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Knowledge of God:
I am impressed by the passion
of Therese Foote's postulates concerning Knowledge of God;
and the elegance and cogency of Kevin Solvaa's self-assured criticism.
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Perhaps it is pedantic of me
to point out
that our knowledge of deity,
and indeed what deity in itself (an sich) might be,
has been in issue literally
since the beginning the history recorded in Genesis.
What knowledge 
human beings (can) have of the divine
is the oldest of theological questions,
a perplexity that can be traced through the entirety
of the Judaic-Christian tradition.
The identification of knowledge of deity as being subjective
as distinct from objective,
Our assertion that knowledge of deity is subjective
(as dist8inct from objective)
we restate an argument that has its roots
in the very distant past.
.PP
At the footing of our religion are the convictions
a) that deity is invisible,
and b) that the name of deity must
not be taken in vain.
I interpret the invisibility of deity
in the light of Aristitles observation
that vision is the primary source of human knowledge,
I construe the invisibility of deity
to be both optical and spiritual.
as an expression of the circumstance that
deity is inherently unknowable.
An invisible deity
will be an unknowable deity,
especially in conjunction with the constraints on
theological discourse of the second commandment
with its prohibition of taking the name of the lord in vain.
Our concepts are elaborations of the the words that we speak.
If its name may not be spoken,
the conception of deity is severely compromised.
If, as I believe, it is a legitimate inference from the
second commandment that the name of the Lord may not
be uttered at all, then this prohibition literally
renders deity unthinkable.
I construe the proscription of taking its name "in vain"
as an expression of its inaccessibility
to our language and hence to our thought.
.PP
We are social creatures;
At the same time, that
we are overwhelmed by a need for
and by the awareness of the immediacy of God.
we feel a need to communicate,
to share our experiences with one another.
Ordinarily, our communication consists in
by demonstrating to one another,
by making one another aware of,
the objects that constitute the world in which we live,
And when this us not enough,
we supplement the physical world that we experience
with an expanded, virtual universe of objective concepts
to reflect our experience and our intentions.
Our struggle with "knowledge of God"
with the definition of deity,
reflects the fact
that deity as we experience it,
eludes objectification.
No image of deity can suffice;
no account of deity can suffice.
.PP
The history of our religion is the dialectic
that ensues
from the need to share,
to establish a common understanding,
to establish literally a spiritual community,
from the (social compunction) need
to picture what is invisible,
and to communicate to one another
what is beyond the power of language to express.
.PP
Thus, quite logically, intimation of deity arise
not only from the incomprehensibility of the Universe
(The heavens declare the glory of God)
but also ,and perhaps to an even greater extent,
from the inadequcies of individual and social existence.
(Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir."
It is the smallness, the mortality of the individual
which suggests to him the infinitude an immortality of the divine.
The inaccessibility of deity
corresponds to
is the mirror image of the inadequacy (Hinfaelligkeit)
of human existence.o<P>
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Arguably then,
it is the attempt to escape from this dilemma
which persuades men
the overcoming of this inadequacy by 
by the spurious identification with a deity
imagined as an earthly potentate,
or with an earthly potentate imagined as holy or divine,
But it seems to me
that such identifications are spurious and
invariably extinguish the flame
of genuine religiosity that nourished them
Here is the theological imperative for the
separation of church and state.
.PP
There have been times in the past,
when the inaccessibility of deity was defined
in the so-called negative theology.
But the simple statement that deity is beyond
our power to define is too obvious to satisfy
our intellectual Ansprueche. demands  Erwartungen. Expectations.
In the modern, post-Hegelian world the essential unknowableness
of God finds more sophisticated at least twofold expression:
in the transformation of the knowledge of deity
into dialectic, i.e. into contradiction and paradox,
and secondly in the displacement of deity from
the realm of potentially demonstrable objects into inwardness
and subjectivity. Subjectivity, by definition is that
which is objectively unknowable.
Each of us, according to his or her temperaments an talents
must recapitulate this spiritual reality into which we were
born and which has shaped our minds.
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I not only agree with Kevin that a true Christion is a rarity.
I believe a true Christian as subjectivity objectified
is an impossibility, a paradox.
That is why Christianity turns into martyrdom.
Martyrdom is symbolic for the paradox
the literal impossibility of being a Christian.
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I think the expression of religious conviction,
as it manifests itself in our political and social life,
may be interpreted as a spectrum
of the ways in which different individuals
cope with the contradiction implicit ...
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There are those, as there have always been,
who like the ancient Egyptians,
who deemed their Pharaos to be gods,
invest temporal power with infallibility and divinity.
and those again,
who endow their religion (religious concepts)
with temporal power, by establishing theocracy.
.PP
Thus religious activity if not indeed experience
invariably threatens the spiritual integrity of
of subjective individuality. It forces him who
marched to the tune of a different drummer into lockstep
with the rest.