Hi Incurablefanatic,
I do like your name although you seem a lot more curable and a lot less fanatic than your name declares, which is a relief for maybe you can help other incurablefanatics visiting you!
I’ve been thinking about your post and have a few more thoughts that I’d like to share. I would like to continue to approach the question of sexuality and the church in which homosexuality is included from different perspectives if you allow me.
You say that it would be difficult to prove my claims scientifically and I wonder if we need to prove our claims scientifically when we can verify them in our being. Verifying them in our being is what I would understand by “religion”. Let me clarify that. When we talk about clarifying scientifically are we not asking for an external proof of our claim? What do we really mean by that? Is it that “everyone” can accept it or that the scientific community can accept it? Will that make “us” as individuals accept it? Or will we have actualized our findings and understandings in the phenomenical world or dimension in such a way that many of us can approve it and incorporate it in our status quo?
I’ve been working on the separation of state, religion, science and art claiming that they are four spheres of our lives that need not be separated but connected and understood and our discussion here can bring some light into that if you allow me the room to expand.
What do we understand by religion? I realize you’ve been talking about the church but the church is just the leaves of the tree. Why don’t we try to understand the tree?
Religion in my childhood was “going to Church”, something one “did” in one’s life so I turned to psychology and went to the shrink for a while and then I walked in and out of myself through the corridors of my own existence, spent my time as a child many times, recovered my youth, the parents within, the absences and presences of each and all in between and was… or became… aware of the multiple dimensions of the human being and am still in the process of doing so.
My question is, do we need to prove our claims scientifically when we can verify them in our being? While the former is an external social process the latter is an internal inner process. I call “religion” this “internal inner process” that has overtime been replaced by “psychology” although the role of the psychologist is not very different from the wise-man’s role in ancient times and yet, the psychoanalysis, religion, philosophy and sociology of our days are but splinters of a tree that we should be able to piece together again some day.
I would certainly like to try to organize my claims “scientifically” if that helped you to better understand what I am trying to convey without doubting that the more we explain the more we set ourselves up for confusion and yet unafraid of dealing with the confusion if we are to dialogue!
It is difficult to understand the dimensions of religion and “politics” if we come from a one way street from the tip of the iceberg of our own being to the tip of the iceberg of the social sphere. We need to try to reunite our different sciences in our consciousness in order to get a picture of the whole of our own self as much as of our selves.
In psychology and religion we might dive into the inner processes of our individual ways while in politics we deal with the external processes of our social encounters but do we not need to recover the tension of the rope that unites them to recover the sense of the whole?
Were we to study how we lost that connection we would realize precisely how not only our sexuality but all the crucial aspects of our lives are disconnected from each other.
If we study the external “version” of our history it would be interesting to place our selves in the times in which the Church separated the human being from the divine and established a monarchy of papal authorities to connect them. With that separation, the whole sphere of the “mystic” was appropriated by the Church and the “mystic” in the people was burnt at the stake particularly active in the burning of female “witches”. The sphere of the “divine” was taken away from the human being who became a “sinner” in an everlasting quest for redemption through sacrifice and submission. With the Church, the Monarchy and when the King and the Church collided Henry the eighth separated the church of England from Rome where we eventually witnessed the development of a completely “new” space for the “people” in the “industrial revolution”. God had been separated from the people as much as the dimension of the divine within the human being but the “Earth” had become a place for people with “civil rights”. When the king separated from the Church so that he could marry again at the cost of no matter how many women’s heads (!) so that he could give birth to a male successor, he broke the divine monopoly of the Church of Rome from the rest of the world. It is quite an irony that it should have been Elizabeth and not a man who reigned for the following forty four years.
From wikipedia:
Elizabeth established an English church that helped shape a national identity and remains in place todayThose who praised her later as a Protestant heroine overlooked her refusal to drop all Catholic practices. Historians note that in her day, strict Protestants regarded the Acts of Settlement and Uniformity of 1559 as a compromise. In fact, Elizabeth believed that faith was personal and did not wish, as Francis Bacon put it, to "make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts".
Despite Elizabeth's largely defensive foreign policy, her reign raised England's status abroad. "She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island," marvelled Pope Sixtus V, "and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all".Under Elizabeth, the nation gained a new self-confidence and sense of sovereignty, as Christendom fragmented. Elizabeth was the first Tudor to recognise that a monarch ruled by popular consent. She therefore always worked with parliament and advisers she could trust to tell her the truth—a style of government that her Stuart successors failed to follow. Some historians have called her lucky; she believed that God was protecting her. Priding herself on being "mere English", Elizabeth trusted in God, honest advice, and the love of her subjects for the success of her rule. In a prayer, she offered thanks to God that:
[At a time] when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of my enemies frustrate
You must realize what an ignorant I am in these matters and that I have to study what I intuit as I go along to be able to corroborate my intuitions but they are an exploration more than an affirmation of dogma for I am far from being knowledgeable enough in the “scientific” terms of the word.
I wanted to write about this to present the following piece from Augustine, and try to understand the picture of “women” that we’ve been carrying with us in our Western world. I believe it of utmost importance to study all these aspects of our “psychological make up” if we wish to come even close to understanding homosexuality, sexuality and the Church.
Born in North Africa; bishop of Hippo from 396 to his death.
Note. Augustine deserves much credit as a seeker, a theologian and a writer. But honesty demands that we also acknowledge another side to him. “This Augustine who had made love to women and perhaps to men, who could not control his own sexual problems, who was constantly torn between lust and frustration, who could in all sincerity pray: ‘Give me chastity . . . . , but not yet!’ (Confessions 8,7), who only became devout after he had ravished whores to his heart's content, when his weakness for women, as so often happens to older men in later life, turned into the opposite . . . , this Augustine created the classic patristic doctrine on sin, a morality in which especially sexual desire was condemned. Augustine has influenced Christian morality decisively, as well as the sexual frustrations of millions of Europeans unto our own day.” (K. Deschner, De Kerk en haar Kruis, Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1974, pp. 326-327).
Translation from the Ante-Nicene Fathers. For a complete electronic copy, visit the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, the New Advent Library. Italics in the text by John Wijngaards.
For Augustine it was an indisputable social and religious truth that women were subject to men.
Though marriage is a divine institution, and therefore good in itself, the carnal desire that accompanies intercourse is a remnant of sin. In fact, it is the sign and carrier of original sin. Also in lawful marriages sexual intercourse should be avoided asa venial fault.
http://www.womenpriests.org/traditio/august.asp
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