Discussion at Fresh Bilge.

I’ve been involved in a discussion at Fresh Bilge where I got into something of an argument with Tatyana one of his commenters. This is one of my comments:

I’ve just been for a walk in the ravine in the snow with my camera and naturally a few thoughts occurred.
In one sense I’m in complete agreement with Tatyana. There is no God, no Creator as such, we live in a big, cold, indifferent universe. One fine, or not so fine, day our sun will end all our days, our beautiful existence will vanish as if it never existed. Schubert’s music will be gone and an infinite number of monkeys with scratchy quill pens will never bring it back, but it will have existed, nothing can take that away and that is the kind of immortality or afterlife if you like that awaits. Which also applies to ‘us’ and if that comforts some all well and good.
So there is ‘us’, the earth, the universe, also time and space and infinity, the physicists’ question, why is there something rather than nothing? All a great mystery, and there are those who use the word God for that mystery, when really there shouldn’t be a name which is why in Judaism there isn’t one. There is the answer Moses got, ‘I am what I am’. It is this realisation that there is more than we can know and something outside ourselves that is behind the religious impulse and to reduce it to paper cut outs as Tatyana is doing,even though unfortunately it does apply to too many, is to do a dis-service to a great number of very impressive people who have struggled with these difficult questions. Among that number I would include the current Pope, and the reason Tatyana should check out his writings as well as Melanie Phillips, who she seemingly hasn’t heard of, is that she might learn something.

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Posted by Ligneus on Dec 3, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

1 Comment

  1. zee
    Dec 4, 2007

    Welcome Back Lig!
    I was so tired when I read this last night, but it spurred many reactions. I love your response and I think you echo the journey many are experiencing. I, as you know, struggle with the issue of God, but, unlike Tatyana , I am well past the militant stage of “Damn it God, you don’t exist, you don’t you don’t you don’t!!” (accompanied by stamping of feet and arms akimbo). I recognize the anger she has, the condescension towards believers…. it is all familiar and it is more of a personal battle projected towards God than a battle to prove or disprove his existence, which can’t be done anyway.

    She speaks of freedom. Free. What is free? Man, be he a result of evolution or creation, can’t initiate his birth nor reverse his death, nor can he particularly order his life according to his will…There actually is little freedom to begin with – this being human on planet earth has inherent limitations.

    Our sciences can certainly take stabs at altering man, playing with all of the elements that compose us- but still, man is using what is available and discovering all these marvelous string theories and such using their organic brains – brains that they couldn’t create or imagine all on their own. Man can play with artificial intelligence all he wants, but man has never had an original thought, ever. All in all, no matter how advanced man becomes, he is not original and uses only the material provided by fluke, or fate, or a god. So where is the freedom there?

    If you are going to pitch gods, the Christian God has the better package – man has thrived where Judeo-Christian principles ( not religious deviancy) prevail – and it seems the god named allah can only produce carnage and suffocation.
    Personally I’ll take the christian god with his simple 10 commandments rather than the multitude of restrictions that issue from the left. At least the Christian god allows you to hate him, he even allows hate speech.
    Today, in the here and now, the only deity placing legalistic bonds, strictures, and prohibitions are the priests and priestesses of the left and islamists. Hate speech laws, social engineering, bogus global warming proscriptions – I can feel the prison walls inexorably closing in and if the left should prevail, those prison walls will stifle the very soul of man, whether that soul issues from god or apes, it will be the left who kills it.

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