Читать книгу Love and Communication - Paddy Scannell - Страница 7

God, whoever or whatever that may be, is not some kind of Übermensch or super human. The everlasting virtue of this placeholder word is that it prevents me from falling into human hubris. Man is just not (even allowing for its sexist implications) the measure of all things. “God” is the placeholder for a power that far surpasses my limited, fallible, human, understanding. For purely human reasons, I will think of Him as some kind of “almighty father,” because I cannot imagine any other way of thinking about Him and His world. But put this way, it draws attention to two quite distinct worlds: the divine and the human. With this in mind, I follow the Genesis narrative in which our first parents were cast out of the Edenic garden where they were naked and unashamed, and lived directly in the presence of God, and spoke with Him. Their expulsion from God’s presence was, as the story goes, because Eve and Adam “were tempted” by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, they were willing to lose paradise, or heavenly bliss. I don’t mean this literally, but neither do I mean it metaphorically. I simply take it as expressing essential human truth. Whether it is fact or fiction is, for me, neither here nor there. Leaving Eden was a deliberate choice by our “first parents” to live in a human world, rather than in God’s. It was the original sin, in which human beings began to take responsibility for the world, rather than leaving it to God. What followed from this, over many, many centuries, was the evolution into history of the totally human world in which we live today. And this is the point of the distinction. Today’s world (and we take it utterly for granted) was made by human beings, for exclusive human use. God was thought of once as the Creator of all life, of the living world in all its parts, including us. But now, we who live in our human world have no time for the rest of the living world and its Creator. We no longer share it with other nonhuman living creatures. We think of this “external” world as Nature, and it belongs to the natural sciences, if it belongs to us at all. We talk of the external world as external to inner mental life, but really the external world belongs to God and His creation. Leaving that world for our own was the original sin.