Reddit reviews The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
We found 16 Reddit comments about The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The Experience of God Being Consciousness Bliss
Former fedora atheist here. For a long time, I felt like I belonged to the "skeptical, rational, atheist" tribe. But at one point I became disillusioned with the crowd, and realized that I no longer want to be part of it. I started looking for alternatives, groups I'd want to be a part of, and I settled upon Catholicism. I first approached it from a purely secular perspective, as a serious and reliable institution. But I ended up accepting the faith and God as well.
Here's my progression, what drew me in more and more:
I. The intellectual life. I was always fascinated by science. It was interactions with promoters of dishonest creationism (usually evangelicals) that originally pushed me towards rejecting religion and to become a militant atheist.
Then I read a book that changed how I view the relation between Church and science: God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I now follow @catholiclab and similar profiles on Twitter, which post interesting facts about Catholic scientists. It's simply astounding how this information is completely absent from contemporary popular culture.
II. Just on an emotional level, feeling "closer" to Catholics. It helped that my family is Catholic. On YouTube, I've watched many videos by Bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Mike. They are very lucid and reasonable in addressing contemporary issues. I'm sure there are many others.
I'm also reading biographies of martyrs who died persecuted in modernity by revolutionary ideologies. My TODO reading list includes books by Thomas Merton, Joseph Ratzinger, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.
III. The aesthetics. I'm subscribed on Twitter to profiles like @Christian8Pics which post a lot of inspiring imagery. Familiarity breeds liking. I also listen to music on YouTube: liturgy, Medieval chants, Mozart's Requiem, Byzantine chants (usually Eastern Orthodox).
All these sideways might seem very strange to a Catholic convert or someone raised Catholic who stayed Catholic. But if someone is immersed in a materialistic, mechanistic and atheistic worldview, there's no available grammar or impulse to even take God or the life of the Church into consideration.
IV. Actually knowing what theism is all about. The "god" dismissed by popular atheist debaters is a caricature of God as understood by classical theism and the actual tradition of the Church. So is the "god" argued for by Intelligent Design proponents, biblical literalists, fundamentalists.
I read 2 books by Edward Feser (Catholic) and David Bentley Hart (Eastern Orthodox) to finally become comfortable with this very simple point. The books I read are, in order:
By Edward Feser:
By David Bentley Hart:
Each author has his own biases, which might trip the reader up at times (Hart is biased against evolutionary psychology for some reason). But these books produced in me a fresh view of where to begin seeking for God. They gave me the confidence to proceed.
Atheism always addresses "god" as if it's simply one entity among others, part of the natural world, for which one ought to find physical traces and then one simply "believes in the existence of god" (much like you'd believe there's a car parked outside your house, once you look out the window and observe it's there -- meaning it could just as well NOT be there).
Creationists just muddy the waters with "god of the gaps" and "Paley's watch" style theories, which simply postulate "god" as an explanation for why this or that aspect of the natural world is a certain way, a tinkerer god which molds the physical world into shape, or which created it at some point in the past.
This has nothing to do with how God is presented by the authors I quoted, and they go to great lengths to make this point.
I started by understanding that there needs to be an ultimate answer to certain metaphysical questions which, by definition, can't have a physical answer (e.g. "why does there exist a physical world in the first place?"). There's a qualitative difference between physical questions and metaphysical ones, and the gap simply can't be breached by adding more layers of physicality. Hart makes this point very well (he differentiates between the Demiurge that deists, atheists and creationists discuss, and God as the "necessary being" of classical theism).
The ultimate metaphysical cause is "necessary" because it's simply a necessity for the physical world to have a non-physical cause which keeps it in existence. If the only thing that existed was a quantum field that didn't produce any particles, or a single proton that always existed and will always exist, the "necessity" would be exactly the same. Nothing would change even if it turned out our Universe is part of a Multiverse.
Then, through reasoning, one can deduce certain characteristics of this ultimate answer, which ends up forming the classical theistic picture of God as a "necessary being" which continuously creates every aspect of the physical universe. Feser is very good at explaining this part and especially at underlining how tentative and feeble our understanding of the unfathomable is. He also explains why it has to be a "being" rather than an unknown impersonal cause. It's a humbling experience.
But as Bishop Robert Barron stated in his interview on the Rubin Report, philosophy only takes you halfway there. Looking back, the existence of God simply makes sense and is a no-brainer. Faith doesn't have to do with "accepting that God exists with no evidence". Faith is about what you do once you realize that the existence of God is an inescapable conclusion of rational thought. What do you do once you realize that He exists and is conscious of us? You have to go beyond the impersonal, and engage, interact. Here's where prayer, the liturgical life and spiritual exercises come into play.
Unlike conversion, faith isn't a one-time historical event, it's a daily effort on one's part to drive one's thoughts towards the infinite and the ultimate cause of everything. This requires individual effort, but it is not an individual venture. One has the entire tradition and life of the Church to guide you: selfless persons who dedicated their lives to help people like you and me.
Here's how Feser, in his "Last Superstition" book, describes the various ways of conceiving of God:
>To understand what serious religious thinkers do believe, we might usefully distinguish five gradations in one’s conception of God:
>1. God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.
>2. God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours. He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space. Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations. He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.
>3. God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.
>4. God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.
>5. God as Aquinas knows Him now, i.e. as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.
What I've been talking about is at #3. Atheists and creationists are debating #1 and #2. #4 is a gift to be accorded by grace, and is what people strive for in their spiritual life. #5 is the ultimate goal of the Christian life.
I was a nonbeliever. I'm now a Catholic theologian. The best thing on the market right now that everyone should read is David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Most of the atheists and Christians I meet today don't really know what they mean by the word 'God.' A lot of classical theism has been lost to modernity. Hart gets things squared away with what we mean by the word 'God.' It's immensely helpful.
David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss might provide some reassurance of monotheism. It's great.
I suggest starting with the book The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart (here). It's a book that attempts to show what the major religious traditions traditionally meant by "God." It's extremely different from Mormon God and very eye-opening.
I remain chiefly interested in Christianity. I also have difficulty saying what I believe is "factually true" about Christ's life, but I find myself drawn toward Christ as a person: his wisdom, humility, and love. In short, I continue to desire to be a disciple, even if I operate with less certainty than I used to. Christ, as the archetype of the Good Man, resonates with me. For now, for me, that's enough.
A recent work by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God is well worth reading (it is more philosophical than its title lets on).
Ed Feser's The Last Superstition is good and I would also recommend his Scholastic Metaphysics.
As a panentheist (not pantheist) and a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, I would recommend:
David Bentley Hart
https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526005966&sr=1-3&keywords=david+bentley+hart
Marcus J. Borg
https://www.amazon.com/God-Never-Knew-Authentic-Contemporary/dp/0060610352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006014&sr=1-1&keywords=borg+god+we+never+knew
Alan F. Segal
https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Convert-Apostolate-Apostasy-Pharisee/dp/0300052278/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006077&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=segal+apostleship+apostasy+of+Paul
Rennyo's Blog
https://rennyo01.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/god-immanent-and-transcendent/
John Paraskevopoulos
https://www.amazon.com/Fragrance-Light-Journey-Buddhist-Wisdom/dp/1597311456/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006153&sr=1-3&keywords=paraskevopoulos
First I would point out that depending on your background you may be under the assumption that there is a dichotomy between the Bible and science. The reality is when you place the Bible in its proper context such a dichotomy need not exist. Secondly, I would recommend David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. Hart points out the flaw of the strict materialism of the new atheists and shows how it is a flawed philosophical approach that most of the new atheists take (often without even being aware it) which prevents moral outrage and ultimately undercuts most of the new atheists arguments against theism. Much of his argumentation comes from being both a theologian and a scholar of Nietschze. The reason I bring this book up is the issue that I'm seeing in your post is that you seem to be moving towards this materialist philosophy. I should note that this book is an apologetics book (a discipline I don't care for) but rather a philosophy book. Ultimately Hart even argues that an atheism that is not founded on materialism actually has the ability to have profound moral outrage. I hope that this will help you navigate your journey, whatever path you end up taking.
That is not what I was saying at all. I was speaking of "God" as the source of being—an understanding of God broadly affirmed by many different religions (Abrahamic, of course, but also Hindu and certain forms of Buddhism, etc.). This God is categorically different than the god whose existence is so often debated by the new atheists and their detractors. It seems to me that the new atheists have created a straw-man version of god that they deny and so many Christians have rallied to defend the truth of that fabrication.
This is a fantastic book if you are looking to learn more.
I read his book a long time ago and thought it was great. I don't know what he's like as a debater but from memory, his book was solid. If you're looking to check out apologetics "from the other side", I'd also recommend Feser's The Last Superstition. I haven't read it yet but it's well-known in Catholic circles to be one of the best books written against atheism (tied for #5 on our sub's top 20 books). Someone also recommended this book to me recently, you might want to check it out.
The Experience of G-d: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart
Five Proofs of the Existence of G-d by Ed Feser
Let's Get Biblical!: Why doesn't Judaism Accept the Christian Messiah?
The Beast That Crouches At The Door by Rabbi David Fohrman
Free D-loads:
Secular By Design: A Philosophy of Noahide Laws and Observances by Alan Cecil
Living Up To The Truth by Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb
G*ds Your Forefathers Did Not Know
Towards a Renewed Case for Theism
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life
We can know some things about God rationally. We can only know God personally.
This is how we experience all relationships. I can know things about my friends, for example, by looking at them. I can tell how tall they are, or the color of their hair. We may be able to know something like blood pressure with the right measuring equipment. To know them as a friend though is mind-to-mind, interpersonal.
Using God as an example, I think we can know that there is a God rationally through certain rational arguments (Experience of God for some thoughts on that). Knowing him, though, is only through the hard work of interpersonal communication. For Christians (and other religions, for that matter), that is through contemplative practices. That said, we mostly accept second hand knowledge from the contemplatives. We take information from those who have known God, and apply the lessons rationally to inform non-contemplative praxis.
What career?
I believe that what makes our life meaningful is the meaning we give it. If for you that means committing to religion, then it is good for you to do that. I've personally met a bunch of people who said they felt like you did before joining the Church and that it really turned their life around.
>Just looking for reassurance that believing in God could be a plausible belief system.
I've only studied Christianity, but I would say that it definitely is plausible. There is a long tradition of very intelligent people who have thought a lot about the issues of God and religion, and whatever the New Atheists may say the answers these people have come up with can't be dismissed lightly. I would recommend this book, and especially any of the popular work of Swinburne or Plantinga (note: haven't read this one, but heard good things about it and Plantinga knows his stuff), as an introduction to the academic study and defence of theism.
>The possibility of God is all I've got, if I want to defeat my suicidal thoughts and embrace life fully.
Go for it, and I wish you the best of luck (though I also second others' recommendations of seeking counselling, it was a great help to me when I needed it).
Selfishly I will hope that at some point you might come to see the meaning I see in an atheistic world and be in a better space to consider the merits of atheism, but it sounds like that isn't what is important right now.
I'd recommend reading Hart's The Experience of God for quality answers to most of your questions here.
It lays out the philosophy of theism better than anything else I've read on the topic.
>I’m genuinely confused, how is your faith in the bible different than cult members’ faith in their cult leaders’ words?
The difference between the Bible and a cult leader's words are pretty substantial.
A charismatic preacher such as a cult leader has little but his words to legitimize himself. Thousands of books and letters have not been written around the People's Temple. There is no systematic and epistemological study of the vast majority of cults that matches that of Christianity or even the other major religions on Earth. Even most academics who are atheists and are not being completely uncharitable will agree with this.
>Also, what is the single philosophical argument you find most impactful to your conversion?
The Five Ways by Aquinas are good. But their function is not to convince people that God exists as much as it is to establish a foundation for the rest of Aquinas's theology. If you want a good book on the "essence" of what God is I would suggest this book.
But honestly, the people who become convinced of God's existence are not those who read a philosophical proof and then believed. Speaking from the experience of my most intelligent friends, belief in God comes from the most unexpected places. One of my friends came to believe while reading a passage from Dante's Inferno. Another came to believe while going to the March for Life with their fiance. And there is another friend who realized they believed while arguing with someone over the existence of universal morality.
My point is that belief in God does not come from reading a single philosophical or historical text. Rather, it appears from a complex blend of life experience, knowledge, and reflection. It is a long process that even the person himself may not notice until they find themselves at the cusp of believing. Another way of thinking about it is this: a war is often not won due to a grand battle; a war is won because of the many hundreds of skirmishes across many battlefields and points.
This is my favorite introductory book that covers the basics.
For primary sources in regards to the Fathers that gave Eastern Orthodoxy its intellectual shape:
Origen: On First Principles
Gregory of Nyssa: On the Soul and Resurrection and On the Making of Man
Athanasius: On the Incarnation
For more contemporary works, I’d suggest David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God and That All Shall Be Saved
I can recommend some books.
For general theology:
For living a Christian life:
For adjudicating between denominations:
Some essays and blogs:
Do you need a denomination? Yes. All truths cannot be equally valid; therefore, some denominations must be closer to the truth than others. In the end, Christ teaches that the Church will be preserved throughout history. The question to answer for yourself is: what is the true Church? Obviously, I'm Eastern Orthodox and am convinced my Church is the fullest expression of Christianity, so read my comment as being spoken by a person from a particular group who has his own biases. Feel free to check out Orthodox Christianity if you start looking our way.
Edited