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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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