Saturday, June 22, 2019

Hate Mail - More Of An Answer Than The Comment Deserves But I'm Feeling Generous Today

The God revealed in the Bible is filtered through human imagination.
Walter Brueggemann

That idea isn't at all rare among those who believe in God, though there are certainly people who never think about it hard enough to realize that's exactly what the Bible, in fact, all scripture is.  It's my experience it's far more commonly realized among religious people than it is realized among atheists of the modern area that science, mathematics, etc. are physical phenomena and the abstraction of numbers and their properties are, to EXACTLY the same extent,  filtered through human imagination.  We couldn't possibly articulate the first idea about anything without imagining it first, words, themselves, are a human invention in order to act as that tertiary filter that can articulate what we imagine, what we think about what we perceive. perception being the first filter of the world external to our minds but secondary to our own perception of our minds.

It is one of the consequences of modernity, of scientism that people imagine science as a direct expression of the physical universe when such a direct access to external reality is not possible.  Among those who work in science but who maintain that false conception of what science is, what it does, its most basic vicissitudes, exigencies and limits, show the shocking extent to which one is allowed to make a career in science, to gain what is mistaken as authority in science while not having grasped or taken seriously the most basic foundations of its theoretical construction.   Descartes and Bacon, among those who invented modern science and scientific method, were explicitly trying to reproduce in natural philosophy the level of reliable certitude achievable in pure mathematics, mathematics being the rigorous logical analysis of numbers and their properties and operations on them - which are all knowable only as imaginary entities.  The irony of modern scientism of the sort that regularly derides religion based on its imaginative practices is that its very language, mathematics, is the most obviously pure practice of imagination, through which all of scientific method is performed.  

So, no, I'm not in the least bit troubled that some peoples' imaginations lead them to other conclusions about God.  I have made the choice to recognize what I believe is the superior record of imagining God as found in the Jewish scriptures and its children, Christianity and Islam while respecting that God has not cut off other people whose imaginations have led to other articulations of God - a rather surprising number of those I'd been told and I believed were "polytheistic" turn out to be not that different from the Monotheism of Christianity that believes in saints and angels.  A lot of that "polytheism" turns out to be an imaginative extension of what is, at its most central level, monotheism.  The key difference between the gods of Greek mythology and the God which the Jewish scriptures articulate is that the gods of the Greeks were created creatures subject to physical or fatalistic forces whereas the Jewish imagination gets to a God who is not so subjugated, not created.   

Another difference, one of the most crucial ones for me, is that the God of the Bible is the most potent origination point of egalitarian democracy.   I see that and it is one of the most important reasons that I believe based on my experience and observation of life. 

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