a book by Eben van Tonder
There is reality and there is our perception of reality. It’s like living in two distinct worlds. One is the real world and one is a mental world.
Within our mental world there are, of course, many different worlds, but the most basic distinction is between what “is” and what we “perceive to be”.
The mental world is just as real as the real world. In the mental world, we live and breath and have our being – our interface with the material world.
The mental world is as real and concrete for us as the physical world.
As we developed abstract though, we increasingly started to occupy mental landscapes. Food, safety and procreation are no longer our only concerns.
We started to fight wars, not because we could no longer find food and shelter, but because of values that exist purely in our mental world’s such as democracy, our disdain for slavery or our faith in God.
Even primitive humans had the ability to live a life that is primarily rooted in the conceptual, the hypothetical. The ability to live life “outside of oneself”; to perceive the “other” and to look at the eyes of a 3rd person to ourselves.
So developed the question of the God-concept and if it is the result of a God who really is and who really can be seen and perceived in real space and time or is the god-concept the result of a our ability to think in the 3r person.
Plato et al gave us the notion of a “supreme other” that we are merely derivatives off. Is this true? Does the Christian God have a real existence apart from in the human mind and the system as contained in the church movement?
This is the question I tried to figure out.
Index
Start Reading chapter 1.
The Anatomy of a Skeptic 