Steve Holmes speaks well when he say here :

"The story is told that, when he taught on Schleiermacher, Barth made it a rule that no-one was allowed to criticise in any way for the first term; until you have learnt just how attractive Schleiermacher’s theology is, you are not yet able to explain why he is wrong. Surely this is true of any theology: unless you feel the attraction, know why another generation of students was captivated, fascinated, by this theology, you have not yet understood it. and until you have understood it, you have no right and no ability to critique it."

Too true not just of Theology but even most other things. The problem however is whether the attraction of something takes you over the edge. Let us say you are trying to find the attraction of fascist philosophy from your roughly liberal standpoint. First of all you would be hard pressed unless you can really seperate your judgemental self from what you are trying to get into. Secondly if you could really seperate yourself for the time and space needed to get into something what is there to stop you from truly advocating the postion say if your circumstances were to change. Do we really adopt a position absolutely. At least my experience is that I don't.

Coming back to truly understanding something (prejudged) 'not good' as a means to going through and beyond it is taking a great risk. A part of the risk of living I guess.

Steve in the post above is talking about leading his students into a deeper engagement with theology of the 18th and 19th century which many theologians today feel is too intellectual and leads to over certainity about things one cannot be certain about in that mode, before leading his students to the attractions of 20th century theologians like Barth. What if someone today felt there was something wrong in theology today and cannot put her finger on exactly what it is?

Miracles and the Realist

Reading an old post here Ben Myers says,

Anyway, let me give the last word to Dostoyevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator remarks:

“It is not miracles that make a realist turn to religion. A true realist will, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability not to believe in a miracle, and if faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. And if he does admit it, he will admit it as a natural fact hitherto unknown to him. In a realist, faith does not arise from a miracle, but the miracle from faith.”

Another reason for me to start reading Dostoyevsky.

The Metaphysics of Discipleship « Inhabitatio Dei

A short excerpt of a really thought provoking post from Halden at : The Metaphysics of Discipleship « Inhabitatio Dei:

"In Jesus’ view, the call to discipleship that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind. Jesus seems to think that discipleship is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt. 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30)."

Read the whole article. My thought is Jesus must have had some idea about the kind of people we and his contemporaries are. Always looking at things through dark glasses. Then why did he say what he said if he knew it was bound to be misinterpreted at least by a majority -- or was the early church an exception to this.

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A wonder quote from Dewy (h.t. to Aaron Ghiloni)

“Recreation, as the word indicates, is recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more urgent or less to be escaped. The idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely fallacious, and the Puritanic tradition which disallows the need has entailed an enormous crop of evils. If education does not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination. Education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effect upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand.”

Democracy and Education, Chapter 15

So remember to Re-create yourself and help those around you to get some for themselves. I keep thinking of street cleaners here in Kuwait who work for KD 20 or so a month and work from morning till night without resting. Many turn to what Dewey above aptly calls "illicit outlets" and the newspapers here scream about how society suffers.

Interiority is it G-d?

Ken wilber being interviewed by Salon here quoted on the scientific outlook and the presence of what he calls "interiority"?

But is that scientific view wrong?

At this point, you enter the philosophy of science, and the argument is endless. Is there nothing but physical stuff in the universe? Or is there some sort of interiority? We're not talking about ghosts and goblins and souls and all that kind of stuff. Just: Is there interiority? Is there an inside to the universe? And if there is interiority, then that is where consciousness resides. You can't see it, but it's real. This is the claim that phenomenology makes.

For example, you and I are attempting to reach mutual understanding right now. And we say, aha, I understand what you're saying. But you can't point to that understanding. Where does it exist? But if you take a phenomenology of our interior states, then you look at them as being real in themselves. And that's where values lie and meaning lies. If you try to reduce those to matter, you not only lose all those distinctions, but you can't even make the claim that some are right and some are wrong.

Wisdom - Philosophy and Life

Mark Vernon and a quote from J.B.S. Haldan ("Science and Theology as Art Forms," Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927))

"Religion is a way of life and an attitude to the universe. It brings men into closer touch with the inner nature of reality. Statements of fact made in its name are untrue in detail, but often contain some truth at their core.

Science is also a way of life and an attitude to the universe. It is concerned with everything but the nature of reality. Statements of fact made in its name are generally right in detail, but can only reveal the form, and not the real nature, of existence.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science, but he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art forms."

Art forms .... So is Christianity the Mona Lisa. What about Buddhism, Islam ...

Explaining things away

In his book “The Abolition of Man”, CS Lewis says
:

But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see."

Freedom and the nature of technology

Wedell Berry puts it so:

Our present idea of freedom in science is too often reducible to thoughtlessness of consequence…In both science and art there is a principled resistance to any suggestion that the specialist, within his or her work, might be subject or subordinate to anything. And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us. Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race."

No easy response to Catastrophe

David Bentley Hart, an eastern orthodox theologian has an article where he talks of the tsunami and its aftermath and suffering.

" The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature."

and

"When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against 'fate,' and that must do so until the end of days."

Suffering?

A few days ago, a friend of mine from school told me of his loss of faith because of what he had seen in the world. I did not have any kind of answer or consolation because whatever I thought sounded too intellectual, self-righteous and smug. In this post Dan of poserprophet reflects on the debate between Bart Ehrman and the Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham and gives what I think is a good description of how a Christian could talk about suffering. Read the whole article for a good summary and his reflection. A small quote below :

"Thus, in response to Ehrman's question, "Why do we suffer?", I wish Wright had responded, "I don't know. But I continue to believe in God, and here's why...". Of course, I don't believe that others will find the "here's why..." to be compelling, because I think that the only reason why we continue to believe in God, when confronted with the magnitude of suffering, is because we have met God. The reason why I find faith to be compelling is because God has chosen to come out to meet me, and I suspect that the only reason why a person like Ehrman would believe in God would be because God comes out to meet him as well. Now I can't help but wonder if Wright, in his efforts to engage in a substantial and reasonable dialogue, deliberately avoids this track, and where it leads, because it seems entirely too subjective and experiential."

Monasticism

Another fascinating word for me from Britannica:

"The word monasticism is derived from the Greek monachos (“living alone”), but this etymology highlights only one of the elements of monasticism and is somewhat misleading, because a large proportion of the world’s monastics live in cenobitic (common life) communities. The term monasticism implies celibacy, or living alone in the sense of lacking a spouse, which became a socially and historically crucial feature of the monastic life."

How I wish I had a chance as a kid to try this life out. Boarding schools are very poor imitations of this kind of life. The article from which the quote is taken gives a brief overview of monasticism in different religions.

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States

I just can't resist gloom and doom. Here is another quote from, Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States:

"Kerala has witnessed major changes in its land use pattern. The most important are the shrinking area devoted to cultivating food crops and an increase in the rate of deforestation. The land area used for rice cultivation declined from 876,000 hectares in 1975 to 431,000 hectares in 1996, with the result that local rice production barely meets one-third of the total consumption requirements of the state."

Most of the paddy land is filled in and now has houses, at least as far as I can see while travelling between Punnakadu and Mullaringadu.