Tiny Thinker is one of my oldest and best friends on the net. He's a Buddhist, or an agnostic with Buddhistic leanings. He challenges the article I wrote just below, and I answer him. He felt this was best done on his message board, so here's a link to that discussion:
Tiny's Challenge
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Have I Denied God?
On CARM apologetics, someone was arguing that the YEC time line for civilization didn't make sense compared to the "real" time line anthropologists have pieced together. He argued that the world couldn't go from everyone on earth knowing God sent the flood and had Noah make the ark, to total polytheism, error and deceit (again) in just 299 years. He based that time frame on taking the genealogies in Genesis literally and assuming that children were born when the father's were young. Thus Ham's 500 life span overlapped with others and put him into the time of Abraham. So why wouldn't anyone listen to him?
That's actually a cogent argument, against a YEC, and why I am not a YEC (part of it). But his conclusion was that "Y" (the God of the bible, God of Ab, Isaac, Jacob) was just a myth derived from the polytheistic sources. Now that in itself is a pretty interesting problem. Because isn't it odd that the little old Jews, slaves in Egypt perhaps, or just hangers on among other Semitic tribes in the Levant, would come up with occam's razor a couple of thousand years before Occam? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Why would the Jewish monotheism by Occam's Razor? The Razor is basically the idea that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. In other words, why stack up the idea of an essence of trueness to make trees be trees, when the basic facts that make trees require only the characteristics of trees and not some special additional quality of "trueness?" Thus, in cutting away all the other members of the various mid eastern pantheons and getting down to the heart of the matter of being; one all powerful, all knowing, all present creator God who tells Moses (at least in the LXX) I am being itself.
So the monotheistic approach is evidence of true religious genius on the part of the Jews, and yet the atheists don't see that as an advance, must less do they comprehend the argument, how could a race of religious geniuses be wrong?Be that as it may, the original argument still deserves an answer. How did human religious thinking move from this brilliance of, "one is all we need, so don't multiply gods beyond necessity," to vast polytheistic schemes, only to find the one again? Could that really be the way it would go? If so, what does that say for "Y" (Or "J") the God of the Bible? Should he have been known to everyone on earth from the beginning, and if known why would he himself be forgotten again, as in the time of the flood? This seems especially odd if there were fold people still around, Noah's kids.
My answer was that religious consciousness evolved slowly and from a primitive state, like all other thinking. It would have been natural to our preter human ancestors who were more in touch with nature wildlife than we are, and would have gradually become sharp over time to take on the personality and kingly qualities of the "God of the Bible." But wait! Isn't that just out and out giving up? Isn't that just admitting that the God of the Bible is a myth and that the atheist evolutionary account of religion is right? No! Of course not. Did any of you really think I was going to say that? On CRAM I said the literary image of "Y" is a metaphor for the true creator, and that this cultural image of the King of Heaven developed over time with the idea of heave itself. The stories of the Suzerain and Akkadian creation and flood are obviously the source of the Genesis creation myth, and are clearly must older. So its no doubt that Hebrew thinking and religious understanding developed out of the previously existing clutters and religious traditions of the fertile crescent, and developed over time. But it is a safe bet that no one worshiped "J" or "Y" by name during that pre-Israliate era.
No one on CARM has as of yet taken up the problem with my answer and offered a challenge. I expected the YEC's and fudies to challenge from the standard ponit that I"m denying the God of the Bible, and the atheists from the stand point that the God of the Bible can't be defended.
So I'll take up these challenges here. Am I not giving up the God of the Bible to reduce God to that of a literary metaphor? And how can the God of the Bible be defended when he derives as myth historically from other religious systems? Let's don't forget, God says, in the Bible, "I will not give my glory to another." Much is made of the name of God, so the name, the identity, the thing I'm calling "Metaphor" and saying developed over time, seems to be very important to the Bible. It's a crucial act of Deity in the Bible.
Fallacy of "God of the Bible."
This is a point I've tried to get across for a long time. The atheist and message board way of thinking has left its indelible mark in the form of this kind of thinking; "the Christian God," "your God," "the God of the Bible." But it's a fallacy to speak of all these differing gods as though they are all sitting in the "green room" Of ontology waiting to go on stage on some sort of metaphysical talk show that will give them existence. They are not competing possibilities; they are all different ideas about the same thing! That's the point about being itself. God is not one example of a huge category consisting of multiple possibilities. That's what it means to say "a god" as opposed to "God." If we deal with contingencies, any given contingency could be replaced by another. I have "a penny" but it doesn't have to be this penny that I hold in my hand, it could be any penny. It's one of many, its "a penny" because its' not "the penny." But God cannot be replaced. That's the fallacy of those atheists, God is not a contingency waiting to exist in a field of other possible gods. God is the only God there could be, we just all have different ideas about "him." Those ideas are different because they are filtered through our cultural constructs, but they are all born of wordless, imageless mystical experience that we experience at the most basic level of consciousness. Thus we are not dealing with a possibly of God...we are dealing with the only God there is or could be, not "a God" but God. Not "a being" but a category above our contingency, "being itself." This is the thing that being is, it is to be the will of this from of existing consciousness.
Specific God Personality: and Jesus
But what does this mean for "Y" the God of the Bible? Dose it mean that the name and the glory that attaches to that name can just as eaisly be dished out to MIthras or Buddha or Brahmin or whoever? Does it mean the voice that says "let there be light" is not the same as the figure who appears to Abraham to tell him Sarah will conceive? Does it mean that the entity which covenanted with Abraham is just a metaphor, just a made up figure like Santa Clause who is only loosely based upon a half backed reality we can never pin down? Of course not! Because this concept of God, as portrayed in the Bible (rather than "the God of the Bible") linked to the concrete historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That links the character we see coming through the prhopets and the name we are given by the prophets with the actual representative of God on earth and links the identities together as indicative of the true reality spoken of as "being itself." That's why the name and glory are important, not because God is an ego maniac, which is suggested by immature skeptics all the time, but because it gives us a highway marker to associate the creator, the deity encountered by the people of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth all together as one reality.
Where does Myth Come in?
What about that Metaphor which I said developed over time and grew up with the Israelites? If "Y" is the reality of being itself and manifested himself as Jesus, where is the metaphor I spoke of? Well, first of all, in accepting that skeptic's assessment, we are getting ahead of ourselves. He wants to make a problem out of the fact that on one knew to Call God "Y" until the OT came out, or that no one knew to call God "I am" until Moses. So if these figures are not derived from human history all along, the assumption goes, then the whole fabric of the Bible must have been made up at some point in history and must be dependent upon forerunners. But the deceptive aspect is that anything in a text is a metaphor because all linage is metaphorical, and all religious language in particular is analogical; so it's all metaphor to begin with, and that doesn't separate it from the reality that the metaphor represents. The metaphor is found in the expectations we put into the symbol or the cypher that stands for the reality that the Biblical authors experienced. Some prophet may go up on a hill and what he experiences in prayer he cannot communicate clearly and we will never know what he really felt, saw, smelled, understood, but what comes out is a long diatribe against someone, for someone, pleading with a group of people to think and act a certain way; we fill that indication with expectations about God the king on a throne with a white beard. So the metpahor really exists in our heads and not on the pages of a text. In the text the find the literary element, but in our minds we carry with us the metaphorical image which is our individual understanding of God. That metaphor is wrong, and it has a history, it didn't exist before a certain time, but the thing it pertains to is not wrong and not false.
We should not find it strange that the idea of a particular personality of God and a name developed slowly. Nor should we find it strange that for millions of years there were no terrestrial beings on earth who knew that name. The earliest clear delineation of divine reality was probably some nameless feeling connected to a thunderstorm of something, it meant nothing to anyone, but stood apart form other nameless nothings connected to other forms of weather. But the Bible seems to imply sharp movements of revelation when some person, Abraham or Moses came to understand God in terms never before understood. No one else had ever been old "I am that I am" is his name. No one else had ever been told to go off into the wilderness and find a promised land. Let us not forget we don't know his real name. It cannot be prouneced and even the name we do have (which I write only as "Y"--which it isn't) is not the full name, but the name without the vowels--so that the "God of the Bible" is truley a mystery even to those follow. We do have hints of God reaching people in other religious systems. I've always been fascinated by Melchizadeck, the priest of Salem (pre-Israelite Jerusalem). He is described as "a preist of God most high" and yet, not connected to Israel or the Jews, what group worshiped that God? Would they have been worhsipping him as some pagan deity with a wired name and a carving in stone? We can't know. What we can know is, here was a guy, who was said to be an actual preist of the true God, who was worshipping God prior to the personaity of the "Bible God."
The only logical conclusion is that there is a reality to God that transcends culture and religious tradition and is not found just in the pages of the text. That reality has always been around as long as humans have had hearts. My only task as an apologist is to persaude atheists to be open to experiencing that reality, and to consult the text as a general guide.
That's actually a cogent argument, against a YEC, and why I am not a YEC (part of it). But his conclusion was that "Y" (the God of the bible, God of Ab, Isaac, Jacob) was just a myth derived from the polytheistic sources. Now that in itself is a pretty interesting problem. Because isn't it odd that the little old Jews, slaves in Egypt perhaps, or just hangers on among other Semitic tribes in the Levant, would come up with occam's razor a couple of thousand years before Occam? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Why would the Jewish monotheism by Occam's Razor? The Razor is basically the idea that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. In other words, why stack up the idea of an essence of trueness to make trees be trees, when the basic facts that make trees require only the characteristics of trees and not some special additional quality of "trueness?" Thus, in cutting away all the other members of the various mid eastern pantheons and getting down to the heart of the matter of being; one all powerful, all knowing, all present creator God who tells Moses (at least in the LXX) I am being itself.
So the monotheistic approach is evidence of true religious genius on the part of the Jews, and yet the atheists don't see that as an advance, must less do they comprehend the argument, how could a race of religious geniuses be wrong?Be that as it may, the original argument still deserves an answer. How did human religious thinking move from this brilliance of, "one is all we need, so don't multiply gods beyond necessity," to vast polytheistic schemes, only to find the one again? Could that really be the way it would go? If so, what does that say for "Y" (Or "J") the God of the Bible? Should he have been known to everyone on earth from the beginning, and if known why would he himself be forgotten again, as in the time of the flood? This seems especially odd if there were fold people still around, Noah's kids.
My answer was that religious consciousness evolved slowly and from a primitive state, like all other thinking. It would have been natural to our preter human ancestors who were more in touch with nature wildlife than we are, and would have gradually become sharp over time to take on the personality and kingly qualities of the "God of the Bible." But wait! Isn't that just out and out giving up? Isn't that just admitting that the God of the Bible is a myth and that the atheist evolutionary account of religion is right? No! Of course not. Did any of you really think I was going to say that? On CRAM I said the literary image of "Y" is a metaphor for the true creator, and that this cultural image of the King of Heaven developed over time with the idea of heave itself. The stories of the Suzerain and Akkadian creation and flood are obviously the source of the Genesis creation myth, and are clearly must older. So its no doubt that Hebrew thinking and religious understanding developed out of the previously existing clutters and religious traditions of the fertile crescent, and developed over time. But it is a safe bet that no one worshiped "J" or "Y" by name during that pre-Israliate era.
No one on CARM has as of yet taken up the problem with my answer and offered a challenge. I expected the YEC's and fudies to challenge from the standard ponit that I"m denying the God of the Bible, and the atheists from the stand point that the God of the Bible can't be defended.
So I'll take up these challenges here. Am I not giving up the God of the Bible to reduce God to that of a literary metaphor? And how can the God of the Bible be defended when he derives as myth historically from other religious systems? Let's don't forget, God says, in the Bible, "I will not give my glory to another." Much is made of the name of God, so the name, the identity, the thing I'm calling "Metaphor" and saying developed over time, seems to be very important to the Bible. It's a crucial act of Deity in the Bible.
Fallacy of "God of the Bible."
This is a point I've tried to get across for a long time. The atheist and message board way of thinking has left its indelible mark in the form of this kind of thinking; "the Christian God," "your God," "the God of the Bible." But it's a fallacy to speak of all these differing gods as though they are all sitting in the "green room" Of ontology waiting to go on stage on some sort of metaphysical talk show that will give them existence. They are not competing possibilities; they are all different ideas about the same thing! That's the point about being itself. God is not one example of a huge category consisting of multiple possibilities. That's what it means to say "a god" as opposed to "God." If we deal with contingencies, any given contingency could be replaced by another. I have "a penny" but it doesn't have to be this penny that I hold in my hand, it could be any penny. It's one of many, its "a penny" because its' not "the penny." But God cannot be replaced. That's the fallacy of those atheists, God is not a contingency waiting to exist in a field of other possible gods. God is the only God there could be, we just all have different ideas about "him." Those ideas are different because they are filtered through our cultural constructs, but they are all born of wordless, imageless mystical experience that we experience at the most basic level of consciousness. Thus we are not dealing with a possibly of God...we are dealing with the only God there is or could be, not "a God" but God. Not "a being" but a category above our contingency, "being itself." This is the thing that being is, it is to be the will of this from of existing consciousness.
Specific God Personality: and Jesus
But what does this mean for "Y" the God of the Bible? Dose it mean that the name and the glory that attaches to that name can just as eaisly be dished out to MIthras or Buddha or Brahmin or whoever? Does it mean the voice that says "let there be light" is not the same as the figure who appears to Abraham to tell him Sarah will conceive? Does it mean that the entity which covenanted with Abraham is just a metaphor, just a made up figure like Santa Clause who is only loosely based upon a half backed reality we can never pin down? Of course not! Because this concept of God, as portrayed in the Bible (rather than "the God of the Bible") linked to the concrete historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That links the character we see coming through the prhopets and the name we are given by the prophets with the actual representative of God on earth and links the identities together as indicative of the true reality spoken of as "being itself." That's why the name and glory are important, not because God is an ego maniac, which is suggested by immature skeptics all the time, but because it gives us a highway marker to associate the creator, the deity encountered by the people of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth all together as one reality.
Where does Myth Come in?
What about that Metaphor which I said developed over time and grew up with the Israelites? If "Y" is the reality of being itself and manifested himself as Jesus, where is the metaphor I spoke of? Well, first of all, in accepting that skeptic's assessment, we are getting ahead of ourselves. He wants to make a problem out of the fact that on one knew to Call God "Y" until the OT came out, or that no one knew to call God "I am" until Moses. So if these figures are not derived from human history all along, the assumption goes, then the whole fabric of the Bible must have been made up at some point in history and must be dependent upon forerunners. But the deceptive aspect is that anything in a text is a metaphor because all linage is metaphorical, and all religious language in particular is analogical; so it's all metaphor to begin with, and that doesn't separate it from the reality that the metaphor represents. The metaphor is found in the expectations we put into the symbol or the cypher that stands for the reality that the Biblical authors experienced. Some prophet may go up on a hill and what he experiences in prayer he cannot communicate clearly and we will never know what he really felt, saw, smelled, understood, but what comes out is a long diatribe against someone, for someone, pleading with a group of people to think and act a certain way; we fill that indication with expectations about God the king on a throne with a white beard. So the metpahor really exists in our heads and not on the pages of a text. In the text the find the literary element, but in our minds we carry with us the metaphorical image which is our individual understanding of God. That metaphor is wrong, and it has a history, it didn't exist before a certain time, but the thing it pertains to is not wrong and not false.
We should not find it strange that the idea of a particular personality of God and a name developed slowly. Nor should we find it strange that for millions of years there were no terrestrial beings on earth who knew that name. The earliest clear delineation of divine reality was probably some nameless feeling connected to a thunderstorm of something, it meant nothing to anyone, but stood apart form other nameless nothings connected to other forms of weather. But the Bible seems to imply sharp movements of revelation when some person, Abraham or Moses came to understand God in terms never before understood. No one else had ever been old "I am that I am" is his name. No one else had ever been told to go off into the wilderness and find a promised land. Let us not forget we don't know his real name. It cannot be prouneced and even the name we do have (which I write only as "Y"--which it isn't) is not the full name, but the name without the vowels--so that the "God of the Bible" is truley a mystery even to those follow. We do have hints of God reaching people in other religious systems. I've always been fascinated by Melchizadeck, the priest of Salem (pre-Israelite Jerusalem). He is described as "a preist of God most high" and yet, not connected to Israel or the Jews, what group worshiped that God? Would they have been worhsipping him as some pagan deity with a wired name and a carving in stone? We can't know. What we can know is, here was a guy, who was said to be an actual preist of the true God, who was worshipping God prior to the personaity of the "Bible God."
The only logical conclusion is that there is a reality to God that transcends culture and religious tradition and is not found just in the pages of the text. That reality has always been around as long as humans have had hearts. My only task as an apologist is to persaude atheists to be open to experiencing that reality, and to consult the text as a general guide.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
What I can't get Christians to Face Squarely
i say this a lot, but no seems to grasp the import of it. There is no passage where we are told to make a Bible. There is no Biblical verse that says "Make unto theyself a Bible." There are passage where they speak of texts, and where they speak of writings, there are a couple of passages that the community of faith has a set of books, but no real passage where it says "thou shalt make a bible."
The Closest thing we have to that may well be "All scritpure is Godbreathed." But taht doesn't tell us what we should understand as the body of scritpure. Since it was written (by Paul) before the even close of the Hebrew canon (council of Jamnia, 90 AD) there was no closed set of works which one might understand as "scripture." Now we can reasonably infur that it means the body of works authoritatively consulted by Jews for thei religious observances, which would clearly include the pentatuqe and at least some portions of the Tenoch (that means the frist five books of OT and some of the prophets). But it might also include things we don't even have now, or ideas we know nothing about. It might even include the oral traditions that became part of the Talmud, the mishna for example, the Jerusalaem Talmud.
Certinaly when Paul wrote that prhrase he was not thinking of a NT canon at all. So the whole idea of Scripture for Paul lacks a NT. The Christian canon was totally a matter of the Bishops decisons in councils that weren't even dermpt of when Paul wrote that phrase.
My point is that we cannot see the Bible as God's memo to the empolyees of a vast company, which I'm afraid is really how most Christians see it. We cannot embrace any sort of verbal plenary inspritaion because that would assume ideas that are not just given. This doesn't mean we should give up on the Bible. It means we should learn to see it as a collection of writtins which are human in nature, and which testify to the divine/human enconter.
The Closest thing we have to that may well be "All scritpure is Godbreathed." But taht doesn't tell us what we should understand as the body of scritpure. Since it was written (by Paul) before the even close of the Hebrew canon (council of Jamnia, 90 AD) there was no closed set of works which one might understand as "scripture." Now we can reasonably infur that it means the body of works authoritatively consulted by Jews for thei religious observances, which would clearly include the pentatuqe and at least some portions of the Tenoch (that means the frist five books of OT and some of the prophets). But it might also include things we don't even have now, or ideas we know nothing about. It might even include the oral traditions that became part of the Talmud, the mishna for example, the Jerusalaem Talmud.
Certinaly when Paul wrote that prhrase he was not thinking of a NT canon at all. So the whole idea of Scripture for Paul lacks a NT. The Christian canon was totally a matter of the Bishops decisons in councils that weren't even dermpt of when Paul wrote that phrase.
My point is that we cannot see the Bible as God's memo to the empolyees of a vast company, which I'm afraid is really how most Christians see it. We cannot embrace any sort of verbal plenary inspritaion because that would assume ideas that are not just given. This doesn't mean we should give up on the Bible. It means we should learn to see it as a collection of writtins which are human in nature, and which testify to the divine/human enconter.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Salvation and Other Faiths
Two corrections or clearifications to make before you read:
(1) I include atheists and agnostics as "other faiths."
(2) when I say hell = seperation from God I do believe in annihilation for the unbeliever, not hell fire and brimestone or conscious never ending torure. I don't beleive in this as a "punishment" but as a consquence of a choice people make. But I think there will be a point at which we know we face that end, and that creates the sense of seperation that serves as punishment for those who really deserve punsihment, like Hitler and Reagan.
Here's my essay from Doxa:
II. Is Belief in Salvation Unfair to Those of Other faiths?
A.Salvation unfair?
1) Well meaning people will not be saved?
Many good and well meaning people do not feel the need to be saved. Some wonder why is it not enough to jut be good and well meaning. Surely God knows that we are well meaning, if God looks upon the heart, so why do we need to conform to the ideological strictures of a particural religious view? Wouldn't God be extremely unjust to condemn someone who was well meaning? And aren't Chrisitans really unfiar to assume that all but those who follow their views are not well meaning?2) Unfair because believers in other religious traditions will not be saved?This is an often heard objection and it is not without merit. Why should God send someone to hell for all eternity, simpley because he/she was born in a culture that is not open to Christianity, perhaps has not herd of Jesus, and perhaps even at a time before there was any possibility of hearing (say before Christ came to earth). Such a person would have no chance of being saved. Closer to home, a person in another culture who is very committed to the religious tradition he/she was brought up in, why should such a person suffer eternally just for being who they are? That is basically what it amounts to, everyone is proud of their own culture, and everyone identifies with his/her own religious tradition in a very personal way. Why should someone be condemned just for being who they are, being born and raised in the culture they were born into?
B. Unjust because it implies an unjust alternative?
Sice hell is eternal, and sin is finite, it seems unjust to punish someone in a mannar that far exceeds the crime. Moreover, isn't the punishment unfair in the first place? Just to go to hell simpley for not being a Christian, this is very unjust becuase it means that who the person is and what they live for, and the nature of their intensions aren't even considered. To just whisk people off to hell forever, where there is no learning process so no chance to correct mistakes, is unjust.
C.Popular misconceptions of the nature of the Gospel.
"Gospel" means "Good News." The Good News is not that people are going to hell. The Good News is that God cares and provides a way to orient our lives toward him so that we can know him in this life, and in the world to come.
1) Are there really well meaning people?
"All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God." From a human perspective, relatively speaking from one human to another there are, of course, well meaning people. There are good people all around us, from a human perspective. Relative to the Divine however, no one is good, no one is capable of meriting salvation. We all have our sins, we all have our human frailties. We are all caught up in "height" (our ability through the image of God in which we were created to move beyond our human finitude and seek the good) and "depth" (our nature burrdened in the sinful wickedness to human deceit).
These are Augustinian terms and they basically mean that we are both, good and bad, saint and sinner. God knows the heart, He Knows what we truely seek. God is merciful and is able to forgive our tresspasses. But, if we are really well meaning toward God we will seek the turth. If we are seeking the truth than God will make it plan to us.
2) Other Religions
Paul said "To those who through persistance seek glory, honor and imortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declaired righteous.
Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now acusisng, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New Aameircan Standard and other translations say "their hearts acusing, now excusing them..." Most Chrsitians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) thorugh a de facto arravngement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philsophers to explain his ideas to them.
These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.
In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolotry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Isralites to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolotry. It means that on an idividual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolotry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unkonwn to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the turth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.
3) Justice of Punishment.
Jesus himself never speaks directly of hell, but always in parables. The other statements of Hell are mainly in euphamistic passages or in apocolypic passages such as the book of Revelation. But I suggest that for some crimes hell is deserved. The slaughter of innocent people, the disruption of thousands of lives, the Hitlers of the world, and those who rationalize the deeds through "following orders" deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions. Evil has consequences, and those who committ evil should suffer the consequences, and they will.I have no direct knolwege of what hell is. It is based upon the Greek mythological concept of Tartarus which got into Hebrew thinking through hellenization. There is no "hell" in the Tennach or the Pentatuch ("OT"). In the Hebrew scriptures there is only mention of Sheol, or the "the grave" to which everyone goes. But in the books of Revelation it does speak of those who work inequity being "outside the Kingdom of God." I dont' believe that hell is litteral fire and brimestone, I do believe it is some state of anxiety or seperation from God.
C. Knowing God.
Heb. 8:10-12 "...I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man say to his neighbor 'know the Lord' for they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more." This passage promises a "personal religionship with God."The word for "to Know" is the Greek Term Ginosko, which means personal epirential knowledge. To give one's life to Jesus means to develop a personal religionship with Jesus. Jesus said (John) "My sheep know my voice..." Personal relitionship means that it is more than a set of rules, more than an ideology or a belief system, but a matter of the heart, the emotions, religious affections. IT may not be through dramatic miraculous effects (although I do believe that that is open to all Christians) but it is deeper than mere rule keeping, and does make for a satisfaction nothing else can match.God acts upon the heart. Salvation is a matter of "knowing God" not of mere intellectual asscent. What does it mean to know God? It means that being a Christian is a matter of experiencing God's love in the heart and of loving God and others. It is also a matter of being "led" by God through impressions upon the heart, and not merely a set of rules or a list of beliefs that one must check off. IT is the development of "religiuos affections."The excitement of knowing God is unequalied by anything else in this life.
III. Developing Personsonal Relationship with God.
A. Getting Saved.
This is very simple. God keeps it simple so all of us can do it. John tells us "...that whosoever believes on him shall be saved." (3:16). Beleif is the first step. But believe doesn't just mean intellectual asscent, it means to place our faith in him, to trust him, as said above to place ourselves into his death, to express our solidarity with him.
Paul says "...That if you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the Dead, you will be saved, for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved....everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Romas 10:9-12).
Note that the resurrection is stipulated as a criterion of belief, and notice that it also says believe in your heart. Belief is not mere intellecutal asscent but is a decision of the will to trust in God. Does this mean we must believe in the resurrection to be saved? It at least means we must believe in the thing the resurrection points to, the new life in Christ, that we trust God to give us this new life and that such life is found in him. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. What does it mean to call upon the name of the Lord? It means, to place our trust in God and in Jesus as God's Son, as our savior.
B. The Name of Jesus
The name of Jesus then becomes our expression of solidarity with God, that we state clearly that we choose God's way, we want to change our lives and we are ready to accept God's terms for life; that we respond to the solidarity he shows us by committing to solidarity with him.In Acts 2: 38 the mob asks Peter what they must do, in response to the miracles of Penticost and Peter's sermon on Jesus being raised form the dead. Peter tells them "Repent, and be baptized everyone one of you in the name of Jesus Christ that your sins may be forgiven." Does this mean that baptism is a pre-requiset for salvation? I don't believe so. They were really asking a more general question than "how do I get saved." IN response to Peter's sermon they were asking in a general way "well, we curcified the Messiah, what can we do about it."
Peter tells them two things, repent (change your mind, express sorrow for sin and determine not to sin any longer) AND be baptized as an expression of surrender to God (in keeping with the Jewish custom). The key here is to repent, turn from the present course of life and follow Jesus. Baptism is something we should do. It is an expression of our faith, and a symbol that we palce our hope in God, die to the old way, it is an outward symbol of placing ourselves in solidarity with God and in Jesus death. But the important thing here is to repent. And, "you will recieve the gift of the Holy Spirit."Latter in Acts when Peter takes the Gospel to the gentiles for the first time, the house of Cornelius. He tells them (Acts 10:43)"... everyone who believes in him recieves forgiveness of sins through his name." With that the Holy Spirit comes upon them while Peter is still talking. He does not tell them to be baptized, nor does God wait for that to give the gift of the Holy Spirit (which is the renewing of the spirit, the "born again" experience and empowering for service to God). So here again the common link is belief, which implies a committment of trust.Eph 1: 13 "Having believed you were marked in him with a seal the promised Holy Spirit who is a deposit guaronteeing our inheritance unto redeemption of those who are God's possession."Romas 5 "since we have been justified through faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access into this grace..."Therefore, "getting saved" is very simple, although it may be the hardest thing you will ever do. Just place our trust in Jesus and give your life to God. Actively determine to believe (place trust) in Jesus and his sacrafice on the corss, God's expression of solidarity with humanity.
C. The formula.
It doesn't matter what formula you use, just pray, tell God you are sorry for your sins and you want to change and follow him, ask him to save you and to come into your life, and tell him you want to committ your life to Jesus. Don't formulate preconcieved notions about how you are suppossed to feel, just try to be sensative to how you do feel. Read and study the Bible and find a chruch where you feel at home and where they beleive the Bible. It is important to develop freindships with believers, but don't burn your books, don't become obligated to obey some preacher man in everything he would tell you, if a group insists that you need their particuarl group to be saved, or if they impose a bunch of rules don't stay with them. God will convict you about what you need to change. Just try to be open to him. Of course some things are obvious, stop sinning try to be good to peole and spread the word about what Jesus is doing in your life.B. Personal TestamonyI Hesitate to give my "testimony" because it's private, and I don't want skeptics trying to disect it, and also becasue all conversions are different, most aren't dramatic, and I don't want people expecting that if they pray to be saved the same things will happen to them that happened to me. It is different for everyone, God taylor makes conversions special for each individual. But it does seem logical to at least mention it.
(1) I include atheists and agnostics as "other faiths."
(2) when I say hell = seperation from God I do believe in annihilation for the unbeliever, not hell fire and brimestone or conscious never ending torure. I don't beleive in this as a "punishment" but as a consquence of a choice people make. But I think there will be a point at which we know we face that end, and that creates the sense of seperation that serves as punishment for those who really deserve punsihment, like Hitler and Reagan.
Here's my essay from Doxa:
II. Is Belief in Salvation Unfair to Those of Other faiths?
A.Salvation unfair?
1) Well meaning people will not be saved?
Many good and well meaning people do not feel the need to be saved. Some wonder why is it not enough to jut be good and well meaning. Surely God knows that we are well meaning, if God looks upon the heart, so why do we need to conform to the ideological strictures of a particural religious view? Wouldn't God be extremely unjust to condemn someone who was well meaning? And aren't Chrisitans really unfiar to assume that all but those who follow their views are not well meaning?2) Unfair because believers in other religious traditions will not be saved?This is an often heard objection and it is not without merit. Why should God send someone to hell for all eternity, simpley because he/she was born in a culture that is not open to Christianity, perhaps has not herd of Jesus, and perhaps even at a time before there was any possibility of hearing (say before Christ came to earth). Such a person would have no chance of being saved. Closer to home, a person in another culture who is very committed to the religious tradition he/she was brought up in, why should such a person suffer eternally just for being who they are? That is basically what it amounts to, everyone is proud of their own culture, and everyone identifies with his/her own religious tradition in a very personal way. Why should someone be condemned just for being who they are, being born and raised in the culture they were born into?
B. Unjust because it implies an unjust alternative?
Sice hell is eternal, and sin is finite, it seems unjust to punish someone in a mannar that far exceeds the crime. Moreover, isn't the punishment unfair in the first place? Just to go to hell simpley for not being a Christian, this is very unjust becuase it means that who the person is and what they live for, and the nature of their intensions aren't even considered. To just whisk people off to hell forever, where there is no learning process so no chance to correct mistakes, is unjust.
C.Popular misconceptions of the nature of the Gospel.
"Gospel" means "Good News." The Good News is not that people are going to hell. The Good News is that God cares and provides a way to orient our lives toward him so that we can know him in this life, and in the world to come.
1) Are there really well meaning people?
"All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God." From a human perspective, relatively speaking from one human to another there are, of course, well meaning people. There are good people all around us, from a human perspective. Relative to the Divine however, no one is good, no one is capable of meriting salvation. We all have our sins, we all have our human frailties. We are all caught up in "height" (our ability through the image of God in which we were created to move beyond our human finitude and seek the good) and "depth" (our nature burrdened in the sinful wickedness to human deceit).
These are Augustinian terms and they basically mean that we are both, good and bad, saint and sinner. God knows the heart, He Knows what we truely seek. God is merciful and is able to forgive our tresspasses. But, if we are really well meaning toward God we will seek the turth. If we are seeking the truth than God will make it plan to us.
2) Other Religions
Paul said "To those who through persistance seek glory, honor and imortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declaired righteous.
Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now acusisng, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New Aameircan Standard and other translations say "their hearts acusing, now excusing them..." Most Chrsitians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) thorugh a de facto arravngement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philsophers to explain his ideas to them.
These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.
In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolotry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Isralites to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolotry. It means that on an idividual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolotry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unkonwn to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the turth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.
3) Justice of Punishment.
Jesus himself never speaks directly of hell, but always in parables. The other statements of Hell are mainly in euphamistic passages or in apocolypic passages such as the book of Revelation. But I suggest that for some crimes hell is deserved. The slaughter of innocent people, the disruption of thousands of lives, the Hitlers of the world, and those who rationalize the deeds through "following orders" deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions. Evil has consequences, and those who committ evil should suffer the consequences, and they will.I have no direct knolwege of what hell is. It is based upon the Greek mythological concept of Tartarus which got into Hebrew thinking through hellenization. There is no "hell" in the Tennach or the Pentatuch ("OT"). In the Hebrew scriptures there is only mention of Sheol, or the "the grave" to which everyone goes. But in the books of Revelation it does speak of those who work inequity being "outside the Kingdom of God." I dont' believe that hell is litteral fire and brimestone, I do believe it is some state of anxiety or seperation from God.
C. Knowing God.
Heb. 8:10-12 "...I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man say to his neighbor 'know the Lord' for they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more." This passage promises a "personal religionship with God."The word for "to Know" is the Greek Term Ginosko, which means personal epirential knowledge. To give one's life to Jesus means to develop a personal religionship with Jesus. Jesus said (John) "My sheep know my voice..." Personal relitionship means that it is more than a set of rules, more than an ideology or a belief system, but a matter of the heart, the emotions, religious affections. IT may not be through dramatic miraculous effects (although I do believe that that is open to all Christians) but it is deeper than mere rule keeping, and does make for a satisfaction nothing else can match.God acts upon the heart. Salvation is a matter of "knowing God" not of mere intellectual asscent. What does it mean to know God? It means that being a Christian is a matter of experiencing God's love in the heart and of loving God and others. It is also a matter of being "led" by God through impressions upon the heart, and not merely a set of rules or a list of beliefs that one must check off. IT is the development of "religiuos affections."The excitement of knowing God is unequalied by anything else in this life.
III. Developing Personsonal Relationship with God.
A. Getting Saved.
This is very simple. God keeps it simple so all of us can do it. John tells us "...that whosoever believes on him shall be saved." (3:16). Beleif is the first step. But believe doesn't just mean intellectual asscent, it means to place our faith in him, to trust him, as said above to place ourselves into his death, to express our solidarity with him.
Paul says "...That if you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the Dead, you will be saved, for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved....everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Romas 10:9-12).
Note that the resurrection is stipulated as a criterion of belief, and notice that it also says believe in your heart. Belief is not mere intellecutal asscent but is a decision of the will to trust in God. Does this mean we must believe in the resurrection to be saved? It at least means we must believe in the thing the resurrection points to, the new life in Christ, that we trust God to give us this new life and that such life is found in him. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. What does it mean to call upon the name of the Lord? It means, to place our trust in God and in Jesus as God's Son, as our savior.
B. The Name of Jesus
The name of Jesus then becomes our expression of solidarity with God, that we state clearly that we choose God's way, we want to change our lives and we are ready to accept God's terms for life; that we respond to the solidarity he shows us by committing to solidarity with him.In Acts 2: 38 the mob asks Peter what they must do, in response to the miracles of Penticost and Peter's sermon on Jesus being raised form the dead. Peter tells them "Repent, and be baptized everyone one of you in the name of Jesus Christ that your sins may be forgiven." Does this mean that baptism is a pre-requiset for salvation? I don't believe so. They were really asking a more general question than "how do I get saved." IN response to Peter's sermon they were asking in a general way "well, we curcified the Messiah, what can we do about it."
Peter tells them two things, repent (change your mind, express sorrow for sin and determine not to sin any longer) AND be baptized as an expression of surrender to God (in keeping with the Jewish custom). The key here is to repent, turn from the present course of life and follow Jesus. Baptism is something we should do. It is an expression of our faith, and a symbol that we palce our hope in God, die to the old way, it is an outward symbol of placing ourselves in solidarity with God and in Jesus death. But the important thing here is to repent. And, "you will recieve the gift of the Holy Spirit."Latter in Acts when Peter takes the Gospel to the gentiles for the first time, the house of Cornelius. He tells them (Acts 10:43)"... everyone who believes in him recieves forgiveness of sins through his name." With that the Holy Spirit comes upon them while Peter is still talking. He does not tell them to be baptized, nor does God wait for that to give the gift of the Holy Spirit (which is the renewing of the spirit, the "born again" experience and empowering for service to God). So here again the common link is belief, which implies a committment of trust.Eph 1: 13 "Having believed you were marked in him with a seal the promised Holy Spirit who is a deposit guaronteeing our inheritance unto redeemption of those who are God's possession."Romas 5 "since we have been justified through faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access into this grace..."Therefore, "getting saved" is very simple, although it may be the hardest thing you will ever do. Just place our trust in Jesus and give your life to God. Actively determine to believe (place trust) in Jesus and his sacrafice on the corss, God's expression of solidarity with humanity.
C. The formula.
It doesn't matter what formula you use, just pray, tell God you are sorry for your sins and you want to change and follow him, ask him to save you and to come into your life, and tell him you want to committ your life to Jesus. Don't formulate preconcieved notions about how you are suppossed to feel, just try to be sensative to how you do feel. Read and study the Bible and find a chruch where you feel at home and where they beleive the Bible. It is important to develop freindships with believers, but don't burn your books, don't become obligated to obey some preacher man in everything he would tell you, if a group insists that you need their particuarl group to be saved, or if they impose a bunch of rules don't stay with them. God will convict you about what you need to change. Just try to be open to him. Of course some things are obvious, stop sinning try to be good to peole and spread the word about what Jesus is doing in your life.B. Personal TestamonyI Hesitate to give my "testimony" because it's private, and I don't want skeptics trying to disect it, and also becasue all conversions are different, most aren't dramatic, and I don't want people expecting that if they pray to be saved the same things will happen to them that happened to me. It is different for everyone, God taylor makes conversions special for each individual. But it does seem logical to at least mention it.
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Preasence of God
My friend, Pastor Dorcas, (of ECA) has ask those of us on that list to discussion our sense of feeling the presence of God.The reader can find her refelctions on this topic on the link on the right side bar to the blog "the Owl's song."
Just to tackle it from a phenomenologial persective, that is, to record the sensations and sense of it without commentary or attempt to categorize or expalin.
I have many different experiences which I associate with the presence of God. It's hard to describe and sometimes easy to confusse the thing itself withe certain affects. For example if I say "I have a great sense of peace," that doesn't really speak to the sense of God's presence but the affect of God's presence; yet sometimes that's all that can be said.
My frist such experince,when I really said "hey there's some reality here beyond anything I've known," was the night I got born again. At that time I a sensation of being looked at from some great height. I had a sense of being cleaned, especially inside. I felt a sense of all pervacive peace and cleaness and as it washed over me I felt I was being cleaned. I felt loved. I felt that someone was looking at me with great love.
When I got baptism of the Holy Spirit I sensed something like elecricity. another way I've descbied it is "liquid love." I don't know why I say "liquid" becasue even though the sensation was akin to wetness, I remained dry. I also felt a tingling all over lik electricity. Physical affects included palms of my hands burning and tingling, a force like a magnet pulling my arms up and I could actually feel waves of it washing over me and I could feel a gentle pull guiding my arms upward as I began to speak some lanague I dind't know. My mouth was heavey like it was a chore to speak (I was saying "prise god" and stuff) and so I began to speak the way my mouth wanted to go, and it sounde like some language I'd never heard before. I did say two word I found latter in national geographic as Myian place names.
Also a phenomenon of dizziness. I would feel dizzy and like passing out after praying for some time, and that would be accompanied by a feeling of great exceptional peace, but also like I wash rag that jut got wrung out, no stength left. I would feel like I was flaoting, sometimes like floating over the world.
But all of these things are basically affets on me. I still find it impossible to describe what exactly the thing is that I call "the presence of God." I can say it's a sense of cleaness, like everything around has been scrubed. Sometimes a sense of urgency, or a sense of importance, as though some great and imporatnt visitor is coming. I have a sense of shrinking in signficance and standing before the infinite, before the sublime. That's like when you stand in the desert at night under the stary sky, only even moreso.
Sometimes a sense of "utter dependence." That is the feeling that everying is connected and the whole that is connected is depepndent upon some greater thing that pervades the universe.
I used to get that feeling in my patio at night. I'd sit out under the stars late on a summer night and listen to the traffic on the freeway just a few blocks off, and get a sense of the connection between me, and my garden, my house, my neighborhood, the freeway, the cars, the factors that made the cars, the world as a whole the stary sky, it's all one thing and all created by some higher all pervasive form of being which creates and holds things together.
Just to tackle it from a phenomenologial persective, that is, to record the sensations and sense of it without commentary or attempt to categorize or expalin.
I have many different experiences which I associate with the presence of God. It's hard to describe and sometimes easy to confusse the thing itself withe certain affects. For example if I say "I have a great sense of peace," that doesn't really speak to the sense of God's presence but the affect of God's presence; yet sometimes that's all that can be said.
My frist such experince,when I really said "hey there's some reality here beyond anything I've known," was the night I got born again. At that time I a sensation of being looked at from some great height. I had a sense of being cleaned, especially inside. I felt a sense of all pervacive peace and cleaness and as it washed over me I felt I was being cleaned. I felt loved. I felt that someone was looking at me with great love.
When I got baptism of the Holy Spirit I sensed something like elecricity. another way I've descbied it is "liquid love." I don't know why I say "liquid" becasue even though the sensation was akin to wetness, I remained dry. I also felt a tingling all over lik electricity. Physical affects included palms of my hands burning and tingling, a force like a magnet pulling my arms up and I could actually feel waves of it washing over me and I could feel a gentle pull guiding my arms upward as I began to speak some lanague I dind't know. My mouth was heavey like it was a chore to speak (I was saying "prise god" and stuff) and so I began to speak the way my mouth wanted to go, and it sounde like some language I'd never heard before. I did say two word I found latter in national geographic as Myian place names.
Also a phenomenon of dizziness. I would feel dizzy and like passing out after praying for some time, and that would be accompanied by a feeling of great exceptional peace, but also like I wash rag that jut got wrung out, no stength left. I would feel like I was flaoting, sometimes like floating over the world.
But all of these things are basically affets on me. I still find it impossible to describe what exactly the thing is that I call "the presence of God." I can say it's a sense of cleaness, like everything around has been scrubed. Sometimes a sense of urgency, or a sense of importance, as though some great and imporatnt visitor is coming. I have a sense of shrinking in signficance and standing before the infinite, before the sublime. That's like when you stand in the desert at night under the stary sky, only even moreso.
Sometimes a sense of "utter dependence." That is the feeling that everying is connected and the whole that is connected is depepndent upon some greater thing that pervades the universe.
I used to get that feeling in my patio at night. I'd sit out under the stars late on a summer night and listen to the traffic on the freeway just a few blocks off, and get a sense of the connection between me, and my garden, my house, my neighborhood, the freeway, the cars, the factors that made the cars, the world as a whole the stary sky, it's all one thing and all created by some higher all pervasive form of being which creates and holds things together.
Church Meeting
Saturday night I went to a pesudo-Charismatic service, of the type called "prayer and praise." That means that the point of the thing was the singing. Everyone rasing their hands up, or clapping, big hoopla. I really loved that stuff back when I first got saved, but haven't been to such a service in a long time. A friend I've known for many years urged me to go with her. She's concerned about my spiritual life, because I'm not going to charismatic chutes, and I don't go regularly. I sort of got out of the habit in those years when I cared for my parents and couldn't leave home.
It was nice to back int that sort of environment again, to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, the peace and spiritual excitement. The sermon was good too, all about looking beyond the superficial aspects of a person and seeing their spiritual needs. He said a lot of good thins about accepting people, not for the way they look, or rejecting them because they don't measure up to our notion of propriety, but seeing them as spiritual people with spiritual needs, and people for whom Christ died.
But the thing is it also raised certain conflicts. I found myself being very judgmental about the basic middle class milieu about me. Most such Churches in North Dallas are White middle class. While all the people were nodding in agreement wit the wonderful message of accepting people who are different, no one sitting around me doing the nodding was different. Still I hate to fault them for who they are. I hate to become the opposite end of the problem and judge those guys for how they appear. They can't help it if they are acceptable.
Inevitably, at least for me, it raised the question of Christian identity and social action. I can't get around that dilemma. The dilemma that I will always be at odds with the church politically; at least as long as church favors bourgeoisie culture. Because for them being a Christian means being a republican, so how can I join in with them when for me being a republican means supporting muddier, rape, torture and lies in central America? Sorry to all those of you out there in log land who are republicans. I know the average person doesn't put things together the way I do. Maybe we can't make such clean cut judgments, when the Deems have a lot of dirt to sweep under the rug too.
But where does that leave me? Still squirming for an answer about the finding the basis upon which I can fellowship with church and still stand up for the ideals I believe in. But as we prayed and praised I began to feel the presence of God; then I realized at least a partial answer. The answer is we are called to love people. Jesus teaches us that the second greatest commandment is "love your neighbor has yourself." I don't need to judge the republicans or take the church to task for its social sins. I need only to love them and support the political angina that I see flow out of the basic motivation of human compassion.
It was nice to back int that sort of environment again, to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, the peace and spiritual excitement. The sermon was good too, all about looking beyond the superficial aspects of a person and seeing their spiritual needs. He said a lot of good thins about accepting people, not for the way they look, or rejecting them because they don't measure up to our notion of propriety, but seeing them as spiritual people with spiritual needs, and people for whom Christ died.
But the thing is it also raised certain conflicts. I found myself being very judgmental about the basic middle class milieu about me. Most such Churches in North Dallas are White middle class. While all the people were nodding in agreement wit the wonderful message of accepting people who are different, no one sitting around me doing the nodding was different. Still I hate to fault them for who they are. I hate to become the opposite end of the problem and judge those guys for how they appear. They can't help it if they are acceptable.
Inevitably, at least for me, it raised the question of Christian identity and social action. I can't get around that dilemma. The dilemma that I will always be at odds with the church politically; at least as long as church favors bourgeoisie culture. Because for them being a Christian means being a republican, so how can I join in with them when for me being a republican means supporting muddier, rape, torture and lies in central America? Sorry to all those of you out there in log land who are republicans. I know the average person doesn't put things together the way I do. Maybe we can't make such clean cut judgments, when the Deems have a lot of dirt to sweep under the rug too.
But where does that leave me? Still squirming for an answer about the finding the basis upon which I can fellowship with church and still stand up for the ideals I believe in. But as we prayed and praised I began to feel the presence of God; then I realized at least a partial answer. The answer is we are called to love people. Jesus teaches us that the second greatest commandment is "love your neighbor has yourself." I don't need to judge the republicans or take the church to task for its social sins. I need only to love them and support the political angina that I see flow out of the basic motivation of human compassion.
Friday, June 03, 2005
The Logic of the Lamp Post
I was planing on using an analogy for my argument about phenomenology. It ws the logic of the lampe post. That's the idea that you drop your car keys in the dark, where do you start looking? Under the light. But if you dind't drop them under light, why would you look there? Because that's the only place you could find them. That would have fit the situtaion thusly: my approach to God arguemnts is to calim the idea Schleiermacher's "co-determinate." That is, a "trace" or "finger print" or some aspect that goes alonog with God, but is not but which will be indicative of God. We can't prove God in an emprically verifiable way, so we do the next best thing, we "prove" the co-determinate.Of course, the 64, Million dollar question (yea,it's suppossed to be 64,000,but inflation...) how do we know what the co-determinate is? But let's brackett that for now, I'm still working on what's wrong with the analogy.
So the idea is we prove what we can, we look under the lamp post. The problem is, the lamp post is also what empiricism is doing. The empiricists,the scientific reductionists, (ie skeptics) are looking at what they can see and nothing more. The conclude on the basis of a limited and narrow range of data that there can't be anything else out there in the dark but that which they see in this mall patch of light. I was in a qunadry. Should I re-shape the analogy? Should I find a new analogy, does this mean that there is no real difference in the phenomenological approach and the empirical scietnific (sketpical) approach? Before I go any further let me qualify that I use the term "scientific" opporationally. I am not saying that all scientific thinking is skeptical and anti-religious. I am just using that phrase here for the purposes of describing the oppossition in terms they like to see themselves.
Let's ask ourselves what is the basic difference in what the empiricists (inductive scientific thinkers) are doing and what the phenomenologist is doing? The empiricists are restricting what they look for to that which can be statitstically recorded. That's how indictive reasoning works, they have to be able to make statistical averages, and they figure the probabileis give them enough weight that they don't to prove 1x1 corrolations, they can rest upon the stronger statistical corollations. But the problem is that a lot of things far between the cracks.
On average men are taller and physically stronger than women. There are women who are taller tha me, women who are stronger than me. There are women who can beat the you know what out of me. If we made a statisitical law that "men are taller and strong than women" man women would fall between the cracks, there would be many distinctions. Well this get's scientific materilsts in trouble they try to apply their method to rulling out miracles. They have to place 'the miracle' in the category of "that which does not happen" because they have ruled out all the enstances of them, becasue they dont' happen. So thehy are actually arguing in a circle. The Loudes miracles are notable exceptions which fall bellow the materilsts radar. The phenomenoloigist is not doing this. The idea of phemonmenology is that we allow the sense data to detemrine the categoires. In other words, we say "I am meeting a woman who taller and stronger than I am, I wont make a law like statement based upon statistical averages about the realitve size and strength of genders."
So I guess one way I could alter my analogy would be to say that the empiricist has a pre concived notion of what the key must look like. You describe it to him, but he has his fixed idea, so even if he sees it he wont pick it up because he's determined it has to fit a certain shape. Moreover, the phenomenologist says "the key could be in the dark, in fact the key probably is in the dark. If nothing else we will just rule out the key being in the light." But the empirist says "no, our understanding of the ligted areas tells everything we need to know about the dark areas. So if there is no key in the lighted area, there no key in the dark area.
Of course I've made my materilst unnecessarily stupid because most of them are going to compleicate things by being much smarter than that. But that's a simplistic examle of what I mean (any resemblance between my hypotethical empiricist and actual posters on the CARM board is purely a matter of opinion). So while meothodologies choose fields in which a co-detemrniate can be found, one has a preconcieved set of assumptions about what that something is, and about what the territory we cannot investigate is like, and the other does not.
Now how do we know the co-detemrinate? Schleiermacher saw it as the feeling of utter dpendence, because the object or correlary of having such a feeling was the thing that evokes the feeling. Just feelings of sublimity imply that one enoucnters the sublime, feelings of love imply that there is a beloved, so feelings of utter dependence imply that there is a universal necessity upon which the live world and worlds are supremely utterly dependent. We can also include mystical experince and life transformation because these are part and parcell of what is meant by the idea of religion and the divine. As far back as we can dig for artifacts we seem to find some form of mystical experince at the heart of all organized religion. So we can conclude that God, religion, and life transformation always go hand in hand. The studies themselves tell us that life transformation always accompanies dramatic experiences which are understood as and which evoke a strong sense of the Holy. Is this really phenomenological? We can screw up our phenomenological credentials by responsding to it in a non phenomenological way. But it is the product of the phenomenological method, because it derives from obserfation of the phenomena and allowing the phenomena to tell us what categories to group the data into.
So the idea is we prove what we can, we look under the lamp post. The problem is, the lamp post is also what empiricism is doing. The empiricists,the scientific reductionists, (ie skeptics) are looking at what they can see and nothing more. The conclude on the basis of a limited and narrow range of data that there can't be anything else out there in the dark but that which they see in this mall patch of light. I was in a qunadry. Should I re-shape the analogy? Should I find a new analogy, does this mean that there is no real difference in the phenomenological approach and the empirical scietnific (sketpical) approach? Before I go any further let me qualify that I use the term "scientific" opporationally. I am not saying that all scientific thinking is skeptical and anti-religious. I am just using that phrase here for the purposes of describing the oppossition in terms they like to see themselves.
Let's ask ourselves what is the basic difference in what the empiricists (inductive scientific thinkers) are doing and what the phenomenologist is doing? The empiricists are restricting what they look for to that which can be statitstically recorded. That's how indictive reasoning works, they have to be able to make statistical averages, and they figure the probabileis give them enough weight that they don't to prove 1x1 corrolations, they can rest upon the stronger statistical corollations. But the problem is that a lot of things far between the cracks.
On average men are taller and physically stronger than women. There are women who are taller tha me, women who are stronger than me. There are women who can beat the you know what out of me. If we made a statisitical law that "men are taller and strong than women" man women would fall between the cracks, there would be many distinctions. Well this get's scientific materilsts in trouble they try to apply their method to rulling out miracles. They have to place 'the miracle' in the category of "that which does not happen" because they have ruled out all the enstances of them, becasue they dont' happen. So thehy are actually arguing in a circle. The Loudes miracles are notable exceptions which fall bellow the materilsts radar. The phenomenoloigist is not doing this. The idea of phemonmenology is that we allow the sense data to detemrine the categoires. In other words, we say "I am meeting a woman who taller and stronger than I am, I wont make a law like statement based upon statistical averages about the realitve size and strength of genders."
So I guess one way I could alter my analogy would be to say that the empiricist has a pre concived notion of what the key must look like. You describe it to him, but he has his fixed idea, so even if he sees it he wont pick it up because he's determined it has to fit a certain shape. Moreover, the phenomenologist says "the key could be in the dark, in fact the key probably is in the dark. If nothing else we will just rule out the key being in the light." But the empirist says "no, our understanding of the ligted areas tells everything we need to know about the dark areas. So if there is no key in the lighted area, there no key in the dark area.
Of course I've made my materilst unnecessarily stupid because most of them are going to compleicate things by being much smarter than that. But that's a simplistic examle of what I mean (any resemblance between my hypotethical empiricist and actual posters on the CARM board is purely a matter of opinion). So while meothodologies choose fields in which a co-detemrniate can be found, one has a preconcieved set of assumptions about what that something is, and about what the territory we cannot investigate is like, and the other does not.
Now how do we know the co-detemrinate? Schleiermacher saw it as the feeling of utter dpendence, because the object or correlary of having such a feeling was the thing that evokes the feeling. Just feelings of sublimity imply that one enoucnters the sublime, feelings of love imply that there is a beloved, so feelings of utter dependence imply that there is a universal necessity upon which the live world and worlds are supremely utterly dependent. We can also include mystical experince and life transformation because these are part and parcell of what is meant by the idea of religion and the divine. As far back as we can dig for artifacts we seem to find some form of mystical experince at the heart of all organized religion. So we can conclude that God, religion, and life transformation always go hand in hand. The studies themselves tell us that life transformation always accompanies dramatic experiences which are understood as and which evoke a strong sense of the Holy. Is this really phenomenological? We can screw up our phenomenological credentials by responsding to it in a non phenomenological way. But it is the product of the phenomenological method, because it derives from obserfation of the phenomena and allowing the phenomena to tell us what categories to group the data into.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Stupidity amazes me
I love to think about travel, so I tried to look at the stats on the far away readers of this blog. Someone coming in through the Netherlands was coming via an atheist board. I went to see it and someone had posted a thing about stupid I am. Probably some Cretan who ran in with me on the sec web and never understood what I was saying to begin with.
It really gets me. Why do they try? You mention a bunch of books by a bunch of guys they've never heard of, Heidegger,Schleiermacher, Popkin, Hacking, Hegel, they can tell by the way I talk about them that they must be important, but to them they are just geeks or freaks, or nobodies. they don't care. They know nothing, they think nothing, they are just waiting for the next fruit roll up commercial to come on so they can go "yea I hate school too!" Why do they bother pretending they understand the issues?
It often happens that they will say "megashit your argument are illogical and circular." I'll say 'OK show which rule of logic makes them illogical? Do they violate the law of excluded middle? Why are they circular? Do they have premise resting on the conclusion? show me where? But I get nothing back but the sound of crickets. Yet it never occurs to them, Duh the reason I can't understand what he's talking about is because he's smart and I'm stupid.
And they go on this way with other little pimple faced 15 year olds, and it never occurs to them that most of the Christians are talking about the wired name guys and saying stuff they don't understand.
When they get really desperate the use that stupid "atheists have higher IQ's" website with all the studies put in the wrong categories. So they want to convince themselves they are o so smart, but it never occurs to them they can't do anything smart people do. They don't read books, they have no vast stock pile of learning, they dot' understand big words, they never think about anything, they have no culture.
Of course they believe that science is the only from of knowledge, so it wouldn't even occur to them that not knowing anything about art or letters means they are less well educated, and that's a mark of intelligence. All of this watt off a ducks back.
There are some atheists who are angry because big mean preacher man wouldn't let them screw. They can feel so much smarter than religious people because that website says so, and so if they just wave the science flag they don't have to understand science, they just have to reject religion and art. Most atheists I find on the net do not understand science. So for them science becomes a kind of er zots religion, because they have a mysterious relationship to it, they trust it to save them from big mean preacher man's angry God, and yet its' ineffable, its' a mysteries Tremendum that they can never penetrate.
Now I know many smart atheists on the net, and of cooers I'm sure if I don't say this Tiny Thinker will certainly make a comment. But I do know many smart atheists and non Christians and many who are smart enough to know better than to indulge int he kind of petulance that this kind I'm speaking of had indulged in.
For that matter, there are some really stupid Christians on the net too. I just wan to say much about that, too embarrassing. I will say this, I got into an argument on a message board with a Christian who claimed that genesis was literal. I said "where's the water above the firmament and where's the firmament?" Firmament in real Semitic mythology meant a dome over the earth with doors in it to be opened so that rain and snow could fall to earth. That was the water above the firmament. so when Genesis speaks of "the water above the firmament" it's actually affirming a flat domed earth. This guy said "it's spiritual water so you can't see it."
Explaining what's wrong with that would just take too much energy. But I am always amazed by these people.
It really gets me. Why do they try? You mention a bunch of books by a bunch of guys they've never heard of, Heidegger,Schleiermacher, Popkin, Hacking, Hegel, they can tell by the way I talk about them that they must be important, but to them they are just geeks or freaks, or nobodies. they don't care. They know nothing, they think nothing, they are just waiting for the next fruit roll up commercial to come on so they can go "yea I hate school too!" Why do they bother pretending they understand the issues?
It often happens that they will say "megashit your argument are illogical and circular." I'll say 'OK show which rule of logic makes them illogical? Do they violate the law of excluded middle? Why are they circular? Do they have premise resting on the conclusion? show me where? But I get nothing back but the sound of crickets. Yet it never occurs to them, Duh the reason I can't understand what he's talking about is because he's smart and I'm stupid.
And they go on this way with other little pimple faced 15 year olds, and it never occurs to them that most of the Christians are talking about the wired name guys and saying stuff they don't understand.
When they get really desperate the use that stupid "atheists have higher IQ's" website with all the studies put in the wrong categories. So they want to convince themselves they are o so smart, but it never occurs to them they can't do anything smart people do. They don't read books, they have no vast stock pile of learning, they dot' understand big words, they never think about anything, they have no culture.
Of course they believe that science is the only from of knowledge, so it wouldn't even occur to them that not knowing anything about art or letters means they are less well educated, and that's a mark of intelligence. All of this watt off a ducks back.
There are some atheists who are angry because big mean preacher man wouldn't let them screw. They can feel so much smarter than religious people because that website says so, and so if they just wave the science flag they don't have to understand science, they just have to reject religion and art. Most atheists I find on the net do not understand science. So for them science becomes a kind of er zots religion, because they have a mysterious relationship to it, they trust it to save them from big mean preacher man's angry God, and yet its' ineffable, its' a mysteries Tremendum that they can never penetrate.
Now I know many smart atheists on the net, and of cooers I'm sure if I don't say this Tiny Thinker will certainly make a comment. But I do know many smart atheists and non Christians and many who are smart enough to know better than to indulge int he kind of petulance that this kind I'm speaking of had indulged in.
For that matter, there are some really stupid Christians on the net too. I just wan to say much about that, too embarrassing. I will say this, I got into an argument on a message board with a Christian who claimed that genesis was literal. I said "where's the water above the firmament and where's the firmament?" Firmament in real Semitic mythology meant a dome over the earth with doors in it to be opened so that rain and snow could fall to earth. That was the water above the firmament. so when Genesis speaks of "the water above the firmament" it's actually affirming a flat domed earth. This guy said "it's spiritual water so you can't see it."
Explaining what's wrong with that would just take too much energy. But I am always amazed by these people.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Phemonmenology and Method
Many Atheists are hung up on empirical knowledge. Thats why so many of them (not all by many) insist that we have no info about God, you can't verfy God and so forth.Many posts on CARM lattely have criticized "religious subjectivity." Even many christians have fallen into the trap of dicotomizing between subect and object, such that they think: subjectivity = bad, objectivity = good.
But God cannot be the subject of empirical data becasue is not given in sense data. That's becasue God is not just another object along side objects in creation. God is not just another thing, God is the basis of reality. That's like a fish scientist saying "they assinged me to study this thing called 'water' but I can't find any water." he says that because it never dawns on him that its' all around him, the medium in which he lives and he's always looking through it. he can't see the water because he's looking through it.
That's sort of the case with God because God is the basis of reality, the ground of Being. "in him we live and move and have our being." When we try to look at God and see him directly we look through him because in a sense he's the medium in which we live.
The only answer to this is to search for something else. We don't look for empirical evdience of God, we look for a "co-detemrinate." That is, we look for the signatrue of God, or to use a Derridian term the "trace of God." Like the arua of a neutrino. We can't photogrpah neutrinos directly but we have photographed their auruas that are the reaction of Nuetrinos with other particals. When you see that aurua you know you have one.
But the trace of God has to be the result of a subjective or intersubjective understanding. So rather than subject it to empirical means, we need allow the sense data to determine the categories under which we organize our thinking about God.
Schleiermacher was the originater of this kind of thinking (prior to Brintono who is attributed to be the inventer of Phenomenology). Here is Schleiermacher's take on God consciousness. We don't search for God in objective terms we search for "God consciousness."
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is very important because it is the altenative way of htinking to either empirical science and hangs ups on iductive data, or deudtive reasoing and hang ups on the a prori. When I say "allow the sense data to determine the categories," what do I mean? (this is very crucial to understanding every point I make on message boards):
What that means is, you have a bit of qualia, an impression of the say sense data strikes us,the way something appears to us. Let's say the desk my computer sits upon. Our tendency is to tuck it away into a neat category based upon our preconcieved notions of desks. This is a bit of wodden furniture, it's funciton is proving a surface for writting and bit of storage for what we write. We plug in the label "made in Hong Kong" and we say "it's a cheap desk." Now we have a sub category. all that is pre set in our minds based upon our understanding of the universe vis a vie writting surfaces. But if we appraoch the desk phenomenologically, we don't say "o a cheap peice of furniture for holding my computer--manufactured in formerly British colony, the home of Jackie Chan, thus a Kung fu capitalist cheap desk. but we just say "there is this object that appears in my sense data, and it seems to provide uses x,y,z. So it may not be a desk at all in terms of its functionality, perhaps it would work better as a door stop. Or perhaps this door put across two saw horses would make a better desk. That's not part of my preconcieved notion because it's not made to be a desk, but it might work better."
Ok that's a trivial example, so much for my understanding of desks and their place in the univrese. But, when we consider other thins, things of more gravity such as empirical science and reilgion, or religious belief and expeirnce, the nautre of myth and religious texts, you can see how the outcome might might be a lot more significant if we do it one way as oppossed to another.
The way the atheists want to to it is to demand certian things, and those things require sense data and that sense data is preconcieved to belong in certain categories and to rule out other sense data. Thus they wind up asking for probability of miracles when in fact by defition a miracle cannot be probable. So they rule out any kind of miracle based upon the pre convieved category of "things that do no happen because we don't observe them so they are too impoprobable." Whereas in reality, since miracles are things taht are impossible, but happen anyway because some higher law overrides that of probablity, they are just arbitrarly crossing out the category of the possible and arbitraily arranging their understanding of the universe to exclude the SN, then demanding that, well there's no evidence for it (because we have filed all the evidence under the preconvcieved category of "that which does not happen.").
Religion not Reduceable to Knowledge
Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Dispisers, and The Chrisitian Faith (Glogenschleurer) (I know my German spell has to worse than my English spelling),sets forth the view that religion is not reduceable to kowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenoloigcal apprehension of God consciusness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confussed with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is udnerstood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vinture close to this position in one form of the arugment, this is not exactly what he's saying.
In the earlier form of his argument he was saying that affections were indicative of a sense of God, but in the Christian Faith he argues that there is a greater sense of unity in the life world and a snese of the dependance of all things in the life world upon something higher.
What is this feeling of utter depenedence? It is the sense of the unity in the life world and it's greater reliance upon a higher reality. It is not to be confussed with the stary sky at night in the desert feeling, but is akin to it. I like to think about the feeling of being in my backyard late on a summer night, listening to the sounds of the freeway dying out andrealizing a certain harmony in the lfie world and the sense that all of this exists because it stemms form a higher thing. There is more to it than thatbut I don't have time to go into it. That's just a short hand for those of us to whom this is a new concept to get some sort of handle on it. Nor does"feeling" here mean "emotion" but it is connected to the religiousaffections. In the early version S. thought it was a corrolate between thereligious affections and God; God must be there because I can feel love for him when I pray to him. But that's not what it's saying in the better version.
The basic assumptions Schleiermacher is making are Plaontic. He believes that the feeling of utter dependence is the backdrop, the pre-given, pre-cognative notion behind the ontological argument. IN other words, what Anselm tried to capture in his logical argument is felt by everyone, if they were honest, in a pre-cognative way. In other words, before one thinks about it, it is this "feeling" of utter dependence. After one thinks it out and makes it into a logical arguemnt it is the ontological arguement.
Unity in the Life world.
"Life world," or Labeinswelt is a term used in German philosophy. It implies the world of one's culturally contructed life, the "world" we 'live in.' Life as we expeirence it on a daily basis. The unity one senses in the life world is intuative and unites the experiences and aspirations of the individual in a sense of integration and belonging in in the world. As Heidegger says "a being in the world." Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuative sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher relatiy, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuative sense of "radical constingency" (int he sense of the above ontolgoical arugments).
He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesnt' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative relaitzation of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Becasue in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.
All religions seek to do three things:
a) to identify the human problematic, b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and c) to mediate between the two.
But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:
1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.
2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic.
3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible. 4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.
5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.
These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.
A religious tradition is like a language, and theology is a converation. Since God is mystyical reality, beyond words, to speak of our experiences of God one must encode those experinces into cutlural constructs, that makes for the differences in different religons. Traditions are like languages in that they furnish a vocabulary for dealing with such experinces based upon past experiences in an inter-subjective fashion. The point of the discussion is to mediate transformation. One moves into mediation through the conversation of theology. One is then able to come terms with mediation on a personal and experiential level as is still able to relate intersubjectively with others who have similar expeirnces.
The question then,is not which religion is "true," but which one best mediates transformation. For the individual who answers that question, and comes to identify with a tradition, that is the conversation to take up; join that traidion. For me its Christianity. As part of the conversation one can set up cirteria for understanding the conversation, criteria such as those listed above.
How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.
Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.
The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through *****ures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.
Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.
The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.
The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).
One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.
After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of text is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.
The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.
But God cannot be the subject of empirical data becasue is not given in sense data. That's becasue God is not just another object along side objects in creation. God is not just another thing, God is the basis of reality. That's like a fish scientist saying "they assinged me to study this thing called 'water' but I can't find any water." he says that because it never dawns on him that its' all around him, the medium in which he lives and he's always looking through it. he can't see the water because he's looking through it.
That's sort of the case with God because God is the basis of reality, the ground of Being. "in him we live and move and have our being." When we try to look at God and see him directly we look through him because in a sense he's the medium in which we live.
The only answer to this is to search for something else. We don't look for empirical evdience of God, we look for a "co-detemrinate." That is, we look for the signatrue of God, or to use a Derridian term the "trace of God." Like the arua of a neutrino. We can't photogrpah neutrinos directly but we have photographed their auruas that are the reaction of Nuetrinos with other particals. When you see that aurua you know you have one.
But the trace of God has to be the result of a subjective or intersubjective understanding. So rather than subject it to empirical means, we need allow the sense data to determine the categories under which we organize our thinking about God.
Schleiermacher was the originater of this kind of thinking (prior to Brintono who is attributed to be the inventer of Phenomenology). Here is Schleiermacher's take on God consciousness. We don't search for God in objective terms we search for "God consciousness."
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is very important because it is the altenative way of htinking to either empirical science and hangs ups on iductive data, or deudtive reasoing and hang ups on the a prori. When I say "allow the sense data to determine the categories," what do I mean? (this is very crucial to understanding every point I make on message boards):
What that means is, you have a bit of qualia, an impression of the say sense data strikes us,the way something appears to us. Let's say the desk my computer sits upon. Our tendency is to tuck it away into a neat category based upon our preconcieved notions of desks. This is a bit of wodden furniture, it's funciton is proving a surface for writting and bit of storage for what we write. We plug in the label "made in Hong Kong" and we say "it's a cheap desk." Now we have a sub category. all that is pre set in our minds based upon our understanding of the universe vis a vie writting surfaces. But if we appraoch the desk phenomenologically, we don't say "o a cheap peice of furniture for holding my computer--manufactured in formerly British colony, the home of Jackie Chan, thus a Kung fu capitalist cheap desk. but we just say "there is this object that appears in my sense data, and it seems to provide uses x,y,z. So it may not be a desk at all in terms of its functionality, perhaps it would work better as a door stop. Or perhaps this door put across two saw horses would make a better desk. That's not part of my preconcieved notion because it's not made to be a desk, but it might work better."
Ok that's a trivial example, so much for my understanding of desks and their place in the univrese. But, when we consider other thins, things of more gravity such as empirical science and reilgion, or religious belief and expeirnce, the nautre of myth and religious texts, you can see how the outcome might might be a lot more significant if we do it one way as oppossed to another.
The way the atheists want to to it is to demand certian things, and those things require sense data and that sense data is preconcieved to belong in certain categories and to rule out other sense data. Thus they wind up asking for probability of miracles when in fact by defition a miracle cannot be probable. So they rule out any kind of miracle based upon the pre convieved category of "things that do no happen because we don't observe them so they are too impoprobable." Whereas in reality, since miracles are things taht are impossible, but happen anyway because some higher law overrides that of probablity, they are just arbitrarly crossing out the category of the possible and arbitraily arranging their understanding of the universe to exclude the SN, then demanding that, well there's no evidence for it (because we have filed all the evidence under the preconvcieved category of "that which does not happen.").
Religion not Reduceable to Knowledge
Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Dispisers, and The Chrisitian Faith (Glogenschleurer) (I know my German spell has to worse than my English spelling),sets forth the view that religion is not reduceable to kowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenoloigcal apprehension of God consciusness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confussed with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is udnerstood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vinture close to this position in one form of the arugment, this is not exactly what he's saying.
In the earlier form of his argument he was saying that affections were indicative of a sense of God, but in the Christian Faith he argues that there is a greater sense of unity in the life world and a snese of the dependance of all things in the life world upon something higher.
What is this feeling of utter depenedence? It is the sense of the unity in the life world and it's greater reliance upon a higher reality. It is not to be confussed with the stary sky at night in the desert feeling, but is akin to it. I like to think about the feeling of being in my backyard late on a summer night, listening to the sounds of the freeway dying out andrealizing a certain harmony in the lfie world and the sense that all of this exists because it stemms form a higher thing. There is more to it than thatbut I don't have time to go into it. That's just a short hand for those of us to whom this is a new concept to get some sort of handle on it. Nor does"feeling" here mean "emotion" but it is connected to the religiousaffections. In the early version S. thought it was a corrolate between thereligious affections and God; God must be there because I can feel love for him when I pray to him. But that's not what it's saying in the better version.
The basic assumptions Schleiermacher is making are Plaontic. He believes that the feeling of utter dependence is the backdrop, the pre-given, pre-cognative notion behind the ontological argument. IN other words, what Anselm tried to capture in his logical argument is felt by everyone, if they were honest, in a pre-cognative way. In other words, before one thinks about it, it is this "feeling" of utter dependence. After one thinks it out and makes it into a logical arguemnt it is the ontological arguement.
Unity in the Life world.
"Life world," or Labeinswelt is a term used in German philosophy. It implies the world of one's culturally contructed life, the "world" we 'live in.' Life as we expeirence it on a daily basis. The unity one senses in the life world is intuative and unites the experiences and aspirations of the individual in a sense of integration and belonging in in the world. As Heidegger says "a being in the world." Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuative sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher relatiy, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuative sense of "radical constingency" (int he sense of the above ontolgoical arugments).
He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesnt' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative relaitzation of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Becasue in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.
All religions seek to do three things:
a) to identify the human problematic, b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and c) to mediate between the two.
But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:
1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.
2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic.
3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible. 4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.
5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.
These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.
A religious tradition is like a language, and theology is a converation. Since God is mystyical reality, beyond words, to speak of our experiences of God one must encode those experinces into cutlural constructs, that makes for the differences in different religons. Traditions are like languages in that they furnish a vocabulary for dealing with such experinces based upon past experiences in an inter-subjective fashion. The point of the discussion is to mediate transformation. One moves into mediation through the conversation of theology. One is then able to come terms with mediation on a personal and experiential level as is still able to relate intersubjectively with others who have similar expeirnces.
The question then,is not which religion is "true," but which one best mediates transformation. For the individual who answers that question, and comes to identify with a tradition, that is the conversation to take up; join that traidion. For me its Christianity. As part of the conversation one can set up cirteria for understanding the conversation, criteria such as those listed above.
How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.
Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.
The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through *****ures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.
Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.
The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.
The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).
One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.
After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of text is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.
The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Subjective Faith
Recently on a Message board I defended Keirkegaard's idea of fiath as subjective. A fellow Christian said to me:
I think you have fallen into the trap of letting the
>atheists set the agenda fort the meaning of the word
>"subjective."
>
>I answered:
>
That's so very irnonic. Becasue by embracing the subject Object dichotomy you are doing nothing more than affirming the atheist world view. There is no way to be a Christian and affirm the subject/object dichotomy in the strict "good/bad" framework, with subject = bad, object = good that atheists impose.
That is empirically and Biblically the case. When God speaks thorugh Jerimaiah and describe the new covenant (ch 31) he says "the new covmenat will not be like the old one, for the broke the old one. NO longer will a man say to his neighbor "know the lord" for they will alll know me from the least to the greatest."
Now laws are objective. Rules are objective. He's saying they broke the objective covenant the one based upon rule keeping. They new one will be subjective (they will all know me--knowing is a jubjective matter because it depends upon the indivuaul's percetions).
so he's saying the objective coveneant will be overturned in favor of the subjective covmenat, the one based upon personal experince.
You have fallen into the trap of not being up to date on Heidegger and not being well versed int he thierkers of the tradition, such as Kierkegaard.
I think you have fallen into the trap of letting the
>atheists set the agenda fort the meaning of the word
>"subjective."
>
>I answered:
>
That's so very irnonic. Becasue by embracing the subject Object dichotomy you are doing nothing more than affirming the atheist world view. There is no way to be a Christian and affirm the subject/object dichotomy in the strict "good/bad" framework, with subject = bad, object = good that atheists impose.
That is empirically and Biblically the case. When God speaks thorugh Jerimaiah and describe the new covenant (ch 31) he says "the new covmenat will not be like the old one, for the broke the old one. NO longer will a man say to his neighbor "know the lord" for they will alll know me from the least to the greatest."
Now laws are objective. Rules are objective. He's saying they broke the objective covenant the one based upon rule keeping. They new one will be subjective (they will all know me--knowing is a jubjective matter because it depends upon the indivuaul's percetions).
so he's saying the objective coveneant will be overturned in favor of the subjective covmenat, the one based upon personal experince.
You have fallen into the trap of not being up to date on Heidegger and not being well versed int he thierkers of the tradition, such as Kierkegaard.
Ethical Paraidigms
Many atheists support the notion of morality based upon what is teleological ethics. The end or outcome or the goal is the point. It is the achieved goal tha makes an action moral. The prime exmaple of this form of ethics is Utilitarianism; life is a trade off of pursuit of pleaure and avoidence of pain. the highest goal to which one can aspire morally is to aid othes avoidence of pain.
Of course who could forget that gem of the Utilitarian hit parade, "the grestest good for the geraest number."My view is represented by the deontological school of ethics. to be more prescise, rule deontology is my bag.
The basic concept here is that morality is grounded in duty and obligation. Rule deonology says that all rules must be observed from a standard of following duty and promoting obligation, and keeping these rules determines the morality of a given standard.
Deontology is unfairly criticized as blind rule keeping is often confussed with empty legalism. Quite the conrrary, I think I'm very unlegalistic type of person. Rather than insiting up rule keeping at, my level of ethical standard is one in wich the attempt to fulfill duty or keep an obligation is enough to make an action ethical, so that the agent need not even succeed at keeping the rule.
If I said that actions must confrom of rule keeping I would be a "act deontologist."
On the other hand the notion that actions are judged by their outcomes is "act utilitarianism." Whereas the idea that general percipoles shoudl foster outcomes such that pleasure over pain is promoted is called "rule utilitiarianism." Act utilitairainism is often noted for producing extremes.
Teleological or consquential ethics (HRG's bag) is well know among liberals. It's the brand of ethics most often embraced by liberals and humanitsts (which doesn't mean that I'mn not a liberal and humanist--although Christian humanist).
Even though most liberals tend to embrace teleological ethics, most ethecists do not. Teleological ethics fell into disvaor in the 30s, and has been on the decline every since. IN the 1960s it was considered that John Rawls of Oxford drove the final nail in the coffin when he proved that teleological ethics reduces the indivudal to a faceless aggregat at the bottom of a business ledger.
That would be the key to my attack upon consquentialist ethics, it does not take account of the fine feeling of the indiviual to keep his/her sense of duty of obligation, but urges the indiviudal to do immoral acts and to betreay his or her own personal sense of the moral in order to fulfill some aggreagate sum such as "greatest good for the greatest number."
this can be demonstrated in most life theory games, where one is led to believe that the old lady and the presit must be chucked over the side they can't row as fast.
Of course who could forget that gem of the Utilitarian hit parade, "the grestest good for the geraest number."My view is represented by the deontological school of ethics. to be more prescise, rule deontology is my bag.
The basic concept here is that morality is grounded in duty and obligation. Rule deonology says that all rules must be observed from a standard of following duty and promoting obligation, and keeping these rules determines the morality of a given standard.
Deontology is unfairly criticized as blind rule keeping is often confussed with empty legalism. Quite the conrrary, I think I'm very unlegalistic type of person. Rather than insiting up rule keeping at, my level of ethical standard is one in wich the attempt to fulfill duty or keep an obligation is enough to make an action ethical, so that the agent need not even succeed at keeping the rule.
If I said that actions must confrom of rule keeping I would be a "act deontologist."
On the other hand the notion that actions are judged by their outcomes is "act utilitarianism." Whereas the idea that general percipoles shoudl foster outcomes such that pleasure over pain is promoted is called "rule utilitiarianism." Act utilitairainism is often noted for producing extremes.
Teleological or consquential ethics (HRG's bag) is well know among liberals. It's the brand of ethics most often embraced by liberals and humanitsts (which doesn't mean that I'mn not a liberal and humanist--although Christian humanist).
Even though most liberals tend to embrace teleological ethics, most ethecists do not. Teleological ethics fell into disvaor in the 30s, and has been on the decline every since. IN the 1960s it was considered that John Rawls of Oxford drove the final nail in the coffin when he proved that teleological ethics reduces the indivudal to a faceless aggregat at the bottom of a business ledger.
That would be the key to my attack upon consquentialist ethics, it does not take account of the fine feeling of the indiviual to keep his/her sense of duty of obligation, but urges the indiviudal to do immoral acts and to betreay his or her own personal sense of the moral in order to fulfill some aggreagate sum such as "greatest good for the greatest number."
this can be demonstrated in most life theory games, where one is led to believe that the old lady and the presit must be chucked over the side they can't row as fast.
Monday, May 30, 2005
The Rise of Right Wing "Fundism"
On my board someone echoed Sam Harris's (End of Faith) sentiment that liberal theology didn't do enough to stem the tide of the "fundies." The liberal theologians didn't criticize them enough. While that may be true to a certain extent, it's understandable why they didn't. But we can't find much decent analysis about the reasons for the right-wingization of American religion. I think I can shed some light on that isn't often shed. But one must realize that fundamentalism goes way back in American clutter. There are many good books written on the phenomenon of American conservative mentality and American religion. Martin Marty was one the beast Historians of American Civil religion. Another excellent source is a book by McLaughlin on American Revivals. I think if I recall its called Awakenings in America or something like that. There's also a guy named Smith with a revival book. I read all of this back at Perkins, under the tutelage of Billy Abraham.
As to the charge that liberal leaders didn't do enough to discourage it:
That is absolutely ignorant. The guy (Sam Harris) has no understanding of history. I get the idea he doesn't even bother to do historical research about any of the statements he makes. He probably thinks his understanding of history is so good he doesn't need to research it.
Fundamentalism goes way back in American culture, back to the founding of the original 13 colonies, but it was really structured the way we know it today by the civil war. Calvinist mentality created a degree of guilt over the failure to obtain wealth. That set the conservative mind set in American culture, as each new shifting in American landscape, Wallace's "chaining of the Maze ways" brought new and deeper retest into the mythical "golden age of the past" when people were truly virtuous and faith was truly faithful; the great "golden age" the Reagan era kept evoking.
W.W.I played a major role too, and most of what we know as the fundi movement came about as a result of the shift from post millennialism to pre mil. But of course that was connoted by WW1 and the civil war. But I would be totally remiss if I didn't include the two great awakenings, especially the second one, as the real seed bed of fundamentalism.
Essentially, Post millennialism was liberal, although believing liberals not the 19th century European kind; but socially liberal, abolitionist, progressive era crusaders, social Gospels and the like; in fact there was a major feminist egalitarian movement among Evangelicals in the mid 19th century, that would also figure into the post mil mix. Post millers said we will make the world a better place through our Christian social reforms and Christ will return to find a Christian world. that's where the phrase "Christian century comes from."
So they had all these well meaning liberal crusading types who had very strong Christian triumphalism but only in a purely liberal social sense. That's how they thought of Christian victory. Some of the early influences coming out 2nd great awakening were in the Charles Finney camp.
But after the civil war all that began to change. Post mil began to waver, the war turned everyone cynical and convinced them that post minims wasn't going to work. It also brought in right wing groups, anti-foreigners, anti immigration, anti-reform, or conservative reform such as prohibition of liquor.
If you saw Gangs of New York, the Cutter chatter (the Butcher played by Daniel Day Lewis) represented that kind of thinking. The beginnings of the Jung ho American New York hard hat type.
at this point the mid to late 19th century, liberals in America were growing strong. They didn't have televangelists but they had guys like them, and the most famous ones, such as Horace Bushnelll, were liberal. They did criticize fundies, except there weren't many fundies in the contemporary sense. But that didn't matter because the incoming right winners who themselves as preaching the social Gospel and carrying on the torch of Finney and holiness movement, but the center was slipping over to the right.
After W.W.I post minims was totally dead. Everyone figured cyclically that the world get worse and worse, the war made them see it this way. so the new right wing fundie pessimism was born; the word will get more and more evil until Christ comes back and saves a tiny little remnant from a vastly evil black antichrist world.
Then they started with pre-mil thinking; we can avoid all that because the rapture will come first. Meanwhile the real liberals had no more post millennialism, they had enough of that and began embedding the 19th century Germanium liberalism and questioning the whole faith and rewriting the faith to exclude any super naturalism and taking out all aspect of what fundies consider true faith.
But the funds were largely confide to camp meetings and tent revivals, the rural areas. They were thought of as uneducated hicks, or deep inner city dwellers in Greta poverty. But it was after WW 2 brought them to California and other places, to the city to work in defense that they became part of main stream America and their views began to take over the air waves as they became prosperous enough to buy air time and respectable enough to avoid ridicule.
Reinhold Neibhur tried to instigate a show down with Billy Graham in the 50s over anti-communism. But he couldn't go very far because he would have been seen as a communist. He had an uphill battle because his position was complex and people preferred Graham's simplistic optimism of "get saved and beat communism."
By the 60 the liberals were so far out they weren't even in the ball park of faith anymore, or those that were so shell shocked by the seeming secularization that when the Jesus movement came along they eagerly embraced it because it seemed great; be a Christian hippie meant for them being open and caring about others and living up the social gospel at last. but people like Graham just used it to try and drain off young people protesting the war. So by the late 80's the church was ready for taking over by the Regents and the extreme right wing. The overall center of the country moved right and the funds didn't seem so far out anymore
As to the charge that liberal leaders didn't do enough to discourage it:
That is absolutely ignorant. The guy (Sam Harris) has no understanding of history. I get the idea he doesn't even bother to do historical research about any of the statements he makes. He probably thinks his understanding of history is so good he doesn't need to research it.
Fundamentalism goes way back in American culture, back to the founding of the original 13 colonies, but it was really structured the way we know it today by the civil war. Calvinist mentality created a degree of guilt over the failure to obtain wealth. That set the conservative mind set in American culture, as each new shifting in American landscape, Wallace's "chaining of the Maze ways" brought new and deeper retest into the mythical "golden age of the past" when people were truly virtuous and faith was truly faithful; the great "golden age" the Reagan era kept evoking.
W.W.I played a major role too, and most of what we know as the fundi movement came about as a result of the shift from post millennialism to pre mil. But of course that was connoted by WW1 and the civil war. But I would be totally remiss if I didn't include the two great awakenings, especially the second one, as the real seed bed of fundamentalism.
Essentially, Post millennialism was liberal, although believing liberals not the 19th century European kind; but socially liberal, abolitionist, progressive era crusaders, social Gospels and the like; in fact there was a major feminist egalitarian movement among Evangelicals in the mid 19th century, that would also figure into the post mil mix. Post millers said we will make the world a better place through our Christian social reforms and Christ will return to find a Christian world. that's where the phrase "Christian century comes from."
So they had all these well meaning liberal crusading types who had very strong Christian triumphalism but only in a purely liberal social sense. That's how they thought of Christian victory. Some of the early influences coming out 2nd great awakening were in the Charles Finney camp.
But after the civil war all that began to change. Post mil began to waver, the war turned everyone cynical and convinced them that post minims wasn't going to work. It also brought in right wing groups, anti-foreigners, anti immigration, anti-reform, or conservative reform such as prohibition of liquor.
If you saw Gangs of New York, the Cutter chatter (the Butcher played by Daniel Day Lewis) represented that kind of thinking. The beginnings of the Jung ho American New York hard hat type.
at this point the mid to late 19th century, liberals in America were growing strong. They didn't have televangelists but they had guys like them, and the most famous ones, such as Horace Bushnelll, were liberal. They did criticize fundies, except there weren't many fundies in the contemporary sense. But that didn't matter because the incoming right winners who themselves as preaching the social Gospel and carrying on the torch of Finney and holiness movement, but the center was slipping over to the right.
After W.W.I post minims was totally dead. Everyone figured cyclically that the world get worse and worse, the war made them see it this way. so the new right wing fundie pessimism was born; the word will get more and more evil until Christ comes back and saves a tiny little remnant from a vastly evil black antichrist world.
Then they started with pre-mil thinking; we can avoid all that because the rapture will come first. Meanwhile the real liberals had no more post millennialism, they had enough of that and began embedding the 19th century Germanium liberalism and questioning the whole faith and rewriting the faith to exclude any super naturalism and taking out all aspect of what fundies consider true faith.
But the funds were largely confide to camp meetings and tent revivals, the rural areas. They were thought of as uneducated hicks, or deep inner city dwellers in Greta poverty. But it was after WW 2 brought them to California and other places, to the city to work in defense that they became part of main stream America and their views began to take over the air waves as they became prosperous enough to buy air time and respectable enough to avoid ridicule.
Reinhold Neibhur tried to instigate a show down with Billy Graham in the 50s over anti-communism. But he couldn't go very far because he would have been seen as a communist. He had an uphill battle because his position was complex and people preferred Graham's simplistic optimism of "get saved and beat communism."
By the 60 the liberals were so far out they weren't even in the ball park of faith anymore, or those that were so shell shocked by the seeming secularization that when the Jesus movement came along they eagerly embraced it because it seemed great; be a Christian hippie meant for them being open and caring about others and living up the social gospel at last. but people like Graham just used it to try and drain off young people protesting the war. So by the late 80's the church was ready for taking over by the Regents and the extreme right wing. The overall center of the country moved right and the funds didn't seem so far out anymore
Descartes,Epistemology, and Phenomenology
We tend to think of epistemology as fashioned by Descartes. the rationalist constucts a neat little system for obtaining certain knlwedge. At the time that Descartres came up with the cogito Europe was emboiled in a crisis of skepticsm. The Skeptics weren't just anti-religious, though, they were Calivnists! The Calvinists challenged chruch authority, and the chruch was the gate keeper of knowledge. So Descartes' system was aimed at wrecking the arguments of the Calvinists, who despized reason and militated for faith as the ulimate route to knoweldge.
Descartes failed in that he didn't bring everyone back to the RCC, but he succeeded beyond his wildest in that he established the method of empirical scientific proof thorugh statistical verifcation, or helped to do so. Since that time we have tenede to think of epistemology as a need little disciplien that sets out a systemstic system and 1,2,3 we have the truth because we know how we know.
But it doesn't work that way in moderity. Things are too complex. One thing that happened since WWII was a current in German thought that goes back to Brintano and the 19th century came to fruition in the guise of a Nazi, even one accepted in the land of the Nazi deafters.
I speak of course of Heigeggerian epistemology. That is a very appropriate juncture for a Christian to move into thinking about epistemolgy, since Heidegger was influenced by two major christian thinkers, in the liberal tradition; the 'father' of modern liberal theology, Schleiermacher, and the "father" of modern existentialism, Keirkegaard. Both were devout christians.
This phenomenological persective runs parell to the persective of mystical religoius experince, which is the most sure fire safe guard on faith of which I know.
Heideggerian phenomenology proceeds from a point of allowing the phenomena to suggest their own categories. Rather than "gathering" all data into a heap and forcing it into pre conceieved categoreis, the phenomenologist begins with the root of the experince in sense data and phenomena, and rather than insisting upon filing it where he thinks it goes, he mentally allows the phenomena to suggest its own category.
That means in practicle terms expeiencing the presence of God rather than insisting thorugh rationalistic means that God exists and God is thus and so. One experinces God and then comes to an understanding of the nature of God.
Now I'm not saying that this can be a total empistemology in and of itself. We also have emprical knowledge and revelation. But you know my view on revelation of the Bible, that is a recored f peopel's experinces of god; that is very phenomenological. rather than be dictated their theological tennets, they recorede their expeinces and that becomes the tennet as the community comopares it to its own experinces; the dialetical presence model of inspiration that Barth and others spoke of.
Descartes failed in that he didn't bring everyone back to the RCC, but he succeeded beyond his wildest in that he established the method of empirical scientific proof thorugh statistical verifcation, or helped to do so. Since that time we have tenede to think of epistemology as a need little disciplien that sets out a systemstic system and 1,2,3 we have the truth because we know how we know.
But it doesn't work that way in moderity. Things are too complex. One thing that happened since WWII was a current in German thought that goes back to Brintano and the 19th century came to fruition in the guise of a Nazi, even one accepted in the land of the Nazi deafters.
I speak of course of Heigeggerian epistemology. That is a very appropriate juncture for a Christian to move into thinking about epistemolgy, since Heidegger was influenced by two major christian thinkers, in the liberal tradition; the 'father' of modern liberal theology, Schleiermacher, and the "father" of modern existentialism, Keirkegaard. Both were devout christians.
This phenomenological persective runs parell to the persective of mystical religoius experince, which is the most sure fire safe guard on faith of which I know.
Heideggerian phenomenology proceeds from a point of allowing the phenomena to suggest their own categories. Rather than "gathering" all data into a heap and forcing it into pre conceieved categoreis, the phenomenologist begins with the root of the experince in sense data and phenomena, and rather than insisting upon filing it where he thinks it goes, he mentally allows the phenomena to suggest its own category.
That means in practicle terms expeiencing the presence of God rather than insisting thorugh rationalistic means that God exists and God is thus and so. One experinces God and then comes to an understanding of the nature of God.
Now I'm not saying that this can be a total empistemology in and of itself. We also have emprical knowledge and revelation. But you know my view on revelation of the Bible, that is a recored f peopel's experinces of god; that is very phenomenological. rather than be dictated their theological tennets, they recorede their expeinces and that becomes the tennet as the community comopares it to its own experinces; the dialetical presence model of inspiration that Barth and others spoke of.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
God imged as big Sky Dadday or great adminstrarotr in sky?
I have traffic hit counters that trace where visitors are coming from. We have quite a collection of international reders:
45 United States
23 United Kingdom
8 Thailand
5 Ireland
3 Canada
2 Australia
2 Singapore
2 - -
1 Korea, Republic Of
1 Indonesia
I do notice that I've lost ground among UK readers. I guess I'm just not as interesting to UK people as I used to be.
The reason I mention it is because I can follow the links and see where they came from, that is what sight brought to me. One such site was a post on some message board in which the poster made the remarkable observation that the God of the Bible is not a very good administator. The poster seemed to be quite serious about it. Of curse one might think having a whole universe to run is a big deal, but this guy seemed rather emphatic that God has really screwed it all up. For example, all those wars in the Bible. He made such an incredibly frail creation in man, we just canm't keep oursevles out of trouble; all God's fault of course. Atheism forbid that we should ever take responsiblity for our own actions. Its' all because God is such an inept creator that he just couldn't make a perfect speicies.
Of course, unique and original as this line of reasoning must be, it seems flawed somehow. I think the real flaw is in the incessent need that sketpics have to blame teh father. Its' truely freudian, they playout their battles with the superego by construing God as the Big Sky Daddy. Of course i must say, the Bible doesn't help matters that much by occaisoinally portraying God in ths manner. The Bible, chruches, religion in general all set up the image of the big man in the sky with a white beard on a big throne watching us all and decing who get's zapped. That kind of thinking hangs over religious thought like a stench, causing us to reflect upon God as though he were just another drunk in bar on saturday night. We all probably have a sneaking supscion that we could do better than the big white beard guy. We probably could, the thing is, that's not God. It's hard to think of it as not God, because incessently relate to God in such a way as to give that impression. It also could be the case that in those passages where God is portrayed this was a similar public image probelm from that time and perhaps the author's own Fruedian thing at work back then.
The truth of it is there are coutner images where God is imaged as female, or even non human, in the actual Bible. The number of passages in the OT where God is picutured sitting as a big man on a throne are not that many. I can think of Job, and couple in Isaiah, and a couple in Esserah. The word used for God and most often tralstaed "Lord," El Shaddi, means "brest."
"El Shaddai The God who is Sufficient
from the website Hebrew Letters by SARAHLEAH
EL SHADDAI is usually translated as GOD ALMIGHTY - EL, meaning GOD and SHADDAI being a combination word - SHE, meaning WHO and DAI meaning ENOUGH. EL SHADDAI GOD WHO IS ENOUGH, GOD WHO IS SELF-SUFFICIENT (Hagigah 12a). SHADDAI may also be from the Akkadian sadu, meaning MOUNTAIN, or the Hebrew sadeh, meaning BREAST. EL SHADDAI would then be translated respectively as GOD OF THE MOUNTAIN or GOD OF THE BREAST. Variant spelling - EL SHADAI “Adonai appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai” (Exodus 6:3).
(Zohar. 1984. Tr. Harry Sperling et al. New York: Soncino. 3:130).
Jacob giving last instructions to his sons said:
Gen 49:24-25.(24) "But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God (El) of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel:)25 Even by the God (El) of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty (Shaddai), who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb..."
(For other references to this same usage, see Isaiah 60:15-16 and Isaiah 66:10-13.)
For the full list of female imagery of God:
There are also many ensconces in scripture where God is imaged in female or motherly terms:
Deu 32:11 "As an eagle stirs up her nest, and hovers over her young, and spreads her wings, takes them up, and bears them on her wings.
Deu 32 :18 "Of the Rock that bore you, you were unmindful, and have forgotten God that formed you." (that one may be hard to get, baring children--female image).
Job 38:8 "Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb."
Job 38:29 "From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven."
Isa 45 9-10 Woe to you who strive with your Maker, earthen vessels with the potter. Does the clay say to the one who fashions it: What are you making, or Your work has no handles? Woe to anyone who says to a father: What are you begetting? or to a woman: With what are you in labour?
Isa 49:15 "Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. (comparing God's attitude toward Israel with a woman's attitude toward her children).
Isa 66:13 As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
Hosea 13:8 "I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs, and will tear open the covering of their heart";
Mat 23:37 and Luk 13:34 Jerusalem, "Jerusalem, the city that kills its prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing."
But my point is not just that God can be imaged as female. A female could possibly also be thought of as a bad administrtor. There are also images of God that compare the divine to non human: hens, bears, egals, chickens, whirl winds, consuming fires, sotrms, darkness, light. The point is really that God is not an adminstrator. There is no passage that implys that God set up the world to opporate as some form of public works project. Even though God is often compared to kings, taht is no reason to understand creation as a Kingdom in the sinese of a nation state.
The virulent atheist is fond of thinking of religious people as week and needing a crutch. We could just as eaisly think of the atheist (or at least that knee jerk type of atheist) as obressed with castrating the father, and needing an authority figure to best. The problem is in trying to think of God in a way that doesnt conjure up some athropomophic image projected into the heavens, while not losing the warm fuzzy of the parental images. I don't think this is possible. There is no such image that is both human and none human at the same time. Givent he track record of athropomorphizing, it might not be a bad idea to try to think of God in other ways; like the laws of physics for examle, or as some kind of strange attractor (even strage attractors are not real things).
45 United States
23 United Kingdom
8 Thailand
5 Ireland
3 Canada
2 Australia
2 Singapore
2 - -
1 Korea, Republic Of
1 Indonesia
I do notice that I've lost ground among UK readers. I guess I'm just not as interesting to UK people as I used to be.
The reason I mention it is because I can follow the links and see where they came from, that is what sight brought to me. One such site was a post on some message board in which the poster made the remarkable observation that the God of the Bible is not a very good administator. The poster seemed to be quite serious about it. Of curse one might think having a whole universe to run is a big deal, but this guy seemed rather emphatic that God has really screwed it all up. For example, all those wars in the Bible. He made such an incredibly frail creation in man, we just canm't keep oursevles out of trouble; all God's fault of course. Atheism forbid that we should ever take responsiblity for our own actions. Its' all because God is such an inept creator that he just couldn't make a perfect speicies.
Of course, unique and original as this line of reasoning must be, it seems flawed somehow. I think the real flaw is in the incessent need that sketpics have to blame teh father. Its' truely freudian, they playout their battles with the superego by construing God as the Big Sky Daddy. Of course i must say, the Bible doesn't help matters that much by occaisoinally portraying God in ths manner. The Bible, chruches, religion in general all set up the image of the big man in the sky with a white beard on a big throne watching us all and decing who get's zapped. That kind of thinking hangs over religious thought like a stench, causing us to reflect upon God as though he were just another drunk in bar on saturday night. We all probably have a sneaking supscion that we could do better than the big white beard guy. We probably could, the thing is, that's not God. It's hard to think of it as not God, because incessently relate to God in such a way as to give that impression. It also could be the case that in those passages where God is portrayed this was a similar public image probelm from that time and perhaps the author's own Fruedian thing at work back then.
The truth of it is there are coutner images where God is imaged as female, or even non human, in the actual Bible. The number of passages in the OT where God is picutured sitting as a big man on a throne are not that many. I can think of Job, and couple in Isaiah, and a couple in Esserah. The word used for God and most often tralstaed "Lord," El Shaddi, means "brest."
"El Shaddai The God who is Sufficient
from the website Hebrew Letters by SARAHLEAH
EL SHADDAI is usually translated as GOD ALMIGHTY - EL, meaning GOD and SHADDAI being a combination word - SHE, meaning WHO and DAI meaning ENOUGH. EL SHADDAI GOD WHO IS ENOUGH, GOD WHO IS SELF-SUFFICIENT (Hagigah 12a). SHADDAI may also be from the Akkadian sadu, meaning MOUNTAIN, or the Hebrew sadeh, meaning BREAST. EL SHADDAI would then be translated respectively as GOD OF THE MOUNTAIN or GOD OF THE BREAST. Variant spelling - EL SHADAI “Adonai appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai” (Exodus 6:3).
(Zohar. 1984. Tr. Harry Sperling et al. New York: Soncino. 3:130).
Jacob giving last instructions to his sons said:
Gen 49:24-25.(24) "But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God (El) of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel:)25 Even by the God (El) of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty (Shaddai), who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb..."
(For other references to this same usage, see Isaiah 60:15-16 and Isaiah 66:10-13.)
For the full list of female imagery of God:
There are also many ensconces in scripture where God is imaged in female or motherly terms:
Deu 32:11 "As an eagle stirs up her nest, and hovers over her young, and spreads her wings, takes them up, and bears them on her wings.
Deu 32 :18 "Of the Rock that bore you, you were unmindful, and have forgotten God that formed you." (that one may be hard to get, baring children--female image).
Job 38:8 "Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb."
Job 38:29 "From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven."
Isa 45 9-10 Woe to you who strive with your Maker, earthen vessels with the potter. Does the clay say to the one who fashions it: What are you making, or Your work has no handles? Woe to anyone who says to a father: What are you begetting? or to a woman: With what are you in labour?
Isa 49:15 "Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. (comparing God's attitude toward Israel with a woman's attitude toward her children).
Isa 66:13 As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.
Hosea 13:8 "I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs, and will tear open the covering of their heart";
Mat 23:37 and Luk 13:34 Jerusalem, "Jerusalem, the city that kills its prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing."
But my point is not just that God can be imaged as female. A female could possibly also be thought of as a bad administrtor. There are also images of God that compare the divine to non human: hens, bears, egals, chickens, whirl winds, consuming fires, sotrms, darkness, light. The point is really that God is not an adminstrator. There is no passage that implys that God set up the world to opporate as some form of public works project. Even though God is often compared to kings, taht is no reason to understand creation as a Kingdom in the sinese of a nation state.
The virulent atheist is fond of thinking of religious people as week and needing a crutch. We could just as eaisly think of the atheist (or at least that knee jerk type of atheist) as obressed with castrating the father, and needing an authority figure to best. The problem is in trying to think of God in a way that doesnt conjure up some athropomophic image projected into the heavens, while not losing the warm fuzzy of the parental images. I don't think this is possible. There is no such image that is both human and none human at the same time. Givent he track record of athropomorphizing, it might not be a bad idea to try to think of God in other ways; like the laws of physics for examle, or as some kind of strange attractor (even strage attractors are not real things).
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Gournd 0
Donald Trump doesn't like the proposals for re-making ground 0. The proposals call for modern archetecture to be applied to new desinged commemorting the tragedy and the subsequent spirit of triumph. Trump wants to build back twin towers that look almost like the orignals. That to me is very emblemeatic of his generation and the American unorigniality syndrome. Trump and his Ilk, the geniuses who destoryed America's landscape and covered the country in asphault, have no more originality than to just rebuild, which would be the greatest insult to the dead, as though the events of 9/11 had no meaning and never happened.
I think the problem goes deepr than that. I think it's really becasue most Americans have no appreication for the arts. Trump is kind of like the super average American. Not that the Average American can be rich, but the Average american worships wealth and aspires to be like Trump. This sort of anti-intellectual mentality places no value upon atheistics, so the concept of commeneration through astheitics is probably a part of a by-gone era. In the one-dimensional world of Donald Trump remaking the landscape in the shape of the preivous landscpae is just another way to commemorate the only value that can survive in a mercantile age; that of erecting monuments to wealth and power.
I think the problem goes deepr than that. I think it's really becasue most Americans have no appreication for the arts. Trump is kind of like the super average American. Not that the Average American can be rich, but the Average american worships wealth and aspires to be like Trump. This sort of anti-intellectual mentality places no value upon atheistics, so the concept of commeneration through astheitics is probably a part of a by-gone era. In the one-dimensional world of Donald Trump remaking the landscape in the shape of the preivous landscpae is just another way to commemorate the only value that can survive in a mercantile age; that of erecting monuments to wealth and power.
Monday, May 16, 2005
what a quick way to get a head ache?
On "Christian Froums" a set of boards that exist for the benifit of atheists so they can look more intelligent than Christians, I've bee having the kind of discussion I hate; all about the ontolgoical argument.
I woud noramlly love discussing that argument, but only if I had someone to discuss it with who know and cared about logic. Most atheists hate logic. They try to pretend that atheism is so much more loigcal than Christianity, but when confronted with real logial arguments (I mean s5modal) they just fold up and strat mocking and openly say logic is no good,it doens't tell us anything ect ect. Some have gone so far as to deny the validity of modus Ponines and some even deny the law of non contradiction! Anything to avoid the horrible conclusin that God can't not exist.
Here's what most people mean by "logic:" "I like X, whoray for X." If you disagree with X you are illogical. Most people do not know that logic has rules, they think that it's just a matter of having a "cool" opinion. So when they say "Christianity is not logical" they really mean "Christianity is not cool."
Here's another aspect of logic that these atheists couldn't handel:
X cannot be p
q = p
therefore, X cannot be q.
they deny the loigc of this. First they denied it in terms of God arugment when the symbolic value represented these concepts:
X = necessity
q = possiblity
p = contingency.
first they deneied the idea that:
if X cannot be contingent and it cannot be impossbile then it must be necessary. Therefore, if God cannot be contingent, and cannot be impossible, then God must be necessary.
Then they denied it in the form above when they didn't know the values.
In four threads of about 4 pages each not one single atheist made a single argument based upon loigc but they all said the OA was illogical.
I woud noramlly love discussing that argument, but only if I had someone to discuss it with who know and cared about logic. Most atheists hate logic. They try to pretend that atheism is so much more loigcal than Christianity, but when confronted with real logial arguments (I mean s5modal) they just fold up and strat mocking and openly say logic is no good,it doens't tell us anything ect ect. Some have gone so far as to deny the validity of modus Ponines and some even deny the law of non contradiction! Anything to avoid the horrible conclusin that God can't not exist.
Here's what most people mean by "logic:" "I like X, whoray for X." If you disagree with X you are illogical. Most people do not know that logic has rules, they think that it's just a matter of having a "cool" opinion. So when they say "Christianity is not logical" they really mean "Christianity is not cool."
Here's another aspect of logic that these atheists couldn't handel:
X cannot be p
q = p
therefore, X cannot be q.
they deny the loigc of this. First they denied it in terms of God arugment when the symbolic value represented these concepts:
X = necessity
q = possiblity
p = contingency.
first they deneied the idea that:
if X cannot be contingent and it cannot be impossbile then it must be necessary. Therefore, if God cannot be contingent, and cannot be impossible, then God must be necessary.
Then they denied it in the form above when they didn't know the values.
In four threads of about 4 pages each not one single atheist made a single argument based upon loigc but they all said the OA was illogical.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
I am in trouble i need help
I am as far down as I've ever been in life. PLease help.
read all about it.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/palbo/index.html
read all about it.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/palbo/index.html
Monday, May 09, 2005
Bad Moon on the Right
I can't find an article to Chris Hedges article in Hapers for this moth, but it's a very important article: "feeling the hate of the Religious Right." So here's a link to an article about the article.
http://www.liquidlist.com/archives/2005/05/politics_louis.html
I Just saw Hedged talking about this on "Democracy Now" On Free Speech TV. It's a terrible thing to wake up and released I've had my head in the sand. I've known for a long time what the religious right is about, but have paid less and less attention on the assumption that; (1) I can't do anything about it; (2) Americans love to sin and even if the RR establishes theocracy it wont last long.
That later point might have a point to it. But I think we should all be aware of the religious right's agenda. I also want my non Christian friends to be aware of the fact that a minority of hip Christians have always tumbled to the agenda of the Christian fascists, and we are not pleased or amassed. I now see that minority growing. That in itself gives me a bit of hope.
The alarming problem is that most Christians, most Evangelicals are just not willing to listen. 90% are good people who want to please God and have no political savvy so they have no idea what is being said by these people. But the religious right's agenda is to marginalize everyone not a member of their movement. Hedges traces the roots of that movent from the modern Falwell and so on to the segregation's of the 60s to the Ku Klux Klan.
It's in the latest issue of Harpers, we should all read it.
http://www.liquidlist.com/archives/2005/05/politics_louis.html
I Just saw Hedged talking about this on "Democracy Now" On Free Speech TV. It's a terrible thing to wake up and released I've had my head in the sand. I've known for a long time what the religious right is about, but have paid less and less attention on the assumption that; (1) I can't do anything about it; (2) Americans love to sin and even if the RR establishes theocracy it wont last long.
That later point might have a point to it. But I think we should all be aware of the religious right's agenda. I also want my non Christian friends to be aware of the fact that a minority of hip Christians have always tumbled to the agenda of the Christian fascists, and we are not pleased or amassed. I now see that minority growing. That in itself gives me a bit of hope.
The alarming problem is that most Christians, most Evangelicals are just not willing to listen. 90% are good people who want to please God and have no political savvy so they have no idea what is being said by these people. But the religious right's agenda is to marginalize everyone not a member of their movement. Hedges traces the roots of that movent from the modern Falwell and so on to the segregation's of the 60s to the Ku Klux Klan.
It's in the latest issue of Harpers, we should all read it.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
The Concept of the Supernatural
The problem in all these discussions about the supernatural is that we are dealing with a degraded concept. The notion of "Supernatural" is a misgnomer to begin with, because modern people construe the idea as another place, an actual location that you can go to. It's the unseen invisible world that is filled with ghosnts and magic and so forth. It's in the realm where God can heaven are, we supposse. But what they dont' realize is that this is the watered down, dilapidated concept. It's not even understood well by Christians because it was destroyed in the reformation.
The term "supernatural" comes from the term "supernauturalator" or "Supernature." Dyonisus the Areogopite (around 500ad) began talking of God as the supernaturalator, meaning that God's higher nature was the telos toward which our "lower" natures were drawn. St.Augustine has spoken of Divine nature as "Supernature" or the higher form of nature, but that is speaking of nature in you, like human nature and divine nature.
In the begining the issue was not a place, "the realm of the supernatural" but the issue was the nature inside a man. Human nature, vs. divine nature. The Sueprnatural was divine nature that drew the human up to to itself and vivified it with the power (dunimos) to live a holy life. This is the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said "when I am weak I am strong." Or "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The weak human nature which can't resist sin is transformed by the power of the Godly nature, through the spirit and becames strong enought to reisist sin, to be self sacraficing, to die for others ect ect.
This was the "supernatural" prior to the reoformation. It was tied in wiht the sacraments and the mass. That's partly why the Protestants would rebell agianst it. Austine (late 300s early 400s) spoke of Chrstians not hating rocks and trees, in answer to the assertion that Christians didn't like nauture. But the extention of the natural world as "nature" didn't come unitl latter. The idea of "the natural" was at first bsed upon the idea of human nature, of biological life, life form life, that's what the Latin natura is about.
Prior to the reformation Christian theologians did not see the supernatural as a seperate reality, an invisible realm, or a place where God dwells that we can't see. After the rformation reality was biphercated. Now there came to be two realms, and they juxtoppossed to each other. The realm of Supernature, is correllated to that of Grace, and is holy and sacred, but the early realm is "natural" and bad it's myered in sin and naural urges.
But all of that represents a degraded form of thinking after goign throught he mill of the Protestant Catholic split. The basic split is charactorized by riationalism vs feideism. The Catholics are rationalists, because they believe God is motivated by divine puropose and wisdom, the Protestants were fiedeists, meaning that faith alone apart form reason because God is motived by will and sheer acceptation, the desire to prove soverignty above all else.
The rationalistic view offered a single harmony, a harmonous reality, governed by God's reasoned nature and orchastrated in a multiferious ways. This single reality continaed a two sided nature, or a mutli-facets, but it was one harmonious reality in wich human nature was regeuvinated thorugh divine nature. But the Protestant view left Christian theology with two waring reality, that which is removed from our empirical knowledge and that in which we live.
The true Christian view of the Sueprnatural doesn't see the two realms as juxtoppossed but as one reality in which the natural moves toward its' ground and end in divien nature. It is this tendency to move toward the ground and end, that produces miracles. A miracle is merely nature bending toward the higher aspect of Supernature.
but with the Protestant divinsion between divine sogerignty, acceptation and will motivating the universe, we mistake univocity and equivocity for nature and supernature. We think nature and supernature are not alike they are at war, so difference marks the relationship of the two. But to make the Suepernatural more avaible they stress some aspect of nature and put it over against the rest of nature and pretend that makes it sueprnatuarl, this is univocity, it's the same. So will and acceptation, soverigty, God has to prove that he is in charge, these are all aspects of univocity.
It's the natural extension of this biphercation that sets up two realms and sees nature as "everything that exits." or "all of mateiral reality" that sets up the atheist idea that supernatural is unnecessary and doesn't exist.
The medieval Christian doctrine of the supernatural has long been misconstrued as a dualistic denigration of nature, opposed to scientific thinking. The concept of supernature, however, is not a dualism in the sense of dinigrading nature or of pitting against each other the "alien" relams of spirit and matter. The Christian ontology of the supernatural bound together the realm of nature and the realm of Grace, immanent and transcendent, in a unity of creative wisdom and purpose, which gave theological significance to the natural world. While the doctrine of supernature was at times understood in a dualistic fashion, ultimately, the unity it offered played a positive role in the development of scientific thinking, because it made nature meaningful to the medieval mind. Its dissolution came, not because supernatural thinking opposed scientific thinking, but because culture came to value nature in a different manner, and the old valuation no longer served the purpose of scientific thinking. An understanding of the notion of supernature is essential to an understanding of the attitudes in Western culture toward nature, and to an understanding of the cultural transition to science as an epistemic authority.
The ontology of supernature assumes that the natural participates in the supernatural in an ordered relation of means and immediate ends, with reference to their ultimate ends. The supernatural is the ground and end of the natural; the realm of nature and the realm of Grace are bound up in a harmonious relation. The Ptolemaic system explained the physical lay-out of the universe, supernature explained its theological relation to God. The great chain of being separated the ranking of creatures in relation to creator. The supernatural ontology is, therefore, sperate from but related to cosmologies. This ontology stands behind most forms of pre-reformation theology, and it implies an exaltation of nature, rather than denigration. This talk of two realms seems to imply a dualism, yet, it is not a metaphysical dualism, not a dualism of opposition, but as Fairweather points out, "the essential structure of the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead the unwary into dualism, and then to resolve ... an exclusive emphasis on one or the other severed elements of a complete Christianity...such a dissolution is inevitable once we lose our awareness of that ordered relation of the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent, which the Gospel assumes." Yet, it is this "two-sidedness" which leads unwary historians of into dualism.
In his famous 1967 article, "The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Lynn White argued that the Christian belief of the Imago Dei created "a dualism of man and nature;" "man shares in God's transcendence of nature." This notion replaced pagan animism, it removed the "sacred" from the natural world, and with it, inhibitions against exploiting nature. Moreover, by the 12th century, nature became a source of revelation through natural theology. In the Latin West, where action prevailed over contemplation, natural theology ceased to be the decoding of natural symbols of the divine and became instead an attempt to understand God through decerning the operation of creation. Western technology flourished, surpassing even that of Islamic culture (although they still led in theoretical pursuits). Thus, White argues, medieval theology did allow science to grow, but at the ultimate expense of the environment.
The insights of feminist scholarship, however, suggest an even more subtle argument for the denigration of nature. Feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruther, argued that there is an identification between the female and nature, the male and transcendence. Women have been disvalued historically through the association between female sexuality and the "baseness" of nature. Londa Schiebinger, calls attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian cosmology placed women in a subordinate position. Gender was more fundamental than biological sex, and it was a cosmological principle, "...Men and women were carefully placed in the great chain of being--their positions were defined relative to plants, animals, and God." The subordination of women was predicated upon their position in nature. "Male" and "Female represented dualistic cosmological principles penetrating all of nature, principles of which sexual organs were only one aspect. One might suspect that the place of women on the great chain of being is indicative of the true status of nature itself in Christian ontology; an overt denigration of women indicates a covert denigration of nature.
read the following paper i wrote for Grade school on Science and the Sueprnatural. Only 12 pages.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/scienceandnature/
The term "supernatural" comes from the term "supernauturalator" or "Supernature." Dyonisus the Areogopite (around 500ad) began talking of God as the supernaturalator, meaning that God's higher nature was the telos toward which our "lower" natures were drawn. St.Augustine has spoken of Divine nature as "Supernature" or the higher form of nature, but that is speaking of nature in you, like human nature and divine nature.
In the begining the issue was not a place, "the realm of the supernatural" but the issue was the nature inside a man. Human nature, vs. divine nature. The Sueprnatural was divine nature that drew the human up to to itself and vivified it with the power (dunimos) to live a holy life. This is the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said "when I am weak I am strong." Or "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The weak human nature which can't resist sin is transformed by the power of the Godly nature, through the spirit and becames strong enought to reisist sin, to be self sacraficing, to die for others ect ect.
This was the "supernatural" prior to the reoformation. It was tied in wiht the sacraments and the mass. That's partly why the Protestants would rebell agianst it. Austine (late 300s early 400s) spoke of Chrstians not hating rocks and trees, in answer to the assertion that Christians didn't like nauture. But the extention of the natural world as "nature" didn't come unitl latter. The idea of "the natural" was at first bsed upon the idea of human nature, of biological life, life form life, that's what the Latin natura is about.
Prior to the reformation Christian theologians did not see the supernatural as a seperate reality, an invisible realm, or a place where God dwells that we can't see. After the rformation reality was biphercated. Now there came to be two realms, and they juxtoppossed to each other. The realm of Supernature, is correllated to that of Grace, and is holy and sacred, but the early realm is "natural" and bad it's myered in sin and naural urges.
But all of that represents a degraded form of thinking after goign throught he mill of the Protestant Catholic split. The basic split is charactorized by riationalism vs feideism. The Catholics are rationalists, because they believe God is motivated by divine puropose and wisdom, the Protestants were fiedeists, meaning that faith alone apart form reason because God is motived by will and sheer acceptation, the desire to prove soverignty above all else.
The rationalistic view offered a single harmony, a harmonous reality, governed by God's reasoned nature and orchastrated in a multiferious ways. This single reality continaed a two sided nature, or a mutli-facets, but it was one harmonious reality in wich human nature was regeuvinated thorugh divine nature. But the Protestant view left Christian theology with two waring reality, that which is removed from our empirical knowledge and that in which we live.
The true Christian view of the Sueprnatural doesn't see the two realms as juxtoppossed but as one reality in which the natural moves toward its' ground and end in divien nature. It is this tendency to move toward the ground and end, that produces miracles. A miracle is merely nature bending toward the higher aspect of Supernature.
but with the Protestant divinsion between divine sogerignty, acceptation and will motivating the universe, we mistake univocity and equivocity for nature and supernature. We think nature and supernature are not alike they are at war, so difference marks the relationship of the two. But to make the Suepernatural more avaible they stress some aspect of nature and put it over against the rest of nature and pretend that makes it sueprnatuarl, this is univocity, it's the same. So will and acceptation, soverigty, God has to prove that he is in charge, these are all aspects of univocity.
It's the natural extension of this biphercation that sets up two realms and sees nature as "everything that exits." or "all of mateiral reality" that sets up the atheist idea that supernatural is unnecessary and doesn't exist.
The medieval Christian doctrine of the supernatural has long been misconstrued as a dualistic denigration of nature, opposed to scientific thinking. The concept of supernature, however, is not a dualism in the sense of dinigrading nature or of pitting against each other the "alien" relams of spirit and matter. The Christian ontology of the supernatural bound together the realm of nature and the realm of Grace, immanent and transcendent, in a unity of creative wisdom and purpose, which gave theological significance to the natural world. While the doctrine of supernature was at times understood in a dualistic fashion, ultimately, the unity it offered played a positive role in the development of scientific thinking, because it made nature meaningful to the medieval mind. Its dissolution came, not because supernatural thinking opposed scientific thinking, but because culture came to value nature in a different manner, and the old valuation no longer served the purpose of scientific thinking. An understanding of the notion of supernature is essential to an understanding of the attitudes in Western culture toward nature, and to an understanding of the cultural transition to science as an epistemic authority.
The ontology of supernature assumes that the natural participates in the supernatural in an ordered relation of means and immediate ends, with reference to their ultimate ends. The supernatural is the ground and end of the natural; the realm of nature and the realm of Grace are bound up in a harmonious relation. The Ptolemaic system explained the physical lay-out of the universe, supernature explained its theological relation to God. The great chain of being separated the ranking of creatures in relation to creator. The supernatural ontology is, therefore, sperate from but related to cosmologies. This ontology stands behind most forms of pre-reformation theology, and it implies an exaltation of nature, rather than denigration. This talk of two realms seems to imply a dualism, yet, it is not a metaphysical dualism, not a dualism of opposition, but as Fairweather points out, "the essential structure of the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead the unwary into dualism, and then to resolve ... an exclusive emphasis on one or the other severed elements of a complete Christianity...such a dissolution is inevitable once we lose our awareness of that ordered relation of the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent, which the Gospel assumes." Yet, it is this "two-sidedness" which leads unwary historians of into dualism.
In his famous 1967 article, "The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Lynn White argued that the Christian belief of the Imago Dei created "a dualism of man and nature;" "man shares in God's transcendence of nature." This notion replaced pagan animism, it removed the "sacred" from the natural world, and with it, inhibitions against exploiting nature. Moreover, by the 12th century, nature became a source of revelation through natural theology. In the Latin West, where action prevailed over contemplation, natural theology ceased to be the decoding of natural symbols of the divine and became instead an attempt to understand God through decerning the operation of creation. Western technology flourished, surpassing even that of Islamic culture (although they still led in theoretical pursuits). Thus, White argues, medieval theology did allow science to grow, but at the ultimate expense of the environment.
The insights of feminist scholarship, however, suggest an even more subtle argument for the denigration of nature. Feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruther, argued that there is an identification between the female and nature, the male and transcendence. Women have been disvalued historically through the association between female sexuality and the "baseness" of nature. Londa Schiebinger, calls attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian cosmology placed women in a subordinate position. Gender was more fundamental than biological sex, and it was a cosmological principle, "...Men and women were carefully placed in the great chain of being--their positions were defined relative to plants, animals, and God." The subordination of women was predicated upon their position in nature. "Male" and "Female represented dualistic cosmological principles penetrating all of nature, principles of which sexual organs were only one aspect. One might suspect that the place of women on the great chain of being is indicative of the true status of nature itself in Christian ontology; an overt denigration of women indicates a covert denigration of nature.
read the following paper i wrote for Grade school on Science and the Sueprnatural. Only 12 pages.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/scienceandnature/
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