Joy
Posts: 188
Joined: Sep. 2007
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Schroedinger's Dog:
| Quote | | please answer carefuly... |
Carefully? I actually quite like Tolkien's concept of "the infinite 'potential variety' of God." Though his hierarchal model is nothing new - many cultural mythologies include 'levels' of creation and creative impulse - gods, demigods, powers, principalities and such. Due to Catholicism's warm embrace (and outright usurpation) of entire systems of Pagan metaphysics, it doesn't seem so strange that the scenario would appeal to someone as gifted a storyteller/mythmaker as Tolkien.
As for Osyrhia, I'm not all that fond of terminal complexity in metaphysics, though I will certainly admit that things on that level may indeed be terminally complex. I'm often amazed at how twisty and unfathomable people can make their metaphysical belief systems - a reflection of their minds, I'm pretty sure, as well as a way to provide cover for obvious and endemic personal failings. If I could get the pages in English I might be able to figure out if this is an elder system or just another New Age construct. But it doesn't really matter. Again, 'ages' of progression and/or regression ruled by different powers is nothing new. Aldous Huxley's documentation of common themes and concepts across cultures and systems amounts to what he termed the "Perennial Philosophy." Looks to me like certain classes of direct experience come quite naturally to the human animal. Our propensity to turn them into authoritative, sociopolitical constructs called Religions can lead to lamentable results.
For myself, I choose the "Simple Answer" because I don't seek too much knowledge of the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell, nor to I wish to claim such [h/t Reinhold Niebuhr]. Of all the systems of belief I've encountered and examined, I've chosen the one with the best advice on how to live. Here, and now, since that is my concern while I live in the here and now.
In that system Love is the Answer. I honestly and reasonably doubt that any avatar or holy man/woman will ever impart to us a better or more complete Answer to the suffering of this world. And I believe very, very strongly that if we could just abide by that one commandment - to Love One Another - life on planet earth would be as good as it gets here and now. Alas, love is not something so easily commanded, is it? Judging by the obvious difficulty that humans have with so simple an Answer, it seems a mighty Fool's Errand to go seeking after anything more obscure or occulted. I'm just doing the best I can, figure that if I someday wake up dead, I'll deal with 'reality' there and then as I find it to be.
YMMV.
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