acamp1 wrote:As an Atheist, you'd probably be more drawn to her ideas on society
I don't consider myself an atheist. I simply reject the American Judeo-Christian notion of a paternalistic anthropomorphic personal deity.
Something drives life. That is clearly so. I don't know what it is and I'm fine with that. No need to jump to conclusions about angry/loving bearded giants in the sky.
I'm the same. This is why I side with those like Simone and Prof Jacob Needleman. He writes in part in the preface of his book "Lost Christianity."
........As once again we witness the horrific engines of war being fueled by religious zeal of one kind or another, and under one kind of name or another, the answer to this question is obviously to be: Yes, sometimes: Yes often! Have not the darkest crimes of world history - the insane barbarism of genocide, the bloody crusades, the murder of innocents, and the depredation of defenseless cultures - have not many, if not most, of these crimes been committed under the banner of religion or through a quasi-religious frenzy attaching itself to religious ideals? Put next to these endlessly recurrent horrors, the intimate comforts of personal religious faith and day-to-day individual efforts to live religiously may seem to count for little in the balance scales of human life on earth. Little wonder, then that so many of the best minds of the modern era entirely rejected religion as a foundation for both ethics and knowledge. Just as the scientific turn of the mind seemed to have entirely eclipsed religion's claim to knowledge, so - it has seemed to many - the same modern turn of mind must inevitably displace religion's claim to moral authority. Just as religion can no longer show us what is true but must yield that task to methods of thought that are independent of religious doctrine, so neither can religion, it was claimed, show us what is good, but must now surrender that task as well to the secular mind of modernity.
But in fact, no assumption of moral authority by secular humanism has taken hold or now seems in any way likely or justified. The modern era, the era of science, while witnessing the phenomenal acceleration of scientific discovery and its applications in technological innovation, has brought the world the inconceivable slaughter and chaos of modern war, along with the despair of ethical dilemmas arising from new technologies that all at once project humanity's essence-immortality onto the entire planet: global injustice, global heartlessness, and global disintegration of the normal patterns of life that have guided mankind for a millennia. Neither the secular philosophies of our epoch nor its theories of human nature - pragmatism, positivism, Marxism, Liberalism, humanism, behaviorism, biological determinism, psychoanalysis - nor the traditional doctrines of the religions, in the way we have understood them, seem able to confront or explain the crimes of humanity in our era, nor other wise and compassionate guidance through the labyrinth of paralyzing new ethical problems.
What is needed is either a new understanding of God or a new understanding of Man: an understanding of God that does not insult the scientific mind while offering bread, not a stone, to the deepest hunger of the heart; an understanding of Man that squarely faces the criminal weakness of our moral will while holding out to us the knowledge of how we can strive within ourselves to become the fully human being we were meant to be -- both for ourselves and as instruments of a higher purpose.
But this is not an either/or. The premise --or rather, the proposal -- of this book is that at the heart of the Christian religion there exists, and has always existed, just such a vision of God and Man. I call it "Lost Christianity," not because it is a matter of doctrines and concepts that may have been lost or forgotten; nor even a matter of methods of spiritual practice that may need to be recovered from ancient sources. It is all that, to be sure, but what is lost in the whole of our modern life, including our understanding of religion, is something even more fundamental, without which religious ideas and practices lose their meaning and all to easily become the instruments of ignorance, fear, and hatred. What is lost is the experience of oneself -- myself, the personal being who is here, now, living, breathing, yearning for meaning, for goodness; just this person here, now, squarely confronting ones existential weaknesses and pretensions while yet aware, however tentatively, of a higher current of a higher current of life and identity calling to us from within ourselves. This presence to oneself is the missing element in the whole of the life of Man, the intermediate state of consciousness between what we are meant to be and what we actually are. it is perhaps the one bridge that can lead us from our inhuman past toward the human future.,,,,,,,,,
It seems to me that a new understanding of man can only come from intentional efforts to "Know thyself." Unfortunately this is frowned upon.
I don't see what is so offensive about considering a source for universal laws. Of course it is a lot to ask modern man to accept that he may be as Plato described psychologically in a cave and include within education the means for acquiring self knowledge. But this is IMO what must happen if we are ever to acquire a new understanding of God and Man.
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