then gain a more precise resolution over time.
Because of the “fall of the angels” (the process through which luciferic angels became luciferic doubles), the human astral body became, as we have said, detached from guidance of the gods. This was manifested as egoism, a quality that, toward the end of the Lemurian epoch, mastered the human individual with the intensity of a natural force. Humankind would have succumbed entirely to this egoism if the hierarchies of good had not struck back. This involved the creation—from below, out of the human etheric and physical nature—of a countercurrent that opposed the egoism flowing down from the human astral nature and “I” being. In the depths of the human subconscious, a force was planted that restored the balance needed for the evolution of a free I-being. If the elemental force of love had not been planted in human beings, we would have completely succumbed to the elemental force of egoism. Through the luciferic impulse, humankind receives a strong tendency toward self-esteem; through the Yahweh impulse, we receive an equally strong tendency to esteem others. For it was Yahweh Elohim who planted the capacity for love in earthly human nature, whereby we are able to focus not only on ourselves, but also on others. To counterbalance the luciferic tendency toward self, the “Thou” tendency sprang up in humankind, receiving its impetus from Yahweh Elohim.
We may consider how crudely egoistic human beings would have become if husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters and relatives had not been able to love one another—in short, if individuals, surrounded by an abstract “humanity,” had only a living self-interest. Owing to the earthly activity of Yahweh Elohim in the earliest days, long before the Christ event, humankind became capable of sacrifice; it was Yahweh Elohim who infused the faculty of love into the human bloodstream... We can never understand the spirit of the Old Testament if we misrepresent the historical significance of Yahweh as the opponent of Lucifer on Earth. This is exactly what distinguishes the Bible from the sacred writings of other civilizations (for instance, the sacred writings of India); in style, form, and content, it is free of luciferic influence...
The Bible, however, is also distinguished from Eastern scriptures by its content. The ascetic, world-renouncing character, which is a feature of both Eastern and Early Christian ecclesiastical literature, is entirely absent in the Bible. No prophet or Old Testament hero is an ascetic in the Eastern or Christian ecclesiastical sense. The mortification of desires is not regarded as having the slightest value in the Bible; rather, it esteems the subordination of desire to high and distant ideals. There is, indeed, in the Bible a kind of asceticism, but it is an asceticism of the soul, a purely moral kind. It involves subordinating one’s personal inclinations to the call of duty. Fear, anger, and self-indulgence must be overcome in order to accomplish acts that will hasten the fulfillment of Israel’s mission. This is why the Israelites were a peaceful race. They hated war and had a horror of bloodshed. And yet this race waged wars of annihilation against those who followed corrupt cults. This—overcoming of one’s own interests for the sake of objective requirements—is asceticism in the biblical sense. Only this kind of asceticism is free of the luciferic impulse, from which asceticism in the usual sense is never free.
...
True Christian asceticism, therefore, can be found only in the history of the Grail line, which began with Joseph of Arimathea and ended with Lohengrin, not in the cells of the monks and hermits of the Eastern and Western Catholic churches. Similarly, the asceticism of the Bible is higher than what is contemplated in the Upanishads and Puranas. The asceticism of the Bible reveals the spirit of the cosmic cross bearer, Yahweh Elohim; and it is therefore, at heart, nothing less than a cross bearing in life. Cross bearing is the subordination of personality to the karmic decree to spiritual duty, and this indeed can be done with joy; it is the basic moral impulse of the Old Testament. Unless we understand this basic moral impulse of the Bible by realizing the cosmic and terrestrial mission of Yahweh, the Bible remains not only a mystery, but also a stumbling block for the modern human being, in whose subconscious mind still echoes the notions of the Catholic ecclesiastical worldview.
It may easily be argued that the age of the Old Testament is past; since the Mystery of Golgotha, humankind is freed from the ties of blood. The Yahweh impulse working in the blood has given place to the purely spiritual Christ impulse. Before raising this objection, however, we should consider that the Yahweh impulse does not oppose the Christ impulse, but represents a part of it. Just as white light can manifest the seven primary colors, likewise, the Christ impulse can be revealed in a sevenfold way through the seven elohim. The Yahweh impulse is simply one of the seven ways in which the Christ impulse reveals itself. And the process that was brought about by the advent on Earth of the “Fullness” (the six other ways of revelation) in Jesus Christ was that the six others were added to the Yahweh impulse. Freedom from blood ties does not mean that the blood loses its importance, but that it is now able to be not only the bearer of the Yahweh impulse, but also the bearer of the united entity of the seven elohim, the complete Christ impulse.
Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (pp. 21-22). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition.