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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Ferguson who wrote (26162)	7/11/1999 3:18:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Respond to of 39621

In briefest form of definition, theism affirms that God created the universe over patterns of his cosmic thought and supervises its operation from his point of transcendence somewhere at the summit of creation, either that he wound up the universal mechanism and let it run by the power he injected into it by his initial thrust, or keeps his hand constantly on the levers of control. Deism holds that he deployed his mental and physical energies in the construction of the universe and poured them into the organic structure as the soul of man pours its energies into his body, his mentality and dynamism permeating every portion of the organism at all times. Pantheism stands on much the same ground, but has been accused of claiming that the physical structure of the universe embraces the whole of God's being, that God is no greater than his universe. Theism repudiates it because it seems to limit God to his physical manifestation in this one act of creation. As man is conceived to be a power above and beyond his body, so theism avers that God is a power above and beyond the universe, if that is considered to be his body. Deism asserts that God is present in the totality of worlds and therefore the question of his transcendence is irrelevant. Confined more particularly to the life of man than to that of the world, humanism postulates that whatever deific power is in evidence in man's life is comprehended in and exercised by man himself. He is not a puppet to be manipulated by a deus ex cathedra. He contains within himself the potential, if not the immediate power, to advance his own life to its highest possibility. This puts it in sharp antithesis to theism. Theism tends to cut man's life out of the order of physical nature, in fact in its Christian expression, directly aims to effectuate this severance as the means of man's final apotheosization. Deism and pantheism would hold any such transformation of his being as the culmination merely of the course of the natural evolution of which man is an integral portion and a product. The origin of divergence of opinion and the confusion in which the entire debate has been thus involved are chiefly due to the misinterpretation and misconceptions introduced by Christian theology into the purview. It was due to an unbalanced application of the relation of the two constitutive elements of our nature, the natural element on our bodily side and the spiritual element on the side of soul. When Christian mentality lost sight of the principle of polarity, it mistook the functional beneficence of the warfare of opposites for an overt hostility of the negative pole to the positive and heaped upon matter and the flesh the stigma of enmity to the god, whether in man or in transcendence. A study of Christian history discloses the portentous fact that the concept of the "malignancy of matter," coming into the movement from Hinduism through Zoroastrianism, became an influence overwhelmingly dominating the theology and the ethic. It bred the monstrous cult of asceticism, whose driving motivation was the idea that the instincts of the flesh must be crushed down in the interests of the spirit. Instead of holding the body in salutary relation to the soul, as nature's means of giving the dual parental function of the two their chance to bring to birth the true Christ child in the physical body as its womb and cradle, Christianity tore the two natures violently apart and set the bodily pole in enmity against its positive twin. The opposition of function, all beneficent, was mistaken for the opposition of evil against good, or God. The tragic consequence of this staggering default of insight are incalculable, but in all conscience overwhelming to any intelligence that discerns it. It lay the Christian mind open to the obsession of a psychological influence that has been nothing less than devastating to sanity, inflicting upon the psyche a trauma that has produced morbidity and crushed to a degree the natural instinct for human happiness. John Dewey has pronounced this supposititious enmity between man natural and man spiritual, rather between man total and his God, as the most deadly dichotomy in the mental life of mankind. George Santayana has re-echoed the accusation in forceful language. Nietzsche cursed it in the most vitriolic terms he could find. Surely the most naive intuition of reason should have averted the debacle from the simplest intimation that God would not thrust his children out of heaven and lodge them in fleshly bodies which would at the same time become the instruments of their ruin. Yet this fatuous misconception is almost fundamental in Christian systematism. By confronting the soul with the necessity of deploying its divine potential through the effort to maintain its balance with the inertia of matter, God did house these child-souls of his own being in mortal bodies. They could not become gods in their own right unless they became masters of the physical forces over which, as gods, they would have to rule. Mastery could be achieved only by a long struggle--Jacob wrestling all night with the angel--with the polar opposition of matter, which should never have been mistaken for an evil element, when it was in fact the spirit's own twin. One of the most lamentable consequences of this debacle has been that the dominance of the Christian influence has tended to inhibit the spontaneous interest of mind in nature and has therefore delayed for centuries the exercise of mind in its instinctive bent to divine the secrets and the message which nature might have imparted to Western intelligence so much earlier. Obsessed religiously with the persuasion that nature was an evil influence, inevitably there was never that intense motive to fathom her depths of meaning that natural piety would have inspired. The theological contempt for nature discouraged the consecration and enthusiasm that are the requirements for felicitous adventure in such an enterprise. The advance of Occidental culture has been immeasurably retarded in consequence. A/B. Kuhn