RE: Reply to Glenn's 9/11 post

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Howard J. Van Till [mailto:hvantill@sbcglobal.net]
>Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 7:58 PM
>
>No, on the contrary, it leads me to a sense of the need to take
>responsibility for painting my portrait of God in a way that makes
>use of as
>much of human experience as I can process. That includes the human
>experience to which revered texts attest as well as my own
>experience of the
>presence of the Sacred. (You are free to speak of that experience in the
>language of "the leading of the Spirit" if you like.)

But if everyone is busy painting self-delusionary pictures of god, it
doesn't seem to be a very productive activity from what I can see.

>
>Does this approach make the product of no more worth than faerie stories?
>No, this is not a simple case of _either_, 1) a portrait of God
>derived form
>selected portions of ancient canonical text, _or_ 2) silly nonsense or folk
>lore. Your rhetoric is often built around this false dichotomy, but no one
>need buy such a stark either/or dilemma. There are many other options,
>including worldviews that do include, for the sake of honesty and humility,
>healthy doses of agnosticism.

Give a cogent, objective definition of how we tell silly nonsense from truth
when one can say such things as we are all painting our own pictures of god.

>
>Does this approach lead to the sort of certainty that many people lust
>after? No, that degree of certainty is unattainable. (I must note here that
>the same problem appears to be just as prevalent among those people who
>claim to craft their portraits from sacred text alone. Look at the myriad
>conflicting claims re "what the Bible clearly teaches about God.")

There is clearly a difference between certainty and uselessness. All sorts
of various cultures have painted their personal pictures of what wood
spirits are like. The Celts called them sith (shees), Norse called them
elves, French called them faeries, Chinese have called them xian ren and the
Irish called the Leprechauns. I bet the pictures painted of these beings
are every bit as real as all the human pictures of god, which all of us are
supposedly painting.

It is not about certainty, it is about reality or the lack thereof in the
case of pictures. My point is that if all we are doing is painting pictures
of something we can't not know, then there is no correspondence with
reality, Howard. I see little reason to believe illusions or self-delusions.
Received on Fri Oct 1 17:30:00 2004