Ethon

Thank you for your well-considered and positive response to my essay about Eckhart and the Haitian Earthquake. About your ‘conscience...', remark being equivalent to the God that I hinted about:

Generally, it’s not ‘our conscience that is God’; for, the technical definition of God is that, this ‘Chap in the sky’ as you characterise God, is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient, etc. Our conscience then does not arise to that level of definition, or gravity, if only because many people’s conscience is defective, if we think that, what they sometimes do is ‘bad’.

Likewise, conscience could not be God; and, referring back to Eckhart who adopts the apophatic position, which as you no know, says, God, or more precisely, the Unum is nameless, indescribable, etc., would not make conscience God. So based on this apophasism, God is not. That is: God is not anything that we can describe ‘him’ by. In contradistinction, God is what we cannot say about Him. Because God is not: He is not, not; therefore God is. I hope that I’ve made this sufficiently confusing for you. Theologians and philosophers do things like this all the time!

The best then that we can say about conscience is that, it is not God; but, if it is informed or directed by God, then it acts godly. This last point of course, nicely brings me to your ‘PS’ addendum: This God, or what ever way we chose to describe 'him', is a moral, epistemological or ontological variable, or shall I say concept that we have developed to give some meaning to our existence. This concept is a semantic or linguistic device. But such a concept of God is important, if only to the extent that it is a psychological ‘crutch’ - or a drug that people need to cope with life. The concept of God is the Marxian ‘opiate of the people’ claim. Lots of people depend on the opiate simply because they are mortal, and being mortal they die – we all are mortal – so we need this anaesthesia to deaden or lessen the mortality-burden - re. Prince Hamlet of Denmark, ‘To be or nor to be’ soliloquy - that we carry around.

Arriving at this understanding a few years ago – that God is a linguistic concept - allowed me to recover from my ‘bruised’ state, where religious indoctrination and conditioning made me think that ‘I was lost’.  So again, I say like Eckhart, and like other later thinkers, that ‘God is man’s thoughts cleaned-up, purified and apotheosised’. This realisation then doesn’t negate the need for God, if only because our existence needs some rational or conscious explanation. This rational explanation comes about partly because of the Cartesian observation of: 'Cogito ergo sum’. God-talk therefore becomes one of the many forms of logical and necessary reasoning; a reasoning as valid and necessary as when we express feelings or desires, or make claims about things in general.

What however has been the problem for most people, especially for preachers and theologians in coming clean, and admitting the anthropological nature of God, is that they have religious, economic, and political interest in maintaining the status quo; and, although secretly they may know that God-talk is indeed allegories about man; they are not prepared to make public this knowledge for fear of losing their economic and other benefits. But worse, they could not abide what they think would be public displeasure if they came out and declared their hand. Thinking then, that the truth would be inconvenient, they play it safe by taking refuge in the dictum that, ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.

George