My Notes on John's Comments. Some comments of a Gang Stalking target interspersed:
The Theology of the Unconditional
https://youtu.be/jn9OQxuJDQQ
What I Got From John Caputo About The Theology of the Unconditional
It involves a Call. We are free to respond or walk away from the Call. “It can happen anywhere.” Involves an act of courage. You make a statement with your acts – this “is what life is about.” - “An Act of the Unconditional Value of Life. This is Religion for Tillich. A unconditional affirmation of life.”
“You don’t get anything out of it.” I beg to differ on this. This is how you create meaning in life. You answer the Call – of deep inspiration/or the Call of the events of your life and it is your response which creates meaning in an otherwise universe which is not personal, without meaning.
“Unconditional affirmation of the value of something.” This is how I see my response to Gang Stalking. http://www.StopGangStalkingPolice.com My response is because it is. It comes from deep inside me. It is my answer to that deep inner call. What I stand up for gives meaning to the meaningless – the outcomes from The System of which we are a part. I fight for my ability to be – unconditionally. My religion is “a life lived unconditionally – who has found a truth – the truth for which I am willing to live or die.”
In fighting Government Gang Stalking I am not alienated from life. I do not go to church on Sunday. All my life is my religion.
“The existence of religion as a separate category – as something defined and delimited is a testimony to our alienation.” Thus I am Gang Stalked on Church property by people who go to Church. There is a division between what goes on inside Church and out. This is Gang Stalking America today.
The Theology of the Unconditional is about “the affirmation of something of unconditional value.”
Doctrine is symbolic language. The Scripture is symbolic language. It talks about “the sphere of the unconditional.” “It’s found in narratives, and stories, and parables, and paradoxes, and striking sayings, and a kind of poetry which evokes this deeper level of experience – a theopoetics of the unconditional.”
“If you try to divide the world up into concepts and propositions and arguments, you’ll miss the underlying depth of experience which those concepts and propositions and arguments are trying to analyze.”
“The underlying character of experience is found in this distinction between the conditional and the unconditional.” I think this is a profound statement which explains the heart of what it is to be a person. “We live in the distance between those two.”
“So there will always be symbols.” I think in zen they call it pointing to the moon. "There will always be concrete historical traditions (which satisfy sensing types) , otherwise the unconditional doesn’t exist as such.” - “The unconditional is only found in certain concrete forms.” It requires a bodily existence to perceive it. “There is an unconditional element in them”/the concrete forms." I would add the unconditional is unformulated and requires formulation which is never adequate.
“There is something unconditional” in our religious symbols. I think that is why religion exists. It fulfills a human need for the unconditional. “What is valuable about religious text is they are giving narrative form, symbolic expression, and poetic form to something of unconditional value.” – “And that’s what happens in all of the religious traditions.”
“But the moment you literalize those symbols, you contract the unconditional to the conditional.” You make a map of the territory which is never the territory.
“The Protestant Principle is always to shine the light of the unconditional on the conditional.” - “When you take the conditional” the symbols “as unconditional, you have idolatry.” I would say it is idolatry that we are drowning in. God has died in America.
The Gang Stalkers try to force their false gods on their targets. Their absolute thinking is idolatry. This is what has happened in modernity to religion. This is why we see members of Churches Gang Stalking on Church property.
“In the Catholic community the experience of the unconditional is contracted to the authority of the institution.” – “And in the Reformation, the experience of the unconditional is contracted to – the Book, to literalism.” Worshippers of Idols – All.
The problem in religion is the need for certitude. The problem in America today from Dick Cheney/the Gang Stalking founder onwards – is this need for certitude – “in a book or institution.” This summarizes the problems with our institutions in America. They will not embrace the ambiguity of the unknown, of the unconditional. So the whole of our society takes its narratives as truth – worshippers of idolatry.
We can respect our religions “as important expressions of something deeper that they don’t have final authority over.” - “Symbols are important.” And fine as long as we recognize them as symbols and not literal truth. They point to the moon. They are not the moon.
“Life needs to take form under concrete conditions.” – “But those conditions themselves can’t be absolutized.” – “They have to be left plastic, reformable, revisable, rethinkable, reinventable, because no form that they take is ever adequate to what they are trying to give form to.”
“So then what finally is God.” - “He can’t be a being. A being is something determinate, identifiable, something conditioned.” – “God is not a being. But the being of beings.” When you think about it, I think that is a good definition. He/She/It/Whatever is the being in us, is being with a capital B. The expression of Being is being, with a small b. And thus we were created in the image of God. Being with a capital B doesn’t contract God to any one thing, even a super thing.
“But even then that’s giving God a kind of deep substantial reality, saying it’s the underlying substance of reality – pan-in-theism.” It’s still making God some identifiable substantial reality that is still not purely unconditional.”
“God is a symbol for the unconditional.” - “God is a symbol for the possibility of the impossible.” Of all the things we say about God, the thing we most need is this idea of the possibility of the impossible. In Scripture: “With God all things are possible.” – “Not possible for humans, but it is possible for God.” This is symbolic expression of how the unconditional can occur in the conditional. What might be going on in the name of God is this idea of a new being – the unconditional breaking through in the conditional. “God is a symbol for our hope, our faith, our love, of a new being, a transformation, a renewal, that the future is always better even when it’s not; it’s a symbol for our faith and hope and love in the possibilities of life.” – “It’s not the name of somebody.”
It’s not the name of something.” “It’s the name of the structure of the unconditional – unconditional faith, unconditional hope, unconditional love.”
It isn’t concerned with sacred books, ritual, belief.
It is grounded in human experience.
It is what we have lost in America, the American Status Quo who now worships idols - our institutions. We have lost hope, faith, love - a sense of new possibilities. We no longer answer the Call from the Unconditional.