Clericalism, Modern Gnosticism?
....Our age seems to have specialized in God-management - the absurd endeavor to keep functional some respectable notion of "God" and yet at each step to neutralize any divine reality that interferes with the way in which we have constructed the world. The domestication of the Almighty. The relativizing of the Absolute. The taming of the Fire of divinity into a porcelain cup of lukewarm tea.
The chief culprits have been certain ideological clerics and professional religious, who knowing from the inside both the terminology and the dynamics of theological systems, have subtly turned the truths of revelation against themselves in the construction of a subtly nuanced yet anodyne "Christianity" without tears and without passion. Without Truth....
We deny God most radically, not by becoming atheists, but by a more effective method: we ban him from our lives as an active burning presence, and construct for ourselves instead a poetic phantom that cannot be distinguished from a pleasing landscape or a pleasurable stimulus vibrating through our nerves. We make God so grand and sublime that that his relevance is reduced to that of background music, to be switched on and off at will. Whatever else God may be, he is not allowed to become active Center, Source and Goal, Father, Lord, and Judge. Lover. "Too anthropomorphic", cries purely critical reason of such names for God. Yet would not "too close for comfort" be a more truthful appraisal?
The Fire of Mercy by Erasmo Levia-Merikakis Vol. III, pp. 315 - 316
Several doors along from here are a young couple with two littlies - he an engineer & she a Math teacher at a Catholic Girl's High School. In the course of casual conversation last week she informed me that she and hubby are atheists (both ex Catholics). I responded by laughing & said "you must be joking - atheism is a denial of all that underpins modern science." I told her try reconciling Portia's oration on mercy with Darwins Random Natural Selection theory. She didn't know any Shakespeare & yet she is English!!! She said she tries to be the best person she can be. She doesn't realize that that desire is her seeking redemption. I told her (amid laughter) I would be speaking more on the subject. I'm convinced atheism is a form of mental impairment.
ReplyDeleteThe weird thing is these folk don't know what a human being is - by denying their true origins they use their Freewill to deny their will is free - sheesh
ReplyDeleteIt, atheism, is surely an impairment in the ways we "see" that prevents us from seeing what is Most Real and the Source of everything else we call "reality." Historically, the greatest scientists have been religious people, many of them Catholic, who were fascinated by the wonders of the created world and wanted to understand its workings and its origins as well. Everything created somehow images the Creator. But today we get so lost studying the microcosm we forget its relationship to the whole, and to the Source of the macrocosm we call the universe.
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