Wow what a beautiful day, blog readers! I’m at the window here, watching cats watching whishing leaves, armed with my NJOY electric cigarette, an ingenious contraption that allows you to inhale nicotine-infused water vapor. I’m going to go for two posts today, half-timed by a trip to Trader Joes. Perhaps even more. Work is going to swallow both days of my weekend whole, and then I think I’m done for my week, which is a shame, as it’s gone by all too quickly, the coins too quickly spent and on what, ultimately, I’m not sure.
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Continuing from yesterday, I must admit I’m a bit dumbfounded by all the possible conversational directions we might go in. Doubt is really not some haze, but the acute awareness of an equally viable option – in poem-making, it’s a word or line or whole draft that could equally well be a different word or line or whole draft. In life, it’s a torn heart. In a matter like this, the doubt pertains to the fact that there is so much that deserves to be brought immediately to the fore. I don’t know if anyone would disagree if someone were to say that every crisis is a crisis of limits.
First, my impulse in bringing up Tillich and Einstein was apologetic….One thing Tillich asks is that theology be shown the same respect as one shows physics, medicine, or any other discipline. When criticizing it, one should criticize the most advanced and not some obsolete forms of the practice….In one sense, he’s absolutely right. We don’t debunk medicine as a field because Benjamin Rush, the Doctor Os of the late 18th century, once prescribed his diarrhea-inducing “Thunderbolts” for everything from malaria to nosebleeds. Nor do we say astronomy is doomed to truthlessness because it once assumed the sun to be just the bolder and brighter of our two orbiters. However, we have no problem attacking obsolete forms of religious thought, and feeling justified in our attacks. Of course, it is a different situation in religion. If certain doctors were trying to bleed sinus infections out of us in the present time, we would have grounds for attacking medicine as a viable field. Such a parallel situation can no doubt be found in contemporary religious practice.
Ultimately, in Tilich’s religious thought, contemporary Athiesm is put into the surprising position of serving what it believes itself to be attacking. This is what I was hoping to show. Attacks on a distorted concept of God, a conflation of the symbol for the “unknowable ground and abyss of Being itself” cannot be strong enough, and are ultimately in service of religion. This is because they’re in the service of Truth. As Augustine puts it, “where I have found the Truth, there I have found my God, the Truth itself.” Truth, as we all know, can only replace itself with itself. You cannot remove a truth without establishing truth. Thus, it can only become itself more fully as if moves through time. If God is “veritas,” what can be said then?
Says Tillich: “Ultimate Concern is manifest in the realm of knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality. Therefore, if anyone rejects religion in the name of the cognitive function of the human spirit, he rejects religion in the name of religion.” These are some of the most challenging words Tillich speaks to the contemporary religious.
On a side note, Tillich’s imploration that theology be treated the same as other fields presupposes that the field of religion is dynamic. This is troubling to many inside of religion for all kinds of reasons. Unfortunately, as it has related to scientific inquiry, religion’s movement has had the tendency of resembling a continuous retreat, from one untenable position to the next untenable position. (One can trace this to the Thomistic Dissolution.) Tillich warns against theologians and religious leaders building their doctrines in the dark spots of scientific research, and how such is ultimately at odds with religion. At the time he wrote his History of Christian Thought, and to this day, science has not been able to conclude how organic matter arises from inorganic manner. The danger is that religion places a “being among beings” in the universe at this point, where he reaches down with His fingertip aflame and puts life into the world, only to eventually withdraw, as one does from a grill gone blazing out of control. While such a concept of God is exciting to the mind, and pleasing to our poetic faculties, where can it go next once science is able to get its thumb on how life came to be? Perhaps religion places this transcendent being at the instant before the Big Bang. Anywhere it places it, however, is ultimately a misplacement, a misunderstanding of God, and a misunderstanding of religion.
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