Wednesday, August 27, 2008

praying to no one

Prayer is not a transaction or interaction with some hyperbeing in the sky, a communication with some ultrareality behind the scenes, the invocation or appeasement of a magical power of supernatural intervention from on high. Prayer has to do with hearing, heeding, and hearkening to a provocation that draws us out of ourselves.
John Capute, in the essay 'Spectral Hermeneutics', in the book 'After the Death of God', p. 57


It always raises the eyebrows, how much people will twist and contort themselves and their thinking in order to come up with some way to discard and disregard God. It goes beyond simply looking a bit like the old party game "Twister", and becomes more like some wild-haired mad scientist wildly and maniacally splicing various genetic materials to create the monster that turn on him in the end and devour him.

Read Caputo's words, and see that he is in essence proclaiming a form of 'athiestic spirituality'. When we pray, we do not pray to God, because there is no God out there to pray to, a statement athiestic to its core. But there is a spirituality or something like it that he does say that we hear from, perhaps it is only ourselves and something inside us that we hear from (a bit later then the above he seems to say that it is 'our desire').

One may wonder what he hopes to gain from this dismissal of God, and why emergents seem to look to him, because they do.

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