[Vision2020] RE: No God-is-dead theologian

[Phil Nisbet]

Nick

The shrillness is largely contained in your own article and that 
disappointed me.  I realize you were responding to folks who you disagree 
with who lay claim to acts by G-d targeting New Orleans as a city of sin, 
but I can get a similar argument to yours posted from wikipedia or from less 
astute fellas like Wayne (I never net a conspiracy theory I did not like) 
Fox.  No doubt you have written better things, but they were not contained 
in your argument as presented.

If you read some of the screeds that followed your presentation, you will 
find that they were far less coherent and did indeed try to use Katrina as a 
G-d is dead proof.  I note that you did not post a single correction to any 
of them.

Further, as I noted, the Holocaust Philosophers from the orthodox and 
neo-orthodox perspectives have dealt with many of the issues that you have 
raised in your simple statement of the Problem of Evil as presented in the 
article.  It’s a far different thing to deal with millions of Jews, 
Cambodians, Rwandans and others killed in genocide versus a few hundred 
killed in a storm no matter how big.  Lack of reference to Primo Levi, Elie 
Wiesel or Emmanuel Levinas seems to me to be a serious shortfall in any such 
discussion.

And I realize you were dumbing it down for general consumption, but how 
exactly did that justify the last paragraph, which left philosophy and 
entered the political realm?

Phil Nisbet



>From: Nick Gier <ngier at uidaho.edu>
>To: pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com
>Subject: No God-is-dead theologian
>Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:30:49 -0700
>
>Hi Phil,
>
>You are getting snippy and shrill and that disappoints me.  You should read 
>the essays at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/305/home.htm before you prejudge 
>my philosophical abilities.  My true peers have judged this work to be 
>higher than freshman level. Once you've done that, then we can have an 
>exchange of views on this issue.
>
>By the way my master's thesis at Claremont was a refutation of Death-of-God 
>theology from the standpoint of process theology.
>
>Nick
>
>
>"The god you worship is the god you deserve."
>~~ Joseph Campbell
>
>"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
>represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
>  --Mohandas Gandhi
>
>"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
>discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
>by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
>interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
>life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
>art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
>--Max Planck
>
>Nicholas F. Gier
>Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
>1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
>http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
>208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
>President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
>http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm
>

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