Agnostic Christianity

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.

Billions of Specks

To continue the unabashed posting of YouTube videos in lieu of real content here’s another song in the tune of science:

Good to see Mr. Nye gets his due in inspiring folks to think beyond the tube. Go look at the stars, kids.

World News Update

1. The Portland, Maine chapter of the 48 Hour Film Project is finished!  MINT Films submits their short: ”The Burden” on time. Screeming on Tuesday at 9:30pm at the Westbrook Cinemagic with the rest of the festival’s films.
2. New Zealand man robs record store after giving owner his contact information.
3. Jones vs. Harris Associates may be first Supreme Court case to address the issues of ”excessive” bonuses paid out to executives of failing publicly traded firms.
4. Obama may opt for non-profit insurace co-operatives in health care reform plan following pressure from opponents.
5. Japan leaves recession but experts not sure for how long.
6. 600 Chinese villagers storm lead plant after children poisoned.
7. Egyptian President agrees to recognize Israel if comprehensive peace plan is achieved and building on the West Bank is stopped.
8. 20 dead in Russian suicide bombing.
9. Stanford engineer decodes his genome for just five easy installments of $10,000.

A Your Effin R: Twitter Shirts

Thanks to my friend Dragos for this find:

Apparently the folks at Squidder are busy at work turning the world into Shadowrun 4. They’ve been playing with a number of augumented reality (the AR of the title) oriented devices like this one:

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

Imagine being able to slap on a pair of AR sunglasses and walk down the street and read what everyone was doing, where they were going, etc. (Provided of course they were Tweeting or Facebooking their actions.) It’d certainly evolve the sport of people watching to a whole new level. Twitter would no longer be something you check in the dark solitude of your bedroom or while secretly craning your neck down to your iPhone during a buisness lunch, instead it would be a direct broadcast proudly worn by you for all the augumented world to see, a constantly changing novelty tee whose idiotic phrases are dictated solely by you.

(Side note: Perhaps if people are forced to face the visual reactions that their tweets then some standard of ettiquette will evolve.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I am enthusiastic about this. There are tons of other perks about this beyond Twitter:

• Looking at a box of food in the supermarket and having a screen pop up with a list of recipies that the item would be good with, or a wine pairing, or a comparative list of prices between brands.
• An AR museum experience with searchable databases of paintings and art histories. (Think of a museum plaque crossed with a Wikipedia article and you’re barely scratching the surface.)
• Chips on signposts telling you which way to turn for a certain address or what the next 3 intersections with a particular street are.

Of course this design is specifically for Twitter/Facebook feeds and the oppertunity to be presented with thousands of t-shirt encoded passive-aggressive internet messages about people being bored, depressed or pissed off at their ex is staggering. I crave the day when I can go out to the Old Port, see some dude who can barely stand tack away at his iPhone for a few seconds and then watch a tweet pop up on their shirt that says:

sherri!!!!!!! cum ot 2 4play!! I”MDRUNNNK!!!!!!!!

Cause that totally wont be obvious.

World News Update

 

1. NASA defends it’s next-generation moon rocket plans.
2. Iran just can’t seem to help itself when it comes to toeing the oppressive police-state line as armed government forces descend on a public mourning for the victims of the post-election violence.
3. Recently discovered Mac flaw could leak scrambled data.
4. Saudi man forced into hiding after talking about using Bluetooth to pick up chicks in Jeddah on live TV.
5. Red Sox’s World Series victories could be tainted by Ortiz/Ramierez perfomance-enhancing drug use.
6. Nanotechnology succesfully kills ovarian cancer in mice. Human trials may be less than a year away.
7. Senators threaten to reduce federal highway funding to states that do not ban texting and driving. iPhone and Blackberry users in a spectacular show of solidarity rapidly tweet protests and complaints while driving with one knee down the interstate.
8. Hugo Chavez, everyone’s favorite demon-sniffing* South American socialist president, pulls his ambassador from neighboring Colombia over a weapons dispute.
9. A girl, from her mother’s wombe untimely ripp’d*, discovered alive by NH police. (PS: Holy shit.)
10. Pelosi accuses insurance companies of trying to kill a government run health plan, calls insurance companies “villains” and says they’ve been “immoral all along.”
11. Men at Work face plagarism case and no, it’s not for the phrase “and men chunder.”

World News Update

1. Pyongyang calls Hillary Clinton ‘a funny lady’ and says ‘sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl.’
2. Califonia’s senate decides to pull an all-nighter to figure out this whole $28,000,000,000.00 budget deficit thing.
3. China breeds live mice from skin cells.
4. Iran’s opposition leader unveils new broad-based political front that will give the opposition to the June elections legal status.
5. Khameneni, Iran’s Supreme Ayatollah, orders the dismissal of current vice presidential choice.
6. Three people escape Bruges jail in hijacked helicopter.
7. Britain’s Prince William spends entire day being cool with a bunch of homeless kids on a mountain.
8. N. Korea has stepped up the execution of Christians.
9. Ireland realizes it doesn’t have a law against blasphemy and quickly passes one.
10. Bill Gates criticises the U.S. for not adopting a national identity card.
11. Two lobstermen get into a turf-war shootout, ruin it for everyone else.