Sunday 21 January 2018

from Tillich's wikipedia entry

Tillich states, sympathetically, that the God of "theological theism"

"deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications."
Isn't this the the God of Dawkins and Hitchens?
You can never be summed up, understood, grasped, or analysed. Prayer surely has to be a constant letting go of all theory, concept and vision: aiming always to seek to allow You to be who, what and where You really are.  

Tuesday 2 January 2018

Wittgenstein

regarding the modern way of seeing: our scientific view of the world. The only anti-dote to scientific positivism - the idea that what the scientist "says" about the world must be true because proven - the world of hard surfaces if you like - has to be a better understanding of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the limitations of language. It is exactly the same with what we might call "religious positivism" - which directly opposes "scientific positivism" of course  - but is paradoxically built upon the same scientific view of the world. For the religious positivist it is not the scientist who speaks the truth but the prophets of old - through the Koran and the Bible essentially. Not so much "hard surfaces" in their case but "hard facts" instead. Wittgenstein should be studied by all. If only he was a little easier to understand!
nothing we can say about you does anything other than mislead.  we can only understand you by meeting you.
beauty can never be described: it can only be witnessed. the very word only creates in the mind half-glimpses of dusty images which have almost nothing to do with reality.