Belinda wrote:Reflex wrote:
No matter how many times and no matter how many ways they are told that God is the ground of being and not a being alongside other beings, they still carry on as though the word “God” refers to a Big Daddy in the sky.
I wondered if you, like me, have a problem equating the ground of being god , with the ethics to which humans aspire .
I'm not sure I know what you mean, but I'll pretend that I do.
When skeptics hear said that God is one, infinite, immutable and eternal, they give no thought to the rational implications. When they hear said that God is personal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenovelent, they immediately conclude that God is like themselves, only bigger and more powerful and can therefore be held accountable for the imperfect world.
But being one, infinite, immutable and eternal, God is not -- and cannot be -- personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense that a human being can be said to be any of those things. The fact that the language religion is
analogical rather than
univocal never enters into the minds of skeptics who carry on as though the word “God” refers to a Big Daddy in the sky even as they argue they understand the language.
We don’t "see" the truth of the Pythagorean theorem in exactly the same sense in which we "see" a tree, but there is an analogy between the intellectual insight and vision that makes the use of the term appropriate in both cases. Similarly, God isn’t “good” in the sense in which a human being might be said to be good — e.g., striving to fulfill moral obligations — but is good in the sense of being the summum bonum (the supreme good from which all others proceed). It may be true that to say that humans can only positively know God in an analogical sense leaves us “in a state of genuine agnosticism about the nature of God” or the Ground of being. But this should in no way deter us from our first duty, and what should be our highest ambition: manifesting the perfection of divinity.
Someone wise said, "I hope you understand that a true god is not a big powerful supernatural Person but is a way of behaving." Finite beings cannot hope to be perfect in the infinite sense, but it is entirely possible for human beings, starting out as we do on this planet, to attain the supernal and divine goal which the Infinite has set before us; and when we do achieve this destiny, we will, in all that pertains to self-realization and mind attainment, be just as replete in our sphere as God himself is in his sphere of infinity and eternity. Such perfection may not be universal in the material sense, unlimited in intellectual grasp, or final in experience, but it is final and complete in all finite aspects of divinity of will, perfection of personality motivation, and God-consciousness.