Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

One interesting thing about moving from stage to stage in Peck's model is that as often as not, there is a conversion type process. Something shakes your world, you go off to figure it out. That sounds alot like a typical come to Jesus, but there is as often as not, another one that makes someone question God's existance to move from stage 2 to stage 3.
 

On Peck: Upon further reflection, I did rather systematically make an effort to strip away the nonessentials of my tradition and my beliefs while in college, all the while being so scared shitless by SDI, Reagan's saber-rattling and the USSR's death throes that I, as I said in retrospect, let the world get bigger than God. It look a certain kind of logic to to the first, and it took a certain kind of logic to get out of the second. Maybe that might represent my journey into, through and out of stage 2 ...
 

Oh, dude. Ya know what helped me get onto Peck's stage 4: "The Tao of Pooh" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"! Summer of '88!
 

Most "orthodox" religions would cease effectiveness somewhere in the green zone of your chart.
 

I tend to think that most mainline Protestant churches fit there. Ya know, the Methodists and Presbys in a small to mid-size town. Rotary Club types. The esteem they enjoy from membership is in social-business circles.
 

Drlobojo says: "Most "orthodox" religions would cease effectiveness somewhere in the green zone of your chart."

What I think is interesting is that it shows a failure of churches to actually meet the parishoners needs. They should be running thier church like a business, and with the congregation as customers. I found most church leaders tell their congregation what they need, and ignore feedback. I have also found that when a church embraces the idea that they have to find out what thier people need, they are much more successful.

On the other hand, since many xtians are embedded in stage 2 of Peck, going higher on Maslow is difficult.
 

Well, the only institutions that I think should be run as businesses are businesses. Not the government. Not social organizations. Not churches. Ick.

It depends on what your definition of success is. If you're looking for a large congregation, aim the messages and programming for the lowest common denominator(s), which, incidentally, is what I think many of the megachurches are doing.

But size of membership is the least meaningful way to measure the effectiveness of a church.

I might go so far as to say that giving (not gifts to the chuurch, but gifts by the church to everyday, non-affililated, non-church needy) as a percentage of the congregation's estimated income, and and per-capita time spent in the service of helping meet the basic needs of others, are better ways to gauge the effectiveness of a church.
 

In peck's heirarchy, I'd say I mostly fall into the IV Stage, although obviously some might differ.

I've had friends say that I'm not a "spiritual person", and decribe me as coldly intellectual. I've tried to explain to them that they are missing the spiritual significance of the everyday.

For instance, I have Christian friends that pray for healing or for things to go right for them, or for salvation or whatever. And I have pagan friends that do magic to gain themselves more power and control over their lives.

The tend to see my more practicle suggestions as being "Intellectual" and "unspiritual"...but to me it is a spiritual thing that we have what we need to make the changes in our lives. I see God as the source of the powers that we possess as ordinary human beings.

As a mteaphore, some people pray to have God move something, and say that I am not a spiritual person because I use my hands to move it.

I say, the object, the hands, and the will to use them are spiritual gifts, and no further magic is required for me.
 

Could be that "spiritual" and "not spiritual" -- like "natural" and "supernatural" -- is another false dichotomy based on what we don't yet know.

Could be, I think, if, as some say, the farther science gets the closer it gets to God, and the farther the vanguard of human spirituality, as we understand it, goes the closer it gets to ultimate reality. "God" and "reality" both being words that do fairly poor jobs of expressing what it is we're trying to express when we use them.
 

It's been two decades since I read any M. Scott Peck, so I will pass by that on the basis of ignorance. Maslow's hierarchy, based on a psychological reading of Nietzshe, usually leaves me asking all sorts of questions, including the relationship between love and self-actualization, indeed between physical/emotional security and self-actualization; how is promoting esteem not a kind of self-actualization?

I hate to toss a spanner in the works, but I've never bought in to Maslow's work because it creates false distinctions. Why put self-actualization above love/relationships, which is below esteem? From a Christian perspective that is warped. Indeed, as the demands of the Christian life lead to self-abnegation, to the point of death, physical survival should be above self-actualization, shouldn't it?
 

My thinking -- my admittedly smart-alecky thinking -- wass how to place denominations on maslow's heirarchy, based on what is generly known about them:

I see fundamentalists as being most needy of the fundamentals -- the spiritual equivalent of getting milk when needed and getting to potty a lot: Pentecostals, hardshell Baptist, etc.


Safety: rank-and-file conservatives.

Love-belonging: neo-Jesus People-type "I'd like to teach the world to sing" congregations.

Esteem: Mainline not in-your-face "country club" denoms and churches.

Self-actualization: Those who don't need much in the way of certainty, but still believe and are active as the Lord's arms and legs -- and brain -- in advancing the kingdom right here and right now; Episcopaleans, lib churches that haven't lost all of their connections to those in the faith who went before ...


Hey, I'm just making this stuff up as I go.
 

ER,

Re natural and supernatural, and "Spiritual" and "non-spiritual"...for me it is a meaningless distinction in a lot of ways. It implies that somehow, here and now, we are supposed to be more than we are...or something that is impossible for us to be without intervention from outside the material world.

That doesn't make sense. Given the assumption of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, how could we have been created as anything other than what he intended?

To me, there is a big enough job in making the most of the gifts we have without reching for more. Somehow, if we do the best we can with what we have, we end up finding that we had more than we thought we did in the first place.

That is magic and miracle enough for me right here and right now.

GKS,

Re Maslow - My philosophy teacher in college (admittedly an entry level survey course, so take this for what it's worth) described it not as one level having more VALUE than another...but that the needs of the next level cannot be fulfilled unless and until the minimum level is achieved in the levels below.

It's not saying tha the top of the building is BETTER than the bottom of the building...only that the top of the building can't exsist until the foundation is laid beneath it.
 

The very use of the pyramid locks the thinking into an non-real model.

Sometimes denying ones self of the basic can lead to the higher levels in spiritual reality.

Sometimes we jump down from the higher levels to the lessor levels for insight:re. Luther on the can.

Most "spitual" models are less linear and many use concetric circles and overlapping circles. Paul for example use a Pathagorian model of concentric arches to descibed the levels of heaven such as the seventh level etc.

What model would you use to demostrate "feed my sheep"?

Early Gnostic Christians used a circle with the ultimate God of the Kosmos as a dot in the center with the journey of knowledge to God as a line from the outward relms of the unware, the circle of the forgetful, to those who are awakining, and on down through the concentric circles of the model till gnosis with the "singularity".

Beware the model.
 

This is a way of stating the Christian walk (or it should be), and it sounds pretty Jesusy, too: "Sometimes denying ones self of the basic can lead to the higher levels in spiritual reality."
 

Maslow was an avid Nietzschean, and was taking Nietzsche's discussion of the hew, fully human person to a new level. Having said that, while Teresa is correct to a certain extent that, later on in his career, Maslow downplayed the Nietzscheanism within his hierarchy, as originally conceived, this was not just a display of the stages of human development, but a description of the differences between the vast hordes and the few, proud ubermenschen that Nietzsche celebrated, and believed to be the natural rulers of the rest of us.

His disdain for the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice (Nietzsche once said that there was only one true Christian and he died on the cross), for its slave-mentality, was demeaning for true human beings. While I find him fascinating, I cannot but disagree with the idea that the call to self-denial by Christ is somehow demeaning. Nor do I think we should seek it because through it we might actually find some kind of greater self-actualization. As Bonhoeffer wrote, and lived, when Christ calls someone, he bids that individual to come and die. Somehow, I don't see Maslow putting that at the top of any pyramid; yet it is the life to which we are called.
 

GKS,

I'm afraid I have to plead ignorance and inexperience, because I didn't actually read any Nietzche to speak of...just excerpts and summaries and such from the survey course, and some papers that I proofed for a friend who was a philosophy major. He didn't have quite the same take on Nietzche as you do, but there's no way I could possibly defend the impressions.

I got the anti-Christian establisment thing, but the implications of the ubermench was different...more that those who rejected what he saw as the servile nature of Christianity at that time, and avoided the dissipation of nehilism were the true inheritors of the potential of humanity.

I look forward to your corrections of this view, becauseas I said, I don't really knwo what I'm talking about and maybe you could elaborate to inform me.
 

Teresa - it is true, as far as you take it. While Nietzsche admired Jesus (as one of those true human beings for which he pined), he believed the Christian ethic was that of the slave, the herd. He saw it as part and parcel of the nihilism that plagued his time. The only answer, for him, was a heroic ethic that embraced life, which he saw as negated by the Christian ethic.

Beyond Good and Evil his last semi-coherent work (he descended in to syphilitic madness soon after), was an epigrammatic rumination of the possibilities inherent in transcending the mundane, and in his view ultimately destructive for true humanity, obsession with good and evil. To the extent that one can read Nietzsche's as an attack on bourgeois morality, all well and good, and I tend to accept it (as did Bonhoeffer, who began his Ethics fragments with a similar demand the Christian ethics leave behind an obsession with the dichotomy of good versus evil). Yet, Nietzsche was not without an ethic, but it was an ethic for the few, the superior elite. The masses who could never achieve greatness shouldn't even be considered, because it is the few, those who understand what true humanity is, and what it requires, for whom true ethics apply. These include a hardness towards one fellow human beings, because the superman had of necessity to no longer see one's fellow human beings as worthy of attention or consideration.

Again, one can read Nietzsche as simply rejecting the schmaltzy bourgeois morality that overlaid so much of the Protestantism with which he was familiar (his father was a Lutheran pastor); again, read that way, and going that far, I have no problem with it. Yet, Nietzsche was not just someone who negated. He advanced an ethic that was exactly counter to the prevailing ethic, one that he insisted was rooted in the true depths of Western thought (thus his early works on the "archaeology of knowledge").

Now, one argument about Nietzsche surrounds the Nazi appropriation of some of his, especially later, work. Partly inspired by the late Walter Kaufman's attempt to separate him from that appropriation, this ignores the fact that there is much in Nietzsche's early work that lends itself to such an appropriation. Of course, Nietzsche was no Nazi. He was disdainful of Pan-German nationalism, the gross anti-Semitism of much of European intelligentsia, and the kind of triumphalism that ignored the fact that, until a generation before, the Germans were a laughingstock in Europe, and rightly so (Nietzsche was of German descent, and fought for the German army in the Franco-Prussian War, but was Swiss).

This is wordy, and probably confusing, but I hope it helps(?).
 

GKS,

It actually does help thanks. I enjoyed reading it and it was quite informative. I've read a lot of philosophy, but never got into Nietzsche much.

It sounds like both Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss both owe quite a bit to him.

The whole Nazi's appropriating his ideas thing struck a cord. They were good at that. They also appropriated Luther's writings and many others for their purposes. Some fit better than others.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to educate me. I knew it would be worth it to ask questions here.
 

Maslow rules.

What he understood in terms of the social calculus is that the Zeitgeist must have balls.

Sam
 

Maslow rules.

Must puncture the future rather than sidle up to it.

Nice to see your energy.

Sam, www.maslow.org
 

Step forward into growth or back into safety.
 

But what about the sociopath, who sees elegance and transcendent beauty in torture, a la De Sade?

Only future is to train people to discriminate out the dangerous bastards, who, at their best, seduce us well.
 

LOL. Welcome Sam(s)!
 

The last Nietzsche I read was his book, "My Sister and I".
 

The last Nietzsche I read was his book, "My Sister and I".
 

Did I stutter?
 

Oh yes, just for the record I think Peck is full of B.S.. It is a linear model of order and progress, very neat but not very realistic. Sort of the kind of thing a "spiritual" ""leader"" would devise to provide training to converts or an outline for a set of book chapters.

Oh yes, and the child doesn't start at Peck's level one. They often start at level five. We have to break them down to level one so we can control them and train them in the way they should go.
 

Mebbe that's why the early Christian idea was to come to Christ as a little child.
 

Xzachly!