Oley oley olsen freeo
I’m an expert on the hidden god, so I’m interested in what Rabbi Alan Lurie has to say about it.
This notion, that God’s presence is hidden, is a significant dilemma for many, and for some is clear proof that God does not exist…Many site the Holocaust, for example, as clear proof of God’s impotence or indifference.
No not proof; evidence; reasons. The notion that God’s presence is hidden is a reason to think god either doesn’t exist or is a nasty trickster.
The first step, then, is to let go of a literal vision of God, and to begin to know that the search for God is more akin to the search for love and connection than the search for a graviton or Big Foot.
In that case, why call it “God”? (I know I’ve said that some ten million times, but they don’t listen, so one just keeps having to say it again.) If you’re searching for a feeling, why call it by the same name as the all-powerful person? Well because that way you can make a living as a cleric. Any other reason?
the true purpose of religion is to help us recognize that we are more than our momentary desires
and that’s why god is hidden. Uh huh.
It takes a lot of time and effort to find god.
We don’t expect…to sleep through school and never open the textbooks and yet miraculously absorb the material.
So why don’t parents make their infants struggle to find them? Why isn’t that considered the best way to raise children?
Then he ends by saying the proofs are not much good and besides they’re useless because the point is the feeling. You have to have the feeling, and then you don’t care about the proofs – or the fact that god is under the currant bush behind the barn ten miles down the road in a distant galaxy.
I have this argument with liberal rabbis and ministers all the time. I don’t understand why they agree with my about everything and still need to keep talking about God like it was something real and not just their metaphor. Why do they need to borrow an anthropological metaphor from fictional literature? GRRRR. Sometimes they frustrate me more than the fundamentalists and Orthodox.
“Well because that way you can make a living as a cleric.”
ROTFLMAO. But they DO have an alternative. They can be humanistic celebrants and still do the same work without the supernatural and esoteric nonsense
Rabbi Lurie’s essay on why God hides is misleading. More than that, it’s dishonest. For he must know his scripture pretty well. It’s true, from the point of view of the Jewish scriptures, God, in general, is thought not to have any form. There are, of course, exceptions, such as the three strangers at the oaks at Mamre (an early Canaanite cultic site), one of whom was God (and Christians would say that the three prefigure the Trinity). Although even in this case it is said that “the voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare.” (Gen 29.9). The whole point of the hiddenness of God, from the point of view of the Jewish scriptures is that God cannot be represented. Any representation is an idol. But while God cannot be represented, God speaks. So, though hidden, God is heard. Even in Job, where God appears in the whirlwind (compare the Genesis passage) — and so, not as something seen — God speaks, and challenges Job, and his voice reduces Job to apoplectic silence.
So, speaking of the hiddenness of God is disingenuous. Of course, God is hidden, because God is not, as the theologians are wont to say, one existent amongst others. But God does speak. That is the important point about the biblical God. God speaks. God speaks through his chosen representatives, the prophets. It is simply not true that, for religion, at least the religions of the book, composed of words, many of them supposedly spoken by God, that “God’s presence is experienced, not quantified, measured, or recorded.” The last is precisely what was done. God’s words were recorded. In fact, in the very passage where Isaiah tells us that, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself,” (Is 45.15) he quotes God as saying, “I the Lord speak the truth. I declare what is right.” (45.19)
So, yes, God hides himself, according to Jewish, Christian and possibly even Muslim tradition, but God speaks, and God not only speaks, but speaks volumes! (The word, of course, is ambiguous!) So it is simply not true that the purpose of religion is just feeling. The purpose of religion is obedience. The only problem is that neither the rabbi, nor anyone else, can tell us which words are the Lord’s and which are not. And that’s where the evidence is lacking, and that’s something that the religious should be able to tell us, but cannot.
Rabbi Lurie says, in that confidently supercilious way that the religious have of telling unbelievers that they really don’t understand very much, because, if they would only be open to the experience they would see the answer for themselves:
But, again, this is only a roundabout way of saying that they don’t know. It’s a yearning, a search, for meaning and purpose. But when he speaks of ‘documenting’ “the encounter with the Divine realm,” what is the meaning of that word ‘document’? For most religious believers it has a clear meaning, and when they hold the Bible or the Qu’ran in their hand, they believe that they hold ‘the lively oracles of God’ (as it says in the coronation service, I believe). This is the living word of God, and for the rabbi to suggest that religions of the book have not claimed to have recorded that word is simply prevarication. It is extremely annoying to be continually rebuked for failing in simple ways to understand religion’s acknowledged limitations (such as our inability to see God), only to find that the rebuke comes from someone who has his fingers crossed behind his back. Because the rabbi knows that religion is not just a search. Certainly, there is an element of doubt in religious faith (because there really is not enough evidence), but there is also a confidence which belies that doubt, and carries the real content of religion: God’s word spoken, recorded, and proclaimed.
Sorry, that parenthesis in the penultimate sentence should read “such as our inability [not ability] to see God”. At least my proofreading is not as bad as the Huffington Post’s.
I want to see as well as hear! Speaking not good enough. I want to see the bastard; check the wardrobe, smell the breath, poke the flesh, prod the biceps. I don’t want some radio, I want the whole nine yards. Otherwise, no dice.
Yes, “cite” as opposed to “site” unless he meant to locate it in the discourse…
As for his comments, I prefer this quote:
I take Lurie’s message to be that the secret to spirituality lies with self-brainwashing, which requires deliberate and sustained effort. The third section of his essay, “A Misunderstanding of the Means to Experience God’s Presence,” condemns his entire enterprise of trying to explain why God remains hidden. God remains hidden because, well, you know, but if you are committed to pretending hard enough, you may be able to understand. If, ultimately, you do not, well, that must because your ego…tends to resist experiencing God’s presence.
Lurie writes under the Huffpost heading, Religion and Science. From everything I’ve heard since childhood, the religious life should be focused on the question, What does God require of us? Lurie adds to a long line of writers who reply that what God requires of us is that we be credulous. One therefore must conclude that God despises science.
Ken said: “One therefore must conclude that God despises science.”
Hmmmm…, “Why Does God Hate Scientists?”
It’s got a certain ring to it…
Next book, Ophelia?
Well, you may want to see the bastard, Ophelia, but even the ancients knew better than that. Since the monotheistic God is assumed to transcend the gods of the nations, and their existence as mere human artifacts, God is not a God that can be seen. This is made fairly clear in many biblical and theological texts, except insofar as Jesus is seen by Christians, counter-intuitively, as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15) .
Of course, that in itself is significant, since Jesus’ physical appearance is not considered particularly important. It is his words and actions that matter. That is precisely my point about the good Rabbi and others, who continue to claim that religion takes the way of unknowking, in Karen Armstrong’s rather blasé sense: they are simply concealing the element of knowing that is involved in the monotheistic understanding of God, a very strong sense in which, while God may not be “known” in the way that other things in the world are known, God is nevertheless, in some sense, transcendent mind, and can be known directly by mind. This is why so much stress is placed on so-called ‘religious experience’, and personal relationship with God, etc., because these are contexts in which (if anywhere) human contact with God can be made.
That the same problems break out here — since “my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord” (Isaiah 55.8) — must inevitably push God out into complete inaccessibility, except that, clearly, it is universally thought by the religious that we can in fact know the mind of God. The only problem is that human beings find it very difficult to think God’s thoughts and to live in accord with them. It is not really a problem of unknowing, and millions of people throughout the world, including, I dare say, Rabbi Lurie, believe that they have an understanding — and quite a good understanding — of what God requires of us. So it is deceptive to suggest that the religious life is a yearning after and a search for God. The only reason believers like Lurie and Armstrong use this expedient is simply that they find themselves backed into a corner. What else can they say? They want to preserve religious life as they know it, and yet they don’t want, time after time, to justify themselves to unbelievers, so, for the time being — at least for public consumption — they play the hidden God theme; but when they talk about God amongst themselves, you can be assured that they think they know, in a very strong sense of that word, precisely what it is that God requires of them.
As my rabbi recently said, “Don’t get hung up on theology.”
Rabbi Lurie is speaking from a modern Jewish perspective which really doesn’t look anything at all like biblical Judaism and doesn’t have that much in common with Christianity or Islam. I found his final paragraph to be the most instructive:
This is not Christianity. There is no notion of faith being a virtue in and of itself. It seems to me that he is mostly trying to address Jews who are living in a Christian society. In that sense, he is neither dishonest nor disingenuous. His writing seems to me to be very consistent with mainstream thought and practice for Reform, Reconstructionist, unaffiliated, and much of Conservative Judaism. That accounts for the vast majority of all Jews. Orthodox Judaism, which takes a more literal approach, is a small subset of Judaism.
Ophelia: I want to see as well as hear! Speaking not good enough. I want to see the bastard; check the wardrobe, smell the breath, poke the flesh, prod the biceps
Actually it should be simpler than that. How do you determine that a poster on your site is a real person? You get answers that relate to your statements and questions. You get intelligent interaction. Someone/something that just spits out cryptic phrases (to which you need to attach your own meaning, all the while ‘discovering’ wisdom in the crypto) is just some form of cosmic Eliza. A being that’s deeply concerned about who you choose to mate with, but can’t be bothered to hold a conversation.
That’s what it would take to make me believe in a God. Not some bizarre stage show miracle, but one that would precisely and insightfully answer my questions, give me information that I don’t have, enlighten me (if God were so divinely intelligent, why couldn’t he do a better job of explaining things in his book)
Jeff Alexander: Rabbi Lurie is speaking from a modern Jewish perspective which really doesn’t look anything at all like biblical Judaism
I would suspect that someone like Lurie would have been stoned as a heretic under the Old Testament Judaism.
Sigmund – heh – not a bad idea. But of course there’s also “Why Does God Hate Atheists?” Mind you, that may seem a tad self-answering, but never mind. If Fri Tanke like it, perhaps we’ll get another chance to meet in Stockholm! :- )
jay – god and the Turing test. Good idea.
Shouldn’t the title of that huffpo article been “Rabbi Claims Moses, Abraham were Lying Dirtbags”?
“If Fri Tanke like it, perhaps we’ll get another chance to meet in Stockholm! :- )”
Great! I said it as a joke but now that I think of it, its not such a bad idea at all! If the major religions are true (or one of them!) then why is the physical evidence so arranged as to point in the opposite direction. The one group of people most likely to come to the ‘wrong’ conclusion about the existence of the theistic God is inevitably the group that is most interested in physical evidence – scientists. There’s so many example of evidence contrary to religious expectation from all areas of science that I’m surprised now that I haven’t heard the argument before! The logical conclusion is that God hates scientists! (and probably philosophers too!)
God can be proven not to exist. A 95 million year old fossil of an octopus was found–C-design-proponent-ists not only acknowledge that but they think its proof of God because it still looked like an octopus, y’know: “See? everything was created in its present form! Praise Jesus!”–and yet not one Egyptian soldier at the bottom of the middle of the Red Sea.