Atheists’ Affirmative Beliefs Your friend has rejected religion. There is not a God, he believes. There is not a Creator of the universe. There is not a Sustainer of it. There is not a God present among us in some way. There is not a God component to our conscious self-awareness. There is not a transcendent […]
Read more...Category: Consciousness
Review (Part Seven): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
The dream and the reality Right after his introduction, Hart took a couple of pages to tell the story of waking from a pleasant dream, but with a sense of foreboding. Now, near the end of the book, he continues that story. The dreamer is now awake. He considers the ingenious intricacy of the distortions […]
Read more...Review (Part Six): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Having explained how we approach the natural only over the interval of the supernatural, Hart turns to the incoherency of materialism. Absolute truth The human longing for truth involves a loyalty to an ultimate ideal, and that ultimate ideal beckons to us from beyond the totality of beings. We would not care at all about […]
Read more...Review (Part Five): The Experience of God — Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Bliss Mind over matter There is a mystery at the base of all of our ruminations about consciousness, and that sense of mystery resists reduction to material causes. Reality is one, embraced within the totality of being. “[P]erhaps we really should look elsewhere for the source and sustaining principle of that unity.” And Hart does: […]
Read more...Review (Part Four): The Experience of God—Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Consciousness The mechanistic vision of reality holds that material forces are inherently mindless; intrinsically devoid of purpose. Consciousness, on the other hand, is everything that matter is not: directed, purposive, essentially rational. Materialism and the fact of consciousness cannot be reconciled. The materialist point of view means making no accommodation for any spiritual reality. But […]
Read more...Review (Part Two): The Experience of God — Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
In part one, we considered Hart’s explanation of what it is meant by “God,” in order to avoid the distraction of puerile attacks on straw-man stand-ins for the real God. In this post, we consider Hart’s discussion of the philosophical backdrop against which his argument will be received. This will help us to avoid prejudices that we […]
Read more...Review (Part One): The Experience of God–Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
This book is a rare find. Hart eloquently puts forward what is fundamentally wrong with the materialist point of view that lures so many into a blinkered perception of reality. Part One: “God” The Straw Man Here we consider the first of the theses Hart pursues: that the new atheist argument against God is a […]
Read more...Review: Ex Machina
Sci-fi movies with whirring gadgets and robots and what-not might be fascinating for techno-philes. Ex Machina is not such a movie, however. Gadgetry is not the point. You’re meant to focus on every word of dialogue, by man and machine. Sure, there is tension building, and there are plot twists. But this movie is about […]
Read more...The Trapped Woman
These are reflections on a sermon of the same name, by Jason Harris, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church, New York City, February 15, 2015. We understand the text at John 7:53 through 8:11 to be about how we should not judge others. This is the story of the woman caught in adultery. The church leaders […]
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