Aristotle was a lazy jerk. Centuries of philosophers before him were willing to do the hard work of quantum reasoning. It’s not easy to operate on multiple levels at the same time, but it results in a far better response to the moral fabric of Creation. Aristotle simply declared there was no such thing and lopped off from his consideration all the vast lore of higher moral consciousness. He preferred the comfort of reasoning only about those things he could control. In other words, he reveled in the Fall, giving people a whole system of thought that denied revelation.
Recovering that lost legacy is harder work now than it was before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle came along to shit on God’s truth. They acted like their brilliant ideas were new, when their predecessors recognized how silly and barbaric it was to reduce knowledge to what man could control through mere sensory data and reason.
The depth with which we are infected is manifested throughout the full range of our thoughts as Westerners. It makes us intellectually lazy and we are quick to seize on false conclusions. It shows up in Western Christianity with all the things labeled “sacred” as if that would require us to bow the knee simply because someone with canon authority says so.
Nowhere is this more painfully manifest than in disputes over music. Some of us are old enough to remember stern warnings against rock music as incapable of praising God. We snicker about that now, but it’s been like that since a church hierarchy arose. One generation scolds the next for daring to develop a different artistic taste.
You don’t have to like my music, and I don’t have to like yours. Suggestions by either side that the other is somehow lacking intelligence and/or moral character because they simply can’t get into the preferences of the other characterizes almost the whole range of religious debate. (It also characterizes most political debate.)
Lately I’ve been facing some emotional stresses difficult to explain to someone outside my own head. I’ve noted previously my propensity to clinical depression, which helps to explain why I understand it as well as I do. It no longer seizes me by the throat as it once did, so you need not concern yourself with my condition. Christian Mysticism in full blossom lends itself to godly compartmentalization, allowing me to wall myself off from feelings that aren’t connected with moral reality. I can deal with those feelings as mere feelings, not reality. Part of the healing process is music. Without further ado, I offer the following as the single most powerful healing agent for my troubles, and the hope it will help some of you in yours. Yes, the whole album:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4YIAARkkw
