Religion is the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
I love it when it comes to be that other people are writing about the same thing as me. You might be interested to read about Isaac Newton; he was of quite his own mind. Here's a couple snippets of my own writing from just yesterday that follow your thinking quite closely.
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I accept a fundamental commonality of all things, God in effect, because we’re part of a universe that at some times must be allowed to exist in totality for the sake of our mental sanity. However I find myself unwilling to address God directly because God can be addressed at all times in our life in a multitude of indirect ways. Simply refraining from the dialectic is enough.
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I aspire merely to a spiritual life of reasonable faith that matches time for all it’s days as it goes it’s way.
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To illustrate the necessity of totality let me pose a question. Is it the Earth that pulls the Moon or the Moon that pulls the Earth? For in truth the Moon orbits us so faithfully that it’s face never turns away and the Earth is the free and lusty soul which spins beneath it’s gaze. And yet in another truth the Moon is a drag tearing at our clothes and digging in it’s toes thereby ruffling the fabric of our surface, creating the ocean’s tide and molesting our most delicate tectonic plates. Yet more and more poetry of this raging life can be brought before your eyes and so totality must be answered by concluding that it is the both of them who are dancing with their arms wrapped together and yet it is the conceptual objective of our scientific method to place a pin in the space between them where the material phenomena makes itself apparent—here’s where of gravity has sung. Eureka, we’ve found it! The Nobel prize!
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Nihilism is rather like the ultimate stick in the mud of forgetting every other perspective in the universe and God is the offer to release the hand you've unknowingly clenched. Absolutely there is something to what religion's selling because nothing in the secular world feels anything like a ritual does to experience; you just have to try it. It's wise to acknowledge the powers apparent and to leave control to the unconscious. Time passes in mysterious ways.
thanks for this post, Shifra! Your part on science reminded me of the key distinction Wilhelm Dilthey made between science and the humanities: science seeks to *explain* the world, but it cannot *understand* it (in the elevated way that philosophy and religion can, for example). the tension inherent within a "scientific worldview" is that science cannot tell us what is meaningless or meaningful because its domain is exclusively the empirical world: what one can touch, taste, see, etc. So by definition, science cannot transcend the material world--that is for the other humanities disciplines 🕺🏻. in my opinion, because science will always be dependent on *language* to express the world, it will always be subordinate to disciplines that deal with language, and thus meaning (poetry, philosophy, history, etc.)
I totally feel religious without being religious! As though rituals add depth to life, even if they don’t add meaning.
This was a beautiful Shifra!
I love it when it comes to be that other people are writing about the same thing as me. You might be interested to read about Isaac Newton; he was of quite his own mind. Here's a couple snippets of my own writing from just yesterday that follow your thinking quite closely.
...
I accept a fundamental commonality of all things, God in effect, because we’re part of a universe that at some times must be allowed to exist in totality for the sake of our mental sanity. However I find myself unwilling to address God directly because God can be addressed at all times in our life in a multitude of indirect ways. Simply refraining from the dialectic is enough.
...
I aspire merely to a spiritual life of reasonable faith that matches time for all it’s days as it goes it’s way.
...
To illustrate the necessity of totality let me pose a question. Is it the Earth that pulls the Moon or the Moon that pulls the Earth? For in truth the Moon orbits us so faithfully that it’s face never turns away and the Earth is the free and lusty soul which spins beneath it’s gaze. And yet in another truth the Moon is a drag tearing at our clothes and digging in it’s toes thereby ruffling the fabric of our surface, creating the ocean’s tide and molesting our most delicate tectonic plates. Yet more and more poetry of this raging life can be brought before your eyes and so totality must be answered by concluding that it is the both of them who are dancing with their arms wrapped together and yet it is the conceptual objective of our scientific method to place a pin in the space between them where the material phenomena makes itself apparent—here’s where of gravity has sung. Eureka, we’ve found it! The Nobel prize!
...
Nihilism is rather like the ultimate stick in the mud of forgetting every other perspective in the universe and God is the offer to release the hand you've unknowingly clenched. Absolutely there is something to what religion's selling because nothing in the secular world feels anything like a ritual does to experience; you just have to try it. It's wise to acknowledge the powers apparent and to leave control to the unconscious. Time passes in mysterious ways.
GG
thanks for this post, Shifra! Your part on science reminded me of the key distinction Wilhelm Dilthey made between science and the humanities: science seeks to *explain* the world, but it cannot *understand* it (in the elevated way that philosophy and religion can, for example). the tension inherent within a "scientific worldview" is that science cannot tell us what is meaningless or meaningful because its domain is exclusively the empirical world: what one can touch, taste, see, etc. So by definition, science cannot transcend the material world--that is for the other humanities disciplines 🕺🏻. in my opinion, because science will always be dependent on *language* to express the world, it will always be subordinate to disciplines that deal with language, and thus meaning (poetry, philosophy, history, etc.)