Cliche Guevara
04-25-2009, 10:55 AM
Paul Tillich asks a very profound question in regards to religious beliefs, especially those religions with very personal deities. What happens to God of the prescientific age when the prescientific age itself collapses?
*Note: having grown up in a predominately christian family and society I have only christian examples and analogies but it applies to all structured massively held religious beliefs
I have found that there are generally three (maybe 4) responses to this dilemma. (In order of increasing rationality)
1)You get people who cling to the scripture as it was infallible words written by god himself through proxy and deny belief in rational scientific concepts that prohibit certain events critical to religious beliefs from occuring. Also, lets not to mention the quite limited understanding of morality that religion provides and focus more on the silly things they say like "creationism is just as credible of evolution" and actually believe in talking in tongues, and other religious traditions I am not aware of or say other retarded things like "God put dinosaur fossils on the Earth to test our faith"
2) You get people who twist rational beliefs into their religion and make everything gravy. They say things like "Even though God created the world in 7 days, a day to god could be a thousand years" or come up with far fetched, quasi-scientific notions like intelligent design and say things like "the eye is too complex to be not intelligently designed" and bring up archaic philosophies like the watchermaker analogy
3) Most modern and post modern Religious folk with strong rational thinking would say something like this:
The Popular anthropomorphic, personal, and mechanistic concepts of God, the "God upstairs", as Bishop John A. T. Robinson would call it in his book Honest to God, simply no longer credible. For Tillich, the collapse of the concept did not collapse the reality of God; rather, the modern mind must be encouraged to think of "the God above God", that is, of what is above and beyond the limits of our imagination. This Death of God might lead some to the despair of atheism and meaninglessness, but for Tillich it leads to a greater and deeper faith in a god beyond and above all that we doubt
And I say to these people "hey thats great, but thats not the God described in thousands of years of oral history, Thats the God that you went through leaps and bounds through to arrive at something that can appease your rationality and religious beliefs".
Claiming belief in a higher order or a transcendental impossible to imagine kind of God is great and all, infact I share these beliefs, but that is not Christianity or any religion described by man. The farce of religion is that it is always evolving the God they describe can 'evolve' (notice how the old testament god is a jealous angry god, while the new testament god is benevolent and all caring and sent his one and only son to save us). How can the "infalliable" word of god being so fluid and changing. Now these people are taking it one step further and instead of modifying the personality of God they are changing Gods very nature, into something more rationally comprehendable.
In short you can't believe in a "god above god" and believe that Jesus was the Son of God and preformed miracles (sadly, a prerequisite for being a christian), religious belief are irrational and trying to rationally answer the question of god is not the religious way.
*Note: having grown up in a predominately christian family and society I have only christian examples and analogies but it applies to all structured massively held religious beliefs
I have found that there are generally three (maybe 4) responses to this dilemma. (In order of increasing rationality)
1)You get people who cling to the scripture as it was infallible words written by god himself through proxy and deny belief in rational scientific concepts that prohibit certain events critical to religious beliefs from occuring. Also, lets not to mention the quite limited understanding of morality that religion provides and focus more on the silly things they say like "creationism is just as credible of evolution" and actually believe in talking in tongues, and other religious traditions I am not aware of or say other retarded things like "God put dinosaur fossils on the Earth to test our faith"
2) You get people who twist rational beliefs into their religion and make everything gravy. They say things like "Even though God created the world in 7 days, a day to god could be a thousand years" or come up with far fetched, quasi-scientific notions like intelligent design and say things like "the eye is too complex to be not intelligently designed" and bring up archaic philosophies like the watchermaker analogy
3) Most modern and post modern Religious folk with strong rational thinking would say something like this:
The Popular anthropomorphic, personal, and mechanistic concepts of God, the "God upstairs", as Bishop John A. T. Robinson would call it in his book Honest to God, simply no longer credible. For Tillich, the collapse of the concept did not collapse the reality of God; rather, the modern mind must be encouraged to think of "the God above God", that is, of what is above and beyond the limits of our imagination. This Death of God might lead some to the despair of atheism and meaninglessness, but for Tillich it leads to a greater and deeper faith in a god beyond and above all that we doubt
And I say to these people "hey thats great, but thats not the God described in thousands of years of oral history, Thats the God that you went through leaps and bounds through to arrive at something that can appease your rationality and religious beliefs".
Claiming belief in a higher order or a transcendental impossible to imagine kind of God is great and all, infact I share these beliefs, but that is not Christianity or any religion described by man. The farce of religion is that it is always evolving the God they describe can 'evolve' (notice how the old testament god is a jealous angry god, while the new testament god is benevolent and all caring and sent his one and only son to save us). How can the "infalliable" word of god being so fluid and changing. Now these people are taking it one step further and instead of modifying the personality of God they are changing Gods very nature, into something more rationally comprehendable.
In short you can't believe in a "god above god" and believe that Jesus was the Son of God and preformed miracles (sadly, a prerequisite for being a christian), religious belief are irrational and trying to rationally answer the question of god is not the religious way.