yep cult of the self

Ad Hoc

@@bramreeuwijk8269 no

Great explanation of it all... It's not evil in itself, but it can lead you astray. It can lead you astray, if you let yourself be your ultimate judge of which parts of which religions you choose to follow & which you judge you can ignore.

@@jiojiojoj I don't think so. We will always hit some elements in a religion that we have difficulties to accept, like Immaculate Conception or the existence of Hell for many Catholics. It's in part by overcoming these problems and by accepting the mysteries that we progress. In an 'a la carte' spirituality, when we hit a wall we turn left or right or get back, but we rarely continue forward.

I seen many beautiful quotes throughout my life, this is one of the best.

I agree. I think Jonathan paints a very unjust picture of (Christian) Universalists here.

​@@michelfingado202 Yeah, it seems like he should have been saying "unitarian" instead.

@@michelfingado202 i think more people are drawing the distinction between unitarian univwrsalists and Christian restorationists, that such Christians are moving awat from the use of the word "universalist" because of the bad baggage from the misguided relativist crowd that most popularly uses it. Upon reflection and study, I too have come to a restorationist position, and I also understamd the plethora of misconceptions about what people think I actually mean if the word "universalist" is ever used. Christ is the only path to the father. It's just that everyone gets there in their appointed time. (Although I'm still not certain if it eventually will be everyone, most everyone with exception to a few, or simply a lot more than those who think it's just a miniscule few whem all is said and done, whatever "a lot more means," but I'm inclined more and more to say that it will be everyome that will eventually enter the fold, at least when it comes to humans anyway.)

Amen🙏

@@Tyler_W hell is a prison locked from the inside, God won’t force anyone to do anything, why would God force everyone into heaven, a lot more than a few willingly reject the Holy Spirit, like a child that could come back out to eat cake and play with friends if only they apologized but they instead choose to snicker and storm off to the bedroom. C S Lewis illustrates this beautifully in the great divorce.

I think the tough part of the second Greatest Commandment for people is loving oneself. He phrases it perfectly, and its a perfect mirror of previous scripture, but elevated. Love your neighbor as yourself. People are afraid that loving oneself is narcissism. In fact, narcissists hate themselves and they hate the reality of who they are. They hate their limitations, and conditionally love themselves for their gifts and status. Loving oneself is like loving oneself as though you're responsible for yourself as you would be your own child. There is tough love. And, if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love your neighbor. And, if you cannot love your neighbor, you cannot love yourself. In a way, it's like there's no distinction between loving your neighbor and loving yourself, hence why it is phrased as "love your neighbor as yourself."

This applies to people of all religions

Have you read “Christ The Eternal Tao”?

@@mythosandlogos it's on my digital bookshelf! reading the cs lewis's abolition of man now. thanks the reminder!

Your problem is that you are looking at yourself. It is about God not man.

@@metaspacecrownedbytime4579 could you state that in an helpful way?

@@4comment0nly76 To put it another way, all other religions are about man's search for God, but Christianity is about God's search for man. Hope that helps.

I sorta disagree with this, it was more true in Jung's day these days we only look down. Everything is dark, monstrous, marginal. When we look up, it's sort of like looking up at a mirror that is reflecting the floor. In some senses you are correct, we don't look down far enough. But I'd argue we don't look up at all.

@@chrisc7265 I agree! Very eloquent reply.

I think it was asked really well.

A lot of so-called Christianity has strayed far from the first 500 years of church history which was universalist and explicitly non-violent, and has more recently turned to fear-based ideas such as eternal conscious torment (ECT) and penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) theory. The beautiful gospel is one in which Jesus gets everything he paid for. If nothing is bigger than God, then nothing can separate us forever from God.

@@Ben-YThat’s a lot of modern bull. Not one church that has ties to the first ancient church agree with anything you said, neither Roman, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian nor Coptic churches have that belief. The closest thing you can get to that sort of thinking is like St Isaac the Syrian and even he would say you are on the wrong track. That being said the parable of the Good Samaritan comes to mind when speaking about judgment.

Agreed, David. It's just difficult living wholeheartedly within a mythological narrative, no matter how "true" that myth is. How do you make it work?

@@cbogue418 Yes- they will feel God’s love, perhaps first as a consuming fire, but ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ, before whom every knee will bow, and every tongue gladly swear allegiance to the Lord of Love!

Yes, this video could have been more explicit that it was addressing Unitarian Universalism and not Christian Universalism, in which Jesus is Lord and Liberator of All.

awww i grew up very fundamentalist too & have recently had to deconstruct and reconstruct my entiiiire worldview. some resources that helped me put things in place: the Bible Project (KZfaq & podcast) has an excellent, cohesive, synoptic view of scripture "That All Shall be Saved" by David Bentley Hart on universal reconciliation "Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl" by N.D. Wilson on approaching this created world as God's art, with wonder and joy

Interesting...

it's impossible to dedicate yourself to any path if you think any path would do the job

Problem is the muslims also think that, and they live in your country and you have to form some sort of coherent collective with them. Discuss.

@@F--B no coherent collective can be achieved with people who worship another God than yours. Muslims seek conflict because their goal is to have the entire world serving their god.

@@csongorarpad4670 it’s the same god though

@@YusoufAtalla no it's not the same "god". Islam does not believe in the Christian God, Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of Christ is what changed everything for humanity.

Weak

We're just allergic to other religions. We have weak stomachs, and can't handle the forgiveness and enemy love that Jesus demanded of his followers.

It's easy to speak from the privileged position of somehow being born into the right tradition. However, God is bigger than Christianity. God alone gets to choose where each person Is born. But, do we trust that God knows what God is doing in having each person born into whichever tradition they get born into? What right do we have in condemning (to where? To eternal conscious torment?) other great faiths into which God allowed millions or even billions of people to be born?

Agreed. Jonathan isn't really addressing Christian Orthodox Universalists like Bradley Jersak, and Hopeful Universalist leaning top Orthodox theologians like Kalistos Ware. Christian Universalism doesn't need to assert itself as sperior or exclusive.

This is why I believe in ethnic religions

They were explicitly confusing matter and a product of their hands and minds with God the Creator.

There's a difference between Unitarian Universalism and Trinitarian Universalism, in which Jesus Christ is the Only Way, and he draws ALL men to Himself.

Go ahead and worship demons then

If you read doctrine as a scientific paper then you're just playing yourself. Science cannot be a universal truth because it cannot account for itself. The only all-encompassing meta-story is Christianity (Catholicism and Orthodoxy)

Omnipresent God has always been everywhere, and anyone who has been seeking truth has been recording that truth, often in religious forms that have gotten handed down through the millennia. Do we not trust that God has been drawing ALL people to Himself? Why would God be smaller than one religion, or controlled or ruled or only perfectly understood by one singular religion if God is everywhere? Jesus said, "Seek, and you will find." If Jesus speaks eternal truth, then is it not the case that throughout ALL history, anyone who truly sought persistently, found Him?

Humility is recognizing that from your incredibly limited subjectivity YOU can’t possibly fully understand or embody what is good on your own. There are great intellectual defenses for Christianity but a strange part of the path is the more you walk it the more you resign your will to it. The more it becomes your hermeneutic and you recognize that you don’t know what’s best for yourself. You are infinitely flawed but god is infinitely merciful and true and good. Transformation comes from submission. Fallible as you are can you really trust your own incredibly worldly and biased evaluations? Becoming truly faithful is having your own Identity subsumed into the tradition itself. A grander identity. THATS faith. Not your hodge podge cherry pickings. Think about it rationally. If something truly is the radical transforming word of god and if god is earth shatteringly omniscient, how can you possibly trust yourself, limited as you are, to pick and choose the parts of theology that ‘work’. How would you even know. God is unchanging. The maxims of the times are incredibly unreliable. Dust in the wind. The whole point of spirituality is to ascend the ontological ladder towards something fixed and eternal. To think you’re the arbiter of the ultimately true and eternal is spiritually infantile. You need a large dose of humility.

@@cicerogsuphoesdown7723 I agree with almost everything you just said. My question to you is then: What path should I follow? I do not know what religion you belong to. Everything you just said could be an argument for faith in Islam, any of the Christian denominations, any of the thousands of different strands of what we call Hinduism, or any other faith based practiced. Do you see what I mean? Do you really feel it? If you truly understand me and have honest answers to my question, please provide me with it. But please refrain from wasting my time by saying that I think I'm the arbiter of truth and need more humility. What do you think I'm doing, looking for wisdom throughout all great spiritual traditions? So if you can genuinely help me in my quest, I'll gladly make use of it, but please don't play around with me about this topic, because to me this is as important as life itself.

Pick one path. In the same way that you hamper your own growth if you spread yourselves too thin in several skill groups vs. applying all of your time love and care into one. I’m not a perennialist but I’d read rene guenon for insight onto this matter. And then I’d read seraphim rose. A man greatly inspired by guenon who became an orthodox Christian (I don’t recommend exclusively because he’s Christian. More because he was inspired by guenon and perennialism. Had some great criticisms of jung and other sort of universalists and ultimately full heartedly committed to the path of orthodox Christianity. Not because it was ‘one’ of the paths. But ultimately the path of paths. His defense is far better than I could ever pen. But what I would say is god is a non local atemporal being. All of our experience is local and temporal. That means all of our thinking (save for the transcendentals we use as tools like morality and mathematics etc.) is a collage of our temporal and local experience. That means almost everything we’ve ever thought or seen or interacted with is not god. There may be imminence sure. But the point is we cannot approach him logically. You’re never gonna catch god with the mind. I heard someone say once the best defense of Christianity is the lives of the saints. It’s also the greatest blow to Protestantism. Something about the TRADITION itself transforms those who participate in it. So my only advice would be to stop jumping around. At least for a long time. If you’re an earnest seeker you have to stop holding up and tinkering and reading and thinking and you actually have to suck it up and go to church or temple or whatever and participate in the rites and rituals and ceremonies. Ingratiate yourself into the community and truly live your one path. You have to be an ‘orthodox’ person whatever that means to you. If you’re willing to believe in divine revelation you have to take the risk of truly practicing the divinely revealed. And if you do that in a full blooded way you won’t have to wonder if it’s the right thing or not. Because you’ll be transformed in the doing and your doubts and fears will be silenced. But that will not happen as long as you continue to try and ‘figure it out’.

@@cicerogsuphoesdown7723 Thanks for the geruine response. It makes me think a lot. If I may, some questions I have are these: 1: Which mental faculties did you use to pick your path? And which ones would you advice I use? Did you pick your path using logic? Best arguments? Intuition? Familiarity? Or just somewhat random, like a dice roll? 2: In your decision making process in life, what is the ultimate priority? (For me, for example, this is God as I experience him in my being. The highest/deepest self in the Hundistic and Jungian senses) The reason I ask this is: What decision making process is going to save you when tradition alone stands on top of your decision hierarchy, and your tradition ends up being corrupted? If you put all your faith in a tradition that the real God actually DOESN'T want you to practice, how will God reach you if you put tradition above your divine intuition? 3: (Kinda follows from the 2nd one) What would it take for you to convert to another faith (within or outside Christianity)? Or have you completely ruled out that possibility?

We’ll ultimately I don’t use mental faculties to evaluate. The experience grabs you and acts upon you. Not the other way around. What I would say (again based upon seraphim rose who I believed learned thai and Cantonese as a means of interacting with teachers directly. Also Thomas Merton had a similar experience) in the way a tree grows in particular soil people grow out of different traditions. Ultimately he found that his teachers or mentors like Watts or Jung projected their westernism and biases all over the traditions they fetishized or lumped into some universalist pattern. This is disingenuous to do as Rose found out once he attempted to go the extra step and learn the languages to approach said tradition on its own terms. A western person is a Christian person. Or Abrahamic person. It doesn’t matter whether they attend or subscribe to a faith practice in order for this to be so. Religion is do deeply embedded so central to history and politics and trade and EXPERIENCE itself. We’re so thoroughly versed in a sort of moral realism we can’t appreciate how all consuming it is. Like the ‘this is water’ speech. I would say religion is the highest identity available. It’s highest crystallization and the more fully we participate the more fully ‘real’ we become. I don’t wanna be disrespectful towards great western teachers or interpreters of eastern experience- but I feel a lot of the exoticism and romanticism behind eastern or Vedic wisdom in the ways can be payed at the failures of Protestantism and the Protestant revolution. I think it was once more generally understood that religion is a vehicle for mysticism and mystical transformation. That by participating in the tradition it has the power to transform and trigger these experiences. (Also as per what you mentioned I’ll respond with a platonic example. A city is greater than a person in the way a collection of souls is greater than a soul. You can examine the themes and structure of the world more fully in the macro. A great artist can only accomplish so much with his own hands in a lifetime. A fleet of people can build a cathedral over the course of many the tradition IS greater than your highest self. Because it encompasses potential thousands of years of great ‘selves’. It’s like Throwing on an ancient over soul. Any honest person who obsessively reads will eventually come to the conclusion that every brilliant thought they’ve ever had has been had a thousand times over by more brilliant people in more brilliant epochs. The font of wisdom the tradition supplies has the ability to answer every question and weather any and every possible experience or fear or doubt. It is the difference between living as a brick embedded in a grand cathedral. And being alone and useless. Again I think the fetishization of eastern wisdom is because people unconsciously recognize ‘true’ spirituality in the monastic tradition. The archetype of the old master in the ashram is pretty commonly understood. What westerners have forgotten is their own spirituality has the same tradition. And it still exists. The monasteries on mt. Athos rival any ashram anywhere in the world in grace and beauty and ancient legacy and mystical power. Again the STRIPPING AWAY of tradition due to the Protestant reformation and the thousand of years of amnesia led to people forgetting WHY we do these rituals rites and ceremonies. What they are for. What they are supposed to lead to. This is what orthodoxy provides. And in some circles or parts specifically with regards to Latin mass- Catholicism. I think the idea of ‘conversion’ makes no sense. The only choice for a western person is to become more thoroughly what you are. And what you are is an abrahamic person. There’s no ‘choice’ really. Only and admission of self. The farthest I went as far as conversion was from an empty atheism and agnosticism (born Catholic) to orthodox. I hope that helps. I’ll leave it with this. Have you ever walked into a room and seen someone speaking very animatedly about say baseball and then an ACTUAL baseball player walks in and the person becomes embarrassed and ashamed and deflecting and quiet? It’s because I’m the end they are speaking about something they are not. It’s an identity question. Again I mean no offense to great western interpreters. But I can’t wrap my mind around how. Someone can abandon their own tradition especially when it’s so overwhelmingly rich. The only conclusion I come to (as someone who was also once very interested in eastern spirituality academically) is an incredibly superficial understanding of their own tradition- and in some ways by extension- themselves. I could never be a Buddhist. Or a hindu. Not because I don’t ‘want’ to be one. But because, I am not. It’s not what I am. I have to be about the business of who and what I actually am. And a tradition several thousands of years old with a track record for creating saints isn’t a bad place to start so long as it’s explored in its most potent and pure and ancient incarnation. That would be my advice.

Yeah, Campbell inspired gulags make Marx look like an amateur.

I wonder what would happen if a Joseph Campbell fan was confronted with Rene Girard's ideas about Christianity

"Follow your bliss" has always annoyed me for the sentiment Pageau expresses around 7:40.

@@thecannibalrobot I didn't say Joseph Campbell was an influence on Stalin :D I mean this latest round of "woke" I'm up on the threads of Marx in woke as illustrated by James Lindsey and others, but Joseph Campbell strikes me as more explicitly causal

@@chrisc7265 Joseph Campbell has literally nothing to do with postmodernism/wokeism. You're banging on about something that makes absolutely no sense.

Constructivism

They make very different claims and have differnt presuppositions. I wouldn’t be so liberal

Of course they make different claims. They are different perspectives. But they are talking about the same reality. The correlation and crossover isn't a freak accident.

@@TheRationalCarpenter we could talk about the same reality in two different ways, one could say we’re using iPads others might say we have magic talking light boxes…. Who is right? Having different presuppositions is significant…

@@TheRationalCarpenter And some of them come to the conclusion that the "gods" need to eat human hearts, lest the sun never rise again - so you cut out human hearts and burn them on an altar, while the gathered "faithful" drink the blood of the slaughtered. I give this extreme example because extremes make things more obvious, particularly for us modern people - but the principle described in this extreme example also holds true in cases where it's not that obvious. Not all perspectives are created equal.

There’s actually a distinction between the universalism that Jonathan means here and universalism that you and Hart are talking about. Jonathan is critiquing universalism in a more perennialist sense I.e. trying to stand above all paths, whereas I think you’re talking about apocatastasis which is universal reconciliation not universalism. I plan on asking him about this in his next Q/A if he’s pro or anti apocatastasis

Yes what this other commenter said. Universalism here seems to imply the pluralistic unitarian universalism, not the Christ-centered universal reconciliation as advocated by certain Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians.

@@processrauwill7922 did you ask him?

@@MrSofuskroghlarsen yeah I did no response. He said he didn’t want to answer it

@@processrauwill7922 Oh okay. On the live today? I really Wonder his stance on it.

Grow up

@@alphabeta8284 I will pray for you