Cosmo-Religious Concepts God, Man and Evolution

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Cosmo-Religious Concepts God, Man and Evolution

Page 5

13.

It is of the very nature of what could be called the ‘religious outlook, i.e. one taken ‘sub specie aeterni’, to view present human collectives and anorganic structures not only as inevitably doomed, but as heading inexorably towards self-destruction; this is not seen as ‘natural’, i.e. a necessary feature of all living beings, - e.g. mankind lives now, yet ‘must’ not die out; the doom is seen as a fate ‘deserved’ that follows on corruption and biological wrong.

A religious outlook is the only one to bring the complete ‘otherness’ of the Divine from existing human orders into the category of ‘moral’ judgment. There is, therefore, no reconciliation, no connection between these orders and the Divine and, consequently, no ‘remedy’ for them.

The non-religious rationalisation that sees the approaching annihilisation of these collectives is to declare it a ‘natural death’ of all historical units. The pseudo-religious attitude is to suggest awareness and to offer a remedy that connects the Divine with the existing collectives in order to improve and sanctify them.

A view that distances itself somewhat further, sees the gulf between that which exists and the totally ‘other’, although not altogether beyond nature, as being yet so wide that all moral judgments passed from that distant and complex point of view appear as unintelligible, not expected in terms of moral valuations; as natural expectations, however, they would be on familiar ground. So called ‘harmless’ collective phenomena then appear as fairly damnable, on account of their combining with what is destructive. To be selfish and reckless then seems relatively right.

A task of a theodicy would then be like looking through the entire course of nature, to understand it as a whole, i.e to understand judgments executed by nature as moral if, and only if, they relate to the whole of reality (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” says G-d to Job. ch.38,4).

14.

If guilt as a characteristic is accepted as applying throughout for everything undesirable and disastrous, then the course of the human world as a section of nature should be conceived of as a manifestation of justice. Guilt extends as far as the range of possibilities. There can be no fundamental incongruity or discrepancy between what is essentially and unalterably desired and aimed at by life on the one hand and the limits of its possibilities on the other.