Well done Philo

You have displayed all the pride and arrogance of modernism.

You have God all boxed up and perfectly presentable to fit your idea of him.

I don't think you have any idea of what Peter is writing about.

I join with Priscillian in recognising that the Christian God, Zeus, Mithra and all the others is and were ideas existing in the human brain. They have all been credited with desirable human qualities such as those listed by Philo: love, purity, wisdom, etc.

Ideas only become real when they lead to action outside the brain, and in this the believers constantly use the image of God and His promise of a life after death to encourage us to be good. In real life that call to goodness has manifestly failed in the face of quite different pressures in human society. Only when the physical relations between humans are recognised as the source of their problems will there be a chance of fixing them. Belief in the supernatural is a fog which prevents people seeing problems and solutions clearly.

The scientific problem is to study how those particular ideas formed in the brain.

Perhaps we should go back a few hundred years to what grew to be called the Enlightenment and realise that it was a struggle in the name of reason, against tyranny, superstition and inequity. It is pretty easy to oversimplify the faculty of the human mind that creates and operates with abstract concepts, described as a type of thought or aspect of thought we call reason. Its heritage in the Greek word "logos" gives us three separate words logic, rationality and reason. All three words are associated with the ability of the human mind to predict purposeful effects based upon presumed causes.

However, the Enlightenment, it can be seen, left open a crucial question ....... i.e. How does reason justify itself? Well, Modernism of the early 20th century is highly problematic because it presents as mechanical and seemingly a period of unreason flirting seriously with irrationalism. e.g. the connection of fascism to capitalism, and the tyranny of Stalinism. However, in the midst of Modernism already is the theme of Postmodernism with Duchamp and DADA where we first see that there is nothing to prevent reason from challenging reason.

I suspect that we humans share many unconscious yearnings and that the freedom to follow our intellectual curiosities is one of the greatest. We need to actively find true diversity which includes an ability to adopt a framework of perspectives that can be inquiring, analytical, critical and evaluative. This is still a struggle in the name of reason, against tyranny, superstition and inequity, but why not challenge minds with reason, free inquiry, dignity, participation and imagination. Why not understand fragmentation, provisionality, chaos, ambiguity, skepticism, conflict, vastness, disorientation, questions, confusion, incoherence and coax out of chaos the rudiments of a civility without borders.

From 1995, with the birth proper of the www it now makes sense that "postmodern" has mutated into a hyperlink to the 360 degrees of an infinite meta-narrative with its global network of moderators and always connected (neither a system but an environment) and where to say that the "word" was with teddy is to say that teddy is meaningless.

Keiran all the internet has done in that regard is give us more channels of crap. It has made information more accessible but more importantly it has made a great deal of misinformation for truth to hide in. Now more then ever do we need to teach kids how to separate fact form fiction with reality based rational thought. That also means you can't isolate one part of your world view from that process. The belief in the supernatural must have the full force of evidence based reasoning put on it. It's like saying there is no such thing as sprits however the fairies told me....

I think it is too easy today to slip from discussing religion into phsychology, philosophy, modernism, post-modernism etc. This is the mistake I think Peter makes. The facts are these.
1. Religion exists.
2. We live in a (developing) secular state.
The problem is how to maintain social harmony and work with our differences. Both points of view have come some way for the common good. Whether the churches admit it or not they practice relativism and work within modernist (if not completely post-modernist) practice. Whether rational secularists admit it or not religion pervades our society. God is not dead, humans will always make gods. Christianity has moved at a glacial pace towards the new world. Things are getting better. Now Islam........

The above commentaries are possibly enlightening, but do they prove more of escape from earthly reality than possibly an answer to the problems we are having today.

Though a professed Christian, but as one who has become more interested in philosophy than religion in his old age, looks to reason for answers as a balance to faith. It was what St Thomas Aquinas became partly convinced about, as a remedy to get Christians out of the Dark Ages, which proclaimed overmuch about the next life being better than the first life.

So it is with the Moslem Mullahs today, who mainly through intrusion and injustice from the former barbarian West, do preach that the next life grants rewards that the first life can never give.

But while residing on this earth, as well as faith is it not better to use the faith that the Nazarene Jesus taught mixed with the reasoning to make us think deeply about the Good Samaritan, and to put ourselves in the position of our enemies and wonder whether it might be our fault rather than theirs?

A bit of strong historical study rather than swamped with religous faith, does reveal why St Thomas finally resorted to reason after learning how Muslim Moorish scholars after building a university is Spain were inviting all non-Muslims not about a belief in Allah but a belief in Golden Greek Reasoning, which through Aquinas opened the way to the Western Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, and our present democratic age.

Even as the tough-minded Churchill once said, we much need religion, but without a true sense of history we fail to be true to ourselves. Unfortunately, too much religous faith can make us less faithful to the true Christian message, which contains so much compassion and forgiveness we never much hear about it these days.