Being Human, Knowing God

By G. Temp Sparkman

This book is an inquiry into what it means to be human and its implications for being religious. It begins by naming the basic word about reality to be that there is something instead of nothing. Being is a quality that infuses breathing, historical persons.The primary word about humans is that we mean because we exist.Secondary meaning comes through religion, humanism, atheism, science, etc. Being is good and purposeful.Evil is individual behavior, not a universal natural force. Human experience is a paradox of epic & tragedy.Religion professes a belief in God as being at the core of spiritual space.Religious experience resides in human consciousness.God is an unfathomable mystery, but is accessible to humanity in the metaphor, 'the open face of God.' New paradigms for nature of God proposed to replace stagnant power images.God trivialized by cultural alternative and partial gods, ex. Warrior God, National God. God is never absent from a true believer.Religious spirituality includes sensing the numinous, receiving the given grace, grieving, prayer as centering, and other experiences.Sin works against spiritual wholeness. Sinning is an individual and social behavior, not a universal condition.Institutional religion gives it continuity through time, but it can become dogmatic and irrelevant to life concerns. Good religion reveals the holy to the world. This book is informed by seminal works in philosophy, psychology, theology.Its language is gender inclusive. It draws illustrations from literary classics and perspectives from all religions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1468110438
• ISBN13: 9781468110432
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"