Religion: The Big Picture

Last night I watched a debate between the Cosmic Skeptic Alex O'Connor and an assortment of Christians. I don't know what the format is called, but he was in the hot seat in the center, surrounded by a tag team of 25 Christians (and one Mormon) who took him on one at a time.

Any fair minded person would say that O'Connor politely ran the table, although, of course, he wasn't contending with the Thomas Aquinas Society. Probably the only unanswerable objection came from a woman (starting at about 1:01) who said that Jesus appeared in her room and literally gave her a hug and lifted her up, which was accompanied by an otherworldly joy. 

That has never happened to me, but I would certainly like for it to happen. Indeed, one thing that bothers me -- or the rational mind in general -- about such apparent vertical interventions is their seemingly arbitrary nature. In fact, supposing such an experience were vouchsafed to me, one of the first things I'd wonder about is, why me? Why not someone more deserving, or more devout, or more desperate? 

Yes, God presumably has his reasons that reason cannot comprehend, but why then did he give us reason, and why does St. Paul advise believers to always be prepared to give a presumably rational defense of one's faith? 

O'Connor is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that he would very much like to believe, but that his intellect will not permit him to do so. The intellect can only assent to the truth, or, put conversely, cannot and should not believe what is repugnant to it. 

O'Connor also has more detailed knowledge of scripture than most Christians, including me. He is courteously relentless in highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts. 

For my part, I assume there's an expert somewhere who is capable of reconciling them, but I'm more of a big picture guy. I take revelation to be true in the general sense, but don't have much interest in the fine points. He has an analytic mind, whereas mine is more synthetic. 

For example, if there's a troubling passage in the Old Testament that, taken literally, makes God sanction, say, genocide, I know there are traditional exegetes capable of contextualizing them -- for example, a while back I read a book on these called Dark Passages of the Bible that does just this.

I am much more troubled by the question of how to square a loving and omnipotent God with the existence of so much evil and suffering. Sure, growth and maturity require a degree of suffering, but much suffering is purely meaningless. 

Likewise, I can see how evil must exist in a creation that is separate from God, but the Holocaust? Even if God can draw some good from it, that's like the doctor tossing you off a building so he can manifest the good of offering medical treatment. 

Nevertheless, God exists, and the purpose of religion is to know him and conform our intellect and will to his -- which is to say, to the ultimate Real. In the Big Picture, 

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God (Schuon).

So, knowing reality and attaining union with it:

Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union. Man is intelligence and will, and religion is discernment and concentration (ibid.).

 Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

Religion is discernment between the Everlasting and the ephemeral, and union with the Everlasting. In other words, religion is basically discernment and concentration; separation from evil, which is illusion, and union with the Divine Good, which is Truth and eternal Reality.

Again, this is only the Big Picture, with no details as to who God is or how to go about union with him. In order to know these things, they would have to be revealed from Godside. 

Although there's a twist: supposing we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator, then there must already be something in us that mirrors him. Thus, for Schuon, 

Revelation is none other than the objective and symbolic manifestation of the Light which man carries in himself, in the depths of his being; it reminds him of what he is, and of what he should be since he has forgotten what he is.

This being the case, there must be some congruity between the revelation given to us from the outside, and the interior revelation "in the depths of our being." Problem is, this latter revelation has been distorted, weakened, and forgotten due to some sort of primordial calamity, which we don't know much about but can infer from its effects. Schuon compares our post-lapsarian state to   

something like that of fishes unknowingly enclosed in a block of ice. Revelation is then the ray of Omniscience which teaches us that this ice is not everything, that there is something else around it and after it, that we are not the ice and that the ice is not us.

Elsewhere he characterizes revelation as "a kind of cosmic Intellection, whereas personal Intellection is comparable to a Revelation on the scale of the microcosm." Or, "pure Intellection is a subjective and immanent Revelation just as Revelation properly so called is an objective and transcendent Intellection." 

Here again, this must be anchored in the principle of Image and Likeness mentioned above. Man -- in particular, the intellect -- is already a revelation of God, but the Fall accounts for the rupture between the reflection and its source. 

In this context, the purpose of revelation is to heal this rupture, or to clean the mirror of intellect. Looked at this way, the Bible "expresses complex truths in a language that is indirect and full of imagery," disclosing "a sphere of reality that transcends" the empirical, rational, and psychological planes:

It is the intellect that comprises in its very substance the evidence for the sphere of reality that we are speaking of and that thus contains the proof of it....

Indeed the “classical” prejudice of scientism, or the fault in its method if one wishes, is to deny any mode of knowledge that is suprasensorial and suprarational, and in consequence to deny the planes of reality to which these modes refer and that precisely constitute the sources both of revelation and of intellection.

But again, 

What the Bible describes as the fall of man or the loss of paradise coincides with our separation from total intelligence; this is why it is said that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and again: “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” 

The Bible itself is the multiple and mysterious objectivation of this intellect or Logos. It is thus by way of images and enigmas the projection of what we carry in a quasi-inaccessible depth at the bottom of our heart; and the facts of sacred history... are themselves cosmic projections of the unfathomable divine truth.

So, that's what I would say to O'Connor in response to his niggling over this or that little contradiction of inconsistency. Pull back and look at the bigger picture. 

To be continued...