| In the end, it is meaningless to say that everything is divine. The parts cannot meaningfully be such, and the whole should be more perfect if it were so. I do not care for the sort of perspectivalism that Vedanta puts forth, for example: "things are only bad from our limited perspectives, if we could see the total scheme of things, we would see that everything is good". I just say fine, I'll go run down a couple of kids, firm in the belief that it is good from a God's eye view. Finally, I saw that divinizing Nature was merely sentimental, and became an atheist. What is, is, no need to call it divine. On the other hand, I did discover something interesting. I could not shake a sort of crypto- Taoism, the feeling that certain coincidences were more than accident, that there was a sort of immanent intelligence at work in things, although I was non- commital about its precise character. I got interested in Jung for awhile, to deal in a non- commital way with this presentiment. Anyway, I realized at a certain point that one had to make a choice: either cease to import basically religious notions of "deep structure" into one's atheism, or admit that God likely existed, in some form. My own deepest sense of things resisted the idea of essential chaos, and therefore I started back on the path of religious belief....... |
