On heresy and the tribal mind...

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy[...]

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The eclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study[...]

Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Lies, lies, lies...

'Love thy neighbour as thyself', say the petty bourgeois, and by this those well-raised children and now useful members of the state - who are very prone to any passing emotional influenza - mean partly that if someone asks one for a pair of snuffers, even though they are sitting quite far away, one is to say 'by all means', get up 'with the greatest pleasure' and hand the snuffers to the person, and partly that one must remember to pay the obligatory condolatory calls. But they have never felt what it means for the whole world to turn its back on them, since of course the whole shoal of socializing herring in which they live will never let such a circumstance arise, and should serious help ever be required, sound sense will tell them that the person in sore need of their help, yet not at all likely to have any opportunity to help them in return, is not their 'neighbour'.

S. Kierkegaard

I wonder: is 'heresy' not the word that Christianity invented to be able to turn its back on some people with a clear conscience? Are words like that not the only way that a christian can justify with a smile in their face that the people who has left the church are 'not of God', or 'not spiritual enough'?

I recently heard of someone in a church who said: 'those who left our church were just not good enough, they were not walking with God; but we are very happy now'. This shows the importance of a clear conscience to the Christianity of our day, even when that clear conscience might be based on lies, lies, lies...

There will be blood

I found this film quite remarkable. This is the web page:

http://www.therewillbeblood.com/

You have to watch this film and then comment your impressions here.