George Pattison Quotes

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At a theoretical level, I think a naturalist approach to religion is just asking questions I'm not interested in. They're perfectly legitimate in their own terms, but they don't address the actual experience of how one or other aspect of religion becomes existentially meaningful to us in our actual lives. The fact that we ourselves are the subject of investigation makes all the difference.

George Pattison

Meaningful, Thinking, Asking Questions

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Every stroke a tennis player plays is different, yet we perceive them as playing in a distinctive and unique way. It's what Heidegger called a certain 'how' of existing. It's ultimately always singular, and the double task of (a) getting it in view and (b) communicating it to others will inevitably be marked more often by failure than success!

George Pattison

Unique, Player, Views

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

George Pattison

Philosophical, Character, Philosopher

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Of course, it's always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling.

George Pattison

Thinking, Years, Taught Us

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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When I'm on the operating table, I'm happy for the surgeon to treat me as a machine, but the moment I return to consciousness I have other needs and aspirations that should be recognized. We're not here only to survive or extend our individual or species life but to do something seemingly more difficult, for which I've used words and phrases like 'love' and the 'Kingdom of God'.

George Pattison

Like Love, Needs, Phrases

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I think he [Heidegger] sets the question up in a useful way and, despite appearances, he's not 'against' technology. He just wants us to have a questioning and thoughtful relation to it. This must be relevant to any approach.

George Pattison

Thoughtful, Technology, Thinking

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations.

George Pattison

Keys, Political, Atheism

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn't lost it.

George Pattison

Party, Political, Church

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure if Cupitt himself still uses this term, but it's useful in suggesting that, actually, there are more choices than the choice between nihilism and faith. In fact, the issue may not be faith as such but the fact that for millennia, Christianity has buttressed itself with a particular kind of metaphysics that has now seemingly reached the end of its life-span. But perhaps Buddhist metaphysics could provide an alternative here - or, at least, offer a direction of travel.

George Pattison

Buddhist, Issues, Choices

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.

George Pattison

Teacher, Real, Past

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.

George Pattison

Buddhism, Needs, Care

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.

George Pattison

Reality, Thinking, Impact

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Positively, he [Heidegger] shows that the prospect of death doesn't of itself destroy all possibilities of meaning but calls instead for these to be relocated from fantasies about a future post-mortem life. However, I don't think he does enough in this work to show that this relocation has - I believe - a primarily ethical character (in Levinas's sense of 'ethical').

George Pattison

Believe, Character, Thinking

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope.

George Pattison

Past, Ideas, Long

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I still read a lot about teenage angst! Of course, any kind of mourning CAN become pathological and then it 'has to stop', but to move through life untouched by the loss of hopes, beliefs and aspirations once cherished is also questionable.

George Pattison

Teenage, Moving, Loss

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice.

George Pattison

Cfs, Justice, Liberty

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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What it does remind us is that 'God' is not to be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and is not and cannot be the object of any detached 'scientific' contemplation. Heidegger's critique of onto-theology is also driving a wedge between speaking of God and the aims of science - not so as to get rid of God but rather to free God from a false objectification.

George Pattison

Kingdoms, Objectification, Doe

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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However, in brief, I think the connecting of 'God' and 'Being' is one of these things for which there seems to be a natural impulse in human thinking but it can also lead to confusions. Religious believers mostly want to see God as the epitome of what is most really real and in some non-theistic contexts, people talk simply of 'Isness'.

George Pattison

Religious, Real, Thinking

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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It seems that just Being, the sheer fact of existence, that there is something rather than nothing, already inspires a wonder akin to religion. But - as in my comment about the Kingdom of God in the last answer - Jewish and Christian traditions are also prepared to challenge what 'is' for the sake of what could be.

George Pattison

Christian, Challenges, Inspire

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.

George Pattison

Religious, Real, Thinking

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.

George Pattison

Religious, Thinking, Nihilism

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

George Pattison

Tears, Scripture, Possibility

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways.

George Pattison

Elements, World, Way

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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Ultimately, we live in the face of an irresolvable mystery about our origin and, for that matter, about our end. And what Schleiermacher would have us do is (a) acknowledge that this is the case and (b) accept it as something positive, a point of departure for a life of trusting joy.

George Pattison

Joy, Departure, Matter

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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And this is also what he takes Christian doctrine, in all its complexity, to be centrally about, that is, teaching an attitude rather than a set of propositions. Call it joyous openness to life. What's not relevant about that?

George Pattison

Christian, Attitude, Teaching

"Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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"And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope."

- George Pattison,

www.3ammagazine.com, added Feb 24, 2016

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