Why God is not Top Gun

Here we have Halden on why God is not like us only much much bigger :

The only god we could ever “act directly on behalf of” is precisely that, “a god,” an inhabitant of the universe, a “top person” who legitimated our activities. The God of the Christian confession is not a top-person, a mere existent whom we could claim to represent directly. Rather God is the reason there is anything at all, the source of all being, and as such lies beyond our ability to directly mediate or claim. McCabe notes that most atheists think of the question of God as though religious people “claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, ..... that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheist too” (God Matters, 7). Only if God is some sort of existent, a “top person” who issues arbitrary decrees could we conceptualize God as the justification for acts of violence. And this is not the God of the Christian faith.

Yippy Yae! Halden and McCabe.

Strange belief

To believe in Jesus’ God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well.”

– Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990), 17.

Thanks to Halden

Do I truly believe in the God that the Archbishop talks about? He is talking about a God whose ways are not my ways and who remains for most part in a dark mist. What does it mean to believe is something so darkly wonderful? At the same time Jesus is a very strange and clearly only a very dimly understood answer.

Sudden Heat

I have to say it although it may sound like I am belittling those who are suffering due to the activities surrounding the economic chaos in the U.S.A.

I wish there would be an economic collapse of the financial system. I have loved ones in the U.S. who would suffer. So would I, because most of my current savings are U.S. dollar denominated. But, and this is a really bit but, I would choose to suffer now because the cancerous economic system in the U.S. is the progenitor of almost every other nations model. There are obviously big differences between India's policies and the U.S. but ultimately the only measure accepted by both systems is a quantifiable value - something that can be measured in cold Dollars or Rupees.

The food crisis of a few months back is said to have been caused by unfounded rumors but the real fact is that prices of all food commodities have risen far more than they have in the previous five years put together. I know I cannot talk in detailed economic terms but I do know that the major reason for price rises is that demand outstrips supply. I know there are a host of mitigating factors and what I said sounds too cut and dried.

I think a collapse of the financial networks and there obscene power to destroy anything that stands in their way would work wonders for all of us. There may be a magnitude of suffering rivaling the tsunami but it will not be the end of the world. Right now we are like the proverbial frog that is slowly being cooked in water that is being warmed on a slow fire of environmental rapine and social anomie. The financial collapse would be like a sudden full flame that would perhaps make us the foolish frog jump out of this mess in sudden reflex.

Subsidizing our way to stupidity

Another example of hypocrisy in the so called free market economy that we idolize so much both in the West and in the keeping up with the Jones's economies of the developing coutries. I don't know of any way of getting out of this hole that we keep digging ourselves into. Pouring money into the private sector which at other times always cries "wolf" when any hint of regulation threatens their ability to make money, seems to me the ultimate betrayal of government.

A quote stolen from here :

“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”

Wittgenstein

4 more are there worth reading.

Orthodoxy to be vulnerable

I really like what Ben Myers says here about the vulnerability of orthodoxy to failure and the connection to its ability to grow by renouncing its capacity to give a final authoritative vision.

The problem with my liking this is -- do I like it because it resonates with my general way of thinking or because that is what we learn from the gospel? The gospel did call outcasts to repent and be a part of the Kingdom. This was something that the orthodoxy at the time could not comprehend. It was a scandal.  Just one amongst many shocking things that Jesus advocated. A brief extract from his extract.

“This rejection of the idolatrous notion of a ‘successful’ church, this willingness to fail, is at the same time a profoundly apocalyptic gesture: the church’s identity is not immanent within its own practices and institutions; its identity is that which exceeds it, that which comes to it as gift, that which fills its own emptiness and abasement. "