Many Related Issues

It counted as a disappointment that when the new-atheism was a fad in the wake of 9-11 and those hundreds and thousands of atheists, most with college degrees or in college, or so it seemed, . . . when they started making their pitches against religion and anything that could imply the reality of God, I was surprised at a. how threadbare their slogans and arguments tended to be, b. how really bad a lot of them were at thinking, c. how plug awful conventional they were.  I concluded that it was one of the most conformist of fads I'd ever witnessed, a vulgar form of ephemeral fashion dressed up in academic drag and with pretenses of being all, you know, sciency.  

One of the more silly arguments I had pulled on me, even in my agnostic phase had been the old paradox of an all-powerful God being able to make a rock too big for God to pick up.  My first response was that the argument didn't take the word "all-powerful"  at its word.  All powers would include the power to overcome paradox, something which human beings would certainly struggle with and probably fail at but the all-powerful God would be able to overcome the paradox, probably in ways that human beings couldn't imagine and certainly can't replicate.  Despite what so many of us seem to believe, including the current occupant of the Oval Office and so many a pop art diva, we're not God. 

As it is, a lot of recent theology, when it deals with the All qualities of God of previous theology, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc. is a lot better at presenting problems such attributes of God present than any atheist I've ever heard or read.   And they aren't afraid to point out that God, as presented in the varied human imagination of the Bible, presents a lot of those problems.  

For example, God is presented as changing his mind when Israel fails to live up to the Covenant that God presented as eternal.  Which might be an understanding of why the misfortunes that the Children of Israel thought were NOT part of the bargain befell them.  A lesser people would have ignored their part in bringing about the results of their misfortune.  Or that what was promised was not what they had assumed in all too human terms.   One of the things I've found enormously impressive with that is that, very often, the failures of the Children of Israel are attributed to their failures in charitable justice, their obligations to the destitute, the widow, the orphan, the alien living among them.  It's a far more impressive God who brings national consequences for that than some god who does it over sexual jealousy or some other, all too human motivation.  

The issue of paradox figures in these next paragraphs form Why I Am Still A Christian, I thought I should get the issue out of the way first. 

After saying in the last paragraph I posted,  "He is not a super-ego or a Big Brother.  God bursts apart the concept of person;  God is more than a person," Kung continues:

But conversely, a God who is the foundation of personal nature of human beings cannot himself be a-personal either.  He is not sub-personal.  God also burst apart the concept of the impersonal;  God is not less than a person either. 

Even mathematicians and scientists had to get used to paradoxical thinking.  Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity offers itself as an example here.  In quantum mechanics, it depends on the question that is asked whether the answer in an experiment is expressed in terms of "wave" or "corpuscle" ;  and in the same way, in philosophical and theological discussion, it depends on the way the question is put whether, in answer to a particular question, God might be described as "personal" or "a-personal."  But the fact that God is fundamentally neither personal nor a-personal depends upon the incomparable nature of God.  He is in fact both the same time, and might therefore properly be called "super-personal."   

But for our biblical faith and our Christian values today, the decisive thing is that, even though this God is "super-personal," he is still a genuine partner who is kind and absolutely reliable, a partner to whom we can speak.  Of course we can only talk about this God, and talk to him, in metaphors and images, in ciphers and symbols.  But we can nonetheless communicate with him with human words - how else?   And it is obviously on this basis that the possibility of prayer and worship depends - a possibility which, it seems to me, is enormously important, particularly for us modern human beings and our essential Christian values - which of course should not be purely intellectual.  For in simple prayer and genuine worship even modern men and women can find certain values at a wholly different depth of their existence, and can truly experience where we come from, where we are, and where we are going.  

In my personal experience of meditation, something I've done most days, walking meditation.*   

But it wasn't until about six years ago that I changed the focus from the mere sensation of walking and breathing to the two parts of the Shema, love God and be good to each other that it was effective for me.  I am convinced that it is a belief in God that powers the most effective manifestations of being good to each other, certainly in society, that's the case.  I have never seen a deficit in one half of that, in people liking people to be good to them, it's a lot harder to keep up their end of the bargain if they don't feel compulsion to do good to other people and they figure they can get away with it.   Trump and pretty much all of Republican-fascism functions that way, which is most visible in those who support them while professing most loudly their Christianity.  Even when Trump so badly mangles the ideas he's obviously never thought of except in the way he might have learned a line for his reality TV show, even when he fumbles into declaring his divinity, such Christians as stick with him show the difficulties of giving up self-interest when they figure  there is no divine requirement that they do so.   

Since this is obviously a political commentary on the book, I will point out that slavery as practiced in the United States and elsewhere is an ultimate form of NOT doing unto others as you would have them do to you.  In the institutions, the Constitution, federal and state law, local statutes, in the parts of Protestant denominations that broke with their abolitionist and desegregationist brethren, in the Catholic and other cannon law that maintained the institution of slavery** we can see what happens when people figure they are entitled to having people do FOR them, what they have absolutely no intention of doing for other people.  I don't think that it's any accident that the evangelicals who support Trump tend to be in the tradition that supported slavery and segregation and that the Catholics who support him despise liberation theology and any attempt to drag the Catholic church out of the darkest days of its past.  

In political terms, it all does hinge on whether or not you really believe you are to do the will of God in doing to others what you want them to do to you.  You can either make that real in real life out of fear of punishment - which might be effective enough to make it real in law and in practice - or you can do it because you want to because you love God and are inclined to follow the commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples, "Love one another as I have loved you."   I think the second one would be the more successful means but I can't think of any other motives that would overcome self-interest that they can get away with in human terms, in sufficient numbers of people, with sufficient universality except those two.

Today Christians no longer have a naive belief in God, which suggests an answer to some other difficulties in the way of the Christian faith,  especially scientific ones.   

I'll leave it there because the next paragraph is a very long one which goes into that.   I will say that here Kung is talking about not all Christians because a lot of people who profess Christianity do have a naive belief in God as the answer to their personal difficulties - especially those who never deal with those difficulties asserted with modern science.  

Science, itself, can't deal with Christian faith except in only a few details associated with physical objects.  Science can't be used to honestly address anything but those things which are susceptible to its methods.  The famous "wave-particle" issue of physics that Kung brings up is about as practical a demonstration of the very real and important limits of science in addressing even the simplest of objects such as electrons.  As I've noted before, scientists, when they are being honest, most so when they're being most rigorously honest, will admit those limits.  I found it interesting that the major figures of the new atheism tended to be those in the life sciences and most of them in the most attenuated and speculative branches of what is called science, including those which often by professional habit, put aside any notions of strict adherence to both the methods of science and the subject matter which can honestly be subjected to scientific methods.  The vulgarity, the puerility of argument that came from Richard Dawkins in that landmark of the new-atheist fad, The God Delusion was so bad that even many of his fellow atheists publicly expressed their embarrassment over it.  And there were worse. 

* I first took it up because as a piano player I had to sit for so many hours a day I couldn't stand sitting anymore.  I couldn't stand sitting meditation.  I learned it from a student of the Buddhist monk Titch Nhat Hanh, before "mindfullness" became a watch word.  What I think of as Buddhist meditation technology is a huge contribution to human culture but when it is done in an absence of moral content, like conventional technology, I worry about its ability to just make people more efficient at being self-centered and more concentrated in doing bad things they want to do.  I've been impressed, and not in a good way, at how some of the worst of the tech millionaires and billionaires took up "mindfulness".   That's something that Buddhist texts warn about, so it's not jut me who had that problem with it.  I'm sure the Buddhists who told me that justice is an illusion were diligent in their "mindfulness" practice, it just didn't contain what was needed to let them see that justice is no illusion.  

** War is, of course, another ultimate form of not doing unto others what you would have them do unto you.  So is wage slavery - against which so much of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets speaks.