Since nothing of any interest is happening anywhere in the United States right now, I'll keep at it on the religion front. It's just another fragment, but I hope it ends up as part of something bigger.
"[Riemann] was very pious, in the German Protestant style. . . . His opinion was that the essence of religion is, to translate literally from Dedekind's German, 'Daily self-examination before the face of God.'"
-John Derbyshire. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2003.
This is as good a descriptive definition of piety as I have seen. "Daily self-examination" is, of course, not specific to religion, so I don't have much trouble conceiving of a secular ethical piety.
Every religious group I have ever personally encountered does something to encourage this virtue. And it is piety, combined with love, that does much to counter the excesses of zeal. Better, I say, to be staunch and pious than to be zealous.
2 comments:
"Daily self-examination" is, of course, not specific to religion, so I don't have much trouble conceiving of a secular ethical piety.
Hear, hear!
But what's the function of God, then? Is it just that establishing an ongoing personal relationship with an Ideal Being helps us examine ourselves? I mean, I think it does, but are there people who don't need that, and as long as they're doing a solid job, how much does God care about them actually talking to him?
That's a hard one for me: What does God think of those people who seem to be living good lives but are doing it without Him? I have trouble with the idea that He's so concerned with us glorifying Him, because it's hard to believe His ego is that big. And I sort of feel like the ultimate purpose of Christianity—the idea that the Law will be written on our hearts someday—is that we won't need the external impulse of Him watching over us to do the right thing.
Maybe the answer is just that I shouldn't be worrying about other people's paths. But it's a problem that's interested me.
I'm going to try to offer a thought by way of a stretchy analogy that occurs to me because you used the word "function," and I do a lot of math these days.
For God to "have a function" would mean that God is associated with some particular transformation: you offer prayer, He delivers a result; you sin, He punishes. I'm seeing this as a sort of God-function, like a transcendental G(x), where x is anything that we normally feed into the function, like prayer or sin or good deeds, and the result is what we expect God to do. So if we can get the results of the God-function with some other function, what is the real need for God?
But if we go for classical theology's take on creation ex nihilo, which I am not sure that I understand at all, then God is not really a function so much as the domain and range of all functions: the set of all x's and all possible results in this weird analogy. Perhaps even the substructure that makes these sets possible.
I don't mean to be weird; this is actually the first thing that popped into my head. I know that this is not at all an answer. But I want to leave it at this because I wonder about these things myself.
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