[53] to the ULTIMACY of one's concern? And which is less adequate? Which is distorted and idolatrous? This is the problem, and not the wrongly-so-called "existence" of God-- which I would call in impossible combination of words. God^a as the ultimate in man's ultimate concern is MORE certain than any other certainty, even the certainty of one's self. God as symbolized in a divine figure is a matter of daring faith, of courage, of risk, of change, of error. Now God is the basis [?]* of faith^b, but He is not the only one. There is a second level which I would call the qualities and actions of God--qualities such as power, love, justice: they are taken from finite experiences which we all have and are applied symbolically to that which is beyond finitude and infinity. -- Or if faith calls God "almighty," faith uses the human experience of power in order to symbolize the content of its infinite concern. But it DOES NOT DO something extremely absurd, namely [to] assert the existance [sic.] of a highest being, sitting on His throne, and being able to do what He pleases to do, and nobody (not even Himself) knows what He will do the next moment. This is a caricature and absurdity, and many stumbling blocks against religion are derived from non-symbolic literalism^c of religion which leads us to a nest of absurdities. For instance the question of so many people: Why, if God is almighty, has He permitted misery on earth? --Now this presupposes a nonsensical and absurd concept of almightiness. But I cannot go into this in this moment. So it is with all the other qualities: omniscience--I will only show how absurd this becomes in the moment in which symbolic language is understood literalistically. Then one can ask, with some medieval Scholastic: Does God also know everything which would have happened, if what has happened had not happened? -- Now here you see what an amount of absurdity is possible if you distort symbols into literal statements. The same is true of all the divine activities (past, present and future) which one tells about God^d. They are symbols taken from our daily experience, and not informations [sic.] about what God has done, or what a highest Being called "God" has done, once upon a time, or will do some time in the future. Faith^e is not the belief in such *My notes recorded "the basic of faith," with subsequent interpolations that T. may have said "basis," and that perhaps the word "symbol" was understood, but not expressed; or perhaps he meant "basic" as "foundation".--Ed.