Since the Hebrew and Catholic deities are Biblical and since the Bible is monotheist, these two deities are notionally identical - unless they have bifurcated? That has happened at least conceptually if not also ontologically. The adverb, "theologically," would be ambiguous, referring either to God (indivisible) or to ideas about God (perpetually divisible). Prince John locates the Hebrew/Catholic God at the apex of a feudal hierarchy:
"'Same ultimate overlord, different chain of vassalage...'"
-SM Stirling, The Golden Princess (New York, 2015), Chapter Fifteen, p. 374.
(One principle of feudalism is: "My lord's lord is not my lord.")
Since Wicca is neo-pagan, it recognizes Shinto gods as aspects of divinity. It is the fitting of Judaism, Christianity, Wicca, Shinto etc into a common conceptual framework that is the tougher theological assignment. Stirling manages this task with a multi-faceted, emergent deity that is ultimately incompatible with Christianity although it seems that the Catholics will continue to be granted experiences apparently validating their beliefs and, further, that there is something about all this that human beings cannot understand.
If there is a hereafter, then maybe it is not such a serious matter to end a human life? (Krishna says this in the Bhagavad Gita.) I am thinking about what God/the gods did at the Change. Also, maybe gods may morally end lives when we cannot?
35 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I can accept, with some difficulty, I admit, S.M. Stirling using ideas about a multifaceted emergent Deity for fictional, story telling purposes. But I absolutely don't believe such ideas to be literally true. Because it does not make sense to imagine God as being somehow created or "emergent." So, yes, I believe the God of the OT and NT to be the same God, except that the NT gives us a fuller revelation about God.
And it is a VERY serious matter to end a human life. An accurate translation of the Commandment not to kill would render it as "you shall not MURDER." No exceptions, no ifs, ands, or buts. That helps to explain why the Catholic Church is so resolutely unyielding in refusing to assent to any and all direct abortions or types of infanticide.
It is not murder, however, for the state to execute criminals for the worst crimes or for soldiers to kill in times of war (civilians, of course, cannot rightly be slain).
Sean
Ah, well, I don't believe them to be literally true either -- it's the "conditional hypothetical".
To write fiction, you have to be able to write things you don't believe -as if- you believed them for the duration of the project.
That's the only way you can convincingly write characters who differ in their fundamental assumptions from you, or do a social 'world' based on those assumptions convincingly.
A consciousness that survives the end of a universe and intervenes like a deity in a subsequent universe is at least possible whereas a creator before his creation would be a self without other which is like a square without sides.
And yes, the King James is magnificent prose but often lousy translation. For example, it consistently translates a Greek-derived term meaning "poisoner" as "witch/sorceress".
Though the mistranslation of "thou shalt not do murder" as "thou shalt not kill" is also seen elsewhere and is much older -- Jerome got it wrong too.
Hebrew makes exactly the same distinction between "killing" (wayakk) and "murdering"(retzach) as English does.
The latter is never used of killing in war, or execution by a court, or in self-defense -- when Moses kills the Egyptian overseer he sees brutally beating a Hebrew slave, the verb form used is "wayyak".
"Retzach" is only used of killing that violates law and custom -- killing that incurs blood-guilt.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with you! And the fact that I often mentally argue with your Wiccan characters and those who believe in "process theology" shows how well you write. You successfully created characters who convincingly believe in ideas which makes no logical sense.
Sean
Paul: it's a little more complex than that, and you have to watch out for the implicit assumptions in the structure of the English (and most Indo-European) languages.
The creator-God of the Abrahamic tradition doesn't exist "before" creation; He's outside time itself and doesn't experience duration as we do.
His consciousness is coterminous with eternity -- and eternity is not an indefinite stretch of time.
In the Biblical conception, time/duration starts at a given point and extends to another, at which it ceases. God is not in time; time is in God.
If you analyze the grammar of English carefully, you'll see that it contains an assumption that both space and time are flat (uniform in all directions) and infinite. We tend to confuse this with logical necessity.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Yes, I read with great interest how the apostate Jew Judy Barstow pointed out how "poisoner" was mistranslated by the KJV as "witch." But even more recent translations still don't use "poisoner." I wish modern translations would "poisoner" and "murder" in the relevant passages.
Frankly, I dislike Judy. I recall with distaste how she offered to abort Rudi Mackenzie when she confirmed Juniper was pregnant.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
Thanks. I am familiar with the idea of durationless consciousness but I question it also. Certainly an instantaneous consciousness, beginning and ending simultaneously, would be as impossible as a completely flat plane. I think that the question becomes: can a consciousness be not atemporal but transtemporal? The latter would incorporate and transcend time instead of merely negating it, just as a solid incorporates planes. Can consciousness be transtemporal but able to act in time like God acting in history as He does in the Bible?
Paul.
An interesting element in the Japanese Buddhist-Shinto religious synthesis is that it's a melding between a religion that has very little theology (Shinto), only myth-stories, and one that's just as intellectually deep and complex as Christianity or Judaism (Buddhism), though profoundly different.
One reason it works so well is that Buddhism (especially the earlier forms) doesn't concern itself as much with eschatological questions as the Religions of the Book do. Shinto "does" different things from Buddhism; in the popular imagination there was no contradiction between them, and they melded easily in popular devotion.
Religious -philosophy- in Japan was overwhelmingly Buddhist, of necessity because you really can't think formally about Shinto except in an anthropological sense -- Shinto is something you feel and do; religious -practice- tends more to the Shinto side, sometimes with popular-Buddhist overlays, for precisely that reason.
I was educated as a Christian, always thought philosophically about religion and have wound up practicing zazen.
Paul: I don't think that there's a logical contradiction between transcendence and immanence in this context. If God is transtemporal -- if God encompasses time -- then it would seem to follow that He could intervene in it.
As I said, this -feels- like a contradiction, but in my opinion if you examine it closely that feeling is linguistically based rather than deductive.
Lewis once pointed out that this solves the predestination/free will question rather neatly.
God doesn't "foresee" events, God experiences the whole of time simultaneously, where we experience only the moment, recall the past, and press forward into the future.
A human being, from God's perspective, would be always be a -completed event-, including the choices that human being made.
Mr Stirling,
Sean and I have discussed this before and I published "Philosophical Disagreements With CS Lewis" on my Religion and Philosophy blog. I agree that:
foreknowledge is not transtemporal knowledge;
neither of these would negate free will.
However, my actions result from my motivations, circumstances, knowledge, beliefs, abilities etc. An omnipotent creator of all things other than himself has complete control over all these factors and thus could have made me a person who would have acted differently.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with what you said about the influence of Buddhism in Japan. I think Confucianism also left its mark in Japan, but not as deeply as Buddhism.
Confucianism did not penetrate as DEEPLY in Japan because it was too abstract to appeal to men's emotions and hearts. Confucianism, in some ways, was like the Stoicism seen in the Early Roman Empire.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
As Paul has said, we have discussed such issues before. I still disagree with his last comments, however. As you said, God is transtemporal and encompasses time. All time is an eternal "now" to God. Which is why He can intervene in it.
Sean
An omnipotent creator could have created me slightly differently: different motivations; different strength of will to resist temptations; different exposure to temptations. Every factor that generates my actions he could have created differently. On the hypothesis of an omnipotent creator, he is responsible for everything that happens and that human beings do. We can be held to account by each other for social and moral purposes but not by an omnipotent creator.
Also, Confucianism (though officially sponsored at times, for example by the Tokugawa Shoguns) was formed in a very different society.
Japan tried to imitate Chinese institutions -- there really wasn't much of an alternative, once Japan wanted to move past its tribal antecedents -- but they never took very well.
Japan was profoundly aristocratic, for example, whereas China never really was; and the class that dominated Japanese society for a very long time was ferociously warlike, something at the very core of its identity.
In China, warriors were a low-status group, particularly after the Han dynasty. The scholar-bureaucrat was the Chinese ideal.
How people think about how they organize their lives matters, because it constantly interacts with practice.
For example, the Chinese Confucian system of government was theoretically a competitive meritocracy.
In practice, it was rare for someone really poor to take the civil-service examinations, because studying the texts required a lot of leisure, but it -did- happen now and then.
(The man who started the Taiping Rebellion, the most destructive single struggle of the 19th century, had failed the examinations, and was of very humble background.)
If you made money, it was considerably more common for your sons to take the exams and go on to political-administrative careers. Merchants were not an exalted class, but they could move up seamlessly. Soldiers, on the other hand, were despised -- the saying was that you didn't use first-class iron to make nails, or first-class men as fighters.
This may well have affected and been affected by the frequent changes of dynasty in China; you didn't have to be well-born to become Son of Heaven in time of troubles. You didn't even have to be ethnically Han -- several dynasties started out as foreigners.
In Japan everything was -supposed- to depend on birth.
The castes were never as hermetically sealed as they were in theory -- and rarely as much so in practice as they were under the long peace of the Tokugawas, the Edo period, when the whole country was tightly controlled and governed. Paradoxically, the warriors were never as supreme and never as separated from the rest of the population as in that time when there were no wars.
And the theoretical superiority of the warrior class was never as absolute as it was in theory either.
Under strict law, a samurai could simply cut down any commoner because he felt like it or thought the commoner had been insufficiently deferential.
In practice, that rarely happened; the lords valued good order too much, and anyone who cut down one of their bankers was going to be in deep trouble, because while officially despised the merchant-financier class in fact had a lot of influence if not formal power. Lords knew the men of money could make their lives intolerably troublesome.
But it certainly mattered that that -was- the theory; just as it mattered that the Imperial dynasty really was the same one that had been on top (theoretically again!) since the very beginnings of Japanese civilization.
Mr Stirling,
Have you considered writing historical fiction as well as alternative history fiction?
Paul.
Yes, I've thought of it, but... as the saying goes, "so many books, so little time". This applies to reading, and even more to writing. I'm fairly prolific, but even so I have ten ideas for books I'd like to write for every one I have the time to actually do.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I think were times in China's early history when an aristocracy was very influential. Here I mostly have the Early or Western Chou Dynasty in mind, when the realm was divided into many small fiefs whose lords owned allegiance to the Chou king. The system resembled post-Roman feudalism, esp. as it took shape after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire.
The Eastern Chou era was marked by the decline of the royal power and the increasing tendency of the stronger feudal states to conquer and annex weaker neighbors (the Contending States era). It ended with the Kingdom of Chin deposing the last Chou king and conquering its last rivals and founding the first truly Imperial dynasty, the short lived Chin.
During the Contending States era, aristocratic mores and ideas were replaced by increasingly centralized and bureaucratic governments. Because that was the only way ambitious states could mobilize resources and increasingly large and powerful armies in the struggle for power or survival.
Confucianism really became dominant only in the Han Dynasty, which is when the ideal of the scholar bureaucrat took form.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Yes, I knew the ideal in Imperial China was for the civil service to be a competitive meritocracy open to anybody. Practicalities, as your pointed out, limited it MOSTLY, but not always, to candidates who had the money and time needed for studying.
Yes, I have read about the Heavenly King of the abortive Taiping Dynasty of 1850-64 which challenged the reigning Ch'ing Dynasty in one of the most destructive civil wars in human history.
The Heavenly King, a civil service candidate who had repeatedly failed the examinations, was inspired in his resentment and disappointment by a a warped form of Christianity in motivating his rebellion.
Very interesting, your comments about Japan. They fit in with what I recalled reading in Japanese history. Which was not as much as the Chinese history I read more deeply in.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
While many of the factors which led to you becoming the "you" you now are could have been changed, resulting in a different Paul Shackley, I still argue that you will still have free will. You still would have the freedom to shape what you became in different ways. This bit from Chapter I of JRR Tolkien's "Quenta Silmarillion," the third part of THE SILMARILLION might help to clarify matters: "Therefore he [Eru Iluvatar, God] willed that the hearts of men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else, and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest."
However mysterious, baffling, and contradictory it may seem to you, we DO have freedom of the will, and we are not compelled by God nor does He allow any other Power to force our wills once we have assented or set our minds to a course of action.
Sean
Sean,
Compelled, no. Created as we are, yes. Assuming a theistic premise, of course.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Created as we are with the power to make choices, for good or ill.
Sean
Sean,
We make choices but God creates all the factors that determine those choices. An aggressive drunk automatically kicks a dog that bites him whereas a Gandhian saint who lives his beliefs does not kick the dog. God creates the drunk and the saint and could instead create two saints.
Paul.
God does not compel us against our wills but creates our wills.
You're right that only with the Chin/Han era did the "classical" phase of Chinese civilization jell, to remain fundamentally similar down to the early 20th century.
Kaor, Paul!
But we remain free to make what we will of the factors God created. He will not force the saint to remain a saint or a wicked man to stay a wicked man.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Which is a bit odd in some ways, because Confucius himself was an aristocrat who proposed idealized versions of "feudal" beliefs in a "stoic" leaning direction. But one reason why Confucianism was adopted by the Han and succeeding dynasties was the need for a moral code that could soften and moderate the harshness of the School of Law which also helped to shape the new Empire.
Sean
Sean,
We are free if we are not constrained. But, if the drunk's addiction (created by God), his aggression (created by God) and his lack of moral sensibility (created by God)remain stronger than his will power (created by God), then the drunk will not change for the better.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
A few more comments before disconnecting.
I still disagree. The inclination or proneness to drunkenness is a weakness or flaw, but it's not INEVITABLE for such persons to become or remain drunks. Because I'm sure we both know of persons who have managed to regain sobriety. And the same with aggressiveness or wrath, I believe such urges can be restrained or controlled by acts of our wills. I myself have had such moments of such moments of aggressiveness/anger, but restrained myself from acting on them. So I don't think it's inevitable that I will kick a dog in a moment of pique!
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
One thing I forgot to comment about was me thinking you probably have note books filled with story ideas and very rough plot outlines for books you MIGHT write about if you ever had the time or inclination to fully develop and write out one of them.
Sean
Sean,
It is not inevitable that a drunk will remain a drunk but he will remain that way if he has a strong addiction and insufficient will power to overcome the addiction. His creator is responsible both for the strength of the addiction and for the weakness of his will.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And this is where I believe another factor comes in, the grace and mercy of God. I believe God HELPS people to overcome vices and weaknesses, if they consent to His help. That is, a hardened drunk, disgusted with his mode of life, could appeal to God to help give him the strength needed to master his addiction to alcohol. We see a man's free will cooperating with God.
Sean
Sean,
But the creator creates one man with a motivation to ask for grace and another without. If He does not create the motivation, then (i) He is not the creator of all things other than Himself; (ii) the occurrence of the motivation in one man but not in another is a random event and random events cannot have any moral significance.
Paul.
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