Picking Fights with the Gods
A Spiritual Psychoanalysis of Civilizations Superego
Paul Gilk
Picking Fights with the Gods
A Spiritual Psychoanalysis of Civilizations Superego
Copyright 2016 Paul Gilk. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Also by Paul Gilk
Green Politics Is Eutopian
Natures Unruly Mob: Farming and the Crisis in Rural Culture
Polemics and Provocations: Essays in Anticipation of the Daughter
The Kingdom of God Is Green
A Whole Which Is Greater: Why the Wisconsin Uprising Failed (with David Kast)
As Seedy Buckberry
Get Poor Now, Avoid the Rush
A Windfall Homestead: The Life and Times of Henry Buckberry
For Maynard Kaufman, Kat Becker, Tony Schultz, Barb Kass, Mike Miles, Tenzin and Stacey Botsfordthe seven people I know who are doing the most for the revival and renewal of rural culture, and for the resurrection of pagus .
By definition a revolution is illegal; it can advance to the new only by violating the old.
Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins , page
Once we have made explicit the biblical basis of the claimed right of Christian discovery and dominion... it then becomes possible to call this oppressive religious aspect of federal Indian law into question, directly challenge it, and eventually overturn it. However, so long as the Old Testament background... continues to remain hidden from view, it will continue to be taken for granted and successfully used as a covert weapon against indigenous nations and peoples.
Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land , pages xxi-xxii
We are all trying to live in an age of accelerating change with a static theology. Since the phrase rapid social change serves often merely as a euphemism for revolution , the issue could be put even more bluntly: we are trying to live in a period of revolution without a theology of revolution.
Harvey Cox, The Secular City , page
The greatest error of which historical Christianity is guilty is due to the circumscribing and deadening notion that revelation is finished and that there is nothing more to be expected, that the structure of the Church has been completely built and that the roof has been put on it. Religious controversy is essentially concerned with the problem of the possibility of a new revelation and of a new spiritual era. All other questions are of secondary importance.... The revelation of the Spirit cannot be just simply waited for; it depends also upon the creative activity of man; it cannot be understood simply as a new revelation of God to man; it is also a revelation of man to God. This means that it will be a divine-human revelation.
Nicolas Berdyaev, in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox, page
The healing process is in fact synonymous with the uncovering of truths repressed or never known.
Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation , page
Generally an advance in human theory carries with it many remnants of the theory displaced.
Will Durant, The Reformation , page
Unlike many of his contemporaries among the deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine Husband or Lover of any. He can scarcely be characterized in any but masculine epithets: king, lord, master, judge, and father. Indeed, the absence of feminine symbolism for God marks Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in striking contrast to the worlds other religious traditions....
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels , page
The human male alone is not the image of God, only the male and the female together. And this duality in the image must somehow be matched by a duality in the original. It is this fact that requires us to speak of the exclusion rather than the mere absence of the feminine from Gods character.
Jack Miles, God: A Biography , page
But to achieve this reintegration of the repressed feminine, the masculine must undergo a sacrifice, an ego death. The Western mind must be willing to open itself to a reality the nature of which could shatter its most established beliefs about itself and about the world. This is where the real act of heroism is going to be. A threshold must now be crossed, a threshold demanding a courageous act of faith, of imagination, of trust in a larger and more complex reality; a threshold, moreover, demanding an act of unflinching self-discernment....
This is the great challenge, yet I believe it is one the Western mind has been slowly preparing itself to meet for its entire existence. I believe that the Wests restless inner development and incessantly innovative masculine ordering of reality has been gradually leading, in an immensely long dialectical movement, toward a reconciliation with the lost feminine unity, toward a profound and many-leveled marriage of the masculine and the feminine, a triumphant and healing reunion. And I consider that much of the conflict and confusion of our own era reflects the fact that this evolutionary drama may now be reaching its climactic stages.
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind , page
Acknowledgments
F irst, Carol Ann Okite. Carol Ann has had a hand in the preparation of all my books. Even though shes insisted I learn elemental editing on the computer (Wipf and Stock requires the electronic submission of manuscripts), Carol Ann has bailed me out of innumerable keyboard difficulties, often with my hand-me-down laptop popped open on her kitchen table. Thank you, Carol Ann. Thank you very much.
Second, T. B. Scott Public Library in Merrill, Wisconsin. On the third floor, theres a behind-the-stacks, long, narrow table bolted to the north wall, its big windows overlooking the Prairie River as it tumbles through an adjoining park. Its from that perch (when Im not at Carol Anns) that I edit until my head feels like cooked oatmeal looks. (And then there are the librarians who so graciously rescue me when the computer plays a totally one-sided game of electronic chess with its operating idiot.) Once again, my heartfelt thanks.
Finally, with some ambiguity, I want to express genuine but cranky gratefulness to Quakers and Catholic Workers. These folksthe radical fringe respectively of Protestantism and Catholicismare groping (or just hunkered down) at the boundary of orthodoxy. Since Trinity is a heavy cross to bear, it isapparentlyeven harder to set down. That is, Im not seeing much, even among Quakers and Catholic Workers, indicating a decisive break with or breakthrough from orthodoxy, though theyve largely gotten beyond murderous Protestant mythology and the magical Catholic fascination of playing dolls with saints.
As the epigraphs in this book indicate, I believe the world is in a crisis of unprecedented magnitude, a crisis not only irresolvable by the core constructs of religious orthodoxy and civilizational principles, but a crisis created by religious orthodoxy and civilizational principles. This is a crisis that will only get worsemuch, much worseuntil we repent of our orthodoxy and civility. Its time we learned to live on Earth. When that occurs, it will be the greatest acknowledgment of all.
