> On Oct 28, 2016, at 2:17 PM, Helmut Raulien <h.raul...@gmx.de> wrote: > > Thank you, Clark, for this nutshell summary of God-concepts since the Greek > abstraction.
After I wrote it I worried I’d come off as being patronizing as I know many here knew all this. I just put it in that form because I think the unifying of God as ground of being and God as intervening high power needn’t be unified. So I hope the tone didn’t come off wrong. > So it (your summary) is a basis for getting a feeling, or different feelings > towards the different varieties of "God": Pity? (So alone), Envy? (No.), > Worship? (missing information about better or worse worlds.), Empathy? (yes, > in case of process theology.) Maybe people can choose their belief in order > to have a feeling they like to have, and maybe this is ok, if they reflect, > why they want to feel this or that way, and not have an unreflected feeling > like revenge, superiority, and then construct a God-concept out of that. I am > too confused now to tell which feeling about God I want to have, but > confusion (Tohu Va bohu) is always a good start. Well I’m not sure I want to get into religion proper from a personalist perspective here. After all most of us likely have our own views on God (or whether there is anything like an interventionist God). While I personally have trouble with many elements of of the Whitehead/Hartshorne process theological God, it does seem a position that can’t be neglected. I’ve read some of the works on Peirce’s religion and I confess I’m really still not sure what he really believed. (Not God as real but not actual that’s discussed in the NA but the other aspects he brings up at times) Where I’m most sympathetic to Peirce’s view of religion is that whatever our views, it seems like inquiry has to proceed empirically in some fashion. My sense, perhaps completely wrong, is that most people either proceed to think about God on the basis of religious experience or via a more traditional kind of rational transcendental argument for metaphysics. The latter tend to focus on God as being in some sense. The former tend towards atheism or agnosticism depending upon their experiences (or lack thereof) and skepticism towards others experiences. A few people believe in a theist type of God on the basis of experience, but I assume most reason poorly. (That’s not a knock on religious believers just that most people don’t reason carefully so it’d follow that most don’t about religion either) The more I think on it the more my own view is that Peirce’s process approach to epistemology offers the best solution. Our beliefs are not volitional. All we can do is inquire. If we really inquire carefully and still believe, well that seems a good basis from which to believe (or disbelieve) So to answer your question while maintaining a connection to Peirce, I suspect the answer ends up being a question about what experiences we are analyzing.
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