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Reader
Registered Member
Date Joined Feb 2005
Total Posts : 66
| Posted 3/26/2005 9:15 AM (GMT -6) |   | | I just read an extremely interesting pagan book Rational Mysticism by John Horgan who spent many years as a journalist with Scientific American magazine. It is an excellent secular look at mysticism of all kinds and considers many "mystical technologies" used to obtain experiences. He deals with meditation, contemplative prayer, yoga, and especially drugs. Selected drug use is the quickest and easiest way to obtain mystical experiences without the severe disciplines, and corresponding elitism, imposed by other methods. What is interesting is that the experiences themselves, and he cites many well known Christian mystics along with many pagan ones, the experiences themselves are the same accross technologies and beliefs. That a person is Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or agnostic has little to do with the mystical experiences themselves.
The main debate in the book is not whether these experiences exist but whether they are "true." Are they a non-rational way to experience and know truth, a transcendent truth concerning who and why we are. Are people experienceing God as they believe or are they experiencing their own imaginations and things within them? This debate goes back and forth. The irony that I found is that even here, in a secular book, the major argument against God and that these experiences were God is "the problem of evil." Thus the various secular mystics wrestled with this to reconcile the obvious problem that they were mystically experiencing a good God, though the world has/is evil. I would like to quote two paragraphs from page 193 which is from a brilliant secular Jewish physicist touching on the concept of "Open View" in a broader setting. I found it interesting.
One eloquent spokeman for the nature-does-not-care principle is Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and one of the twentieth century's most prominent physicists. Weinberg scoffs at the claim - advanced not only by provocateurs like McKenna but also by some respecteble physicists - that modern physics is revealing a "plan" underlaying reality, a plan that gives us a central role. Some of Weinberg's collegues, intoxicated by their ability to discern profound symmetries in nature - symmetrics embodied in the theory of general relativity - have proposed that "God is a geometer." By uncovering nature's geometric structure, these physicists suggest, they are unveiling "the mind of God." Weinberg retorts, in effect, that if God is a geometer, He is a geometer who couldn't care less about us.
Weinberg's main objection to belief in God is the problem of natural evil. His own life has been "remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile of human happiness," he emphasized in a recent essay. But given the suffering he had seen meted out to others, Weinberg did not understand how any rational person could believe in a God who cares for us. "I have seen a mother die painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered by the Holocaust." He rejected the proposition of some theologians that evil is the price we pay for God's having given us free will. "It seems a bit unfair for my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for the Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will of tumors?"
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/26/2005 9:36 AM (GMT -6) | | | Weinberg: "It seems a bit unfair for my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for the Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will of tumors?"
Jeff: I agree with Weinberg. I have always thought that natural evil IS the problem of evil. Because the sheer quantity and degree of natural evil seems hard to explain as a means to greater good(s). Much of it seems to be down right senseless and tragic.
wjs | | Back to Top | | |
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Reader
Registered Member
Date Joined Feb 2005
Total Posts : 66
| Posted 3/26/2005 2:28 PM (GMT -6) | | | As I read through the book Rational Mysticism it became clearer and clearer that Christianity is non-mystical at its core. We beleive in propositional truth with a thesis/antithesis. We believe in exclusivity. We believe this NOT because of some blind leap of faith and NOT because we feel a burning in our bosom or some mystical experience. We believe in objective propositional truth that can be understood with reason because God became man and communicated what was hidden - Jesus revealed the Father, affirmed the demands of His Law and demonstrated His love. He proved that His words were true by rising from the dead and leaving the grave with his real body.
He claimed that His truth and revelation was the ONLY true and certain revelation of God. He proved that His truth was exclusive and superior by predicting his own death and resurrection. This happened as a historical non-mystical fact that was witnessed to by men who say and touched his glorified body.
Others claim insights and elightenment. Jesus' claims and the proof of His resurrection nullify the claims of others who say that they too have reached reconciliation with God. Their mystical "truth" is not based upon propositional truth and cannot be apprehended with reason. It is unverifiable. We would need to die to experience it. I reject Weinberg's claims that natural evil demands that a rational person not believe in a God who cares for them. I also reject Horgan's claim that God is not and cannot be "particular" in acting differently for different people. I reject this on the basis of the claims of Christ, the God man who revealed real truth about the world which we cannot see for certain on our own - the spiritual one. | | Back to Top | | |
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