Introduction:
My thoughts started with the intention to come to a modern appreciation of the idea that Jesus was crucified and died for an other being, but yesterday I came to a new understanding of my two earliest memories. In between these two lies a process of analysis and composition relating to the meaning of human existence. So, I made quite a journey and I hope to be able to give it all a meaningful perspective. It could be that in the end, this will have to take on the essay format.
Jesus’ death and the individual:
I considered a person dieing for me in regular life, as an act of appreciation and love for me as a person; that is of another person giving up his or her life for you. Some times you read about some body offering an organ for donation to the benefit of an other, when no suitable donor can be found. But here we are donating a whole life as it were, to enable an other to live.
Once you accept this and get past the grotesqueness that arises initially, you are overwhelmed with the immensity of such an act and realise that it signifies a powerful validation of me as a person if this were to occur.
But this is not all, because Jesus, according to tradition, is the son of God. Therefore his death for me as a person would mean that I would become like a son of god also. This symbology is over powering as the validation of me as a person and so constitutes a powerful and unquestionable validation of me as a person and as an individual, who is now empowered to go forth into the world as a person and no longer as a member of a group.
This process of becoming an individual takes many generation, but it started with that narrative of the person Jesus laying down his life voluntarily for others. These are psychological assimilation processes that slowly evolve with time.
When the West Europeans met all those different looking people during their explorations, this individuality notion was severely challenged, as is evident from the long term efforts to remake these people into different looking West Europeans, a process that is still going on today, albeit with diminishing intensity. Some stone age style tribes in Brazil are respected for their choice and protected from a-culturisation, but this attitude still does not yet fully apply to Canada’s native People.
What needs redemption?
Except for the last paragraph, these were my thoughts for Good Friday. On Holy Saturday I concentrated on the meaning of this redemptive act by Jesus and what it would be in our society today, that needed such redemption for the moving forward of our globalised state of conflicts. We are caught in this conflict between diverse identities, which have us locked in preconceived power solution of one being better and more advanced than the other.
This could be called our planet wide state of ‘sin’ or misconception from which we need to be redeemed. However, people are not going to give up their identities, so we need an insight and a teaching to effect and affect the required change. In Jesus times it was love - charity and compassion - that needed to move that cruel Ancient Roman society from its power position, while for us today it is the willingness to honour and validate the other’s identity that needs to become our new attitude.
The making of change:
This identified, we move on to the problem of how to bring about this change in attitude. The next step would be behaviour and a change in it and finally we need to support this with teachings. So, attitude, behaviour and teachings are the tools be means of which we can bring about the required change. And, as ad men know, you start with the kids
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<11:00am stopped for lunch and shopping [116$/31 items] and unloading; now restart at 00:57pm>
With respect to this change in attitude, quite often it is only as a last resort that attitudes change, usually after a strike, violence and sometimes armed conflict. Such are the dark sides of identity and the often related value frame works and/or belief systems.
So, the redemption, then would be in each identity to modify and work towards tolerating others, whose identity is different, but held with equal conviction. This should encourage us to make the required changes in attitude, behaviour and teaching of values, now with an eye to what is held in common, rather than in difference.
After this Saturday’s result I moved on to the Sunday asking the following question: ‘To what purpose do humans exist, given that this relative harmony can be achieved to a workable extend?’ This question I answer by noting that humans are in the process of exploring the possible in the realm of humanity within Existence Divine. We have discovered ethics and the rules of moral behaviour, we have ordered our human experience world to the extend that we have modified it to an extensive degree, enabling modes of existence that evolution could never produce, such as an airplane.
Taking inventory over what has been accomplished over the last 60k years, we can produce a long and impressive list. We might say then, that further exploration of the humanly possible, is warranted if not promising.
In this process we add to the totality of that which exists and we should and could also explore ways of establishing communication with other planets where conscious existence and possibly life also exists. Establishing a network of such centers of conscious awareness throughout a region of say our galaxy would ensure continuity of such abilities and achievements, enhancing our under standing of the mystery that is existence and which I have called ‘Existence Divine’, for it not having to exist in the first place.
<2:pm? Maybe.
