Heaven as a reality negates the struggle of labour

[CplFerro]

It occurred to me, thinking about the Christian notion of the afterlife, that the standard life, death, resurrection, judgement, afterlife scenario completely renders the struggle of labour irrelevant. By that struggle I mean not only the struggle for social justice, but also the struggle more specifically of geniuses to contribute to society, so that, with these two struggles taken together, society tries to advance to a higher mode of existence.

The Christian afterlife model completely smashes the relevance of all contributions made by all geniuses throughout all of history, and renders the struggle for justice in the here and now by organised labour, a meaningless farce. If Jesus comes down and sets up a perfect government, everything that came before that government is immaterial. It's an immediate leap to total social justice. All of history becomes, instead of a sensuous, meaningful reality to be overcome by thought and action, merely a giant virtual reality test of character. The actual fruits of character mean nothing, in a civilisational sense.

Don't bother planning for the future, activating for change, inventing something, or anything except throwing pennies into the collection plate on Sunday -- it'll all come out in the wash anyway when Jeeeeesus arrives.

[Beerina]

If Jesus ever came down, I say we all go on strike until he started producing free food and holodecks for us to be entertained. It's no skin off his ass, after all.

Or am I missing something in this whole "reality" business? :confused: We're supposed to jump through hoops of effort just why again? For some jr. high school science project of Yahweh's?

[slingblade]

Don't bother planning for the future, activating for change, inventing something, or anything except throwing pennies into the collection plate on Sunday -- it'll all come out in the wash anyway when Jeeeeesus arrives.

You're not supposed to do that anyway, that planning stuff. Give us this day, our daily bread. Nothing about stocking up, there.
Consider the lilies of the field, the birds, and all those things that aren't human and don't have mortgages, car payments, and credit cards. They don't spin, yet are clothed; don't toil, yet they reap. So sit on your butt and contemplate your navel, I guess....but if you're a woman, don't let anyone see your navel. It's bad.

Jesus is coming. Look busy.

[David Swidler]

Jesus is coming. Look busy.

I think I have found my sig. May I?

[slingblade]

I think I have found my sig. May I?

You're so kind to ask, but it's not mine, so go ahead. :)

[Meffy]

My only comment is that the title of this thread really ought to be painted on a BIG Soviet-style propaganda poster.

[Jimbo07]

It occurred to me, thinking about the Christian notion of the afterlife, that the standard life, death, resurrection, judgement, afterlife scenario completely renders the struggle of labour irrelevant...

The Christian afterlife model completely smashes the relevance of all contributions made by all geniuses throughout all of history, and renders the struggle for justice in the here and now by organised labour, a meaningless farce...

Don't bother planning for the future, activating for change, inventing something, or anything except throwing pennies into the collection plate on Sunday -- it'll all come out in the wash anyway when Jeeeeesus arrives...

...or will be rendered irrelevant when the universe becomes unliveable. :boxedin:

Irrelevance is probably not the best argument to use against Xians... ;)

[ceo_esq]

It occurred to me, thinking about the Christian notion of the afterlife, that the standard life, death, resurrection, judgement, afterlife scenario completely renders the struggle of labour irrelevant. By that struggle I mean not only the struggle for social justice, but also the struggle more specifically of geniuses to contribute to society, so that, with these two struggles taken together, society tries to advance to a higher mode of existence.

The Christian afterlife model completely smashes the relevance of all contributions made by all geniuses throughout all of history, and renders the struggle for justice in the here and now by organised labour, a meaningless farce. If Jesus comes down and sets up a perfect government, everything that came before that government is immaterial. It's an immediate leap to total social justice. All of history becomes, instead of a sensuous, meaningful reality to be overcome by thought and action, merely a giant virtual reality test of character. The actual fruits of character mean nothing, in a civilisational sense.

Don't bother planning for the future, activating for change, inventing something, or anything except throwing pennies into the collection plate on Sunday -- it'll all come out in the wash anyway when Jeeeeesus arrives.

This strikes me as a curious way of looking at it. Fortunately for Western civilization, that doesn't seem to have been the view traditionally taken by Christianity. Rather than disincentivize the things you speak of (social justice; the culture of invention; faith in the progress of humanity; etc.) it would appear often to have been a significant driving force.

[CplFerro]

Dear ceo_esq,

Without pretending to heavy historical knowledge, I submit that the Middle Ages were fairly stagnant at a time when the Church was hegemonic. Our modernity came largely as a result of classical humanism emerging in the Renaissance, did it not? That philosophy worked within Christianity, but was not an expression of Middle Ages Christianity per se.

Cpl Ferro

[ceo_esq]

Dear ceo_esq,

Without pretending to heavy historical knowledge, I submit that the Middle Ages were fairly stagnant at a time when the Church was hegemonic. Our modernity came largely as a result of classical humanism emerging in the Renaissance, did it not? That philosophy worked within Christianity, but was not an expression of Middle Ages Christianity per se.

Cpl Ferro

I'm not sure I agree. Remember that the Church did not reach what was arguably the peak of its influence (roughly at the time of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) until after the so-called 12th-Century Renaissance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century) had already begun to flower. The humanism of the 15th and 16th centuries was in most key respects a natural development of the medieval humanistic tradition; in a similar vein, historian Edward Grant (http://www.indiana.edu/~alldrp/members/grant.html) argues that the Age of Reason began in the Middle Ages.

The issues you raise in your post are vast in scope, but let's consider just for example the theme of invention, since you mentioned it in the OP.

The late Lynn White, probably the most eminent 20th-century historian of early technology, writes in the article on Western technology in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Middle_Ages):

One of the few correct historical cliches tells us that the invention of invention was the most important invention in the human past. In the Hellenistic-Roman era there was a brief but notable increase of tempo in specific areas of engineering. We have no evidence, however, that anyone of that time envisaged invention as a total project for meeting human needs. Indeed, the Roman invention of, and then abandonment of, the very useful and economical application of flattened arches to bridges shows an ominous indifference to engineering creativity.

By the early ninth century the idea was springing up in Europe that technological change is beneficent, and that to encourage it is virtuous. The Utrecht Psalter, illuminated near Rheims between 820 and 830, contains a picture showing a small band of the godly, led by the Psalmist himself, guarded by an angel and blessed by the hand of God emerging from a cloud, preparing for battle against a larger troop of the unrighteous. In each camp a large sword is being sharpened. The wicked are using a big, flat, stationary whetstone. The righteous employ the first rotary whetstone known anywhere, and it is turned by the first crank depicted outside China. The monk who drew that picture was saying unambiguously that technological advance is an expression of God's love for his children. ...

Nevertheless, inventions in the early Middle Ages, and from then until after 1200, would seem to have been largely ad hoc. The invention of invention, involving not only wide-ranging thought about technical improvements that are needed but also intercommunicating groups of technicians striving to produce them, is datable to about the middle of the thirteenth century in Europe. Invention as a movement has flourished in the West ever since then. ...

The invention of invention was first codified in a sermon preached at S. Maria Novella in Florence on 26 February 1306 by a well-known Dominican, Giordano of Pisa. The topic of the sermon was supposedly repentance, but it quickly turned into a eulogy praising the contemporary expansion of technology. "Not all the arts," said the preacher, "have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art ... they are being found all the time." Then, like any good orator, [Giordano] offered an exemplum ... "It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help you to see well, and which is one of the best and most necessary in the world." ...

By the early fourteenth century, Europe had arrived at a technological attitude toward problem-solving that since then has remained characteristic of Western culture. ...

People put their brains, imagination, energy, and capital into what they value most. ... From 800 at the latest, Western Europe has put great and increasing value upon technological development. ... In the history of technology there is no defensible frontier between the Middle Ages and "modern times." ...

The great caesura in the history of the Western world came with the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity. ... It appears that in the specific historical situation of medieval Western Europe, Christian views provided a fertile soil for the vigorous growth of technology, in three basic ways.

First, the Hebrew-Christian faith centers on a Creator God who is totally outside his creation. ... Christians have always felt free to do what they wish with other natural objects, without considering their concerns. The technologist's approach to materials and forces was simplified and made more direct by the new religion. Christianity is ruthlessly anthropocentric; paganism was not. Connected with this despiritualization of nature was the belief that God created the world for mankind's use and instruction, and for no other purpose. ...

Second, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, time is part of God's creation. Pagan time was cyclical, repetitive, as Hindu time continues to be. Christian time is unrepeatable and unidirectional [and] ... the most evanescent of natural resources. ... It follows that every new means of speeding travel or production, or of increasing the output of a worker in a given time, has a spiritual implication. Saving time and labor helps to save souls, as the [medieval] Benedictines and Cistercians have told us by their actions.

Third, in the most intensely religious parts of their communities, first Judaism and then Christianity fostered a sense of the spiritual importance of manual labor, which was in great contrast to the contemptuous Greco-Roman attitude. ...

The expulsion of the spirit from the objects of nature, the conviction that mankind, by God's will, exercises a rightful rule over all of nature, the idea that time is a unique resource to be conserved and utilized to man's advantage, and the belief - never universal, but sufficiently widespread to be socially operative - that labor is virtuous are Judeo-Christian alterations of contrary Greco-Roman views that do much to explain the remarkable contrast between the technological style of antiquity and that of the Western Middle Ages and more recent times. The technology ... became amazingly innovative largely because it was so closely integrated with a specific and dominant faith, Latin or Roman Christianity. ...

It is a commonplace among church historians that Eastern and Western Christians have been nourished by the same religion, but have taken it in quite different flavors. The East considers sin to be primarily wrong thinking; the remedy is contemplation leading to right thinking (ortho-doxy). The West believes that sin is primarily wrong action, to be cured by repentance resulting in right action. The goal of the East is illumination; that of the West is virtue. One stresses the mind, the other the will. A religion of activism is a religion for engineers, and that was the sort of religion that dominated the Western Middle Ages and most of what we call "modern times."


So although I suppose the "standard life, death, resurrection, judgement, afterlife scenario" of Christianity could have fostered indifference to human labour and progress (and in the East, arguably came close), that's not the attitude it inspired in its followers in Western Europe - to the great benefit of their posterity in the modern era.

[chris epic]

In Response to CplFerro- Try looking at it this way- according to Christian/Jewish faith- the "Perfect Government" was already established- it was "the fall" that made "total social justice" a farse.

[chris epic]

...now the "plan" is to get back to the original government and the Christians believe that Jesus was the catalyst and that anyone who believes has access to the previous perfect government once established.

The "genius" was God, and the government "worked" or was supposed to work because God worked through his creation, but then God gave us free will and we chose the later. Our geniuses through history (to use religious jargon) were and are of the "flesh" and therefor contrary to God's genius.... right?