iambiguous wrote: ↑Sat Jun 17, 2023 6:05 pm
Same with our souls...with immortality and salvation. A God defined and deduced into existence -- a concept of God -- is very, very different from a God that has actually been shown to exist.
You are stuck in a place similar to our own quack Dubious. In your case your ‘faith’, which I gather was not so well grounded, took hit after hit until it ‘fragmented’. Your virulent nihilism, with attendant moral nihilism, rose up as replacement (my interpretation). But yet you are still deeply, even exclusively, involved with the problem (oddly enough).
Personally, I think your error is in asking for a *proof* that will (or can) resolve your faith-problem. Hitting your head against that wall and doing that for years has done a number on your grey matter though! That seems evident.
(Check out Section 4, Subsection 7 of my Ten Week Email Course, I’ve included more nuggets and tidbits there …)
Mystics and faithful practitioners receive proof through inner experience, right? Yet you are locked out of that. But I think there is another order of proof but it is
indirect: the effects that are known (or
knowable).
My own take, my understanding, is that predominantly on this forum are dozens of functional illiterates. Very
very insufficiently informed by and familiar with the literary productions of their own culture (not only literature but art and also music). So, they are unfamiliar with the ‘effects’ of faith and belief which are revealed through the content of that material.
As a sideways illustration Harold Bloom proposes that *Shakespeare
invented the human*.
Bloom’s thesis is that Shakespeare ‘teaches us how and what to perceive, and he also instructs us how and what to sense and then to experience as sensation’. In creating what Shelley called ‘forms more living than real men’, he is the greatest master at ‘exploiting the void between persons and the personal ideal’. Once he has made this point, somewhat repetitively, and gets down to specifics, Bloom grows more penetrating. The clue to Shakespeare’s ‘preternatural’ ability to endow his characters with personalities lies in his ‘vitalism’ (or what Hazlitt called ‘gusto’). As the likes of Falstaff are (in a phrase borrowed from Ben Jonson) ‘rammed with life’, so, too, are the murderous villains (Aaron, Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth) and the comic villains (Shylock, Malvolio, Caliban).
But let’s take “teaches us how and what to perceive, and […] instructs us how and what to sense and then to experience as sensation” at a different level and see it as “indirect effect” of the influences that have come substantially through Revelation.
In any case, these are ideas I work with.
True, this is
indirect proof and will never be sufficient for those of us with so very little intellectual grounding that indirect evidence is meaningless since, really every fucking thing is void of meaning (!)
But I suggest that for those with higher
literacy (I really mean this at a higher level than it is normally taken) the
reality of the existence of profound effect is definitely known.
I wonder if the issue I am outlining has some relationship to the statement that “to those who have something more will be given, but those who have nothing from them it is taken away”?
Again, these are larger and general problems and the discussion of them is not intended as an invitation to
scrap with those referred to, directly or indirectly.
I give you the floor.
I give you the floor.