(In
my development of an Absolute Standard, to be applicable to the concept
of International Justice, there was an attempt on my part to write a
separate entry under the straightforward title The “Word Of God” As The
Absolute Gold Standard. That title has since been retired, and with it, the
separateness of the entry in question.
Now,
so that there will be no lingering ambiguity about it, what exactly did I mean
by the phrase The Word of God? This
term is often used as a synonym to the Holy Scriptures and The Bible,
in Christian parlance. The same is true of the Moslems in maintaining the
sacredness of the Koran as the Word of God, etc. There is a direct
correlation here to how each religious group views its particular religion, and
its particular Scripture. In my usage of the term Word of God, I am making
no reference to any religious tradition, but only to the abstract, transcendental
understanding that I apply to the transcendence of all particular religions in my
two-storied temple metaphor (see my posting of October 1, 2011). I hope
that this is well understood by the reader.
And
finally, my use of the old American motto in the title of this entry is not
merely a playful reference to the familiar Latin phrase. E pluribus unum worked pretty well in the American experience (the
American Civil War was a tragic exception that only proved the rule), and this
fact obviously has a direct relevance to the subject of this entry.)
On
a number of important occasion, I have talked about the term “The Word of
God” evolving as a kind of gold standard of international
justice. Here is an interesting extension of this term, provided by Hobbes,
in the 36th Chapter of his Leviathan:
“When there is mention of the word of
God, or of man, it does not signify a certain part of speech, such as
grammarians call a noun or a verb, but a perfect speech, whereby the speaker affirms,
denies, commands, promises, threatens, wishes, or interrogates. The Word of
God is also the dictates of reason and equity.” (I am responsible for the underlining.)
The
most significant point of Hobbes’s quotation is that the word of God does not signify a certain part of speech, but a perfect
speech. Reiterating one of my central arguments in the development
of the concept of international justice, the purpose and the end result
of such justice is not a better way of ‘international law enforcement,’ but a
common search for the ideal, the Absolute; and the God in the word of
God is not the God of a particular religion, but the common source of Absolute
Authority, the God of Philosophy.
In
order to arrive at the doorstep of the common God, all nations ought to
conceptualize themselves as the diverse worshippers of a two-storied temple,
where each nation, or rather each culture, has its own room on the ground
floor, while the doorstep of their common God is upstairs on the upper
floor, where there are no partitions. Thus, this line parallels the line of
my entry Allegory Of A Two-Storied Temple, in suggesting a solution to
the problem of all these world religions, biting at each other’s throats,
instead of providing our troubled world with an integrated moral backbone,
making them consistent with Lichtenberg’s enlightened view of religion: “All the different religions are only so many religious
dialects.”
This
allegory works both in its application to normal international relations, the
enlightened way of doing business with each other, and also in finding the only
solution to the complex dilemma of common ethical denominator, where the
discovery of common ethics is complicated by the apparent incompatibility of
their respective religions and denominations. See my other entries on the
subject of transcending from the Gods of religions toward the One Absolute God
of the philosophical abstraction, that is, ascending to the “upper floor” of
the same temple. E Pluribus Unum.
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