[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Mr. Broderick asks two very pertinent questions:

>Is it just a stroke of luck that you happened to live in a 
>culture where people read the Gospels, or would you have expressed the same 
>inexpressible experience in terms of animism, Hindu pantheism or 
>Scientology, with the same confidence, had you lived among one of those 
>mythic systems? 

The question is perfectly fair. It was not Krishna nor Grandfather Coyote who
came to visit me. Not all parts of the various miracles, visions, visitations,
and religious experiences I suffered are beyond description, but, unfortunately,
some of them I was commanded not to speak of. 

If you are asking me the theoretical question, “would the Virgin Mary appear to
a man in the form of Parvati if he were a Hindu, rather than a man raised in
Christendom?” That question no mortal can answer. Would my wife have accepted my
proposal of marriage had I been born a Zulu?  

There is a possibility that God is all things to all people, and appears in
whatever form we cloak Him in. If so, I have been deceived by the cloak. It is
possible that I am in error, and that I misunderstood what I saw and what I was
told. 

If so, I ask only that the Hindus pray to Vishnu to preserve me through higher
reincarnations as I clear myself of this error, and that the Shaman intervene on
my behalf with the ancestral spirits, if, in return, I pray my God forgive them
their sins and errors. If we all pray for each other, perhaps we can all be
saved, no matter who, in the end, turns out to be right. 

>Would it make any difference which form of limited analogy 
>you employed for the unutterable? 

Well, the analogy comes from A. Abbott’s book FLATLAND. In this case, it is the
culture in which my readers were raised that concerns me, not my culture. 

>This is not a captious question; many 
>people in the USA assert that to be saved one must gain and confess a 
>personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and declaring for L. Ron Hubbard 
>or Pan or the Sky Spirits and their messenger Binnungar the frill-necked 
>lizard just won't do it.

I am not in a position to pass judgment on the truth or falsehood of the
assertion. The unambiguous mainstream belief of the Christian tradition agrees
with the proposition that Christ is the exclusive door to salvation. I pray that
the good Lord might extend His mercy even to those that reject and scorn Him, as
I did for so many years; but I am not sure that this is logically possible. I
assume the form, and the content, of the worship has an effect on the fate of
the worshiper: otherwise worship is pointless. 

>>a man who grows into an adult, while losing nothing of his personality when he
was a 
>>child, builds a new level onto old foundations.

>Well, yes, but I hope this observation does not entail the implication that 
>atheists are children and you an adult speaking of what we'll only grasp 
>when our adolescent tantrums are outgrown?

Heaven forbid! The analogy I hoped you would prefer was that I was the Yahoo
addressing the Houyhnhnms, the all-too-human ogre talking to creatures of pure
reason. My only point there was that some changes are organic, and do not
involve a loss. A two eyed man who (somehow) grows a new organ of sight and
opens a new eye in a new viewpoint, is not the same as a one-eyed man giving up
an old viewpoint to move to a new viewpoint: binocular vision lends depth. 

An example is better than an analogy. Like most good Stoics (and all good
Objectivists), my reason had concluded that there must be an objective moral
order to the universe (for, if not, then there is no ground to condemn those who
falsely think it so. If there is no virtue, intellectual integrity and honesty
are not virtues, therefore the thinker has no reason to practice even the small
amount of honesty needed to think about the question of whether there is a moral
order to the universe). As a Christian, it was shown to me that this moral order
which I dimly perceived with my reason, is a living thing, a Mind, a Principle,
that can operate on me independent of my reason, and bring me (I pray) into
conformity with it.  In sum, the old me and the new me can agree on the
objectivity of morality; where the old me had a relation to the moral order of
the universe like that of a mathematician to geometry, the new me has a
father-son relationship with it. 

But far be it from me to pretend any superiority of insight or wisdom! The gods
would smite me for my hubris, were I to condescend. You may think of me, if you
like, as one who has been flung from the Olympian cliffs of sanity and logic
into the mired swamp of primitive superstition; but if you use that analogy,
just keep in mind that, to me, it look as if I have just been freed from a tomb
and flung up into the dazzling clouds. A theist and an atheist cannot agree on
basic axioms. They cannot agree which direction is “up”. They can agree upon the
flinging. But, at least they can both agree that their common enemy, the
relativist, is wrong. The change was not merely an arbitrary movement from point
A to point B according to an arbitrary axis. It was either a fall or an ascension.