"Those who belong to the orthodox faiths claim that the authority of their faith rests on revelation, and that revelation is given in the pages of books and accounts of miracles and wonders whose nature is supernatural. But those of us who have long discarded the belief in the supernatural still are in the presence of revelations which are the foundation of faith. We too have our revealed religion. We have looked upon the face of men and women that can be to us the symbols of that which is holy. We have heard words of sacred wisdom and truth spoken in the human voice. Out of the universe there have come to us these experience which, when accepted, give to us revelations, not of supernatural religion, but of a natural and inevitable faith in the spiritual powers that animate and dwell in the center of [a person's] being."
John Lovejoy Elliott (1868-1942)
Profound humanism. He gets to the point, but why does he still mention the universe as one of revelation´s sources? What is the universe in down-to-earth-humanism?
ReplyDeleteIn everyone's brain there is a place where the unmentionable is staying. Noone dares to speak about it, because our worst part lies there, and our best. And of both we are ashamed. This is the adyton. Empathy hardly can reach it, but it conditions our mirror neurons. Anthropocentrism is trying to enter the adyton.
ReplyDeleteEvery intelligent man knows that religions are only frescoes.
ReplyDeleteNothing we get won, if we spend energy into an enterprise of disenchantment, discovering and announcing that water is wet. The most frustrated man by such a mission, if accomplished, would just be Mr. Elliott