Life Defined

Back on September 6, in the post entitled, "It's Gotta Mean Something", I mentioned that I am currently reading After God: The Future Of Religion by Don Cupitt. This small philosophical book is quite fascinating, to say the least. I can only read a few pages at a time because I keep needing to stop to contemplate what I just read! I hope to provide a book review sometime in the next 2 - 3 weeks.

However, for the next day or two, I will focus on a list (shown below) that the author compiled to illustrate most of the philosophical points that undergird a Christian conception of the concept of life. I plan to address each of the nine points, one-by-one, in separate posts. Well, at least, that's the plan. We'll see how and if it works out as I've drawn it up in my head. ; )

In this post, I will offer no analysis; just the list. This will provide you with the opportunity to chew on it yourself, unfettered and unblemished by my eclectic musings.

The list can be found in Chapter 8, The End of Dogmatic Metaphysics, p.59.

Life
1. Truth is not manufactured by us; it is discovered by us, or dis-covers (the Latin vela, "veil," gives us the word re-veals or un-veils) itself to us.

2. The answers to all properly framed questions, both questions of fact and questions of value, preexist out there, objectively.

3. There is a great and final Answer to the mystery of our existence, out there, waiting for us.

4. All these truths and answers (2, 3) are, so to say, tailored to our faculties and requirements. They are in principle accessible and intelligible to us, so that we may reasonably hope and expect to discover them, or have them reveal themselves to us.

5. There is then something quite dazzling, namely, a preestablished harmony between thought and being, language and reality; between the questions we want to ask and the Answer that the nature of things is waiting to give us. (Notice that this most astonishing doctrine is also the one most profoundly taken for granted.)

6. The final Answer will be revealed to us in or through death.

7. Our life is a pilgrimage toward death, the moment of truth, the moment of absolute knowledge.

8. Our life is a journey, then, from
a) the relative to the absolute; from
b) time to eternity; from
c) the changing, sensuous world of becoming to the realm of pure timeless intelligible Being; from
d) the particular to the universal; from
e) the mediated, discursive, through-a-glass-darkly sort of knowledge, to pure face-to-face unmistakable vision.

9. Each person's life is a story scripted beforehand, and there is a great Story of Everything whose plot has been revealed to us in a Book.