All Comments (8)

It's a great achievement for Islamic leaders and scholars as well as Newsweek and the Washington post to present this imperative opportunity for inter cultural and global philosophical dialogue. What's important is that by exchanging our ideas and comments regarding inter religious relations and world events that affect our views of each other as fellow human beings. Since the advent of humanity, We strove to make sense of the world we live in and the lives we've experienced. Worldwide curiosities to learn the true nature of life and our universe is an exceptionally rare virtue upon life on Earth. In other words, we're the only known species on the planet who've pursued to unravel these great mysteries and developed written philosophies based upon our understanding of the world around us.
One such philosophy that lasted throughout the ages of humanity is commonly known as religion and spirituality. Ever since our early belief in the Sky God and the God Mother from ancient Pagan times, we vigorously pursued to unravel the truth about our most profound questions. As any educated person would know that religion and their core beliefs or faith have evolved over time. Paganism, Monotheism and Polytheism have been influenced by humanity as these great philosophies have influenced our perceptions and decisions in life over the ages. Over time humanity has embraced diverse religious faiths and spiritual convictions that continue to influence our behavior in our times and most likely beyond.
What's vital for humanity's progress and even survival is to know the true nature of faith itself. To understand the true origins of faith. But most of all, is to accept the truth for whatever it may be. Each one of us will learn the absolute truth once we die. But until that time comes for anyone of us to depart this world, we really don't know the answer to God's existence nor do we have the absolute truth in regards to the true nature of God. Besides if we did possess the truth, there would've been only one religion on Earth with no diversification of any way, shape of form. There would only be one holy scripture written throughout human history.
Considering one's religious faith to be absolute, while considering others to be false would be ethnocentric at best. While collectively searching to unravel the mysteries on nature, life and the universe through sincere reasoning and serious research would be enlightening at its worst. Most importantly, we must accept the fact is that none of us have conclusive evidence to confirm our core beliefs and there's always an immanent change that our most cherished beliefs could be wrong. Our greatest challenge would be to tolerate the truth no matter what it may ultimately be. With such an open mind, we would be able to overcome any future discovery that would contradict our faith regarding the true nature of life, spirituality and divinity.
Humanity does have the ability to achieve such a social achievement. However, it's solely up to humanity and not any other entity or groups of entities to decide our destinies. Each one of us has a choice to make; either hopelessly engaging into meaningless inter cultural conflicts or combine our scientific and cultural gifts to thrive into an enlightened global civilization that could ultimately expand beyond our solar system. The choice is yours, and the time to make it is now!

I like to think I've learned a thing or two about 'monsters,' myself. :) For starters, if you let them scare you away from dreaming at all, they don't exactly get *weaker.

And there's a lot more to the Dream than the Dweller on the Threshold. ;)

Hi, PaganPlace.

"When the reason dreams, monsters are born."

- FRANCISCO GOYA

Regards.

P.S. I like dreaming. Decades ago I regularly had precognitive dreams, including one of Robert Kennedy's asassination. I saw a murdered man lying on the floor in a distinctive posture. It was the exact same image as that of a photo on the front page of the NY Times two mornings later.

Hey, Norrie:

Concise generalizations suck. :)

You can't stop people from dreaming, and you probably wouldn't want to. :)

Frankly, our dreamlike and dreaming experience is something that most of our literalist minds, whether they are theistic or atheistic, show quite the failure of curiosity about or interest in truly using.

In a way, by dismissing them as 'mere' shadows, we miss out on good things, and relegate some things we could be seeing about ourselves and our world *to* an easily-dismissed realm of the 'unreal' where they therefore have uneamined power over us.

I mean, if your goal is to see the world for illusion, there are worse ways to think than the 'mutual dream' of our experience, anyway. We start where we are, wherever we think we're going.

:)

Wendy,

Alan Greenspan called, he would like his glasses back.

Ms. hoyt-

Who decides if there is no god? How much does the imagination of man constitute reality?

It is impossible to fully address the notion of God without allowing for the possibility of the notion's reality. It may very well be true that there is no God, or gods, but one must keep in mind that there is only god, or no god, if the individual invests authority into his or her conclusion.

Professor Doniger's statement on god being fully enlivened by our attention and we being truly enlivened by god's seems to point, in my eyes, to the reality of the unutterable existential groaning of mankind to know its origin or essence and/or the essence/origin/nature of things. We see a depth to reality, but we have not the faculties to address that depth. Whether God exists or doesn't exist is beyond the point.

The point is that God, as a notion, has been used to address the inexplicability of life and our relationship to this notion of vastness allows for a subtle dialectic between that notion and ourselves to produce an intuitive understanding of the nature of things...the most we can hope for.

Professor Doniger,

If you had simply accepted that there is no God, and no gods, your essay would have been much shorter and less convoluted.

Could it be that the sacred, though a manifestation, indubitably, of the human imagination, is in fact the product of a conversation between the a sacred senter in man(woman) and external forms of sacred space? That the sacred maintains a reflexive consciousness in which it peers out through our human eyes to see itself in the world? In other words, is the sacred itself found within the psyche or being of the human and does it discover itself in physical sacred space, in myth, in religious experience and insight. Or is it the other way around? or is it both? Could it be that the sacred in fact resides both in the heart of man (or woman) and the external world? Is it this internal form that grants authority and meaning to forms of exogenous sacrality? Or the other way around? or is it both? Could it be that this is the place that beholds the lamb of god, in all its mystery, and knows its sacrality by way of a kierkegaardian absurdity? Is the sacred in man looking out, finding itself in the world, reflecting itself back, to be recieved, and so revealed and understood, as an actual mechanism in the individual ontological reality? These are questions of mine.