This guy's thoughts on God, reality, and Christ's humanity resonate with what I've been thinking about these days. Life, existence, our very selves are absurd and meaningless without the existence of a personal God. Yet so many people go through life thinking they can ignore the ultimate questions about reality. They avoid the questions because they're avoiding the answers. They convince themselves that sex, fame, money, success, personal fulfillment, or even just the immediate moment are ultimate reality when they are mere trifles compared to what God really wants for us.
When it comes to ultimate reality and our humanity, there are really very few options.
If there is no God, there is no such thing as the "human" in the classically Judeo-Christian sense. There is an existential human, thrown into existence and forced to determine his own identity by choices that are, ultimately, absurd. There is the pagan human, a struggler against forces that he cannot understand or control, but can only hope to religiously placate or nobly ignore. In this contemporary time, the human is a category in the pages of science, an observation in the notebook of the psychologist, yet these disciplines do not give us our humanity, but increasingly take it from us. They tell us we are dancing to our DNA while being no more than one species among millions briefly occupying a warm rock in a third-rate solar system in a second-rate galaxy in a universe that doesn't care.
If there is a God, then our humanity stands in reference to God. If it is the God of pantheism, we are God every bit as much as anything else is God. Humanity is a meaningless concept. If it is the God of Deism, we can only look for his fingerprints on the project and hope to derive some significance for our existence from that distant being. So far, the message isn't promising for our humanity or our future. If it is the God of eastern spirituality, our humanity is one level among many, a place we pass through from one existence to another, and posessing no special significance and, ultimately, illusory.
If it is the God of the great theistic religions who truly exists and has made us to be who and what we are, then humanity has meaning. "Special" meaning. Real, endowed, created meaning. All three religions share the creation accounts in Genesis, and agree that human beings do not just reference God as a social or psychological fact, but in the essence of our identity. Without God, we do not know who we are. Without God, we lose our humanity, and all reference points for what it means to be human.
Read more Mark Spencer.
1 comment:
hmm, just curious, wat would be so wrong with losing our concept of humanity? i ain't saying act like an animal, but clinging on to wat is safe and comfortable doesn't always reap the most benefits. By the way danika, i like ur blog.
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