{"id":8845,"date":"2013-11-04T01:38:09","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T01:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=8845"},"modified":"2013-11-04T01:38:09","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T01:38:09","slug":"the-sheer-ocean-of-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-sheer-ocean-of-being\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Sheer Ocean of Being&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Blake.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Blake-216x300.jpg\" alt=\"Blake\" width=\"216\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-6227\" srcset=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Blake-216x300.jpg 216w, https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Blake.jpg 288w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 216px) 100vw, 216px\" \/><\/a>I\u2019ve never really thought that the God of Jews and Christians (despite His rather mixed origins\u2014check out the works of James Kugel on this topic) was a god to be compared with a Zeus or an Odin and I doubt if the leading \u2018new atheists\u2019 do either, so <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearreligion.org\/articles\/2013\/10\/31\/atheists_dont_get_god.html\">this piece<\/a> by Fr. Robert Barron is, I suspect, largely an exercise in strawmanship:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To a person, the new atheists hold that God is some being in the world, the maximum instance, if you want, of the category of &#8220;being.&#8221; But this is precisely what Aquinas and serious thinkers in all of the great theistic traditions hold that God is not. Thomas explicitly states that God is not in any genus, including that most generic genus of all, namely being. He is not one thing or individual &#8212; however supreme &#8212; among many. Rather, God is, in Aquinas&#8217;s pithy Latin phrase, <em>esse ipsum subsistens<\/em>, the sheer act of being itself.<\/p>\n<p>It might be helpful here to distinguish God from the gods. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, the gods were exalted, immortal, and especially powerful versions of ordinary human beings. They were, if you will, quantitatively but not qualitatively different from regular people. They were impressive denizens of the natural world, but they were not, strictly speaking, supernatural. But God is not a supreme item within the universe or alongside of it; rather, God is the sheer ocean of being from whose fullness the universe in its entirety exists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThe sheer ocean of being from whose fullness the universe in its entirety exists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Oh dear. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dish.andrewsullivan.com\/2013\/11\/03\/thomas-aquinas-vs-the-new-atheists\/\">H\/t: Andrew Sullivan<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve never really thought that the God of Jews and Christians (despite His rather mixed origins\u2014check out the works of James Kugel on this topic) was a god to be compared with a Zeus or an Odin and I doubt &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-sheer-ocean-of-being\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[711],"tags":[821,487],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8846,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8845\/revisions\/8846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}