Revelation September 8, 2006
Posted by Phineas in : Psycho/Spirit , trackbackLet’s call revelation a kind of knowledge. And faith is the way one comes to accept and know that knowledge. Faith is really the only kind of knowing that can know revelatory knowledge.
Revelation is knowledge revealed to a certain person by a special source — in mystical terms a prophet is revealed knowledge by an angel of God or God Himself. Now the prophet possesses the knowledge and is compelled either by God or by a feeling of compassion or responsibility to for others to share it. A document or a doctrine or a teaching is produced. Now mediators or evangelists are required to go spread the word. These people are like you and me – they did not experience the revelation first hand. They just believe it or claim to.
Now one day, you are minding your own business, tending your crops or downloading MP3’s or whatever, and one of these evangelists tries to persuade you to accept the doctrine, scripture or teaching.
Or you are a child, and your mother tries to instruct you.
Whether you accept the teaching or don’t has everything to do with:
1) you relationship to the persuader
2) you intellectual capacity to comprehend the nature of this relationship
3) your power to resist
For example, if you trust and love someone, and they tell you something that you cannot verify or disprove, you may be more inclined to receive it than from a stranger. Or if you feel that person has something to gain or not – all the usual criteria for trust applies.
Even if you ought to distrust someone because they have an obvious vested interest in your accepting the teaching, you may still be powerless to resist it. Powerlessness may be due to intellectual capacity, emotional maturity, or economic disparity (or other threats or consequences). To eat, you have to bow your head and pray, or else you starve.
Therefore, revelation knowledge is dependent on or derives from a socio-economic system which manages people, their roles, their authorized knowledge.
This is not necessarily to implicate revelation knowledge as a corrupt form of social control per se. It can be benign, or start out that way. But it is still politically archaic and undemocratic. Besides, even if it’s not about power we know power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so it will become about power sooner or later.
Religions based on revelation:
1) Christianity
2) Judaism
3) Islam
4) Buddhism
5) Not sure about Hinduism? (don’t know enough about this)
To convert from one of these religions to the other means you have to decide that the people bringing you the news or teaching of the new religion are somehow more trustworthy than the ones who instructed you in the first one. I’ve yet to meet anyone from any of these religions who are even slightly more trustworthy than the most untrustworthy advocates of my first religion, Christianity.
Therefore, one needs to clarify for one’s self:
1) what other forms of knowledge are there, and what are their strengths/weaknesses? What do they allow to be knowable?
2) What other forms of spiritual feeling/expression/experience are possible which are not based on revelation/faith, if any?
3) Is revelation potentially useful if you eliminate is social apparatus? If God spoke directly to me (as opposed to some Hebrew shepherd 4000 years ago), would that count as knowledge?
4) What is the basis of the knowledge one feels that one possesses now? Can one be sure that faith/revelation are not still somehow involved? Is it possible to un-know something because you consciously reject the means by which it first became known?
Comments»
I’d like to think I’d recognize a revelation if I had one. One of the core facets of a revelation is that its effect endures long after the experience is over. That’s my belief, at least. I’ve probably had several mini-revelations over the years that eventually swirled down the drain with everything else. It’s like the difference between a full-blown stroke and a bunch of TIAs, only less debilitationg. I like to think.