Conscience: where the Spirit sits in the drivers seat. (Y-not question the Sunday Readings)

by Ynot , Sunday, June 03, 2012, 13:34 (381 days ago) @ Brian Coyne

Brian, you sure know how to extend a discussion and open lots of doors. I'm not going to answer your questions directly, but I'd like to refer to a comment for this Sunday's readings from the St Louis Liturgy Centre. John Kavanagh sj tackles the question of the relevance of a personal god in the modern world:

Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos, mused ironically about the strange fate of postmoderns who spend millions trying to get chimps to talk and billions on space stations attentively listening for an extraterrestrial blip that might speak to us.

Meanwhile, we are sheepish about the possibilities of a personal God and positively skeptical about whether God has anything important to say to us. More strange still, humans wonder whether they have anything meaningful to say to each other. We, like God, seem impoverished in this age of personal deconstruction. Some high-priced academics even pontificate that there is no author, there is no text.

And towards the end:

The long, historical unfolding of our trinitarian faith is central to a dramatic struggle over human meaning and destiny. It is a strategic player in the grand competition for our minds’ allegiance.

Are “itness,” “thingness,” matter, and force the ultimate categories of existence? Or is there something else? Someone else? Someones else? Is the cosmos mute? Or does it address us as the voice of God?

http://liturgy.slu.edu/TrinityB060312/theword_encountered.html

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May I also drop in something I devised as I posted a response to Francis [above] a little while ago, because for all its novelty, it strikes me as getting to the nub of the question, but I've not heard of it expressed this way before:

I think the idea that Sue came up with last week and Jerome underlined this week, that 'our conscience is the holy spirit' might be expressed this way:

THE place, the very spot [the locus] where the Creator Spirit interacts with the Universe in a directive way is in the human conscience.

This aligns the concept of free will with the concept of emerging directed evolution. It by-passes the problem of an interventionist god suspending laws of nature to change direction, and it elevates the mystery of free will in intelligent beings to the level of necessary co-cause with the Creator Spirit. And, of course, it loads the whole problem onto Free Will, which is a mystery no-one wants to deny the existence of, even if philosophically it is incomprehensible - except when we're in criminal mode of course, when we like to say 'the Devil made me do it', or 'I was following orders'.

'TonyL
"A post is a free gift, and it will go where it pleases."'