I have recently been in a discussion about free will and I am left with a few thoughts.
First, I argued against free will because I don't see that the will is free. I had stated that I don't believe in free will but in reflection I don't think that I have proven that statement. What I do think is clear is that the will is dependent, and that within the parameters of dependency the will may have a sense of freedom. Certainly the will is dependent and conditioned, or so it seems to me, but it is not certain that the will is at any time free.
Now, it has been explained to me that freedom lies in the fact that I can choose this or I can choose that. It is the ability to choose that defines free will. I struggle to accept that definition because the very choice is in many ways conditioned, dependent, and influenced from a multitude of means.
I think that much of my thoughts hinge on how you define free will and what is meant by that. The term is thrown about without much thought as to what it means. Mostly I think it comes across as balme for the ego. Of course, one needs to assume that there is any reality to the ego, that it is not a burdensome illusion. Certainly Christians (and I would suppose any of the big 3 western faiths) cling to the idea of free will to various degrees because it fits into their doctrines of judgement and accountabilty (and I suppose to theories of personal salvation to a lessor extent). Is free will a major player in the thought of the eastern faiths (taoism, buddhism, sikhism, hinduism)? It seems that it does in terms of practical day to day living, but in terms of systems of belief I think it falls to the side with the belief in the non-self.
13 comments:
i was poking around on your facebook and found your of philosophical statements. long time, old friend, good to see the wheels are still churning. is it ok if i come at you on these? initial comments on this one:
"Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched, ant therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside--in image and in word, in Church and Bible--but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old." ~ Carl Jung (1875-1961). Psychology and Alchemy, 1, 1944, tr. R.F.C. Hull, 1968
I think a statement like this is so closely true - and that is why i find it so insidious. It depends so much on poor Carl's perspective and particular worldview. no thinking Christian should disagree that his statements can be true and often are - however so many, myself included respond in puzzlement on how he can universalize his observations on the exterialization (i just made up a word!) of our faith to make it a completely true statement. because it is often true, and perhaps more noticeably true, doesn't make it essentially true. especially since by the same observational technique as Carl, I can come up with quite opposite conclusions. I appreciate the introspection, philosophical searching, and genuine desires of people outside of Christianity, and by God I concur with the disheartening number of "shallow, dogmatic" Christians, however, I have a great list of people i know personally and incidentally, who are the deepest, internally honest, peace-filled Christians I could ever think possible - and many of them to a degree I find negligible, although admittedly present and beautiful, outside of Christianity. and so i am offering an equally perspective-driven description as Carl that opposes him- but that is just it.
carl says, "all veneer, unchanged, everything, never" the arrogance! the hubris! Carl has seen enough of the data to make deified objective universalistic statements! he is very guilty of the same crime as ignorant and dogmatic Christians but from his empirically religious perspective! i think that his statement can be generally true - but is what is so wrong about it - looking at a glass half empty that can also be half full, but then using universalistic statements that by their very nature cannot be possibly true to paint a very different picture of Christianity than the experiences of millions of its adherents! I think the end of the matter is way you want to look at a billion-strong faith as Christianity - with all its variations, complexity, truisms, and falsehoods. if you choose to look at it from a completely negative light be honest about it and don't try to hide behind empirical observations - it isn't the data that leads one to these conclusions, it is a decided response to experiences. poor Carl Jung - a bastard-child of modern rationality, allowing his experience of individuals, however many they are, to decide for him how he will interpret a faith-system!
oh, and if he says the primal savagery of a Christian's inner self represents an archaic version of the Judeo-Christian God, he really needs to compare it to the other gods that were present in antiquity and beyond. Adonai looks oppressive to modernists in 21st century liberal democracies, but stand him up in the time when the New Testament was written and beyond, you find an incredibly liberating and compassionate theology that had no equal.
Nice to hear from you again!
You have taken on a more aggressive style it seems. Carl voiced his opinion based on the data that he had, and that is certainly fair for him to do. It may not match your data (or anyone else's), and that is fine too. But if that is the data he is presented with, and I suggest he had access and opportunity to greater data than many of us. Certainly his observaton feels right according to the data I have to work with, but I also know people of christian faith who are exemplary and of high quality - but no more amongst the christians than the barbarians, and those the few, not the many. But then, if it is all about data then certainly all of our opinions are dependent upon it and are accordingly relative.
A billion strong, well Islam can offer the same number,and so can locusts, ants, and bees. Of course, with so many faithful followers of Christ one would expect to have an overwhelming, impossible to miss, witness to the life transforming power of the faith...and perhaps it is the fact that there is a desperate lack of evidence despite the billion strong witness that led Carl to his opinioned statement.
"you find an incredibly liberating and compassionate theology that had no equal."
Well, to be fair,there were other liberating and compassionate faiths that predate christianity - buddhism for example. The Buddha, long before Christ brought to the front of his society incredible social reforms. Islam, following after Christianity also brought taught enlightened social reforms. Again, Christianity is not unique, although one could argue it certainly brought forth some advancements in its culture.
yeah, i was pretty aggressive - don't take it personal, it is more or less the way i write i guess. alas . . . but i did react because i find the perspective so one sided on the one hand and universalistic in its conclusions on the other hand. i think you're right about the fact that when dealing with the data, really - at least idealistically we have the same data to work with. however, what i am most interested in is the scale of conclusion you can come up with based on the data you have with which you make that conclusion. we don't have to waste time pointing out Christians who do that with "data" - statistics, archeology, social theory, etc. because i really do think this is the case. but that doesn't give Carl Jung leave to do the same thing.
the interesting thing about this is that i have experienced enough of Christianity to agree with Jung's statement for even a great majority of adherents to the Christian system. I just don't thing his universalistic statements are accurate by their very nature.
and the same can go for the bringing in of the other faiths - sure their are Buddhists who display a great "quality" but if you look back at the ancient nations that were under Buddhism, their track record for oppression and injustice doesn't look much better than the Medieval church or the Colonial Church, and these so-called "Christianities" oppressed Christians under their political manifestations more than they did outsiders more often than not. by its very nature a high-population religious system constantly sheds adherents in gradient degrees of fidelity to the faith. the sad part is, the Christians that I know personally that fit into Carl's assessment here are often the ones causing trouble in the churches and don't represent the essence of the faith - and are opposed to the direction of the church community.
and yes, i think the same thing about the other faiths, that there are core people that represent and essence that is good and admirable. not so sure about Islam but that discussion has more to do with their holy book than the way their adherents act, ironically enough. good to hear from you. we'll get to sit down and talk sometime soon. did you hear about the baby?
your comment: "I suggest he had access and opportunity to greater data than many of us" yeah, i think you're right about that - and so we must be humble about our challenges and statements at the feet of a well-informed expert. but that doesn't mean he is not immune to his own highly-motivated assumptions as the rest of us - unlike the early rationalists, few serious scholars are as optimistic about their own objectivity nowadays. My problem with this statement isn't that I think he is wrong - I just think he is wrong to jump to the universalizing conclusion he does, as if that wealth of data he has is enough to describe something as large, complex, and contradictory as a world faith-movement.
I can't help but wonder if you would be so opposed to his universalizing of the christian faiths if he painted a positive picture rather than a negative one. We don't have to agree with him, although I mostly do, but he is doing what we all do - making judgments according to the evidence he is presented with. The real concern is not that someone made such a judgemen, but that it is so common. Where is the evidence to the contrary? And if there is evidence, why is it so hard to find?
yeah, you're probably right, i wouldn't have noticed the discrepancy as easy because of my own angled perspective. and i think that i have to reiterate that i mostly do agree with him too, but that is with his quantitative assertion as opposed to a qualitative one. I would repeat his quotation in front of my congregation if he had used words like "most" or "majority" or "the evidence points to" but he doesn't give that flavour to his opinion. if he was talking about a case group that numbers in the 100's or less and doesn't have a constitutional text that says otherwise, i think it would be more fair to give more sweeping evaluations. However, he is dealing with a rather large and complex global system, with an almost infinite number of shades and variations, spanning a sizable junk of history. and besides, when you take his evaluation into the text while he may be an expert in psychology and the like, he shows a rather simplistic and selective evaluation of what is said there. in order for Jung's evaluation to apply to the text you have to ignore an awful lot of what is said there.
as for evidence to the contrary, i assert that there is an awful lot. i mean, pick a category. there is world social services, inner-city compassion action, the changed lives daily of hundreds of thousands of broken-hearted individuals who find within the Christian church compassion, community, and belonging, those pesky Christian pacifist organizations that resist political movements such as Religious Right in the US, Zionism in Israel, and Communism in Vietnam, etc. The point is, that while all this is exterior action it is motivated by a change in the inner-person. People don't spend their money feeding millions in the third world because they are living for themselves and their own archaic God. Sure you could say they do it to relieve their conscience but that evaluation is so surface as to be omitted from the conversation. the point is that Christianity has cause massive sweeping positive changes in a vast number of people and just because there are so many more that wear the faith around their neck as an externalizing, conscience-saving faith doesn't discount the other group. I would say that it is unlikely to be any other way. It all comes down to which side of the perspective you choose to look at it from, which group you choose to have be the spokesman for the whole. Old Fashioned Rationalistic numbers-games have demonstrated themselves, within almost every discipline of science, including social studies, to be a callously simplistic and therefore inadequate evaluation tool. Life is just too complex for that. and evaluating any religious system based on the actions of the sum number of its adherents is just not an accurate method. You have to look at its sub-groups, its historical movements, its teachings, its motivations, and yes, also its overall impact on the world and history, which is the most difficult to evaluate of all.
but the point is that it is a decision to look at it negatively, just as it is to view it the other way. i for one, feel no compunction to try to defend worldwide Christianity, as in this regard I find myself agreeing with Jung's statements. I just don't think it is fair at all to say that all of it is like that, or even that its central teaching and spirit reflects that.
there are an awful lot of Christians that would be genuinely puzzled by this evaluation while at the same time concurring with the damning evaluation of many of the faith's adherents.
I agree with you that Jung is incapable of speaking for all of the Christianities out there, but as I mentioned he is free to offer his opinion and evaluation based on what he has observed and the data he has available. I'm not sure that Jung spoke in the sense of absolutes - he did say "to a terrifying degree."
I don't think that there is a complete lack of positive expression from Christianity, but that there is no more positive expression from Christianity than from any other faith or community. One can't point at the evidence and say, "wow, those christians are more good than everyone else". One can point to Buddhist communities and find the same outreach', the same claims to transformation etc...
I agree with you that Christianity is not all bad, nor are all of its adherents. But it as a whole does make some universal claims that the evidence does not appear to prove. Appearances can certainly be deceiving, but we are bound by our perception. I don't choose to agree with his statement because I want to, but because the evidence I have suggests he is right. Perhaps it is a choice to see the negative side at times, but there are times when something just looks the way it looks.
Your's is a difficult argument to maintain, something akin to "I agree but don't like to hear it."
"to a terrifying degree" sounds pretty absolute to me, and it sounds like he has the sort Christianities associated with the Religious Right movement in the US, which I believe (although I don't have stats) represents likely less than 5% of global Christianity.
you say "there is no more positive expression from Christianity" than from other world religions. i have two questions about that. One, what is your loose definition of positive expression? also, do you really want to line up the faiths in some sort of comparative way and evaluate who takes the trophy on positive expression? If we could do that, I am of the impression that there are a great many categories of positive expression for which Christianity will take the trophy hands down. again, i would be very surprised if Buddhism could post the same sort of statistics in terms of charity groups, familial social reform, recovery groups, reconciliation efforts, etc. you may be thinking in terms of negative expression as a factor in this evaluation, and i concede here that likely Christianities around the world frequently and repeatedly say some damaging and troubling things. yes, they can take the trophy there, but perhaps that is because they are the ones saying the most internationally period, although likely some of the horrid statements coming out of the Republic of Iran and the like trump the Christianity's negative contributions, if not in number but in content.
no no, it's not "i agree but don't like to hear it" it is rather "i agree but its point is limited and not descriptive of the whole or the essence."
no no, it's not "i agree but don't like to hear it" it is rather "i agree but its point is limited and not descriptive of the whole or the essence."
Okay, sorry about that. I think I agree with you that it is not descriptive of the whole (although it is arguable that it is descriptive of a large, noticable, portion), but it is his observation and opinion (key word here - opinion) of the essence.
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