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Roni and Brian,Thank you for your beautiful thoughts about God and justice. Powerfully expressed by both of you. Thank you.

The ancient Hebrews had no concept of a life after death, except as the sort of shadowy existence shared by many groups in the Mediterranean. To go to sheol(hades) was just to go down into the grave. The book of Job makes this strikingly clear. “Like a cloud dissolves and has gone, so no one who does down to Sheol ever comes up again… (7:9-10 See the beautiful passage in 14:7ff, about the difference between a tree which can come back to life, and people, who cannot. “But a human being? He dies, and dead he remains… will never rise again.” (I think the Jerusalem Bible has the most beautiful translations of the Hebrew scriptures.)

This is why THE HEBREW PROPHETS WERE FOCUSED ON JUSTICE HERE AND NOW. If justice did not happen here, it never would.

Plato thought of Justice first as a quality of balance or gracefulness within the human soul. To treat people with justice was to help them achieve this balance or grace Likewise, the process thinker, Henry Nelson Wieman thought of justice in terms of creative transformation. How can we treat the people involved in injustice, on both sides, so as to help bring creative transformation of both people, their relationship, and the society around them? This was the goal of the Truth and Reconciliation projects in South Africa. As many people have pointed out, If a cruel person is transformed into a more loving one, they will surely suffer much pain over the cruelty they have committed. For the victim, Marjorie Suchocki says that to forgive means to learn how to will the welfare of the abuser without minimizing the abuse.

Whether the consequent nature of God opens up any paths toward such creative transformation is a much discussed question among process relational theologians. I fear that the author of Job is right, and that we must just live with the reality of injustice which is not resolved before death.

Thank you again for your powerful comments, and your clear thoughts about the process vision of God. (Of course, we know that not all process share a single vision.)

Peace,
Bob

Julie,
Thanks.
I’m sure we all share your hunger for some way to impact our country (i.e.the U.S.A.) fight now. I wish I had a plan for you. I feel pretty helpless, myself.
. FRIENDS FROM ABROAD: How about a group project outlining how process relational thinkers can fix America? Due by March 8.

Our Unitarian Universalist congregation has various strategies. Our pastor has been clear that if Immigration police (ICE) turn up at our door they will have to show a warrant to intrude on our space. We might use offices to shelter some undocumented people. It is going to be a long, hard, struggle.
One of our friends has a sign by her door: RISE, REVOLT, REPEAT.
Trump will not engage in thoughtful and open-minded discussions with us, nor will many of his followers, it seems. But giving up is not an option.
Thanks, again Julie.
Bob

Right

Julie,
The housing first approach you describe is a good example of John cobb’s view that persuasion opens up possibilities while coercion narrows them.
Having a place to live, with an address to put on application forms, certainly does expand a homeless person’s range of possibilities for jobs and other dimensions of life, like inviting friends and family to visit.
Thanks for a good example.
Bob

In my experience it often happens that the many bubbles become one large belch- with great satisfaction.

Thanks, Daryl.

Yingying,
Thanks for writing. I’m interested in your question about the freedom of our body’s cells. I don’t recall anyone asking quite this question, and I don’t have a ready answer. Forgive me if the answers gets a bit long. The more I type, the more uncertain I become. I wonder what my wife or other women might think about my answer. Hmmmm.

The molecules in a rock or chair are generally not living.(Of course, you need to look at the particular rock to be sure what it is made of.)

So their experience is just those physical connections which hold them together.They don’t feel pain.

But the cells in our bodies are mostly living cells. So they have much more complex experience, more complex relationships with each other, and can often feel pain or distress of some kind.
Also In living bodies the cells are connected in some way so that they support each other and the whole organism so as to help the organism stay alive and healthy, seeking food and fleeing danger. In many organisms there is a central nervous system and a brain which can centralize the experiences of the body’s cells to achieve more novel responses to the world. Here again, the experience of the cells becomes more complex.

But just think of your own body. Obviously, you have an extremely complex brain. Your central nervous system is connected to the cells in your body in different ways. Some cells, like skin cells send experience to the brain of pain and pleasure, but your brain cannot tell your skin to do much. Muscle cells are connected so that your brain can send them directions on how to act. So think about all the different ways your cells, and especially your brain, are connected to each other. We are learning new things about, for example, how nerves from your gut (like your digestive system) are connected to the rest of the body cells.

Key to all this is that the nervous system and your brain are structured so that the experience of your living cells, in different ways and degrees, become centralized and make it possible for your brain to have experience so complex that it crosses a boundary into consciousness. Though, as Whitehead points out, consciousness and thought are flickering, not always the same. For the same of survival, one part of your brain, the amygdala, allows some signals to skip thinking altogether to allow you to react to danger immediately– as if you touch something hot or sharp and pull your hand back without thinking. But then we can use such information in moral thinking later.

Your brain’s ability to send direction to the cells of your body varies a lot.
With regard to your question about the freedom of cells, and whether the mind can increase the freedom of bodily cells–
we get a lot of feelings from our body which shape our moral thoughts and feelings at the conscious level. In English we often speak of our “Gut Level” feelings of good and bad, of right and wrong. But those are processed by the brain to reach the level of conscious reflections on what is morally good and bad, or how our feelings should lead us to act.
But I think that conscious moral thoughts and feels probably cannot be send back to the cells of your body because consciousness requires the function of the brain. I’m cautious about that. Life is complex, and often surprises me. But in general, I don’t think that it is the work of skin cells or bone cells to be more free on their own. Their life is the life of the community of cells. Communities (organs) within communities, working together. It is largely the work of the brain to give rise to greater capacity for novel responses (freedom) which can help the whole body survive and thrive in the world around us.

Again, I’m sorry if that is too long. Your question interests me.
Thank you for writing.
Bob

Dear Friends,
Thank you so much for your rich and morally passionate thoughts.
Let me just respond to a couple of ideas.
It is absolutely basic to process relational thinking that we are all always in relationships. So, yes, all power of any kind, whether “unilateral” or “relational” is exercised within relationships.

Greg wrote in response to me that “I think the picture of “unilateral power” – as command and control – is too simplistic; it unhelpfully obscures dissent.”
I would respond that no one has absolute unilateral power–certainly not Trump. Dissent can be competing unilateral power: when you hit me I hit you back, even if you are bigger. But dissent, as I think Greg suggests, can come in the form of relational power resisting unilateral power. That can be individual, as the kind prison guard– or in the form of Gandhi and MLK drawing whole peoples together in what MLK clearly describes as relational power.

I offer no guarantees about who will win any particular struggles. When MLK said “The arch of justice bends toward justice,” I am with those who say that it “CAN” bend toward justice, and that we must give ourselves to that bending. Albert Camus, having just fought in the French Underground, made it clear that we have no guarantees about the future. Having just defeated Fascism in his time, he knew that others might well turn around and re-establish it. We are seeing that now in the U.S. and much of the world.

I am not optimistic or, I think, unrealistic about America’s future or the world’s. But, like all of you, I struggle to be a person of relational power and compassion. As Gandhi and MLK both said, there is nothing passive about that.

I am grateful for all of you and your contributions to this discussion.
Peace,
Bob

Bill,
I don’t think I’ve told you that my wife (Barbara)’s brother Jeff, was gay and died of AIDS in 1998 after 12 years of struggling with it. Barbara and Jeff were very close, and also their sister and other brother. Jeff was also fortunate to have a partner who loved him and cared for him through all the terrible times AID’s can bring. He is still a much loved member of our extended family. He got HIV from living with Jeff, but was late enough to have the next generation of medications and is still living a healthy life.

In 202 Barbara and I spent a semester on leave in Kansas City, MO, where Jeff lived.I was studying medical ethics. We both did hospice training to be able to sit with people dying of AIDS. Almost all of the people we got to know had been kicked out by their families. I mostly sat with Eddy through his dying process.

I mention this because, like you, I heard a lot of men, and some women, talk about their problems with self-love, especially Jeff’s partner, who was raised Catholic.

Fortunately, Jeff’s parents both loved him very much. His dad, especially, had to struggle with his homophobic up-bringing, but overcame it because he loved Jeff. Still, Jeff spoke to us a lot about the hostility he felt around him in the world. Nevertheless, in the year he died, The Kansas City Star listed him as one of the 12 leading citizens to have died that year.

Thanks for all the lovely thoughts and research you shared with us.
Peace,
Bob

Hi friends I agree.
Any human tradition that has been around a long time will contain both some wisdom and some folly. Clearly there are forms of Christianity which have been and still are, quite appalling, while others are deeply loving.

The passage I love so much from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, does not reflect the entire Gita. It draws from traditions which are thousands of years old, and definitely contains both deep compassion and very troubling visions of the divine.

At a more personal level, I was 70 years old, during the George Floyd riots, when I first realized for the first time that had grown up in a segregated city. Even when my family was watch news reports of the young people working to desegregate cafes in the south, and cheering for their success, my parents never pointed out that when we went to the cafes near us, or the ice cream shop, or the movie theaters, there were only white people there. Not by law, but by custom. The hospital I was born in was segregated, as were the schools I attended until Brown v Board of Ed took effect. How could I have been so blind, so oblivious, to the racism around me? My parents always treated everyone with kindness and love. They certainly never taught me to view black people as inferior, yet, they never discussed with me or my sisters, and maybe never realized themselves, that we lived in this racist way.
Obviously, That happens in many ways in human communities and religious traditions. We can be so blind to ways in which we think we are being compassionate, while actually being quite otherwise.

This is haunting me these days. If I could be so blind about the racism in my home community, and myself, what other forms of blindness persist in my life and my spirituality?

Thanks Jay. JAY WILL BE WITH US IN CLASS NEXT WEEK ON FEB 19 TO CHAT SOME MORE ABOUT GOD.

I will begin that class by BRIEFLY Whitehead’s idea of self-creative freedom with modern quantum physics. I will also very briefly explain why Whitehead felt that he need a new vision of God to hold vision vision of reality together.

Then we can all join with Jay to chat about Whitehead’s God and what how that idea has blossomed on the tree of process relational thinking.

Dennis,
One note of clarification. It was the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who argued that our sense experiences cannot show causation, only sequence of events. Whitehead is offering the solution to have problem by pointing to experience in the mode of causal efficacy. We can’t SEE causation, but we FEEL it in every moment of our becoming.

Also, you right cite the example William James of getting to the bottom of some steps and having the world push back against you regardless of your conscious thinking. that is the demonstration of the causal reality of the “external” world which becomes inner to your body.

I see a weakness in what I wrote about physical violence on page 63. If someone hits you in the jaw with their fist, it is not ONLY the sensation of pain you feel. The physical force of the blow drives your head backward and you experience that causal efficacy even more deeply than the pain your body creates to signal the significance of that force. I win I’ made that clearer.
Bob

Johannes, Randall and Brian,
Thanks for sharing these experiences with us.

I will briefly repeat something here that I wrote separately to Brian about process theology and sexuality.
Much of traditional Christian theology presents God as not having experience of the world’s pleasure. Indeed, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas insisted that God did not share any feelings from the world because that would mean that God was changeable.
The idea that God could not experience such feelings implied to many Christian people that human pleasure itself was sinful, and played no positive role in human life. Sexual pleasure for its own sake has definitely been seen as sinful.
But if, instead, we think of healthy, loving human sexuality as contributing positively to the life of God, things change. There is no reason to reject the value of gay or lesbian sexual pleasure. Indeed, they can enrich God’s life.

Take care,
Bob

Johannes
We will miss you in the class, but wish you well in what you are doing.

Best wishes
Bob

Donald Thanks for asking for help on this. Probably others need this too. When people ask good questions they help everyone.

Richard is doing a great job on his end to make all this work.

Chris,
Thanks for sharing. Your study of rat brains certainly touches on a problem to which no one I know of has offered a fully satisfactory solution. Whitehead is interesting about how the mind and brain connect, but he was writing long before the kind of neurological research we have now. He would surely say that we must not let a good theory lead us to ignore the observable facts.

We really appreciate the leadership you are offering as Dean of our program.
Bob