DavidD

It is true that "born again" became synonymous with "Evangelical", whatever that word means, as if no one else wants to spread the story of Jesus. I remember feeling frustrated on debate boards when atheists used "Christian" interchangeably with "Fundamentalist", as in "take all the Christians out and shoot them". At the same time "transformed" sounds like a sci-fi term. Then something like "child of God" sounds fake to me. I liked Christian, not otherwise specified, at one point, but there's as much baggage with "Christian" as with "born again". So I go by David and know that if anyone really wants to know my faith, it's going to take me a while to explain it. It's like Marcus Borg's, but then it isn't. That might be the shortest version I can narrow it down from Christian.

"no hearts to care but ours" I've wondered about this one. My prayers were much more effective when I started Al-Anon. The 7th step is about praying for God to remove various defects in character. I had a number of longstanding resentments that went away that way, so completely that it really got my attention about the power of prayer. At the end of that process, though, there were still a few more resentments, about things that were certainly injustice. I almost heard God say, "those are yours to keep". For the rest of my career and now that I do volunteer work for a charity, I'd be surprised sometimes at how much anger I'd feel at ignorant and arrogant things that where done to my patients or clients. What was this, paternalism, what? It was a longstanding issue for me whether this was righteous anger or something from my ego. Then whatever the feeling itself is, how does one respond to it in a godly way instead of just whatever I feel like doing. There were times when I would say, "Wait a minute, I don't care about this personally. Why do I feel angry?" I can't point to any specific example where I would claim that it was God who was feeling something that was just diffusing into me, but I've wondered about that. It's easy to say God doesn't have His own hands and feet, but does He have His own senses of some kind to bring Him information? Does He have His own emotions in response? Or does He truly have no emotions other than human beings or sentient beings elsewhere? Then do they feel what He would feel or would He wish to be an emotionless automaton as I do sometimes. With no logical justification, my impression is that God never wishes to be an emotionless automaton. That's just me wanting a rest from all the suffering and craziness I see. So then are His emotions entirely within us or does He have His own? I don't know. I do believe emotions and many other things are a cooperative effort between God and us. I don't know how. I don't believe those churches which at one time held officially that God has no passions. That's not my experience from prayer. At the same time I find it hard to believe that God can do nothing without me or others like me. Maybe that's true, though.

It was Rachel something, a frequent guest of his. I don't mind people being pragmatic, but I wonder when there isn't something from a different sort of morality that asserts itself, too. It reminds me of a Nixon tape where most people heard Nixon say that something wrong could be done. Nixon claimed that he had also said, "but it would be wrong" inaudibly. At least he recognized the need for some moral addition to the record. So many in the US believe might makes right on some issues and moralize on different issues, without the two ever coming together. It's puzzling.

I like how succinctly des listed the responses to “everyone is right” initially. Certainly there are real things where people see the same thing differently, whether subjective things like morality and love or potentially objective things like the best way to educate kids. When Joseph Campbell was on PBS, he helped me hope that there might indeed be some common truth to religion, but then again that might only be what evolutionary psychology sees God to be, a side effect of how our brain looks for hidden causes and inside information, for father, for simple fantasies instead of unfathomable reality. In recent years, I find more reality in everyone being wrong than right. The first response could actually mean: 1a) It’s not true that everyone is right. Only my group is right, and everyone else is condemned to hell, to being ignorant, to paying me hundreds of dollars to show them the one true path or something else like that. 1b) Everyone is right except those performing human sacrifices or something else considered to be definitely wrong. 1c) All religions are false, so be an atheist. 1d) All religions are false, including atheism. I don’t think it makes sense to say everyone is right about something as broad as religion. It’s like saying everyone is right about medicine because everyone has some response to illness. Yet one can see different outcomes from different societies or subcultures and be confident that not everyone is right. So then which subcategory of #1 is best? In my twenties I was closest to 1c, like most scientists, but then I started feeling incompetent at life, started praying again regularly, had this presence build up in my prayers, and had other experience that makes me sure that atheists are as oversimplified and lost in fantasy as any religion. So I could go with 1d, but there are further categories to that: 1d(i) All religions are false, because God is unknowable. 1d(ii) All religions are false, because it takes a very precise path to know God well, and all human beings have fallen short so far (or they haven’t, but then that goes back to 1a). 1d(iii) All religions are false, because it is impossible for a human being to know God well until culture, material knowledge and/or other circumstances have evolved enough for any human being to understand what is God and what is not, if anything. Does even God know Himself that well? Many assume so, but why should He? Can He get outside Himself to see Himself objectively, or is He like we are in defining ourselves through our relationships with everything we are not? There is enough uncertainty to make all religions false, in large part or even entirely. Is there any way around that? Who knows? Maybe even the part of God that goes through time with us greets each day thinking that this might be the day when He figures out the ultimate truth, when He finally has enough experience, concepts, other tools and materials to put the rest of the truth together. Or maybe He’s at peace with just knowing what He knows, even if that is surprisingly little, and God is actually instinctive or intuitive while we’re the knowledgeable ones, the ones with memories. What a frightening thought. One could say that the possibilities for being objective about a spiritual reality, someplace where our senses don’t reach, are so bad that everyone has an equal chance at being right. All religions are entitled to their guesses. I don’t see that being the case, though. Religions all make claims for being right far beyond anything that can be demonstrated. They’re all wrong just for doing that. So is the agnostic who says that because of this, the only sensible way is to keep one’s distance from God. No, one can approach God as if 1d is the truth, not sure why it’s true, but sure that no human being knows why it’s true and maybe God doesn’t either. That’s what I wound up doing, not by plan surely. I just wanted to embrace Christianity again, but how to do that without glossing over the long lists of problems atheists compile about Christianity, that dedicated atheists compile about any religion? I have noticed that people don’t like this approach, but I don’t know a better one, and I’m not giving up the God who showed up in my prayers just because other people can’t believe in Him. People’s track record on beliefs just isn’t that good. It seems to me that record is much better summarized as “all religions are false” than as “all religions are true”. The blind men are studying an elephant, but needed to find a horse. What the river people are drawing from is not wisdom at all, but fantasy. There are many ways to go wrong. Is the answer to keep trying the same way, try a different way on our own, or ask for help? It depends on what’s real, doesn’t it, on knowing the big picture. So to know the big picture one can keep trying the same way, try a different way on our own, or ask for help. Repetitive, isn’t it? The good part of that is that we live long enough to try every way we can think of. We don’t have to choose. We can see what works best for us. I just hope people include the idea of asking God for help directly. It’s strange. It’s possible to get something completely wrong that way. It is, however, the one way I know to get around the problem that all religions are false, including atheism.

I flipped over to MSNBC last night in time to see Tucker Carlson announce that after the commercial he and his guest from Air America would discuss whether the US should apologize for killing people in Pakistan while trying to assassinate an Al-Qaeda leader. I wanted to see that. It seemed immoral to me when there were all these unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Iraqi leaders with “surgical strikes” that just kept killing civilians. What would a liberal from Air America say? When they returned from the commercials, they said nothing about morality. Both said an apology would be good for pragmatic reasons, to help the president of Pakistan, not because anything was wrong with killing civilians. How innocent were they, after all? I was disappointed. Both sides thought pragmatism was sufficient. Doesn’t anyone fear divine judgment or even just the judgment of history? Civilians have been killed in war for a long time. If the war is just, then I guess the civilian deaths are usually just. If the war is unjust, do civilian deaths add anything immoral to the unjust military deaths? It’s hard to cover every possibility of what’s moral and what’s not, but even the Mafia doesn’t assassinate someone by blowing up the entire restaurant. Should the Mafia be a model of restraint compared to the US government? I don’t see it as my place to draw a sharp line between moral and immoral. If God does that, He will do that. Those who judge from the future will have the complete picture of how this all turned out to help that judgment. Still in the present there is all this dancing around the boundary of immorality, with some actions by the US that definitely cross the line, whether what crosses the line is called “torture” or “abuse”, “murder” or “faulty intelligence”. It does not sound as if morality is a high priority. Defenders of the government say we have to be ruthless. No, we don’t. There are many possibilities. Just after the attacks on the World Trade Center I imagined many possible responses, from something genocidal to something that took a step back from the conflict and said, “We mourn for 3000 dead, but we have 300,000,000 more people. We can forego vengeance for the sake of peace.” Something between those extremes was predictable, but how is it that among those who are excited about having a “true Christian” in the White House, the talk is all about pragmatism, not what Jesus would do?

For a long time, I've wished people would use "faith" to mean trust and devotion, instead of belief. I don't think belief alone provides faith. At the same time, I find faith to involve belief in the unknowable, but not in the unbelievable. That gets to an even bigger question. What's the difference between true faith and false faith? Do you just have to wait and see which one works and which one fails? It could be a long wait. Of course, one could decide if someone else's faith fails, if it leads to hypocrisy, selfishness and believing in the unbelievable. I've crossed a lot of religions off my list by seeing that.

In The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg urges those of the "emerging paradigm", whom I think it is fine to call "liberal" from his description of them, to take back the phrase "born again" to describe the transformation that is central to Christianity. It made sense to me. I'm not sure why that is distasteful to so many. Is it too biblical? Does it sound like pride? Does it sound like a declaration that one speaks in tongues? I am a born-again Christian, but on detailing what that means to me, it means a transformation that was not conservative at all. It's like the last time I said the Bible was the word of God, by which I meant it was God's instrument to teach us about Jesus, even if it was written entirely by men, even if the gospels are in large part fantasy. That's not what people mean by Word of God, I suppose. Words are ambiguous. There's no getting past that.

The issue of beliefs vs. actions was mentioned earlier. So who decides if Christianity is a belief system or a way of life? I think it's missing the point to say it's both. Beliefs alone is one kind of Christianity. Beliefs plus whatever actions the believer chooses is another. I want God to choose, the real one, not just a character in a book or whoever a bunch of people agree is God. I think following Jesus Christ has let me be led by God. That's just my perspective, of course. It's either right or wrong, maybe mostly one or the other. It is also my perspective, though, that the needy are terribly neglected both by many with conservative beliefs and with liberal beliefs. This is more hypocritical for those who call the Bible the Word of God, with its promise of everlasting punishment for such neglect than those who can legitimately call that hyperbole. So who is Christian, not otherwise specified. Is it those who think beliefs matter most or those who do the will of God, revealed through Jesus Christ, regardless of belief?

I think I focused on "one with nature" because that is the title of the discussion, but it occurs to me that someone else would talk about how they were "one with God" on LSD. I never took LSD. I saw too many effects of bad trips. I do remember some guys on LSD looking at flowers at a party, talking about how crystalline they had become. I've talked with others who saw the brightest colors they've ever seen on LSD, as if the world had become a cartoon. Then they can be a similar cognitive "brightness" to the perceptual one, where an idea is the greatest idea ever thought, just as a song or a color is the greatest representative of their class perceptually. My focus was on the neuroscience of such things, but there is this connection to spirituality. God spoke to me out of some bright sunlight streaming into a room once, not the result of a pharmaceutical. Before I heard any words, the sunlight had already become God, brighter maybe, but maybe not perceptually changed at all. This wasn't so much perceptual as cognitive. The light just had become God to me, similar to how ideas came to the author of this article under the influence of LSD. He could make sense of his ideas by seeing them as getting back to nature, something people think of without LSD. I made sense of mine by connecting them to similar experiences others had had, like Paul's description of his. I also made sense of it because I had started praying again, because I needed some help. I had a context to put it in. I don't share the same context that this author has about getting back to nature or talking to LSD. I talk to God. I talk to my fingers, but I don't talk to molecules. Is that about my idiosyncracies or is it about who God really? I don't think experiences like this are good at answering this. Our judgment about such things is not great at the time. It's where such a thing goes as time goes on that is more interesting to me now. There is still much uncertainty about what is God and what is an idol, but if there is any chance there is a God behind such things, that's who I'm going to trust to teach me the difference. I think that does work better than LSD, but there is something similar between the two, if I knew enough to detail that.

OK, flow, I trusted you enough to give yet another organization my e-mail address, so I could read this article. The main point I would make from this is that it is a false dichotomy to say part of the world is natural and part is artificial. Human beings are a product of nature, so people have thought for the last two centuries. So culture is a product of nature. So the ugliest building in your town is a part of nature. Culture evolves more quickly than genes do, so there is some difference. People do get some different feeling being in the woods. Is it the color green? Is it being around things not made by human hands? People do get a different feeling being on top of a mountain. Is it so much blue? Is it seeing so much territory at once? Is it the thin air? Some people see such feelings as spiritual. They don't have to be. They could be purely biological. Neuroscientists haven't studied nostalgia to my knowledge, but in theory the continued neuroscience revolution of this century could show how this comes out of the brain with no need at all to invoke anything spiritual in the process. What are people really talking about when they talk about being one with nature? I bet it's more than one thing. Nostalgia is one. Oh, wasn't it wonderful when we were living in mud and filth, at the mercy of all sorts of diseases. Then there is this false idea that what God made in nature is perfect while what we have made through civilization is not. The woods are not so perfect, either. They have stood for a longer time, but endurance isn't everything. There are many ways to see our world as having lost its way. There are even more prescriptions about how to fix it. LSD was an interesting one, but is so much a dead end like most of them. It's natural how we learn by trial and error.

I wish people would just say what they mean. I don't think I'm metaphorically challenged, but maybe someone else would explain such a wish that way. I find my first reaction to this story is that there are no dragons, and if there were why would they want to mate with yet another princess? Have they no imagination? My second thought is OK, this is about someone shedding a false self, and it is interesting that it's not exactly voluntary. It is brought about by a desire, a romantic desire maybe being a common form of how this happens. It is brought about by buying into someone else's arbitrary rules, not just anyone, but the object of desire. My third thought is how do you know that it's the true self in the end? Just because the author stopped there? Do you know when the baby comes that at least something is real? The world is full of people who see some things as false and some as true. I do. I gave up on Christianity as a teenager because its claims are ridiculous and contrary to experience. Then when I wanted God again in my thirties, I was ready to be led anywhere, including the most orthodox Chrstianity. I wasn't led just anywhere. I was led to where I am now, where God is not like most people's God, I am not like most people, and the world is best understood by science, except the spiritual world, which is hard to understand at all, but which I trust God for. I find I need time for contemplation and to be with God. It happens without my forcing it. I need time for various sustaining things in the physical world, where God is with me, but in a quieter way. There are all sorts of false things in that world, but does it make me more true to keep away from it. I don't think so. There is also something false about staying away from the secular world, as if God would abandon the truth of the secular world for the mind games of separating ourselves from it. In the end, maybe the most important thing is what does God want? Does He want me to shed skin after skin? I am sure at this pont in my time with Him that I would do just that if He wants. I think God wants something else. It's not transcendence. We already have that, no matter if some wonder if they can't have some greater degree of transcendence. I think God wants to fill the world with love and truth and has no instruments but humans to do that, as flawed as we are. Maybe that's not right. Maybe I haven't spent enough time alone yet or surrendered to the right guru. My bride can get me to do that if she wants. Men are so simple.

In his commentary on the works of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Gerald May wrote about the experience of God no longer being in one’s prayers as He had been: “As John makes clear, it is not God who disappears, but only our concepts, images, and sensations of God. This relinquishment occurs to rid us of our attachment to these idols and to make possible a realization of the true God, who cannot by grasped by any thought or feeling. At the time though, it seems like abandonment, even betrayal.” (Gerald G. May, The Dark Night Of The Soul, pp.146-147, 2004, HarperCollins) Every serious illness is an opportunity for spiritual growth, even if it is completely physical. Can one’s usual experiences of God go away for purely physical reasons or is there always this motivation to rid us of idols as Dr. May writes? Either way it’s still an opportunity for spiritual growth. Is it possible this happens many times unsuccessfully for every time that someone makes progress this way? Whether God does this or some automatic feature of spirituality is responsible, is there something that guarantees that this should work every time? Those who see God as being perfect and omnipotent in what He does can’t believe that He would offer spiritual growth to people in so many ways with so few takers. They can’t believe that their theology is so flawed that such growth is necessary, even for C. S. Lewis. My brother-in-law wound up with the same faith after his worst depression as he had before. People cling to their faith whether it’s true or false, fundamentalist or progressive. Maybe that’s the best we can do in a single lifetime, not that we get another. Somebody gets another life, and there does appear to be spiritual evolution going on as well as biological and cultural evolution. Maybe in the future we’ll get to a more stable place. Maybe God knows that or has good reason to believe that, as opposed to people who have some anxiety about it as I do. Then again maybe God is a chain-smoking wreck wondering what He has to do to get more people to follow His clues away from their myths about Him, whether traditional or progressive. It might be a much more collective effort than what most people see.

Not automatic writing, flow. I had much more of a veto over what my fingers were doing than that. A friend of my mother did automatic writing, faster than I can think, without looking at what she was doing. It always struck me as something different than the sort of deliberate deceptions Houdini proved in spiritualists. It's in the same category as speaking in tongues, which I've tried to fake just out of curiosity. I can't keep it up more than seconds. I think there's something beyond nature there. At the same time, I don't know that my mother's friend ever came up with any wisdom. She certainly never passed on that there was a bunch of money buried at 3rd and Chestnut, anything like that. Whoever and whatever God is, I'm sure that communication with Him and not some reflection of oneself is indeed difficult.

I've experienced despair, but never after I learned to turn to God. I'm sure how one turns to God matters. There's a lot written about that, but I don't know what's reliable about any of it. People write of "a dark night of the soul", but they write about so many things in that, depression, addiction, oppressive circumstances, a loss of faith or something else internally. So many people write like Lewis and use metaphors when it would be so much better to describe the reality of the situation, even if it is personal and embarassing. My brother-in-law became deeply depressed after the millenium. It was as if he was disappointed all the bad things his fundamentalist teachers were preaching turned out to be false alarms. At the same time, he's been deeply depressed before. Antidepressants didn't help him. All sorts of spiritual help did nothing. I had an intuition about a Bible verse for him once. That didn't help. Nothing helped until he was forced to have electroshock therapy. Then God came back. Was that God's fault? I doubt it.

Another quote from Ken Wilber I like: “ ‘You get this experience: ‘Oh my God! I am one with God! Oh, this is amazing! Nobody’s ever had this experience in the entire history of the universe!’’ But ‘the personality that you had before you got your satori is the personality you’re stuck with. If you’re a geeky little toad, then you’re gonna be a geeky little toad that thinks he’s God. And then it’s going to be really hard to get rid of your geeky toadness,’ Wilber added, ‘because nobody can tell God what to do.’” (John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, p. 61, 2003, Houghton Mifflin) Another factor in denial is when one thinks one is God or holds one’s God in one’s hands and doesn’t need to listen to anything else.

I've left a lot of my ideas on the thread I started, but I think there's one from many years listening to people talk about the physical principal of uncertainty that is near the crux of the problem. People come to black-and-white thinking naturally. So when many become aware of uncertainty, they react nihilistically. Even some good physicists did that in response to Heisenberg's principle. Yet the reality of that is that such uncertainty is quite small. One can fly a spacecraft to Mars today with incredible accuracy knowing nothing of quantum mechanics or relativity. It just requires good computers, a good method of course correction for all the factors that knocks a craft off course, and an understanding of the science of the whole thing. The uncertainty of spirituality is much worse. What is spirit? Who is God? What do I make of all these things people say about both? As with physical uncertainty, though, there is nothing about this that negates that there is one best way to go through a spiritual life. Uncertainty is manageable, as soon as one admits to it. Otherwise, course corrections just have people going in circles. There is a point in this where I have felt tension with my fellow liberals. Does everyone go the way that's best for them? This is like something that conservatives say that everything is God's will. It takes pressure off you to do anything differently. Sometimes specific applications of these ideas look pretty ridiculous, though. I volunteer for a charity now. To say that all my clients are on the way that's best for them is ridiculous. They have sufferred much more than necessary to build character, to realize the evils and hypocrisy of a world that neglects them, and turn to God. People don't just go wrong by themselves, whether it's the materially needy or others who are materially well off and just spiritually needy. That doesn't mean it's up to me to fix everyone, but it's impressed me that there are many ways to go off course in one's life. It's not uncertainty that does that as much as people are going the wrong way, and it's very hard to tell them that. So what is the right way? I think it's the way the works, not just for me, but for everyone. Any of us can see our way and those of others. If we're honest, we can see what's wrong with both. If we're humble, we can get help with that. I've been impressed by my getting help from God, just praying to God. That led me to being a Christian again, a liberal, charismatic Christian. It's a lonely thing to be, but that's where empiricism has brought me. If there's a better way, I'll listen, until I know what's wrong with it. Is there something better than that?

There is this idea from Ken Wilber that works for me: “But the proper response to scientific materialism, he (Wilber) said, is not to transform science into a pseudospiritual philosophy, as books such as The Tao of Physics try to do, or to call for a ‘new paradigm’ of science that permits supernatural phenomena. One should simply accept that science addresses the material world and mysticism the world of spirit. You cannot understand the mystical realm by studying physics, psychology, philosophy, or any other intellectual discipline; you can gain entrance to that realm only by engaging in a spiritual practice that transforms your consciousness. Spirituality ‘is not just thinking about the world differently,’ Wilber said. ‘It’s changing the thinker.’ ” (John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, p. 60, 2003, Houghton Mifflin) One can refuse to be changed, secure that one’s worldview is correct, and live a life of contentment, if circumstances allow, but how much experience one misses that way, how much life is wasted, and how much spirit is obstructed in oneself and in others. How often someone sweetly sings, “Spirit flow through me …” and then is upset when She does. Fortunately God is often gentle about such change.

des - you assume I'm good at parody. This was a different sort of performance. I know I was physically nowhere near Iowa yesterday. Spritually it's so much harder to be definite. I regognized some of the ideas that came off my fingers while typng. I have wondered before about the godliness of digging up dead people just to kill them spiritually. Other things were familiar, too, but not everything. I do believe that it is a big mistake to see evil as individual acts. I'm sure God knows this as well as I do, by 2006 if not in the distant past. Whether good, bad, or something else, every act is a cooperative effort between various beings and circumstances. Labelling them all is so difficult. Consider my fingers. I asked them yesterday if they were God. They said no. I take their word for it. Some would not be so trusting, but it's easy to trust such simple creatures. Sometimes I wish I were more like them.

I was exploring websites about religion and science, both pro-science and anti-science. One of the anti-science ones was from the Chabad sect of Judaism: http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?...true&AID=108395 It was subtle in attacking science, expressing hope that science someday will confirm the truth of the Torah, which the author believes to be eternal and absolute. He did not seem malicious. He was obviously educated, though obviously not in science, which did not stop him from judging science, saying that such a speculative theory as evolution “can have no place in the arsenal of empirical science”. Says who? From beginning to end, this article is a gross distortion of what science is, and its implications beyond mere data. One might just say that it is typical of political or religious propaganda, where partisanship causes people to leave out half the story, at best. Yet I don’t think that’s enough explanation. The author here chides Jews who try to make the Torah less than absolute truth in order to accommodate science. He knows there is a problem, but he denies it, and sees both science and the Torah in the only ways that allow him to deny any uncertainty in the Torah. Anyone can read this for oneself. The description of science is wrong in many ways. How it’s wrong is straightforward, though tedious, including how it is that non-physicists are forever confused by the uncertainty principle because they don’t know it’s an equation, not something that can be understood just because one speaks English. Why it’s wrong is what interests me. Let anyone make a list of relevant factors, but I am more and more convinced that denial of the loss of religious certainty is a huge factor among all people who have a holy text. It’s not that the text definitely didn’t come from God, though I surely would lean that way. It’s that there’s no way one can be certain about that. Even if one feels a God-given faith that a text is the Word of God, it’s possible one is deceived, by oneself, by one’s community, or by some deceptive spirit. The only way to escape such a reality of uncertainty is through denial. Learning to adapt to the uncertainty makes much more sense to me. I find God helps me do that. If you see a wave coming, a naïve person braces himself or herself and hopes it’s not that bad a crash. Someone used to normal surf knows better and dives through the heart of the wave before it breaks, accepting and adapting to it. If it’s a tsunami, that’s not the best thing to do. A tsunami has such a longer wavelength than normal surf one cannot dive through it. One even has to be flexible in how one adapts to marginally different things. There’s something to be said for the saying that ignorance is bliss, but my experience is that looking at the big picture, flexibility and acceptance beats denial everyday. I am God’s water, not His rock, metaphorically speaking. Most things change over time. Few do not, if any. Still so many people want to cling to something eternal, even though we are in no position to judge the timelessness of anything. It is better to become ever-changing water than the rock that was thought to be timeless, but is being eroded, sometimes quickly. It is better to be part of the many things that must adapt to survive than to be steadfastly wrong about who God is. Anyone unsure who God is can ask Him. The answers I’ve gotten from doing that are not simple. Those who claim that the answer is as simple as their holy book, or that there is no God, or that there is any single key to understanding look to me as someone braced for a wave to crash on them. Hmmm, I wonder how their faith or lack thereof will survive this next illness, some other tragedy, even death itself. It’s not the best way.

Des Moines (Eternal Press) – In an early morning press conference today, God announced His intention as of 2006 not to go through with a proposed Day of Judgment. The Lord God Almighty appeared in a cornfield near Keokuk, Iowa just after dawn as a bright light, accompanied by a peaceful voice heard within the minds of a sparse group of reporters in attendance. Explaining that mechanical devices could not record Him, God stated that it was up to those who had been drawn to this event by visions and compulsions to spread this news, despite the skepticism it was bound to meet. “Those who would know Us better will do so,” He said. God reviewed the circumstances that prompted Him to publicize His plan for a resurrection of condemnation around the time of the ministry of Jesus Christ, as if the suffering of this life is not enough. He had anticipated the need for punishment to quiet both His own sense of vengeance and that of humans He held close to Him. That has abated, however. God confided that He never had been completely happy with the idea of digging people up just to kill them again, this time excruciatingly slowly, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course He knew there would be another time. “We created this universe for Ourselves as well as for you who live within it. It brought Us joy and love. It has changed Us, even recently, as parents are changed by children. Those who look at evil as individual acts miss how much of a collective effort it is. We don’t. There has been enough judgment as it is.” God allowed a single question before fading away. In response to being asked, “What do You want us to do?” God advised that we be good and if anyone was unclear what that meant, he or she could talk to Him directly. God advised that communication with Him is difficult, but vital for our spiritual health, at least for some of us. This reporter must add that it is beyond me fully to describe this event, which has become more dreamlike with every passing hour. It only has been in talking to others that we can confirm for each other that this event did happen as we all remember it, we think.

What's called unhealthy faith here can also be called pride and idolatries of doctrines, institutions, leaders, ... What's called healthy faith here is debatable, but it's certainly in the right direction. I remember hearing sermons about not making an idol of one's spouse or other person or something abstract before this became a matter to understand within a 12-step program for religious abuse. I've always been curious why this concept of idolatry has never caught on well in a general setting. I guess one person's idol is another person's God or way to follow God. Just how rare is truly healthy faith?

Following the federal court decision that rhetoric favoring the intelligent design of life is just religion, a few anti-evolution letters to the editor appeared in my local newspaper. The writers had the familiar certainty that as they alone are such truth-seekers, they see the situation more clearly than judges, teachers, or scientists do. The letters explained how evolution is just an atheistic religion, unproven, how evolutionists follow Darwin the way Christians follow Jesus. It’s amazing how judges and scientists keep missing that they are pawns in an atheistic conspiracy when such men see it so clearly. I have the same immediate reaction to reading such things as I’ve always had. I think about how best one could counter the worst of what they write. I’ve tried that at times. It’s pointless. This is not about a lack of information. There are plenty of popular books explaining why evolution is a fact, especially since molecular genetics became part of the evidence for evolution, some written by theists such as Kenneth Miller or Robert Pennock. Fundamentalists don’t accept them as believers in their God, but still there is plenty written about how evolution doesn’t do away with God and only conflicts with the most literal reading of the Bible. Somehow that isn’t relevant for fundamentalists. My fellow liberals often speak as if it is just fundamentalists who are so narrow minded. In fact everyone gets defensive about beliefs, from atheists to fundamentalists, including everyone in between. Some of it involves the sacredness of one’s belief, explicit when fundamentalists defend “The Holy Bible” given to them by God, the Word of God, but implicit when atheists defend beliefs that have served to free them from religious oppression and even connect them with the TRUTH in a manner that is sacred in its way. Strife over beliefs is about more than just sacredness, of course. People’s personalities matter. It matters what sort of forums exist, whether they allow excuses to commit genocide, facilitate polite discussion or anything in between. In recent years, something else has occurred to me. Many have written about modern challenges to religion, by a world made smaller through commerce and travel, by ideas of the Enlightenment, by the success of the scientific revolution. Despite the fact that religious strife continues to be as contentious as ever, it seems to me that there is doubt in the process that wasn’t there a thousand years ago, because of such influences, even when people deny them. Anyone who denies doubt has to wear blinders like creationists do about evolution, like atheists do about the reasons to believe in spirituality, like liberals do about the possibilities of fundamentalists or atheists being right, among many other things. I used to see this as mere stubbornness, but in recent years I’ve come to see this as denial that is the first stage in grief over the loss of religious certainty in the modern world. Whether one senses that more from religious diversity, the Enlightenment or the scientific revolution, people are sensing this. This is on top of our natural desire for certainty, which drives us in many ways. After I get through marveling at how anyone can be so ignorant and arrogant as the authors of the letters in my newspaper, it hits me now what this is. This is the denial of grief. They’re imagining the referee was bad instead of grieving that they lost the game fair and square. People tell stories all the time to make some better version of reality. It’s more often denial of the true reality than anything else. Knowing this has limited utility. No one in denial over the loss of religious certainty is open to being confronted about that, fundamentalist, atheist or anything in between. Those who are angry or depressed about it are somewhat more open, but the place I find this most helpful to me is regarding those who seem to be in the bargaining stage of grief over the loss of religious certainty, including me. For years it has irritated me at times how wishy-washy and accepting of contradiction those attending church with me could be in their liberal faith. My sister holds the Bible in higher esteem than I do. She has some handles that let her do that, such as the phrase, “a day is as a thousand years”, which to her means Genesis can mean just about anything and still be from God. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate how different biology is from what the Bible describes. She is an immunologist teaching at a university, just as much a person of science as I am. Like perhaps all liberals, she has struck a bargain with God about those things in which she wants to have some sense of certainty, in spite of reasons not to be certain. Her Bible is one of those places. For me God is more in prayer and daily relying on God as 12 steps teach. My bargain with God allows Him to be that personal for me and allows Jesus Christ to be my Lord and my Savior in a liberal way, even though I know how to argue that this is surely not a Christian universe, how there is no sacred and no profane apart from our perceptions of them, how the Judeo-Christian story of sin ruining the world makes no sense. Of course I could be wrong in all of that. I didn’t come to that as if I were bargaining with God. I prayed for God to lead me. That wasn’t answered very explicitly, but things happened that led my faith to be what it is. I reacted to both fundamentalists and atheists attacking my faith. Were they right? No, they don’t recognize the obvious deficiencies in their arguments. Are there deficiencies in mine? I’m glad I can get straight answers now from questions I ask myself, even if I still don’t know how to pin down everyone else. Going along that way has given me my faith, a faith from God for those who believe in a spiritually active God, a faith from some other process for those who must believe otherwise. I think there was a bargain. I think God let me hang on to being Christian, either because it’s good for me or because that’s where I drew a line regarding moving away from the teaching of my youth, which God let me do. Does He hold others back from that or is faith all up to the individual? I feel comfortable with my faith, but I know there is this lack of certainty about it, both because there is no book that describes it and because there are concepts like God and faith that no words do justice. Also I do get this sense of it being a compromise with what God would have me believe if I had no needs that push my beliefs elsewhere, even if that is only a matter of my being more vigilant about faith than God would have me be. Those fundamentalists can be so scary about disagreeing with them. I think I have scars from that God can’t heal, not in this life. So maybe I need a crutch I wouldn’t have needed in some other life. Where is there acceptance of the loss of religious certainty, the last stage of grief? Everyone in denial about it would say it’s in their faith, even atheists. They miss the point that anyone claiming certainty is missing the part of the picture that argues against them. Nowadays there is a good argument against almost anything. I don’t think I’ve missed exploring any form of religious thought. It is a wasteland, full of fantasies, full of false premises and poorly defined terms, lacking in a reality that confirms the truth of such thought. Show me how your people live lives to end poverty. Show me how they live lives to end conflict. Show me the reality that you think is even better than living to end poverty and/or conflict. I don’t know what it would take to end poverty or conflict, but I know how to live in that direction, despite how my biology resists that. Those who would sell me their faith would have to do even better. I don’t find anyone coming close. So I don’t think acceptance means some perfect faith that I have yet to find or giving up faith altogether. We all believe in something. Do I already have my acceptance? Maybe it’s impossible to live in this world without some sense of compromise, so the best one can do is have a place of acceptance within oneself. I have tried to pull things out of that place, but they don’t play well for others. I’ve mentioned here before that I am devoted to God, whoever and whatever God is. Every time I’ve used that phrase on the internet, someone has responded as if it is a statement of ignorance. It is not. It is a statement of acceptance of uncertainty. It is the opposite from the sort of Bible-believing Christians who insist or fret that they would reject God completely if a substantial part of the Bible proved to be false to them. And they call that faith? Again it is people in denial of the loss of any legitimate way to have certainty about God who object to such acceptance that the truth is uncertain. Yet to point that out to them is surely pointless, because of their denial. What a strange life it is. Things are not what they seem to be, yet simultaneously they are just that. It is in the eye of the beholder, but it is also what it is in its own right. It’s not 50% of one, 50% of the other. It’s not quantifiable at all. We just move closer and closer to becoming the glove to fit on someone’s hand. Then we die before we ever reach such perfection. So what is it God wants? Is it a dresser full of gloves or just one good one, or two that are mirror images? Is it many different spiritual products from this life? Answer me that one, anyone who thinks you’re so advanced. Only someone in denial of religious uncertainty would say there’s just one answer or that God can’t be like this. And it’s a different sort of denial to say there’s no answer, to say uncertainty means we shouldn’t play the game. I accept the answer God gave me, which is somewhat different from the choices above. I accept the uncertainty in the answer, in God, and in me, though far from perfectly. Label such a process however you will. To me it’s faith and acceptance of what faith is in a real world. It’s as fuzzy as any subatomic particle, which I find reassuringly realistic. Other things I still bargain about.

"I believe that you would agree that there may be some theoretical point in time and space where individual perceptions could exist of separateness-aloneness in conjunction with some sort of connectedness-unification to-with a greater wholeness." I retired from academics in 2001. I never accomplished much in research, but fortunately I had other talents. I knew someone in the seventies who said that in the future everything with a switch would have a microprocessor. He's someone who would have foreseen completely computerized houses by now. It is significant both what he got right and what he got wrong. I suppose it's the same way now with nanotechnology. Standard neuroscience says that consciousness must be something trivial, an emergent property of any information processor that builds up a sufficiently detailed map of the outside world that also includes ourselves intimately associated with that world. If it were just that, we would have conscious machines by now, as they expected in the fifties, but we don't. Maybe that's because consciousness requires this incredibly interactive feedback by which everything we do to act on the world or even just to passively be in the world is fed back to us through our senses, maybe even something spiritual as well. We have to think about it long and hard to believe there is any seam in this at all, that the world of our senses might be an illusion that only I as an individual sees exactly the way I do, even though others see something pretty close. Most people manage to have such an insight eventually. Then they either embrace that or reject it. We also have a mind that is biased toward finding hidden causes, something evolutionary psychologists say is a gift from evolution shaping us according to what might be rustling some nearby bush, and a mind that thinks in symbols. So we have a mind that can imagine all kinds of constructs for how we are or aren't connected to things beyond us, while at the same time being utter slaves to our biology and the ways in which we are definitely connected to the physical universe through our brain and body. We can imagine all sorts of millenialisms almost as well as we can imagine an apple. Are any of them real? We can wait and see. We can simulate the process in our minds or on paper or sometimes even on a computer as I did with a few simulated neurons for memory, way too little to test for what's required to have a real human memory. Hopefully we can be honest about the limits of our simulation. My mental exploration of millenialisms has me saying I don't believe any of it, but maybe I missed something. I've made enough mistakes to know I don't always know when I have made one. So I have to figure that into the process as well. Human beings come to black-and-white thinking naturally. We can conceive of being connected. We can conceive of being alone. We can't conceive of exactly how our connections and our separateness exist within a worldview that includes everything about me and everything about the world, physical, spiritual, whatever. So people simplify. I think it's oversimplication to emphasize either connectedness or separateness in that. One can find some of each in our experiences without getting very abstract. Neither is illusion. I'm sure it would take me a long time to say why I'm sure that neither is illusion. It would take me a long time to say why I'm sure all millenialisms are illusion, unless God says otherwise. There are a lot of things I'm content to explore only so much.

There is such a thing as overgeneralization. To go from the entanglement of subatomic particles that were created together and have very good reasons to be entangled to saying that the entire universe is entangled is quite a leap. All my life I have heard facts about quantum mechanics morphed into fantasies that met some pre-existent desire of some dreamer. Some of those dreamers were a lot better physicists than I was, like Richard Feynman, who believed in parallel universes resulting from choice somehow. A lot of words have been invested in such ideas, but they remain no better documented than the contents of any dream. I made computer models of memory in the seventies, trying to reproduce this quality of an output recapitulating a previous state, from an input that is only a piece of that state, part of the "hologram" metaphor. It can be done, if one doesn't get too lost in the how a real hologram works and remembers instead that it is neurons doing this, not photons. Exactly how these neurons do everything they do is still a great mystery. Synaptic plasticity doesn't explain everything yet. Neither does the hologram metaphor. Physics shows in great detail how the physical universe is one, how a few forces and particles explain everything, with some areas where it's hard to be explicit how they do. My consciousness may be entirely due to that, or there may be something else to explain whatever part of a mind turns out to be unexplainable by the physical brain. Call that something else spiritual reality or whatever else. Regardless of that, there is some kind of separateness in my consciousness and apparently everyone else's consciousness. I doubt it is as absolute as those who believe they are totally free in their thoughts or choices at some level. Yet there is a separateness that seems even more important a thing to perceive as unity. God is God, and I am not. I have many examples to illustrate that, even if it is also true that I am part of God in some way. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was the same regardless of the path the light took, meaning there is no ether required for the EM waves to propagate through, as startling at the time as anything now.

Personally, I'm just not sure how one can be "devoted to God, whoever and whatever God is," without having any idea -- or any conceivable way of finding out -- whoever and whatever God is. If you view the philosophical exploration of God as no better than astrology, then I guess "something greater than me" is probably the best you can hope for. If it works for you, then nobody's "insisting" that you change. On the other hand, just because I'm human, and the philosophers who have influenced me are human, doesn't mean that all ideas about God are worthless. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I am a philosopher, and I have to defend my turf a little. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Now why do you assume that "whoever and whatever God is" means that you know God better than I do? I see many people who state their views of God without equivocation, and I find no way of putting them all together. So someone doesn't know what they are talking about. Can I figure out who? What would I have if I did that, just some man's opinion, and it still might be wrong. I believe the Holy Spirit helps me learn about God, empirically, in intellectual ways, practical ways, through everyday experiences, through spiritual experiences, through prayer, lots of things. I wasn't making a statement of agnosticism. I was saying that I will never know enough to proclaim the TRUTH about God as many pretend to do. My devotion is what's important, not the knowledge of every last detail of who and what God is. God told me so, in more ways than one. Interesting that you assume that I was talking about having no idea of God and no conceivable way of finding out. Perhaps you overstated yourself. Astrologers developed a model of reality that is ridiculous to someone with direct experience of what they claim. They claim the zodiac is divided into 12 even parts. It is not. In fact there are 13 constellations along the ecliptic, varying wildly in size. The sun signs published in newspapers are 2000 years out of date, the Earth having precessed in the meantime, making almost everyone's sign off by one. With cold hard facts are far off as this, why bother trying to figure out if there is any conceivable truth to their other claims. Philosophical approaches to religion do indeed remind me of astrology. They have built up this God of absolute power (not everyone is as you in what omnipotence means to them), absolute knowledge, absolute goodness, and absolute love. I haven't seen this God in my exploration of Him. I can't be as concrete about what the problem is as I can with astrology, but I see a similar attitude, that purveyors of this method prefer their traditions to empiricism. If all we have is words, we won't learn anything. Hasn't the scientific revolution taught at least that much? I didn't say all ideas about God are worthless, did I? I have said elsewhere that I prefer to have one attribute to start on who God is. I understand the tradition that this starts with creation. I'm sure that the authors of Genesis were doing the best they could 3000 years ago to start this way. But it is now 3000 years hence, and my relationship with God started elsewhere. You may feel secure making fun of the helper God. That's up to you. I meant the Helper of John 14: 16-17. If you don't think He can teach me anything about God, then we are indeed speaking diifferent languages.