Do you like the cosmos you believe we inhabit, and why or why not?
ChastMastr
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I was reading the "Determinism, predestination and freedom" thread here in Purgatory, and after realizing that (if I am correct) most posters on the thread don't believe in a God, and/or in free will, and/or in the soul, it occurred to me--do people who believe in those things, or in other things (I'm a Christian who believes in God, free will, and the soul), actually like the world they believe in? Or is it a matter of being constrained by their conclusions to believe in a world they wish were not true? In my case, I would gladly believe (for example) in universal salvation, but my belief in free will does mean that someone could say "no" to God for all eternity, if I understand things correctly. I am grateful for my understanding of Christian belief as being true. But I might be an anomaly on the Ship nowadays--I'm not sure how many supernaturalists, much less traditional "Jesus was the Son of God, died and rose again for our salvation" Christians there are on the Ship compared with decades past. So I'm curious, basically.
Comments
But there is one location where my view and the view of Christians intersect and that is in the acceptance of the Christ Consciousness incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth whose flesh was crucified in order to release that Consciousness into the planetary sphere in order to create a "way out" and "way of return" for us all.
And whose Consciousness was returned to his resurrected flesh in order to empower the disciples in the 40 days of Pentecost to bring the message of eternal forgiveness, release, healing and reunion to the fragmentary consciousnesses so lost and deeply enmeshed in the despair of the hall of mirrors of Matter that they could not find their way out.
To my mind - All. Experience. Is. Sacred. The beauty and the horror. The atrocities and the sublimities. The hilarity and the despair. This universe is everything, and everything worth savoring and experiencing and immersing myself in. It's a collosal YES!!! and who am I to say no to the YES that powers the stars and the galaxies??
AFF
That's a pretty broad brush you are painting with; one can be a supernaturalist without believing in a particular supernatural doctrine, in this case the 'soul' (a concept with arguably very limited textual support).
Yes, I absolutely love the cosmos I live in, with all its glory and its terror, with all the unexpected popping up around every corner, creatures of amazing and freaky beauty, including especially the human beings. I love the people in particular, though they drive me freaking insane half the time--their bravery, their willingness to engage with each other and the world, even when they think one another completely wrong, the small acts of love, the creativity and the willingness to spend huge amounts of time and effort on art or cooking or a single musical performance that is gone as soon as performed, because it's good, dammit! I love the God that imagined it all, and when things went terribly wrong chose to insert himself into that cosmos as an actor and player on the same level with everybody else, and paid the price for it, and thought it well worthwhile. And I love the glimpses of what he's going to transform the cosmos into after it is finally healed of its long sickness, and evil will be no more.
(This naturally implies that I hate evil, and the effects it has had on the cosmos I love, and I'm not terribly happy about some of the ramifications of that--in particular the sheer amount of pain it's caused people, and will continue to cause people. I'm glad some of that pain is redemptive, I wish it all were, but that's not under my control.)
For me that's somewhat the case, yes.
I believe in God, in Heaven and Hell, the Life Everlasting, and all that jazz. The prospect of Hell if I'm not good/worthy/repentant/broken enough for God terrifies me. Frankly, the prospect of Heaven in any form I can conceive terrifies me almost as much. I would find believing that there's nothing after this life but oblivion - the lightbulb goes pop and that's that - strangely liberating. It would mean that there's nothing to fear, no consequences for getting it wrong (however honestly) or making mistakes (however unknowingly). And yes, it would also mean that I could indulge those little selfish desires of mine without having to feel bad about it. I could be free to live my best life according to my own conscience without the Eternal Judge looming like the Sword of Damocles over my long-term future.
Which is why I said “how many supernaturalists” (i.e. general) “much less traditional” etc. (i.e. much more specific). I also said “I’m not sure how many” because I’m genuinely not sure how many. It seems to me like far fewer posters who believe in supernaturalism in general, much less specifically traditional Christianity, weigh in on the threads I am seeing on matters like this. But I genuinely don’t know.
As for the doctrine(s) of the soul (no need for scare quotes), and how much the notions are supported by various texts (and/or traditions, from a wide variety of beliefs and religions across space and time), that would be for another thread.
This is basically my own position, and feelings about it, as well.
Sending hugs for your own struggles here, just as a side note. ❤️
As I think you may have surmised from my own posts, I don’t think things are as dire like that, particularly with regard to honest or unknowing mistakes or confusion, or with God as a harsh judge rather than a loving father (as in the parable of the prodigal son), or even being “good enough.” But that would also be another thread.
Those weren't scare quotes, merely an indication that it's a bad translation of something that seems to owe more to neo-platonism than anything from either part of the Bible, or indeed traditional Christianity.
I'm a supernaturalist, but that doesn't mean subscribing to the idea of a "soul".
Regarding “bad translation,” we will disagree, especially when it comes to traditional Christianity. As for neo-Platonism, if God (in my understanding) chose the place and time for Christianity to grow up so it would learn a more developed understanding of the soul, I won’t complain.
(And yes, I understand that one can be a supernaturalist and not believe in the soul; this could be its own thread of course.)
But how do you feel about what you believe and don’t? (Which is the point of this particular thread.)
A great answer according to faith.
I am tempted to reply, but I don’t wish to derail the thread into that. Another thread on the nature of the soul could be started if someone wants to.
(It does further discussion, however—just not as far as some people may prefer. But on this thread, for me, I want to avoid derailing it from the actual topic.)
Nor do I, on my good days at least. But the fear is always there, the “what if that’s what’s true” whispers in the back of my mind that I can never quite silence, the “I never knew you”s and “they shall be cast into the fire”s that Jesus said as well as all that nice wish-washy lovey-dovey stuff other people like to pretend was all He was about.
Ah. I can understand that. I think those can be things we struggle with in this world, depending on our own natures (some people struggle with one thing, some with another)--the black dog of depression, the dark night of the soul, and such. Remember, though, who He said those harsher things to, and about. I would cling to the genuinely kind and loving (not the wishy-washy notion of the blonde-haired Jesus, hovering about three inches off of the ground, saying in a sing-song falsetto voice, "Follow meeeee!" as someone put it years ago (some sermon, I think)) Jesus and His compassion for all of us struggling here. Remember "Blessed are those..." --I think this applies to those of us who struggle with things like this and depression/fear and the temptation to despair, too.
(I have my own struggles with despair and related stuff as well.)
Have you read Adrian Plass? He talks about struggles with things like this in a very human manner. (OMG, me recommending someone other than C.S. Lewis? Gasp!) I really recommend him a lot.
Ernest Hemingway
I don't know enough about the Cosmos
Returning to ChastMastr's question, I seem to have accumulated several beliefs about the cosmos, starting with a fairly speculative/sciencey belief alongside an evangelical belief resembling the one he outlines. But in relation to the following: I don't remember being grateful - appreciative, maybe? The morality made sense to me, at least to start with. And the sociality. I can't remember thinking of Christianity as being true, more as being what I believed. (I was aware that quite a lot of people thought that it wasn't true.)
I don't want to derail the thread, but I am genuinely curious: If you believed it, then doesn't that mean you thought it was true?
Also, just to clarify, is the evangelical belief you mention part of what you believe now, or do you mean you started out with that belief?
I have to agree that for me if I say I believe something, that means I think it is true. I can't begin to imagine what believing something I didn't think was true would even mean.
Yes, that's where I stand. My mind won't allow me to believe anything I have doubts about, much less something that I want to be true but can't find evidence for. I understand other people can do that, but it puzzles me how that works.
I'd describe Christianity primarily as a "how you live your life" belief, or a "how you ought to live your life" belief. In other words, a faith (although faiths can also be about the meaning of life, for example). There were always aspects of Christianity that didn't make sense to me - it became apparent, fairly early on, that this isn't actually incompatible with faith - I wasn't being asked to believe they were true in a "making sense" way, but that I was being asked to have faith in them - to rely on them, to accept them, to depend on them, to lay claim to them, to be counted among the adherents...
So, rather than being True, maybe it's more a case of Christianity encompassing Truth. One of the more resilient and hopeful truths I found is expressed in John 10:10 Which always seemed pretty positive. And the person saying it was prepared to stake His life on it. In many respects, it still seems worth believing (in).
A question in return: if you believe Christianity is true, does that mean you don't experience doubt?
Two years to the centenary!
It needs an update, to the multiverse. We know a little about 5%, matter. We know virtually bugger all about the 95% (27:68) dark matter and energy. We now suppose m-branes colliding ekpyrotically in >=5D bulk space. Starting big bangs.
I like it!
Naturally I'd like it infinitely, eternally better if it were in the mind of Love.
But it ain't.
Yes this world suits me, but then I'm a comfortably retired, educated, western white man, and so it should, because other men like me have gone before to make sure it does suit me.
Ah, I see Christianity as--well, centrally, a claim about this fellow Jesus from 2000 years ago being God incarnate and dying and rising again in the flesh. For me, if I didn't believe that is true, I would not call myself a Christian, whatever code of ethics I might adhere to. Or I'd say that I was a Christian in an ethical sense but not a religious one, or something. (But I'd probably be a (polytheistic or neo-, etc.) Pagan if I wasn't a Christian, or even a ceremonial magician or the like...) I wasn't raised in Christianity, or indeed any religion, though by blood I'm Jewish, so for me this was something I was convinced of rather than formed by.
I do experience doubt. It's just part of life for me. I think my intellectual doubts have been resolved (as always, I recommend C.S. Lewis for those matters), but of course I can be a bundle of anxieties about all manner of things even without theology coming into it.
I mean more what you believe about the cosmos, God, etc., rather than earthly circumstances.
What inspired this thread was, in "Determinism, predestination and freedom," the question in my mind of people who don't believe in God, souls, free will, and/or other religious matters. I'm used to most people who believe in those things generally being glad they do, apart from some concerns as raised by @Marvin the Martian, but I was wondering how people who don't believe in (for instance) God feel about it. Like, do they look back wistfully at the notion of believing in a supernatural universe, and wish that such a thing could be so? Or souls that go on, and not simply being extinguished like a candle at the end of at best about a century life on Earth? Or are they pleased to have escaped or avoided such "fairy tales"? Do they look at the idea of supernatural religion the way they might look back at "when I was small and believed in Santa Claus/Father Christmas, and the world seemed more magical, what a shame it isn't so" or "thank Reason we've escaped from those ghastly irrational horrors" or some other thing?
I'd agree that a lot of the time the cosmos just *is*, but equally these are some of the things I like, and occasionally there's a brief glimpse or apprehension of something more numinous.
Both. Concurrently. And it isn't black and white. My beliefs had got better and better, exponentially so, out of all recognition, thanks to Rob Bell and Brian McLaren. Until believing itself came in to question. Once I'd deconstructed that, there is no way back. I want to believe, but there is nothing credible, nothing transcendently good in the gospels. There is no Love. There are still some excellent humanist elements transcending the Jewish feet of clay. On the long epicyclic arc of the moral universe.
I'd describe my Christian faith, my Christian belief, being a Christian, as always having included doubt. My understanding was that this was quite common, possibly normal. In any case, in my experience of Christian belief, doubt was/is part of what faith is about.
In some ways, I've found doubt quite helpful: doubting my beliefs being part of the process of examining and exploring them; asking myself "what-if's" about them; refining them, as it were. And though doubt can be destabilising, and even quite unpleasant, a consequence of accepting it is that you get more used to dealing with it, and (at it's most extreme) have confidence that you can come out the other side.
For all three of you, it seems to me that having reached certainty in your faith belief, you've stuck with it. And in response to Lamb Chopped's implied question, I suppose part of the answer from my perspective is that you don't doubt because you don't (or can't) let yourself doubt. Maybe that you've internalised the idea that faith requires the elimination of doubt.
I do believe in God, I am a Christian. I am agnostic about free will - I'm a universalist so I don't think anything important rides on it. Likewise I tend to not believe that the soul is a distinct part of a human being made of immaterial stuff - I tend to agree with Wittgenstein's saying that saying someone has a soul is an attitude towards them, or of describing their attitude. (If someone has a purely utilitarian attitude to everything in their life, in which they treat everything or everyone as there to maximise their utility, one might say they have no soul.)
As I say, if you do believe in God and you don't believe in eternal conscious damnation, then I don't think anything of importance hangs on either free will or an immaterial soul. It's all in God's hands either way and what God does is best.
I'm far from certainty. What I mean is, for me "I believe that God might exist" = "I think it is true that God might exist".
It's "believe" and "think is true" which seem the same thing to me, but that doesn't mean they don't have degrees of confidence, from "very weak" to "seems effectively certain".
What I was getting at was that "I believe this but don't think it's true" or even "I believe this but don't care whether it's true or not" make no sense to me at all - not just in the "strange position to hold" sense but in the "square circles" actual logical nonsense sense.
For me, doubt is not specific to or special within religious truth claims any more or less than any others. Some things are more certain than other things, and doubt is just that margin between certainty and the confidence we have that a given claim is true.
I mean, that's the problem with perspectivism and denial of absolute truth: it sounds like it's giving permission to validate many perspectives, but in practice it ends up treating all other perspectives than the speakers as not mattering.
Oh, and no, i don’t think faith requires eliminating all doubt, I’m a Lutheran. That’s not part of my background at all and makes no sense to me. How would i even set about doing such a thing? I believe because i think a thing to be true, and if doubts arise, i do further investigations.
For context, I envisage there being different types of belief, which are arrived at in different ways and which affect our worldviews in different ways. I don't find it straightforward to see doubt, truth and certainty playing an equal role in all of them. For example, it struck me fairly early in life on that faith belief couldn't be approached empirically - it's the wrong tool for the job.
What I also had in mind in referring to "certainty" isn't just the true-ness of a thing, but also the degree of conviction someone has in their position regarding that thing, which to my mind is something you address in your first para above. Taking "I think it is true that God might exist" in two parts, it seems to me that you express a significant degree of confidence (possibly approaching certainty) in the "I think it is true" part; but that you express only a partial degree of confidence in the "God might exist" part.
For me, doubt is rather more than the margin between certainty and whatever level of confidence I have. Doubt is one of the attitudes involved in the process of establishing confidence. I find it quite useful in relation to problem-solving, for example.
A lot of this I find very hard to parse.
If it is possible that God exists, and also possible that he doesn't, it is logically necessary that the statement "God might exist" is true - it can only be false if God either definitely does or definitely doesn't exist, so my near certainty of the truth of that statement is mere consistency and so unremarkable
I am aware that empiricism is not up to the task of examining religious truth claims - but here's the rub - no-one seems to have come up with anything that *is*. So they inevitably fall into the "might be true" category.
That's a process I can understand. It strikes me that ChastMastr's comment might be relevant: Christianity was being formed in me before I knew what any of the words meant, let alone was able to reason about anything. So the process for me was in a rather different order to the one you describe. It's quite hard to work out how other people use some of the words and concepts when, for me, they've been defined, at least initially, by the faith belief itself.
Good. Thanks.
I think the short version of what I'm saying is that, for the sake of my own well-being, I did come up with a different way of examining what you call religious truth claims, which involves treating them as a rather different category of thing.
Would you mind sharing that way?
Re “ Maybe that you've internalised the idea that faith requires the elimination of doubt,” I don’t understand. I do experience doubt. Believing something is true doesn’t mean you’ll never experience doubt. I also genuinely don’t understand the idea of believing something, anything, but not believing that it’s true.
In what way that hasn’t been thus far?
Do you mean the question that if predestination/no free will is true, then everyone on every side would “believe” the notions they believe—including on predestination and free will—regardless of whether or not their position is true? And that for instance the entire thread would itself be predestined, down to punctuation? (I don’t believe that way, but then I believe in free will and Reason.)
I’m probably borderline deist. I am utterly convinced that God exists (I’d find it much harder to think that He didn’t), but when it comes to the received CofE faith of my family and I, then we’re into believe/hope/have faith. I can utterly empathise with the faith and doubt of John Betjeman, or David Cameron’s Magic FM quote (which was so perfect that I truly genuinely believe that was him speaking and not a focus group).
What was the quote?
He described (whilst Prime Minister) his faith as
"a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes",
God knows he got a lot of things wrong, but that was so authentically his age/background/education/class that for me it had the ring of absolute sincerity.
Lots of other things he said and did didn’t, but I completely believe that that was a genuine statement of where his head is at.
Actually, he attributed this particular saying to Boris Johnson - which may put a slightly different spin on it. The full quote being:
A good PR man usually has an above average grasp of human nature, which leaves me wondering which side of the because/despite line he was operating in when he gave that particular answer to Patrick Wintour.