© Roger M Tagg 2010-2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
| Chapter | Page(s) | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | xi-xii | There’s more ‘total belief’ in a football club than in religion these days |
| xiv-xv | The ‘skandalon’, or stumbling block to belief, is not the same as it was in c1 AD | |
| xvi | Our world has been (re-)shaped by the natural sciences | |
| We (RT: presumably he doesn't expect that wide a readership!) have no option but to be modern westerners (RT: some of us do seem to try our best not to be!) | ||
| Modern man is put off by (talk about) “spirits and demons, incredible supernatural events and bad science” | ||
| xvi-xvii | Can we remove the ‘false’ stumbling block, i.e. the above, by de-mythologizing? | |
| xix | Bultmann overlooked the possibility that the big stumbling block is God | |
| xxi | Just because Jesus believed in God, demons and evil spirits, does that mean that we have to? | |
| xxii | Also, Jesus believed that the second coming was very near | |
| xxv | Contemporary atheists are not necessarily bad people (RT: an Aussie preacher claimed that electing Julia Gillard, an atheist, as PM would lead to national moral collapse) | |
| xxvii | AK’s definition of Transcendence means transcending one’s ‘animal’ (my word) nature | |
| xxviii | What we are meant to transcend is what the Bible refers to as ‘the world’ | |
| 1 - | 3-4 | Almost all dogma isn't 'revealed' - it's someone's interpretation |
| Religious | 4 | That's not much different to Scientific theories! |
| Experience | 6-7 | Schleiermacher ('the theologian of Romanticism'): (in those times) "One was cultured and full of ideas; one was aesthetic and one was moral. But one was no longer religious." |
| 8 | Schleiermacher's characteristic of religious experience - that of being absolutely dependent (RT: but on what?) | |
| 10 | Is it just the 'outside of us', or is it (Otto) the 'numinous' or mysterious (e.g. like what one gets from old churches)? | |
| 12 | We should reject Otto's 'creature consciousness' and Paley's 'divine watchmaker' | |
| 13 | William James described 4 features of religious experience: 1) ineffability (can't explain it to others); 2) noetic quality (emotion plus insight); 3) transiency (brief, can't recall it accurately); and 4) passivity (it can't be induced deliberately) | |
| 15 | Stace distinguished externally-related and 'withdrawal' forms of religious experience | |
| 16 | Drugs can help bring on religious experiences - AK mentions RC Zaehner in this respect (RT: Aldous Huxley also experimented, but with different conclusions; also, Zaehner was strongly anti Perennial Philosophy) | |
| Stace: "Atheism is not as such, I believe, inconsistent with introvertive mystical experience" (RT: Buddhists would surely agree) | ||
| 17 | Eckhart (re Christians experiencing introvertive religious experiences): "The Father loses His Fatherhood completely" | |
| 18 | Eckhart: "... what is normally meant by 'religious experience' is 'experience which is given a religious interpretation'" | |
| 22 | Bonhoeffer warned against thinking of God as a problem solver and need fulfiller | |
| 23 | Just because St Augustine thought it inevitable that our hearts are restless until we find God, maybe we today don't. Hamilton's view was: "some hearts are, and maybe some are not" | |
| 24 | AK refutes Baillie's idea that "this is what our hearts believe 'really' (RT: like Freud's Oedipus stuff?) | |
| 26-27 | Contemporary atheists are not atheists because they are fleeing or denying - they just haven't had any experience to suggest a God | |
| 29 | Robinson's idea of atheism is 'tame' - it doesn't match contemporary atheists as defined above | |
| 2 - New | 34 | Following Heidegger's 'Being and Time', some guys tried to tie in God with Heidegger's ontology, at the top of which is Being. |
| Definitions | 35 | Tillich was one (Ground of our Being) but he also adopted other strands |
| of God | 36 | Ogden, partly as a reaction to the 1960s 'Death of God' movement, tried to reformulate the question 'what is a satisfactory way of speaking about God?' |
| 37 | Ogden noted that doing theology doesn't make sense if we can't talk about (a) God | |
| AK: "It is interesting to note that the attack upon the God of traditional theism has been mounted most acutely by contemporary theologians" | ||
| 39 | Ogden, following Toulmin, said "the primary use or function of 'God' is to refer to the objective ground in reality itself of our ineradicable confidence in the final worth of our existence" | |
| 40 | AK says this clashes too much with the everyday usage of the word (God) | |
| 42 | God (as Ogden defines it) "is understood to be continually in process of self-creation" ('Process Theology') | |
| 44 | 'Reality as such' doesn't impress as a new definition of God | |
| 45 | 'Ontotheology' (Macquarrie) attempts to bring Heidegger's ontology into a definition of God | |
| 46-47 | Macquarrie uses his version of 'Natural Theology' (a neutral account of reality). AK prefers to call it 'Philosophical Theology' | |
| 48 | Heidegger's 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' parallels St Paul's 'man in sin' and 'man in faith' | |
| 49-50 | AK criticizes Heidegger (also Sartre, Camus) for being obsessed with 'alienation' - something more common when they wrote (just before and just after WW2) than nowadays | |
| 52 | AK asks "is 'faith in Being' good enough?" | |
| 55-56 | 'Degrees of Being' (as proposed by some) doesn't make much sense | |
| 58 | Nor does 'more Beingful' | |
| 60 | AK: "Macquarrie has given us not a description of contemporary experience of existence, but a religious man's view of what existence would be like if he had his way"; and he feels much the same about Robinson | |
| 62 | Re prayer, "what we cannot do, and Macquarrie in all honesty and consistency cannot bring himself to say we can do, is to pray to Our Father in Heaven to give us this day our daily bread" | |
| 63 | (Theologians) "fail to recognize the pragmatic nature of ordinary people (and this is one of the penalties of being an academic, that we think people are changed by ideas)" | |
| "A man might suddenly say that he no longer believes in God, but this would not be the result of an intellectual debate" | ||
| "The problem does not lie in the conception of God, but whether it corresponds to anything in our experience" | ||
| 3 - The | 66-67 | JAT Robinson's book ('Honest to God') succeeded because laymen were included |
| Death of God | 67 | Harvey Cox argued that the problem is caused by urbanization. "For ancient Israel the desert was the place of obedience, and the city the place of corruption" |
| "The conclusion drawn by the early Church, namely that the miracles of Jesus are very significant witnesses to his divinity, is quite unacceptable to us" | ||
| 70 | "The proposition 'Jesus is the son of God' has not been revealed. It represents the conclusion which faith draws from revelatory events and experiences" | |
| "If his (Robinson's) way is to be criticized for not going far enough, it is infinitely preferable to the position of those theologians and churchmen, the true heirs of the title 'Flat Earthers', who neither see the problem nor seriously attempt to deal with it" | ||
| 71 | "But we may doubt whether it ('Honest to God') has enabled one single non-believer to come to faith" | |
| 73 | AK thinks that tinkering with beliefs, language, liturgy, ecumenism, architecture etc is just a sort of 'plumbing' | |
| - Diagnosis | 76-77 | There was strong antipathy to the Death of God movement, but it was not well thought out - more just an example of turning on the messenger. "However 'God is Dead' is not more meaningless than a father in heaven who has become a man. And the reformists weren't wanting to kill Christianity" |
| 78 | Fr Robert Adolfs: "It (contemporary atheism) is not rebellious belief. It is a quiet indifference, which develops in people who discover that they can be complete human beings without religious faith" | |
| 79 | AK: Those who deny this "are surely guilty of irresponsibility"; they are 'Gadarene swine' or 'lemmings' | |
| 82 | Religious 'Canutism' involves calls for a revival campaign, e.g. 'back to church' | |
| - Altizer | 83 | "Secular culture is not going to disappear" |
| 84 | "God died in becoming man" | |
| 88 | Barth pointed to the difference between God as commonly invoked (e.g. 'Gott strafe England') and the God of the Bible | |
| 89 | But Altizer thinks it is an inevitable progression to reduce the gap between the sacred and the profane | |
| 90 | Altizer is more concerned with the 'in the end' (eschatology) than the 'in the beginning'; so his question is 'where are we heading?' | |
| 91 | (RT: If God only died to become J.C., where does that leave Islam, or any other theistic religion?) | |
| 93 | In Altizer's view, 'Death of God' means saying that God once was, but is no longer | |
| 95 | "We do not say that God was despotic or racialist in the OT, but that men were as yet insensitive to his true nature" | |
| (RT: Isn't that just it - our model changes (and hopefully improves) with time, i.e. our model of 'the Good'?) | ||
| 97 | AK notes that Altizer doesn't say much about Jesus as 'the Way' | |
| 99 | Altizer talks about a "dialectical reaffirmation of the sacred (which) may take place in the future" | |
| - Hamilton | 100 | Hamilton says (of people admitting a loss of religious certainty) "... such discussion groups, if care is not taken, take on the atmosphere of testimony night at a gospel hall" (RT: yes, I was once in such a group) |
| 101 | "God seems to have withdrawn" (RT: doesn't seem to be calling people as much) | |
| 102 | "This 'absent-present' disturber, God" suffers an image problem with 'evil' - "a God who is not altogether Christian" | |
| "... theology has not understood that the Incarnation is not about Jesus, it is about God" | ||
| 103 | "The period of (the Christian) God's absence must be an interim one" - so we should keep the faith, watch and pray, and still worship; the parable is that the master is away - are the stewards faithful? | |
| 104 | Could it be that "a master is no longer going to return - so is there a master at all"? | |
| "The dark night of the soul has normally overcome individuals, but now it is overtaking whole generations" | ||
| "We are not talking about the absence of experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God" (RT: not my viewpoint) | ||
| 105 | But Hamilton still finishes up waiting for something, maybe new language | |
| 106 | "The time of waiting should not be a religious 'dark night of the soul', but 'being Christ to the neighbour' ". Earlier on, Hamilton had said that "faith collapsed into hope", but later that "faith collapsed into love" | |
| 107 | "... being alienated from the least Christian parts of the life of the Church is a positive gain for the radical theologian" | |
| "Christ becomes the norm by which divinity is judged" (i.e., not the OT); RT: once again, this excludes Islam etc | ||
| 108-9 | Why is he still talking about divinity? | |
| 112 | AK says Altizer and Hamilton aren't really Death of God theologians, just reformists. Only Nietzsche really qualifies (next chapter) | |
| 4 - | 114 | "Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner and all forms of German imperialism" |
| Nietzsche and the Godless world | 115 | " 'The Will to Power' is not a single work by Nietzsche, but a collection of aphorisms edited by his sister" (Elizabeth, who was married to a proto-Nazi) |
| 117 | Without God, do we have any right to have "standards of judgement and evaluation? For Nietzsche, we lose every moral landmark and every aesthetic point of reference. We are 'sailing the ocean without a compass'" | |
| RT: but I think we can still get consensus as we as a species get more experience and education | ||
| 119 | N "refused to replace God with a historical process which was 'leading' somewhere" | |
| N qualifies 'man as an advanced animal' by having "a potentiality for self-realization. To be sure, very few men actualize this potential" - hence N's elitism (RT: maybe more people, at least in the West, do now get nearer) | ||
| 120 | AK asks: doesn't the ueber in uebermensch imply some amount of judgement? | |
| 121 | Our drive, 'will to power' (= self-motivation?) shouldn't be used just to gain power over others, but to surpass our basic (= animal?) nature | |
| What is good then? N says strength and not weakness; Christianity overdoes the pity and sympathy, and so drags us down (RT: but these are natural feelings, maybe stronger in some than others, but not specifically Christian) | ||
| 122 | N characterized Christianity as "hatred of the senses, and joy in general". Instead, we should espouse the 'noble values' and be 'free spirits' | |
| 124 | N also criticized religion for undervaluing "the particular and the present ... (and) regarding 'this vale of tears' as without lasting significance" | |
| 128 | Like Freud, "N believes religion to be an illusion, based on projection" | |
| 130 | N's Zarathustra says "I should only believe in a God who would know how to dance" | |
| 5 - The Christian Dilemma | 135 | "Either Christianity is for everyone (worldwide) or it is not Christianity" (RT: but if people have trouble believing in God, isn't Buddhism a good alternative?) |
| 137 | AK proposes 5 choices to confront the crisis. 1) is that the Church is (as by default) just a voluntary religious society; it will go on becoming more and more of a minority; there is tacit rejection of the commission to convert the whole world | |
| 138 | 2) is the reformist option - which will only help internal doubters | |
| 139 | "A small band of intellectuals secretly knowing that the vast majority of Christians misunderstand what Christianity is about, yet allowing this misunderstanding to continue" (which doesn't appear to have worked!) | |
| Option 3) is pluralism (Ch 6); 4) is reductionism (Ch 7) and 5) is re-examination of theology itself (Ch 8) | ||
| 6 - Agenda | 140 | Pluralism = allowing different and incompatible beliefs and cultures to co-exist |
| for Pluralism | The longer the creed, the more chance for controversy and doubt | |
| 142 | Just 'the Way' (of Jesus) is more inclusive | |
| 143 | "If there was a caring community of people, many mental patients would not need to enter hospital" - Jewish psychiatrist (RT: sounds like Oliver Sacks of 'mistook his wife for a hat' fame) | |
| 144 | It's difficult to remain a Christian for long if one cuts oneself off from the 'body of Christ' | |
| 145 | We don't follow Christ to the Cross - we don't damage "our careers, our status or our respectability" | |
| 145 | "As it is, ordination is a passport to limbo" | |
| 7 - The | 149 | Feuerbach said "to talk about God is 'really' to talk about man" - AK sees that as 'reducing' theology to anthropology |
|
Reductionist Solution | 151 | "Men have (historically) believed in a God ... (who) could demonstrate his own existence if he chose"; F viewed religion as a symptom of alienation |
| - Feuerbach | 152 | F described religion as an "indirect form of human (self-) knowledge" ... "the appropriate mode by which unenlightened people may come to truths which can be established directly by reason" ... |
| 153 | ... (but in the end) "Religion is the disuniting of man from himself" ... i.e. the antithesis of himself (God in his own image) | |
| "God is what the understanding thinks is the highest" | ||
| "The resurrection of Christ is therefore the satisfied desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death" | ||
| 154 | F thought Christianity similarly represents the wish for things to be more like what humans desire, preferably through the agency of some other power rather than one's own effort (RT: in other words, a 'cop out'?) | |
| AK asks if "unconsciously, Christians have been content to 'continue in sin that grace may abound' (Romans 6 v1)" | ||
| 155 | AK claims there is no evidence that by dropping religion society would become more "morally sensitive or socially active" (RT: but can we really know either way?) | |
| 156 | Is Feuerbach's God limited by the imagination of man (individual or the species, and at any point in time past, present or future)? | |
| 158 | AK: but man is also alienated from man - F doesn't really address good versus evil | |
| 160 | AK says F "has not understood to what extent the Christian view of God is incompatible with what men commonly envisage as the goal of human existence" | |
| - Braithwaite | 161 | AK says that Braithwaite's position is that "religious assertions are really moral assertions" |
| 162 | B invokes Logical Positivism (LP) - a big bogey for AK - i.e. "the meaning of a statement is its means of verification". But (see p 163) this statement itself is meaningless according to its own rules. | |
| 163 | For moral assertions, B switches to the later Wittgenstein - "the meaning of a statement is given by the way it is used" | |
| AK thinks B has argued from a weak logical basis, LP having been 'superseded' by the later Wittgenstein (RT: but LP is a default view of ordinary modern man, who may say "prove it!") | ||
| 164 | B suggests that moral assertions are only an attitude | |
| 165 | B says that a moral assertion is about 'intent' - people may still fail to act accordingly | |
| 167 | But surely it's morally bad not to act according to a good intent? | |
| 168 | In judging actions, should we be concerned with the stated intention, or the grounds for the intention? AK says B eliminates this gap by ignoring it | |
| 170 | AK doesn't like B's characterization of the Christian way of life as just a 'love ethic' | |
| 171 | Nor does he like B's view of Jesus as just a great moral example; a lot of Christ's teaching is eschatological (RT: so what? Most people think that's bunk) | |
| 172 | B says that being a Christian means 'entertaining' the stories in the Bible | |
| 173 | AK: "This does not emphasize sufficiently the necessity of maintaining some relationship between faith and fact - if Christianity is to be a truly historical religion" (RT: again, so what?) | |
| - Van Buren | 175 | vB tries to combine Barth, Bultmann and the later Wittgenstein to convert God-statements to man-statements |
| 176 | RT: AK shows his true colours; he is "feverishly" against LP, but that (right or wrong) is how modern man thinks. If vB hadn't started from a modicum of LP he would have had no hope of relating to non-religious readers | |
| 178 | AK claims vB is following Anthony Flew rather than Wittgenstein (RT: see Flew-Macintyre highlights) | |
| 180 | As with Braithwaite, the difference between action - and the belief or 'grounds for judgement' justifying the action - is not well addressed | |
| 182 | vB says that people don't just entertain the stories, they are "grasped by the kerygma" (RT: I'd say, some are, but some are not - are we talking about oratory, or more?) | |
| It's about more than doing good to one's neighbour (RT: but what more, is not said) | ||
| 183 | vB "wants to say more than his ill-considered philosophical position will allow" | |
| 184 | vB sometimes invokes "how things are" or "how things really are" - dangerous! | |
| 184 | Bultmann's warning: "to eliminate instead of to translate is to fall into positivism" | |
| 8 - The Meaning | 186-7 | Bonhoeffer isn't covered in the book; he may have recognized the problem, but didn't offer a secular solution |
| of Theology | 188 | In any case, AK says, we can't just jettison the Christian tradition, so we have to address it (unlike van Buren et al) |
| Is the suggested parallel, namely the change from Astrology to Astronomy, a good one? | ||
| 189 | Astrology was never really 'on to something' whereas Theology is (RT: I'd say, only to a degree!) | |
| 190 | Van Buren was wrong not because he didn't use the word God, but because he eliminated what Theology is 'on to' | |
| 191 | Tillich: Theology is about our 'ultimate concern' | |
| 192 | This could be trivialized, e.g. a woman with the appearance of her home, a man with his career | |
| 193 | AK says Theology should be "the systematic reflection on what is entailed in commitment, with ultimate concern, to that which came to expression in J.C." i.e. Jesus Christ). (RT: but surely that's 'Christian Theology'? What about Judaism, or Islam?) | |
| 194 | This does allow us to talk about "the history of Israel's pilgrimage" (i.e. towards J.C.) | |
| 9 - Secular Transcendence | 197 | The 'liberal tradition' is seen as "religion as a human possibility, an integral part of the life of a cultured man" (RT: what about the oiks?) |
| Barth's 'system' - recognition of the "infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity" (RT: what does that mean?) | ||
| 199 | Braun's model: "God would, therefore, mean to abide in the concrete act of devoting oneself to the 'other'" | |
| Gollwitzer: "human associations and social phenomena - is that it?" | ||
| AK: part of what we (presumably, like-minded theologians) are 'on to' involves this "infinite qualitative distinction" | ||
| 203 | In the early Hebrew view, "God represented reality expressed in two ways: first, an insurmountable obstacle to men pursuing their own ends; and second, as a never-failing source of power to pursue quite different ends" | |
| 204 | "It is not difficult to see a secular meaning of transcendence in the Old Testament" | |
| 204-5 | There is a problem of 'other nations' in the OT - "had they no knowledge of God?" | |
| 205 | Jesus, like most in his day, "believed fervently in the imminent end of the age" (i.e. of the world as we know it) | |
| 206 | How could Jesus be wrong about this? Because, to be sure, "it did not come" | |
| 207 | "Orthodoxy has no answer ..." | |
| 208 | Or, did Jesus know it wasn't true, but said it to "encourage people to think it" (RT: my suspicion) | |
| Or, as he was a man, was it that he did not have independent knowledge of reality? | ||
| 209 | AK's attempted resolution - our own little (immanent) world comes to an end if we opt for the Way of Transcendence (WoT) (RT: sounds far-fetched to me - surely we will always oscillate, and different people will see the light at different times) | |
| 211 | The Incarnation "does not tell us anything more about Jesus", but about God. If God is now the WoT, then "Jesus is the very incarnation of the WoT" | |
| 212 | "God has become man" makes no sense | |
| 213 | If "the time had fully come" in the first century AD, why didn't God wait until Baird invented television? | |
| 214 | Instead, it was because the WoT became fully revealed in J.C. (RT: weak, I think. Also, it's 'Christians only') | |
| To establish WoT-type thinking, we need to show that whatever current believers "believe about God, is contained in this new position" | ||
|
10 - Reality in Dispute | 215 | In the world today, the division is not between Christians and non-Christians, between those who go to church and those who do not. Oxfam, Care, The Link etc are not specifically Christian organizations |
| 216 | This has some downsides, e.g. some activists don't want to work with professing Christians who want to impose their mark on things, while some Christian organisations refuse to use non-Christian experts (RT: sometimes, even Christians from other sects) | |
| AK argues that the line implied by the WoT (RT: presumably between people that follow the Way and those who don't) is more relevant | ||
| However, "we none of us stand completely on one side or the other" | ||
| 217 | What does belief in God possibly add to the WoT? Possibly 1) prayer, a direct line to a Mr Fixit (but AK thinks that's out, and prayer is just contemplation); or 2) strengthening of one's motivation, following S Toulmin (but AK thinks that means implying that "heteronomous ethics are better than autonomous ethics" (RT: but people do get motivated by 'spirit' of various sorts) | |
| 218 | There are hints of the WoT in existentialism, Heidegger and Freud | |
| 219 | J Macquarrie: "The suspicion dawns upon us that a bit of unconquerable nature lurks concealed behind this difficulty as well" (i.e., that the ills of life cannot all be attributed to external factors) "- in the shape of our own mental constitution" | |
| 220 | Interest in Zen Buddhism (for example) can be seen as evidence that people are searching for the WoT | |
| "Christianity has been reduced in the Church to religious belief and religious practices" | ||
| "The Church seems to present no particular view of man except the image of the average 'decent' middle-class citizen" | ||
| 221 | "If this line (i.e. WoT via new spiritual interests) were developed, it might lead towards the doctrine of the Holy Spirit" (RT: it took AK 221 pages to get to this point!) | |
| 222 | Maybe this doctrine has been played down by the Church because they thought people would confuse the Spirit with ghosts and wizardry | |
| "The Spirit may be the only element of the Trinity compatible with a radical theology" (RT: my view too - and with a multicultural society and a global village) | ||
| 11 - The Continuing Problem of | 224 | Traditional religion is more 'reductionist' than the WoT, because it doesn't 'cover the field'. It doesn't raise the vital issue. "Your God is too small" (RT: wasn't that JB Phillips?) (RT: just being 'devout' doesn't cut the mustard) |
| Theology | 225 | "Theology must not simply concern itself with man: it must not be reduced to ethics, even a Jesus ethic" |
| 227 | "The Christian view of man has too often been simply that of the average decent citizen who does not beat his wife and who certainly does not maltreat his dog" (RT: i.e., don't worry about living a better life, just be decent and devout) | |
| 228 | "The Deutsche Christen, the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and many other Christian bodies have all believed in God while being committed to demonic immanent paths" | |
| 229 | In choosing the WoT, "we test our suspicion that the real nature of man is ... embodied in J.C. and not a Nazi Führer" | |
| "Faith involves commitment to a decision" (not to a belief in God or whatever) | ||
| 230 | The awesome question is not 'which value judgment?' but 'why any?'. "We all make value judgments on a non-natural basis, so a purely natural theory of value is ruled out" (RT: sounds like 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. But by natural, did AK rather mean 'logical', 'scientific' or 'left brain'?) | |
| 231 | (Christians) "can then go on meaningfully to present J.C. as the final revelation of Transcendence" (RT: I don't think I like 'final' - it smacks of once-off revelation) | |
| "The question is 'why is faith in Transcendence confirmed?'" The superficial answer (RT: traditional Abrahamic religion) applied for almost 3000 years. "But increasingly in the last 200 years this answer has been less and less satisfactory. It is not wrong, but simply inadequate" | ||
| 232 | There is a mystery beyond human concerns - the WoT addresses it | |
| 233 | Robinson still had one foot in the camp of a personal God | |
| 234 | Macquarrie: "The question is not whether you are going to have an ontology or not, but whether you are going to have an examined ontology or an unexamined one" (God and Secularity, p33) (RT: but AK does not seem to have addressed ontology with respect to the WoT, at least in any formal way) |
AK's particular criticisms of other positions seem mostly sound. One exception is that he wants to be seen as a zero on a scale of 1 to 10 as regards Positivism. I don't see Positivism as totally worthless, just limited.
To me, the Way of Transcendence seems a tortuous concept. And why does it have to be so Christian-specific and exclusive? Sure, we think that J.C. 'had the goods', but what about lots of others, from Socrates to the present day? Why didn't AK call it 'The Good' - meaning the total good of all humans, creatures, nature and the universe, covering short and long term, overall and detail - and with a sensible balance between our own good and that of everyone and everything else?
He seems to spend a lot of words justifying why he should not be thrown out as a heretic. OK, we don't want to exclude current believers, but why can't he admit it, a lot of religious language is mumbo-jumbo?
Finally, why didn't he use the concept of 'models'? Then he doesn't have to say that the old ones were wrong, but that they were just superseded by better models.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 20th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .