thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-03-01, MikeRM wrote:
Sydney, have you been reading my book?
(I know you haven't, I haven't published it yet.) Basically I talk about how it's easy to exaggerate a virtue into a vice, and one of the ways that happens is being obsessed with "not doing" instead of obsessed with doing.
I also have a disclaimer when I quote the Desert Fathers about how their excessive asceticism came more from Greek dualist thought (which denigrated the physical) than from Christianity (which is, after all, in its orthodox form anyway, about the spiritual entering into the physical to redeem it). They were pretty amazing practical psychologists, though - discovered the Shadow centuries before Jung, for example.
I'm not, myself, a full-on pacifist, either; though I respect people who have the courage of that particular conviction, for the reasons you outline I'm not quite able to share it. I'm fortunate to live in a country with a foreign policy which consists basically of "Let's be as friendly and helpful as reasonably possible to everyone in sight, so that a) nobody will want to attack us, b) if anyone does we'll have lots of help (because we'll need it), c) when our people travel all over the world, they'll be welcomed, and d) everyone's more likely to buy our produce." I did some work last year for the NZ Department of Defence, and had no moral qualms about doing so, because their main functions, in practice, are disaster relief, reconstruction, search-and-rescue and peacekeeping.
As NinJ noted in the other thread, differences of emphasis arise naturally out of different religious traditions. I'm in a radical Anabaptist tradition which is suspicious of government and authority and tends towards pacifism; Sydney is in a tradition which started as a state church. I think we actually agree about everything important, we just talk about it differently.
