Reference no: EM133621589
Assignment:
Answer the following questions and provide in text citations and references. If it's a book include page numbers
1. How, according to Nietzsche, does a person's feeling of power paradoxically lead him to project power upon a source outside himself?
2. In what sense is the homo religious (the religious man) a split personality - a divided self?
3. In what sense (according to Nietzsche) are priests constantly "posturing and posing'? What drives this?
4. Nietzsche gives us what we might call a drastically right-wing picture of the excesses and perversions of religion. Some of the master theologians of monotheistic religion that we have discussed such as Maimonides and Nicholas of Cusa take us beyond the range of possibility envisioned by Nietzsche. What is it in their approaches and "conceptual equipment" that enables this?
5. At p. 138, Levenson says, "The Chinese tradition can be scrapped, but a Chinese tradition exists which can be prized." How can this sentence be applied to the histories of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
6. How could you, broadly speaking, explain the devolution of Monotheistic Religion in all three of its guises into a multiplicity of separate traditions?
7. How under Nicholas of Cusa's theological scrutiny does God emerge as at best a possibility - rather than a certainty?
8. How, according to Nicholas of Cusa, does skepticism make monotheistic faith possible? Why is monotheistic religious belief indissolubly linked with skepticism? Why is it (according to Nicholas) that it is only because the thing-in-itself (God) is unknown and unknowable that the concept of the Biblical, monotheistic God can be sustained in good faith?
9. Why, according to Maimonides, would it be impossible to disprove God's existence? How does this outcome fit in with the whole notion of negative theology?
10. Elaborate upon how this insight about the impossibility of disproof of negative theology might also have the effect of rendering negative theology impossible to formulate and to rationally prove.
11. How are "that" and "what" questions in any field of human discourse and inquiry linked or related? If we cannot successfully fill in content under the rubric of "that" questions, would it be possible for us to resolve "what" issues - and vice versa? Do we need both categories to be in play at the same time for the inquiry to proceed? What is the import of this line of argument for negative theology?