[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:32 PM 12/9/2004 -0600, John Wright wrote:

>Mr. A Square has no word for "volume" and
>he cannot express the overwhelming solidity of his three-dimensional visitor.

This is interesting, because...

>A religious experience, or, to be precise, a visitation by the Paraclete is a
>literal inspiration, the entering of one spirit into another. The Holy Ghost
>enters the mind and soul and works a transformation.

...that way of putting it embraces such a specific, contingent and local 
tradition. 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? Would it make any difference which form of limited analogy 
you employed for the unutterable? 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.

>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?

Damien Broderick