Comments on: Love, Death and the Neighbour

By: solidgoldcreativity

solidgoldcreativity — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:56:39 +0000

Yeh, it’s Dr Williams who uses, say, “God” and “wholeness,” and “sin” and “failure” interchangeably, not me. Not sure if the desert fathers in their writings do too.

By: andreaskluth

andreaskluth — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:55:49 +0000

Well, you/Williams have taken a story from a religious context and declared certain terms in it (sin, eg) “swappable” or “replaceable” with modern concepts (failure, eg).

Metaphor may be the wrong word. Analogy. In any case, you’re moving the canon of religion BEYOND its literal interpretation.

That’s what I was endorsing.

By: solidgoldcreativity

solidgoldcreativity — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:10:31 +0000

Yes, there is a way for atheists and believers to find common ground, and in any event, the common ground (human being) is there whether we like it or not. Not sure I get your first point about turning religious stories into metaphor.

By: andreaskluth

andreaskluth — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:54:40 +0000

Your approach — ie, to turn the content of religious stories into metaphor, its concepts interchangeable with contemporary ones — works.

This, in fact, is the healthiest direction for religions to evolve. And yes, it is the way for atheists and believers to find common ground again, around the campfire with the old stories and their transcendent meaning.

By: solidgoldcreativity

solidgoldcreativity — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:37:27 +0000

Thanks, Phil. And for the thoughtful comment. I hadn’t remembered that line from the movie (a great film; Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman … just, wow). It very much goes to what Dr Williams is illustrating. Glad you picked up on the tie to our conversations with others and “talking past” them. His speech is particularly good on this, on how often we are “not attending” to “what a particular person can hear, or what a particular person can bear at any one point.”

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:04:30 +0000

A wonderful posting.

In the quite recent film, “Doubt”, and in the play on which it is based, a priest, in a sermon, says that it’s not our successes which connect us all, but our failures insecurities and doubts. No doubt (sic) because, while only relatively few of us are “successful”, we, all of us, have insecurities doubts fears and other unmentionables, which we feel no-one else has, so there’s no-one we can talk about all this with. It ties in with what Rowan Williams spoke of.

What Rowan Williams said about judgement and empathy is simple common sense, for we all wish to feel understood. If we just put ourselves in the shoes of another we’ll easily sense what he’s feeling, and we’ll accordingly treat him in a way we would wish to be treated ourselves.

This also ties in to our conversations with others, in which, all too often, we talk past the others without listening to them. We indulge in the monologue rather than the dialogue. We turn away from each other, rather than towards.