Provocarea ta merita un raspuns mai elaborat decat am timp sa criu acum.  Sunt prins intr-o numaratoare inversa pana la jumatatea lunii cand se va decide soarta mea de catre Sfantul Oficiu. Pana atunci vreau sa termin o carte pe aceiasi tema ca si editorialul tau, intrucat nu stiu daca voi mai avea confortul necesar dupa aceea. Asa ca iti ofer un fragment din cartea mea inloc de raspuns.

Let us detach ourselves from the sterile question on whether or not God exists. We will leave this to the private or public profession of faith, not because the question is unimportant, but because the answer is beyond demonstration. Our object here is the concept of God as a human mind product. We learned about it from from the primary teachers of the West: the Jewish rabbi and the Greek philosopher.

The Jewish concept of God is given in a double verb in Ex 3:14: “hayah hayah”, rendered as “I AM THAT I AM” in modern translations. What strikes here is the tautology. The implication is that God cannot be defined as something except himself. This is also reflected in the third commandment prohibition of abusing the name of God in common talk. A deeper conclusion of the tautological character of the definition of God, is that God cannot be subjected to logical analysis or empirical falsification.

As for the Greeks, one of their earliest definitions of God belongs to Epimenides of Knossos, a sixth century BC poet-philosopher: “For in thee we live and move and have our being”. Epimenides is protesting against the Cretans  “liars” (Tit 1:12) who held that Zeus was mortal and even prepared a tomb for him.

He was quoted by Paul before the Areopagus (Acts 17: 23), to the effect that “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (29). In other word God does not simply exist. He is the ontological ground of everything in existence: “in him… we have our being”. Nevertheless “we are the offspring of God”, and as such, human experience has an ontological dimension.

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Because goodness, beauty, truth, justice and love are attributes of God, it follows that they also participate in “the ground and the power of being”. They are self-standing and self-defining like God. They are also part of man’s essential being, rather than sociological constructs. This concept was first clearly articulated in Plato’s dialogues, and is admittedly the most defining aspect of the Judeo-Christian legacy. It is also the most challenged.

The Jews and the Greeks followed different ways in speaking about God. Yahweh was defined by a narrative rather than abstract judgments. He took an active part in human affairs and was revealed among a community of faith. The Greeks invented theology as a rational approach of God  inspired from geometry.

The merging of the two traditions resulted in what Nietzsche called “a sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth”#. “I think so I exist…”, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free…#” are scattered beams of a sun setting in the West.

It was also Nietzsche who made the statement that God was dead. Because Greek and Scholastic metaphysics have been delegitimised by the scientific revolution, the modern mind no longer possessed an intellectual tool to rationalise belief in God. Nietzsche denied not the existence of God as such. He rather meant that the concept of God belonged to a metaphysical frame of reference, rendered obsolete by science and modern experience.

What we have here is a situation of hauntology (Derrida).  A God that has become the spectre of his own history is our only witness to the rationality of being. The ghostly voice utters that good an evil, beauty and ugliness, justice and oppression, are infinitely more than social constructs. They are ontological dimensions in an ontologically defined reality. Yet because of its spectral nature, the haunting idea cannot be brought into full daylight.

Paul Tillich hoped “for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment”. Until that day comes, we have to stand the ground of the haunted prince of Denmark, listening to visitors from medieval graves against the rotten relativism of our times.