I don’t wanna get burned either

****** my reply to John ********

Thanks for the on-fire hope…. I don’t wanna get burned either. My apologies if I introduced you to Sartre’ and sorry if you spent unneeded time reading Percy (he was a believing Catholic, you know.)

The two sources of truth are the easiest to sweep away, although yes, the historical sound case can be made for belief.

Faith – I’m not sure what this is or where it comes from or what it even means really…. Can you have faith in a truism ? I suspect you can only have faith (or not) in Good itself – being what we wrap with the persona of God. Yes that’s abstract, but my hunch is that the fall of man itself is seeded in the FINDING of good and evil, i.e. the Knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the fact that we think in terms of and sort out categorically things into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The fact that we bucketize, categorize it all! (but yet we have to – that’s what speech is)

Did Adam separate out in his mind and speech into good and evil before the discovery of knowledge? No.

How did he know God before? By faith? I think not.

But his own self-awareness (and shame) through the ‘knowledge’ of good and evil was his curse that man has lived with ever since. God himself has faded into the background and has Himself become only some penultimate cloud of conscious ‘Good’ and all that it means to be ‘good’. (total sovereignty, total power, consummate love, biggest baddest bestest father, wisest creator without a face or body but does have a manifestation of himself into flesh (his son) and his invisible being that floats within and upon and around us (his spirit).

THAT is the god I am calling into question! The one that I/we have made and supported with ancient memories, texts, accounts of miracles and walking on water and healings and resurrections that just smell like stories – yet stories that meet a deep need within.

I don’t want to deny God. I just don’t want to be responsible for supporting Him. And I sure don’t want to continue an emotional imagery that tends to fade the longer I live in this world – that even reeks with the feel of self-creation.

It’s been a long time since any of us were in the garden.

Does anybody remember what it was like?