Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all!

We attended a Christmas Eve candlelight ceremony at Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Texas and it was very nice. They have a building designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and it looks like he learned his lessons well. It is a beautiful sanctuary and building and the service was lovely. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday surrounded (as we are) by family and friends.

The Rehabilitation of Galileo

Or the rehabilitation of the Catholic Church's treatment thereof? The holidays are still occupying our time (in a wonderful, not an annoying way). Hope everyone is having a fine holiday season! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the rest! No time to write about anything in detail but I couldn't pass up this article from the Houston Chronicle today about the Catholic Church "rehabilitating" Galileo. Of course Galileo is not in need of rehabilitation from anyone concerning his contribution to human knowledge, but it is nice to see that the Vatican's chief astronomer (I didn't even know they had astronomers, let alone a "chief" one) can say "[T]he Church in some ways has recognized its errors. Maybe it could do better. One can always do better."

A Sobering Poll

'Tis the season and that means visiting family and no time to blog or read or... Well much of anything other than spending time entertaining and traveling around and working when you have to. In the meantime, the ever-interesting NT Wrong posted a sobering poll result showing that more Americans believe God impregnated a virgin than believe that evolution happened. Sigh. Some of the other results are interesting too. About one third of Americans describe themselves as "not very religious" or "not religious at all." That is larger than I would have thought.

Anthropomorphilizing God

James McGrath recently blogged on "Science, Idolatry, and Anthropomorphism." He quoted Chet Raymo's When God is Gone, Everything is Holy as saying that the "modern idea of a transcendent personal deity who acts wilfully in the world is only the final manifestation of ancient animism" and he ask "What do you think?"

James indicates some agreement with what Raymo is saying but also that "it is hard for me to imagine setting aside entirely the language of "personhood" in reference to God, not because I think of God as a person micromanaging events in the universe, but because I think that God is greater than that rather then something less." He goes on to quote Hans Kung's language that God is "more than personal" though he admits "we don't have any idea what that means, but it seems to be pointing in the right direction." Tillich says something much like what James is talking about here too.

I think that these are issues that are probably familiar to folk who are interested in the Unitarian-Universalist church. Most people in that tradition have rejected the idea of the personal God that micromanages the universe, but I think one of the limitations many of us find ourselves bumping into as UUs is that it is rather difficult to find what to replace it with. Don't get me wrong, nature is really cool, and I sympathize with Einstein's mysterious "Cosmic God" and the notion of making the grandeur and wonder of nature a center of religious contemplation, but I can only sing so many hymns about trees....

I am beginning to suspect that talking about God in anthropomorphic terms might just be more useful than I used to think. The key to me is that religion really is about people, about the core of our being, about us becoming better people and being transformed in some way to find, for lack of a better term, some sort of "inner peace." And nothing is more central to the way human beings think than stories. Whether it be gossip, folk tales, hard news, fiction, our lives are full of telling stories to each other and I think that is for a reason. It is one thing to say "one should work hard and not expect someone else to do our work for us" but it is much more intuitive for most of us to simply think back on the little red hen. When I listen to folk songs and political songs, I always think the most powerful ones are the ones that offer specifics - stories, characters, or at least specific feelings rather than just general statements. There is just something powerful about a story. A God that is just wonder and mystery and nothing else just doesn't keep my interest for very long - it might be "real" in the sense I can believe it with ease, but it doesn't really do anything for me. Religious mythology can be very moving, however, no matter how much I know it isn't "true" in a literal sense.

The problem is how do you (1) use the personal God language, (2) know that it is symbolic of a greater transcendent truth and not literal, and (3) still manage to take that language seriously despite its not being literal? (3), I think, is especially difficult for those of us raised in a tradition where Paul seems to say if the resurrection is not literal than Christian faith is meaningless. I don't know whether he says that really or not, but I know that is what the folks that taught at my church when I was a kid seemed to think he said! I don't know if there is a solution to this dilemma, but it is sure interesting looking for one!

RIP Odetta

Today comes the sad news that legendary folk singer Odetta died at the age of 77. April and I had the pleasure of seeing her live at a club in New York several years ago. She was clearly not well even then (she didn't play her guitar and sat on a stool throughout the performance) but it was still a thrill to see someone who inspired so many musicians (like Bob Dylan, who said she was the first thing that turned him onto folk music) and civil rights activists. Rest in Peace, Odetta.

Tillich and the Courage to Be - Part Five

Tillich’s next section is titled “Courage and Life: Nietzsche.” It is the last section of Chapter 1 “Being and Courage” of the book, The Courage to Be, and it contains some important statements that get illuminated throughout the rest of the book (and in some of Tillich’s other works). In the very beginning of the section he addresses a very obvious concern – namely, what the heck does “self-affirmation” mean when applied to something that has no self – “the inorganic realm or in the infinite substance, in being itself?” This, it seems to me, is a Big Deal in Tillich’s scheme because in other works he seems to make clear that he conceives of God as “being itself” and “infinite substance.” So what he is really talking about here (though he doesn’t come out and say it in this way in this section) is what does “self-affirmation” mean when applied to God? The way he answers it says much about Tillich’s conception of God and why it appeals to me so much. He asks what this means about the ontological concept of courage – essentially doesn’t this undermine it? He says that critics say that he is introducing subjective concepts (such as “world soul” and “will to power”) into the realm of objective reality. His reply is:

…[T]hese accusations are mistaken. They miss the meaning of ontological concepts. It is not the function of these concepts to describe the ontological nature of reality in terms of the subjective or objective side of our ordinary experience. It is the function of an ontological concept to use some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side. Ontology speaks analogously. … They must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them. (Courage p. 19)

As I read this, he is basically saying that God cannot be understood literally as some kind of objective truth – God is beyond the literal or subjective and must be understood analogously. But at the same time God can be taken seriously. And the theology is empirically based - experience-guided experiments. The literalness of the understanding of God is what gets in the way of religion for many of us science and reason loving moderns.

When Tillich addresses Nietzsche’s philosophy he says that Nietzsche makes an important advance on Spinoza. While for Spinoza self-affirmation implies affirmation as against or over “something” he does not specify over “what.” In fact Tillich implies that it seems impossible to account for a negative “something” over which one must affirm the self in Spinoza’s system. For Nietzsche, Tillich argues, the “something” is essentially the negation of life, or death. Nietzsche’s “will to power” says Tillich is “the self-affirmation of the will as ultimate reality.” (Courage p. 17) Courage, then is “the power of life to affirm itself in spite of [the ambiguity of life], while the negation of life because of its negativity is an expression of cowardice.” (Courage p. 17) And finally “[s]elf –affirmation is the affirmation of life and of the death which belongs to life.”

One of the neatest quotes Tillich takes from Nietzsche (to me) is “And this secret spake Life itself unto me. ‘Behold,’ said she, ‘I am that which must ever surpass itself.’ …. There doth Life sacrifice itself-for power!” (Courage p. 19, quoting The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. II, translated by Thomas Common. Italics in the original.) For Nietzsche, according to Tillich, self-affirmation implies self-negation as well, but not for the sake of negation but rather for “the greatest possible affirmation, for what he calls ‘power.’” The “will to power” is the path to “more life.” (Courage p. 19) Life must be willing to surpass itself.

The courageous, says Nietzsche, know fear but can defeat it. They can look into the abyss “with eagle’s eyes” and grasp the abyss. That person has courage. With that thought, Nietzsche’s existentialist side, Tillich concludes his review of the history of the ontological side of courage, and Chapter 1 of The Courage to Be.