Thursday, September 23, 2004
A bit more
Yesterday I wrote about the confrontational choice I felt. The panel on "The Question of God" also discussed this confrontational choice, and the show explained how Freud and Lewis handled that choice. One of the materialists on the panel seemed dismissive of belief because it requires a "leap of emotions." It was pointed out that it is wrong to set up intellect and emotion as opposites. I agree.
If create an opposition between intellect and emotion, then we could fall into a parallel opposition of materialism and spiritualism. Naturally we would draw intellectualism and materialism together against emotion and spiritualism. This denies the spiritual to have intellectual properties. The generative topic of Cutting Edge Theology is religion found through the head more than the heart. Naturally I deny any suggestion that there is no intellectual background to religious belief.
The point was pushed further by a demand that the existence of God (or some other 'Other') be proven. This is another false argument. God cannot be proven or disproven by science and logic and this is not a weakness of belief. Belief, as Winifred Gallagher explained, is not an 'on/off' thing. It's a scale. Some days belief and faith are stronger than others. Again, I don't see this as a weakness.
Freud called religion an illusion. Freud worked to interpret dreams, which one interviewee described as a very Jewish idea, as Judaism is an interpreted religion. I think there is some bias in the program because it drew a picture of Freud saying that he would save the masses from religion and replace God the Creator with God the Reason. It almost sounded like Freud had a God complex himself.
Freud's confrontational choice came at the death of his father, and he turned away from the religion of his father and looked into his own dreams. He came up with some fanciful ideas.
Lewis faced his choice through poetry and found that the poems he loved the most were religious or written by religious poets. He felt that he was supposed to enjoy the athiests and their works but they just didn't speak to him. Lewis became a theist before he became a Christian. The realization the God was God and Lewis was not God affected him deeply. He had to recover from this shock before he could move on.
¶ 11:20 AM
If create an opposition between intellect and emotion, then we could fall into a parallel opposition of materialism and spiritualism. Naturally we would draw intellectualism and materialism together against emotion and spiritualism. This denies the spiritual to have intellectual properties. The generative topic of Cutting Edge Theology is religion found through the head more than the heart. Naturally I deny any suggestion that there is no intellectual background to religious belief.
The point was pushed further by a demand that the existence of God (or some other 'Other') be proven. This is another false argument. God cannot be proven or disproven by science and logic and this is not a weakness of belief. Belief, as Winifred Gallagher explained, is not an 'on/off' thing. It's a scale. Some days belief and faith are stronger than others. Again, I don't see this as a weakness.
Freud called religion an illusion. Freud worked to interpret dreams, which one interviewee described as a very Jewish idea, as Judaism is an interpreted religion. I think there is some bias in the program because it drew a picture of Freud saying that he would save the masses from religion and replace God the Creator with God the Reason. It almost sounded like Freud had a God complex himself.
Freud's confrontational choice came at the death of his father, and he turned away from the religion of his father and looked into his own dreams. He came up with some fanciful ideas.
Lewis faced his choice through poetry and found that the poems he loved the most were religious or written by religious poets. He felt that he was supposed to enjoy the athiests and their works but they just didn't speak to him. Lewis became a theist before he became a Christian. The realization the God was God and Lewis was not God affected him deeply. He had to recover from this shock before he could move on.
¶ 11:20 AM
