Interesting remarks relating Straussian concerns to Augustine, in early Christian historical context, here: http://www.academia.edu/1457615/The_Saeculum_and_Politics_Markus_Fortin_and_Augustine, beginning page 9 of the PDF.
As for Strauss, I'll look up him up on Augustine, though Strauss sometimes addresses the biggest names in the faiths that were never his through critiques of lesser but still interesting co-religionists.
Hindu Atheism has a long and by our standards quite ancient history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism
Since one of the main things that got me started on this subject again was an earlier discussion of atheism as a "moment" integral within and prefatory to monotheism, and since that comports so well with my own views on the ideal unity of faith(s), it is interesting for me to look at a "legitimate" Hinduism that is both atheistic and pre-Christian, so both Hindu and, in an idealized sense, "Judaic," Judaic in the sense of evolving from a pagan god concept toward an entirely different answer to "what would a god be?"
Of course, the philosophers are also Everyman writ large, trying to discover a link between reason and justification, or locate the point or points where one turns into the other. I'm not sure I understand which reductionist attack you see A and A "falling victim" to. The atheist/Sunday School attack? My hypotheses? Someone else's?
I started writing a longer response, then realized I was setting a new project for myself likely to take up a day or three, but I do hope to return to these hypotheses and to the radical implications of and answers to the Argument from Evil.
Also, on a topic from your initial comment that we didn't come to, are your able to explain in simple terms for a stupid Westerner how Buddhism or a "naturalist" Buddhism differs from "Hindu atheism"?
First of all, Psalm 139 is a wonderful piece of writing, and quite relevant to our purposes I think, so thanks for bring it up. It immediately makes me think of William Blake's "On Another's Sorrow," which speaks to a similar sense of the divine, for instance in these lines, which are repeated somewhat like a chorus:
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
But Blake's poem is a "Song of Innocence," and the Psalm is a Psalm, a poem or song of praise, not a commandment, and even commandments need to be interpreted before they can be understood. I don't see how "arrogance" is an issue here at all. There are several hundred other pages of Bible and other sacred writings that we have also not gotten to yet.
I'm not sure how Catholics are supposed to deal with that concern you raise specifically in regard to doctrines of salvation and damnation. It does seem to be a somewhat Sunday Schoolish problem, where we seek to conceive of an individuality defined in just such a way as to pose difficulties for somebody's as-stated rules for distinguishing culpable evil from innocent evil, or for assigning responsibility, or some such.
The easy answer in a layman's religious terms might be that, whatever a particular priest or nun or theologian might happen to say, you and I and the Catholic Church may not be able to define or know the true status and fate of the mass murderer's soul, but God surely would, and, anyway, what we have to worry about is our own real souls, the souls we know, not the soul of an imaginary individual or perhaps an individual depicted in the news but not really known to us.
I don't know if my answer is an acceptably Catholic answer, but, if we set aside possible doctrinal particulars, I think we're left with the same problematic I tried to address in the post: As soon as we start insisting that God "should have done" or "should not have done," we're discussing God as a simple natural existent and quasi-human being reducible to our peculiar human-natural propositions. We are also extending ourselves beyond what we are compelled to accept as real, a dialogic moment or onto-anthro-theological present, to what we imagine might be real or, more strictly speaking, we imagine we might imagine might be real. We are imagining the truth of a known falsehood for the sake of an imaginary falsification of the truly known.
Never would have suspected Bely - whom I know more for his critical work, never having read Petersburg - to have been a follower of Cohen, though I wonder how much relevance Cohen's turn to exploration of Judaic sources would have had, since for most of Cohen's career he was best known as a founder of the Neo-Kantian school.
Am thinking if I ever return to reading serious fiction again, Petersburg might go on the list.
If God is all-pervasive, as under most monotheistic understandings, how can "man" be simply "apart" from Him? Or, in a different sense, if we are one with God in Christ, as in the Eucharist or in other signs and acts typical for Christianity, or after the Crucifixion, or if God and Man were one in Christ, or if humanity is destined for a return to oneness with God, or if we acheive oneness with God after death, or we emerge into this life out of oneness with God, to cite some major traditions of the bridging of the notional gap, then any such "apartness" is clearly not a simple, irreducible, and irrevocable apartness in Christian belief.
Interesting remarks relating Straussian concerns to Augustine, in early Christian historical context, here: http://www.academia.edu/1457615/The_Saeculum_and_Politics_Markus_Fortin_and_Augustine, beginning page 9 of the PDF.
As for Strauss, I'll look up him up on Augustine, though Strauss sometimes addresses the biggest names in the faiths that were never his through critiques of lesser but still interesting co-religionists.
Hindu Atheism has a long and by our standards quite ancient history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism
Since one of the main things that got me started on this subject again was an earlier discussion of atheism as a "moment" integral within and prefatory to monotheism, and since that comports so well with my own views on the ideal unity of faith(s), it is interesting for me to look at a "legitimate" Hinduism that is both atheistic and pre-Christian, so both Hindu and, in an idealized sense, "Judaic," Judaic in the sense of evolving from a pagan god concept toward an entirely different answer to "what would a god be?"
(I mean the differences theologically or philosophically, not necessarily culturally or historically.)
Of course, the philosophers are also Everyman writ large, trying to discover a link between reason and justification, or locate the point or points where one turns into the other. I'm not sure I understand which reductionist attack you see A and A "falling victim" to. The atheist/Sunday School attack? My hypotheses? Someone else's?
I started writing a longer response, then realized I was setting a new project for myself likely to take up a day or three, but I do hope to return to these hypotheses and to the radical implications of and answers to the Argument from Evil.
Also, on a topic from your initial comment that we didn't come to, are your able to explain in simple terms for a stupid Westerner how Buddhism or a "naturalist" Buddhism differs from "Hindu atheism"?
First of all, Psalm 139 is a wonderful piece of writing, and quite relevant to our purposes I think, so thanks for bring it up. It immediately makes me think of William Blake's "On Another's Sorrow," which speaks to a similar sense of the divine, for instance in these lines, which are repeated somewhat like a chorus:
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/on_anothers_sorrow.html
But Blake's poem is a "Song of Innocence," and the Psalm is a Psalm, a poem or song of praise, not a commandment, and even commandments need to be interpreted before they can be understood. I don't see how "arrogance" is an issue here at all. There are several hundred other pages of Bible and other sacred writings that we have also not gotten to yet.
I'm not sure how Catholics are supposed to deal with that concern you raise specifically in regard to doctrines of salvation and damnation. It does seem to be a somewhat Sunday Schoolish problem, where we seek to conceive of an individuality defined in just such a way as to pose difficulties for somebody's as-stated rules for distinguishing culpable evil from innocent evil, or for assigning responsibility, or some such.
The easy answer in a layman's religious terms might be that, whatever a particular priest or nun or theologian might happen to say, you and I and the Catholic Church may not be able to define or know the true status and fate of the mass murderer's soul, but God surely would, and, anyway, what we have to worry about is our own real souls, the souls we know, not the soul of an imaginary individual or perhaps an individual depicted in the news but not really known to us.
I don't know if my answer is an acceptably Catholic answer, but, if we set aside possible doctrinal particulars, I think we're left with the same problematic I tried to address in the post: As soon as we start insisting that God "should have done" or "should not have done," we're discussing God as a simple natural existent and quasi-human being reducible to our peculiar human-natural propositions. We are also extending ourselves beyond what we are compelled to accept as real, a dialogic moment or onto-anthro-theological present, to what we imagine might be real or, more strictly speaking, we imagine we might imagine might be real. We are imagining the truth of a known falsehood for the sake of an imaginary falsification of the truly known.
Never would have suspected Bely - whom I know more for his critical work, never having read Petersburg - to have been a follower of Cohen, though I wonder how much relevance Cohen's turn to exploration of Judaic sources would have had, since for most of Cohen's career he was best known as a founder of the Neo-Kantian school.
Am thinking if I ever return to reading serious fiction again, Petersburg might go on the list.
If God is all-pervasive, as under most monotheistic understandings, how can "man" be simply "apart" from Him? Or, in a different sense, if we are one with God in Christ, as in the Eucharist or in other signs and acts typical for Christianity, or after the Crucifixion, or if God and Man were one in Christ, or if humanity is destined for a return to oneness with God, or if we acheive oneness with God after death, or we emerge into this life out of oneness with God, to cite some major traditions of the bridging of the notional gap, then any such "apartness" is clearly not a simple, irreducible, and irrevocable apartness in Christian belief.