Posted by Woody on January 24, 19101 at 17:19:11:
In Reply to: Re: Christ OS : enlightenment and avatars posted by Philoman on January 24, 19101 at 15:33:33:
Note to all: I first posted this as part of a general thread, somewhat listserv style, but was prompted by our moderator to repost my comments to the individual threads to preserve continuity. Below, I mention "unaided by grace" but I feel that needs to be better nuanced. Does anyone remember all of those catechism texts which distinguished sanctifying grace, actual grace, etc? because, surely, folks of implicit faith have "grace" and are cooperating with it when leading the moral life.
Loretta wrote: “There is a place in our experience of God that is beyond concepts, beyond us even having a self. In this place, analogies don't hold, metaphors collapse and symbols collide and all that is left is this at-one-ment with the whole of creation and The Uncreated. Now that's an operating system upgrade! “
Loretta, I caught that at-one-ment pun (or was that accidental?). I think there may be something distinctly different going on with Enlightenment, a full realization of natural human potentialities, unaided by grace. It is impersonal, as you say. It is also existential as opposed to theological, immanent versus transcendent. If I get Philoman’s drift, there is an ontological “discontinuity” involved in the PxOS upgrade, the Divine engaging the human. I’d be willing to suggest that, impersonally, immanently, existentially, naturally, the human can enjoy OS upgrades through all MacIntosh OS versions and we could metaphorically call that enlightenment. If that person also experiences an upgrade and can then run applications that are personal, transcendental, theological and supernatural, we might suspect an ontologically distinct upgrade such that the MacIntosh platform is now also running Windows 2000. Now it is pretty obvious that Philoman is an Apple-phile and thus perhaps we should reverse the analogy and let OS 10 for Mac be PxOS and Windows 2000 be the “enlightenment” equivalent. (I can see the Apple vs PC wars emerging in this thread already!)
Kewl thread! Hope everyone gets as excited as me!
Woody