JackDaydream wrote: ↑May 15th, 2022, 3:45 pm
I puzzle over what 'God' implies because this 'reality' beyond human thinking cannot be reduced to the anthropomorphic imagination. I see the various spiritual traditions, whether they suggest a God, like Christianity, or some reality which is not an actual deity, like Buddhism as pointing to some underlying aspect of human consciousness of importance.
An essential difference between philosophy and spirituality is that spirituality is mainly meant to be experience, while philosophy is meant to be understanding. This criterion has been crucial in my choice about God. I deal with the essential problem of theodicy not only by reasoning, but especially by considering my human experience; in this context, even reasoning is considered, to a large extent, in its being a human experience, rather than just a system to understand things. This is what is always ignored by all the answers to the problem of theodicy: they fail to consider the human experience as such, they consider it just as a concept. If we take seriously the human experience, we realize that any logical answer to the problem of theodicy, in order to be valid, must be an acceptable harmony of reasoning and experience, not only reasoning. It doesn’t matter if it works from the logical point of view, if it fails in giving a solid human experience harmonized with that reasoning. In other words, if anybody tells me any answer, my counter-answer is “I don’t care your reasoning; the fact is that I am suffering: I want to be met in my suffering, not just in my intellect”. This is the challenge that spirituality is proud to meet: meeting the whole person, which means including a whole relationship that includes charity, friendship, action, involvement. This is why I decided not to believe in God: because all answers to the problem of theodicy don’t make a valid whole human experience out of a reasoning. They just fly over my head, without touching my body, my emotions, my heart, my life. We could say that spirituality, in its most general meaning, is philosophy that decides to accept the challenge of meeting the whole person.
Once we get on board this mentality, we can realize that the problem of the existence or non existence of God needs to be re-addressed in a different way: what is important is the experience, not any ultimate rational answer. This means that I don’t care so much if I am an atheist and my friend is a Muslim, or a Christian, for example: what is important is not that my friend believes in something I don’t believe in; what is important is that they live an experience that is strong and intense to them. This is what I am interested in. As a consequence, I have no problem, as an atheist, even to go to their celebration, their cult, and even invoke and pray their God: I invoke your God, even if I don’t believe he exists, because what is important to me is visiting your experience, sharing it, as intimately as possible. Obviously, I will never be able to be intimately involved like a believer: I am just a visitor, but this is already a lot: I want visit experiences from their inside as much as possible. This gives nourishment to my inner life.
This way, even between me and myself, it doesn’t matter so much how to conceive God, or the world, or anything else: what matters is what kind of pregnant experience is able to come out from visiting that specific philosophy, that religion, or whatever experience.
JackDaydream wrote: ↑May 15th, 2022, 3:45 pm
Some, especially the materialist philosophers may dismiss inner reality and the focus upon the inner world. As far as I can see, even if this inner consciousness is mortal it is at the basis of human life and human values.
On one side I appreciate the criticism coming out from materialistic or similar positions: they have a revealing power, in making us aware of flaws, contradictions, hypocrisies. But, at the same time, it happens too frequently that criticism forgets to criticize itself. I think the strongest criticism to criticism must be, and is, something that is not criticism, cannot be attacked by criticism and, at the same time, is able to pose a challenge to criticism. This something is experience. Experience is not criticism. Experience cannot be attacked by criticism: you cannot criticize somebody who is just expressing their pain or their emotions: you can criticize concepts, ideas, but it is impossible to criticize experiences. On the contrary, experience is able, from its side, to challenge criticism by saying to criticism “You are ignoring experience, you are ignoring humanity, so, after all, you are ignoring me, all humans, and yourself as well. You are ignoring too many things in order to be the ultimate word”.