My View Of Religion 3

I previously mentioned there were two books that made a great influence on my view of Religion. That was a mistake. Firstly, Toynbee’s Study was in 14 volumes. I read it a long time ago. There was no baby Mozart back then, but there was baby Toynbee, so my parents started reading it to me, and I took over when I learned to read, about volume 5. Secondly, I neglected to mention Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. The Idea of the Holy takes a strictly Kantian point of view, and Prof. Otto regards the idea of the Holy as a special thing within the Kantian category of Value. I do not agree with this, but this was the very first mention I had ever across that the Holy was an idea that was part of the very structure of the human mind. I believe that the idea of the Holy, the idea of God, is part of the structure of the human mind, both consciously and not consciously. By this we do not mean that God is somehow hard-wired into the human mind. If this were indeed the case, then we would be at a loss to explain the existence of Atheists. I believe God speak to each of us in a special way due to the structure of our minds. I believe we are aware of this when we are children, hence Jesus asked that his disciples let the children come unto Him. The type of consciousness of children I call dawn consciousness, or eoconsciousness, and this serves to distinguish from the consciousness into which we grow as we reach the age of reasoning and language use. The loss of innocence of the children is the realization of the idea of Death, and not merely the concept of Death, which forms a part of God’s plan, but the gross imposture of Death as final and the end of all. As my father approaches his operation for an abdominal aneurysm, I find I shall have to speak to him to calm his nervousness. I shall if needed. What shall I say? I shall say what I have already said numerous times to people I know who need God, but cannot find belief in their hearts. I tell them that God touches us when we are conceived and in our childhood. This dawn consciousness is the consciousness we use to live and play. We played cowboys and Indians as children. We played soldiers. However, when someone was shot and killed, they did not remain inert. They did not stay silently on the ground. They did not remain dead. Rather, they rose up! We rose up and played on! At that time, we had the dawn understanding of life, and in that time God had indicated to us that Death has no dominion. And the only thing we as adults have left of this Eden is a dim concept of the Resurrection, so dim it cannot stay our fears. Most of us think it a dark mystery, not a bright mystery. Our understanding of the Resurrection, in Christianity, in Islam, and in Judaeism, stems from our dawn understanding. And our dawn understanding was different; it was not incorrect and childish. It is we, the adults, who are childish, because we cannot see the truths given us when God created us.