Renouncing Reason

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

There is no such god, Lacewing, and anybody who says different knows nothing of god. My late mother was a devout believer although only those who knew her intimately well could possibly have known this because she regarded her belief as the most personal of personal relationships between herself and a god which she freely explained to me was of her own creation. She almost never spoke of god and she wasn't in the least dismayed when I abandoned all notions of god in my adolescence and she said so to me quite plainly. She said her god couldn't care less what I chose to believe or not believe but what he did care about was how I chose to live my life. I still get a tear in my eye when I recall these words of Mum's because she taught me more about god than all the priests or rabbis or imams ever possibly could have.

Yes, it makes sense: her imagined and invented god, in his imagined inventedness, would have a tough case to make to defend any particular assertion.

And her invented and imagined god who only cares how you live you life and not if you 'believe' or not, that is interesting material.

And that one's mother's imagined and invented god can teach one more than all the priests and rabbis combined and could ever teach one.

Oddly in all this, there 'is' and there 'is not' a 'god'. I don't think one could call this precise atheism, rather it is a crespuscular zone of partial belief.

Kierkegaard said something similar to Atto: That 'proofs' of God are not only absurd but that they function contrarily to the basic requirement of (for want of a better word) godliness or god-communion. To need a proof, or to imagine you can concoct one, is evidence of disbelief, since God in this sense is linked to an awareness that has always been described as epiphany, or revelation, and also of grace.

A similar sense about *something* that cannot be arrived at rationally functions both in Christianity as well as a tradition quite separate: Zen buddhism for example. We have to get out of the way - our own way - before we can *know*.

Yet we can know everything there is to know, and all that we can store up in our mind's memory-banks, through theological reading, and reading on Buddhist ethics. Yet there is *something* (as they say) that can only be gotten through a certain difficult self-surrender. This idea presents itself in many times, and in many different contexts, both 'high' and 'low'.

I suppose one would be forced to say that your mother understood things in similar terms. It makes sense.

[Obvious Leo]

Zen buddhism for example. We have to get out of the way - our own way - before we can *know*.

I guess we all read different philosophies from within our own conceptual frameworks but in my view this is a very simplistic way to understand Zen. Zen is the antithesis of the Platonist doctrine where our personal relationship with reality is codified according to some transcendental truth. In the Zen we accept that we each construct our own version of reality from within the confines of our own minds and we must NEVER assume that this construction is a representation of some sort of ontological absolute. Zen is not saying that we need to get out of our own way before we can "know". Zen is actually saying that once we manage to get out of our own way we can see that such an ontological absolute is a myth. In this respect Zen is really just a more ancient version of the Kantian metaphysic with its own cultural slant.