Christianity is Humanism

What is religion? Religion is a way for individuals to deal with the void in their soul - their existential anxiety. We are not going to do away with its individual dimension but we must somehow deal with institutional power built on human religious impulse. Here I think that Christianity has a certain advantage.

Let us start with a simplified bullet point list of major world religions:

• Judaism - we are God's chosen people and we communicate and negotiate our existence with God
• Judeo-Christianity - we are promoted from chosen people to children of God
• Islam - we are God's slaves or at best tenants and have to submit to the Supreme being
• Buddhism - God is the void and we are happy to join the void
• Hinduism - God is the system of the world

The story goes like this - in comic-book grand narrative style:
Abraham sees a burning bush and realizes that the void in his soul is the only void. The void is unique. The sole and universal God speaks to him. From this event Judaism has developed as a practice of the chosen people to enter into dialogue with the Absolute.

Jesus comes along as an activist for existence and claims that he is the Christ, totally human and totally divine - and designated to die and be resurrected to prove all that. So starts the development of Christianity and it starts with Christ as the first existentialist activist. He claims that by accepting death we become children and heirs of God and God has become one of us. He is not a teacher, not a sage - but an activist like we have them nowadays. The actions of Jesus as Christ, the death and resurrection are presaging the "postmodernism" of Nietzsche and company.

Judeo-Christianity splits off the Orthodox East and the ancient original rites and develops into Catholicism and Protestantism in the West. They all become institutions. Judeo-Christians think themselves to be children of God and so having to behave like them.

Islam enters the stage - prior to Protestantism of course - and, while acknowledging the Abrahamic priority, reveals a teaching harsher than the Abrahamic one. Namely, we are not God's heirs and children - we are his slaves, or tenants at best, - and ought to live in submission. God is no longer the void but the whole of being and we are merely supplicants rather than participants.

Islam and Judeo-Christianity resemble each other in the judgment of human obligation as subordinates to God but differ very much in the concept of the status of human beings with respect to God.

The Asian developments of Hinduism and Buddhism, having taken place before Christ, resemble the split between Catholicism and Protestantism in Christendom. Hinduism is a religion of a God that is the system of the world. As far as I understand, human beings are not really important to this type of God. Perhaps for this reason, Buddhism basically asserts that human existence would be best served by its own denial and devolution into the divine void.

In my view Christ (born: Jesus) is still the guiding figure in the development of our modern religious sensibility.

The religion of Christ, if it existed, and which is not to be confused with the current forms of Christianity, would be profoundly humanistic. Christ does not care if God's existence can be proven - we, humans, have trouble proving our own existence to ourselves. That proof is otherwise known as Love - the elusive state of the soul that everybody is seeking. The main ethic of Christ's religion is not faith but a deep respect and awe for the courage of human existence. Or, to paraphrase Tillich, it is the faith that arises after God has died.

Here is a story by a Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz, told in his autobiographical novel - "Trans-Atlantic." He gets stranded in Buenos Aires in 1939 and cannot go back to Poland because the Germans started WWII. He stays in BsAs (he really lived there for 20 years or so) and observes his kin folk, arrived on the ship with him, immersed in the life of the locals. One of those people is an older Polish military officer who has a young adult son. The officer upholds high Polish moral standards for himself and his son and really wishes they could fight somehow against the enemy. Unbelievably, with his acquiescence, his son succumbs to the seduction of a rich, vaguely homosexual, Argentinian. The novel ends in a surreal party or orgy where the protagonists proclaim that the idea of sonship should take precedence over that of fatherhood. Or in splendid and clever French translation - "filistrie" over "patrie". The moral is that we will no longer serve the fatherland but forge ahead creating a "sonland." Or Christ taking over from the Father.

The religion of Christ really does not exist. What we have is a seed of the idea embedded in Judeo-Christianity as a sort of contraband. Not sure what to do with it presently, I suspect that in the right moment it will supply strength and a source of meaning to Western civilization.

Gombro's "Trans-Atlantic" shows that the religion of Christ can open its seed in our time, even when vaguely clamoring for various sorts of liberation, through such a thing as an LGBTQ moment.

Modern atheism is not helping because it covers up the existential void with a scientific void. Neither is the exhortation to return to Enlightenment values because they exclude anything beyond the rational and objective. Existentialism, psychoanalysis (Jung invoked Christ's model directly) and other modern and postmodern directions are aiming better. Somehow paradoxically, they stand with Christ taking the position of profound respect for the courage of existence which will allow us, in due time, surpass Judeo-Christianity as well as Enlightenment.

Crisis of sexual relations in our culture

Sexual relations in our culture are often decried as severely crippled and even dysfunctional. On one side we hear about the decline of the family while on the other about the impossibility of sustaining a long-term mutual interest between a man and a woman. Yet from other quarters we hear about the decline of community as a result of domination of the market systems in which we objectively function. We plan our future rationally and when that plan rules our life we quite often see no important point of intimate engagement with others. Or others outside of the family which has congealed into a social object of our sexual life. Then we hear about the horrors of rape and other sexual abuse both weighing on those who have suffered it and those who have been accused. And all the while the cultural productions are assailing our imagination with provocations to enjoy more sexual pleasure.

Sexual relation is in its essence an expression of desire to be with, to be together with another human, group of humans, or thing, animal or just oneself. The desire to loosen certain boundaries that constrain our being while we function in society. The sexual desire is at its core a desire for intimacy where certain things do not need to be talked about, do not need to be communicated but can arise. In this sense the closeness of mother and child is realization of sexual desire as is keeping and caring for a pet at home. And of course a powerful and traumatic realization of sexual desire is genital intercourse for which men and women are just wonderfully built. So why the crisis? The crux of the problem is in the transition from communication to intimacy and it's complicated.

There is an unbridgeable gap between men and women - at least this is how it would be stated if we believed that men are made of masculine and women of feminine substance or essence. It has been mythologized in this manner and the proponents of this view make it more acceptable by allowing for example that each of us can assume one or the other substance for a while or for a duration of a certain sexual interaction. Interaction is only properly sexual if there is a good polarization between these substances among the participants. I don't believe that. My views come from psychoanalysis as pioneered by Freud and later formulated by Lacan. Their science of the subjective is very much alive and developing along with support that it receives from clinical practice as well as from philosophy and even mathematics.

The masculine and feminine are certain subjective mental formations into which we are brought up rather than essential substances poured into us in the process of creation. We call these formations genders. Gender is not determined by biological sex although it is a major factor in how the social and family environment guides gender formation. Each individual is different and his/hers gender is not purely masculine or feminine although the individual will typically strongly identify with one. The masculine and feminine are more like two ideal directions or dimensions in space while any particular realization will be a more or less balanced mix of the two. Let us talk about the self-identified feminine as a woman and self-identified masculine as a man. Between such two individuals the sexual impulse is strongest.

Woman has the life, the goods, she feels the fullness of it. Man knows that he does not have that, but knows that he can furnish something that opens up the enjoyment of life. To begin with this is his penis that he protects and is anxious about losing. What does the woman want? What is she lacking? She will first deny that she is lacking anything because she is fullness but then also admit that she does not know what she wants. Actually woman asks to know what she wants, she asks for knowledge that she perceives can be obtained from a man. She needs a man to be herself complete.

Man knows what he does not have. He does have knowledge which is essentially crippled. He seeks to confront the knowledge with the reality of life. He seeks the goods carrying as his gift a stunted version of the knowledge of her gifts. He seeks life that glimmers among the gifts of a woman. In a way man and woman offer each other something they don't really have.

As far as the gifts offered go they unconsciously lie to each other. But as a result they become to each other what they really seek. The having (or not having) is converted into being. The semantic web of communications between man and woman is fraught with lies - for the most part unconsciously produced - because conscious knowledge is partial. The goal of this communication is again paradoxically an overcoming of the communication and stepping up to intimacy - where the gift of life and the gift of knowledge flow together.

This convergence of life and knowledge is love, just that. At that point we are at great altitude and might dispense with investigations of past lies and untruths. Love is what woman demands and man knows he enables.

The crisis in sexual relations is happening along the path toward love between the people who attract each other. The woman asking to know what she wants needs to be properly confronted. She is asking to be seduced and ought to be open to seduction. Judging who should be allowed to seduce her is a difficult judgment call that she can develop only with experience. The man cannot apologize for his attempts to seduce. He will speak to her in terms of her fullness representing to her a fantasy of love that she invariably has. To start with his words and signals cannot be possibly true because - how could he know? Yet speaking and interacting with her he will grow his knowledge specifically of and for her which will ground the possibility of love. He need not apologize for his seductive lies as much as woman does not apologize for her provocative sexual fullness. He need not apologize as long as he is leading her to place where according to his knowledge she wants to be. Being fit to navigate this field of seductive maneuvering is the erotic capacity - and that is where people tend to fail in our culture.

Where does the genital act fit in the course of the process of seduction? Everywhere. A woman should be open to be sexual with an erotically worthy partner. A man should be ready to be sexual with a woman who appears as a map of his knowledge. People should be available to each other.

I was moved to write this article in response to posts complaining about rape being blamed on seemingly nice guys, who got close with girls, became trusted friends and then during some sneaky opportunity, lying down sleepy or drunk, felt entitled to put the penis in the vagina. To me this is a failure of seduction, lack of erotic fitness. A guy who is proceeding along the lines of being a nice guy and a woman's friend and trusted helper is not seducing her into love. He is not presenting himself as the potential bearer of the knowledge - he is being a child and asks her to become a mother. A woman will throw herself at a fulfilling chance of being a mother, but then she treats the "man" not as an erotically worthy partner but as someone who has already fulfilled his sexual role - like a son has to a mother.

Concluding I would say that much of the crisis of sexual relations is due to the failure of openness to seduction, lack of erotic fitness. Seduction is the process of communications, much unconscious and fraught with lies and misperceptions, yet creating the hope for love.

Warren Beatty films

Recently I started paying closer attention to the artistic output of Warren Beatty. Either as actor or actor-director his movies seem to share a common theme - theme of the spiritual aspect of man's involvement in the world. In particular I am thinking here about "McCabe and Mrs Miller" and "Bulworth", partly also considering the "Reds" about the American journalist, Jack Reed, who got to play a part in the Bolshevik revolution. The main character in the film "Bulworth" is a US senator planning to unconventionally end his career. In "McCabe and Mrs Miller" Beatty's character, McCabe, is a young Western entrepreneur in Washington state of 1890-1900. "Bulworth" was directed by Beatty himself while the other film, made in 1971, is the work of Robert Altman.

In his story McCabe is a entrepreneur building an entertainment complex, complete with a whorehouse, in a city in the rainy Washington rockies to serve the needs of miners and loggers populating the area. He has some money to invest and gets to own a good portion of land in a good location. He is a danger to the interests of local established businessmen who are envious of his boldness and repeat rumors that he is a dangerous gunfighter who has killed a man and ought to be pursued by the law. McCabe receives overtures from a large company to buy out his land and investments - an offer that turns into a threat. He of course turns down the offer made by well-mannered representatives of a large East-Coast company in a unrefined manner of an uneducated man, while he still feels his right to pursue his life and his initiatives. His business is a great success, he gains a woman and a partner, Mrs Miller, who brings with her a number of prostitutes from Seattle and directs the operation very well. However, the threats against McCabe materialize in dangerous. He talks to a lawyer in a larger city nearby, a lawyer with political aspirations, who assures him that he, McCabe, is in the right, but also says that in the end no-one with stand with him to defend his rights. Despite all of that McCabe feels greatly inspired in his life - this is in the scene when he mutters to himself - "I got poetry in me" - him, an uneducated man. But the situation develops in an ominous way. The shady characters in town decide to follow their plan to kill him. At this point even Mrs Miller, who normally shares his bed, is gone missing. With all his "poetry in him" he fights his pursuers valiantly - but succumbs and dies alone, wounded and freezing in the snow.

The other story is of Senator Bulworth, a man who has been in office for a while and has served the interest of big corporations by skewing the laws to their advantage and getting contributions, gifts and sweet deals. At this point he is disgusted with himself and plans an exit. He wants to die. He pays some people to gets himself assassinated while getting an insurance company pay a life insurance benefit to his daughter. He also is planning to act rightfully as a politician and against the insurance industry doing what he believes is right and passing a clause in a law that mandates selling insurance to the underclass. Once the plan is set in motion he is free - he spends a weekend of freedom giving speeches explaining what he really thinks and getting in return applause and admiration. He becomes newly alive being truthful to the people around him and to himself even though he comes to and over the edge of insult. Now Sen. Bulworth desperately wants to cancel his assassination. This becomes quite comical and he tries to avoid his attackers by going into hiding among black people of the underclass. It turns out that his assassin's helper was actually the black girl who befriended him and was now helping him hide. She had stopped the plan's execution because of an odd feeling about Bulworth. She was strangely attracted to him because he appeared to be a man standing in his truth. When this is revealed along with other comical aspects of the killers being underpaid, assassination is miraculously canceled and Bulworth rides to a peak of popularity and approval and appears to have huge chances as political candidate of truth. With the hot girl at his side (Halle Berry) he triumphantly rides a limo in the spotlight and cameras. And at that moment a bullet strikes him down. This time organized unfailingly by the insurance industry he has double-crossed.

These two films of course share a common theme. That a man's mission is to bring his truth into the world. That is what brings out the best in him. For many it will be something great, for some mediocre, for some despicable and punishable by law. But each of us has to bring it out. Each of us has to risk life for our truth, perhaps meet death but probably just rejection.