Alone with God

A patient deals with her cancer and its treatment through a life of the imagination, dreams and God. The author observes a toughness in her and strong feeling. She struggles to bear the aliveness of God as she wrestles with childhood memories of her own mother's death from the same disease. Prayers for her are experienced as sunbeam fibers and a kind of transfusion.     

When God Smites: Talking with Students about the Violence of God in Scripture

This article emphasizes the need for religious educators to address the issue of divine violence in Scripture with students, and it offers various pedagogical strategies for doing so. The focus is on violent Old Testament texts, with special attention given to the issue of Canaanite genocide. A general framework for structuring class time around divine violence in Scripture is proposed which includes (1) encouraging students to encounter violent biblical texts firsthand, (2) helping them understand why people find these passages problematic, and (3) offering various options for dealing with the potential problems these passages raise. In the second half of the article, significant attention is devoted to a number of practical considerations that should be taken into account when talking about this sensitive issue in class. A brief word about assessment is offered at the end.     

God is not a person (an argument via pantheism)

This paper transforms a development of an argument against pantheism into an objection to the usual account of God within contemporary analytic philosophy (’Swinburnian theism’). A standard criticism of pantheism has it that pantheists cannot offer a satisfactory account of God as personal. My paper will develop this criticism along two lines: first, that personhood requires contentful mental states, which in turn necessitate the membership of a linguistic community, and second that personhood requires limitation within a wider context constitutive of the ’setting’ of the agent’s life. Pantheism can, I argue, satisfy neither criterion of personhood. At this point the tables are turned on the Swinburnian theist. If the pantheist cannot defend herself against the personhood-based attacks, neither can the Swinburnian, and for instructively parallel reasons: for neither doctrine is God in the material world; in the pantheist case God is identical with the world, in the Swinburnian case God transcends it. Either way both the pantheist and the Swinburnian are left with a dilemma: abandon divine personhood or modify the doctrine of God so as to block the move to personhood.

     

Speaking of God after the Death of God

Abstract :  This article affirms the ability to talk about God in the twenty‐first century 40 years after God died (according to Death‐of‐God theologians) in the 1960s. It does so by an appeal to the proper combination of mystery and revelation ideally expressed in the paradox that God reveals Godself as hidden. The language of God's revealed hiddenness comprises a "middle way" which avoids the extremes of theological hubris on the one hand and atheism or unbelief on the other, making it possible to speak today of God in a faithful yet humble manner.     

The encounter with God in myth and madness

Background

It is well known how often psychiatric patients report religious experiences. These are especially frequent in schizophrenic and epileptic patients as the subject of their delusions. The question we pose is: are there differences between this kind of religious experiences and those we find in religious texts or in the mythological tradition?

Results

An overview on famous mythological narratives, such as The Aeneid, allows us to establish that the divinities become recognizable to the human being at the moment of their departure. Thus, Aeneas does not recognise his mother, Venus, when she appears to him in the middle of the forest at the coast of Africa. A dialogue between the two takes place, and only at the end of the encounter, when she is going away and already with her back to Aeneas, she shows her son the signs of her divinity: the rose-flush emanating from her neck, her hair perfume and the majesty of her gait. Something analogous can be observed in the encounter of Moses with Yahweh on Mount Sinai. Moses asks God: "Show me your glory, I beg you". And God replies, among other things: "you shall see the back of me, but my face is not to be seen". In the same sense, the Emmaus disciples do not recognise Jesus till the moment of his disappearance ("but he had vanished from their sight"), and Saul of Tars falls off his horse just in the moment when he feels the divine presence. In short, the direct encounter with the divinity seems not to occur in the realm of myth or in religious tradition. The realm of madness is exactly the opposite. Our research on religious experiences in schizophrenic and epileptic patients leads us to conclude that God appears to them face to face, and the patient describes God the father, Jesus or the Virgin Mary in intimate detail, always in an everyday setting. So, the divinity is seen in the garden, or in the bedroom, or maybe above the wardrobe, without any of its majesty. The nearness to God also tends to be so extreme that even an identification of patient and God can occur. That light emanating from the world of the divine ceases to be perceived by them.

Conclusion

While in mythological narratives God appears to the human being at the moment of His departure or showing His back, psychiatric patients with religious delusions experience the divinity in a direct way, face to face. Given the deformation of the divine occurring on the edge of madness we can better understand the mysterious words from Yahweh to Moses in Exodus: "for man cannot see me and live".     

God and the Girl

Philosophia - Abstract Imagine you are an agnostic who wants to maximise your chances of getting the right answer to the question whether God exists. I show that theism and atheism are not on an...     

God Diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder

This article endorses the contention that God suffers from a mental disorder, but challenges J. Henry Jurgens’ diagnosis of bipolar disorder as reported in The Onion (“God diagnosed with bipolar disorder”, 2001) and proposes narcissistic personality disorder instead. It uses the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC, 1994) and various biblical citations in support of this diagnosis. It rejects the idea that a major personality change is reflected in the New Testament and claims that God did not experience a major transformation of his narcissistic personality structure as described by Heinz Kohut (Forms and transformations of narcissism, in A. P. Morrison, Ed., Essential papers on narcissism, pp. 61–87, New York University Press, New York, 1966/1986). However, it concludes that God’s creativity accounts for the stability of his narcissistic personality structure and helps to explain his lack of empathy toward human beings.

On the distinction between the concept of God and conceptions of God

The starting-point is the distinction between concept and conception. Our conceptions of gold, for instance, are the different understandings we get when we hear the word ‘gold’ whereas the concept of gold consists in the scientific determination of what gold is. It depends on the context whether it is more reasonable to claim a concept or to look for fitting conceptions. By arguing against metaphysical realism and for non-metaphysical realism, I will elaborate on some philosophical reasons for dealing with conceptions instead of concepts of God, and secondly, I will discuss how such conceptions should be critically assessed. This article is an amended and enlarged version of a paper delivered at the conference on The Concept of God, arranged by the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, Great Britain, September 11–13, 2007.