process musings

theology

Living continuity is something that matters, an important aspect of our experience.  But the way it matters is not a given on which we would be authorized to lean, in order to organize everything else.  In other words, the task of philosophy is to interpret common sense, not to follow any commonsensical claim in particular, because as soon as it is given doctrinal authority it will lead to the repression of other commonsensical claims.

~Isabelle Stengers, “Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead” in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, 37-8.

Orientalism and Religion, Richard King, p. 112

Posted on February 3, 2013

“The logic of comparison – which is, on the face of it, concerned with difference – functions rather as a logic of identity , in which the Indian subject does not enjoy independent status, and is made intelligible only in opposition to the fundamental or privileged values of Western modernity … In the hegemonic discourse of modernity and liberalism, the Western subject has been conceived as an individuated self-conscious authorial presence (the ‘author’ of his own activities) … [T]he ‘Indian’ is not simply different from the ‘W esterner’, but is his exact inverse.”

Critique of western Judaeo Christian tradition on Hinduism
Orientalism and Religion by Richard King

http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Religion-Post-Colonial-Theory-Mystic/dp/0415202582

Horizontal-izing the Vertical, Eradicating the Extremes: Scales of Value

Posted on February 1, 2013

When we think we think in bifurcations.  Up/down.  Left/right.  Right/wrong.  This way of thinking causes either/or mentality.  It indicates that one is right, and the other is wrong.

But what would happen if we flatten it out?  We make what is vertical thinking horizontal?  What if we said that in order to have one, you need the other?  That it is relationally intertwined so that if one does not exist, the other does not?

Now what if we got rid of the extremes altogether?  Instead of right and wrong, just or unjust, we have scales of lesser or greater value.  You see, what is absolutely right, absolutely wrong?  When we incorporate culture, education, values, race, class, etc., etc., all the categories (if we can break ourselves down to categories), or better yet, when we know ourselves, we develop values that shape our world.

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Schleiermacher’s On Religion

Posted on October 9, 2012

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion is a series of five speeches particularly situated to speak to the “cultured despisers,” those who in the enlightenment era navigated towards empiricism a method of knowing in the world.  One of the major issues that came out of the enlightenment era was how one was to speak of religion.  Hume’s Dialogue’s of Natural Religion are a telltale sign of the trajectory where the study of religion was going.  For Schleiermacher in particular, his struggles were in Kant’s major works, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, The Critique of Pure Reason, and Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals which led him to question Kant’s move from morality to practical reason.  Schleirmacher’s work, On Reason, is a response to this.

It would be wrong of me not to mention the basic religious struggles in the 1780′s concerning the repression of religious freedom though conforming to established church confessions accross Prussia.  All of this culminates in Schleiemacher’s groundbreaking work On Religion.  Using romanticism as a literary medium to discuss religion, Schleiermacher hopes to move away from empiricist notions of religion, which seeks to acquire knowledge of humanity and their pursuit of religion, and rather relocate it to the ecstatic experience of religion itself, to come to an understanding of religion that is mystical and sensual.  I will briefly discuss speech 1-3 and 5.

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A Women’s Meditation

Posted on July 10, 2012

I took this from my colleague Leanne Dedrick’s post.  Her post can be found here.

I tie this to one of my favorite texts, Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making.  It goes beyond the tribal notions of God as king, father, mother, to God as much deeper, wider, and more mysterious than we can imagine.  God goes beyond anthropological notions of being.  Here it goes.

‎’A Woman’s Meditation’
by Ruth F. Brin

When men were children, they thought of God as a father;
When men were slaves, they thought of God as a master;
When men were subjects, they thought of God as a king.

But I am a woman, not a slave, not a subject,
not a child who longs for God as father or mother.

I might imagine God as teacher or friend, but those images,
like king, master, father or mother, are too small for me now.

God is the force of motion and light in the universe;
God is the strength of life on our planet;
God is the power moving us to do good;
God is the source of love springing up in us.
God is far beyond what we can comprehend.

The Issue of Creatio Ex…

Posted on May 22, 2012

I was reading Trip Fuller’s post on Home-Brewed Christianity here: http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2012/05/21/creation-out-of-nothing-is-overrated-for-tony-jones/ and thought I would post a piece I wrote awhile ago on Wayne Grudem’s notion of creatio ex nihilo, and process theology’s component of creatio ex profundis.  This was in conversation of how to constructively rethink the term kabash, meaning dominion.

The Issue of Creatio Ex…

The second discussion that takes part in Grudem’s creation account is the idea that God created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo.  The text itself does not state this, as we read from the understanding of Rashi, or through Brueggeman’s reading of the text.  The Hebrew scripture is not concerned of creatio ex nihilo.  So there is open room for interpretation.

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adam_and_eve_banished

Theodicy: Griffin’s Process Theodicy and Davis’ Free Will Defense Theodicy

Posted on April 11, 2012

I was in my philosophy of religion class discussing Stephen Davis’ theodicy of evil, when I asked him about his view of creation, that God made “Adam and Eve” spiritually immature. This seems contradictory to me, since only within the two chapters of the creation account, God gives dominion of the earth to “Adam and Eve,” and yet does not give them the spiritual maturity to handle the situation. The conversation I was trying to build with the teacher was that God, who he claims is omnipotent, and all good, had to create create evil, and that it should not be the responsibility of humanity to take the blame for it. The readings showed that his view, the Free Will Defense view (first introduced by Alvin Platinga, but I believe greatly refuted by Raymond Bradley here) is the best possible scenario that shows that humanity is responsible for evil, and God still maintains God’s goodness, as well as God’s all-power.  I do not agree.

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