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Wow! I hope that this will be my last post in this thread as we have gotten way off subject. Not only that, but it has gotten to the point that I’m sure readers (if any) have totally lost track of who said what, when.

In this post, I will not attempt to address the “I said”, “no, you said” replies again as it’s gotten too confusing and I haven’t the time to go back over all those posts.

Suffice it to say that what I said in post #46 about there only being 2 religions is not any different than what I said in my other posts. If one rejects the Absolute Truth (God), he will substitute it for his own personal “truth” (god). Each human being has an “ultimate concern” (a god). That ultimate concern will either be God (as revealed by Jesus Christ), or it will be himself (nature, sentient and/or otherwise) and what he can achieve.

You asked if Bob Godwin, PhD (Gagddad Bob) is a Buddhist. He would answer that he is a Christian. I think he’s a very interesting character, and really like to read what he writes.

Here is a flavor for what he believes - and he addresses “scientism” in this commentary, also:

Excerpt:

“...The traditionalists are also profoundly anti-Darwinian, and in this regard — despite the great wisdom embodied in tradition — I believe they go too far. In my case, I would not call myself “anti-Darwinian,” just “un-Darwinian.” In other words, I accept any truths discovered by science, including natural selection, but I place those facts in a much wider metaphysical context that can never be explained by the empirical facts of science. To put it another way, the facts of science are only intelligible within a metaphysical framework that cannot be derived from science. In this regard, the water-tight logic of .. Kurt Gödel can never be surpassed by humans.

I cannot believe that this is what the Creator wants of us — to bury our heads in the sand whenever we encounter a fact that seems to contradict revelation, and then turn this intellectual vice into a virtue by claiming that we are more “faithful” than the person who believes in evolution or psychoanalysis. I mean, I would actually have more respect for these people if they had the courage of their convictions and stop taking antibiotics.

And perhaps not coincidentally, the traditionalists are also profoundly anti-psychoanalytic. In this regard I suppose I can cut them some slack, as they all seem to share the same ignorance of modern psychoanalysis as does academia. They seem to assume that psychoanalysis began and ended with Freud, which is analogous to rejecting modern physics on the basis of Newton’s ignorance of quantum physics. So the traditionalists rail against Freud — for example, his determinism (because it erodes free will) and his hostility to religion — even though there are almost no purely Freudian psychoanalysts anymore.

And in any event, I don’t think it’s particularly intellectually admirable to deal with anomalies in one’s world view by simply rejecting them a priori, a strategy which is ironically shared by both fundamentalism and scientism. [...]

One reason why so many people get the “Jesus willies” and therefore reject their own precious spiritual and intellectual heritage is because their only exposure to Christianity is in its anti-intellectual fundamentalist version, which I myself find impossible to take seriously. As Dawson wrote, the intellectual synthesis of Christianity and classical thought “was not a contradiction but the crown and completion of continuous effort to achieve an integration of the religious doctrine of the Christian Church with the intellectual tradition of ancient culture.” On this view, the “wisdom of the Greeks” is not opposed to Christianity. Rather, the Christian synthesis was the completion, perfection, or sanctification of these other vital intellectual streams — which is an ongoing project, since history doesn’t just arbitrarily stop historing.

This is a much more expansive view of reality whereby, for example, the great wisdom of Plato and the neo-Platonists is not rejected but integrated, say, in the deeply mystical works of Denys the Areopagite (see here as well for a fine introduction to the synthesis of Christian and Greek thought). By the same token, with this time-honored intellectual approach, a Christian needn’t necessarily reject the wisdom of, say, Vedanta or Taoism, for ultimately, the appearance of Jesus in the Hellenized Roman world is not essential but accidental. What if he had appeared in the Indian subcontinent? Then the task of early Christians would have been to place Christ within the context of Vedanta — to demonstrate how he represented, say, the “perfection” or “completion” of the Upanishads, so to speak.

Indeed, what if Jesus were here today — an absurd hypothetical, since he is. Then the task would be to integrate Christianity with current knowledge. Which I, as a Coon, believe is the whole point: to integrate wisdom and knowledge and thereby sanctify the intellect. “ [...] ~Gagdad Bob

More here: Saturday, December 08, 2007
On Sanctifying the Intellectual World http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/12/on-sanctifying-intellectual-world.html

And even more [excerpts]:

“But on any traditionalist view — including traditional Christianity — religion does not evolve. Rather, the whole point is that it is fixed and final. However, just like everything else, scripture looks very different to a developmentally mature mind than it does to an immature one.” [below]

“It’s not that I believe any kind of salvation lies with conservative political success. Rather, it’s just that the left is so incredibly dangerous and destructive on every level — intellectual, economic, psychological, and spiritual — that it must be combatted.” [below]

Friday, December 07, 2007
History, Herstory, and the Babystory
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8580258&postID=6290988988644854291