a-philosophers-spiritual-journey-and-bertrand-russells-influence/
Tunji Olaopa
Cornelius Hamelberg
If it ever existed at all, it’s impossible to leave one's philosophical past behind, to erase or delete that kind of cerebral content, some of it heretical, to do a neat & complete reset and arrive at a tabula rasa..,
This morning, I was horrified when I saw the title of this piece that I’m responding to. I took a few gulps and thought, “Oh no!” more “Kant & Co” and more humbug! We could be living at the end of days when there should be no time to waste, so please, please, not another long, rambling oracle of Ifa-like metaphysical rumination/mumbo-jumbo/mostly jumbo/ a dimension without head or tail, rhyme or reason or sense of purpose apart from the usual shrill insistence on wanting to be verbose!
Oh no – not some more mysterious, mystical & mystifying gobbledegook, charlatanism trying to create the kind of semantic impression by which yours truly will never be stirred or impressed, especially not after listening to His Holiness the 17th Karmapa last night (I had been at a retreat with his predecessor his earlier incarnation, His Holiness the 16h Karmapa & Kalu Rinpoche & their entourage of lamas of the Karma Kagyu (The Diamond Path) many years ago, but what struck me most about His Holiness last night, speaking here (several lectures) is all that he says, and says so simply, and with such humility…
But Russell is not Kant, and Kant, thank God, is not Bertrand Russell.
In gratitude here and now: A sincere great many, many, many, thanks to Tunji Olaopa for his – like Russell, thoughtful, very readable, down-to-earth, equally thrilling first-person account of Lord Russell’s irrevocable if not irresistible influence, wherein I was sure to find some parallels with my own quests, non-quest, just questions and other mental acts and acrobatics, the teenage sceptic's poetics and politics of the imagination, counterarguments
The title itself “A Philosopher’s Spiritual Journey And Bertrand Russell’s Influence” was/ is intentionally, if not irrevocably provocative and did whet some curiosity as to the possible influence such a one could have had on e.g. anyone with a real and an authentic, not a merely fictional or imagined supernatural Amos Tutuola type of cultural/ religious background that is the very stuff of spiritual realities in “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts “which will forever (and ever) enjoy special status in the literary sphere celebrated as “Magical Realism”, a literary genre in which big grammar has no place, no space, no face, indeed big grammar was and is not e.g. Tutola’s forte - at least wasn't when the always positively word -drunk Dylan Thomas led the chorus of international acclaim describing Tutuola’s masterpiece The Palm Wine Drinkard as “brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching”
Easy-peasy: We were required to read The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, as an introduction of what was to follow.
Can a dead man feel? The question invited a monosyllabic negative, as solid as rigor mortis. That was the essay topic Hugh Kenner gave us in my freshman class’s first encounter with my chosen subsidiary, philosophy – prior to which in middle school Colin Wilson had sent me off to the British Council library on many a wild goose chase, checking out his many references some of which promised to lead to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...
Russell’s “Why I’m not a Christian” has had its own perverse effects on the indifferent, the innocent and not so innocent would-be believers in Christ Jesus. For a while, it was Bertie vs C. S. Lewis on whose Narnia. S Lewis essays, C. S. Lewis and Christianity
In his preface to “Why I Am A Christian”, the now late John Stott addresses Russell squarely, briefly and dismissively (please click on that link)
Tunji Olaopa winds up telling us, ” That is how far Bertrand Russell drove me to engage with my own thoughts and biases. I am the better for it, trust me.”
Post-Russell, has Tunji Olaopa dialogued with this bunch of modern atheists: The four horsemen: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett?
“Trust me”
The fact is some people have enough trouble trusting themselves, never mind trusting somebody else. Reminds me of this joke that Sheikh Sadiq ( of Najaf) a really smart Shia Muslim and with a sense of humour too told me just before I was supposed to give him my first English lesson. He said that a certain pious Muslim gentleman woke up in a morgue and that the conversation went like this:
The man who woke up in the morgue had questions:
“Where am I and what am I doing here? “
He got the answer: You are in the morgue and you are dead
No, I’m not dead, I’m very much alive and talking to you!
This time he got a more reinforced answer;
You are in the morgue and you are very dead. Do you know more than me? I’m the doctor!
It’s the kind of story I should have told Hugh Kenner in answer to that question, “Can a dead man feel?” - or reserved for later questions pertaining to what believers believe is a cardinal belief in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – the resurrection when dry bones will put on new flesh
Cornelius Hamelberg
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Most importantly, first things, first.
This one sentence sticks out:”...how does the desire to know Christ, for instance, lead Christianity into mysticism? “
According to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the aim of the Christian life is Theosis
And by the way, Lobsang Rampa is hardly an accurate representation of Tibetan Buddhism!
Summing up, in the beautifully ideal last paragraph of Tunji Olaopa’s essay, he the broad-minded religious human being and public intellectual finds himself operating in what he calls “the public sphere”, the domain of social relations and I daresay with a good conscience he aims at improving/ reforming some of the current norms of social justice too. How do we put him to the test?
Tolerance is another big word, a very nice word indeed, a feel-good word usually applied to the LGBT world whereas the LGBT world (everywhere) wants both the tolerant and the intolerant to move from tolerance and intolerance to total acceptance of LGBT identities and LGBT ways of life, of being. In holy Christian vocabulary, the closest word to acceptance would be the word “charity” – the practice of charitableness.
Here is one gay poet's all-encompassing definition of holy: Footnote to Howl, something of a litmus test for “tolerance”, “acceptance” “Charitableness” etc.
My impression thus far is that from a very Nigerian Pentecostal point of view the term occultism as generally used is synonymous with witchcraft, demonism, and devil worship. Perhaps, for lack of a better word it would seem that despite the normalisation of tolerance in Tunji Olaopa, thanks to the benign influence of Bertrand Russell, the prejudice about the so-called occult remains unconcealed and not unsurprisingly that term continues to refer to all the phenomena and practices to be found outside the realm of Pentecostal Christianity. On the surface and below the surface – unconcealed, this is but natural, after all, Pentecostalism along with the more original brands of Christianity makes the same absolutist claim, that Jesus, the Son of God as the Word made flesh is the Emperor of the universe, the He who created you and me and everything that we can perceive as sense data, with our various senses, so, the line is clearly drawn in Christianity: There is God and there’s the devil. There’s good and there’s the opposite: evil.
Mention the word occult and I think of the following three people: Aleister Crowley, Frank Bardon, Cornelius Agrippa, and that’s why I was taken completely by surprise to come across the term “Tibetan Occultism” in this essay since I do not associate the Buddha and the many schools/offshoots that he has generated, with the term “occult”, although, if anything, Tibetan Buddhism can be said to share certain aspects of what for lack of a better word could be popularly referred to as Shamanism, and there too we ought not to be surprised to read this book review “Jewish Shamanism lifts the veil of illusion “by a Swedish friend Jorgen Eriksson
(To be continued)
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Cornelius Hamelberg
A
more specific synonym for charitableness
would be generosity,
generosity as
here defined,
I’m trying to practise a little of that, right here.
At the national level, Nigeria is a country in which 50% of the population is Muslim whilst the other half identify as Christians and mushrik. Just over an hour ago, I watched this video: What is Christianity. Poor Cornelius is being bombarded from all sides: I also got this from a Swedish friend, not a fiend: Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. From another friendly source, this: Top Presbyterian Church Official Delivers Anti-Semitic Sermon on MLK Day. I’m not worried. Samuel my Nigerian pastor assures me that “ the gates of hell will not prevail”
Among the Yoruba it’s also 50-50 with adherents of Islam and of Christianity being equally divided, thereby providing some kind of equilibrium and the unlikelihood of an outbreak of a religious war of the type we have seen erupting periodically between basically Hindu India and strongly Islamic Pakistan, the religious divide that resulted in the partition of that sub-continent into India and Pakistan on purely religious grounds – to date the divide has sparked a number of wars between India and Pakistan, and at the moment the flashpoint is Kashmir which is equally divided between Muslims and Hindus,, both India and Pakistan pushing their exclusive claims and wanting to control the whole of that territory. Not that Nigeria risks being partitioned along the same lines – the Muslim North and the mainly Christian South.
I have seen Tunji Olaopa as a man of considerable pondus (a Swedish word meaning authority, in Krio it would be “babati” ) and presence, at least that is how he came across in the Toyin Falola Conversations in which he has participated. There are some people who, when they talk, people listen – others – attention seekers who want to create themselves in their own chosen image may bray and uselessly use highfalutin grammar all to no effect, thank God he is none of that and that’s why it is amazing that at no point in this essay does Tunji Olaopa mention the word/ term/ nation/ religion/ people of ISLAM. This could not have been a deliberate omission/ or out forgetfulness of Islam’s existence and Islam’s supreme importance in the culture, ethics, history, power politics, development of Nigeria, nor does he seem to be the kind of man who would deliberately neglect to mention Islam - as some kind of avoidance therapy or out of animosity or out of spite. That being the case it is devoutly to be wished that all the talk of open-mindedness, tolerance and so on could be expanded to embrace al-Islam when talking about the spirit of togetherness/ unity – as the sine qua non- along with the kinds of educational reform that he has been advocating as best for the future Nigeria (this news item just came in)
Re - “The public sphere—the home of the public intellectual—offers a more significant space for fundamental ideational conversations that are founded on a fallibility-induced humility, unconditioned by petty ethnic rivalries. This for me represents a microcosm of what, in my little book, The Joy of Learning (2010), I called an enlarged mentality that enabled a learning to live together in society. This kind of learning goes beyond learning to know and learning to do to a broader understanding of the interdependent relationship among people of different persuasions and values. In a final sense, Bertrand Russell sowed into me the seed of an epistemic humility that flows from my religious open-mindedness to the significance of ideational reciprocity for the effectiveness of my reform advocacy. No reform idea can ever survive if it fails to tap into the open space where the global and the local, the government and the nongovernmental are relating coherently. That is how far Bertrand Russell drove me to engage with my own thoughts and biases. I am the better for it, trust me “( Tunji Olaopa)
Reminiscent of a man no less than George Bernard Shaw speaking so warmly about the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam and that he would have solved allthe problems of the world
““If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam...I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him – the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Savior of Humanity...I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.” (Sir George Bernard Shaw in ‘The Genuine Islam,’ Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.”)
(to be continued)
Cornelius Hamelberg
Stockholm,
Sweden.
Friday, 11th February, 12.21 pm
If knowledge is king, then these links to matters I referred to earlier, in this thread:
Rabbi Gershon Winkler ( Google)
Rabbi Gershon Winkler ( Bing)
Toyin Falola Conversations: Tunji Olaopa ( Bing)
Toyin Falola Conversations; Tunji Olaopa ( Google)
Astagfirullah, and according to the New Testament which records part of the message that Islam refers to as the “Injeel”, Jesus did say on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” Probably paraphrasing Jesus or another Talmudic sage, a later rabbi said, “Father forgive them for they know nothing!”
I believe that I belong to the latter category, so I say, “Father, forgive Cornelius Ignoramus, for he knows nothing, and more often than not, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Very often his right-hand doesn’t know what his left hand is doing, either...
Therefore, let me hasten to apologise and to correct myself for possibly imputing a motive or a wrong motive where none existed. In checking the matter out I discovered that of course and inevitably, it was probably not necessary to take up Islam in this essay since, unlike other religions, Islam has no relationship with the occult, no relationship whatsoever, and to be fair to him, Professor Tunji Olaopa has addressed the issue of Islam and profusely too, elsewhere - inevitably, and inescapably because Islam & Muslims thrive in a symbiotic relationship with Christianity’s Christians and the adherents of precolonial indigenous Yoruba religion in Yoruba-land, and moreover when it comes to the national “public sphere” it is the religion and way of life of at least half of Nigeria’s population of 220 Million.
Magic - and the pursuit of that kind of knowledge ( the magical arts) is strictly forbidden in the Torah. Also, as every Nigerian Pentecostal man and woman knows, the practise of sorcery is also strictly forbidden in the Torah to the extent that “a sorceress shall not live”
As stated earlier, fortunately, or unfortunately, when I hear the word “occult” I usually associate that word with Aleister Crowley (the notorious) more seriously Franz Bardon and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa somehow associated with the so-called Kabbalah.
The Kabbalah about which Cornelius Ignoramus knows nothing…
Here endeth...