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1 Sacred Transcendence Religion develops, I maintain, as a human response to some manifestation of sacred transcendence, putative or real. That response entails an involvement with sacred transcendence. The presence of that involvement determines human existence at its core, as does its absence as well. Thus I use the expressions “religious involvement” and “religious existence” interchangeably. A philosophy of religion that is phenomenological in character aims at (1) understanding the necessities that (a) determine human consciousness of the sacred and (b) account for self-manifestations of sacred transcendence that are distinctive and original, that is, that are the origins of all further human involvement with and reflection on the sacred; and also aims at (2) understanding the necessities that belong to religious involvement and that allow religious involvement specifically to differ from and to be related to other dimensions and possibilities of human existence. The integration of these understandings has as its outcome a proposal concerning the intelligibility or“meaning”of religion and concerning the conditions that are relevant to a critical consideration of the truth of religious claims.1 In this chapter I will address questions that have to do with the first of the understandings just mentioned, that is, questions about the necessities that determine a consciousness of the sacred and that permit original and distinctive self-manifestations of sacred transcendence. The understandings that come about through a consideration of these questions provide a basis for further discussion of religious involvement, or religious existence. At the same time, these further discussions enrich the understanding of sacred transcendence itself . The analyses and arguments of this chapter, therefore, are the first moves that need to be made in a larger process of inquiry. The whole process is one that moves all of its parts from a relatively incomplete and abstract condition to a condition that is more fully concrete and determinate. Religious Consciousness In very basic terms there are two attitudes that must belong to religious consciousness. It is important to discuss the content of these attitudes and what I will call their “status,” and also to make a remark about their source. Religious consciousness, first, has its roots in the attitude or view that reality is not confined to that which is perishable, imperfect, flawed, limited, qualified , conditioned, and in some sense impotent. Certainly, these qualities are attributable to us and to all that we can encounter or imagine or understand in Sacred Transcendence 15 the context of our direct experience of each other and the world. But that just says that, for religious consciousness, reality is not confined to our direct experience . Religious consciousness is determined, rather, by the attitude that reality includes—but more importantly, exceeds—perishable, flawed, and qualified things and presents us with that which is imperishable, perfect, unlimited, unconditioned, and full of power. There are, of course, many ways in which such a thing can be represented, and in fact it need not be represented as a thing at all. Religious believers speak of God, of the gods, of Brahman, and also of the Tao or of Enlightenment. In addition, the manner in which the unqualified or perfected nature of the object of religious consciousness is represented can be a function of the contrasting imperfections that the object is supposed chiefly to exceed. Thus the fullness of reality may be designated as immortal rather than mortal, as perfect in beauty rather than flawed in composition, as uncreated rather than created, as full of power rather than as subject to the power of things other than itself, or as a condition in which the illusions about the self that desire causes vanish in the face of a thoroughly illumining truth.Whatever may be the case, religious consciousness is informed by the attitude that reality exceeds all of the things and domains of things affected by the sorts of limitations I am referring to here and reaches its summit in a fullness in which those limitations are, in some relevant sense, transcended. Religious consciousness, in the second place, is rooted in the view that I am not the best thing that there is, the center of the universe, and that my own self-realization or the perfection of my own condition cannot legitimately be on its own terms the final end and good to which my strivings are directed. Nor can any other person legitimately stand in the place of this end and good, either for me or for him- or herself; nor can any group...

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