"...eternal and infinite Oneness..."
-The Night Face, IV, p. 582.
Thus, it is the Hindu Brahman, not the Biblical Creator. So why apply the word "God" to both? For the sake of precision, we may indeed avoid using any term that has become ambiguous. However, verbal usage is not always precise. A dictionary lists every way in which a word is used.
"God" can mean "the transcendent" or "the object of religious experience." Apart from culturally conditioned visions of Jesus, Mary, Krishna, Kali etc, religious experiences are either of an awesome presence or of an immense oneness and both can be seen as aspects of a single reality. So far, I can accept Gwydiona ideas. However, their supposedly transcendent experience of "God" turns out to be sub-, not trans-, rational. See The Gwydiona Experience.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
God is not only transcendent, He is also infinitely the OTHER. And Jews and Christians believe God is not indifferent to His Creation, but cares about all that exists.
And no dictionary I've looked up has any definition for "glade" that fits Poul Anderson's baffling and idiosyncratic use of that word!
Ad astra! Sean
Spammer, stop!
Sean,
In Biblical theology, there is ontological otherness whereas, in Non-Dualist Vedanta philosophy, otherness is an appearance within the One. The latter makes more sense to me.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I don't believe the non-dualist Vedantic view is TRUE. The One is the infinitely transcendent Other.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that science confirms monism. Energy permeates space-time and becomes conscious of itself through living organisms. It is one but appears to itself as other and many.
Paul.
Sikhs -- who've been called the "Protestants of the Hindu world" -- use the term "Ik Onkar", usually translated into English as "One Creator" or "One Creator God"; their Gurus drew on both Brahmanical tradition (what you might call "High Hinduism" as opposed to the frankly polytheistic folk religion) and Islamic, and hence ultimately Jewish-Christian concepts.
I've read the Granth Sahib (in translation, of course). It's a surprisingly enlightened and civilized text -- on the role of women, for instance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I've never read the "Granth Sahib," so I can't comment sensibly about that work. Most of what I know about the Sikhs and their religion came from reading your book THE PESHAWAR LANCERS.
And one point I recall from PESHAWAR was mention of the Anglican Church of India holding a synod debating whether or not to accept as true at least some of the errors of Hinduism. Ideas which would inevitably lead to the de-Christianizing of the Anglicans. At least of those which remained in communion with the CoI.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Col?
The Granth is just hymns, as if the Psalms were the whole Bible. Some were written by Hindus, some by Muslims and some by Sikh Gurus. The 10th and last human Guru, Gobind Singh,appointed the Granth itself as his successor so it is "Guru Granth Sahib," "Lord Teacher Book." Gobind did not include his own hymns in the Granth so they are "Adi Granth."
Gobind founded the Khalsa in which Sikhs wear 5 Signs, all men are "Singh" and women are "Kaur." So Gobind is the only person with "Guru" before his name and "Singh" after it.
Paul (named after St. Paul).
Kaor, Paul!
I'm sorry to be unclear, I meant "C o I," short for "Church of India." Analogous to how some write "CoE," as shorthand for the Anglican "Church of England."
And that brings up a subtlety of terminology with theological implications. For Catholics, local churches like those of the US, UK, or France are NOT the "Churches OF the US," etc., but the Church IN the US, etc.
I did look up the "Granth Sahip," and read of how it is a collection of hymns, rather than containing many genres, as the OT/NT does (albeit the NT lacks poetical works).
It might be simply because of the inevitable difficulties of translating from one language to another, but I was not particularly impressed by the bits of the Granth I read. But that too might be merely because I read ONLY "bits."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
CoI, OK!
I think that the Granth hymns express pure monotheism so that a Jew, Christian, Muslim or theistic Hindu would find nothing to disagree with in the content although you might remain unimpressed by the style etc!
A Jewish layman who showed some of us around a Manchester synagogue said that a Christian or Muslim would find nothing to disagree with in the content of a service but would also find it dissatisfying: no mention of Jesus; no reading from the Koran. We were impressed by his grasp of the essence of the other faiths. Some people know only what they know and nothing else!
Paul.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are successive iterations of the same corpus -- the two successors are esse. ntially successful heresies, of Judaism and of Christianity (mainly) and Judaism (somewhat) in the case of Islam.
The Christianity that influenced early Islam was an extremely Semitic and somewhat archaic variety common in the Aramaic/Arabic speaking parts of the Middle East.
It had some fundamental differences with the Western (both Greek and Latin) forms of Christianity; you might say it had shed less of the particular features of Judaism, particularly the overt legalism -- things like dietary taboos.
Leaving aside the strictly Christological features of Christian theology, it's sort of a stripped-down, de-ethnicized/nationalist, generalized and universalistic version of Judaism, and particularly as it developed after the Eastern churches declined.
In its Greek and later Lain versions, Christianity initially appealed to a fairly large 'penumbra' of people who had been attracted by some elements of the Jewish faith but repelled by others, mainly the more localized ones.
Incidentally, Sikhs retain a corpus of the sayings of their Gurus as written down, apart from the Granth itself.
One of my interests is what is the difference between a scripture and a non-scripture and what are the stages of the growth of a canon. The Samaritans accept only the Law.
Kaor, Paul!
Paul: I agree, I found nothing to object to in the monotheism of the Sikhs, I simply was not impressed by the style and literary quality of the bits I read from the Granth Sahib. Both as poetry and literature, I find the Psalms and much of the poetry of the Prophetic and Wisdom books in the OT far more satisfying.
And your Jewish guide was correct. I would modify his remarks by pointing out how much from the OT was incorporated by the Catholic Church into the Liturgy.
Mr. Stirling: And Hilaire Belloc would agree some of your comments about Islam. Albeit he considered Islam a stripped down, Arianizing imitation of Christianity.
Ad astra! Sean
Poul Anderson remarked that Islam was a typical reaction by frontier peoples, who were attracted to a neighboring empire’s religion, but not its political baggage — hence, for example, the embrace of the Arian heresy by the Goths and other East Germanics, or the Sikhs, or several Indian religious movements in the US, or the Taiping.
Islam was the most successful, of course. There’s substantial evidence that in Umayyad times (when the Koran was actually compiled) there was a move to emphasize its differences from Christianity.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree. But one complication was that, at first, Mohammed himself seemed to lean towards favoring the Eastern Roman Empire over Sassanid Persia. And I'm frankly sorry Islam was the most successful of those "frontier" movements. And I recall the mentions made of Islam and the Taiping Rebellion in THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN.
Ad astra! Sean
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