CHAPTER 1: A GOD BEYOND IMAGES

CHARLES TAYLOR

- Argues that Deism can be seen as a "half-way house" on the road to contemporary atheism.

-This loss of a sense of the transcendent meant that spirituality increasingly became focused not on God but on the self, on personal feelings; thus was privatized and opposed to religion which was now seen as institutional and impersonal.

-God has become an impersonal principle or "higher power."

IMAGES OF THE DIVINE

MYTHOLOGIES

- with elaborate rituals that involved sexual intercourse between god and his consort, symbolized by the temple priest and priestess and with all those present in the ritual.

-Mesoamerica deities whose cults often involve human sacrifice.

- the gods of Greek and Roman mythologies were anthropomorphic deities, idealized human figures who governed the heaven, seas, and the underworld, or alternatively personifications such as love or war.

-they are neither transcendent nor "holy" in the sense of "righteous."

-they were gods created in the image of men rather than man created in the image of God.

ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE

-Divine were philosophically conceived.

- legendary Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu described that the Dao exists before the entire universe and generates myriad things in the world making it the "mother of the universe."

-the Dao itself is nameless, eternal, ineffable, unchanging, and the source of being.

- the Dao must not come to us, we must go to Dao.

Plato's God- was a nous or intellect eternally contemplating the forms.

Aristotle's God- self-enclosed deity is described as pure thought thinking itself. was a spiritual being, pure and changeless, an eternal, cosmological cause or primal mover, posited to explain the world’s motion but without contact with it.

(The idea of a personal God did not occur to the ancients)

A PERSONAL GOD

-personal God entering into a relationship with humankind.

-Ultimate reality is personal or as Pope Benedict XVI phrased it, reason and love, the source of all that is, the source of being itself.

Israel’s experience with God- often troubled but passionate whom its people called Yahweh, a name derived from the root hayah, "to be," in Exodus 3:14 is reflected in the book of the Old Testament, composed over some thousand years of Jewish history.

God for Christians- took flesh in the person of Jesus, God's Word (John 1:1) and only begotten Son who poured out his blood for the salvation of the world.

The compassionate God of Islam- for Muslims clover to the believer than his jugular vein, is a God who has spoken his final word in the holy Qur'an, revealed through the prophet Mohammad.

MODERN DEATH OF GOD

- Under the influence of German idealists, the Divine mystery was depersonalized, reduced to an alienated personification of spirit, mind, or human intelligence.

Hegel (1770-1831) - taught that the object of religion was an Absolute Being that comes from and was produced by human consciousness itself. It recognized the infinite object of belief as itself.

Feuerbach (1804-1872)- adopted Hegel’s concept of alienation and naturalizing his Absolute into an objectified projection of human self-consciousness. He was the progenitor of both Marx and Freud. God was humanity's own projected need.

Nietzsche (1844-1900)- he sees the death of God as a deliberate decision, symbolic of modernity. it means a loss of transcendence and with it, loss of any absolute or universal morality.

"new atheists" - have taken on God and religion especially Christianity with vengeance. their arguments are based on naive scientism that seeks to submit religious claims to empirical verification as though God were an object in the world and have been faulted by their critics for failing to address the theological tradition on a serious level.

John Haught- argues that "engaged with theology on the part of these new atheists lies about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature."

Richard Dawkins- argues that the notion of God should be treated like any other scientific hypothesis.

Sam Harris- wondering why a book like the Bible would not be the richest source of mathematical insight available.

Richard Gaillardetz- characterizes new atheist as a naive form of theism that perceives God as just another individual being.

(They are no different from the ancients whose idea of the Divine was simply a more powerful being or beings not a transcendent of God who is a "wholly other."

DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE

- God is very different from the mythological deities of ancient civilizations.

ISRAELS GOD

-The idea of Holiness suggested in the Hebrew scriptures emphasizes God's otherness, difference, or apartness from all that is created, it is a constant in the Old Testament.