This post will deal with the past, particularly in the vein of the "doubling-back" that must be considered always in examining important questions. Every predisposition about dealing with existence has--even in the very substance of its definition--an infinite (to our possible understandings) regression of predicates. As we might reckon that nothing comes from nothing--inasmuch as we can never hope to grasp the bounds of time or causation--so might we reckon that everything comes from nothing. Nothing, that is, to which we can lay claim to understanding.
This inability to grasp the infinites of causation is what (in our reluctance to embrace it) underlies the futility and animosity that characterize the religious posturing I described in the previous post.
The noise raised about the End Times in conservative Christianity is manifest most stridently in its emphasis on "the family," particularly as regards fervent conceptualizations about abortion and about government intrusions on "God's institution" of the family. The fantasy about the End Times and abortion hinges on the Molech-type imagery of "child sacrifice" represented as the pursuit of sexual license at the expense of motherhood. Of course, the huge proportion of women having abortions being already mothers, making such choices in terms of children already born, and merely adjusting thereby the timing of a set number of childbirths, is ignored in the general "pro-life" calculation.
What is particularly notable in the End-Times fantasy about abortion is the absence of a rather obvious expectation in the scriptural depictions of the End: the post-death lives of the "pre-born." Line upon line of precious papyrus might be devoted to describing the particular gems that adorn the eternal city, but nary a mention of the intriguing thought that most of the saved might never have had an experience of an earthly body to be supplanted by an eternal one. Many a "pro-life" plea of the twentieth century purported to be shocked that now "the most dangerous place for a child is in its mother's womb," as though--in the implacable machinery of fertilization, implantation, and gestation--such had not always been the case.
A parallel--in terms of the End-Time depictions of scripture--to abortion is to be found in the conservative Christian fixation on the threat of the state to the family. Always is the autonomy of the "biblical" family to be presumed more just, more wise, and more prudent than the contentions of the government about the welfare of children, of dependents, and (all the more as Bible norms are codified) of wives. Of course, this self-same caretaker role of the government is not to be abandoned totally, so as to assume that the conservative Christian might be thought to absolve the state of an ultimate responsibility for everyone's welfare--it is merely the case that the government in the conservative Christian view must somehow remain pristinely uninvolved in family matters until intruding at last--Solomon-like--with perfect precision and perfect restraint. The folly of such a construction of church versus state is obvious.
The untenable fantasy-state of End-Times Christianity is perpetuated in a mutual thought-silo of uncontested assertions about how the onset of Armageddon must be presaged by "atheistic Communism"--or by anything that can be attainted by that label. This is the dreaded Leftist state that is characterized endlessly as wanting to supplant the family. Of course, there is nothing in the scriptural depictions of the End Times to indicate that the institution of the family will not survive, although the reader is left with the obvious task of assuming (there being no other logical postulate) that the brutal, wealthy, and greedy elements of the latter days will pass on their goods and their tendencies through "God's institution, the family."
Vicious, parasitic capitalist elements (Christian or not) can do just as good a job of destroying the family as can vicious, parasitic collectivists. Vicious, judgmental conservative moralists (Christian or not) can do just as good a job of destroying the family as can vicious, judgmental progressive moralists. What is most important to consider, in terms of our theme of assuming that all questions of substance must stand endless "doubling-backs" of analysis, is the real genesis of any of our conceptualizations.
There is life as we understand it. We can pursue our understandings of life back to their basics, and then we can ask ourselves if we have really reached bottom. As persons who must simultaneously live and address ourselves to the questions of life, we can confront ourselves with the fact that we can never pursue any question to its source--or we can flinch from the prospect itself, and congratulate ourselves that we have grasped the "basics" of existence. I have chosen conservative Christianity (and an admittedly simplistic picture of that faction) but I might have chosen innumerable other belief systems. What I hope to achieve is an examination of belief systems themselves.
Intrinsic to the conflict between living and examining the phenomenon of life is the propensity to exist in untenable yet unaddressed states. As regards the issue of abortion, the pro-life contention that the unborn is not merely a blob of flesh is gainsaid by the fact that generations of cell division can occur before twinning--suddenly the "life from the moment of conception" becomes two "lives from the moment of conception," making it plain that the conceptus up to that point is quite appropriately called "a blob of flesh." The ancients, by happenstance or not, were not fooled, and pro-lifers cannot torture Scripture into enshrining fertilization as they would have it.
And then there is the family, that other icon of conservative Christian thought. Conservative Christians can count themselves lucky in any scenario where a critic of theirs might ridicule the judgment of the Fall as being unfair--the old "how could they know eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was wrong until they ate of it?" business. Better would it be to ask conservative Christians why Adam's predicament of being "alone" (when he was not) ever arose--when it is precisely from this predicament that family life arises. Or was it rather the case that the real First Family (God and, as Genesis will have it, the son of God, Adam) was itself dysfunctional?
This is what I, in my stumbling fashion, am getting at. The process of intellectual "doubling-back" must be endless, yet long before it might ever "end," that is, before we lack time or energy to ask questions, we run into questions that seem impossible to answer. The questions I have introduced, about abortion and about the family, do not resolve themselves into basic premises about life and about human relations, but rather they resolve themselves into quandaries about whether we grasp at all the beginnings of such things.
Take "life from the moment of conception," for example. If, as seems prudent, the idea of a toti-potential cell or group of cells with viable DNA is understood to be a human life (or a potential human life, in this case it matters not), then ought not the materialist do the "pro-lifer" one better, and remark that any human cell of idiosyncratic DNA is understood rightly as a unique and irreplaceable person? If a mutation in division leads to a unique yet viable toti-potential DNA combination in a cell of a conceptus, and that cell by happenstance is pushed to the periphery of the cell ball and therefore is not perpetuated through the reproductive process, or perhaps not reflected at all in the phenotype of the developing conceptus, is it not the case that the unique human person reflected in that idiosyncratic DNA has therefore "died?"
And yet the DNA of ancient viruses or even simpler "life's" are perpetuated in our cells. Clearly, "life" is a phenomenon that pre-exists, in terms of potentially limitless unplumbed premises, our ability to understand.
And then there is this perplexing thing called the "family," which Christians (of all people, as we shall see) characterize endlessly as God's intended "building block" of society. The family was dysfunctional before the "Fall," and also it was constructed awkwardly before the "Fall." Adam should have been contented with, and fulfilled by, the company of God, and neither Eve nor Adam should have been inclined (in what was unmistakably pre-"Fall" sinfulness) to listen to the serpent. None of this, however, can surpass the horrid tendencies of human behavior expressed from the start in "God's design, the family."
It is to the discredit of our kind that we have for so long embraced (or tolerated, or ignored) the horrors implicit in Adam's (and our) response to the existence of another human being. The "flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone" exclamation that characterizes Adam's (and our) relationship to our fellow human beings is the root of innumerable evils. Of course, Eve was actually flesh of her own flesh and bone of her own bone, and only a regard for other persons as unique individuals can animate a truly humane social consciousness. Lamentably, before any sexual implications or connotations of sexual mores would apply by necessity, Adam is told (or tells himself, it matters not) that his male inheritors will leave father and mother and cleave to wife. So the sundering of connections between parent and child (and let it not be pasted over by pretenses that is can be a seamless maturation) is a much a foundation of human society as the "cleaving unto" of man and wife.
The "Fall" has not yet occurred, and yet the agonies of human sundering (and the horrors of humanity sorted into stocks) are predestined. Already, Adam and Eve were sinning beings, and their relationship was founded on a premise of an unintended distance from God, and also founded on their difference as man versus woman. And then there came Jesus of Nazareth, as able to read Genesis as anyone, and yet inexcusably his generation and ours stare uncomprehending at the words by which he condemned--and warned against--the self-same "family as the building-block of society" cant that his supposed followers repeat unceasingly.
This is what I am getting at. Not the notion that the basics of life and of human interactions have been inadequately explored, but rather the notion that the process of examination must plunge backward further than any understandings we possess of the phenomena themselves. Life and human interactions are the extensions through time of pre-experiential and unplumbable causes, and the recognition that our thought lives are rooted in the pre-experiential makes by necessity any notion of our intellectual groundings as much wild postulations as anything else. Ideas such as the material and the supernatural as philosophical stances are as so much dirt under our fingernails, and our settlings on points of view are the dross of our intellectual workings, to be swept aside at every opportunity.
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