As Cromwell has been mentioned, I'm reminded of his victory over the Scots at Dunbar.
The Scottish army occupied Doon Hill with commanding views over the town and surrounding terrain. Cromwell's English army was tired, poorly supplied and trapped between the Scots and the coast.
Had the Scots waited the English Parliamentarian force would have weakened further and either forced to withdraw or attempt a difficult assault up hill.
Instead, Kirk preachers persuaded the Scottish commanders that they had a divine mandate against the English 'sectaries'. All they had to do was descend the hill and fall upon their enemies and victory would be theirs.
As the column descended the hillside in a disorderly fashion, Cromwell, ever the superb tactician, took full advantage of their error. His 'ironsides' rolled up the Scottish flank and the Scottish army was completely destroyed. Some 3,000 were killed and 10,000 taken prisoner.
It could not have been a more cataclysmic defeat. The Presbyterian preachers could not have been more wrong. Few of them had any military experience of course and even mess common sense by the sounds of it.
Is that an example of prelest, spiritual presumption and deception?
Of course, all sides in the Civil Wars claimed divine sanction to a greater or lesser extent. When Parliament finally beheaded Archbishop Laud the King wrote to his wife saying that this might well work out for the best as God would surely hold the rebels to account for doing so.
'God gave them as stubble to our swords,' Cromwell wrote after Newcastle's 'white coats' fought to the last at Marston Moor.
We see both jihadists and people like Hegseth coming out with stuff like this even today - not to mention Putin weaponising Orthodox tropes and imagery in his recruitment campaigns.
So now as I'm leavin', I'm weary as hell
The confusion I'm feelin' ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war
It is said that one of Abraham Lincoln's aides told him God was on our side, to which Lincoln reportedly said, “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
So now as I'm leavin', I'm weary as hell
The confusion I'm feelin' ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war
And with the rise of Christian Nationalism the first few verses spring to mind too.
The cavalries charged
And the Indians died
The country was young then
With God on its side
I blame the OT writers. Far too much killing with God on their side.
There does seem to b a divide betwween 'OT' Christians and 'NT' Chistians that is alive today. As very much of the 'NT' persuasion I'm shocked at some of the scriptures being quoted in say, debates about transgender and homosexuality. Or divorce and women priests.
Lord, have mercy. As to my own disability .... I was told to 'Ask the Lord to take it away. Well, really! Thank goodness for : https://www.ordinaryoffice.org/morning-prayer
that keeps me sane (ish).
Can you trace your lineage back to the Pilgrim Fathers and those who followed in the 1630s?
I've got to be honest. I'm often as sceptical of claims of descent from those who sailed on The Mayflower as I am of those who claim their ancestors came here with William The Conqueror or Australians who claim descent from those on the 'first fleet' - but they do exist and I have been proven wrong.
There does seem to b a divide betwween 'OT' Christians and 'NT' Chistians that is alive today. As very much of the 'NT' persuasion I'm shocked at some of the scriptures being quoted in say, debates about transgender and homosexuality. Or divorce and women priests.
Lord, have mercy. As to my own disability .... I was told to 'Ask the Lord to take it away. Well, really! Thank goodness for : https://www.ordinaryoffice.org/morning-prayer
that keeps me sane (ish).
Although some NT passages are quite 'OT-ish' and scary.
There's a reason why the Orthodox don't read Revelation in church services.
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of scary Orthodox around who wield both OT and NT texts in a scary kind of way.
We tend to 'spiritualise' or allegorise some of the scarier OT passages, or at least 'Christianise' them in some way.
However we cut it, though, there are NT passages that read uncomfortably unless we try to 'liberalise' them in some way.
However we understand these texts, all these things have to be approached in a spirit of love and grace. Easier said than done for fallible human beings.
Lord have mercy!
And it all raises issues as to where the locus of interpretation lies. With me as an individual? With us all collectively?
As far as 'spiritual deception' goes, it strikes me as something that can happen both individually and collectively. How to define it though? A departure from received and agreed 'norms'?
How can we distinguish between 'spiritual deception' and legitimate differences of opinion?
It's rather in the reading. I have been spending time with 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and it seems to me what Paul/early Christians did there was take a pretty unused greek term for love 'agape' and loads into it the characteristics they took from OT as being God's character starting from Exodus 34:6 and adding in others they picked up from elsewhere. It therefore became an explosive term that theological reshaped the Christian community.
To get an idea of how explosive I found I actually needed some idea of the Hebrew behind it. Not easy reading at all but powerful.
There does seem to b a divide betwween 'OT' Christians and 'NT' Chistians that is alive today.
And I tend to think Jesus, the apostles and those in the NT church would have found the distinction of “OT Christians” and “NT Christians,” or “OT God” and “NT God” baffling. It doesn’t appear to me that they saw any such distinctions.
Can you trace your lineage back to the Pilgrim Fathers and those who followed in the 1630s?
Some of us can trace our lineage back to Jamestown in 1607, before the Pilgrims thought about coming here.
And yes, we all have ancestors who did dodgy and terrible things. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. I have ancestors who enslaved Africans in more than one branch of my family tree.
As an aside, I've often wondered why a bigger deal is made of the 1620 Pilgrim Fathers than the earlier settlements, and was always under the impression that it was because it was more successful.
Interesting to have had ancestors connected with either, and sobering too as @Nick Tamen says.
Can you trace your lineage back to the Pilgrim Fathers and those who followed in the 1630s?
I've got to be honest. I'm often as sceptical of claims of descent from those who sailed on The Mayflower as I am of those who claim their ancestors came here with William The Conqueror or Australians who claim descent from those on the 'first fleet' - but they do exist and I have been proven wrong.
All the way to the Mayflower, on my dad's side. James Chilton and family, apparently.
Reading a book on them gave me a little more balance. There were good and bad in that camp, and certainly people who were both. "Dodgy" is a good word for it. And they were full of truly zany ideas about religion.
Interestingly, the way that they went from fundamentalism to craven greed (and you can see the older pilgrims lamenting this in their own writing) is a sight. A lot of the more terrible behavior was the younger generations. "Land-God" was a term of derision some of them used, implying the idolatry of real estate.
If I did the genealogy correctly, I've got army surgeons in my ancestry on both sides of the American Civil War. I hate to think what they saw and did.
The answer to why the Mayflower is the story behind it. They had more story to make a myth from basically.
And there were so many mixed motivations involved. They weren't all monsters. But there were some. And the best intentions often died with the people who carried them. Some of them even knew what was happening while it was happening.
The myth comes up later to cover for the shame of it all, and there is a lot. I'm far enough away that it's history to me. And it's interesting to me, perhaps epiphanical, that I also have issues with my own parents about "maybe they'd have made a wiser choice by not having me, but here I am and I have to deal with the inheritance I have." I sometimes feel like I'm cleaning up ancestral messes in my own soul. It's angry work.
If anyone wants a compelling, fair, and thorough treatment of The New World Pilgrims, I can't recommend Nathaniel Philbrick's MAYFLOWER enough. I've taken to reading it every November. Incredible stuff. Pretty sure I've mentioned it here before.
At the risk of stretching a tangent further, I wonder whether there was a north/south thing going on in the way the Massachusetts settlements became better known / more celebrated than those further south in what became Virginia and the Carolinas?
Or am I stirring things up that @Lamb Chopped's ancestors may have witnessed?
From what I can gather there was something of a 'north/south' divide even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and presumably before.
But I digress ...
Coming back to the OP, is it time to attempt a definition of 'spiritual deception' and how it might be differ from simply 'getting the wrong end of the stick' or being 'misguided.'
If anyone wants a compelling, fair, and thorough treatment of The New World Pilgrims, I can't recommend Nathaniel Philbrick's MAYFLOWER enough. I've taken to reading it every November. Incredible stuff. Pretty sure I've mentioned it here before.
That's exactly the book I read!
@Gamma Gamaliel : Even at the time, Jamestown was considered a cautionary tale. Though there might be something cultural in how the two communities related to their surrounding cultures. Jamestown was pure capitalism run amok.
Might be a question of defining what it means to be "spiritual."
That's one I struggle with. I wrote a CPE paper that was about my spiritual growth, and another paper that was about my biography. And my mentor observed that the two papers were too similar.
Honestly, I struggled to figure out how my "spiritual life" is distinct from my ordinary life.
'First the natural, then the spiritual...' the two are linked.
'Matter matters,' as we Orthodox keep saying.
Would it help if we defined it as 'deceptive or deluded beliefs/emphases and actions in a religious context that can lead to harm to oneself and others.'
That's pretty broad.
A rule of thumb with ascetic practices in an Orthodox context or instance, would be that ascetic practice is good unless it leads to actual physical harm - so no self-flagellation and such - but Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints sitting on poles or living in trees - 'dendrites' - or praying all night long or depriving themselves of sleep or ...
I s'pose it comes down to where each particular group, church or tradition draws the line as to what is acceptable or otherwise.
I don't, but they talked like they should somehow be distinct enough that writing about one wouldn't overlap with the other.
I find this confusing.
Though...perhaps people can become selfish and perhaps be deceived by their own deep desires and then project those desires onto the universe? And that's one kind, to see a need of one's own spirit and exaggerate it until it becomes confused with God?
@Gamma Gamaliel re “ascetic practice is good unless it leads to actual physical harm - so no self-flagellation and such”—well, it doesn’t have to go as far as actually causing harm, though I know some flagellants actually use things that draw blood (eek!). I would avoid that just on basic safety principles.
(How that worked when people did that years and years ago, before antibiotics and stuff, I don’t know, but even with modern medical stuff, I’d avoid drawing blood or causing genuine damage.)
I don't, but they talked like they should somehow be distinct enough that writing about one wouldn't overlap with the other.
I find this confusing.
Though...perhaps people can become selfish and perhaps be deceived by their own deep desires and then project those desires onto the universe? And that's one kind, to see a need of one's own spirit and exaggerate it until it becomes confused with God?
That sounds frankly weird (not your bit, the bit where they think that a spiritual life is distinct from one's "ordinary" life). Surely the point of Christianity is to embrace the whole of one's life, to give all of it meaning and a purpose?
If someone said that to me, I'd be greatly tempted to ask in all innocence (well, with an innocent face) exactly how they told the difference. Because IMHO, a spiritual life that is walled off from the rest of one's life isn't worth anything at all.
I don't, but they talked like they should somehow be distinct enough that writing about one wouldn't overlap with the other.
I find this confusing.
Though...perhaps people can become selfish and perhaps be deceived by their own deep desires and then project those desires onto the universe? And that's one kind, to see a need of one's own spirit and exaggerate it until it becomes confused with God?
That sounds frankly weird (not your bit, the bit where they think that a spiritual life is distinct from one's "ordinary" life). Surely the point of Christianity is to embrace the whole of one's life, to give all of it meaning and a purpose?
If someone said that to me, I'd be greatly tempted to ask in all innocence (well, with an innocent face) exactly how they told the difference. Because IMHO, a spiritual life that is walled off from the rest of one's life isn't worth anything at all.
I think most Christians would agree with you @Lamb Chopped but if we aren't careful we can compartmentalise and 'wall off' what we might call our 'spiritual lives' from what we might call 'the rest' of our lives as it were. Sunday morning Christianity.
It can a lifetime (and more?) to orientate ourselves more equitably.
Returning to historical instances for a moment ...
I was taken aback to read more about Gerard Winstanley's beliefs, for instance - he of The Diggers and St George's Hill fame - 'this world a common treasury for all.'
We all think of groups like The Levellers and The Diggers as the good guys - hippy lefty Christian communist types who challenged both the Royalist and Parliamentarian status quo and sought to create a pre-lapsarian utopia. And yes, they did attempt to do that and there is much to admire.
What I hadn't realised that in his 1652 pamphlet, The Law of Freedom, Winstanley advocated, along with free education for both boys and girls, the death penalty for buying and selling and for being a parson or lawyer.
That would send several Shipmates to an early grave ...
You've got to admire those 17th century radicals. They didn't do things by halves ...
I don't, but they talked like they should somehow be distinct enough that writing about one wouldn't overlap with the other.
I find this confusing.
Though...perhaps people can become selfish and perhaps be deceived by their own deep desires and then project those desires onto the universe? And that's one kind, to see a need of one's own spirit and exaggerate it until it becomes confused with God?
That sounds frankly weird (not your bit, the bit where they think that a spiritual life is distinct from one's "ordinary" life). Surely the point of Christianity is to embrace the whole of one's life, to give all of it meaning and a purpose?
If someone said that to me, I'd be greatly tempted to ask in all innocence (well, with an innocent face) exactly how they told the difference. Because IMHO, a spiritual life that is walled off from the rest of one's life isn't worth anything at all.
I think he acknowledged the awkwardness and made it seem like it was pro forma, or that the spiritual side was more about your religious upbringing or the spiritual systems that you operated under.
Since the spiritual systems of my youth were a hodgepodge...that's rather hilarious. I was a poorly trained ad hoc mystic as a kid. Go figure I wound up an Episcopalian.
Yikes! If that guy wanted my religious upbringing, he'd get a big fat zero. Or darn close to it. To speak of one's spiritual life in that way is assuming A Lot.
Returning to historical instances for a moment ...
I was taken aback to read more about Gerard Winstanley's beliefs, for instance - he of The Diggers and St George's Hill fame - 'this world a common treasury for all.'
We all think of groups like The Levellers and The Diggers as the good guys - hippy lefty Christian communist types who challenged both the Royalist and Parliamentarian status quo and sought to create a pre-lapsarian utopia. And yes, they did attempt to do that and there is much to admire.
What I hadn't realised that in his 1652 pamphlet, The Law of Freedom, Winstanley advocated, along with free education for both boys and girls, the death penalty for buying and selling …
More specifically, for buying and selling "the Earth or fruits thereof, unless it be to, or with <strangers> of another nation".
And the context was his advocacy "for the Commonwealth to be reorganised into a communist society, without private property or money, like that which he had attempted to establish at George's Hill."
One illustration of the prevailing attitude to the death penalty is that following the end of the Commonwealth in 1660, "between 1688 and 1820, the total number of capital crimes in England and Wales grew from about 50 to over 200". Ironically, "most of the new statutes focused on the protection of property."
NB In contrast to a communist state, "a communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour."
Yikes! If that guy wanted my religious upbringing, he'd get a big fat zero. Or darn close to it. To speak of one's spiritual life in that way is assuming A Lot.
Yeah. I had a religious background, but...it was a conflicted mess. Honestly, "zero" might've been an improvement. On the other hand, it does make me kind of a spiritual multi-tool, kinda like a soap.
I'm sure many Episcopalians are 'poorly trained ad hoc mystics' ... likewise many folk from right across the Christian spectrum.
We could do with more mystics if you ask me. Preferably trained ones. I'm not sure if there's a Mystic School out there though.
@Pease indeed. Although I'm not convinced a Winstanley-esque attempt at a theocratic pre-lapsarian utopia would have been any less deadly than the nascent and naked capitalism that gained further traction after 1688.
If you are hanged for stealing a sheep or hanged for being a lawyer or parson, you're still dead.
I often think of the missiologist Lesslie Newbiggin's dictum: 'Any attempt to bring Heaven down from above invariably brings Hell up from below.'
I think you have to put it within a context where capital punishment was the norm for many crimes and was frequently carried out publicly (often in a highly theatrical and painful manner) - rather than reducing it to another cautionary tale.
Of course Winstanley was operating in a context where capital punishment was the norm for many crimes. He was also operating in a context where those in charge thought they had the right to reform the morals of the populace to some extent or other.
Heck, even many Royalists were pretty moralising.
I wasn't aware I was 'reducing' it to anything. I'm not the one being reductionist here.
FWIW I think we owe a lot to those radicals even though they were thwarted at the time. Things aren't perfect now by a long chalk but we wouldn't have many of the freedoms we have today if it were not for 'outliers' like the Levellers and Diggers and so on.
Saying they were wonky in some ways doesn't mean they didn't hit it right in others.
One reason for extreme punishment, so I've heard, was that it was very rare for criminals to actually get caught. So they had to make a big show of it when they caught one, to try to terrify the rest into submission.
I wasn't aware I was 'reducing' it to anything. I'm not the one being reductionist here.
Okay. If it isn't simply a case of reducing this event to yet another utopian scheme which inevitably results in violence, then the Newbiggen quote no longer applies.
Ok. I see the point you are making now. I'd say the Newbiggin quote still applies whilst also acknowledging that people like Winstanley were reacting in an understandable way to the conditions and issues of the time.
I'm Mr Both/And don't forget ...
😉
I don't see how it's reductionist to say that understandable and commendable as Winstanley's utopian experiments may have been they carried with them theocratic assumptions that we'd find problematic today.
What's so reductionist about that?
What would be reductionist would be to dismiss Winstanley and The Diggers as a bunch of cranks on the one hand or laud them as proto-loveable lefties on the other whilst overlooking some of their more dangerous beliefs.
I don't see how respectfully doffing my hat to them on the one hand mutually excludes pointing out how whacky or unworkable some of their ideas were.
It'd have been great if they'd been left alone on St George's Hill or received help to fulfil their communitarian vision. Sadly, they were dispersed.
I don't see how it's reductionist to say that understandable and commendable as Winstanley's utopian experiments may have been they carried with them theocratic assumptions that we'd find problematic today.
Okay, that's less reductionist than your original post, so I'll take it.
…What would be reductionist would be to dismiss Winstanley and The Diggers as a bunch of cranks on the one hand or laud them as proto-loveable lefties on the other whilst overlooking some of their more dangerous beliefs.
I don't see how respectfully doffing my hat to them on the one hand mutually excludes pointing out how whacky or unworkable some of their ideas were.
It'd have been great if they'd been left alone on St George's Hill or received help to fulfil their communitarian vision. Sadly, they were dispersed.
That was usually the case, but at George's Hill (despite the words of the song) it seems they left of their own accord after losing a court case (in which they were forbidden to speak in their own defence), which would have allowed the army to have been sent in to remove them.
Comments
The Scottish army occupied Doon Hill with commanding views over the town and surrounding terrain. Cromwell's English army was tired, poorly supplied and trapped between the Scots and the coast.
Had the Scots waited the English Parliamentarian force would have weakened further and either forced to withdraw or attempt a difficult assault up hill.
Instead, Kirk preachers persuaded the Scottish commanders that they had a divine mandate against the English 'sectaries'. All they had to do was descend the hill and fall upon their enemies and victory would be theirs.
As the column descended the hillside in a disorderly fashion, Cromwell, ever the superb tactician, took full advantage of their error. His 'ironsides' rolled up the Scottish flank and the Scottish army was completely destroyed. Some 3,000 were killed and 10,000 taken prisoner.
It could not have been a more cataclysmic defeat. The Presbyterian preachers could not have been more wrong. Few of them had any military experience of course and even mess common sense by the sounds of it.
Is that an example of prelest, spiritual presumption and deception?
Of course, all sides in the Civil Wars claimed divine sanction to a greater or lesser extent. When Parliament finally beheaded Archbishop Laud the King wrote to his wife saying that this might well work out for the best as God would surely hold the rebels to account for doing so.
'God gave them as stubble to our swords,' Cromwell wrote after Newcastle's 'white coats' fought to the last at Marston Moor.
We see both jihadists and people like Hegseth coming out with stuff like this even today - not to mention Putin weaponising Orthodox tropes and imagery in his recruitment campaigns.
And with the rise of Christian Nationalism the first few verses spring to mind too.
The cavalries charged
And the Indians died
The country was young then
With God on its side
I blame the OT writers. Far too much killing with God on their side.
Still, Nil carborundum illegitimi
It's what happens when you come to believe that God requires you to be a psychopath and to abdicate all moral reasoning in favour of the text.
I just read a book all about that. I wonder if some of those were my ancestors. Humbling.
Lord, have mercy. As to my own disability .... I was told to 'Ask the Lord to take it away. Well, really! Thank goodness for :
https://www.ordinaryoffice.org/morning-prayer
that keeps me sane (ish).
Can you trace your lineage back to the Pilgrim Fathers and those who followed in the 1630s?
I've got to be honest. I'm often as sceptical of claims of descent from those who sailed on The Mayflower as I am of those who claim their ancestors came here with William The Conqueror or Australians who claim descent from those on the 'first fleet' - but they do exist and I have been proven wrong.
Although some NT passages are quite 'OT-ish' and scary.
There's a reason why the Orthodox don't read Revelation in church services.
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of scary Orthodox around who wield both OT and NT texts in a scary kind of way.
We tend to 'spiritualise' or allegorise some of the scarier OT passages, or at least 'Christianise' them in some way.
However we cut it, though, there are NT passages that read uncomfortably unless we try to 'liberalise' them in some way.
However we understand these texts, all these things have to be approached in a spirit of love and grace. Easier said than done for fallible human beings.
Lord have mercy!
And it all raises issues as to where the locus of interpretation lies. With me as an individual? With us all collectively?
As far as 'spiritual deception' goes, it strikes me as something that can happen both individually and collectively. How to define it though? A departure from received and agreed 'norms'?
How can we distinguish between 'spiritual deception' and legitimate differences of opinion?
To get an idea of how explosive I found I actually needed some idea of the Hebrew behind it. Not easy reading at all but powerful.
Some of us can trace our lineage back to Jamestown in 1607, before the Pilgrims thought about coming here.
And yes, we all have ancestors who did dodgy and terrible things. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. I have ancestors who enslaved Africans in more than one branch of my family tree.
It’s sobering.
Interesting to have had ancestors connected with either, and sobering too as @Nick Tamen says.
All the way to the Mayflower, on my dad's side. James Chilton and family, apparently.
Reading a book on them gave me a little more balance. There were good and bad in that camp, and certainly people who were both. "Dodgy" is a good word for it. And they were full of truly zany ideas about religion.
Interestingly, the way that they went from fundamentalism to craven greed (and you can see the older pilgrims lamenting this in their own writing) is a sight. A lot of the more terrible behavior was the younger generations. "Land-God" was a term of derision some of them used, implying the idolatry of real estate.
And there were so many mixed motivations involved. They weren't all monsters. But there were some. And the best intentions often died with the people who carried them. Some of them even knew what was happening while it was happening.
The myth comes up later to cover for the shame of it all, and there is a lot. I'm far enough away that it's history to me. And it's interesting to me, perhaps epiphanical, that I also have issues with my own parents about "maybe they'd have made a wiser choice by not having me, but here I am and I have to deal with the inheritance I have." I sometimes feel like I'm cleaning up ancestral messes in my own soul. It's angry work.
Or am I stirring things up that @Lamb Chopped's ancestors may have witnessed?
From what I can gather there was something of a 'north/south' divide even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and presumably before.
But I digress ...
Coming back to the OP, is it time to attempt a definition of 'spiritual deception' and how it might be differ from simply 'getting the wrong end of the stick' or being 'misguided.'
What does it mean to be spiritually deceived?
That's exactly the book I read!
@Gamma Gamaliel : Even at the time, Jamestown was considered a cautionary tale. Though there might be something cultural in how the two communities related to their surrounding cultures. Jamestown was pure capitalism run amok.
Might be a question of defining what it means to be "spiritual."
That's one I struggle with. I wrote a CPE paper that was about my spiritual growth, and another paper that was about my biography. And my mentor observed that the two papers were too similar.
Honestly, I struggled to figure out how my "spiritual life" is distinct from my ordinary life.
We don't want to get into dualistic territory.
'First the natural, then the spiritual...' the two are linked.
'Matter matters,' as we Orthodox keep saying.
Would it help if we defined it as 'deceptive or deluded beliefs/emphases and actions in a religious context that can lead to harm to oneself and others.'
That's pretty broad.
A rule of thumb with ascetic practices in an Orthodox context or instance, would be that ascetic practice is good unless it leads to actual physical harm - so no self-flagellation and such - but Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints sitting on poles or living in trees - 'dendrites' - or praying all night long or depriving themselves of sleep or ...
I s'pose it comes down to where each particular group, church or tradition draws the line as to what is acceptable or otherwise.
I don't, but they talked like they should somehow be distinct enough that writing about one wouldn't overlap with the other.
I find this confusing.
Though...perhaps people can become selfish and perhaps be deceived by their own deep desires and then project those desires onto the universe? And that's one kind, to see a need of one's own spirit and exaggerate it until it becomes confused with God?
(How that worked when people did that years and years ago, before antibiotics and stuff, I don’t know, but even with modern medical stuff, I’d avoid drawing blood or causing genuine damage.)
That sounds frankly weird (not your bit, the bit where they think that a spiritual life is distinct from one's "ordinary" life). Surely the point of Christianity is to embrace the whole of one's life, to give all of it meaning and a purpose?
If someone said that to me, I'd be greatly tempted to ask in all innocence (well, with an innocent face) exactly how they told the difference. Because IMHO, a spiritual life that is walled off from the rest of one's life isn't worth anything at all.
Beautifully put. 100% agree. PTL!
It can a lifetime (and more?) to orientate ourselves more equitably.
I was taken aback to read more about Gerard Winstanley's beliefs, for instance - he of The Diggers and St George's Hill fame - 'this world a common treasury for all.'
We all think of groups like The Levellers and The Diggers as the good guys - hippy lefty Christian communist types who challenged both the Royalist and Parliamentarian status quo and sought to create a pre-lapsarian utopia. And yes, they did attempt to do that and there is much to admire.
What I hadn't realised that in his 1652 pamphlet, The Law of Freedom, Winstanley advocated, along with free education for both boys and girls, the death penalty for buying and selling and for being a parson or lawyer.
That would send several Shipmates to an early grave ...
You've got to admire those 17th century radicals. They didn't do things by halves ...
I think he acknowledged the awkwardness and made it seem like it was pro forma, or that the spiritual side was more about your religious upbringing or the spiritual systems that you operated under.
Since the spiritual systems of my youth were a hodgepodge...that's rather hilarious. I was a poorly trained ad hoc mystic as a kid. Go figure I wound up an Episcopalian.
Ouch indeed, that would leave me as a widow 😬😆
And the context was his advocacy "for the Commonwealth to be reorganised into a communist society, without private property or money, like that which he had attempted to establish at George's Hill."
One illustration of the prevailing attitude to the death penalty is that following the end of the Commonwealth in 1660, "between 1688 and 1820, the total number of capital crimes in England and Wales grew from about 50 to over 200". Ironically, "most of the new statutes focused on the protection of property."
NB In contrast to a communist state, "a communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour."
[Other quotes from wikipedia]
Noooooo......
Or *uses legal training to weasel out of guilty plea* would it only be for currently practising lawyers?
Yeah. I had a religious background, but...it was a conflicted mess. Honestly, "zero" might've been an improvement. On the other hand, it does make me kind of a spiritual multi-tool, kinda like a soap.
We could do with more mystics if you ask me. Preferably trained ones. I'm not sure if there's a Mystic School out there though.
@Pease indeed. Although I'm not convinced a Winstanley-esque attempt at a theocratic pre-lapsarian utopia would have been any less deadly than the nascent and naked capitalism that gained further traction after 1688.
If you are hanged for stealing a sheep or hanged for being a lawyer or parson, you're still dead.
I often think of the missiologist Lesslie Newbiggin's dictum: 'Any attempt to bring Heaven down from above invariably brings Hell up from below.'
Of course Winstanley was operating in a context where capital punishment was the norm for many crimes. He was also operating in a context where those in charge thought they had the right to reform the morals of the populace to some extent or other.
Heck, even many Royalists were pretty moralising.
I wasn't aware I was 'reducing' it to anything. I'm not the one being reductionist here.
Saying they were wonky in some ways doesn't mean they didn't hit it right in others.
Okay. If it isn't simply a case of reducing this event to yet another utopian scheme which inevitably results in violence, then the Newbiggen quote no longer applies.
I'm Mr Both/And don't forget ...
😉
I don't see how it's reductionist to say that understandable and commendable as Winstanley's utopian experiments may have been they carried with them theocratic assumptions that we'd find problematic today.
What's so reductionist about that?
What would be reductionist would be to dismiss Winstanley and The Diggers as a bunch of cranks on the one hand or laud them as proto-loveable lefties on the other whilst overlooking some of their more dangerous beliefs.
I don't see how respectfully doffing my hat to them on the one hand mutually excludes pointing out how whacky or unworkable some of their ideas were.
It'd have been great if they'd been left alone on St George's Hill or received help to fulfil their communitarian vision. Sadly, they were dispersed.
Okay, that's less reductionist than your original post, so I'll take it.