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Flame » in reply to re: definitions

limits: Sunday morning meditation
Mary Anne — (archived)

Humans look at things as reductions or magnifications of ourselves, in my experience. It's not always a matter of ego, but a matter of available tools and psychologically accessible context.

We have only recently been able to extend our senses, our tool package, beyond their natural range, e.g., using machines to extend our vision into the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum. Theology (old science) never did catch up with that. Religion, writ large, has still not gotten beyond the attempt to outlaw observations of extended senses as insufficiently orthodox. Though Galileo finally got his apology a few years ago for daring to draw conclusions based on things seen through a telescope, religious groups continue to fight against carbon-dated support of Darwin.

As far as I can tell, only the mystics among us, over the millennia, have even made a dent in the context problem. They shoot for an absolute abstract concept of deity, or they use a radically different analogy to skew the concept of the divine to a different area. The thought is to break the conventional mold, moving from picturebox stage to theater-in-the-round. Either way, we continue to be more the audience, outside of the production and yet party to it.

Sexual symbolism is the most widespread of the analogy-skewers, used across all cultures and into the distant past of human meditations on divinity, but obviously not suitable for the instruction of children. So we continue to look at "creator" in the context of human artisan and human artist, with conscious skill guiding intelligent, individual intuition. Ah, Pygmalion.

Genesis is poetry, another analogy-stretching way we reach beyond the world of solid objects and linear time, and so I suspect that there may be more "out there" than the literal words to which many concrete-minded believers pin their hopes. But I also suspect our little brains will never catch up to it. So, if Deity is defined only by what Human can make of It, atheism is a logical road to take.

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