One Good Thing Every Day: March 19, 2013
"Since God was caused by our thinking Him, then He must only be thought and not a reality, a mere subjective projection of our own ego. Since He is not real, then He does not stand against whatever we desire to do with the machine of nature, especially the machinery of the human body. We are free to manipulate it at will, and remake human nature according to our own plans, so that we can really say in a far deeper way that Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am.' Rather than taking ourselves to be made in the image of God with all the moral limitations that entails, we believe that we are self-creators with no limit but our own ever-increasing power." from Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books that Screwed Up the World referring to Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method
Because I am not particularly familiar with Descartes--except for his famous mantra--I appreciate Wiker's analysis of how Discourse on Method continues to infiltrate our psyche and society.
Even more, I appreciate immediately afterwards encountering the following scriptures within my other readings.
“Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands’?
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts,God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you.
"Woe," indeed, to our intellectual ignorance and audacity. "Wow" to God's incomprehensible wisdom and grace!