Discussion Outline - Week 2 Intro to Religion

|inline

I must have missed page 113 in Postcolonialism, A Very Short Introduction. It outlines the grander scheme (directly quoted with bouts of paraphrasing):

1. P/C stands for the right to basic amenities - security, sanitation, health care, food, and education - for all peoples of the earth, young, adult, and ages; women and men.
2. Resists all forms of exploitation (to humans and to the environment)
3. Politically speaking, P/C seeks to assert the right of autonomous self-government of those who still find themselves in a situation of being controlled politically and administratively by a foreign power.
4. Once this independence is achieved, the nationalism that founded the state is transformed and is not used against the minorities and seeks to establish minority rights, women’s rights, and cultural rights, within a broad framework democratic egalitarianism that refuses to impose alienating western ways of thinking on tricontinental societies.
5. While encouraging personal authenticity of sincerity and altruism, it questions attempts to return to a national or cultural ‘authenticity’ which P/C regards as largely constructed for dubious political purposes.
6. It considers the most productive forms of http://unsoundargument.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=115thought that that interact feely across disciplines and cultures in constructive dialouges that undo the hierarchies of power.

Some thoughts on these points:

I don’t know anyone that would deny 1) in the West to others at present. The question of how to get that to people is the question for westerners. I think that most in the West don’t want 2). The historical question is another matter. That is one of the horrible legacies of the West. It is what got us into this mess. However, there are bad eggs dispersed through the world. The love of money does lead to evil. You find that in all economic systems. It has not been the solely the bane in the West. The first two I understand and I think that there is a lot of work to be done so that there is no more exploitation and rights are enforced.

Now it gets interesting, for me at least. Take number three and especially number four. How can one “refuse to impose alienating western ways of thinking” is they are going to make sure that the state is set up with a system of rights for everyone within a democratic egalitarianism framework? Is not a system of rights for everyone within a democratic egalitarianism framework the very hallmark of the West?

All in all, while I recognize the problem, what Young outlines on page 113 seems to be a cut and paste of Western values that Young likes (or that the P/C likes). I am not sure how that is much different from other models of Western intervention… when presented from the “other.” On the other hand, Young says that all he presents is directly from the “other”, the oppressed, and the people that are in the vacuum of postcolonization. I am with him on the problem. I am still unsure where to do from there. But, alas, I am only a few days removed from first contact. I’ll have my thoughts from class up later.

In my Postcolonial Comparative Religion class we had to write a maximum two page response of our impressions of the book along with questions that arose durring the reading. I could seriously write ten fold about what I read in Postcolonialism, A very Short Introduction by R.J.C. Young. So that is shy this is so short and underdeveloped.

This week’s reading was my first taste of the postcolonial. As a westerner, on top of that, as a white male westerner, the issues brought up have not affected me. Since they don’t affect me, I have not thought on them. In reading the work a swirl of issues flooded around me. Many of them centered on basic assumptions about things, the others flowed from the outworking of those assumptions. Like the book suggests, they are hard to put in an eloquently structured form. Here are some of them. |inline

In my last post, I referenced an argument put forth that aimed to show not only that God was mutable, but also that He must exist inside the temporal realm. I do not hold to that conclusion. While I think that God does change, much like a man changes his position while walking, God does lie outside of time.

This does not seem possible at first glance. If something changes, then those changes must be in sequence. If they are in sequence, then they are done in time. If the sequences are done in time, that which undergoes the sequences must also be in time.

I would say that while from the perception of an individual inside of time, God does seem to change within the temporal sequence. However, God only invades time as to interact with that which is in it, yet is still separate from the creation and as a result, is separate from time.

… you think to yourself, “Alright, I only have one whole book and sixty pages of another book to finish and I will have all my reading done for the week.”

I think that is hillarious. As a new grad student in religious studies, I am feeling that way all over.

Yesterday I posted about wondering about Augustine’s ideas on God. This morning I read a post at Prosblogion about the impossibility of God being changeless and creating the world out of free will. Alan Rhoda frames the argument as follows: Can a Timeless God Freely Create?

1. God is absolutely immutable.
2. God has freely created.
3. A free act proceeds from a free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities.
4. Therefore, God made a free decision to create from among several mutually exclusive possibilities. (2,3)
5. A free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities involves a change of ‘intentional stance’ from regarding something as indeterminate (as one of several possibilities) to regarding it as determinate (as the chosen course of action).
6. Therefore, in freely created God undergoes a change in his intentional stance. (4,5)
7. Therefore, God has changed in some respect. (6)
8. Therefore, God is not absolutely immutable. (7)

The lynch-pin of the argument and one of critisms of a perfect and unchangeable God is number six. In excersizing free will, one is changed, whether or not that one is a person or God. Further more, I like what Rhoda hints at towards the end of the post, where he implies that does not employ mere logic in His excersie in free will. This point was first brought to my attention by Carmen Price, a philosophy doctoral student at Washinton University in her capstone paper at Columbia College: “The Necessity of Considering Motivations…”.

What are religions and philosophys that hold both one and two to do? Logically, I think that Rhodes has excluded the posibility of holding to both, so it seems to follow that one of them must be dumped or modified as to allow for the other. Which one takes priority over the other? I think that two takes the priority. Without it, one’s God is reduced to a being without free will, something along the lines of Aristotle’s Prime mover. Since the big three monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Islam, and Judeaism, all hold to a God that is active to varring degrees within It’s creation, this conclusion (Aristolte’s God) must be rejected. Instead it is better to either accept that God undergoes some sort of change in His interaction within time.

Cross posted at Theology for the Masses and Hundiejo.com

As part of my class on Augustine, I have to do a one-page relfection on the reading for that week. This week’s reading is books 1-5 of the Confessions. This was my reflection for this week.

An interesting topic that I would like to know more about Augustine’s worldview is his view of God. I do not want to inquire about the religious aspects of God. Augustine makes very clear in passages such as 1:11 that describe God’s holiness, goodness, mercy, and wisdom. Instead what I would pick Augustine’s brain about is the metaphysical aspects of God, such as his views on the problems of omnipresence, pantheism, free will, necessary simplicity and God’s relation to time.

Augustine at once maintains that God is separate from His creation and is present everywhere in it. Being everywhere would seem to imply that God pervades through everything. This idea of God pervading through everything sounds a lot like pantheism, which is impossible since Augustine says that God is separate from His creation. I am not sure how he would reconcile those two ideas.

From what I can tell, Augustine seems to have God being completely outside time, holding to “B Time”. This is into contrast to “A Time” where God is contained within the same time that His creation is in. One first encounters God relationship to time in 1:9, “You are before the beginning of the ages, and prior to everything that can be said to be `before’.” The phrase, “before the beginning of the ages”, puts God at least in sequential order to creation, but still allows for God to be within the realm of time. The last part of the sentence implies that God has existed before there was a time to speak of. If this is so, how is it possible for God to intervene within the realm of time?

Furthermore, Augustine seems to be very concerned with freewill as a necessary component of salvation and in the human condition. At the same time, God is very active within history and within each individual’s life. This is evidenced by the constant God’s prodding and positioning of things in his life that ultimately lead to Augustine’s conversion at Milan. If God is actively manipulating events, how can one say that they have chosen something of their own metaphysical free will?

Lastly, I wonder how Augustine would reply to the idea that in order to be perfect, God must be simple. In order to be simple He must be unchangeable. But if God does hear prayers and decides to act on them, then He must have changed His mind and as such is not simple and therefore not perfect.

Cross posted at the Theology for the Masses and Hundiejo.com

N.T. Wright gives three interesting lines of argument for thinking that perhaps, just perhaps we have cause to think that Jesus was indeed conceived while Mary was still a virgin. Wright does note that from a strictly historical standpoint, the issue cannot be resolved either way. However, there are some reasons to thing that it was possible. The following is a synopsis of what Wright espouses along these lines in chapter 11 of Two Visions of Jesus.

1. God is not wholly outside our universe, acting only on occasion to intervene in history. Instead, the Jewish God is very close and involved with our lives. Given this, it would be quite allowable for God to act in this way to usher in the climax of history, taking up His title of creator to bring “a new creation from the womb of the old“.
2. Isaiah 7:14 was never used in any Jewish tradition to support the idea of the messiah having a virgin birth. Matthew was the first. It would not make sense to incorporate a pagan idea (hero having a virgin birth, e.i. Alexander and Augustus) into a very Jewish story, unless it happened. Once it had occurred, then were the stories of Isaiah 7:14 looked at again with a new perspective.
3. If the early Christian community thought this happened, why did two very different stories take shape? If it were really a metaphor for something about Jesus, then it should have had a unified beginning, not the two separate cores that we see in Matthew and Luke. Once again, the stories of Matthew and Luke are very Jewish, and the virgin birth does not even matter that much to the story of Jesus. God could have easily used the child of Joseph and Mary as the messiah. In the stories of Matthew and Luke we have following progression of themes: “Jewish -> Pagan -> Jewish” the rest of the way. It does not make sense for the climax of the Jewish story to have a pagan introduction, unless it happened.

I am getting ready to start my first year of grad school at MU. In light of this, I wanted to give a sketch of my worldview, if not for the sole purpose of looking back and seeing how my ideas have changed over the years.

I believe in a dualism, with a basic structure materialism infused with something like Schopenhauer’s idea of will. Most of the universe is deterministic, but there are pockets of free will, i.e. the wills, the souls, the minds that are to a degree separate from the materialism and the determinism that follows. I am a Christian, so I think that there is a supreme will that is God.

I believe almost whole-heartedly the consensus of science. I try not to, but often sketch in a god-of-the-gaps into my religious/scientific worldview. For instance, I think that while there was a big bang, that God set the spark, or that while evolution has and is occurring, it is directed by God. While I think that there is a God and as the creator He has a connection to science, I am hesitant to say that he often divinely saves science from our lack of understanding. After all, we as a race are constantly improving our scientific worldview.

In the realm of metaphysics and religion, I am a Kantian(ish). I think that the world/universe/everything is divided into the noumenal and phenomenal. Because we are bound to our senses, we cannot enter into the noumenal realm to see what it is like. Only that which is already in the noumenal can venture into our phenomenal world and let us know what is going on behind the scenes. I think that part of us lies within the noumenal world, but that we cannot accurately sense that part of us. We can see the effects of the noumenal in the phenomenal world after the fact. I do have a sneaking suspicion that maybe some of the mystics are not crazy, but have had touches with that that is behind the curtain of our senses. However, I do recognize that unless there are supernatural occurances outside the visions or perhaps prophetic statements that come true, there is no way to verify those experiences.

I think the best way to describe reality is the Aviditie analogy. To put it shortly, God is a master computer programmer and the world is a gigantic software simulation.

Back to what I said above, I am whole-heartedly and unabashedly Christian, so I buy into that worldview, for the most part. With that said, I think that Christians could do well to look and listen to what the other religions have to say about things and incorporate that which makes sense into their own worldview. Examples of this is the Eastern (Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist) view of interconnectedness, or Pratitya-samutpada (that is hard word to say, but I think I got it), and the idea of non-attachment. Now, this does not mean that one need to buy into the rest of the other religions, but just to not consider the source when evaluating ideas. We would not want to be guilty of the genetic fallacy would we? Of course not.

Ethically, I favor a literal ethical relativity where deontology determines what is right and wrong and consequentalism determines what is the most right behavior. It recognizes that there are sometimes no clean choices and that we have to decide between the choices in front of us.

The above is a sketch of the way I view the world. I don’t have a good, well explained and reasoned systematic approach to this, just a jumble of ideas that seem to work well in describing certain areas. We shall see how my ideas and views develop in the coming years.