Korfhage,
You obviously show that yourself are a not particularly "deep-thinker." But you do impress me by being the first person I've ever came across who goes on the internet in order to beg other people to come up with an argument for you to regurgitate, in your pathetic attempt at saving face in a debate you yourself were too stupid to win. If I were religious I would say shame on you: you confirm the worst caricature of the mindless religious parrot.

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What I do is to ponder things such as A) stigmata (Padre Pio being the most recent example I can think of [he died in 1968]); B) bodies of saints that do not become corrupt (there are nearly a hundred probably); C) visions such as Fatima (witnessed by 70,000 people, some of whom were atheists, and yet they admitted they saw the sun dance!); D) Eucharistic miracles whereby Consecrated Hosts become human flesh and wine human blood (both were type AB) -- you can see the results for yourself by studying the Miracle of Lanciano (the relics are on display in Lanciano, Italy).

Now in my opinion, a person who knows these true events, events that scientists admit do not show any sign of fraud or deception; and this person still cannot entertain the idea that there may be a transcendant deity, is beyond the point where anything other than prayer, or the personal experience of a similar miracle, can help him.

I realize this may not be what you are looking for, but this is the best way I can "help [you] out."

The Privacy issue - the UNKNOWABLE cannot be known from our side of the equation by an act of our will. Otherwise everyone other than being booted out of heaven would be able to storm back in.

THUS as to whether or not the UNKNOWABLE exists is a matter of faith or BELIEF either way. You either choose to have faith and BELIEVE there is an inceptionary or original force - a supernatural existence beyond the totality of this world, in addition to all that is Here - OR conversely you choose to have faith and BELIEVE that everything Here in the microcosmic and the macrocosmic and all things inbetween = the Totality, is ALL there is.

Either way you have no choice in the matter but to have to BELIEVE one way or the other. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens - they are adolescents who want to convince themselves and anyone who will listen or 'buy' their jive that THEY can know the UNKNOWABLE. In this matter they are silly people who don't 'get' that if they don't know their own limitations they have ONE more. And that one more they'd also like to dump on you. But so are the people (adolescents of all ages as well) who want to tell you 'faith' means they Know the UNKNOWABLE (if they could - there would be no such word as 'faith' - no need for it) and they too have in common with the other crew they would like you to 'buy' their jive and dump that one more limitation of theirs on you. Ever watch the televangeli$ts?

I suspect there is an inceptionary force involved with This dimensional creation that got so to speak, the ball rolling...and that the totality itself is not merely a perpetual motion machine. There's no such thing as nothing, 'nothing' doesn't exist - it's just a concept like the concept of zero. So we KNOW we and the totality exist because that's KNOWABLE... we do Not know that there is also an original supernatural force involved with This creation... that is a matter of Faith. Whether you believe it or you don't BELIEVE that, either way it's the human condition to have to believe one thing or another most of the time. Faith or having to believe one thing or another is mankind's primary hereditament. That's scary to most people including scientists who want to ignore it.
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GS raises a point that I have found puzzling of the atheist mind. How is it reasonable to assume a rational, reasoning mind can arise from the randomness inherent in evolutionary/atheistic theory? I suppose they claim that evolution is, despite appearances, ordered and so naturally evolved into a rational mind. It is like the faux rationalism which assumes homosexuality is "biological" in origin. A little too neat an explanation, I think.

If existence is founded upon an absurd chaotic Nothing as Dawkins & Hitchens believe, and there is naught but impersonal brute force governing the Cosmos, then there is no point in our talking at all -- if by "talking" we mean an effort to uncover any sort of meaning imbeded in reality.

But if existence is founded upon Something, then we can all move on to wondering about what (or Who) that Something is.

So the question is one of how much faith you have that the existence you inhabit has meaning. The hypocrisy of atheists of the Dawkins sort is that they attempt to have it both ways -- get on high-horses about moral issues while simultaneously denying the possibility of a meaningful morality.

I used to really be hostile toward Straussians, but now I don't give them enough thought to get too worked up about them. They're not as different from other modern thinkers as they'd like to believe.

It's the Dan Brown phenomenon, everybody from the Straussian from the flaky leftist tends to view texts as a secret-code which the enlightened intellectual might decipher and thus achieve Gnostic godhood -- rather than as a means by which a writer might commune, across Time, with a reader.

But I think he is at least partially right when he says this: “Atheism isn’t what it was in the eighteenth century. Now, the focus of the attack is not the Church, which is no longer dominant, but religion itself. The disdain one used to hear for ‘organized religion’ extends now to the individual believer’s faith. . . . To reduce the influence of religion, it is [now] politically necessary to attack it in the private sphere as well as in the public square.”

That actually rings true to me. I have watched Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Hitchens on Book TV, and all are contemptuous of average believers.

BTW, Hagee is not your run-of-the-mill dispensationalist. I hope the people reading this realize that. All dispensationalists believe that Israel and the Church are distinct. Israel did not morph into the Church or otherwise go away after Christ. But most dispensationalists do not believe there is a current separate dispensation for Jews today. Hagee believes in a "dual covenant" theory. Meaning he believes the Old Covenant is still operational for Jews today. He believes Jews can be "saved," to use evangelical terminology, outside of Christ. He has discouraged attempts to evangelize modern Jews. This is why he is so comparatively pro-Israel, and this is why Jewish leaders love him so much.

But his view is considered borderline heretical if not outright heretical by most orthodox (small o) evangelical scholars. (People on here throw around the word heresy a lot, but this would be potentially heretical because it deals with the fundamental issue of salvation.) The keepers of evangelical orthodoxy, such as the Christian Research Institute (the Bible Answer Man), have long denounced Hagee.

So while Hagee may be the favorite whipping boy of the anti-dispensationalist, remember he is not typical.

I sometimes tell my students it is a little sad that we consider our current crop of secularists to be scholarly and skilled in language. Our bad guys aren't that good at being bad guys...we've just fallen in our ability to offer contrast. Would that the other side could rise to the degeneracy of Voltaire et al. Then we would have to be better at being faithful in our Christianity and discourse.

As a. atzmon points out: *Heidegger was the philosopher that unveiled the latent threat enclosed within the attempt to reconcile Jerusalem with Athens.*

"An academic atmosphere dominated by those who define themselves as Jewish scholars ends with an intellectual paralysis caused by an ethical double bind. Just by adding the prefix Jewish to their title (a Jewish philosopher, a Jewish writer, a Jewish sociologist) these thinkers announce their belonging to a tribal racial blood community while simultaneously they keep propagating the ideas of cosmopolitanism, universalism and internationalism.

"I argue that the political correctness vicious apparatus spreads smoke in our eyes, blinding us from seeing the devastating impacts of these ethical oxymorons created by the endless preaching about ethics. In other words, all attempts to pacify Athens and Jerusalem emerge from the sinister holes set by political correctness. The gap between Jerusalem and Athens should be portrayed also by differentiating between national identity defined as a Volk and marked by autochthony vs. a blood community which never grows roots in a homeland (or anywhere else) and thus became the symbol for Diaspora, migration and exodus.

"For Heidegger a Volk identity is constituted through history. He interprets the Athens and Jerusalem hostility not in religious terms but as an ontological split where attachment to the soil cannot accept the uncommitted wanderer.

"Since the beginning of time, human beings were destined (as individuals, groups or tribes) to wander from one place to the other. But we should not substitute the urge for survival with the desire for dwelling. Wandering and emigration should be seen as an inevitable means for striking roots in a new dwelling, it is never an aim in itself. Heidegger and other thinkers of his time strived to portray a geo-political mind-set of German rootedness and Bodenständigkeit (the eternity of the soil). What *sounds like autochthonous supremacy can be interpreted as the link of the Volk to its homeland.* For Völkisch ideologists, a homeland is a mythical space that has its roots in the soil of the native earth, as a place for the historical unfolding of the Volk [vii]. For these neo-Hellenist thinkers, Greek autochthony was inseparable from the origins of philosophy [viii]. Setting the foundations of the Graeco-German affinity left its powerful mark upon German academic life and on intellectual elite in the early 20th century till the outbreak of WWII.

"This intellectual enterprise was *banned in the aftermath of the war as it was deemed to legitimize the Nazis’ brutal acts in the name of political exclusion.

"After 1933 Heidegger became preoccupied with the idea that ‘the true revolution’ had to come from the university. He described the university as a bureaucratic vortex that turned into an institutional centre for professional research and teaching. He sought to restore the essence of the German university and bring it back to its original spirit, which had been lost. Only by returning to its origin in archaic Greek thinking could the crisis of the West be resolved. He was close to saving academic thought from its paralyzed condition, and would have done so, if only the Nazis had not diverted it away for many years afterward...*

"... Hence in the battle between Athens and Jerusalem, the present day presents us with a definite victory of Jerusalem. We can realize how in the realm of philosophy and cultural studies ‘völkisch’ aspects as distinct from nationalism are overwhelmingly *violently* dismissed. Their stress on the affinity with the Greeks as bound to the spiritual aversion to Jerusalem is eliminated from the academic discourse. In fact, cosmopolitanism and internationalism as promoted by Jerusalem philosophers from left to right (Marxist, Neo-Marxists, Frankfurt School and critical studies, to Husserlian Phenomenology and constructivism, up to Leo Strauss’s universal monism echoed by American and British Neo-Cons), are triumphant beyond any doubt. *Secular Jewish intellectuals are outsiders looking in not only as Jews among non-Jews, but also as people alienated from their own Jewish culture. This explains their success in portraying modern alienation and initiating radical paradigms of post-modernity, constructivism and critical studies. After inventing internationalism they are the advocates of globalization cosmopolitanism and a boundless free economy.*

(end quote) read complete article of august 7, 2007 if you wish at http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com

What you don't 'get' necessarily is that there is a rhizome or an essence of the truth in what Heidegger was able to isolate or bottle, so to speak, which the nazis abused, or misused going as usual the 'other' way. What our opponents have done since then, is Not to use that 'secret' for they are philosophically Opposed to it - but rather to adopt most of the rotten tactics of the nazis i.e. nazi lite - which they find useful in implementing their vapid, worthless agenda from which you all/we all also recoil.

We are all to some extent of course the pawns of our age - you demonize Heidegger - heil, heil, heil - so what-?- Who are the nazis not 'then' rather today. Wipe the clouds from your eyes. Heidegger was just Heidegger. Sid, no I haven't read yet martin's rektoratsrede but where are your approximately balanced recommendations to read of his that which is of genius & truth. In case you have not noticed modernity's and post-modernity's recent 'other' way of today has led directly back to the concentration camp. "Heil?" !