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page 1: Vision
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Vision
Our growing minds are infinitely plastic. Every new child begins to absorb information from its environment as soon as it begins to grow.
The traditional Christian life aims for the vision of God 'face to face'. Thomas Aquinas calls this final perfect state of human existence beatitude. Aquinas 608. For Christians, the vision of god is a post mortem experiences.
If the universe is divine, however, we experience god in life. Every thought, word, feeling, action, every experience, is experience of god. This god appears to us not only as heavenly bliss, but also as war, murder, rape and famine.
We use theology and religion to come to terms with the divine. When the divine is invisible, the possibilities of persistent error, fraud and corruption enter religion. The touchstone of truth becomes the will of those in power. In power here means 'to be able to deny life to dissidents'.
This project began within the Roman Catholic Church, The most dangerous feature of this Church is the repression of knowledge. There is a firm and clearly documented party line in Roman Catholic theology, and all who expect a welcome from the Church must clearly toe it.
Here, we take the view that a just society can be run in the external forum without constraining the internal forum. All this requires is a common view both on how to act, so as not to violate the sovereignty of other people, and on how to deal with people who act outside this constraint. We see it as the task of theology and religion to develop and criticize models of action within the constraints of individual freedom.
Our chosen disciplines, physical theology and natural religion reflect this attitude. Physical theology is the general task of identifying human needs and modelling ways to fulfill such needs while respecting the human and natural world. Natural religion is the business of receiving such ideas, testing them and putting them into practice. Not an easy task.
Freud felt that it was necessary to repress our natural instincts in order to create civilization. This view may be reflection of our Christian past, which has been run on the premise that we are all guilty of at least original sin, and most are sinners from birth to death. Our vision is not so pessimistic.
We do not believe that the opposite to repressive civilization is chaos. The world that we see is incredibly complex and worked out in infinitely fine detail. We are not inherently evil. We have been tried in the crucible of billions of years of survival. This means that the range of our possible responses covers the total spectrum from love to murder. To prevent murder, we need to prevent situations arising where the death of one party is the only option seen to be viable.
Such situations will be a mixture of mental and physical conditions. What is to be lost if the only alternative to starving to death is to go to war with a reasonable chance of plunder and survival? Condemning the plundered party to starvation. By preventing the physical condition, we render the mental condition superfluous. If there is enough food to go round, why bother murdering the neighbours to get more. The same for oil, and everything else
Our vision then is a theology of humane survival and a religion to match. Many others have this vision. Ours is simply a small contribution to a tide of opinion which may raise global levels of human cooperation to the point where war can no longer be seen as necessary.
(revised 18 June 2007)
Links
| Aquinas 608 Summa II I q3 a 8: Whether man's happiness consists in the vision of the divine essence 'I answer that, Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. To make this clear, two points must be observed. First, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: ... If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists, as stated above (this question articles 1, 7; q 2, a 8). back |
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Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
