Monday, September 30, 2024

Truth paper outline and quotes

 Truth Paper - 8 pages - Chicago style Bibliography and Citation

Truth - it is unknowable, what is really out there. 

  •  Quotes from Caputo about how God is truly unknowable
  • Apophatic theology - we know what God is NOT and that's all we can really say given that God is indescribable. 
    • On what cannot be said  pg 145
    • models of god pg 23



Is God unknowable? 
  • “Each faculty must remain within its natural operation, and cannot shift to that of a neighboring sense. The eye, for example, cannot operate on the data of audition; hearing cannot taste; touch cannot speak, and the tongue cannot function one that is visible or audible. Each sense remains within the bounds of its own faculty within the operation prescribed by nature. So too no created being can go outside of itself by rational contemplation. Whatever it sees, it identify must see itself; and even if it thinks it is seeing beyond itself, it does not in fact possess a nature which can achieve this (William Frank 2007, 149-150).”
  • But I disagree. God may be indescribable in any way other than metaphor, which as many of the readings reminds us is medicore at best. There are ways to know and experience "God" even if we can't properly describe it.
    • Music!! - sacred attunement pg xiii
    • “…. tear ourselves away from this attachment to the non-existent and attach ourselves to real being [God]; then it ceases to have that existence in me any longer, and never will have it again completely… When I attach myself and cleave to what is truly being [God], I abide in that which will always was, is now and ever shall be. (147)”
  • A theology that would unfold "in truth" does not confuse itself with "the truth" - on the myster pg 38

Is there a right answer? - no.
ALL theology is theory and opinion. There is no way to know what is actually out there until we leave our mortal bodies and experience it for ourselves. However while living this life we must be aware and open to the fact that we don't know
  • The claim of absolute truth is the greatest single obstruction to theological honesty - keller on the mystery pg 8
  • Sacred Attunement pg 2 quote - examine our beliefs
  • sacred attunement pg 13 purple quote
  • we must accept our limitations in what we can know - on what cannot be said.. there gatta be a few quotes for that.
  • but our belief and fatih does shape the world we live in. We must accept our power and the influence we have (models of god pg 17) while also accepting the dependence we have on the very thing we have faith in.
  • ". Comparing views implies commensurability and a metric for comparison, by means of which we can detect the proximity of views to one another, to the categorical requirements, and to competitor views outside the category. This metric is what I have called (in ln Our Own lmage) a "disintegrating metric" - Wildman Ultimate Reality 262 -- perhaps what can't be said about GOD and what can be said about God cover two areas of speech - but the truth of what GOD is falls between them in the unspoken?
    • what if truth itself is a way, not an endpoint?What if the way and its truth deliver no totalizing absolute - nor deliver us to the indifferent dissolute? What if we have here to find a third way? - Keller on the msytery xiv
  • trans-religious theology (lately also known as 'theology without walls") attempts to ask and answer theological questions without privileging particular religious traditions or bodies of purportedly authoritative revelation. In light ofthe view set forth here, it is to be expected that every religious tradition and indeed every spiritual journey is oriented to really ultimate reality regardless of how the object of ultimate concem is actually described in each case - Wildman ultimate reality 263


Overall outline: What do apophatic theologians, both classic and contemporary, say about what can and cannot be said in theology? What is the relationship between the via negativa and the via positiva, between apophatic negation and cataphatic affirmation, between mystical silence and theological speech, between divine ineffability and divine revelation?

  1. Is God unknowable?
    1. What is God?
      1. Caputo's pantheism vs panentheism - the very ground we walk on.
    2. Is God unknowable?
      1. Yes
        1. Models of God - page 37 
        2. What cannot be said 150
      2. No - How can we know it?
        1. Music (Sacred attunement xiii)  and Poetry (cannot be said 236)
        2. The tearing away of oneself... (113, 147, 149 Cannot be said)
          1. Meditation and Plant Medicine 
  2. Is God unsayable?
    1. apophatic theology; the failure of language and the use of metaphor
      1. Sacred attunement's definition - xi
      2. on what cannot be said 111, 1121, 145
    2. cataphatic theology and theopoetics.
      1. Caputo definition of theopoetics
      2. Talking about God does not come down to concepts, propositions, and arguments (the only remedies in their medical bag when the doctors of philosophy arrive on the scene). Talking about God ultimately comes down to other discursive resources—images and figures, metaphors and metonyms, symbols and allegories, parables and paradoxes, stories and striking sayings, songs and dance—in which we seek to express the grip the unconditional has upon us, by which we have been seized from a time out of mind - caputo pg 31
  3. Whats the point?
    1. Is there a right answer? -No & why. 
      1. Multiple different faiths - and going on radical theology is possible that all or multiple of them are correct! 
        1. Spirit as an element as opposed to a deity; how deities came about, the self as deity (models of god - pg 6 & 28) --- using God to make the gods.
        2. Sacred Attunement pg 2
        3. Models of God pg 7
        4. ego death: 
        5. “…tearing the soul away from its contrary, to which it was adhering, and uniting it with that true reality which is beyond all reason. (149)”
        6. This to me sounds eerily similar to the Buddhist practice of non-attachment and on page 112 and 113 Franke writes that “for only silence can witness to the manifestation of God’s transcendence… God is manifest … in the..’small voice’ of silence.”
        7. Types of Religions: https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Solano_Community_College/SOC_002%3A_Social_Issues_and_Problems/14%3A_Religion/14.02%3A_Types_of_Religions#:~:text=Judaism%2C%20Christianity%20and%20Islam%20are,belief%20that%20multiple%20gods%20exist.
    2. So what is the point?
      1. The role of religion (models of god pg 25, sacred attunement pg 5)
      2. The role of mythology (the role of mythology: models of god pg 22)
      3. Just because we don't know the right answer, and quite possibly may never know the right answer, doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to figure it out. - "the truth-process does not eliminate uncertainty or its chaos, it makes it visible, in order to release a livelier, more redemptive order" - you can' t force religion/faith/truth on others. "it must emerge" from within them. - on the mystery pg 14


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