And my bad - I see this book was by Gregory.

It was wordpress that told you that it would not share your email address, and not I. There was no devious bait-and switch plan.

Now your email address will NOT be broadcast to the entire WORLD.

Sorry for the scare.

-K.

Second, I wasn’t googling the title of this book (by Metropolitan Gregory Postnikov, BTW, not St. Theophan the Recluse) to argue with anyone, much less “pick on” anyone. I was Googling it to see where I could order several copies because I want to give it to some people. I didn’t intend to “pick on” anyone, but to try to help him by offering some context within which that book was written.

If he or anyone perceived my post not as an attempt to inform but an attack, I am sincerely sorry.

PLEASE edit your post and remove my email address!

Thank you

This said, I’d agree with you that Theophan’s philosophy isn’t “fundamentalism”, at least in the way I understand the word.

I find it interesting that Levi (an atheist)’s posts receive testy responses from other atheists, while Nathan (a deacon in a church that’s orthodox enough to receive overtures from Metropolitan Jonah) gets picked on by orthodox guys.

I think there’s this whole class of guys out there with the hobby of googling the titles of books that are super-special to them so they like so they can argue about them with internet strangers. I’m not knocking that - I kind of love it, but I find these people mysterious and hard to understand, and I’d love to get a few of them in a room together and see what happened.

You said, for example, “… for Metropolitan Gregory, holiness is attained by building fences around your passions so that you don’t experience anything that might actually be pleasant…” Jesus Christ was not a modern pop psychology “love yourself” and “follow your bliss” “affirmation and empowerment” cheerleader. He understood that what we suppose is our “unalianable right” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” doesn’t work. He did not call us to self-denial and taking up our own cross to follow Him because He didn’t want us to have any fun, but because He knows that we spend our entire lives restlessly grasping and striving for what we desire, and paradoxically, it does NOT lead to happiness! He spoke to the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well about people living their entire lives endlessly thirsty, coming back and back to the well, but it doesn’t work, it doesn’t last, they have to keep coming back. That woman had gone through 5 men one after another, and had not been married to them all, but her life was NOT one of “happiness,” but emptiness; she was still “thirsty.” Jesus does NOT call us to spend our lives grasping for what we desire, because it leads to a life more than a little like that of an addict grasping for another hit of whatever drug it may be in his or her case. When we don’t get what we want, we’re unhappy; when we get what we want, we’re happy only briefly, and then we want more, or we want something else. THIS is why Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, why he says that even he who wants to save his LIFE shall lose it, but he who loses his life for His sake shall save it.

Metropolitan Anthony is teaching simple, practical ways for us to put in action what Jesus calls us to in the Bible. Looked at from a Western, legalistic worldview, it seems very dark, like he is trying to interfere with our happiness. That’s not it at all. There is a paradox that Jesus understands but we do not: the more we spend our lives “pursuing happiness” and striving to enjoy our “passions,” the more restlessly empty we are; but the more we give away happiness, the more we empty ourselves as Jesus emptied Himself (even of life itself on the Cross), the more we put what we desire and suppose we have a “right” to on our cross to be crucified with ourselves, the more we self-emptyingly love God and our neighbor, … the more we become liberated from an unconscious, robotic obedience to our desires, and the more we are truly free. The more we empty ourselves the more we can be filled with God’s Illumination by the Holy Spirit. The more we spend our lives filling ourselves up with what {{{ we }}} want, the less room there is for God. Our Fall, after all, was turning away from the Giver of all gifts to our desire for the gifts themselves. The Prodigal Son asked for everything he wanted and felt he had a right to, and his father gave it all to him! But the result was misery; NOT because the father punished him, but because the course the Prodigal Son chose does not lead to joy but sorrow. “Coming to himself,” emptying himself of his desires, his “better ideas,” and returning to his father with faith in his father’s lovingkindness, was the path to which Jesus calls us all. We suppose, like children, that pursuing what we want, our “passions,” will make us happy. Jesus says we are mistaken, and we spend our lives endlessly “thirsty” for what we desire, and our pursuit of what we want does not lead to fulfillment, peace, or joy.

“How to Live a Holy Life” is not “fundamentalism,” but a very simple, practical way to put into action in our daily lives what Jesus calls all of us to. It just has to be understood in the context of the original Christianity, as preserved still living in the Orthodox Church.

The first note is labelled “I. narrative of quest for mother progressive bodily deterioration” By the third page, she is already doing things that are not typical college student notes in the margins bits, like writing “intensity of language.” This either means it is someone who is a fan of Beckett’s, or is probably beyond the student level. They are reading it for aesthetic pleasure, or at least with an eye for things such as “intensity of language.”

A few pages later there is a note in the margin that a passage has “anti-expressive tendencies.” She randomly underlines phrases for a few pages, then brackets a quote on page 21 with “powerful.”

But I lean away from the aesthetic lay reader for the bits of academic coursework looking stuff that occasionally pops up, like on page 23, “only exists in bureaucracy”. This seems like the sort of thing one presents to a class.

She also has a particular habit of making her notes look like algebraic formulas. Things are bracketed, circled, and underlined in the same passage.

She isn’t a particularly voracious note taker. There are longs gaps between inkings. She was only interested in Molloy, as the other two novels (included in the same volume) do not have notes.

Your instantly combatative and insult-filled style of argument sort of takes the wind out your point.

Also, your explanation of the persecution of religious folk by atheists in terms of a clash between militant ideologies which needn’t be aligned with the non-belief in God can be easily adapted (and has been) to absolve Christians guilt in historical persecutions (i.e. “The Spanish crown was expelling the Jews so the state could have their money, that has nothing to do with REAL Christianity”, etc.)

Furthermore, in both the Spanish Civil War and the French Revolution, there were atheist mobs who contravened government edicts to lynch catholic clergy for the sole reason that they were catholic clergy.

History shows us that both Christians and atheists can go nuts and kill people irrationaly - and perhaps in spite of the logical implications of the system to which they purport to adhere.

Also, I’d be interested to learn how old you are.

That is utterly ridiculous.

What transpired was a conflict between totalitarian ideologies… one that proclaimed the supremacy of an invisible, magical, all-powerful, supernatural sky-fairy, and one that proclaimed the supremacy of a political philosophy, and its institutions.

Atheism is not an ideology, and atheism has no agenda. Atheism is simply skepticism pertaining to the assertion… unsupported by compelling (or even credible) evidence… that invisible, magical, all-powerful, supernatural sky-fairies exist.

The authors are essentially claiming (and you seem to be agreeing) that all that death and destruction resulted from a disagreement with respect to the reasonableness or unreasonableness of ‘believing’ in invisible, magical, all-powerful, supernatural sky-fairies. That is… at BEST… absurd.

When I finished Cambodia I felt like I had learned a goddam lot of stuff, but a lot of it didn’t come from the book, but instead the conversations the book made me have with myself, so I resisted the urge to post it all in my book’s blog entry and instead came here.

One of the things that I think I’ve discovered is why The Great Stereopticon exists. My initial feeling was that something so insidious and so set against human happiness had to be a subtly useful instrument of our barbarian overlords (which it is) or the devil incarnate (which is still a really good way of looking at it), but I’ve come to a dryer, more structural interpretation of the thing that I think provides me with additional insights as to how it might ultimately be defeated.

My primary insight is this: the raison d’etre of The Great Stereopticon is not that it seeks to make people forget transcendentals (though it does this, and this is the primary reason for which it is to be feared). The reason that the damned thing exists and spreads is that it is that the economies which have based themselves upon it have grown bigger and faster, and have thus conquered the others. The Stereopticon is profitable. Remove a man from transcendental happiness, deceive him into thinking that assuaging his most base animal lusts is the only path towards anything resembling rest, and ratchet up these lusts so as to be unattainable (using airbrushes, CGI, camera angles, addictive substances, impossibly penile pornography, an rousing bass line, sitcoms that make his wife think he’s stupid, chips that make his wife fat, etc, etc), and a man will keep working and working and buying and buying and before you know it his civilization’s economy will have bought up most of the others in the world and his government will have (with its massive tax revenues to spend on tanks) taken over the rest.

Reading Chatwin’s Restlessness, I came to believe that things had gone a step further and that even our base animal gratifications have been replaced with ones that don’t work as well so we’ll stay miserable and keep coming back for more. We buy birth control pills for every month and batteries for the machine that rocks our babies, while our ancestors more easily (and not having to buy the privilege) strapped their kids on their backs and walked, creating the pattern of menses that solves one problem and the rocking motion that solves the other. We spend days in dehumanizing slave labor at our shitty jobs so we can buy burgers, gym memberships, and roller-coaster thrills when we could get the benefits of all of three by doing what our genes really want us to do and occasionally lunging at the heart of a wild boar with a dagger.

Rousseau/Civilization is a disease/Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains, etc.

I digress.

So up until this point, my new structural, economic articulation of the problem doesn’t add any dimensionality to the solutions I’d already decided on. The path to happiness is still the same: Live physically. Turn off the TV. Go off the grid. Grow your food. Fuck your wife a lot. Believe. Don’t work too much. Listen to folk music and not pop. Listen to your own music. Rediscover conversation. Guard your kids from the spirit of the age. Blah, blah. Same old, same old.

Here’s what’s new: this century, not even ten years on, has seen the explosion of the nonmarket production of artifacts. It was first believed to be some bizarre and probably short-lived apparition that only applied to software, but non-market production has since begun to create music, movies, mountains of essays, and a hell of an encyclopedia. The obvious limitation that suggests itself is that these are all information artifacts, but just about every smart person I’ve read on the subject says that everything is becoming an information technology. The technology predictors with the best track records are envisioning a world where the means of production for physical things like clothes and food and even electronics are cheap and in every home, and the lion’s share of the cost of any item is wrapped up in the intellectual property of, say, the shirt design or recipe. Imagine with me now, that the trend of nonmarket, open-source production, whatever its bizarre motivations, continues into the coming era of fab labs. I’ve already seen a site for open source sewing patterns. What could happen is that people become able to furnish themselves with necessities, luxuries, and works of art that are free. Imagining for a moment that the capitalist incumbents somehow allow this world to materialize, these industries of production sans market incentives would be quite without incentives to try and whip consumers up into a fury of angst and dissatisfaction and perpetual lust. So maybe Stereopticon would disappear? I don’t know.

Even if the point truly comes where some technologically enabled neo-folk culture can serve up anything we want for free, I think that the ingrained stupidity of the masses will ensure that there’s always a demand for Nike brand shoes and Macintosh brand computers, if for no reason other than that they have cute girls on their commercials, or even have commercials at all.

Still, though, I’m surprised and relieved to think that there’s an imaginable future out there wherein The Great Stereopticon could be dealt such a blow.

That’s all.

I’ve heard (or read) “sick” meaning “cool” - but “tragic” for “cool” is wonderful.

But Vinge’s barely-alluded to expectation that the whole world was on the edge of something unprecedented and unimaginable, even while the book’s bewildered characters struggled to make sense of a issues that were trivial in comparison, might have added more awe and terror to the thing.

You’ve read Snow Crash, right? It used to give me a similar feeling, but not so bad, because it was less “realistic” sci-fi than this apparently is.

“Thanks for the post! Added [blog] into RSS-[rider], now read I will be regular”