Thank you for the many copies of Quest Forum you have sent me over the past year. I can't help but feel guilty in not replying to many of them, but I have determined at last to concentrate on addressing myself to them.
I suppose my main response to recent copies of Quest Forum is twofold. Firstly, the arguments just go past me, I can't excited about the points you are making, and tend to be baffled at what exactly you are saying. Perhaps partly this is because I don't read them closely enough, but then again there is something about them that is different to earlier phases of Quest. Before, I would understand your point, sometimes agree with it, usually find it interesting and refreshing, and have a response to it. Now I just have no reaction, except puzzlement, and I can't even really articulate that.
Secondly, and this can perhaps shed some light on my first point, I find there is a certain formulae to your articles now which has two characteristics I don't like. Articles almost always go through a series of why other ideas are wrong: gnosticism was wrong because of this, Catholicism was wrong because of that, eastern religions were wrong because of something else, but Quest Forum is totally right. This style is so sweeping and has such a dismissive attitude to other beliefs that I find it unpleasant. After all, from the various references to other thinkers, QF must have a debt and a tradition, a human, finite, limited tradition, but the impression is that these few "good ideas" pop up out of nowhere, simply for QF to use for its divine purpose of absolute knowledge.
The other point about such a style, is that it is intellectually misleading. After saying why X, Y and Z beefs are totally wrong, we find right at the end, a hidden acknowledgement to the type of problems such beliefs were tackling. As I see it, beliefs that have survived for a long while are typically rich, and deep, and not therefore particularly susceptible to simple dismissals of the type you propose. Usually such beliefs are real responses to real human (existential) problems, which genuinely have no "right" answer. Such problems require judgement to navigate them, not fierce adherent to some creed (e.g. the arguments of QF). Various philosophical and religious answers to life's problems reveal more about the nature of the problem, and propose some responses. However there is no "right" response, although in certain situations and for certain people there will be a "right" answer - or at least even if there is no single right answer, there will be at least one wrong answer.
Thus we find that QF arguments actually circle back (perhaps blindly) into exactly the type of areas it claimed to have rejected as part of its "we're not like them" arguments. This is because you can rhetorically dismiss deep answers to genuine problems, but you will find the reality hits you sooner or later.
I am reminded of Communist rhetoric about the abolition of capitalism, the market and the drive for profit, when historically Communism has always had the reality of such economic laws at work within its industrial and financial system. It had to face such realities in some guise or other, using some language or other. If it chose to dismiss the old language in the name of "progress" then describe the same phenomena using a new language it had invented, this simply appears to be going around in circles, and not making real progress. The same point comes to mind over QF.
As an example I think the law could be a good point to illustrate from. Typically QF and earlier publications insisted on "the law" as being outmoded and a concept for old religious thinking. We are beyond the law, the law no longer applies to us etc was the attitude. However we soon discovered that a lot of the debate over "law" returned the moment we moved onto the question of ethics. Thus typically we would have a long article against "law", only to meet the realities of ethical duty return at some later date. "The return of the repressed" indeed!
The upshot of such meanderings means that at the end of the day what we have is not some major series of differences between all other philosophies and religions, and QF ideas, but rather a lot of rhetoric on why QF is different to everything else, and in fact at lot of rather minor and slight differences when it all comes down to it. This only leads to confusion and lack of focus, and causes readers to think you have all the answers, when in fact you are trying just as hard as anyone else, and having the same hit and miss rate as everyone else.
So what should you be saying? Well, as I have tried to argue before - and to be honest I have never really heard a good argument against what I have said from QF - there are three challenges for Quest.
1. To establish a new religious consciousness and experience; to awaken a real spirituality that is able to feel and experience the divine in a new way, and to move onto a life of enlightenment, based on experience, rather than one based on argument and rhetoric.
2. As part of this Quest, to show the value of the suppressed and outlawed forms of Christianity that never get "revealed" to the general public; to tell people about the newly discovered gospel, The Gospel of Thomas, to encourage people to have the same freedom to create myths, symbols, values and stories as those early Christians.
3. To produce a valid tradition for Quest to be a part of, to show the heritage of Quest, where it came from, what it is a part of, and how it relates to the wider set of values and ideas in the world.
On top of these goals, which I have argued in greater detail in earlier letters, I would also add two further goals.
Religion, God and Children. We need to look again at how God is taught to children. There are new ideas about teaching philosophy to children, and we need to have some new ideas about letting children have the power and confidence to think about God. We know that the old methods of just letting children know about the Bible led to totally un-Christian and superstitious views of God being generated, we need a theory of God that can be understood by children, yet which will be rich and meaningful enough for them to develop and expand for themselves via their own reflection and experience.
The realm of the paranormal (psi) and the ideas of quantum physics need to be analysed for their impact on religious thought and the possibilities of religion. If we analyse what makes ghosts frightening, we first imagine that it is the unknown - then on reflection we realise that what composes ghosts isn't unknown, but the known in strange circumstances. The borders of our experience, of what it natural and unnatural, of how things work, begin to break down. Yet how does this differ from art? Isn't art always about putting the usual in unusual ways - take surrealism for example. Why is it that surrealism isn't frightening? The answer is the important ingredient - reality. If we really though Dali's paintings were photos someone had taken, they would indeed be frightening. So we see that what is missing from art is the connection to reality: art + reality = miracles. Now when we look again at religion, we see that it is exactly art claiming to be about reality, religion is a psychic surrealism. Yet religion always hides this artistic angle by claiming to be revelation to man, something given, not something created by man. What is the important secret is that religion is powerful, it is miracles, it is about things that are frightening and beyond science, but that they are not given by some spirit out there, but rather are built from within our own religious consciousness, we can create them, we can design them. They are our art, but more than paintings, music or poetry, they are spells, gospels... real, raw being, created from within ourselves when we find the real source of our power.