At 20:47:15 PST on 08-05-96, J. Climacus wrote:

> By logic, do you mean the study of symbolic forms or generic rationality?
> I'm not inclined to think formal consistency (or inconsistency) has much to do with God. Rationality, however, I think may well be the Archimedian (sp?) point upon which an important distinction may turn. On one side of this see-saw, we have the notion that God must, by definition, be beyond rationality, some(thing?) that can never be caputured in words or in conceptual thought. I think this is where the existential tension, the sickness unto death, comes from: That urge to make sense of the nonsensical. So, I suppose the goal of the Christian existenialist is to follow his/her lights and attempt to say the unsayable, and in some way get closer by God by failing miserably -- by defining the limits of what God is not. On the other side of this fulcrum is the possibility that God is not so different from us, that he/she is a proper object of contemplation. This second alternative is, I admit, more palatable to me, at least partly because it does not enshrine an impossibly perverse mindset, i.e., a mindset that must tilt at windmills by attempting to grasp the Absolute (whatever that is). This second alternative also gives a God we can cuddle with, one who might be a pal as well as a savior. Perhaps this removes some of the awe and majesty that has pervaded Christianity since medieval days, but it is a God I'd be more inclined to believe in.

This duality does not encompass the universality of
being, within the modality of the Absolute (distinctly
as it IS). In the first, you posit the notion of God for
a cumbersome intellectual, and in the second, the God of
a child. Yet nowhere IS what inherently IS (independent
of belief).

Saying the unsayable and making sense of the nonsensical
is akin to knowing the unknowable, a paradox at best
for lethargic mind to toy with. Where is the "trace"
in all of this (this dialog of knowing/comprehending
God): Where is the experiencing of Him?

The tension and sickness unto death is not so much the
outcome of the attempted comprehension of the conceptual
paradox, but rather a corporeal inability to be cosmic
in destination, hence a vehicle on fire (not aflame) by
its lack of binary membrane, but certainly it is not the
ardent desire to fathom one's natural origin/nature that
is the cause of the aforementioned dis-ease.

ALP, 8/6/96 [2] (Book 36)

Anthony L. Pecoraro
The Cosmic Encyclopedia & Cryptic Poetry
alp@loop.com
http://www.loop.com/~alp/