Monday, January 06, 2014

Toward a Personal Theology continued from 01.05.15

WHAT ABOUT GOD…
Russian Icon in a church in Smolensk

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share similar doctrinal beliefs about God.  All three religions are monotheistic.  Judaism insists that God, YHWH, is a single indivisible unity, a unity unlike any other entity.  Adherents traditionally don’t pronounce YHWH but in prayer use the word adonai which basically is the practice of speaking of God as “Lord” or “Master.”  Christians have no reservations about addressing God directly or saying the name when speaking about him. As a sign of special respect and adoration, they refer to God as “Lord” and “Master.”  The Trinity is the ultimate mystery in Christianity.  God is represented in “three persons,” God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not the Father, but all three together are one God.  Muslims reject any notion that God, Allah, can be pictured, so no visual representations are allowed even in art and architecture. Implications in all three monotheistic religions indicate that God is male and is the infinitely supreme being in the universe, omnipotent and totally without flaw. The inscrutable Deity, He is the almighty Lord of all the worlds that he has created with the understanding that all the worlds that exist were created by Him.
Walking Buddha from Southeast Asia... in our back porch

The idea of a creator deity, especially a personal God, is incompatible with the fundamental doctrines of Buddhism, which stress the impermanence of all existences and phenomena of the world.  Buddhist teachings emphasize the importance of learning the correct way to live in an impermanent world, an impermanent society, beginning with the realization that everyone who is born has to die and all that exists will be extinguished.
Hindu good spirit bell from Bali hanging over the door in my office. 
The tongue is the clapper, and when the bell is typically hung outside, the wind moves it and makes a clattering noise when something evil comes along.

In Hinduism, the supreme, universal Absolute spirit is Brahman, and Brahman is Absolute Reality, the Godhead.  Everything that exists or can be described and attributed to life, all space and time, all matter and energy are included in Absolute Reality.  Absolute Reality is associated with, is tied to, the process of evolution.  In the process of evolution, man was not composed of any special material which has not been made use of again and again but of the same material as all the other animals.  Man, however, is not a mere physical object that can be positively or negatively conditioned, but is especially endowed.  Man has the gift of speech, the capacity to dream; and because man is self-aware, he has free will. Man has a value-sense. It is in the working out of a person’s value sense with relation to Absolute Reality that the religion has application to individual life.
Chinese scholar carved in ivory

Of course, there are other options in the matter of adopting a god concept, and among the options are belief that there is no god at all and an assumption that it is impossible to know whether or not there is god. Atheism and agnosticism are generally associated with anti-religious thought.  Agnosticism is an old concept, at least as old as Protagoras, a 5th-century Greek philosopher, but the word itself was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, from the Greek a for “without” and  gnosis for knowing. The idea is that humanity lacks the requisite knowledge and sufficient rational evidence to justify either belief: that there is god or that there is no god.  Atheism is a denial of the existence of god.
Mural in North Park


So, “You pays your money, and you takes your choice.”  
Homeless woman in Hillcrest... across from Mercy Hospital

4 comments:

Helen Thomas said...

You seem to find it extremely meaningful to explore the concept of god. You like to discuss this with some of your good friends. You have learned a lot, can cite, can quote, can argue different points of view.

The latest edition of SMITHSONIAN (January 2014) has an article that, when I finished skimming it, made me think of you. It is called "Time Travelers - Walking the Ancestor's Trail" and was written by Jerry Adler. Near Kingston in southwestern England, there is a hike inspired by Richard Dawkins.

At the beginning of the trail, one step equals 10,000 years. At the end of the walk, one step corresponds to 10,000 years. The group that walked the trail only walked a branch of it that was about 14 miles long.

I will need many re-readings of this article before I can begin to understand it.

I hope you can read this article, I wonder if it would have any effect on your search for a concept of god that would move forward your search for a "Personal Theology." Would it possibly cause you to wonder if there is a god?

Helen Thomas

Anonymous said...

It's hard isn't it?

As I am singing the religious pieces with the chorus I often wonder why I'm not feeling more spiritual.

The words mean little to me but the music sends me over the top.

Tis a wonderment!
M.L.R.

Deb M. said...

Dear Jerral

I am deeply intrigued by how Science and Spirituality are not separate: one is an essential tool to comprehend the other.

Recently in a book club where we were reading Jim Holt's Why does the World Exist, I summarized the book as follows:

NOTHING + GOD = SOMETHING (says the strict theist)
NOTHING + NOTHING = SOMETHING (says the strict atheist)
SOMETHING + NOTHING = SOMETHING (says the unsure spiritualist)

The Abrahamic religions, in their extremes, are symbolized by equation 1 above: first there was nothing, then God said “Let there be light,” and ex nihilo, created the Universe. God is omni-everything and supremely benevolent. Many scientists believe that this theistic view is not incompatible with their own mainstream scientific views.

Equation 2 describes the world-view of a strict atheist: in the beginning there was nothing, there is no need for a God, and voilĂ , we have the Universe, an utterly improbable yet possible happenstance. Matter emerges spontaneously from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum, the cosmic egg is created, the egg explodes, a super-massive expansion is followed by an accelerating inflation, one improbable thing leads to another, extreme randomness on galactic scales: quarks, protons, atoms, energy, carbon, complexity, replication, cells, life, evolution, natural selection, and man. Man, staring into his own past, himself a product of an exploding cosmic egg.

The third equation represents a spiritualistic view. It says: it is incongruous to suggest that in the beginning there was nothing, nothing is something, quantum fluctuations are not nothing, space itself is not nothing, space is traversable (in the 3D version of the movie Gravity, the audience dangles in space with the protagonist; that space is real), it is not an energy-vacuum, there always is something, and God is embedded inside the primordial something-ness. That something is conscious, intelligent, purposeful, all-encompassing, all-embodying, a universal consciousness, within which each of us is irreversibly and inseparably embedded, not differentiated, and each of us has the potential to attain a sense of oneness with that Universe of which 'we ourselves are a part.'

Just wanted to share this.
Warm Regards
Deb

Jerral Miles said...

Deb, I am grateful for your thoughtful, intelligent response to the BLOG writing. What I'm working up to in my thinking is find a satisfactory (for me, at least) definition of person, social and philosophical. I'm think there is no way to "know" much about God without starting with having a firm sense of what I mean, empirically, metaphysically, psychologically, biologically, etc by person... so that's what's going on in my head. Thanks for the reference to Jim Holt's book. I've had that on my list of possible reads. I'm in the middle of a rereading of Bonhoeffer's Communion of Saints and his deep thinking from the 1930s on the issues Holt and Dawkins, and Spong and many others, including Deb Mukherjee and Jerral Miles are considering. For all kinds of reasons I wish the Gestapo hadn't executed Bonhoeffer. I'd love to know how he would have developed his brilliant thesis about God and man. I especially like that he had begun to use person instead of genus man in his thinking and writing.
Jerral