Giant Floating Daddy Figure

I don’t wanna seem too much like a stiff!

I’m not like – What?!!! You don’t believe in the power of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ??!  And his utterly implausible miracles either?!!!

Hell!!!

This next quote is in honor of my good friend and co-blogger activephilosophy.

“You were probably brought up in a culture where the presiding image of IT has for centuries been God the Father, whose pronoun is He, because IT seems too impersonal and She would, of course, be inferior.  Is this image still workable, as a functional myth to provide some consensus about life and its meaning for all the diverse peoples and cultures of this planet?

Frankly, the image of God the Father has become ridiculous – that is, unless you read St. Thomas Aquinas or Martin Buber or Paul Tillich, and realize that you can be a devout Jew or Christian without having to believe, literally, in the Cosmic Male Parent.  Even then, it is difficult not to feel emotions more deeply than conceptions.  As a devout Christian you would be saying day after day the prayer “Our Father who art in heaven,” and eventually it gets you: you are relating emotionally to IT as an idealized father – male, loving but stern, and a personal being quite other than your self.  Obviously, you must be other than God so long as you conceive yourself as the separate ego, but when we realize that this form of identity is no more than a social institution, and one which has ceased to be a workable life-game, the sharp division between oneself and the ultimate reality is no longer relevant.”

-Alan Watts

Advertisement