Comments on: How can we know god?

By: chutney

chutney — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 05:21:46 +0000

Sounds like you’re a good process theologian. I’ve been playing around with that idea myself lately–the eventual, final reconciliation of all contradictions. I’m drawn to it emotionally, but I can’t decide what I think about it yet. Since I’ve scoffed at the idea for several years now, I’m going to take it as a sign of personal healing that I can even imagine a less-than-bitter end for the universe!

By: CP

CP — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 05:14:46 +0000

I like what you said about experience being multiple and often contradictory. Just today I was trying to reconcile some mystical experiences with some practical ones. One thing I think about God (sorry, I still like to capitalize it!) is that s/he will help us understand all contradictions someday. Not to resolve them and make them no longer contradictions, but to actually understand them in a way we cannot now.

By: Styles

Styles — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 02:55:43 +0000

I have found Lonergan’s Insight a really dis-interesting “experience.” Can’t say I’ve been “enlightened” by it, but neither, perchance, would he!

Do you, by chance, have any light on how to fix stars and such to URLs? Yours — without irony, truly — is “way cool.”

By: chutney

chutney — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 23:52:42 +0000

there should have been a strikethrough on that last “self.” MovableType seems to be persnickety about it.

By: chutney

chutney — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 23:51:46 +0000

I think experience can be unmediated –that’s what the mystics claim anyhow– but it doesn’t need to be unmediated. Separation of the four sources is always an artificial division, especially the distinction between tradition and text. All four sources are capable mediating the others (and of check-and-balancing the others.). But visceral, bodily experience is always present no matter which source is present.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself too much on the god questions. But I think god can be “objectified,” but that doesn’t make god an object, nor does it mean that an objectified god is necessarily helpful. I’m sympathetic to the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, so I’m immediately skeptical of talk of the “self” as a “subject” that knows “objects.” (Perhaps I should write it as “self.”) I think life is too interconnected to allow for such convenient distinctions.

Many of the mystics claim that the direct experience of god does rupture experience, rendering it incommunicable. (In Buddhist schools, experience is the last thing to go before enlightenment.) Not having experienced enlightenment myself, I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. I think mystical god-knowledge is valid, but it is optional. Because of my panentheism, I think most god-knowledge (and all necessary god-knowledge) is readily accesible to everyone.

By: daniel

daniel — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 23:06:45 +0000

I have serious doubts about the “primacy of experience” … Wouldn’t such a primacy require experience to be unmediated by the other aspects you’ve discussed (texts, traditions, reasons)? Can we ask for primacy here?

And then… what is an experience of the divine? That is, if experience is always (and is it?) a subject experiencing an object, can encounter with the divine fall into the category of experience? That is, can god be objectified? Or would a truly religious encounter be a disruption of, a rupture in experience?

btw, chutney, I’m really enjoying your god-talk series. You rock.