RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Driving most of the insanities hag-riding the nations today is the madness of taking science for the ultimate concern as well as the ultimate validator.
For this madness as it formulates in the economic and political functions of life we have to thank scientists and theologians, the first for over-reaching their mission and the second for under-reaching theirs.
Scientists are rampant and theologians supine. This is FUBAR. And that is the fundamental reason Die Welt ist aus den Fugen geraten.
A fraction of the universe is available to sensory experience and therefore to science. Science is utterly incapable beyond sensory or mediated experience. It has no way to get there and never will. Without experience mediated by something not the observer, science is nothing going nowhere.
Science is circumscribed absolutely by experience mediated by the five senses and their bionic enhancers. It cannot see or operate beyond these mediators. Science depends unconditionally on experience mediated by the five senses.
Knowledge gained by mediated experience is the domain of science and science can do very well in this domain. It is highly capable, thankfully, especially after it was freed from superstition by a great Franciscan Theologian (Bacon), Scottish Physician (Lister) and German Physician (Hahnemann).
However, beyond mediated, sensory experience lies the vast majority of the universe and of experience. This is called direct or unmediated experience. Direct experience is the ability characteristic of life in the dimension of psyche (animals and humans) and preeminently the dimension of spirit (humans).
For humans, the majority of experience is direct, not mediated by the senses. This includes scientists, many of whose “discoveries” are in fact prodigies of direct rather than indirect (sensory) experience.
Theologians are responsible for learning and teaching knowledge gained from indirect (mediated) experience and knowledge gained from direct (unmediated) experience.
Since the rise of Protestant Liberalism with the school of Albrecht Ritschl, who tried to put a cheerful face on wilting before the bumptious attacks of Christianity’s cultured despisers — the very scientists theologians encouraged, reared and trained — theologians have sought to ingratiate themselves to scientists in hopes scientists leave them some area they can call their own and live with in peace, no matter how constricted by the dictates of “science.”
In other words, to remain respectable in the academic world, the world they created and allowed to be dominated by scientists, theologians sought to base theology on sensory experience. Scientists rightly laughed at them for doing that, but that deserved derision did not bring theologians to their senses.
Tom Driver was conducting literal touchy-feely sessions in his classes in Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, during the 1960s and 1970s. The cultured despisers were not impressed. Theologians rightly condemned the craven venality of Tom’s pretense of religion.
For nearly two centuries now, scientists have been allowed to dictate the standard of validity and the object of ultimate concern — namely, themselves — with no less tyrannical intent and destruction of life than previously had some theologians and always have all Mohammedan scholars and clerics.
Scientists have become madmen utterly bereft of the normal governors of self-and external scrutiny. They have to be stopped. The easiest way to do that is to attack first their assumptions and then their current obsessions.
And theologians have to be shamed and kicked into standing up and doing their duty.
Bumptious scientists and craven theologians are the reason the nations are hagridden by madness. The madness is scientists claiming more for themselves, their method, their work and their results than the facts merit and theologians claiming less for themselves, their method, their work and their results than their duty requires.
Reform the academic faculties and the madness will subside. The pathogen is in the schools, in the liberal arts and science faculties. Cauterize it, kill it and restore the body it attacked by reforming those faculties to do their duties neither more nor less than reality requires.
Life itself, not science and not theology, is the standard of validity and God, not religion, is the ultimate concern.
Psalm 2
1 Why are the nations so angry?
Why do they waste their time with futile plans?
2 The kings of the earth prepare for battle;
the rulers plot together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.
3 “Let us break their chains,” they cry,
“and free ourselves from slavery to God.”
4 But the one who rules in heaven laughs.
The Lord scoffs at them.
5 Then in anger he rebukes them,
terrifying them with his fierce fury.
6 For the Lord declares, “I have placed my chosen king on the throne
in Jerusalem, on my holy mountain.”
7 The king proclaims the Lord’s decree:
“The Lord said to me, ‘You are my son.
Today I have become your Father.
8 Only ask, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance,
the whole earth as your possession.
9 You will break them with an iron rod
and smash them like clay pots.’”
10 Now then, you kings, act wisely!
Be warned, you rulers of the earth!
11 Serve the Lord with reverent fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
12 Submit to God’s royal son, or he will become angry,
and you will be destroyed in the midst of all your activities—
for his anger flares up in an instant.
But what joy for all who take refuge in him!
New Living Translation
Joel D. Harrison: The Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology
AMDG – VICTORY
