When looking at the world man and animal can be seen moving around, sometimes men going about more than wild beasts.
In that universe where everybody in his worldly life is so busy with working and with earning money to be able to buy as many gadgets as they would like and to make their material dreams realised, lots of people consider those who have faith in a Supreme Being to be loosers or people who live in fantasy worlds. Lots of them do believe that when in faith you just have to accept everything blindly. For them and many faith is a mystery, where you need to ask any questions.
It is true that we mortals can not understand everything. We could even say that we should not even try to understand everything. Question is if you may look at faith on a rational way. Can you believe in a Higher Being Which or Who created everything. And do you have to approach all the saying about It/Him rationally?
Portrait of René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy”, after Frans Hals c. 1648 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The last few years focus has been on the rationale. René Descartes with many followers could say “I think, therefore, I am”, and we can only agree because when you are not in existence you can not “be“. When born and not able to think the being of that person is also like as if without life and can not do anything. To be able to do something a creature (animal or man) has to think or to use its/his/her brains. Without the use of the brain, without letting the ‘electricity’ go through the nerves, creature shall not be able to do much. It has to receive something, analyse it, act and react to it. But before it can go into action and reaction it has to have knowledge of the self. It has to have a working ‘I am‘ and has to feel as an ‘I am‘.
Though man faces some problems.
First there is the “I am”, the “Self” which it has to come to face and has to try to understand.
Secondly it has to come to see that the “I am” is only part of a bigger part of “I Am”. When it comes to know that it can go searching for that Bigger “I Am” and hopefully shall come to recognise the “I Am Who Is” without nothing can exist.
Thirdly each little “I am” has to recognise that manifesting the “I am” demands interaction, but that such interaction is never ending. One word only points to another word and never to reality itself. Having brains thinking, receiving interpretations and having to make interpretations itself, it shall have to come to the conclusion that no one interpretation can ever be regarded as final.
As in interpretation, so in life: everything becomes undecidable.
Now there is a difference between all who want to understand and try to approach the many “I ams” in this world. Into this decidedly undecided world, there are people who have opened their eyes and have come to see what is behind the ordinary “I am”. They have found The Bigger “I Am.” They might have found it by listening to their inner voice or by coming to read, see and hear the Word of God. For them the curtains have gone open and the biblical message as reasonable thinking person has come to them with common sense. They have come to see and understand that Faith and logic are not really opposites.
Genesis 1 tells us that man was created in God’s image (Genesis 1: 26-27).
“26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27 NAS)
Diagram from one of René Descartes’ works. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Being created in the image of God, means also each person we see around us has something which might be found also in God. Each person we do encounter can carry something from God with him or her and can share it with others. The person who has come into the faith, believing there is a Creator Deity, and who has seen the Works of that God (Source of knowledge) shall also come to the understanding of the importance of sharing the knowledge of that “I am” with others. For the one with faith it is like being with child, incredible exiting and giving lots of energy. It is as an extra breath given to you.
In the past many man of all sorts of professions have already felt the special awareness and consequences for them of having faith in the Elohim, Divine Creator of heaven and earth. The “I Am Who Is” or the “I Am that I am” is the Most Almighty God of gods, Who overshadows any other god or “I am”. He is also One God Who demands recognition for His important Pole Position. He does not like to see that His creatures do love other gods more than Him. Believers, man of faith, should recognise that and take it into account, worshipping only that One and Only One True God.
To help us to understand that Bigger “I Am” and our own “I am” This Eternal Being has given His Words and let it hem be notated by the many faithful men. All those writings about the “I Am” are bundled in the Book of books, the Bible, the infallible Word of God.
In the several books of the Bible we can find a.o. the Book of Psalms in which we can find the answers:
- God gave us the Psalms and other Books of the Bible
- as a prayer book for our lives.
- to show the friends of God.
- to learn through poetry and song.
- to experience the transcendence and the imminence of God at once
- to affirm the mystery of life
- to educate and to exhort ourselves
- to show us our sins
- to remind us of the brevity of life
- to remind us of the necessity to live the right way
- to show us the way to a better and easier life
- to express our heartfelt longings
- to discover God His Character
- to discover God His Will for our lives
- to learn to direct ourselves to the utmost important things in life
- to learn how to behave
- to learn to pray aright
- to reveal His sovereign grace to us
- to show us the Way to Salvation
- to show us and give comfort in finding the Way to the Kingdom of God
Created in the image of God, the image of the Big “I Am” this is not just an outward likeness, for God is Spirit, and is only for our understanding presented in a description which is derived from that of a human. Upon further reading in the Book of books, the Bible, we can see that God’s Word reveals that humans, unlike animals, are provided with rational. Man can think and reason logically, but above all he is able to know God; and the latter goes. An animal has no sense of higher values, let alone God, a man does. But that is also exactly what sets him apart. A man who does not have these capabilities, or does not use them, is indeed no more than an animal:
“Man in [his] pomp, yet without understanding, Is like the beasts that perish.” (Psalms 49:20 NAS)
In fact, it is precisely this ability to abstract reasoning that,
according to the apostle Paul, makes the infidel shall not go unpunished because when he looks around himself he should be able to see the many things God provided. It might be true that the invisible things of God can not be seen, but even his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived since the creation of the world are working with the mind, so that they are without excuse.
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20 NAS)
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Preceding articles:
- What is life?
- Looking at three “I am” s
- Creator and Blogger God 2 Image and likeness
- Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
- Philosophy hand in hand with spirituality
- Looking for True Spirituality 2 Not restricted to an elite
- Being Religious and Spiritual 1 Immateriality and Spiritual experience
- Being Religious and Spiritual 2 Religiosity and spiritual life
- Being Religious and Spiritual 4 Philosophical, religious and spiritual people
- Being Religious and Spiritual 5 Gnostic influences
- Being Religious and Spiritual 6 Romantici, utopists and transcendentalists
- Improving the world by improving the Faith
- Are you religious, spiritual, or do you belong to a religion, having a faith or interfaith
- Faith because of the questions
- A Living Faith #9 Our Manner of Life
- Fear of failure, and fear of the unknown
- Looking for something or for the Truth and what it might be and self-awareness
- Leaving behind the lives we have touched.
- Only the contrite self, sick of its pretensions, can find salvation
- God won’t ask
- Pieces
- There is no true and constant gentleness without humility
- For those who make other choices
- Do you believe in One god?
- Revelation 1:8 – Who is Speaking?
- Use of /Gebruik van Jehovah or/of Yahweh in Bible Translations/Bijbel vertalingen
- Without God no purpose, no goal, no hope
- Only worhsip Creator of all things
- A great man does not lose his self-possession when he is afflicted
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- Love: Reuniting the objective and subjective… (thosecatholicmen.com)
The modern world has fallen into a dualism of body and soul in many ways. Descartes, a founding father of modern philosophy described the soul as a “ghost in a machine.” It is only too easy to focus on the body in an animalistic fashion, focused on pleasure and gratification. The opposite extreme is to fall into emotionalism or even a spiritualism that sees no compelling connection to the body.
- Descartes and the Begining of Modern Philosophy (joshpcb.wordpress.com)
n the 17th and 18th century Western philosophy was in strife – split between British empiricism (figures such as Locke and Bacon) and continental rationalism (such proponents as Leibniz and Spinoza), both camps disagreed with one another on the topic of epistemology and metaphysics.
Important to add to the context is that in this time, scholasticism was the most prestigious method of education; it entailed Aristotelian values with a significant religion input. Scholasticism used logical methodology to deduce and then resolve contradictions. It was also qualitative, looking at objects and people and how they worked behaved, i.e., their qualities, and it was this manner in which Descartes was educated
- Last lecture of the semester: Foucault and Derrida on Madness (foucaultnews.com)
We need a history of that other trick that madness plays—that other trick through which men, in the gesture of sovereign reason that locks up their neighbor, communicate and recognize each other in the merciless language of non-madness; we need to identify this moment of that expulsion before it was definitely established in the reign of truth, before it was brought back to life by the lyricism of protestation. To try to recapture, in history, this degree zero of the history of madness, when it was undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience of the division [of madness and reason] itself. To describe…[what] allows Reason and Madness to fall away, like things henceforth foreign to each other, deaf to any exchange, almost dead to each other. (my emphases)
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