Quote:
|
Originally Posted by abaya
But you might say, SM, that this is what all people of any religion do, anywhere. Perhaps that's the case, after all. (Then, I might have to agree with you.)  |
That's exactly what I was about ready to respond with
To add onto that, the human animal is designed to classify. We're just...built that way. So, we like to classify ourselves as well. We also like to be a part of something. So, someone may not fall under the most common description of Christian, but they may also feel it is one of the closest descriptions of their own belief. So, they call themselves Christian.
Quote:
|
Sidenote: I have to say that the stuff I read by Teilhard de Chardin (as recommended by Thomas Merton in some of his books) kicked ass. I still very much admire the Jesuits for their intellectual pursuit of faith... I found it so refreshing after so much time with people who didn't dare think to too hard or in-depth about what they believed.
|
Merton and Teilhard de Chardin are two of my favorite Christian thinkers.
Quote:
|
Yep, neither one sat well with me, either. This was the point I was coming to, when I started to lose my faith. It essentially indicates that God was/is constructed by humanity, not the other way around... and if that were true, then I wanted nothing to do with that kind of god. Way too fucking postmodern.
|
I actually don't disagree with most of this, except the part of having a problem with it. I think god is both created and not created by humanity. Any particular concept of god is certainly created by humanity IMO, but I think we create god in an attempt to describe things that we feel but don't necessarily understand. To be overly descriptive, I think god is probably closely related to attempting to describe a biologically inherent sense of morality. This is why I take issue with the idea of a mythic god - of a person - but I don't see a problem with the concept of god in general. We use metaphors all the time, and I see no problem with using the god metaphor as well.
I think, overall, we probably agree more than we disagree...it's just that I have less of a problem merging the conclusions with some sort of post-modern spirituality.