Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Soteriology

  • Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

    Dennis E. Bradford sent me three comments via e-mail on my recent Butchvarov post.  I omit the first and the third which are more technical in nature, and which I may address in later posts.    Bradford writes, Second, and this separates me from Butch, Larry [Blackman], and you, I reject your assumption concerning the narrowness of philosophy.  You mention…

  • The Christian ‘Anatta Doctrine’ of Lorenzo Scupoli

    Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects self-denial with denial of the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions   presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of self-elimination. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of…

  • Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

    If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying…

  • Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry

    Spencer Case reports from Afghanistan, and I comment in blue (older comments of mine in dark orange): Greetings again from Afghanistan. I've been reading your blog regularly although I haven't written in a while, so I hope you'll forgive a few preliminaries. Things are winding down in my tour, despite an attack on my base…

  • The Eternal Return of the Same Old Same Old

    A redemption from transitoriness that consists of an endless repetition is no redemption at all.  An eternity of the same old crap is still crap.  It is actually worse than transient crap.  It is Crap Eternalized, nihilism on stilts. Pious Nietzscheans will be shocked at my irreverence.  But wasn't it his irreverence that attracted their…

  • Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life

    Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from…

  • Mental Quiet and Enlightenment/Salvation

    In yesterday's post I claimed that the proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet, but listed as an ultimate goal the arrival at what is variously described as enlightenment, salvation, liberation, release. In a comment to the post (from the old blog), Jim Ryan raised a difficult but very important question about the connection…

  • Can Religious Notions be Naturalized?

    I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend…

  • Jim Ryan on Salvation

    Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II. Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized,…

  • Three Concepts of Salvation: Physical, Mystical, Religious

    Salvation is a religious concept, and every religion includes a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Or can you think of a religion that does not? It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term…