Does Deep Thought Lead to God? Here's a Shallow Answer

[Jenny A]

I read the title as "Does Deep Throat Lead to God?"

Deep throat leads to administration leaks or sex without babies. Take your pick.

[FatAndFaithless]

I read the title as "Does Deep Throat Lead to God?"

Deep throat leads to administration leaks or sex without babies. Take your pick.

Or leaky sex with administration babes!

[Neo-Scholastic]

Grounds of Being notwithstanding.

And what is your objection to a foundational reality that preserves being throughout change?

… describe the procedures/processes/means whereby their field of "study" adds one whit to humanity's body of knowledge. … they have no data, nor processes, nor knowledge, nor anything tangible.

You present a red herring because you are working contrary to order; philosophy provides the foundational principles on which both the natural sciences and derivative humanities rely. What you call the ‘tangible’ results of the scientific method look to philosophy to interpret their significance. Otherwise you are just doing engineering.

[StealthySkeptic]

I read the title as "Does Deep Throat Lead to God?"

He certainly leaked a lot of what was going on in Watergate. I wouldn't be surprised if he comes back from the dead to leak the truth about God.

[Minimalist]

Otherwise you are just doing engineering.

Give me an engineer over a philosopher any day of the week.

[JesusHChrist]

Grounds of Being notwithstanding.

And what is your objection to a foundational reality that preserves being throughout change?

I have no idea what that means. Case in point. Foundational reality, sure, but I have no idea what "preserves being throughout change" even means.

Here's another case in point. Someone please parse this Tillich quote into English:

..It is the expression of the experience of being over against non-being. Therefore, it can be described as the power of being which resists non-being. For this reason, the medieval philosophers called being the basic transcendentale, beyond the universal and the particular...
The same word, the emptiest of all concepts when taken as an abstraction, becomes the most meaningful of all concepts when it is understood as the power of being in everything that has being.

Utter gobbledygook. The power of being in everything that has being?

Or how about this one?

..[The concept of Being] appears in the present system in three places: in the doctrine of God, where God is called the being as being or the ground and the power of being;
in the doctrine of man, where the distinction is carried through between man's essential and his existential being;
and finally, in the doctrine of the Christ, where he is called the manifestation of the New Being, the actualization of which is the work of the divine Spirit.

Perhaps closer to gibberish than gobbledygook...

You present a red herring because you are working contrary to order; philosophy provides the foundational principles on which both the natural sciences and derivative humanities rely. What you call the ‘tangible’ results of the scientific method look to philosophy to interpret their significance. Otherwise you are just doing engineering.

Tangible as in "real". The opposite of vacuous nonsense. What pray tell Chad, is the "real" part of Sophisticated Theology and how do these things come to be known? What the hell does it offer? You are splitting semantics I fear to avoid the point.

[JesusHChrist]

Unsurprisingly, the prophecy of JHC has come to pass. No Deep, Sophisticated Theological Thoughts have shown up to be discussed.

I suppose if they did, we'd just get more of this:

The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. The efficacy of these formulations is in their pressure upon ordinary usage and reference. The pressure of figurations of ultimacy on the pragmatics of discourse is a transvaluation of the ordinary. Formulations and figurations of ultimacy, when metonymically placed in a textual practice, can magnify the already existing fissures of received texts. The differential play of reference extends the witness to that which is other than the text through the incompleteness that is the result of the placement of these formulations. Theological texts explicitly express their internal undecidability. In this sense, theological texts introduce an incommensurability into discursive practices that is an internal trace of the other." —Edmund Standing quoting Theologian, Charles E Winquist

I don't know about you, but when someone talks about metonymical placing of extreme formulations, I gets all horny like. Who wouldn't?

[Goosebump]

Unsurprisingly, the prophecy of JHC has come to pass. No Deep, Sophisticated Theological Thoughts have shown up to be discussed.

I suppose if they did, we'd just get more of this:

The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. The efficacy of these formulations is in their pressure upon ordinary usage and reference....

I don't know about you, but when someone talks about metonymical placing of extreme formulations, I gets all horny like. Who wouldn't?

I LoLed, I have no idea what any of those things meant. I knew they were words and I knew what most of the words meant, I knew they were arranged in sentences as well. But my brain stubbornly refused to form any kind of thought out of them. I read them a second time, out loud, to be sure.

It does seem as though that language is designed to make the reader feel inadequately equipped to understand it.

[JesusHChrist]

I LoLed, I have no idea what any of those things meant. I knew they were words and I knew what most of the words meant, I knew they were arranged in sentences as well. But my brain stubbornly refused to form any kind of thought out of them. I read them a second time, out loud, to be sure.

It does seem as though that language is designed to make the reader feel inadequately equipped to understand it.

My ECON 101 professor in college had a stamp he would wield against freshman student essays, that arguably had more content than theological tripe.

His stamp, in red capital letters was -- BULLSHIT.

Quite effective at making the point I thought.

[Crossless2.0]

As regards the "deep thoughts" of the theologians and the resulting nonsense they write when they try to express themselves, I offer Wittgenstein:

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

If only . . . .