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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (40290)	6/13/1999 3:01:00 AM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

No, I don't think Christopher is attributing the three O's to God. I'd say more but it's too late. Or Early. Or something. 'Night....

To: jbe who wrote (40290)	6/13/1999 12:27:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Christopher's position is not all that clear to me. Probably because it is not all that clear to him! <g> I didn't say we couldn't talk about God, I said we couldn't understand or describe him/her/it/them, and that we have no right to expect God to conform to our human notions of good and evil, logic, etc. We can certainly experience aspects of God, and can (and should) talk about those. It is our nature to try to understand, even when we should know that full understanding is impossible. One of the problems I have with traditional Christianity is that it is so fixated on irrelevancies -- ceremonies, analyses of every minutia of God, arguments about whether baptism should be sprinkling or full immersion, who is a saint who can intercede for us with God, whether women can be priests, etc. -- and so bereft of emphasis on simply experiencing God. It's like a scientist (hear, O Chuzz!) who can't simply enjoy looking at and experiencing a sunset because he focuses his whole energies on analyzing the wave lengths of the colors, studying the refractive properties of the atmosphere, calculating the angles of reflection of the light off the wavelets, etc. Those may be partial descriptions of what is happening, but they obscure the simple beauty and majesty of the sunset. (Living on the West coast of the country, I am very partial to sunsets; when I spent time on the Maine coast I was very partial to sunrises.) The sum total of all the scientific discoveries ever made about the characteristics and mechanics of a sunset aren't worth a ten second look at an actual sunset in action. God is. What God is, God is. Why God is, is. Beyond that I can speculate, but can never know. P.S. The answer to Augustine's perceived dilemma is simple: what is flawed in his argument is his insistence that God has to accept our definition of what is good, like my son who believes I am not good if I don't buy him a new truck for his birthday. P.P.S. And if you ascribe responsibility for hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. to God, you must also grant h/h/i/t the credit for making sunrises and sunsets, for providing sexual pleasure, for giving us Shakespeare and Mozart as well as Stalin and Hitler, etc. P.P.P.S. Would you really be happy living in a world that was ALL good and NO evil? And how would you then know it was good? Think about that -- it is more profound than it sounds at first reading.