Tag: religion

Doctrine of Visible Saints

In the Puritan sects of 17th century Britain, visible saints were those select few whom God had ordained righteous and who observably enjoyed the fruits of God’s grace. The visible saints did good works. They were honest and compassionate. They possessed strength of reason and could defend God’s word with eloquence and courage. Visible saints were good because God made them to be good. He furnished them with intelligence, charisma, and an aptitude for moral discipline. Their saintliness was made visible through qualities of behavior, their zeal for the Word, their station in society, and, most often and most obviously, through their acquisition of material wealth. I think the wealth component might have been the basis for the doctrine. There was a bourgeoning middle class in England during the 17th century. Common people—not just lords and noblemen—began owning surpluses of property and assets. To justify their right to wealth, these new members of the middle class began asserting that God desired them to be successful and that anyone questioned their worthiness would be challenging God’s will.

We often mistakenly attribute the protestant schism from the Catholic Church as being caused by frustrations with papal corruption and an unwillingness of sovereign rulers to submit to the church’s power. While these concerns certainly encouraged the spread of Protestantism, it cannot be said that Martin Luther risked life, limb, and his eternal soul because he was upset that the Vatican was taking bribes. Matters of power and administration could be resolved internally—they always had been. Luther’s contention with the church was doctrinal. He was calling into question old, foundational beliefs which to correct would have required an undoing of orthodoxy dating back to the first council of Nicaea. Specifically, Luther challenged the church on the matter of predestination. If we are to presume that God is all-powerful and all-knowing then we must also acknowledge that God has absolute control over the universe and is the facilitating factor behind all causes and effects. This would also mean that human beings, as creations of God, must, at all times, adhere to His will, whether acting morally or immorally. Therefore, the Catholic Church’s stance on free will and its view that salvation was a thing that people achieved through good deeds and obedience had to be invalid. Luther maintained that people were already saved. As an act of grace, God had sacrificed his only son to save mankind. The only moral decision one had to make was either accepting this grace through faith in God or rejecting it. John Calvin went further, discarding the moral decision altogether. He posited in his clear, forceful way that God makes some men fit for salvation and destined for it, while for others he makes it an impossibility: “All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1564)

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And so it is from belief in strict predestination that the Doctrine of Visible Saints arises. As a moral system, this can be highly problematic. It erases ethical responsibility and the role of human will in individuals’ own lives. It justifies one’s success even if it comes at the expense of others and removes the obligation of charity as a means of redistribution. Perhaps most troublesome, it equates positive fortune with moral purity and misfortune with wickedness. The believer is made to accept that when bad things happen to good people, somehow the sufferer deserves it. It does not matter if the individual is good, their poor fate was predetermined and is independent of their worldly deeds.

I myself am areligious and do not have a position on the subject that could result in belief—though it is tempting to make one. I approach this debate more as a philosophical paradox. Still, I think it’s interesting to see how these shifts in doxa influence society and shape ethical values. The Doctrine of Visible Saints never totally disappeared. The rise of Methodism and subsequent spiritual revivals re-emphasizing good works and generosity have since offered some counterweight, but the tradition is still woven into the fabric of most protestant Christianity. We see it resurrected by the evangelical churches and the Church of the Latter-day Saints in the form of prosperity theology. It’s become a cornerstone of the evangelizing mission—and one can see why. They are offering an excellent value proposition: God wants you to be rich and happy, but you have to accept His grace so that He can get into your life and make it happen. More than any other message, the prosperity promise seems to resonate with people the most. It’s built mega churches and has made millionaires out of glad-handing salespriests. It’s ushered Christianity into the era of mass culture. To think, it was a doctrine derived from predetermines that did it. Of course, the part about how some people are pre-ordained to fail is usually left out of the sermons. In the prosperity gospel, everyone has a place the table. Whether it makes sense theologically is beside the point. It’s an optimistic message that everyone can get behind.


Lost Intoxicant: Soma

In both Hindu and Zoroastrian texts, reference is made to a blessed and enchanting elixir that endows one with god-like sight, the strength and energy of a panther, and the gift of everlasting life. According to the Sushruta school of Indian medicine its rejuvenating properties work by causing ones hair teeth and nails to fall off and the rest of the physical self to whither; following this, it compels the body to regenerate into an adamantine form that could last for ten thousand years. The substance to which I refer is called soma in Hindi, and haoma in the vedic languages. It was believed to have been gathered and brewed by the Indo-Iranian people of present-day Afghanistan, probably starting a little before the tenth century BC. The plant from which it is derived grew at high elevations in the Hindu Kush. It was used in religious ritual by Hindu and Zoroastrian priests who believed it was the only means available to mortal beings to commune with the divine.

Chalky or cottage cheese-like formations appear under the skin, in and around the joints order levitra canada or on other parts of your body. Although foea.org sildenafil 100mg price easy, an online consultation cannot replace the face-to-face consultation with a physician. Fruity flavor, like cialis 5mg tablets http://foea.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/FEA-ANNUAL-REPORT-2013.pdf strawberries or banana, is a good compliment to the effect of the drug. Basically, buy cheapest cialis the problem of obesity is caused due to the blockage of blood flow to the penile area and when there is proper blood flow to the penile area. We do not know what soma actually was. Priests of the Hindu and Avestan traditions still perform the rites related to the taking of soma, and they consume a drink which they call soma but is more likely a surrogate for the seemingly more potent soma known to the ancients. Present-day soma is extracted from the ephedra plant. It is a mild stimulant and has an effect on the body similar to caffeine. Many believe ephedra is the very same plant referred to in the Rigveda and the Avestan Yasna. If this is true, then reports of soma’s extraordinary effects and its scarcity would have been majorly exaggerated. R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur scholar with a great interest in soma, puts forth a very convincing argument that soma was more likely a psychoactive intoxicant that caused reverie and hallucination. He identifies the fly-agaric mushroom to be the most likely candidate. This would have provided a very potent psychotropic experience, but description does not seem to match that given by ancient texts as to soma’s color and shape. Fly-agaric is a mushroom with a bright red cap; soma was supposed to be a branching stalk that was greenish yellow in color. Wasson points out that the greenish yellow color might have described only the drink itself and speculates that fly-agaric might have been consumed by a head priest who would then offer his urine, replete with all of the fungus’s psychoactive agents, to the ritual’s other participants to drink.

Frits Staal notes that ritualistic activity surrounding soma began to increase a great deal as the Proto Indo-European Aryan peoples migrated from the Oxus River into the Indus River Valley, further away from the source of the Soma plant. New rites emerged relating to the importation of soma, like, for example, the priest’s greeting to the soma merchant and the dismissal of the soma merchant from the temple. Staal speculates that the build up of ritual around soma intensified as the soma itself grew increasingly unavailable. Eventually, the spiritual energy once associated with the soma intoxication might have been transferred to its accompanying rituals, and that the actual consumption of soma became simply a component of the rite and was easily supplanted by a more readily available surrogate like ephedra. To date no conclusive evidence has been submitted that supports ephedra as the original soma or any other substance. Whatever spiritual qualities the soma elixir might have possessed, they are now lost to human experience and forgotten.

The Esoteric Wisdom of thriceholy.net

Totally great website of the day: http://www.thriceholy.net/home.html.

You’ll notice the page title reads, simply, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I can’t fully tell what this website is and or what its author’s agenda might be. Its theological position is ostensibly predicated on a fairly traditional trinity doctrine. One might be led to think it Catholic, somehow, but in the section, “Answering Roman Catholicism,” we find a treatise condemning the old church in four awesome chapters about things like necromancy and fetishization of relics. The site’s other sections go on to discredit a long parade of “heresies,” including Pentecostalism, Unitarian Universalism, Latter-day Saints, Islam, ect. I would not want to give the impression that these arguments are in any way unhinged or motivated by delusion. Their theses are logical and legitimate, and the writing is very well-composed. The author is quite conservative, really. She claims that her writing aligns with orthodox belief, but the project is so sprawling and esoteric, so overflowing with creative energy that it is anything but orthodox. I think Thrice Holy is the product of orphic delirium. It is vision is so vast that it might as well be real.

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Follow the author on twitter: @TrisagionSeraph

It appears that she is an older German woman who lives in Mainz.