We can approach God in many ways. We can understand Jesus message and mission from many sources. We can grasp Him in our thoughts. We can have the feeling since we are born. We can get inspired by the martyrs. And we can get in touch by the Bible, or be enlightened by a miracle. God speaks to us in the most unexpected fashions, and it is up to us if we are willing to hear His voice or not. One man that I think understood the Gospels of the Lord more than anyone else in his time was the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. With "guilt" in Crime and Punishment, "nihilism" in The Damned, "sanctity" and "greed" in The Brothers Karamazov, and surprisingly with "naivety" in The Idiot, this Russian novelists grasps in very simple and unexpected moments what seems to be the whole message of the Gospels of Christianity. What do we do when the most impressive religious revelations take form through art, and literature? In a civilization that turn its back on God, and no longer has the force to hope, Dostoyevsky seems to me the author of a rebirth of Christianity. I live you with the particular passage that caught my attention this time: The essence of religious feeling doesn't depend on reasoning, and it has nothing to do with wrongdoing or crime or atheism. There is something else there and there always will be, and atheists will always pass over it and will never be talking about that" (1969: 240).
lunes, 14 de febrero de 2011
sábado, 12 de febrero de 2011
Being a New Yorker
I must confess something. Sometimes New York appears to me as a very strange city. This is not bad nor good. It is something beyond good and evil. I'm talking about a subjective experience, a perception of the society around you, and the internal feeling that it produces. How after a night of drinks and laugh turns next day as an ephemeral moment without consequence. It appears in my imagination and memory as a dream. The sense of reality, of here and now, is blurred with this apparent sensation of alienation. This nihilistic state of the mind and the soul is frequent in New York after a very emotional and self-rewarding experience. Or at least it is how I perceive it.
I think this strange spiritual tension between I as a subject, and the world that surrounds me has something to do with the speed of time and the enormous and complex amount of diversity present in New York. Maybe it's common to other people in other cities, but I can only speak it from the place where I live. Diversity in a city like New York overwhelms you. First it is extremely charming. The impressions that leave in the mind are of excitement and discovery. Every person is like an ambassador from distant lands. It's a place where you get into context with the rest of the world. My conclusion is that for the subject, the I, is an overreaching society that remembers you that you are an individual. Even more, it's a society that makes you individual. Whereas in other societies, smaller, less diverse, the sense of community, the sharing of symbols and a common feeling gives you a strong identity. In New York you are forced to be the author of your identity, or fall into an immense loneliness. The charm of diversity gives you food for adventure, and a quest to embrace the world in every single person you meet. It's a universal place where humanity as an amorphous body meets, which means that there is no community at all. No holding from an ancestry or a culture. When something embraces everything, it excludes nothing, and the unity of identity is lost when finding yourself unopposed by nothing. Identity depends also on identifying what you are not. In New York you could be anything, there is no possibility of exclusion. You must determine yourself, which somehow speaks of freedom, but it also requires strength and character. Otherwise you are lost.
In a city where you are exclusively an individual, where you can't hold yourself to a community, the danger of falling into nihilism and loneliness is high. Sometimes I move between both, between the strength of character to form my identity independent from anything else, and the strange feeling of losing yourself in an unstoppable flux of events and people. In New York everything goes fast, time is filled with emotions, experiences and persons. When you turn your attention to your past, the collection of events is so big that you realize how fast you must move in order to survive. This survival is not a matter of life and death. It's a survival of remaining in the unity of your identity, and not dismembering it into unintelligible pieces. The speed of time is enhanced by the number of experiences and people you get in contact with. Overcoming the danger of being lost is the daily experience that forms the New Yorker. If there is unity in the identity of the New Yorker, it's his capacity to form himself everyday in a society which diversity breaks any possible sense of community. The device many of us use is distinguishing ourselves by reflecting on our background, by remembering where we or our family came from (another country or another State). Even a born New Yorker reflects on this family background.
The point is, the danger of diversity for the subject is his weakness in failing to determine himself in the most complex way almost every single day. Otherwise loneliness is a punishment for those that are too nostalgic. Never mind why New York is a city of eight millions of individual persons.
I think this strange spiritual tension between I as a subject, and the world that surrounds me has something to do with the speed of time and the enormous and complex amount of diversity present in New York. Maybe it's common to other people in other cities, but I can only speak it from the place where I live. Diversity in a city like New York overwhelms you. First it is extremely charming. The impressions that leave in the mind are of excitement and discovery. Every person is like an ambassador from distant lands. It's a place where you get into context with the rest of the world. My conclusion is that for the subject, the I, is an overreaching society that remembers you that you are an individual. Even more, it's a society that makes you individual. Whereas in other societies, smaller, less diverse, the sense of community, the sharing of symbols and a common feeling gives you a strong identity. In New York you are forced to be the author of your identity, or fall into an immense loneliness. The charm of diversity gives you food for adventure, and a quest to embrace the world in every single person you meet. It's a universal place where humanity as an amorphous body meets, which means that there is no community at all. No holding from an ancestry or a culture. When something embraces everything, it excludes nothing, and the unity of identity is lost when finding yourself unopposed by nothing. Identity depends also on identifying what you are not. In New York you could be anything, there is no possibility of exclusion. You must determine yourself, which somehow speaks of freedom, but it also requires strength and character. Otherwise you are lost.
In a city where you are exclusively an individual, where you can't hold yourself to a community, the danger of falling into nihilism and loneliness is high. Sometimes I move between both, between the strength of character to form my identity independent from anything else, and the strange feeling of losing yourself in an unstoppable flux of events and people. In New York everything goes fast, time is filled with emotions, experiences and persons. When you turn your attention to your past, the collection of events is so big that you realize how fast you must move in order to survive. This survival is not a matter of life and death. It's a survival of remaining in the unity of your identity, and not dismembering it into unintelligible pieces. The speed of time is enhanced by the number of experiences and people you get in contact with. Overcoming the danger of being lost is the daily experience that forms the New Yorker. If there is unity in the identity of the New Yorker, it's his capacity to form himself everyday in a society which diversity breaks any possible sense of community. The device many of us use is distinguishing ourselves by reflecting on our background, by remembering where we or our family came from (another country or another State). Even a born New Yorker reflects on this family background.
The point is, the danger of diversity for the subject is his weakness in failing to determine himself in the most complex way almost every single day. Otherwise loneliness is a punishment for those that are too nostalgic. Never mind why New York is a city of eight millions of individual persons.
lunes, 7 de febrero de 2011
God, Jesus and Logic
It is common to hear atheists defend their unbelief in God by bringing logic or reason, and similar vaguely used terms brought up in a conversation. It happened to me recently and I tried to explain what I usually think about this use of logic rules to try to unprove God. I'm aware that such conversations and use of logic is a thing of amateurs, because the notion of logic itself breaks the head of the most prominent philosophers. That is, not even the great names in the subject agree on everything. However I don't want to make this note on a debate of logic, but on certain remarks on the possible understanding of God. For this reason I'm going to use logical thinking to demonstrate why logic cannot be used to test God.
God is broadly believed to be the Creator of the world. Plenty of metaphors are used to describe this role He plays in the existence of all things, by portraying Him as the Architect of the Universe, the Consciousness of the World, the Universal Legislator, etc. The prime element is that, if we admit that he is the Creator, then he drafted the rules of the world he created and which existence comes only after His act. This argument goes for the atheists, so follow me closely. Independently of your faith or lack of it, if we reasonable accept as an intellectual experiment, that something like God is the only thing from which the Universe could have spring from, then He is previous to the rules that determine the world He created. These rules are a posteriori in existence. They didn't play any role in God's presence itself. This, my friends, includes logic. The order of the Universe is determined by many laws, and some of them are formal rules of logic. Because we are beings necessarily bound to the rules of this world in which we live in, it is impossible for us to think outside the most basic notions that structure it. That which transcends the world, that lies beyond its rules, that's precisely God. Then how can we even conceive an explanation of the nature of that that is totally outside our sphere of reference? Thinking otherwise is the biggest of illusions brought about by that callous sin called pride.
God as a concept cannot be debated. It is a naive discussion. However, the experience of Jesus Christ can. Why? Because he walked this Earth and his life was bound to its rules... to a certain extend. There are only two assumptions that we have to use in discussing Jesus Christ. Or we acknowledge that he is the son of God, or we don't. If we don't, then we can legitimately debate Jesus Christ on strictly historical and rational terms. But if we do, then we have before us a dilemma. Jesus is both a man, so we can judge him as such, but he also shares with God in His universal nature, so there is something that runs away from our limited understanding. So in Jesus the limitations of the particular man are overcome by the universality of God. As human beings all of us are particulars, fragments of the universe, and we cannot but see the universe from our fragmented peace of the world, whereas God is universal and eternal. Put it from this perspective human beings as particulars are totally alienated from the eternal. But if we acknowledge Jesus divine background, then God as a universal an eternal being becomes part of the human experience. Human beings and God's being become united, linked, in the body of Jesus Christ, and that's the whole point of his mission: the final union between men and the Lord. And last but not less important, if Jesus as a man shares also the nature of the eternal in his same body, then as such, as God-made-man, there is nothing that he could not have done. The only way of debating Jesus' miracles, and Jesus infinite love for humanity, is by stating a priori a totally human nature, and putting aside any divine background.
Jesus Christ is a synthesis between the universal and eternal of God, that embodies and fills the whole universe and beyond (because He is previous to the existence of the universe itself), and the particular condition of human beings in their subjective experience. Only as such he can be our savior. Only as such his message can be understood. If we deny this, Jesus' mission and teachings become blurred and historically inconsistent. It is up to you, as a person, to choose which side of the story you believe in.
God is broadly believed to be the Creator of the world. Plenty of metaphors are used to describe this role He plays in the existence of all things, by portraying Him as the Architect of the Universe, the Consciousness of the World, the Universal Legislator, etc. The prime element is that, if we admit that he is the Creator, then he drafted the rules of the world he created and which existence comes only after His act. This argument goes for the atheists, so follow me closely. Independently of your faith or lack of it, if we reasonable accept as an intellectual experiment, that something like God is the only thing from which the Universe could have spring from, then He is previous to the rules that determine the world He created. These rules are a posteriori in existence. They didn't play any role in God's presence itself. This, my friends, includes logic. The order of the Universe is determined by many laws, and some of them are formal rules of logic. Because we are beings necessarily bound to the rules of this world in which we live in, it is impossible for us to think outside the most basic notions that structure it. That which transcends the world, that lies beyond its rules, that's precisely God. Then how can we even conceive an explanation of the nature of that that is totally outside our sphere of reference? Thinking otherwise is the biggest of illusions brought about by that callous sin called pride.
God as a concept cannot be debated. It is a naive discussion. However, the experience of Jesus Christ can. Why? Because he walked this Earth and his life was bound to its rules... to a certain extend. There are only two assumptions that we have to use in discussing Jesus Christ. Or we acknowledge that he is the son of God, or we don't. If we don't, then we can legitimately debate Jesus Christ on strictly historical and rational terms. But if we do, then we have before us a dilemma. Jesus is both a man, so we can judge him as such, but he also shares with God in His universal nature, so there is something that runs away from our limited understanding. So in Jesus the limitations of the particular man are overcome by the universality of God. As human beings all of us are particulars, fragments of the universe, and we cannot but see the universe from our fragmented peace of the world, whereas God is universal and eternal. Put it from this perspective human beings as particulars are totally alienated from the eternal. But if we acknowledge Jesus divine background, then God as a universal an eternal being becomes part of the human experience. Human beings and God's being become united, linked, in the body of Jesus Christ, and that's the whole point of his mission: the final union between men and the Lord. And last but not less important, if Jesus as a man shares also the nature of the eternal in his same body, then as such, as God-made-man, there is nothing that he could not have done. The only way of debating Jesus' miracles, and Jesus infinite love for humanity, is by stating a priori a totally human nature, and putting aside any divine background.
Jesus Christ is a synthesis between the universal and eternal of God, that embodies and fills the whole universe and beyond (because He is previous to the existence of the universe itself), and the particular condition of human beings in their subjective experience. Only as such he can be our savior. Only as such his message can be understood. If we deny this, Jesus' mission and teachings become blurred and historically inconsistent. It is up to you, as a person, to choose which side of the story you believe in.
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