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Reaction to: A Case for God
One of the purposes of this blog is to be a repository for those fragments and memes that bounce around in my skull long enough to form into a coherent thought and communication. Sometimes they tumble and recombine for years before they would be palatable for the general public.
A large portion of the concepts that I catalogued in some of my earliest journaling attempts, put down on paper long ago and now quite vanished from the world, revolve around philosophical or spiritual musings of a pretty outlandish nature. The type of stuff that may come up in rambling drunken conversations, but never really goes very far with those well-learned on the subjects or who make a career of them.
So, think of my surprise the other day when I began listening to an NPR interview with Karen Armstrong, former Catholic Nun and author on the subject of comparative religion, and she begins to talk about some of her basic understanding of religious precepts (or of general human spiritual methodology, possibly) and huge swaths of her observations and conclusions match nearly seamlessly into my personal theology. I don't mean they are a little similar, I mean that to hear the interview, we hold some of the same very specific ideas at the core of our view of the spiritual world.
Who would have ever guessed that I think so similarly to a nun?
So, for my own archival process, some vague textual analysis for a sec from the interview.
Of course explaining a modern concept of God must start in early religion, or mythology, and the concept of a divine entity to our cultural predecessors. She hits upon the limited omnipotence of a mythological deity, the human qualities, the need for divinity to work in consort with humanity to create stable balance in the universal order.
To get in to the next bit, where the creepy similarities caught my attention, you need to know that I've been speaking of apollonian vs dionysian discourse for years. So when Ms. Armstrong notes that the concept of god used to be a function of Mythos as opposed to Logos, of representational and spiritual systems as opposed to concrete and provable systems, I can say that I'm very familiar with the discourse at hand and arguments for each side.
But the interesting thing to me is her analysis of the logos vs mythos rift that has opened. When god was a myth, yet myth and science were both acceptable, God could remain an ineffible mystery. When logos begat the scientific method, and all things were testable and provable, mythos was pushed out of daily consciousness, or at least robbed of it's legitimacy. God stopped being an allegorical shortcut for human discussions of the higher powers of life, and was given the concrete, somewhat ludicrous form of the old man with a long beard standing on a cloud in the sky. Handy shortcut for children.
Interesting quote:
Very often people hear about God when they're little and when - at the time they first learn about Santa Claus. And over the years, their ideas about Santa Claus have changed and developed. But their ideas of God have got stuck in this rather infantile mode, which mistakes the symbol that God is supposed to be for hard fact.
I'm going to try not to ramble too much further, I promise.
Getting down to the meat of it, Armstrong is a comparative theologian. She sees that the point of all religion (and essentially all spiritual behavior) is an effort to overcome the nastiness and pain of the world, chiefly by overcoming the self. This leads to compassion, as if you can see beyond your own ego, one obviously wants to help relieve the pain of others as much as (if not more than) the pain of the self. Everybody comes up with the golden rule.
So, there it is... things to contemplate. See also the interview transcript
