The Gnostic Gospels were found buried in a jar in 1945 by a farmer digging around in the dirt. Similarly, a reader was cleaning out some old papers when he stumbled upon an ancient scroll from 2009 called I Am Darwinian Man, Destroyer of Worlds! The maladroit title alone made me doubt its authenticity, but it turns out I am responsible. I prepared myself to wince, and scanned the content.
By the way, I only bring this up because it touches on our theme of the religion of the anti- and irreligious, for I maintain that it is literally impossible for a human being to not be religious, except in rare cases of a birth defect such as autism (in other words autism is to reading the dark side of the face what atheism is to reading interiority as such).
Now, what do I mean when I say that human beings cannot not be religious? Well, first of all, there are the mundane historical, prehistorical, anthropological, and empirical facts of the matter. Man and the concept of God co-arise, and last I checked, no atheistic culture had ever been discovered.
Yeah, well, so what: they’re primitive, and we’re not!
Guess again, proglodyte. We’ll deal with you later. But every psychologist knows -- or did know, before the discipline was taken over by woke proglodytes -- that, subjectively speaking, we all sit on a volcano of primitive ideas and impulses that can go off at any time.
Having said that, I would no longer say it that way, because it implies a division in what is by definition indivisible (or simple), AKA the soul. Still, it can feel this way, for example, when we are being goaded by impulses or lured by temptations that mean us no good.
I used to conceptualize the ego and unconscious as a boat atop the ocean. Now I would say it’s more like a cloud in the sky, insofar as a cloud is just the visible aspect of a total meteorological process.
Ultimately, I would say this complementary relation extends all the way up and into God, except it's a tri-complementarity, hence the old saying, "three's a cloud."
All deusrespect intended, but I maintain that there is an aspect of God that is “unknown to himself,” but only in a qualified way and a manner of speaking and by way of distant analogy. Nor do I expect anyone else to agree with me. Rather, this question is left to the prudence or lack thereof of the individual Raccoon.
Nevertheless, if you want to know what could be “unknown” to or "in" God, it is this: Creativity, with a capital C. Better yet, all caps: CREATIVITY. No, go boldly: CREATIVITY. It comes down to what we mean by this word, and whether the thing (or activity) to which it refers is really Real.
Or rather, just how real is creativity? Note that it can never be reduced to logical entailment, for it is a true leap of and into novelty.
Now, they say “God makes all things new.” In fact, this is said in the penultimate chapter of the ultimate book of the New Testament, and is followed by an intriguing image of a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the lamb.
I have no idea how orthodox this might be, but I like to think of God as a kind of eternal spring, or nonlocal metacosmic center from which everything ultimately flows in an endlessly creative manner.
And water itself is a key and recurrent image throughout the Bible, notably appearing in the first and last chapters. In between there are rivers, a big flood, fountains, exodus, baptism, and more. I am poured out like water, a well of living water springing up into everlasting life, etc., etc.
Lately I’ve had an idea for another book I’ll never write, called Fringe Catholicism (or Christianity, if you prefer). Of course, I am referring to this side of the fringe, not the other side, which would land one in the hot water of heresy. But the question is, just how far out can one get before one is outside the church?
Pretty, pretty far, it turns out. You might say that doctrine provides us with the chords which provide the musical structure and foundation, but that we are free to improvise within these limits. One of the surprising discoveries of my life is just how creatively weird orthodoxy can be, and I’m so sure Chesterton would agree with me that I won’t even bother quoting him.
Example. I cite this one because it goes to the seemingly repugnant idea that God “changes.” It’s from a book by Norris Clarke called The Philosophical Approach to God:
Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous “improvisation” of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now…. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but contemporaneous with the actual and ongoing development of the world.
Yes, I am well aware of the traditional counter-arguments, and there is more to my story, but I’m sticking to it. Meanwhile, I gotta run...
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