Originally posted by ryunix
I am not sure I’m following point #2
Can it not be a fact that we are unable to understand God? I mean we are unable to prove or Disprove God, everything is speculation. So why should we stop talking about it 😕
To use your example:[b]
I recall people on here who have said that God’s notion of justice or morality is simply not one that we can comprehe an understand. Just like a higher morality. These statements are not useless be required
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Can it not be a fact that we are unable to understand God? I mean we are unable to prove or Disprove God, everything is speculation. So why should we stop talking about it
Talking about it
per se is not the problem. The problem is with the kind of talk. The early Christian writer Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, employed paradox of negation to point out that the metaphors and symbols being applied to the divine were just that. Zen masters do the same.
As I noted, I think that symbol, metaphor, allegory, myth, etc. has its place. I think it represents an aesthetic attempt to talk about what cannot be properly be said. As a mundane example, I do not object to e.e. cumming’s metaphor “the moon’s a balloon.” But it says more about the mind-state of the poet at that point (fantastical reverie, perhaps?) than about the moon.
But this does not mean talking about a “higher morality” and relating it to something we do understand (morality) does not help us understand,
Yes, it can mean precisely that. One must
first assume that his concept of God is somehow “moral”,
then speculate about the possible morality of genocide. What you end up with is naming something as “moral”, even though it violates your own sense of morality, simply because you want your God-concept to be moral. You end up in the position of asserting that immorality is moral if it comes from God, nothing more.
God is a premise. Scriptural inerrancy, for example, is a premise. Once one accepts these premises, the effort is to try to construct an internally consistent system based on those premises. But the internal consistency of that system does not establish the premises.
It is similar to when someone asks what my slerpee tastes like and i say "bananas". Does it actually taste like a banana, what type of banana, how ripe etc, who knows and who cares but it is banana like in taste and they have an idea. Not a specific fact on its exact flavor but they know it tastes like something they can understand.
Suppose the person in your example has never eaten, or even seen a banana? Would it be sufficient, or even fair, to say that your banana slurpee tastes like an orange—simply because the person
does know what an orange tastes like?
I think it is more like trying to explain to someone who was born without the capacity to taste, what tasting is. So, you might say that tasting is like hearing music. That is an analogy, trying to relate a known experience to an unknown one. But it does not really convey “taste.” It does not describe the reality, which is pre-conceptual.
In Zen there is a state in which one experiences the pre-conceptual reality in which and
of which one is. All language—metaphorical, paradoxical (as in Zen koans)—is aimed at eliciting, through what I would call aesthetic means, that experience in the listener. But there can also be a lot of conceptual groundwork that goes before—and can later be dispensed with. Some Zen teachers eschew even that, in favor of direct practice: intense koan meditation or simple practice at stilling the conceptual running of the mind.
The quote from Foyan is a koan. Koans are not explained: one must work on them oneself. That koan, however, I selected because it is on point regarding this discussion. Therefore, some context is provided. I won’t attempt to contextualize it further. You are free to take it on, or not, according to your own predilection.
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I often sacrifice simplicity for precision, and that can, I admit, lead to overly recursive sentence structure. Your synopsis was more efficient; it was also less precise. I am not going make a point-by-point clarification of it in order to accommodate you. I am trying to address your specific questions.
Hemingway probably spent as much time polishing his “simple” prose, as Joyce did his complex prose; he just wrote more books. I don’t spend much time polishing my posts on here. If you need to complain—instead of simply questioning—you’re probably not part of my intended audience.
Then again, I could simply offer koans, and assume that anyone who needs contextualization is not part of my intended audience. I have lately been thinking that may be the better course.
I do
have a Thesaurus somewhere; but I don’t use it enough to know where it is.