You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘God’ tag.
While we’re on the quest for truths and a realization of our physical oneness with the universe, I’d like to throw out some clips from an article called Agnostic Christianity that my good friend the Rev. David Butler wrote for his church blog. Now I’ve mostly known David outside his occupation as a minister for the First Parish Congregational Church of Gorham, ME; however his views on religion are incredibly insightful and in step with my perceptions as well. So, I’m going to throw up some good excerpts in hopes that you’ll read the article and perhaps respond.
Here we go:
When preachers get into the pulpit and say that they are certain that God wants you to do one thing or another, they are either manipulating you with dishonesty or badly delusional themselves. To pretend that you know a thing that you cannot know is wrong on so many levels. To take the fruit of human imagination (either current imagination or centuries old imagination) and preach it, promote it, or legislate it as fact and or as the truth, is dangerous and oppressive. It narrows our minds and it creates a barrier preventing any future growth and discovery.
…
One of the central themes of the Hebrew Scripture is the proscription against idolatry. The early Israelites understood that the real threat to faith was not unbelief; it was worshipping things that were not worthy of worship. They knew the danger to genuine faith of treating relative things as if they were absolute. They knew that elevating human-made things to the level of sacredness was the one thing that would separate people from a real relationship with God. The very first commandment and the most vital was to “have no other gods before” Yahweh.
Theologian Paul Tillich defined faith as an “ultimate concern.” Everyone has something that has ultimate value to them whether it be God, money, family relationships, humankind, race, nation or some other. Faith is that relationship that we have with whatever it is that we consider truly transcendent. The danger is to have an ultimate concern for things that are not ultimate at all. That is what happens when the Bible is considered sacred in itself. Human beings wrote it. It is a human document. To consider it perfect or inerrant or directly created by God is to take something human-made and to elevate it to the status of God. Even within the bounds of the faith traditions of both Christians and Jews, this is idolatry and the worst kind of affront to genuine faith. We all know how scary it is when race or nation become people’s “ultimate concern,” because those sources of allegiance and identity tend to separate people and alienate one group from other groups. The elevation of one book or one doctrine within a religious tradition to “ultimate” status creates the same kinds of human divisions.
…
As Paul wrote so wisely (he was not so wise about many other things), “we have this truth in earthen vessels.” Those earthen vessels are us; our limited thoughts, feelings and understandings. If we believe that God is infinite, then by definition, God is beyond our comprehension. We cannot know or express anything substantial about what we cannot begin to understand. When we trumpet our “truths,” whether from what we’ve been taught or from what we’ve experienced, as the only truth or the truth for all, we are indeed delusional. We are taking the, oh so limited, contents of our own minds and hearts and inflating them into some universal things that they are not. That is an affront to reason, to the real search for truth, and an affront to the infinite nature of God.
And so, for religious people, and I am one, what we “know” is always a personal thing. We have experienced things that we insert into our own personal mythologies in a particular way. We may link those personal narratives with the broader narrative of a part of the Christian tradition, but when we think about the wider world we must always understand that our ideas are, not just limited, but provisional. Our constructs may be built on personal experience, but they remain just our own constructions that don’t even begin to grasp what we believe in as God.
Even the idea of God is a provisional one. What we have experienced when we refer to the experience of God is some tiny microcosm of what the idea of God might actually mean and we can’t quite grasp even that. We can speak only in stories and metaphors and vague language about realities that are completely beyond us. To assert that God, as we interpret God, exists or doesn’t exist is both beyond our ken and beside the point.
…
So perhaps the most faithful thing that we can be is agnostic. We look at the universe and into the human heart and sigh with the mystery of it. If it is the infinite we are after, any label, any concept, any thought, had better be provisional or it is just plain stupid. Thoughts of transcendence should open our minds, not shut them off. Ideas of an infinite God of love should connect us more deeply to other people who are different than ourselves, not erect more barriers. True experiences of the holy should leave us wondering at the mysteries, not trying to sell our little ideas to other vulnerable people.
Go read the rest of it here. Potential! will still be waiting for you when you get back.
I don’t like to proclaim I live life in the fast lane but as we approached 100 miles per hour it was brought into question. But I’m not in the car yet. I’m on the upper deck of a third story apartment building I’ve never been in down the street from my place, we’re listening to a wandering gypsy cover Paul Simon ["Sometimes life's like a G chord," he tells me with a grin and passes me the Evan Williams.] I’m sitting alone in the Whiteheart drinking Evan Williams waiting for my friends to finish smoking and mustering up the courage to shout to the single lady a seat away from me [she was with somebody else too.] I’m walking down the breakdown lane of I-95 just outside of Gray calculating if I could make it to Portland by daybreak, or at least noon [and maybe I still could have.] That was certainly not the fast lane. It was for breaking down. But nothing was stopping.
An antique store in Rye, New Hampshire is selling a metal tin plate, old and rusted but decorated, and pierced, hanging in the center from two wires attached to my worn edges hangs a metal tin heart, painted in the center in simple but delicate letters it reminds me to “Be.” The art cost eight dollars. “Life is short, but art is long,” Hippocrates instructs me [from beyond the grave in the program for Grease in Prescott Park.] Sitting on the wood stool, beside the last embers of a fireplace, in the ancient ruins of a house’s chimney, I gaze across a serene lake in Waterford, Maine cradling a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and ask myself what I’m doing with my life. I later answer my own question.
Later, but not that later, I’m telling a beautiful Russian woman she is beautiful in Russian. I’m drinking merrily as if I’m filling myself up to the brim with nectar, then I teeter and spill and laugh and laugh. A week after, I walk down the wet and incandescent streets of Portsmouth with a man almost just like me, and today he turned 62. I can barely recall even getting in the car [I do recall thanking the driver, a trusted friend.] The next day I gently glide down the wrong side of Congress Street, I can still hear the rain falling in Portsmouth, pitter-pattering me to sleep. On our rocky coast at Wolf’s Neck, sitting upon boulders that call to me to naturally to leap and bound upon them, I rest instead and stare at the island, up to the osprey’s nest where he stands a sentinel [I'm speechless.]
Hurdling down unpaved closed-country roads in the backwoods of Maine is quite dangerous and common, thus dangerously common, I spent many greener years recklessly testing myself with my equally adolescent peers. It seems so long ago now, but so does everything, the constant flux, the winds of life fill my wax sails and I let go of the sheet and rudder. These events I’ve been listing are out of place, falling like grains through God’s fingers at random, but still landing in the shape of pyramids. I can hardly even remember the crash, just the instant calm understanding, [the "I have to get out the car right now."] Once safe, I turned back to survey the incident, the silver shell lifted at a 45 degree angle over the devastated stone wall, the sails melted and leaking out underneath onto the pine needles. The trees on either side silently loomed over us, judging his poor, poor decision. I can still feel their power, and hear his heart slip under reality’s cold and unforgiving waves. Neither the undesignated driver, nor I, nor Aaron, nor the Russian were injured.
So, needless to say, I’ve been pretty fucked up the past few days.
