I would rather be an endless wanderer
than stuck in a town I did not belong
for I have in my head a cache of questions
unanswerable except by God himself
that keeps me walking and searching and seeking
instead of standing fat on a faith given to me
fearful of the day that I can avoid them no longer
instead I embrace and accept these mysteries revealed
for to do otherwise I am simply unable
What is the substance of Charisma? What causes people to follow a person, independent of credibility and merit? What is leadership?
Occasionally, especially when I’m supposed to be doing something useful (like studying for exams), I find myself slowly snuck up on, captured, and taken away by the allure of the information and idea pool known formerly as the internet. Without getting too metaphorical, the internet, with the proliferation of blogs and videos and news has become almost a collective mind for civilized (and wealthy enough to afford a computer) man. Who knows, with the OLPC project, maybe even the uncivilized countries will join us too.
Anyways, my journey started with a trailer for an upcoming documentary called Jesus Camp, a “book” on Christian anarchy, a rather indignant pagan who hates Christian fundamentalism (and is actually pretty eloquent with the hundred thousand explitives he uses), and ended with eggos. That’s of course not a totally inclusive list, but you get the gist. The internet just took part of my life, and I probably want it back.
The Jesus Camp video warrants an entire post, but everyone is voicing their opinion everywhere, so I figure I’ll let it die down, glean off the best, and steal something sweet to say…or someone needs to seed a certain torrent because I’m only getting 10.1kBps.
“It is also evident that many differences of detail would be possible in the interpretation, according to both the church or sect chosen and to individual temperament of the interpreter. That elasticity of framework which has made it possible for Christianity to appeal to men of all grades of culture and to societies in all stages of development is one of the most notable facts about it.” ~ Julian Huxley
Without a clear definition of “what is” and “what isn’t”, it’s also difficult to say “who is” and “who isn’t.” This brings friction when Johnny murderer claims to be what I am, but I respond by saying I certainly don’t support murder. We are different. A lot of times, people will then divide themselves into groups or sects, both to isolate (and bolster) their particular opinion or interpretation, and eliminate the accountability that comes from hypocrisy by proxy. The Jehovah’s Witnesses call everyone else “Christendom” and call God Jehovah, and make a horrendously big deal out of it (for the primary purpose of differentiating themselves). The Mormons are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We have Southern Baptists and Methodists, Pentacostals, Catholics, and even Evangelicals (there are a hundred more denominations). There is almost always a comment battle on popular video sites (like Youtube) when someone posts a video of a religious person acting foolishly as to the denominational identity of the person. “No way, that’s not a Jehovah’s Witness, they wouldn’t do that!” to “I know he’s a Mormon, they all wear those ties!”
The real problem isn’t naming, it’s the gradual creation of horrendously strict guidelines as to what defines a given group, which (at least to me) amounts to the legalism that Christ pretty much spent his entire time attacking. I’ve always kind of wondered why the apostles suddenly got a bunch of authority at Jesus’ death (and the answer is, he gave it to them), when it’s very clear that during his life they were absolute idiots (even according to the gospels). But what it looks to me like the apostles did was run a church…the body…as a whole. Jesus never had to do it, Paul did a lot of it. And it’s really clear in his letters. The Corinthians had some dude having sex with his mother, and Paul had to write them to say “you’re being absolutely ridiculous.” (Later on I would say “you’re obviously not living by the spirit”) But the early church took these letters, like oreos, distilled every bit of law they could out of them, and stuck them in a pile they began to call Christianity. This is what the followers of Christ adhere to, this is how they act. We’ve always been fond of laws, they’re a lot more clear cut and a lot easier to follow than a simple (but endlessly complex) command to “Love one another.”
As the Church grew, it became necessary to get rid of the filth that was attempting to infiltrate, ascribing all sorts of nonsense to “Christianity”, thus we have a series of councils that hammered out what we will now refer to as “orthodox Christianity.” Deviations from “orthodox Christianity” are heresy.
Take what you will from my blind speculation as to the history of Christianity, but from what I can gather, this is what is wrong today. Christianity is too:
A) Legalistic
B) Simplistic
C) Devisive
D) Political
E) Heartless
(NOTE: I am all of those things and more haha.)
All these combine to create a religious climate very similar (taking into account the distortions of culture) to the Jewish climate when Christ was born. Popular conception of Christianity is protesting abortion by camping by the MSC Breezeway next to hundreds of small crosses, or voting Republican and supporting the war in Iraq. Becoming a “godly” person today involves little more than rote memorization and a committment to your personal image in regards to how other people see you. Give a little on the guidelines of Christ to pray in private and give charitably in secrecy, listen to popular christian music, go to the christian events, become good at praying out loud and what words your particular group of people want you use (maybe talk a lot about faith over works, or stress a relationship over religion)… bam! Knowing God has been reduced to a point where one of the twelve-year-olds in Jesus Camp “got saved when [he] was five” because he “just wanted more out of life.” Disingenousness seems to be almost encouraged, it’ll feel right when you do it, and you will definitely get accolades from people who refuse to see that five-year-olds just aren’t thinking about “life”. Maybe you were, I was thinking about who’s yard I could pee in without getting caught. Sometimes refusing to doubt God’s power can just leave you scammed. “Come, let us reason together” says the God of Israel. “Reason is sinful” says the modern church.
In the Old Testament, God ran the show. He was the judge and ruler, and he spoke through a mountain that was on fire. Eventually the people whined saying, God, please, talk to us through prophets (I’m guessing a firey mountain was rediculously awesome and scary)! God eventually acquiesed. Later it was “God, give us a king!” And God said, “no, you really don’t want a king, look who’s ruling you right now (me)!” And the people kept whining, and God gave them a king.
In the New Testament, Jesus ran the show (don’t lose me on the trinity issue). He’s the judge and ruler, and he spoke with his own mouth. He preached a lot of stuff, but mostly what people were lacking during the time, which was everything. Love, righteousness, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance… When he was crucified, he no longer had a physical mouth (to which the disciples understandably begged “what do we do?!”) but he said to the apostles “don’t worry, I’ll send my spirit to speak to you and guide you.” The apostles worked pretty well for a while, but they had a tendency to get martyred. Once they were gone, and as the miracles (and arguably faith) of the people lessened, they must have decided that God stopped speaking so clearly through his spirit to them. So they got together all the books of the apostles (now deceased) that they were using to teach and made the Bible, and called it the Word of God. We trust they were guided by the spirit in this process, and that ultimately God was sovereign, but really, only he knows. When the people whom the apostles had directly taught started to die off, everyone began to panic. “We don’t know what this book means?!” they said. There was a lot of heresy around this time, because the teachings were largely heresay. I don’t think the words have any connection, but they should. “It’s not really clear on whether I should forgive my brother 7 or 7 times 70 times!” So the priests got up and said “hey, we know God, we’ll help you out.” So the priests helped the people interpret the scripture, and life went on. Nowadays, the people don’t read the book, the priests hardly go by the book, and the sermons come from self-help experts lik Rev. Dr. Phil.
The road of humanity is always away from direct revelation from God. I’m sure Thomas Paine would not have near as much trouble with Christianity if it was run as it was in the first century (Julian Huxley is still screwed though, because religion without revelation precludes God speaking directly to you). No longer do we stress life by the spirit, or accountability by the body of Christ, we establish rules and regulations so that a document can decide instead of a person.
2 Peter 3:16 says “All scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that a man of God is equipped for every good work.”
This verse is used the world over to say that God wrote the Bible, and I’m not here to debate that (though you might note this statement was written down long before the Bible existed as a collective piece in its entirety). But what I am here to point out is that all of these actions: teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training…are preparatory actions. They involve getting the apprentice ready to perform his trade. Conspicuously absent is one word that would have changed my entire stance on a lot of issues. Living.
Sometimes I worry myself. A lot of times I do, actually. But one thing I for some reason have developed a rock solid faith in is that God is capable of guiding us to himself. I trust that all these things I’m learning, and this stuff I’ve gone through, all the mental turmoil I engage in, will all turn out ok in the end. That is endlessly comforting for me. I think trust precedes faith. Before I believe what you are saying, you have to establish your credibility, either by proving it through some means (or a miracle), or by having developed a relationship with me. In the end, we have to trust something, otherwise we are hopelessly paralyzed. But to that end I think it does a body good to diversify his trust investments, lessen the risks of potential brainwashing and misinformation, and get a perspective on how people “are”.
The Trinity has been a doctrine that has been particularly divisive on the denominational front. With certain groups outright denying it (off the top of my head, the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unitarians), atheists considering it intellectually impalpable, and other groups seeing it as absolutely essential, nothing is new on the religious front. But Julian Huxley, the avowed Scientific Humanist writes in Religion without Revelation (for the record, the last time this book was checked out of A&M libraries was 1952):
“The doctrine, in spite of occasional intellectual revolts from its incomprehensibility, has appealed to the European mind for so many centuries that even the most bigoted opponent of Christianity would have to admit that the doctrine satisfies certain human needs and corresponds in some way with reality.”
WHAT?! Seriously, I was not expecting a statement like this from Huxley. Further developments show the true colors of this statement, but that it has “appealed to the European mind” and “satisfies certain human needs and corresponds in some way with reality”? Sick out.
“As I see it broadly, “God the Father” is a personification of the forces of non-human Nature; “God the Holy Ghost” represents all ideals; and “God the Son” personifies human nature at its highest, as actually incarnate in bodies and organised in minds, bridging the gulf between the other two, and between each of them and everyday human life.”
Somehow Huxley manages to outline that absolute and undeniable poetry in the Christian world view between belief and reality, which, at least in my mind, is the gigantic hurdling block for those who want to assert that the new testament is some sort of fraud. But what he also manages to touch on is the doctrine of Plotinus, a third century philosopher who seems to have been a huge influence on everyones’ favorite: Augustine. The only reason I say this is because my version of Augustine’s Confessions has two or three footnotes per page pointing to similar statements in Plotinus’ Enneads. Plotinus writes in this sick mangled style in which “the entire system is assumed in each of the separate treatises, which take the form of special developments or demonstrations of significant points, not chapters in one work of consecutive exposition.” My point: about 5% of what Plotinus says actually makes sense to me since he doesn’t write quite like Aquinas, and hence, to make my point I’m going to quote the introduction by the translator: Stephen MacKenna.
The Divinity is a graded Triad.
Its three Hypostases – or in modern religious terminology, ‘Persons’ – are, in the briefest description:
I. The One, or First Existent.
2. The Divine Mind, or First Thinker and Thought.
3. The All-Soul, or First and Only Principle of Life.…
The First Hypostasis…morally seen, is The Good
…
The Divine-Thought is…generally known, in the phrase familiar in Platonism, as The Ideas.
…
The Third Hypostasis of the Divine-Triad is, then, the All-Soul, or Universal Soul…
[Not Finished]
Insane people have always been interesting to me. Some of that is due to the speculations that maybe the insane people are really the sane people, some of that is due to the moral accountability we hold them to, and maybe some of it is that latent fear that I’m not always there all the time. But rationality, at least from this light, seems to be at very least a little subjective. Putting logic, reason, and morality on a shelf to deal with another time, what is rational to a person at a given time varies significantly with their current emotional state.
For example, breakups can be extremely difficult for people. Given that love is “irrational”, at least to some degrees, the actions of the subjects of a breakup are nothing short of irrational from the “objective” standpoint. But to them, the complete opposite is true. The explanation “I had to do it” holds absolutely no water when your friend questions you about why you just tore up your ex over the phone with every intent to hurt them. You could have simply done nothing, in fact, that would have been magnitudes wiser, but you didn’t. From this I gather two things, the first being that our ability to reason through a situation is almost entirely impaired by emotional trauma, and that to the person, at the time, there is absolutely no recognition of this fact.
That’s a scary thought. Ben Saunders came back into town from the Air Force Academy, and we talked about stuff, but one of the stories he told me was about an altitude chamber they had up there in Colorado. In it, they decreased the pressure to simulate conditions at a given point in a flight, gave everyone masks, and later, told them to take them off. Training beforehand had taught them to eventually put the masks back on, but Ben would remark that had he not known the symptoms, he would have never put his mask back on. The lack of pressure and oxygen so impairs your judgement that it seems like absolutely nothing is wrong aside from this odd sensation, when in reality, everything is wrong.
The question then becomes: Is our reason when we are considered “stable” emotionally and physically, actually true…and how would we know? How certain are we that this “objective” standpoint we like to sit at is truly objective? There are times where I’m in a weird state and everything simply clicks. Things that normally don’t make sense somehow gather to themselves every cubic foot of that airy “that makes sense” and I’m left with this overall feeling of peace. In other times, I can say to myself “while that makes sense, it is not [insert made-up word here] true, and thus, I don’t accept it.” Naturalism is a perfect example of something with that characteristic. Some people would think I’m just being dishonest with myself, that naturalism is indeed the answer, but you’ll just have to trust me. Nirvana is a state that is very poorly described by Buddhists, which leaves it open to endless speculation. Most descriptions have some aspect of an escape from the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering, but almost all have that funny term “enlightenment.” I can’t help but wonder if humans, at least temporarily, are capable of sitting on that higher plane of rationality, just for a second, so that everything just clicks. If our reasoning is impaired at the level we are sitting at right now, we really can’t know unless we’ve been “away” for a while. Like when we’re young and make stupid decisions in our relationships with friends and family, only to see how idiotic we were acting years later. Or how, “I’m right Mom!”, though it felt correct was so wrong. What we need to find are the symptoms of flawed rationality in the plane that we are in, so that, like the altitude chamber, we can realize that state that we are in and put the mask back on to to save our lives…