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Courtney 2009 November 24 |
Faith
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. -- Genesis 8:22 "There is one Truth, one Religion. It becomes many when it passes through human beings." - Gandhi I'm not a student of Ghandi and know little about him beyond this quote, but, surveying the religious landscape, this thought brings considerable order to the chaos. The chaos does not disprove faith, it merely proves diversity and the profound finiteness of the people. Below are some of the influences on my faith from left (top) to right (bottom). Thinking on how I might prioritize them from "most influential" to "least influential" I know it would be much more difficult. There is much from the left, right, and center here for those of you who see everything politically. I am able to contain the tension of open questions in mind and can stand not to have settled answers in hand by nightfall when necessary so I'm open to incorporating material from all over. Simplicity movement and New Roadmap Foundation. Life if too complicated. Our culture is wasteful. Neither is sustainable. These organizations, and local groups based on these principles, struggle upstream towards a better way. "Simplicity" has earned the nickname "Simplexity" meaning that it's actually pretty complicated. If you want to make your own soap and find ways to not use money for anything, Simplicity is the hobby for you, but I do, in fact, find it rather complicated. Pasadena Covenant Church, and a news story about it. We have been modestly active there for eighteen years. I play piano with the worship band that consists of (week to week) ten to fifteen excellent musicians including drummer and artist Joseph Stoddard, Will Salmon of Open Gate Theater, music pastor Joan Reeve Owens, Tim Allen, Debbie Childress, Dale Torstenbo, Carl Crooks, Susan Smith, Nancy Allen, William Myrvold, Dorothy Patzia, Roland Tabell, and several others. Personal Analysis of The Bible and the U.S. Constitution. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return to it without watering the earth And making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it." -- Isaiah 55:8 - 11 From Arete' Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 2001 (The University of Houston Honor's College alumni publication) An Early Afterlife "... a wise man in time of peace shall make the necessary preparations for war." --Horace Why don't we say good-bye right now Then we could just continue Linda Pastan Cited by Ted Estess in Be Well:from "The Soul of Wit,” a poem of
Wislawa Szymborska.
Nothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and we leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, [even] if you are the planet’s biggest dunce, you can’t repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. Proverbs 12:16 "A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult." The text of the short Film "Max" directed by Jim O'Keefe, produced by Dawn O'Keefe. Was shown at the Moondance International Film Festival. Ephesians 4:32 "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." (This is what the Friesen children say when they are disrespectful of each other, rather than "I'm sorry". See Home Improvement Ministries. The Friesens direct the Family Camp where we attended in August 2000, 2003 and 2004.) And... Now that we've gone from Left to Right on the spectrum of faith, here's an attempt of my own concerning the misdirected tensions between Christian Fundamentalists and Darwinists: ===== There are really only two questions: 1. Why does anything bother to exist at all? Science can't touch this because science is based on making logical sense out of what is observed (to the point of understanding the natures of observation and logic themselves!). Science is constrained to having to say, "Well, here we are, what do we see?" and then work from that in a rationale, disprovable way. It must presume existence. There is plenty of good work to do there, but it can never answer the question. 2. Why does anything bother to live at all, chaos (and death) being the ultimate end of physics? While the fundamental direction of all existence is towards increasing entropy, that is, everything is seen to be moving towards more chaos until eventually everything is at some low-level thermal equilibrium, this being the very definition of time moving forward, why is it that some collections of matter get together and struggles mightily to "live" and move and organize themselves to the point of surviving and reproducing and of even being able to have and be interested in having this discussion? There really is no "proveability" on either side of the so-called creation/evolution debate thereby proving the axiom that the amount of heat in a debate is inversely proportional to the amount of actual information available. None of us, or them, were here three or four billion years ago to observe what was happening (or seven thousand years, for the young earth creationists). New lines of discovery or evidence in science could change all those dates or even the fundamental storyline of the science narrative and everyone would just revise their textbooks and start spouting the latest "absolute truth" with the same arrogance that they preach today's versions. Same thing happens in theology. People set up religious institutions and ways of thought based on selective readings and varied interpretations of the various sacred texts, and selective ignoring of other parts of those same texts, then work everybody up into a lather that they are right and all others are wrong. Everybody believes stuff. Everybody explains away stuff that is inconvenient to their beliefs. Reminds me of the long joke about the man who found another man about to jump off a bridge. Trying to stop him or at least stall for time, he asked questions to find out who he was. Discovering that he was Christian he asked, "Oh, what kind of Christian?" Protestant. "Oh, what kind of Protestant." And so on: Baptist .., American Baptist, Calvinist... By this point the jumper, having found a friend in Christ, someone with whom he had considerable common ground, was feeling better. Life was looking like it might be OK after all, maybe he would just go home rather than "end it all" then and there. The questioner then said, "Oh, what kind of Calvinist, three point or five point?" The jumper said, "Five point" at which point the questioner exclaimed, "You heretic! Burn in Hell!" and pushed him off the bridge. The bottom line is that people choose to believe or disbelieve what they choose, and they use whatever tools or evidence (science, ancient texts, word of mouth, whatever) to support or refute whatever they want to support or refute. There is plenty of arrogance on all sides of these discussions, a sign of basic, inherent insecurity. People who had walked on the dry bottom of the Sea of Reeds with Moses and escaped the Egyptians went on to spend many years in the desert saying, "I'm hungry, there is no God." They didn't even need (or have) science to support their innate rebellion. Science was invented as a way to better understand God and what he does. Some use it to rebel against God, others use it to believe. All tools of humanity, including institutionalized religion itself, are used in these conflicting ways as well. This is the nature of faith. Powerful as we like to think we are, no human, or group thereof, really has a clue what's really going on in our big four dimensional universe (or even if that's all there is; some of us suspect that it's not). Every living being, therefore, has faith. All faith contains some error, including the ones called science, atheism, and, yes, even Christianity. The last is self evident from the strife between and even within the various versions (see Joke above). Christianity may well be closer to the most important absolute truths than some of the others. That's what I think myself. But every one of us is required to stop reasoning at some point and take a "leap of faith." I vote for letting people choose their faith and respecting their choice. I vote for having the discussions and trying to persuade each other towards better ways, truer truths, and higher priorities. I vote for reality, to the extent that we can discover or have it revealed to us. I vote against arrogance. ===== Also, I've read and reviewed many books on this subject, and others. (c) Courtney Duncan, 2007, 2009 |