Writing what follows, I'm not trying to convert anybody, or to annoy my atheist and agnostic friends--I'm mostly just thinking out loud, as it were, for my own amusement (and ideally for anybody who happens to read it). The only evangelical impulses I might have would be directed toward political right-wing Christians and Moonies, but they irritate me too much for me to carry out such impulses.
Any way I saw a new edition of a collection of essays by Charles Hartshorne at the library and checked it out--it's called *The Zero Fallacy* The title refers to the view in process philosophy to the effect that there is nothing in the cosmos that is really "nothing"--that is, everything that is actual in the cosmos has a form of subjectivity--is in fact, alive.
But I won't pursue that. Rather I wanted to take up Hartshorne's view of God. He takes very seriously Whitehead's idea that God is the "fellow sufferer"--that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but that God humbly suffers everything that his creatures endure--and also all their "enjoyments." Hartshorne infers an interesting ethic from this doctrine. It is important that we as individuals avoid suffering for ourselves and that we also try and help others avoid suffering as well--because if God is God and is the Ultimate Good we do not want to God to suffer any more than necessary (as finite creatures, it is inevitable that we will in fact suffer, oh, a fair amount). It may seem extremely obvious that we should avoid suffering, but a casual glance at history suggests that there has been *a hell of a lot* of avoidable suffering. And another philosophical aspect of this notion is that the dilemmas generated by the arguments around self-interest vs. altruism are avoided. Of course, none of the foregoing is very convincing if you don't share the worldview in the first place & as I say, I'm not going to try and convince anybody.
Hartshorne had considerable faith in democracy and the decency of ordinary people, but in his later years he came to regard humanity as a threat to itself and to the whole natural world.
Hartshorne, BTW, was not a Christian. He was a Unitarian-Universalist and his views of God in a general sort of way approximated those of Reformed Judaism. (I also think of Isaac Bashevis Singer's).
Here's Wikipedia on Hartshorne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hartshorne Although I have my own criticisms of a couple of Hartshornean notions, my cursory glance at the criticism section in the Wikipedia article led me to conclude, "mere trifling and piffle," as Nero Wolfe might have put it.
Hartshorne lived to be a 103 YO. He was an amateur orinthologist of no mean achievement. One of his last works was a philosophical study of bird song, entitled, *Born to Sing* in which he provided the final answer as to why birds sing: it's because they are happy.
R.
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