Reply To: Reeling from Christian friend's bigotry

[Simon Paynton]

@Strega – in a very real way, you’re right about your dog Peach, because the raw material of compassion from one living creature to another is this tendency to thrive. When Peach licks you and you feel happy, he invokes your tendency to thrive. Peach hasn’t gone into your brain and injected it with happy chemicals, he has set off a predisposed chain reaction along existing pathways leading to happiness.

Mysticism has a wide range of meanings of course, and what I mean is: 1) an experience of “God’s love” (for want of a better term); 2) an experience of reality; 3) an experience of the oneness of all creation, which as defined as an evolutionary trait, can be said to be the same as 1).

I believe that there are three aspects to Christians’ ideas of God’s love, and only no.1 applies here: 1) the evolutionary tendency to thrive and survive; 2) “hallelulah! my village was wiped out but God saved me!”; 3) God will send us to heaven.

God’s love (1) is only ever described in poetic terms, so I can’t do better for now than Christine Cainer’s quote. See if you can see how it matches up to my evolutionary explanation. Try these too:

The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like.” He said to them, “It is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds. But when it falls on tilled soil, it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter for the birds of the sky.”

Jesus: Gospel of St Thomas

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Albert Camus – “Return to Tipasa”