Dubious wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2023 5:20 am
What difference does it make whether god exists as long as one implicitly believes it does? The belief factor is ALL there ever was to compress the unprovable into a fact. Nothing more sustainable than belief was ever available to reify god beyond what is subsumed mentally whether simply imagined or as a psychic necessity. Any request for empirical data on god's existence proves a person completely brainless in understanding the difference between what is possible and what is not.
Here, Dubious presents a type of hermeneutic, a way of seeing man really, and also revelation, that is strictly in accord with his fundamental atheism. In Dubious's world there is only *manifestation* (the world, the universe, in strictly scientific-materialist terms, and within that definition-set Dubious believes no other explanations are needed for any phenomena of a revelatory sort) but the idea of a transcendental divinity is -- here his assertion is similar to Iambiguous's -- an idea that has been rendered impossible at an a priori level.
Because it is a non-admissible concept, the idea is (essentially) a form of
lunacy. Thus he believes that the idea-set he employs to make sense of (hallucinated) transcendental revelation is a sort of 'healing clarification'. If "all speech is sermonic", the sermons offered by Dubious have a definite hermeneutic
function. It is
kerygma of a specifically modern sort. It presents itself as being *really true* and thus undercuts any other conceivable definition.
Nevertheless, the questions are not invalid.
What difference does it make whether god exists as long as one implicitly believes it does?
The idea is not without some merit. One could for example believe that the Earth is the center of the Cosmos and hold to an idea, which may not in fact be true, that the very Earth is the center of everything and thus that the Earth, and man's life, are of prime importance. As everyone knows we did in fact believe exactly this for the longest time. It was a *fact*. Now, other perspectives have intruded on that *fact* and it is no longer understood to be factual. Not only has the centrality of our Earth been challenged, it has been undercut so extremely that it is nearly inconceivable how tiny is our world when compared to something fantastically larger.
But I would say that it is in that (a spectacle of the fantastically huge, in the sense of the incomprehensible magnitude of things) that the *real focus* is lost sight of. The perspectival shift of the recent few hundred years has *done a number* on the possibility of seeing things in terms of old cosmological models. The models have been shattered.
But my understanding is that the model is in fact Story. The former cosmological model was a Story, and the *reality* is different as we all now know. But
the content of the Story is still as much there as it ever was -- if indeed it ever was.
In Basil Willey's
Seventeenth Century Background he introduces some extremely helpful (interpretive) ideas:
To give a 'philosophical' account of matters which had formerly been explained 'unscientifically', 'popularly', or 'figuratively' -- this, it would probably be agreed, has been the main intellectual concern of the last three hundred years. In a sense, no doubt, the separation of the 'true' from the 'false', the 'real' from the 'illusory', has been the task of thought at all times. But this winnowing process seems to have been carried on much more actively and consciously at certain times than at others. For us in the West two such periods are of especial importance, the period of Greek philosophy and the centuries following the Renaissance. It was in the seventeenth century that modern European thought seems first to have assumed, once more, that its appointed task was La Recherche de la Vérité, the discovery and declaration, according to its lights, of the True Nature of Things. It is in that century that we meet once again the exhilaration which inspired Lucretius in his address to Epicurus the sense of emancipation from inadequate notions, of new contact with reality. It was then, too, that the concepts of 'truth ', 'reality', 'explanation ' and the rest were being formed, which have moulded all subsequent thinking. There is some reason, then, for supposing that it may be worth while to watch these concepts in process of formation.
First it may be well to enquire, not with Pilate -- 'What is Truth?' -- but what was felt to be 'truth' and 'explanation' under seventeenth century conditions. As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions; 'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician. It is, however, less difficult to detect the assumptions of an age distant from our own, especially when these have been subject to criticism. At this distance of time it should be possible, I think, to state fairly accurately what the seventeenth century felt as 'true', and what satisfied it as 'explanation'. In reading seventeenth century writers one feels that it was as 'explanation' that they chiefly valued the 'new philosophy', and it is for this reason that I wish first to enquire, briefly, what is 'explanation'?
Dictionary definitions will not help us much here. 'To explain', we learn, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend upon the degree of satisfaction that it affords. An explanation 'explains' best when it meets some need of our nature, some deep-seated demand for assurance. 'Explanation' may perhaps be roughly defined as a re-statement of something -- event, theory, doctrine, etc. -- in terms of the current interests and assumptions.
Dubious continues:
The belief factor is ALL there ever was to compress the unprovable into a fact.
True enough, and the performance of such an act of concretizing belief is just as evident in the hermeneutic deployment with which you are engaged with a notable zeal.
Nothing more sustainable than belief was ever available to reify god beyond what is subsumed mentally whether simply imagined or as a psychic necessity.
To me at least I find this too reductive and, as per usual, you simply reify the set of assumptions that you operate under.
In Christianity Jesus was the most dispensable figure of all. It wasn't even necessary for him to exist for Christianity to take the course it did.
It is a bold assertion, pretty common in today's anti-apologetics, but it may very well be false.
A dominant myth has more power than any personality to create the kind of power structure most organized religions are impelled to become.[/i]
A mythological structure, operating at an unseen, unperceived level, is indeed determinant. But that is not
all that goes on and certainly not when one fairly considers Christianity.
In a sense, religion has even less use for god than an atheist as it transmutes a myth into an authoritarian scholastic entity supervised by its own hierarchy in which god, in some form, becomes an icon of established power; nothing more and nothing beyond.
While I am familiar with the logic of the argument, and have also seen things in terms of 'power-structures', this final analysis is
insufficient in my view.
And yet...you have no idea what I am or am not doing. And I'm talking to you right now, not to others, so you aren't even aware of what I would or would not say to them. All you know is that I gave you what you asked for, and you won't even look at it.
But it's the God I'm pointing out to Biggie that he/she needs to deal with...not me. I have nothing that I can do about Biggie's situation, one way or the other, except to point out the facts and let the chips fall where they may. It is God who saves.