Between Scholastics And Pragmatists: The Mddb Philosophy Debate

[Ahab]

Does the fact that one person claimed to feel "something" provide evidence that God was there? Nope.

Actually, yes. Testimony is evidence, even if it isn't true, so what you have in that example is both true testimony and false testimony. with someone being right and someone else being wrong. God was either there or he wasn't, so to say he wasn't there when he was would be false testimony. Or, in the other case, to say he was when he wasn't would also be false testimony. Someone is right, though. He either was or he wasn't. The issue then becomes how to know who was right, and who was wrong.

It might be interpreted by the person who felt "something" that God was there, but that's not helpful to the people who really did feel nothing.

It actually is helpful, though. Since you were there and claimed to feel nothing... which I have never experienced btw so it's hard for me to imagine anyone actually feeling "nothing"... it might help you to revisit that moment and remember what it felt like to feel what you call "nothing". Maybe that's your way of describing the sense of what I would call "peace" that usually accompanies feeling God's presence. Maybe it was so overwhelming for you that it made you feel as if you were in another time and place, beyond your current environment so that nothing else but that experience occupied your attention. I don't know hat you mean when you say "nothing" but someone else called it something by saying they felt God's presence, so maybe if you think some more about what you actually experienced when you felt "nothing" you could maybe find some way to think why someone else might say they experienced God, instead of nothing. It may be just a case of semantics, but then again, someone else may have experienced something... as in something entirely different;.. than the nothing you say you experienced.

I have no idea whether the investigator really felt "something" or "nothing". I'm not him.

Think back on what you felt, and if possible, if you're still in contact with that person, ask him what he meant by describing what he experienced by referering to it as God. You may have experienced similar things but are using different words to describe what you experienced.

I simply do not know and cannot know.

Yes you can know. If you can't recall enough of that experience to help you look for other occasions where you could feel the same things which you described as nothing, and someone else described as God. Once you have that to work with you can communicate with the other person and ask them to describe that experience some more, which may help you to know why they are referring to that "something" as God. With enough communication you can know what anyone elsle feels or thinks, even though you may use different words to describe what they experience. All it takes is the willingness to understand what someone means when they say something.

All I know is that I kept running out to check the mailbox and God's letter never came. Maybe he never sent it in the first place. Maybe he sent it and someone intercepted it or removed it from my mailbox. All I know is someone told me God sent a letter and I was looking for it. It never showed. The one who claimed to have felt "something" got his letter - or so he says. Doesn't help me much. My letter is missing.

Letter? I didn't see you mention a letter before. What's all this about expecting a letter? When God writes, he usually does it through another person, just like he wrote the scriptures in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and all other things he inspires someone to write.

[Ahab]

It's only a little bit weird if God is material.

Well, yes, and he is, which is why it sounds a little bit weird.

[mfbukowski]

Could be. The (Eastern Christian) hesychast's goal is hypostatic union with that uncreated, divine spark, which exists within every person. God is everwhere and in all things, maintaining it in existence from moment to moment (if divine transcendence and immanence, and creatio ex nihilo, is your cup of tea). Success in this endeavor is termed illumination, theosis, divinization and is what makes someone a saint and theologian (a divinized, created nature that retains its individuality and distinctiveness through the union). A strain of gnosticism believes that God (consciousness) has dreamed everything into existence and each of us is a piece of that consciousness (God) lost in the dream. After death, we awake from the dream and realize we are God. And then there's the pantheism of Eastern thought. Important differences among all of these, but the presence of the divine spark within is common to them.

That's the claim of the eastern hesychasts. That's why I'm currently hanging out with the Orthodox. Have you read "The Way of a Pilgrim" and "The Pilgrim Continues His Way"? It's all about the Jesus Prayer and finding God through finding him where he is to be found - within the heart.

[Edited to correct glaring typos.]

I have always liked Orthodox thought and were I not Mormon that is probably the direction I would now go. I really think that the Eastern church is the closest to us. Check out the Coptic Orthodox- they are so close it is spooky.

And I can see those same beliefs as remarkably compatible with the way I see things about God being man and we being Gods in embryo.

Just as we create our little godlet worlds out of matter unorganized by creating our vocabularies, as the good ironists we are, God organizes the "big world" in the same way but on an infinitely greater scale through his Word (John Chapter1). All that God organizes He organizes through his Word.

So in a sense that is saying that we organize our little worlds through our words/vocabularies while God organizes the big World also through his Word

It could be said even in a Mormon context that this is continuous organization by God, and He upholds it and keeps it organized continually through his Word (Christ/ Jehovah)

That's just a sliver apart from a Mormon position if even that much- I think it is just a slight paradigm shift of difference.

I would go with that if I were you. Sounds like a really good fit for the way your mind works. Then we can look each other up on the other side and see who got the language closer

Edited November 7, 2012 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

It's only a little bit weird if God is material.

God may be material but our perception of him - what is in our "heart" arguably isn't. Are feelings "material"? Is the little picture "in my head/heart" of my mother when I think of her face "material"? Here again we hit physicalism and the idea that descriptions of such "pictures" or qualia cannot be reduced to descriptions of physical states.

In other words "Bukowski's brain shows activity in zone xyz, specific neuron 947-A" is never logically equal to the "picture" I see of my mother's face, nor can it be. One description leaves out information in the other description and it always will. So descriptions of physical states are not equal to what I subjectively experience- imagining my mother's face.

I suppose it's all in the way we describe it, as always, isn't it? It may be less weird than you think!

[mfbukowski]

So maybe we have come full circle?

Within the heart? In what sense? In a certain sense I can see how he is or at least can be found within a person't heart, or even many person's heart, but let's be careful to realize he is an actual person, as we are actual persons, and in that sense it's a little bit weird to think he is in our heart, in his person. Notice I'm trying to avoid saying he is not in a person's heart, though. I try to be very careful about saying God is NOT... anything, because in a certain sense he is in everything and everyone, even if certain people don't think so.

... and here's another idea to help you find God in any one of his persons:

Any good idea you get and have is from God, so at any time if you don't think you are experiencing God that essentially means you're not getting any or having any good ideas.

Is your mother "in your heart"? If she is not, I'm gonna tell her and boy will you be in trouble!

[Ahab]

So maybe we have come full circle?

Is your mother "in your heart"? If she is not, I'm gonna tell her and boy will you be in trouble!

In a sense, she is, and I suppose you can even say it's in a literal (as in real) sense, too.

It still seems a bit weird to think her physical body is actually within my heart, though, and what I mean by saying she is in my heart may not be what you think I mean.

Communication can be complicated, but we can come to the point where we do completely understand each other.

[mfbukowski]

My letter is missing.

Or as we said, maybe you were looking in the wrong mailbox.

[mfbukowski]

In a sense, she is, and I suppose you can even say it's in a literal (as in real) sense, too.

It still seems a bit weird to think her physical body is actually within my heart, though, and what I mean by saying she is in my heart may not be what you think I mean.

Communication can be complicated, but we can come to the point where we do completely understand each other.

I agree. I was just making the point that there are a lot of different ways to speak and therefore think, about these things.

[Spammer]

Or as we said, maybe you were looking in the wrong mailbox.

[Spammer]

I only have one address and one mailbox.

[Spammer]

I have always liked Orthodox thought and were I not Mormon that is probably the direction I would now go. I really think that the Eastern church is the closest to us. Check out the Coptic Orthodox- they are so close it is spooky.

And I can see those same beliefs as remarkably compatible with the way I see things about God being man and we being Gods in embryo.

Just as we create our little godlet worlds out of matter unorganized by creating our vocabularies, as the good ironists we are, God organizes the "big world" in the same way but on an infinitely greater scale through his Word (John Chapter1). All that God organizes He organizes through his Word.

So in a sense that is saying that we organize our little worlds through our words/vocabularies while God organizes the big World also through his Word

It could be said even in a Mormon context that this is continuous organization by God, and He upholds it and keeps it organized continually through his Word (Christ/ Jehovah)

That's just a sliver apart from a Mormon position if even that much- I think it is just a slight paradigm shift of difference.

I would go with that if I were you. Sounds like a really good fit for the way your mind works. Then we can look each other up on the other side and see who got the language closer

Yes, the similarities are uncanny. I don't know, however, that I would call the differences between them a "slight paradigm shift"; the ontological gulf between notions of God's materiality and immateriality seems vast. After I answered some questions about what Mormons believe about sanctification and divinization, the Orthodox priest I'm working with responded: "Amazing! They're so very close, yet so far." For instance, that gulf lends itself to a radically different understanding about the holiness of creation. For the Orthodox, all matter is holy because it is permeated and upheld by the divine (seemingly pantheistic but definitely not; the model is the hypostatic union of the God-Man, Jesus). The cosmos is God's self-expression in material form and the Incarnation is God the Logos's self-expression as a man. A life in Christ is a life lived in awareness of the fact that we literally live in Christ the Word, who "upholds and keeps" all things in existence from moment to moment. There is nowhere where God is not; God is everywhere and fills all things. The salvation of Christians, who are all anointed priests, literally 'little Christs' (anointed ones), is to live all of life eucharistically as a sacrament to be offered back to God. "We know we were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into life in God, communion with God." (Alexander Schmemann). The LDS view of the need for sacrifice and service is very similar. IMO, the LDS view of God is very different, as it posits a material God who resides in space and has spatial coordinates that can presumably be pinpointed if we had the technology and the veil was lifted. Since God and matter are coeternal and God resides within the material cosmos that he organizes, in theory, we could travel to where the Father is through space if we had the technological means to do so, like Spock's brother tried to do in Star Trek V. This view of God ascribes holiness to matter through an association with its Creator, who is the Man of Holiness. Yes, both traditions view Creation as holy and upheld by God. Both aim for the divinization of humans. But beneath the surface, huge differences exist in the language and meanings that define our understanding of who God is. I don't know that I would call these differences 'slight' or a 'sliver'.

That said, I agree wholeheartedly with you that, given the shared view of our temple-centric faiths - that we are gods in embryo (i.e., we are already divine and the purpose of the spiritual life is to grow into what we were meant to be); that life is sacramental/sacrificial - the two traditions are, indeed, very close, closer than many people in either tradition realize. Both churches also view themselves as the Church of the Martyrs. Joseph Smith gave his life for his testimony; some of my pioneer ancestors gave their lives crossing the Plains; many 2nd-3rd century Orthodox-Catholic Christians gave their lives for the faith. There is much that is shared between the respective paradigms, but God isn't found in analysis of those paradigms or in the use of our reason. All of that merely brings us to the threshold of faith (as C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, and Aquinas did for me), but we must leave all that behind and accept the invitation to "Taste and See" and actually live life within the chosen paradigm. Only then can God be experienced. See the link below for an Orthodox priest's view on this issue. I think you'll find he's somewhat amenable to the ironist's view. In sum, Faith must be lived. That's far superior than remaining on the outside, circling around different traditions, analyzing, reasoning, observing, dissecting, and categorizing. I think I'm going to radically cut down on the time I spend here. I periodically find myself immersed too much in thinking about things rather than simply living out my faith. It's a trap I fall for all too often.

Thanks for the stimulating conversations. I've enjoyed it. God bless you. See you on the other side.

http://glory2godfora...thodoxy-stands/

Edited November 8, 2012 by Spammer

[Ahab]

I think I'm going to radically cut down on the time I spend here. I periodically find myself immersed too much in thinking about things rather than simply living out my faith. It's a trap I fall for all too often.

It's a "trap" I fall into fairly often myself, but I think there can be a happy balance. I love thinking about the gospel and the more I think about it, while I live it, the more I want to share it, though, so at some point I'm sure I'd still find myself wanting to share what I experience with other people, and even try to learn from others who are trying to do the same I'm doing.

Thanks for the stimulating conversations. I've enjoyed it. God bless you. See you on the other side.

Ditto, or at least I think I'll see you later. Who knows, though, this may be the only time we get to spend time with each other, considering all of the billions and billions and billions of people there are and will be on the other side and I'm sure we'll all have something to do while we're living there too.

[mfbukowski]

Thanks for the stimulating conversations. I've enjoyed it. God bless you. See you on the other side.

http://glory2godfora...thodoxy-stands/

Loved the article- thanks, and I can't say I really disagree with any of it. I think that web of interconnectedness of symbol is what I get in the temple and indeed I also believe in the sacredness of matter- that indeed as LDS would put it in our somewhat modern vocabulary, that spirit IS matter also means that matter IS spirit. If A=B then B=A just as emphatically.

For me each spoken and acted symbol in the temple speaks of all these truths and each is a microcosm of all of it. Like a fractal image, one can deduce infinity from the smallest particle.

But the strength I see in Mormonism is philosophical and coherent with postmodernism and I see that as an advantage for the future. Maybe not. But the bottom line is the testimony I have of Mormonism and not of Orthodoxy.

One major philosophical point would be how the Orthodox feel about Aquinas and Aristotle. I found this interesting.