Alfredo
The second 'dissenting' voice was that of a European living and working in Syria. Since he's not a Syrian, perhaps I shouldn't call him a dissident, but I got the impression he was certain he knew what he was talking about even if he didn't.
Lets call him Alfredo and pretend he's Spanish. Over the course of two days I met up with him three times. Firstly, just moments after saying goodbye to Peter when I decided I'd continue enjoying the upmarket area. A book standing next to his wine caught my eye: Islamic Jurisprudence. He invited me to join him and we chatted with increasing degrees of warmth for the next two hours on a range of topics before walking back to his stunning apartment where I had my first taste of the local liquor, Arak (an aniseed concoction). To be frank, my experience with Peter had made me a bit paranoid. I was worried Alfredo might also be gay and put pressure on me too. But happily this was not the case. He spoke of a lady he'd met and wanted to assure me (as if he thought I didn't know?) that the pleasures and significance of a woman's sexual company can never be underrated.
By the way, I hope its clear I'm not a homophobe. As it happens, I have many gay friends and have always valued them. An inescapably non-coercive individual I've always found it next to impossible to tell anybody how they should or, heaven forbid, must live their life. This trait made me a very poor sub-prefect at school. I never rose any higher than a sub-prefect, gladly. I also controversially worry that it may partially explain my record of failures with women, or some women, those who want a strong, directing hand. It has meant, too, that I've shied away from all ambitions to be a manager or to achieve formal positions of power. It may therefore account for my relatively unimpressive purchasing power. All I'm saying about homosexuals who try to seduce me is that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I think this may be for two reasons. Firstly I find it embarrassing because I have to be a rejector, and I don't like being a rejector. Secondly it means I can't feel I can be as open and affectionate as I might like to be with them, for fear of giving the wrong signal and so encouraging them.
I later met Alfredo the following day when he invited me back to his flat in the afternoon. Being busy we later went out for a very nice meal.
I mainly remember our meetings for the things we spoke about.
He agreed with everything I told him Peter had said about life in Syria. He added that he thought the American assessment of the threat posed by Iran was pretty accurate, because of the insanity of their President, Ahmadinejad, whom he says 'wants the end of the world'. I'd read about this before. Apparently he is trying to provoke the reappearance of the Twelfth Iman, who went into hiding hundreds of years ago. Apocalyptic scenarios must be suitably loud for him to be awoken, so I understand. I reminded him that he's not as powerful as he would like to be and has opposition from within the ruling clerical clique. This didn't impress Alfredo much, though I hope its true that moderate hands can restrain the President. We spoke of 'regime change' in Iran. We agreed that this should never be attempted by the US, or by other outside forces (e.g Israel). Personally, I only think it an appropriate topic because of how unpopular the regime is inside the country. To me, it's clear this has to happen only from inside the country, if it's to happen at all. Obviously, it's up to the Iranian people. The regime is particularly unpopular amongst the young who happen to comprise a disproportionately high degree of the population. Its interestingly unfortunate, however, that because of Ahmadinejad's nationalist breast-beating rhetoric, seeds of a contradictory stance towards the regime have been sown. Yes, the regime is unpopular but the Iranians are a proud and patriotic people (with good reason, given their Persian achievements) and are reviled by the spectre of the interfering, crusading west, an image the President likes to inflame, presumably to some degree at least because it makes him more popular than he would otherwise be.
Regarding the Syrian undercover police, he said there were not as many as there had been under the former President and that we foreigners did not have to fear them. I hope he's right! He also qualified the degree of the threat they pose to Syrians by adding that political debate to an extent is permitted and does go on. The only really off limits issue is criticism of the President himself.
He said things were not as bad in Syria as they might be. If, for example, an Islamist regime, like Iran's or the Taliban, was in power; this much is clear, as we appreciated the alcohol we drank. The economy is also liberalising and this is reflected in the greater affluence of recent years, so he said, pointing at the upmarket cars on the street, which weren't there in the same numbers even five years ago. But he added that the vast majority of the wealth is limited to a very few and that the 'socialism' which is officially a part of the ruling party's platform is much reduced from what it was and that it doesn't do much to help the people. On the other hand, I would later read that some Lebanese come to Syria to take advantage of the better health facilities that can be found here.
Alfredo, like Peter, is an atheist, though in his case a militant one, despite his relaxed amiable bearing. He is also, interestingly, Jewish by ancestry (I wonder, oddly perhaps, if that will make some discredit his political analyses?), though no Zionist. Regarding Judaism, he said it was the best of the Middle Eastern Religions because it inculcates an attitude of questioning and criticising the religious authorities. Protestantism, I think, did this in its early heroic days, but then got slavish about its subservience to a book, when it didn't encourage people, after Newton especially, down a slippery road to the exaltation of human reason over every transcendence. I mentioned the great bits in the Old Testament where David (hardly a heretic!) is arguing with God, from a position that seems close to equality. Moses did the same, though less so. Since I'm a Christian, of a sort, I couldn't agree that Judaism is the best of the religions, though I certainly took his point. Obviously, because of his secular, atheistic mind, all these religious matters mean much less to him than to me.
Intrigued I imagine by my overly mythologising mind, he asked me what my beliefs were. I didn't come across as very sure. Beyond my personal attachment to Jesus, things become pretty vague. An important ingredient though, as I told him, is my qualified respect for Gnosticism, the counter-cultural tradition within Pre-Constantinian Christianity.
He seemed not to know anything about it. This I often distressingly find. The early heresy hunters did a through job, no doubt about it. One very rarely, even in these freethinking times, finds mention of Gnosticism in current religious debates, though it appeared last year when the 'Gospel of Judas' was published. I cut to the chase (to avoid complexity) and described it as an 'anti-wordly' creed, as opposed to a merely 'unworldly' one. Trying to explain the difference I said that while unworldy people might abstain from sex and booze or retreat to a desert, eschewing luxuries, to banish the temptations of the naughty sensuous life or the life of comfortable ease, anti-worldy people actually believe that the entire set up of the physical world itself, the very nature that covers the earth and is the earth, including our bodies and our minds, is fundamentally flawed, and has been flawed ever since its creation. That creation was either the intentionally malign doing of the 'devil' (whom some consider to be the God of Israel, and therefore Islam, since Islam acknowledges the religious pre-Islamic history of the Israelite God), or of a lesser, inferior deity who was led astray by his foolish ignorance and did a botched job.
Aware that this scenario looks decidedly bleak, the Gnostics would try to introduce some optimism. Luckily, when the flawed, or else malign, entity created this physical world he inadvertently allowed some genuine divine essence belonging to the true God above him to get mixed into his creation, where it now exists in a state of dormant self-consciousness in humanity. There it now resides as a 'divine spark' waiting, hoping, to be awoken and reunited with its truly divine reflection in the true heavens (the Aeons) which are safely far higher than and far distant from the counterfeit substitute heaven, wherein the false God (usually called Ialdaboath) resides and from where he manages the enslavement and exploitation of humanity through the ministrations of his army of Archons.
Whatever the orthodox Churches might want you to believe, you can be a Christian and a Gnostic. Well, at least if you suppose, straightforwardly, that to be a Christian means you think Jesus Christ is God and that he is the saviour of mankind. Admittedly, many Gnostics weren't Christians, but many were. The Christians ones believed, just as Christian Gnostics still do, that Jesus is a direct, primary emanation of the true God (the Pleroma - the fullness) and that he came to be the awakener of the divine spark in us all; though, unluckily for many, this spark is far more present and arousable in some than others. By believing in Jesus, one can be liberated from the yoke of the Law and the capricious demands of the standard God of Religion and ones spirit be let loose to freely roam, unrestrained, in the playing fields of ethereal bliss. The physical world is understandably downgraded in importance. Some Gnostics will even argue against sexual reproduction, seeing it as a tool for the propagation of the evil that is matter, the enchaining of spirit within flesh. Like in Buddhism, reincarnation exists and is a kind of hellish punishment that we all must suffer, as long as we're not set free from the physical world. Many have said that Gnosticism is the 'Buddhism of the West'.
Actually, I don't call myself a Gnostic. I can't help loving the physical creation, for all its annoying tragedies and screw ups. Nor do I feel it should be abandoned or ignored or escaped from. On the contrary, I believe the physical world should be understood as the very heart of the focus of God's love. But I do deeply respect the idea that, as Morpheus would say in The Matrix, a film described by some as articulating a Gnostic mythology, 'There is something wrong with the world' in a very fundamental way. I also share Gnosticism's compassion. Gnosticism sees sin and crime, as much as sickness and pain, as equivalent manifestations of the same operation of an evil world. I like the across-the-board, unqualified mercy that this leads to - even in its more exalted expressions to a mercy extended to the very evil deity, the demiurge, who set in motion the whole sorry story of the world in the first place. Gnostics, I'm suspecting, must have been gentle people. Abstracted, whimsical sure, but not persecutors, not pompous self-righteous institutors of religious cruelty. Of course in that it may have helped that they never had power. Maybe they'd have learned to take the physical world more seriously, in dark, oppressive ways, been corrupted, if they and not the orthodox had inherited the Roman Empire.
Descending from these lofty heights, which it was clear didn't interest Alfredo that much, he asked me directly, what kind of a world I wanted to live in. Actually, this flummoxed me. The kind of world I'd like to live in excludes so much of what is featured in this world that it's hard for me, being an inhabitant of this world (at least partially:)), to have a clear or distinct ideas about. I presumed he didn't need to be told that there would be universal love, of all people for all people, and no hatred. I'm a dippy trippy hippy in this regard, it's true. I presumed he wanted specifics. So I said there would be no money, no private property and no trade. That just kind of leapt out of me, without my thinking too much about it. I added that I supposed that made me a communist, though of a strange kind, a pre-Marxist communist, I wanted to say. He said Communism was 'a good idea' by which I presumed he wanted to imply, as he did, that it doesn't work in practice. So I said there has never been real Communism, if one is tempted to think that what happened in Russia and its satellites was Communism (or Communitarianism as I'd prefer), since it obviously wasn't. I made it clear, however, that I'm not a Communist revolutionary. I believe human nature and human consciousness has to change first. People must want not to be greedy and powerful over others. To effect that change is impossible without divine co-operation and involvement. Marx's atheism, therefore, did not bode well for the future.
Sometimes I call myself a Conservative Revolutionary. Only today I thought up the phrase Theocentric Communitarian. But these are slogans, and slogans can kill, as we know. So as God himself said about himself on the mountain, I am what I am, even though I'd add that I'm what I'm not too, in case people are tempted to get literal.
Lets call him Alfredo and pretend he's Spanish. Over the course of two days I met up with him three times. Firstly, just moments after saying goodbye to Peter when I decided I'd continue enjoying the upmarket area. A book standing next to his wine caught my eye: Islamic Jurisprudence. He invited me to join him and we chatted with increasing degrees of warmth for the next two hours on a range of topics before walking back to his stunning apartment where I had my first taste of the local liquor, Arak (an aniseed concoction). To be frank, my experience with Peter had made me a bit paranoid. I was worried Alfredo might also be gay and put pressure on me too. But happily this was not the case. He spoke of a lady he'd met and wanted to assure me (as if he thought I didn't know?) that the pleasures and significance of a woman's sexual company can never be underrated.
By the way, I hope its clear I'm not a homophobe. As it happens, I have many gay friends and have always valued them. An inescapably non-coercive individual I've always found it next to impossible to tell anybody how they should or, heaven forbid, must live their life. This trait made me a very poor sub-prefect at school. I never rose any higher than a sub-prefect, gladly. I also controversially worry that it may partially explain my record of failures with women, or some women, those who want a strong, directing hand. It has meant, too, that I've shied away from all ambitions to be a manager or to achieve formal positions of power. It may therefore account for my relatively unimpressive purchasing power. All I'm saying about homosexuals who try to seduce me is that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I think this may be for two reasons. Firstly I find it embarrassing because I have to be a rejector, and I don't like being a rejector. Secondly it means I can't feel I can be as open and affectionate as I might like to be with them, for fear of giving the wrong signal and so encouraging them.
I later met Alfredo the following day when he invited me back to his flat in the afternoon. Being busy we later went out for a very nice meal.
I mainly remember our meetings for the things we spoke about.
He agreed with everything I told him Peter had said about life in Syria. He added that he thought the American assessment of the threat posed by Iran was pretty accurate, because of the insanity of their President, Ahmadinejad, whom he says 'wants the end of the world'. I'd read about this before. Apparently he is trying to provoke the reappearance of the Twelfth Iman, who went into hiding hundreds of years ago. Apocalyptic scenarios must be suitably loud for him to be awoken, so I understand. I reminded him that he's not as powerful as he would like to be and has opposition from within the ruling clerical clique. This didn't impress Alfredo much, though I hope its true that moderate hands can restrain the President. We spoke of 'regime change' in Iran. We agreed that this should never be attempted by the US, or by other outside forces (e.g Israel). Personally, I only think it an appropriate topic because of how unpopular the regime is inside the country. To me, it's clear this has to happen only from inside the country, if it's to happen at all. Obviously, it's up to the Iranian people. The regime is particularly unpopular amongst the young who happen to comprise a disproportionately high degree of the population. Its interestingly unfortunate, however, that because of Ahmadinejad's nationalist breast-beating rhetoric, seeds of a contradictory stance towards the regime have been sown. Yes, the regime is unpopular but the Iranians are a proud and patriotic people (with good reason, given their Persian achievements) and are reviled by the spectre of the interfering, crusading west, an image the President likes to inflame, presumably to some degree at least because it makes him more popular than he would otherwise be.
Regarding the Syrian undercover police, he said there were not as many as there had been under the former President and that we foreigners did not have to fear them. I hope he's right! He also qualified the degree of the threat they pose to Syrians by adding that political debate to an extent is permitted and does go on. The only really off limits issue is criticism of the President himself.
He said things were not as bad in Syria as they might be. If, for example, an Islamist regime, like Iran's or the Taliban, was in power; this much is clear, as we appreciated the alcohol we drank. The economy is also liberalising and this is reflected in the greater affluence of recent years, so he said, pointing at the upmarket cars on the street, which weren't there in the same numbers even five years ago. But he added that the vast majority of the wealth is limited to a very few and that the 'socialism' which is officially a part of the ruling party's platform is much reduced from what it was and that it doesn't do much to help the people. On the other hand, I would later read that some Lebanese come to Syria to take advantage of the better health facilities that can be found here.
Alfredo, like Peter, is an atheist, though in his case a militant one, despite his relaxed amiable bearing. He is also, interestingly, Jewish by ancestry (I wonder, oddly perhaps, if that will make some discredit his political analyses?), though no Zionist. Regarding Judaism, he said it was the best of the Middle Eastern Religions because it inculcates an attitude of questioning and criticising the religious authorities. Protestantism, I think, did this in its early heroic days, but then got slavish about its subservience to a book, when it didn't encourage people, after Newton especially, down a slippery road to the exaltation of human reason over every transcendence. I mentioned the great bits in the Old Testament where David (hardly a heretic!) is arguing with God, from a position that seems close to equality. Moses did the same, though less so. Since I'm a Christian, of a sort, I couldn't agree that Judaism is the best of the religions, though I certainly took his point. Obviously, because of his secular, atheistic mind, all these religious matters mean much less to him than to me.
Intrigued I imagine by my overly mythologising mind, he asked me what my beliefs were. I didn't come across as very sure. Beyond my personal attachment to Jesus, things become pretty vague. An important ingredient though, as I told him, is my qualified respect for Gnosticism, the counter-cultural tradition within Pre-Constantinian Christianity.
He seemed not to know anything about it. This I often distressingly find. The early heresy hunters did a through job, no doubt about it. One very rarely, even in these freethinking times, finds mention of Gnosticism in current religious debates, though it appeared last year when the 'Gospel of Judas' was published. I cut to the chase (to avoid complexity) and described it as an 'anti-wordly' creed, as opposed to a merely 'unworldly' one. Trying to explain the difference I said that while unworldy people might abstain from sex and booze or retreat to a desert, eschewing luxuries, to banish the temptations of the naughty sensuous life or the life of comfortable ease, anti-worldy people actually believe that the entire set up of the physical world itself, the very nature that covers the earth and is the earth, including our bodies and our minds, is fundamentally flawed, and has been flawed ever since its creation. That creation was either the intentionally malign doing of the 'devil' (whom some consider to be the God of Israel, and therefore Islam, since Islam acknowledges the religious pre-Islamic history of the Israelite God), or of a lesser, inferior deity who was led astray by his foolish ignorance and did a botched job.
Aware that this scenario looks decidedly bleak, the Gnostics would try to introduce some optimism. Luckily, when the flawed, or else malign, entity created this physical world he inadvertently allowed some genuine divine essence belonging to the true God above him to get mixed into his creation, where it now exists in a state of dormant self-consciousness in humanity. There it now resides as a 'divine spark' waiting, hoping, to be awoken and reunited with its truly divine reflection in the true heavens (the Aeons) which are safely far higher than and far distant from the counterfeit substitute heaven, wherein the false God (usually called Ialdaboath) resides and from where he manages the enslavement and exploitation of humanity through the ministrations of his army of Archons.
Whatever the orthodox Churches might want you to believe, you can be a Christian and a Gnostic. Well, at least if you suppose, straightforwardly, that to be a Christian means you think Jesus Christ is God and that he is the saviour of mankind. Admittedly, many Gnostics weren't Christians, but many were. The Christians ones believed, just as Christian Gnostics still do, that Jesus is a direct, primary emanation of the true God (the Pleroma - the fullness) and that he came to be the awakener of the divine spark in us all; though, unluckily for many, this spark is far more present and arousable in some than others. By believing in Jesus, one can be liberated from the yoke of the Law and the capricious demands of the standard God of Religion and ones spirit be let loose to freely roam, unrestrained, in the playing fields of ethereal bliss. The physical world is understandably downgraded in importance. Some Gnostics will even argue against sexual reproduction, seeing it as a tool for the propagation of the evil that is matter, the enchaining of spirit within flesh. Like in Buddhism, reincarnation exists and is a kind of hellish punishment that we all must suffer, as long as we're not set free from the physical world. Many have said that Gnosticism is the 'Buddhism of the West'.
Actually, I don't call myself a Gnostic. I can't help loving the physical creation, for all its annoying tragedies and screw ups. Nor do I feel it should be abandoned or ignored or escaped from. On the contrary, I believe the physical world should be understood as the very heart of the focus of God's love. But I do deeply respect the idea that, as Morpheus would say in The Matrix, a film described by some as articulating a Gnostic mythology, 'There is something wrong with the world' in a very fundamental way. I also share Gnosticism's compassion. Gnosticism sees sin and crime, as much as sickness and pain, as equivalent manifestations of the same operation of an evil world. I like the across-the-board, unqualified mercy that this leads to - even in its more exalted expressions to a mercy extended to the very evil deity, the demiurge, who set in motion the whole sorry story of the world in the first place. Gnostics, I'm suspecting, must have been gentle people. Abstracted, whimsical sure, but not persecutors, not pompous self-righteous institutors of religious cruelty. Of course in that it may have helped that they never had power. Maybe they'd have learned to take the physical world more seriously, in dark, oppressive ways, been corrupted, if they and not the orthodox had inherited the Roman Empire.
Descending from these lofty heights, which it was clear didn't interest Alfredo that much, he asked me directly, what kind of a world I wanted to live in. Actually, this flummoxed me. The kind of world I'd like to live in excludes so much of what is featured in this world that it's hard for me, being an inhabitant of this world (at least partially:)), to have a clear or distinct ideas about. I presumed he didn't need to be told that there would be universal love, of all people for all people, and no hatred. I'm a dippy trippy hippy in this regard, it's true. I presumed he wanted specifics. So I said there would be no money, no private property and no trade. That just kind of leapt out of me, without my thinking too much about it. I added that I supposed that made me a communist, though of a strange kind, a pre-Marxist communist, I wanted to say. He said Communism was 'a good idea' by which I presumed he wanted to imply, as he did, that it doesn't work in practice. So I said there has never been real Communism, if one is tempted to think that what happened in Russia and its satellites was Communism (or Communitarianism as I'd prefer), since it obviously wasn't. I made it clear, however, that I'm not a Communist revolutionary. I believe human nature and human consciousness has to change first. People must want not to be greedy and powerful over others. To effect that change is impossible without divine co-operation and involvement. Marx's atheism, therefore, did not bode well for the future.
Sometimes I call myself a Conservative Revolutionary. Only today I thought up the phrase Theocentric Communitarian. But these are slogans, and slogans can kill, as we know. So as God himself said about himself on the mountain, I am what I am, even though I'd add that I'm what I'm not too, in case people are tempted to get literal.
2 comments:
There's an excellent book, The Beginnings of Christianity, by Andrew Welburn on the subject of Christianity, Gnostisism, hte Essenes etc which I'd highly recommend though it's likely you're much more educated in this field than I am myself.
Thanks for ther reference. My interest in Christian theology has been a bit in abeyance for about 10 years but Im still v.interested. Currentlky reading Karen Armstrong's 'History of God' which Im really enjoying. One thing I'd want to say even to an atheist is that God matters because God represents the highest dimensions of the reaches of the human spirit - even if God doesnt exist. The denial of God too readily translates into a denial of man.
Hope u r enjoying autumn
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