Re: [asa] dreamtime

Hi Bernie,

I can tell you without much shadow of a doubt that the Wikipedia article you cited isn't the most reliable guide to Aboriginal beliefs. And if you'll forgive me for saying, I think you take a less than reliable article and shape it even further from the recognizable. Frankly, I think you're just seeing what you want to see. In this particular instance, you seem to have formed the impression - on the basis of nothing more than your own presumed cultural superiority - the idea that Aboriginal belief is nothing more than a combination of scientific illiteracy, primitive superstition, and drug-induced hallucination, but I'm telling you straight-up that NONE of these apply. But, let me try to help you through this by response to your various misunderstandings...

I mentioned that the Dreaming has some resemblance to the Platonic realm of forms and so the idea that spirits "manifest" as persons, plants, or animals, should be seen in that light - conceptually it's about "incarnation" rather than "reincarnation". Perhaps there are some Aboriginal nations or tribes which do believe in reincarnation, but I have NEVER heard it advanced and I frankly don't know where the Wikipedia article got it from. About the best Christian theological analogue you'll find is a Johannine theology of incarnation. Actually, there are a great many analogues between orthodox Christian theology and the notion of the Dreaming - which might explain why Aboriginals tend to become orthodox (i.e. Protestant or Roman Catholic) Christians rather than Mormons. It will be an interesting question to put to my Aboriginal friends next time they're down from up North.

As for the Dreaming ignoring the two books analysis - well, in terms of the "content" of the Aboriginal stories, etc, of course it does. Most Aboriginals only encountered Christianity in the last 150 years - so naturally their traditional formulations don't use the language of Christian theology. But I'd suggest you'd need to look at this in more depth. What's significant here are the philosophical resonances with the Christian notion of creation, and - frankly - the Dreaming tends to stack up pretty well here. As I already said, Aboriginal Christians have NO PROBLEM accepting scientific, theological, and biblical orthodoxy for the simple reason that their ontology is actually extremely favorable to both the scientific method AND to orthodox Christian theology AND the interpretation of Genesis as a sacred story which is primarily about meaning rather than history (with apologies to Dick Fischer for THAT remark!). It turns out that the Aboriginal world-view has a remarkable c
 
apacity to "absorb" the two-books view. Actually, the irony here is that the average Aboriginal Christian both embraces God's Word and God's Works in a way that leaves western Christians to shame - these guys may not know much about biology or botany, Bernie, but the traditional Aboriginal five-year old has forgotten more about nature than you or I will ever know. As such Aboriginals are routinely employed as experts in indigenous flora and fauna by Australian scientific researchers. So "totally ignore book 2"??? Probably a damned sight less than you do, Bernie.

As for your remarks about Aboriginal drug use - it's not really relevant here. The Dreamtime has minimal connection with drug induced trance states or hallucinations. Here I think you're probably still being mislead by the nomenclature, but as I previously remarked to yourself "Dreaming" has nothing to do with "visions" and is, as I remarked to David O., a way of viewing reality - it's a philosophical/religious position, an ontology, in which the primary "modes" are story, song, dance, art, law, tradition, sacred space, etc, none of which involves the use of drugs. Sure there are elements of drug use in traditional Aboriginal culture - but no more than in any other culture. And the problems of illicit drug use Aboriginal communities is tragic, but this really is quite a tangential issue. To put it in a nutshell, the connection between Aboriginal notions of the Dreaming and drugs is about as strong as the connection between Lutheran theology and beer.

In the end analysis, though, little of this discussion is germane to the original point at issue. What is germane is this: your over-all position - that the evolution/creation debate is a major problem in the church and that western Christians are best placed to resolve this - is simply wrong. As I've said Australian Aboriginal Christians DON'T have a problem with the issue, and a large part of this is because they have a philosophically robust world-view which readily embraces scientific, theological, and biblical understandings of God's creative activity in both the past AND the present. So not only do they not share your problem, they don't need your solution. From the non-western perspective the western world-view, with it's arrogant self-assurance and split between the sacred and the profane is the problem. You should probably work on THAT if you want a hearing from the non-western world.

Blessings,
Murray

Dehler, Bernie wrote:
> Hi Pastor Murray-
>
> You said:
> " But as I wrote, there are no simple western categories which are adequate to describe the notion of the Dreaming, and I can assure you the idea has NOTHING whatsoever to do with what westerners would call a "vision"."
>
> I read the article at wikipedia about it:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime
>
> I don't really see anything unique there. They believe spirits exist before and after a material manifestation as a person, plant, or animal. Sounds like re-incarnation. Mormons also believe in pre-existence in the spiritual world. Looks like "more of the same" in spiritual experiences we already know about... nothing new and certainly nothing helpful in providing new information for understanding the interface of science and religion... unless you think superstition would be more helpful (because the western world is doing a good job of rooting-out superstition).
>
> As far as I can tell- this "dreamtime" totally ignores book 2 in the two book analysis (God's word and God's works; also ignores book 1 to boot, I guess). If dreamtime helps, maybe if we all smoke some dope and drop some acid we could get some new and useful input too... it's worth a shot. ;-)
>
> Info on Aboriginal drug use:
>
> http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/aboriginal_substance_abuse
>
> ...Bernie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Murray Hogg
> Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 2:45 PM
> To: ASA
> Subject: Re: [asa] The ASA and the Soft Sciences (ASA focus for the future)
>
> Hi Bernie,
>
> Your reply is in many ways typical of the sort which occurs when people first encounter the notion of the Dreaming.
>
> But as I wrote, there are no simple western categories which are adequate to describe the notion of the Dreaming, and I can assure you the idea has NOTHING whatsoever to do with what westerners would call a "vision".
>
> Frankly, even the terms "Dreaming" is a misnomer - it was coined by Spencer and Gillan in the late 1800's when it was assumed that Australian Aboriginals lacked the conceptual capacity to hold sophisticated cultural or philosophical understandings. They were, along with the Hottentots of Africa, considered to be the most primitive race on earth.
>
> Largely, this impression was formed because of the Aboriginal's lack of technological and scientific development. And it was assumed that any group lacking development in the material sphere must therefore lack development in the cultural and philosophical spheres. Since then, however, we've come to realize that the Dreaming is far more sophisticated than Westerners imagined - but simply due to weight of historical usage the term itself remains.
>
> To broaden the discussion a little bit, I think it helpful to understand the way in which non-western theology is moving. In particular, I think it helpful to understand that there has been a recent reaction amongst non-western Christians against western theology. This is true not just of Aboriginal Australian Christians, but of African and Asian Christians also. To put it crassly, they are pretty fed up with the western claim that scientific and technological superiority translates into any sort of spiritual or theological superiority. They have particularly rejected the naive assumption that western theology is itself free of cultural entanglement.
>
> We might look at (say) African Christianity and wonder at some of the rather bizarre goings on in that neck of the woods, but rest assured that they look at us with the same sort of suspicion. Indeed, Australian Aboriginals _generally_ think westerners are spiritually bankrupt and the famous remark "white man got no dreaming" is intended to portray the fact that westerners live with a complete disassociation of the spiritual and the earthly which is unthinkable in the Aboriginal world-view. Aboriginal _Christians_ are more charitable, but while they thank us for the gift of the Gospel, they are a bit less complementary in respects of our insistence on telling them how to live it. They particularly struggle with the fact that the same folks telling them how to be "Christian" were, at the same time claiming their land, poisoning their water, stealing their children, raping their women and shooting their men!
>
> So, what I'd urge here is that BEFORE making the claim that western Christians have something to say to non-western Christians on the science/faith dialogue front, we should keep in mind the broader theological and historical picture. Particularly we should remember that there has been a LONG history of western political and cultural imperialism in which non-western cultures have been misunderstood, denigrated, oppressed and destroyed, and in which non-western Christians have been treated as second-class citizens of God's kingdom.
>
> Of course, the misunderstandings have flowed both ways, and I have no doubt that western Christians have much to offer our non-western brothers and sisters, but if we insist on starting with an assumption of cultural superiority, with misunderstanding and misrepresentation, without acknowledging that the Holy Spirit might speak to us through those of less technologically and scientifically sophisticated cultures, then we shouldn't be surprised if our non-western brothers and sisters have no interest in sitting at our table.
>
> Blessings,
> Murray
>
> Dehler, Bernie wrote:
>> Hi Pastor Murray-
>>
>> What you refer to as "dreaming" in a positive estimation I think westerners would call a "vision." Dreams are usually goofy. "Visions" are from God... whether obtained from a dream state or an awake trance-state. So I see nothing new or different being offered here at all.
>>
>> ...Bernie
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Murray Hogg
>> Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 4:40 AM
>> To: ASA
>> Subject: Re: [asa] The ASA and the Soft Sciences (ASA focus for the future)
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'll only offer the observation here that the only people I've ever met who offer anything like a fully-orbed, theologically orthodox, scientifically informed, and biblically literate resolution of the nexus between evolution and Christian faith have been Australian Aboriginal Christians.
>>
>> This is primarily because of the approach they take to Genesis - treating it as "a Dreaming" rather than as a historical narrative. I'm sorry that I can't easily flesh that out much more as the Dreaming is a quite profound approach to describing reality through the use of narrative which has no counterpart in western thought.
>>
>> The problem for contemporary westerners is that we tend to have a pretty stark dichotomy between the notions of "history" and "myth" - with the former being "true" and the later "false." But the Dreaming is quite another category altogether - it reads like history, but it has more affinity with something like a Platonic plane of forms.
>>
>> As such a Dreaming might read to us like a historical narrative, but it's actually a description of present reality, of the proper order of things, so to speak. As such to ask the question "did it happen?" is actually a category error (and will only result in much shaking of heads amongst Aboriginals dismayed by white-fella's ignorance). The only proper question is "is it so?" -- which one answers by appeal to the power of the Dreaming in question. Very powerful Dreamings have a sort of intuitive obviousness which can't be gainsaid and in some respects an Aboriginal might appropriate the famous words of CS Lewis to say something like: "I know that this Dreaming is true, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else".
>>
>> As a consequence of this sort of approach to Genesis, Australian Aboriginals tend not to find ANY difficulty in holding together evolution and the biblical account of creation. The key is not critiquing the science, but in understanding the role of creation stories in "ancient" cultures. Personally, I think westerners are by and large clueless on this score and, as David suggests, we could learn ALOT from our third-world brothers and sisters in regards to how creation stories should be appropriated.
>>
>> Blessings,
>> Murray.
>>
>>
>> Dehler, Bernie wrote:
>>> David, when you say:
>>> "Maybe some of our brothers and sisters from parts of the world that
>>> aren't so influenced by rationalism will some day offer some solutions
>>> that /we/ will need to integrate"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm wondering what you could possibly mean by that. It seems to me that
>>> the educated western world is at the forefront of integrating science
>>> and religion; groups such as the ASA. How could another place come up
>>> with better understanding after groups like ASA have been struggling
>>> with it for many years- many of the brightest scientists and
>>> theologians? Are you thinking maybe a mystic or prophet of God will
>>> arise to illuminate all of this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ...Bernie
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Received on Tue Jan 6 13:32:45 2009