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Considering(?) the divine...

Considering(?) the divine versus the divine being, is there a difference? Is it meaningful? Can divine exist without a divine being? I don't know. listen

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dkearns72 said…
Many, many religious traditions argue for the divine without using a single being (or many beings) with individual will(s). i would argue that Buddhism presents a very well developed sense of the possibility. The one that I like to study most myself comes from the more theologically-inclined Hindus who would argue that the many gods are only a simple way for humans to think of The Oneness that is all. and that Oneness is not a being with an identifiable single will.
June 6, 2008 at 11:11 PM
dkearns72 said…
the sense of the divine (as in more "fullness" to the cosmos than we can completely use our sensations for) goes back as far back as we can trace with funerary rites. the notion that the divine=The Divine, though, is almost certainly an Axial Age innovation, probably no earlier than the Jews coming back from exile. Their previous "monotheism" seems to have actually been "henotheism" where there is one primary god among many lesser gods: http://tinyurl.com/4o5vnd

Upshot: most people through human history until historical times would have believed in the divine without The Divine.
June 6, 2008 at 11:19 PM
dkearns72 said…
My take on the subject is straight from Rudolf Otto, and the wikipedia entry here, http://tinyurl.com/4zndtd nails it quite nicely:

"The German theologian Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (originally in German, Das Heilige), defined the holy as an experience of something "wholly other," most famously mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a frightening and fascinating mystery.[3] (He was following the tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who defined religion as a feeling or experience rather than adherence to doctrine.) Otto claimed that this experience was unlike any other; the subject experienced the spirit (the numinous, in Otto's terminology) as overwhelming, sublime, truly real, while he or she was nothing."
June 6, 2008 at 11:25 PM
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