Hidden and Inaccessible Knowledge: God the Mystic, Understanding and Not Understanding God

By Celly Luyinduladio

b>Kirkus Discoveries Review
A well-intentioned but meandering discussion of Gods sublimity that frequently sinks into invective on the evils of organized religion.

Luyinduladios central claims about enlightened religious inquiry are admirablethey should be articulated and written about more often. The author argues that we should access our religious urges through our rational capacities. He further suggests that God is too great to be confined by any one religious tradition or sacred textor even, really, by language. This is where the movement religious scholars call negative theology beginswith the suggestion that any God we can imagine would necessarily be too sublime, too inexplicable to be conceived. (God is in some ways the hidden and inaccessible knowledge of Luyinduladios title.) However, even the great negative theologians were ultimately stymied in their efforts to explain religious experience on their own terms. Meister Eckhart lapsed into mysticism, and Saint John of the Cross into gorgeous but obscure poetry. Luyinduladio has similar problems, but without the genius of an Eckhart or John of the Cross, he falls too often into wandering rants. Some are expectedthe author abhors bigotry, religiously motivated violence, sectarian arrogance and the ignorance of the zealot. Others, however, come straight from left field. He castigates the second Bush administration for sending the United States to war in Iraq on false evidenceand Colin Powell for abetting. Luyinduladio goes on about the evils of slavery and applauds the archbishop of Canterbury for discussing the possibility of reparations. These are valid complaints but seem hugely out of place in a tract on God and spirituality. Further, too many of the authors central insights come straight from the religious imagination of one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine. In fact, so fond is the author of Paine that he repeatedly quotes him at long lengthonce for a laughable 22-page stretch. Readers may wonder if they should go straight to Paine instead.

Hidden and inaccessible indeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469100739

Celly Luyinduladio

Celly Luyinduladio is a Mukongo, more specifically a Munianga born in Kinshasa. He lives in the USA and he is an Electrical Engineer.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Mr. Luyinduladio, Celly.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2009905317

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4415-4183-3

   Softcover   978-1-4415-4182-6

ISBN:   ebook   978-1-4691-0073-9

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Contents

DEDICATION

PREAMBLE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

Imagine God creating the universe the way it is actually, and saying,

I shall not make myself known to you physically but you will reach me by the spirit if you so desire because you have been granted absolute liberty of thoughts, actions and responsibilities. I know as your Creator that you will search tirelessly for me scientifically, religiously, spiritually, and so forth. Upon this matter, my final say is that some knowledge are better served hidden than known.

Will we be satisfied? Clearly, no, we won’t be.

I do believe in God, not just in a way religion wants me to.

image%201.jpg

Redesigned by Mr. Luyinduladio, Celly

The meaning of Yowa from

http://www.webarchaeology.com/html/kongocos.htm

Tendwa Nza Kongo: The Kongo Cosmo gram

Wyatt MacGaffey, a scholar of Kongo civilization and religion, has summarized the form and meaning of the essential Kongo Cosmo gram as follows:

The simplest ritual space is a Greek cross [+] marked on the ground, as for oath-taking. One line represents the boundary; the other is ambivalently both the path leading across the boundary, as to the cemetery; and the vertical path of power linking the above with the below. This relationship, in turn, is polyvalent, since it refers to God and man, God and the dead, and the living and the dead. The person taking the oath stands upon the cross, situating himself between life and death, and invokes the judgment of God and the dead upon himself. [This is taken from a work in progress shared with Dr. Thompson by MacGaffey].

This is the simplest manifestation of the Kongo cruciform, a sacred point on which a person stands to make an oath, on the ground of the dead and under all-seeing God. This Kongo sign of the cross has nothing to do with the crucifixion of the Son of God, yet its meaning overlaps the Christian vision. Traditional Bakongo believed in a Supreme Deity, Nzambi Mpungu, and they had their own notions of the indestructibility of the soul: Bakongo believe and hold it true that man’s life has no end that it constitutes a cycle. The sun, in its rising and setting, is a sign of this cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change. (Janzen and MacGaffey 1974:34) (49). The Kongo yowa cross does not signify the crucifixion of Jesus for the salvation of mankind; it signifies the equally compelling vision of the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting lines. The Kongo cross refers therefore to the everlasting community of all righteous men and women:

N’zungi! N’zungi-nzila . . . . Man turns in the path,

N’zungi! N’zungi-nzila . . . . He merely turns in the path;

Banganga bayé E ee! . . . . The priests are here, (49)

DEDICATION

To dear mother, Luyinduladio Mponi, you have been a fundamental source of pride and inspiration in my life. And as I stand here today, every day, I do my very best to honor your virtue and what you have taught me, and I thank you dearly for your guidance and support. Nothing could have been accomplished without your teaching of the basics concerning life; thus, I am deeply grateful. To my wife, Luyinduladio Bolembo, I love you dearly. To my beloved children, the very best is wished upon you. To my family, please know that I care.

May this work impact the world positively and diligently for years to come.

PREAMBLE

The core message developed in this excellent book is not an easy matter for the mind to bear for some people while it may well be bearable by others. Let the tone of this masterpiece be introduced and set up by one of the utmost thinkers the world has known—Mr. Thomas Paine in response to a friend’s letter with respect to the Age of Reason.

An answer to a friend

Paris, May 12, 1797

In your letter of the 20th March, you give me several quotations from the Bible, which you call the word of God, to shew me that my opinions on religion are wrong, and I could give you as many, from the same book to shew that yours are not right; consequently, then the bible decides nothing, because it decides any way, and every way, one chooses to make it.

But by what authority do you call the bible the word of God? For this is the first point to be settled. It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mahometans calling the Koran the word of God makes the Koran to be so. The Popish Councils of Nice and Laodicea, about 350 years after the time the person called Jesus Christ is said to have lived, voted the books what now composed what is called the New Testament to be the word of God. This was done by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. The Pharisees of the second temple, after the Jews returned from their captivity in Babylon, did the same by the books that now compose the Old Testament, and this is all the authority there is, which to me is no authority at all. I am as capable of judging for myself as they were, and I think more so, because, as they made a living by their religion, they had a self-interest in the vote they gave.

You may have an opinion that a man is inspired, but you cannot prove it, nor can you have any proof of it yourself, because you cannot see into his mind in order to know how he comes by his thoughts; and the same is the case with the word revelation. There can be no evidence of such a thing, for you can no more prove revelation than you can prove what another man dreams of, neither can he prove it himself.

It is often said in the bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the bible says so. The Koran says that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. why not? Because, you will say, you will not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don’t is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor? For my own part, I believe that all are impostors who pretend to hold verbal communication with the Deity. It is the way by which the world has been imposed upon; but if you think otherwise you have the right to your opinion that I have to mine, and must answer it in the same manner. But all this does not settle the point, whether the Bible be the word of God, or not. It is therefore necessary to go a step further. The case then is—

You form your opinion of God from the account given of him in the Bible; and I form my opinion of the Bible from the wisdom and goodness of God manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all works of creation. The result in these two cases will be, that you, by taking the Bible for your standard, will