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

To: E who wrote (25125)	10/1/1998 4:57:00 PM
From: Rick Julian	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

E, Your interpretation of my post demonstrates the difficulty of deists and atheists engaging in meaningful and constructive discussion about the matters at hand: most atheists can't competently debate these issues because their knowledge base of spiritual thought from around the world in its many and varied forms--from literal understanding of scripture, to the symbolic and metaphoric meaning of such scripture, to esoteric notions which augment and expand the notions of said scripture--most atheists must plead utter ignorance. Yet I can easily adopt the atheist position with one simple sentence: "I don't believe in god." Ipso facto, I've recited the bulk of atheistic thought. Good debaters are prepared with a fundamental knowledge of both the pro and con stances. I have yet to encounter an atheist who comes prepared with enough knowledge of my position to make a discussion fruitful, while I feel completely competent to assume the atheist position. Most intelligent believers have wrestled with doubt and it provides more than adequate training to assume the atheistic stance. Personally, I find atheism to be intellectual somnambulism, with atheists assuming a passive role in allowing science to dictate to them the nature of reality--a reality defined by instruments of measure (as though a spectrum analysis of the color blue is anything remotely close to the vision of the color itself.) Please prove me wrong about my assumption that most atheists' familiarity with the canon of spiritual thought is embarrassingly shallow. Would you briefly share a portion of your spiritual reading list (Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism . . .)? If you will, then I will begin to couch our conversation in specific terms you can relate to and understand. Rick

To: E who wrote (25125)	10/1/1998 6:48:00 PM
From: Rick Julian	Respond to of 108807

E, "if a God created the hideous particulars of the cruel processes I have barely touched upon, and assigns no values to them, why in God's name are you worshipping Him? Do you not assign values to them?" I am a composer. In making music I use words and musical notes to create a composition. There are rests, there are changes in harmony , there is the flow and content of lyric, and there is the rhythm of all of these elements. In the final analysis, my litmus test for success is: "Have I said what I wanted to say? Have I created beauty? Does it work?" If I can answer yes, I have successfully created a world-- much as a painting is a painter's world, a poem, a poet's, a building, an architect's. I believe God's creation of the universe is a macrocosmic version of the artists' "world building". So now you ask me to explain the particulars of His process, to assign values to His particulars. You might as well ask me why I placed an eighth note rest in measure 8 of my song (it killed the C#!), why the chord in measure nine is major rather than minor. Was it fair to extinguish the B Major 7th chord, so that the D Minor chord could sound? What were the values I assigned to these decisions in my construct? To a creator, such questions are inane--the answers are that they were necessary for the successful exposition of the idea in toto. The composer does not dwell on each individual note in a composition--one simply composes, the poet does not fret over the individual letters in a word, he simply writes -- assembling elements by feel, by intuition until they coalesce pleasingly. Then the beholders of the creation enter the equation. If they "get" the creation, they understand it broadly, because that is most often the best one can do. The creator himself cannot tell you all the "whys", what each particular means, and his hands wrought the damn thing. Picasso's "Guernica" was about the horrors of war. Ask him to explain each brush stroke, why he chose this red rather than that one, why that figure there . . . and he would have dismissed you as a silly pedant. The unskilled beholder wants to microanalyze the creation, wants to know its intricacies and subtext so that he can "understand", so that he can formulate a theory which will contain the creation. This is a fool's game. I believe the world was created by God, and done so in such a manner that his design has allowed it to exist for millions upon millions of years. He made it to work, to be a thing of beauty, and it surely is. Part of his creation must die, that other parts may replace and reinvigorate the world. That you want to assign specific value and meaning to how these particulars are expressed misses the much larger issue of the world's fathomless continual functioning and existence. I try looking at the world from the moon's perspective rather than from down on my knees with a magnifying glass in hand. Rick