Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues by Oppy Graham; Trakakis N. N.;

Author:Oppy, Graham; Trakakis, N. N.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Notes

1 Faith is not immune from life’s flux – as my story (thus far) testifies: I was born into Greek Orthodox Christianity; I then more or less abandoned this faith in my late teens/early 20s, traversing the border between agnosticism and atheism; and then, like Orthodoxy’s prodigal son, I returned to it and enthusiastically explored it for some time, but my theological training progressively eroded my faith in its god; for a while I was attracted to the enthusiastic biblical fidelity and ‘certainty’ of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but that spiritual spell was broken by the not-so-odd couple of (1) an irrepressible-but-modest hedonism (which isn’t altogether unbiblical; refer to Ecclesiastes 5:18–19) and (2) a growing philosophical skepticism: my exposure to currents such as feminism, deconstruction, ecological criticism, etc. – and just some good ol’ critical thinking – has allowed me to arrive at my present position. But we should also remember that ‘faith’ needn’t necessarily be reduced to the domain of the autonomous agent (i.e., that it may not only be something that I decide but also something that happens to me). (As corny as it may sound, I am sometimes tempted to say: “It’s not so much that I have faith, but that in which I have faith has faith in me.”) In any case, when faced with questions such as “Will I believe in the future?” or “Will I always believe?” I can only reply: “Who knows?” (And perhaps: “I hope so.”) (Only after I wrote these words did I serendipitously discover the following line: “The best thing a believer can say in response to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ is ‘I can only hope that I do….’” [Johnston 2009: 10].)

2 The re-exaltation of the earthly and the bodily should in no way be construed as implying a crude rejection of some kind of immaterial reality and the soul. Remaining radically open-minded, I am open to their possibility. (Indeed, the facts that (1) I am rather open to the possibility of a soul and an afterlife, (2) I am interested in purported phenomena such as near-death experiences [discussed later] and (3) I love being alive, all factor in my having some kind of hope in these possibilities, in somehow surviving my death, that ‘my soul’ – if I have one – will go on. However, on both biblical [1 Corinthians 15] and ecological grounds, I prefer the possibility of some kind of futural bodily resurrection.) So, I remain open-minded, but as an ecological thinker, I am driven to contribute to the undoing of the hierarchical binarism which privileges the immaterial over the material, which has all sorts of disastrous consequences, not the least of which is the treatment of the body and Earth as ‘half-way houses’, the treatment of ‘this’ life as some sort of prelude to a better ‘afterlife’. No wonder we trash the planet; no wonder we now face looming ecological catastrophe.

3 Speculation regarding Christ’s divinity obviously opens onto the question of the ‘Trinity’ (i.e., the divine as ‘Father’, ‘Son’, ‘Spirit’ – some sort of [almost?] all-male household).

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