Subj : Rush to Judgement?
To   : FRANK MASINGILL
From : RALPH ZETTER
Date : Thu Nov 02 2000 11:01 pm

>  RZ> Exactly what ARE you describing when you say "God"? And what
>  RZ> are you referring to when you said "dissociation of the
>  RZ> cosmos"?
> 
>         I'm referring to the God experienced by Plato as the "player
> of the puppets" or the God whose voice Moses hears in the thornbush
> episode or the one who appears to Paul in a vision and says, in
> effect, "Paul, it is difficult for you to continue to deny what you
> cannot deny to yourself in truth" or the God to whom Meister
> Eckhardt addressed his prayers or the God to whom the unknown author

If you aren't referring to the philosophical God, then isn't Plato a
philosopher? Wouldn't his God 
be a philosophical God? What is the difference?

If you said that you don't believe in the Biblical God, then why did you
talk about the God of 
Paul and Moses?

> of the 14th century "The Cloud of Unknowing" suggested as the one to
> be contemplated or the God who creates the world in the Genesis myth
> and on and on.  These by no means exhausts the experiences of God
> through history and around the world but in Western Civilization
> they are the most common sources of experiences of the Divine as One
> which point to a universal humanity and an eschatological index. 

Eschatological, meaning a future fulfillment of history, right?

> 
>         When such experiences are visited upon the recipients they
> become representative of mankind.  No longer is the cosmos "full of
> gods" as under the cosmological myths but the one God beyond the
> world has now been experienced and for man, the world is dedivinized
> (the elemental spirits of the air have lost authority) and set free
> for science.

How can the God of all these different people be the same one? I myself
don't have a formal 
religion myself, but not all the claims of these different people are the
same. I'm not an expert 
on the Bible, but I do know that it claims Jesus as the Savior, and other
religions don't. So 
somebody has gotta be wrong, I just don't know who or how or why.

> 
>         When such a revelation occurs and the recipient(s) attempt
> to mediate it for the surrounding societies in which they occur the
> result is quite often (as described by Bergson) an attempt to
> protect it by setting it down in writings and such writings can,
> mistakenly, become THE WORD, rather than an attempt to "contain" the
> Word.  Rudolph Otto's _The Idea of the Holy_ is instructive here.
> History is comprised of such experiences and their symbolization in
> either formative or deformative shape.  Heraclitus already knowns
> love faith and hope but in the Platonic and later the Christian
> revelation these are clarified and differentiated.  

Hmmmmm.......I gotta ponder this. I can assure you that this reply took
longer to type than it 
seems. It seems like you're saying that whether all the specifics of a
religion are true really isn't 
relevant, and that it's OK to say that. And it seems like you're saying
that God gave some kind 
of revelation to those different prophets in history, and the different
religious books were not 
necessarily literally accurate, but that the person who wrote it used
whatever stories that their 
culture would understand. For example, for those people who had awaited a
messiah person, 
Paul expressed his vision in terms of a messiah figure because it answered
the needs of the 
people and explained certain divine truths that they needed to hear. And
that God chose the 
symbol of the messiah to use in order to convey his wisdom.

I'm trying not to interpret your words for you, but that was my
understanding of what you said. Is 
that close? I've also heard other people explain it the same way, so I'm
familiar with that. I 
guess it certainly _would_ solve all the problems of different people
arguing over who has the 
right set of details, wouldn't it?

And I like what you said about the word and containing it. I'm more
familiar with the Bible than 
anything else, so I'll use that as an example (not that I'm an expert in
THAT). But would it be 
safe to say that the words in the Bible are not really the written words of
God (being the Word) 
but are people's attempts to describe God's word (containing the Word)? So
I guess it's not 
important to believe that it was God's literal words in those places in the
Bible that claim to be 
so, but merely a man's description of what lesson the revelation was trying
to convey. Is that 
about right?

> 
> 
>  RZ> > There are plenty of ready-made belief systems if that is
>  RZ> > what one is looking for.  Somebody MAY be at your front door
>  RZ> > next week trying to plop their's upon you.  All you have to
>  RZ> > do is think that it's well dressed out and logical or
>  RZ> > terribly attractive with all kinds of knowledge of that
>  RZ> > which "only gods could know."
> 
>  RZ> Sometimes. Or perhaps one of these groups might actually speak
>  RZ> the truth. I don't know. :-)
> 
>         Ah!  More likely I'll be at HIS door if that should be the
> case.  THE truth is certainly not accepted by everybody.  Not
> everybody has "ears to hear" and the people sincerely looking for
> spiritual messages do not grow on trees.  

True. And by that same token if they possessed the truth,  you might be at
their door, and you 
might not, right?

> 
>  RZ> Is the Divine Ground = God?
> 
>         No "voice" in my soul has ever rendered such a flat
> equation.  If that ever happens I'll surely attempt to communicate
> it but I'm already 80 and so the time is short.  I think I reached

Hehee. I'm no spring chicken anymore, but I ain't quite THERE yet. May you
have 80 more, if it 
suits you. :-)

> the point long ago of realization that I did not make myself nor did
> I make the things around me.   I find that people generally prefer
> to equate GOD to the OPINIONS individuals may have ABOUT GOD or to
> some literalization of scripture by atheists or believers in order
> to scandalize the God they hate (for some ungodly reason).  As we
> find it in modernity, they can even be jealous of the "perfection"
> that is often associated with the term and they want that to be the
> domain of humanity when, of course, it cannot be - unless we
> discover what perfection is.

I know. It's like whenever we see someone who is righteous, it reminds us
of all the times that 
we are not, and we get jealous so we have to start smearing that person in
order to make 
ourselves feel better. Some people even react that way to God.

And people like Joe are doing just that. I mean if you don't believe in
God, fine. But some people 
really go after you if you believe in God and they don't. It only shows
immaturity on their part.

> 
>  RZ> > Philosophy is being done WHEREVER man is questioning and
>  RZ> > wondering in true Aristotelian fashion.  When one has
>  RZ> > stumbled on a satisfactory ANSWER or a GOOD MIX philosophy
>  RZ> > has twinkled out of the door.
> 
>  RZ> I'm not sure I get that. If philosophers are searching for
>  RZ> wisdom and truth in life, then why would you distrust someone
>  RZ> when they discover an answer?
> 
>         Perhaps because they have found, in studying the questions
> thoroughly, that "answers" tend to be either wrong or penultimate.
> Even when they are hearing the "answers" they often resent what it
> contains.  When Socrates attempts to make DIE, so that he might
> LIVE, the soul of Callicles, Callicles does not believe AT ALL that
> a man ought to judge HIMSELF or not gather EVERYTHING he can in life
> even at the expense of humanity, hence, he follows neither the
> "saving tale" of Socrates or the "persusaion" through the myth of
> the judgement.  (Plato's _Gorgias_)


Hmmmm......If answers tend to be wrong, then philosophy is futile. Why
search for meaning 
in life if any answer you come to is wrong or "penultimate" ( i had to look
that one up, it means 
final). If the search for wisdom never reveals meaningful answers, then
it's futile, which means 
the very search for answers and meaning is futile. And if meaning in life
is futile, then life itself is 
futile. And if life is futile, then you see my point hopefully. :)

And why is it a bad thing for an answer to be "final"? As long as that
answer is right, why is it a 
bad thing if it is final?

> 
>  RZ> And when I was talking about a good mix, i  was just talking
>  RZ> about the different ideas here and how freely they go back and
>  RZ> forth between religion, then to science, then to philosophy,
>  RZ> then back again. Is that bad?
> 
>         I'm afraid that what I hear most often is a cacophany of
> shouted mixtures of myth and science which is not truly enlightening
> about either, but instead is actually ruinous to both.  I hear,

OK, I see what you mean. We were just speaking in different meanings of the
word. I was just 
talking about how it is that there doesn't always need to be such a high
wall of separation 
between the three, that they all contain truths that can be in harmony with
each other. Thats 
what I meant by a good mix. But I agree with what you just said.

> also, a lot of egophanti
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