What could possibly be more important in human interaction – for all practical purposes – than the distinction made between that which someone claims to believe or to know “in their head”, and that which they are able to demonstrate as the obligation of all reasonable men and women to believe or to know in turn?
Otherwise folks could simply tell you to do something and then, when you ask why, they respond “because I think that you should”.
It’s just that with God, it becomes of particular importance because of what is clearly at stake:
- morality on this side of the grave
- immortality and salvation on the other side of it
Right?
I can’t even get you [or folks like phyllo and james] to respond substantively to this:
[b][i]…until you are willing to apprise us of your own experiences, we don’t have the opportunity to react at all.
Let alone to compare the experiences that you have had pertaining to your rendition of God to the experiences that others have had pertaining to a very different rendition of God.
Let alone to connect the dots between the behaviors that you choose on this side of the grave as this is embodied in your belief in God as this is embedded in that which you imagine your fate to be on the other side of the grave. [/i][/b]
Which of course is the whole point of the thread!
In other words, pertaining to dasein and conflicting goods, your own rendition of this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin. Both in and out of church.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
Only shifting the focus from abortion in particular to God and religion in particular.
Or, more philosophically, from that which one embraces intellectually as essentially true to that which one has come to embody – for all practical purposes – as existentially true.