You know me. I have no problem with accepting you as a Christian. I have a better time accepting you as a Christian than I do Donald Trump, even though I have to regrettably do so.
I’m not certain being a Christian is something you confess.
Jesus tells this story of two sons in Matthew 21:28-32. One son said he would do the work, but doesn’t. The other son says he won’t do the work, but actually does do the work.
In all my dealings and interactions with you, you have been more of a Christian to me than many Christians I know.
Call yourself what you like. Seek what you want to seek. Find the answers or be on a perpetual search.
There's a Buddhist Dharma center near me that does communal vipassina and zen meditations and serve tea and conversation after on Sunday mornings. Having recently fallen down a secular Buddhism rabbit hole, I'm thinking of trying this as a sort of replacement for church. Although the symbolism of Christianity is still very powerful for me, I often think the truth resides somewhere in between the roots of eastern and western ideals.
This reminds me many years back when I heard a prominent Western Buddhist teacher going through an existential crisis, or maybe a crisis of conscience? He said he didn't believe ANY of it anymore EXCEPT:
"Don't cling"
That has stuck with me and I think about it frequently. And it's this refined down essence that has made me contemplate if I was asked to boil down what's at the core of my heart of hearts, I would probably respond:
Love and compassion
This is what I believe, everything else is just noise.
Practicing writing and finding my voice is changed me profoundly. In a way it is my religion. I do not owe anyone a definition. I do no not owe anyone a nice neat label. Their uneasiness towards my personal beliefs is their personal problem and not mine.
I have to unfortunately keep up the trappings of belonging for family, although I have officially announced it online.
I deal with its influence by reinterpreting for my new religious framework, none of which willl be accepted by the orthodox (and even the heterodox), but is simply my way of holding it all together. It gets very lonely, but I prefer the loneliness to the cognitive dissonance.
Keep moving, is all I'd say. Your journey is yours alone. They can't steal you from yourself.
I get that. I've found myself back in a church for the past year, but I never expected to. I don't think I could just go to any church though. This one is really weird, totally separate from any organizational structures. The pastor is a mystic who regularly incorporates Eastern religions, secular music, and just breaks all the rules in general. We met and bonded over a love of Ram Dass, who he considers a spiritual mentor. He said the book Be Here Now is a mirror of his own relationship with Jesus. There is no concern for what you call God or what path you are on, as long as you are living a good life and taking care of others. He and the church as a whole do carry the "Christian" label, because they base everything around Christ, but it's the "Universal Christ" within everything. I can say it is very nice to have a community of spiritual seekers, but I don't talk about it with people outside of that because I know they wouldn't get it. I have Jordan Peterson and his Biblical lectures to thank for drawing me back into the stories (from a more approachable angle).
Leaving Christianity is like leaving an abusive relationship. You love Jesus, Jesus loves you, but then Jesus starts making demands, becomes all needy, needs constant praise, starts threatening you, and wants all your money, and next thing you know you are working the streets, banging on doors cause Jesus needs more and more attention and you are just not enough. Then you break it off, but you start thinking well he wasn't really that bad, and he took all your friends and you're lonely, and you there were some good times, and you forget the bad times. You start reading all the old texts he sent you, but you skip over the abusive ones cause that's not really the real Jesus. But then hopefully a friend reminds that the abusive Jesus is the real Jesus, that yes he and his father really did drown the world in a flood, really did smite a city, really did commit genocide, really did call people dogs, really said it's going to be really bad for people he doesn't like, like wailing and gnashing of teeth bad, ghosted his followers for 2000 years (and counting), and when he does come back he told a friend he's going to decimate the earth and there will be blood up to horses bridles. Really, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! And he still wants all your money. Just block him and change the locks, cause he's bad news wrapped in good PR. And don't rebound into relationships with his friends either, cause Moses, Buddha, Krishna and rest are just waiting and just as bad and they aren't too good with money either! And don't get me started on Santa, that creepy stalker
It kind of is, though. So is sex. So is pretty much any ecstatic experience: they are all ways to flood our brains with the good neurochemicals that are part of what make life worth living.
When we've learned the rituals that bring us the big chemical hits, our body never forgets. I'm fortunate that the kind of tepid Anglicanism I grew up with was sufficiently short on majesty that I never got hooked, in part because my autistic neurochemistry is unable to process most of the communal aspects of the ecstatic experience, but even so, I can totally see the appeal.
What can replace that? Backed by an absurd and absurdly rich historical panoply going back thousands of years that creates an intellectual and mythological landscape that even I find it great fun to play in?
The sterile architecture of modernism offers nothing to compare. Sex, love, extreme sports... all of these can give us some sense of transcendence, but they lack the social integration that religion offers. None of them could serve as an organizing principle for individual lives or the life of a community. And most of them are the province of the young(er).
For me, I get most of what I need from some combination of solo kayaking and theatre of one kind or another (I've been involved for much of my life in improv, short film, and both community and professional theatre... it turns out growing up as a heavily masked autistic is good training for an actor.) Is there still a void? Yup... made more extreme by the particular beliefs I have about the universe of experience and what lies beyond it that I've reached as a physicist.
This is the conundrum of the modern condition: we stand at a place where we can see the failures and falsities and dangers of the religious myths of the past, but we can also see that our mode of life as cooperative, competitive, communal social primates requires that we have some kind of shared myth to organize our communities, or they break down into the fragmented mess we see around us.
The two responses to that which dominate current discourse are on the one hand people who want to re-blind us to the dangers and falsities and failures so they can on living the myths of old--be they Islamic or Christian or Hindu and/or some kind of nationalism--and on the other hand people who insist that the problems with our sterile amythic environment is that it's not sterile enough, and if we could just kill the last of the stories we would be free, which is like saying to a man in a desert that he just needs to stop sweating and thirst will no longer be a problem.
I don't have any solution to this. I'm not sure there is one. But I appreciate your forthrightness in grabbing this particular dilemma by the horns and seeing how far it can throw you.
I agree it's a big problem, which you've eloquently expressed. The answer, to my mind, is to take creative religious initiative and purify the scriptures and myths of old by taking responsibility for exegisis and consciously (re)interpreting the texts, symbols and values to conform to what we know is true - or at least what we assume to be true based on the evidence. We don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We can and must adapt religions for the modern homo sapiens, who remains a homo religiosus at his core.
Stephen, I am sure you know that the spectrum of Christianity today is rather vast. And there are plenty of people like you, who love the image of Christ and the values and stories of Christianity, but hate dogma or "old-fashioned" morality. Quite a number of Christian denominations from the Episcopalians to the United Church of Christ to the Quakers would welcome you with open arms. But if even these are too dogmatic for you, I would suggest the Unitarian Universalist Association https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe for community and Progressive Christianity https://progressivechristianity.org/about-us/. Finally, I'll reiterate my suggestion to check out the Liberal Catholic Church https://www.thelccusa.org/the-mystical-catholics if you crave more ritual and liturgical depth.
What I wish the Satanic Temple would be better at is to provide a forum for secular humanists to help humanity, helping humanity for the sake of helping humanity without cramming religion down anyone’s throat.
I too am somewhere between an atheist and agnostic. I’m more a Taoist I guess. I believe in a creative force in the universe. Christianity to me has become a great force for evil. When you force women to birth brainless fetuses even if their uterus explodes, that’s some real evil.
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with George MacDonald? He's a figure in the Christian tradition that I think gets across a lot of the transcendent and mythological significance of Christ and the Christian stories without being bound to all the traditional understandings of them.
His Unspoken Sermons is a great piece of spiritual literature.
"I am open to evidence for all these claims, and I am ultimately agnostic on all of them."
Believers will always see evidence where none exists, which is why I long ago stopped trying to engage with them. It is pointless, unless they are already unsure that the doctrine is valid, and the supernatural claims might be the nonsense that they are. Cognitive dissonance is a surefire way to waste a lifetime on false claims.
You know me. I have no problem with accepting you as a Christian. I have a better time accepting you as a Christian than I do Donald Trump, even though I have to regrettably do so.
I’m not certain being a Christian is something you confess.
Jesus tells this story of two sons in Matthew 21:28-32. One son said he would do the work, but doesn’t. The other son says he won’t do the work, but actually does do the work.
In all my dealings and interactions with you, you have been more of a Christian to me than many Christians I know.
Call yourself what you like. Seek what you want to seek. Find the answers or be on a perpetual search.
It is what we do with our life that is important.
There's a Buddhist Dharma center near me that does communal vipassina and zen meditations and serve tea and conversation after on Sunday mornings. Having recently fallen down a secular Buddhism rabbit hole, I'm thinking of trying this as a sort of replacement for church. Although the symbolism of Christianity is still very powerful for me, I often think the truth resides somewhere in between the roots of eastern and western ideals.
This reminds me many years back when I heard a prominent Western Buddhist teacher going through an existential crisis, or maybe a crisis of conscience? He said he didn't believe ANY of it anymore EXCEPT:
"Don't cling"
That has stuck with me and I think about it frequently. And it's this refined down essence that has made me contemplate if I was asked to boil down what's at the core of my heart of hearts, I would probably respond:
Love and compassion
This is what I believe, everything else is just noise.
Practicing writing and finding my voice is changed me profoundly. In a way it is my religion. I do not owe anyone a definition. I do no not owe anyone a nice neat label. Their uneasiness towards my personal beliefs is their personal problem and not mine.
No need to return in my opinion.
I have to unfortunately keep up the trappings of belonging for family, although I have officially announced it online.
I deal with its influence by reinterpreting for my new religious framework, none of which willl be accepted by the orthodox (and even the heterodox), but is simply my way of holding it all together. It gets very lonely, but I prefer the loneliness to the cognitive dissonance.
Keep moving, is all I'd say. Your journey is yours alone. They can't steal you from yourself.
I get that. I've found myself back in a church for the past year, but I never expected to. I don't think I could just go to any church though. This one is really weird, totally separate from any organizational structures. The pastor is a mystic who regularly incorporates Eastern religions, secular music, and just breaks all the rules in general. We met and bonded over a love of Ram Dass, who he considers a spiritual mentor. He said the book Be Here Now is a mirror of his own relationship with Jesus. There is no concern for what you call God or what path you are on, as long as you are living a good life and taking care of others. He and the church as a whole do carry the "Christian" label, because they base everything around Christ, but it's the "Universal Christ" within everything. I can say it is very nice to have a community of spiritual seekers, but I don't talk about it with people outside of that because I know they wouldn't get it. I have Jordan Peterson and his Biblical lectures to thank for drawing me back into the stories (from a more approachable angle).
Leaving Christianity is like leaving an abusive relationship. You love Jesus, Jesus loves you, but then Jesus starts making demands, becomes all needy, needs constant praise, starts threatening you, and wants all your money, and next thing you know you are working the streets, banging on doors cause Jesus needs more and more attention and you are just not enough. Then you break it off, but you start thinking well he wasn't really that bad, and he took all your friends and you're lonely, and you there were some good times, and you forget the bad times. You start reading all the old texts he sent you, but you skip over the abusive ones cause that's not really the real Jesus. But then hopefully a friend reminds that the abusive Jesus is the real Jesus, that yes he and his father really did drown the world in a flood, really did smite a city, really did commit genocide, really did call people dogs, really said it's going to be really bad for people he doesn't like, like wailing and gnashing of teeth bad, ghosted his followers for 2000 years (and counting), and when he does come back he told a friend he's going to decimate the earth and there will be blood up to horses bridles. Really, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! And he still wants all your money. Just block him and change the locks, cause he's bad news wrapped in good PR. And don't rebound into relationships with his friends either, cause Moses, Buddha, Krishna and rest are just waiting and just as bad and they aren't too good with money either! And don't get me started on Santa, that creepy stalker
"Religion isn’t a chemical."
It kind of is, though. So is sex. So is pretty much any ecstatic experience: they are all ways to flood our brains with the good neurochemicals that are part of what make life worth living.
When we've learned the rituals that bring us the big chemical hits, our body never forgets. I'm fortunate that the kind of tepid Anglicanism I grew up with was sufficiently short on majesty that I never got hooked, in part because my autistic neurochemistry is unable to process most of the communal aspects of the ecstatic experience, but even so, I can totally see the appeal.
What can replace that? Backed by an absurd and absurdly rich historical panoply going back thousands of years that creates an intellectual and mythological landscape that even I find it great fun to play in?
The sterile architecture of modernism offers nothing to compare. Sex, love, extreme sports... all of these can give us some sense of transcendence, but they lack the social integration that religion offers. None of them could serve as an organizing principle for individual lives or the life of a community. And most of them are the province of the young(er).
For me, I get most of what I need from some combination of solo kayaking and theatre of one kind or another (I've been involved for much of my life in improv, short film, and both community and professional theatre... it turns out growing up as a heavily masked autistic is good training for an actor.) Is there still a void? Yup... made more extreme by the particular beliefs I have about the universe of experience and what lies beyond it that I've reached as a physicist.
This is the conundrum of the modern condition: we stand at a place where we can see the failures and falsities and dangers of the religious myths of the past, but we can also see that our mode of life as cooperative, competitive, communal social primates requires that we have some kind of shared myth to organize our communities, or they break down into the fragmented mess we see around us.
The two responses to that which dominate current discourse are on the one hand people who want to re-blind us to the dangers and falsities and failures so they can on living the myths of old--be they Islamic or Christian or Hindu and/or some kind of nationalism--and on the other hand people who insist that the problems with our sterile amythic environment is that it's not sterile enough, and if we could just kill the last of the stories we would be free, which is like saying to a man in a desert that he just needs to stop sweating and thirst will no longer be a problem.
I don't have any solution to this. I'm not sure there is one. But I appreciate your forthrightness in grabbing this particular dilemma by the horns and seeing how far it can throw you.
I agree it's a big problem, which you've eloquently expressed. The answer, to my mind, is to take creative religious initiative and purify the scriptures and myths of old by taking responsibility for exegisis and consciously (re)interpreting the texts, symbols and values to conform to what we know is true - or at least what we assume to be true based on the evidence. We don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We can and must adapt religions for the modern homo sapiens, who remains a homo religiosus at his core.
Stephen, I am sure you know that the spectrum of Christianity today is rather vast. And there are plenty of people like you, who love the image of Christ and the values and stories of Christianity, but hate dogma or "old-fashioned" morality. Quite a number of Christian denominations from the Episcopalians to the United Church of Christ to the Quakers would welcome you with open arms. But if even these are too dogmatic for you, I would suggest the Unitarian Universalist Association https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe for community and Progressive Christianity https://progressivechristianity.org/about-us/. Finally, I'll reiterate my suggestion to check out the Liberal Catholic Church https://www.thelccusa.org/the-mystical-catholics if you crave more ritual and liturgical depth.
What I wish the Satanic Temple would be better at is to provide a forum for secular humanists to help humanity, helping humanity for the sake of helping humanity without cramming religion down anyone’s throat.
I too am somewhere between an atheist and agnostic. I’m more a Taoist I guess. I believe in a creative force in the universe. Christianity to me has become a great force for evil. When you force women to birth brainless fetuses even if their uterus explodes, that’s some real evil.
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with George MacDonald? He's a figure in the Christian tradition that I think gets across a lot of the transcendent and mythological significance of Christ and the Christian stories without being bound to all the traditional understandings of them.
His Unspoken Sermons is a great piece of spiritual literature.
Mic drop right there. Coming from an eclectic wierd pagan. 🎤 well done.
Romans 10:9
If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you will be saved.
John 14:6
Jesus said to him ,” I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.No one can come to the Father except through Me.
Then Jesus cried aloud: “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me.“
John 12:44 NRSVUE
"I am open to evidence for all these claims, and I am ultimately agnostic on all of them."
Believers will always see evidence where none exists, which is why I long ago stopped trying to engage with them. It is pointless, unless they are already unsure that the doctrine is valid, and the supernatural claims might be the nonsense that they are. Cognitive dissonance is a surefire way to waste a lifetime on false claims.