Posted on 09/04/2014 2:09:32 PM PDT by walford
Jeepers, dear 'pipe, you speak of God in the plural here. That is difficult for me to conceive; for I'm "all in" — mind, heart, soul, and strength — with the Shema: "The Lord thy God is One God" [Who expresses Himself to human comprehension as three substantively indivisible Persons].
The Oneness of God entails that any other "gods" are pretenders, false gods. [Take Allah, for instance. And IMHO, even Buddha has his limitations. But we won't even "go there" in this writing.]
I do take your point about the "atheist position": The main point of denying or "forsaking God" is to create a vacuum into which human cupidity and will to power can rush, without any possible limitation or resistance.
It's at that point that we enter into an inverted, "looking glass" world, a "second reality" that has no conceivable foundation in truth whatsoever....
Even an atheist must know that God "exists." Otherwise, why would he contend against Him so relentlessly, so mightily — or from my point of view, so tiresomely and pointlessly?
Thank you for the cite to Romans 1:21. It captures the point under contention perfectly.
JMHO FWIW
Thank you so much for writing, dear brother! HUGS!!!
Romans 1:20 does indeed drive the point home beautifully! Thank you so much, dear hosepipe!
Well, dearest sister in Christ, a few days have passed, and my correspondent hasn’t gotten back to me yet. Maybe he doesn’t plan to.
FWIW, lacking further information, I got the impression that what he meant about “second reality” was somehow equivalent to the idea of what is called “a new lease on life.” [No details proffered.]
Yet from the classical and scholastic philosophical point of view, what a “second reality” actually gets you is: a new lease on death.
“Second reality” has been defined by philosophy, in so many words, as a “free” construction of the human imagination (a sort of “imagination” suffering from a pneumopathological disorder [nosos] described at least as early as the 5th century B.C.), which purports to be a complete description of the Cosmos — i.e., a “truthful” depiction of the world as it is and how it works, for the purpose of describing a future which is unknown and completely unknowable in principle.
But such constructions of second realities can only be “true” on the condition that certain critical sectors of First Reality have been obliterated as improper objects of Reason, thus to be eradicated from human thought.
In general, what most post-modern second realities seem to require just to “stand up on their own legs” is the obliteration of a certain critical sector or component of millennial, I daresay universal, human historical experience. That is to say, of any notion of the spiritual, of any divine connection between God and man, thus between human existence and the world at large.
“Modern science” seems to scorn such considerations. Evidently, the scientistically-massaged popular view nowadays is that what “philosophers” do is perfectly irrelevant and risible: “For the world consists of what we scientists can ‘measure.’ And fully explains itself in such terms.”
But to state that scientific method completely displaces and renders nugatory all other human intellectual approaches to the truth of Reality is false. Philosophers “measure” at a scale that differs from the scale defining the scientific method. The reason being: Philosophers deal with universals; scientists deal with time-bound particularities.
Above I stated that to espouse a second reality necessarily involves espousing a “new lease on death.”
I would love to have further conversation regarding this topic. Yet I realize, possibly only a few (if any) readers around here would be interested in it….
I am always so very glad for your company, your interest, on these issues, dearest sister in Christ! And for your wonderful contributions to the discourse! In Christ’s Love and Peace, now and always!
People looking at life thru second realitys are "used to" looking at life thru the rear view mirror(s)...
can't see the forest for the trees.. and often crash into them(trees)..
I know it strains the subject.. but it appears to me, it could be argued that there are.. (with humans)
*) second realities..
*) third realitys..
*) fourth realitys..............
(on like that)..
Seems to me that Second Realities are imagined self-contained subsets of reality.
I doubt one can create a Second Reality without relying on his sense of autonomy, logic, energy, space/time, etc. So, in effect, he is choosing to retain some and deny some of what he must sense, while failing to allow that things may exist beyond his ability to sense them. Otherwise it would not be self-contained.
It truly is a disorder.
Thank you so very much for your informative and engaging essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!
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