Showing papers on "Supreme Being published in 1989"
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01 Nov 1989
TL;DR: It is claimed that the theistic arguments typically take for granted that in order to establish the existence of God they have only to establishThe existence of a Supreme Being, and give insufficient attention to the nature of the Supreme Being whose existence they supposedly prove.
Abstract: Over the centuries, many different arguments have been used to support the belief in God. These range from the abstruse and theoretical, such as Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument, to the relatively down-to-earth and practical, such as Pascal’s Wager; but nearly all of them share a common weakness on which I intend to focus. I shall claim that the theistic arguments typically take for granted that in order to establish the existence of God they have only to establish the existence of a Supreme Being. They thus presuppose that for the office of Lord of the Universe, God as traditionally understood by Christians is the only candidate worth considering, and as a result they give insufficient attention to the nature of the Supreme Being whose existence they supposedly prove.
21 citations
TL;DR: The women were constantly in the forefront of the religious movement, especially as leaders of religious riots as mentioned in this paper, and according to most testimony of the time, women seemed even more intent than their husbands on returning to public Catholic practice.
Abstract: AS THE PARADE FOR THE FESTIVAL of the Supreme Being was forming in Auxerre on 20 prairial an II (30 June 1794), one soldier turned to an old woman looking on and asked her why she wasn't joining in the festival. She responded, "Ce n'est pas le tien que j'adore; il est trop jeune; c'est le vieux. (It is not your god that I adore. He is too young. It is the old one.)"' Behind the simple statement of this old Auxerroise lay a wealth of unspoken beliefs and meanings. When the radical leaders of the French Revolution launched the dechristianization campaign of 1793-94 to close churches, to urge priests to abdicate, and to replace Catholicism with new revolutionary cults and with a secular political culture, many French men and women shared the reluctance of this old woman of Auxerre to set aside traditional Christian beliefs and practices. Particularly when the Thermidoreans relaxed some of the laws regarding public worship after the fall of Robespierre, Catholic villagers struggled through legal and illegal means to return to collective Catholic practice. Both men and women participated in the movement to resurrect Catholicism in the late 1790s. Together they pressured local officials to reopen churches and protect priests from arrest; together they created innovative forms of lay worship and danced on saints' days in open defiance of the law. However, there were differences in the roles and attitudes of Catholic men and women as they strove to regain the right to worship. Women were constantly in the forefront of the religious movement, especially as leaders of religious riots. And according to most testimony of the time, Catholic women seemed even more intent than their husbands on returning to public Catholic practice. Traditional prerevolutionary roles combined with the social and legal structures of France in the 1790s to bring about a gender-based dichotomy in the means of the religious revival. While Catholic men, as legal citizens, could use the petition, the vote, and the village assembly to put legal pressures on local and national authorities, women more often voiced their demands through di-
6 citations
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: The relationship between faith and poetry is explored in this article, where the authors consider four states of the relationship between Christian belief and poetry: the first state is represented by poems of Yeats and Kipling, neither of whom have claimed to be Christian believers in any orthodox sense.
Abstract: At breakfast on Friday, 11 June 1784, Dr Johnson informed Boswell that he did ‘not approve of figurative expressions in addressing the Supreme Being’.1 Beginning with Johnson’s complaint in the Life of Waller, that religious poetry is actually an impertinence, this chapter will consider four states of the relationship between Christian belief and poetry. The second state will be represented by poems of Yeats and Kipling, neither of whom have claimed to be Christian believers in any orthodox sense. Each, however, drew deeply upon Christian association, and found in the traditions of Christianity a tremendous resource for their poetry. The third state concerns three ostensibly Christian writers, the poets George Herbert, W. H. Auden and Edwin Muir, whose poetry reflects their sense of religious commitment and whose vision of religious truth inspires their poetry. Finally, I shall consider that often under-estimated form of poetry which John Wesley described as ‘the handmaid of Piety’, the congregational hymn.