Christian Life 4 - That's All, Folks!

 Looking back, I see that I've been posting tidbits on this blog for 2 1/2 years.  In that time, I seem to have elicited no reactions from anyone beyond my own pastor.  I believe my peak readership has been 30-35 readers, and I'm pretty sure at least half of them were robots.  I confess to having grown tired of talking to myself, and I have therefore decided to bring this effort to an end.  Before I go, and in case someone ever does read this, I'd like to sum up a few points in closure.

We are rarely aware of where our opinions come from, and virtually never of where others get theirs.  As David Smith, philosopher and lecturer in Ethics at Washington State, notes, "We have an assumption that people choose their opinions... [but they don't.]  Their beliefs form naturally over the course of their lives."  (quoted in I Never Thought of It that Way; Guzman, Monica; Ben-Bella Books; 2022; p. 133)  I would add that there's even more to it than that; our opinions are shaped to a surprising extent by many generations of lives, those of our parents, our grandparents and so on.

Most of my readers will be from what we now call Western culture.  It's absolutely astounding, when one examines the matter closely, how very much our modern Western way of thinking was shaped by the ancient Romans, for both better and worse.  Among the ideas that we've inherited from the Romans is that rational thought is better than emotional reactions.  While this may be true, that's as far as the Romans (and, hence, us) were prepared to take it.    The Romans could not - we cannot - conceive of anything more than Options A and B.  If you've followed my little ideas on these pages to this point and still wonder about the whole God thing, might I submit that you may be a victim of Western thought?  Maybe you've never been exposed to an Option C; the option wherein religious beliefs exist.  Remember that all of the current major religions in the world today - Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - as well as the greater minor religions - Jainism, Sikhism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism and Baha'i - are all of Eastern origin.  To truly understand any of them requires, at minimum, a shallow dive into Eastern thought.  Here are a few mind-boggling Eastern ideas:

(1) Certain morals are apparently universal, as they appear in ALL of the religious tenets cited, from antiquity to modernity.  Ethics on the whole vary from culture to culture, but such ideas as "murder bad, kindness good" transcend culture.  Even Rationalists tend to agree with these moral values, which the ancient Chinese called the Tao.  The Tao remains constant, even among ancient peoples who could not possibly have had cultural interactions.  So, where does the Tao come from?  From whence does our species derive this moral code, if not one another?  Hmmm.

And where does God fit into all this?  Well, Zarathustra calls it Ahura Mazda, Judaism calls it YHWH, Buddhism calls it The Everything (and the state of being in the presence of The Everything is called Nirvana), Christianity uses the word God and Islam refers to Allah.  They all mean the same thing.

(2) Words are powerful and necessary things.  Without language, we would certainly have no civilization, and it would not be an absurd argument to state that, without words, we as a species would have likely died out long ago.  Yet, for all their value, words are not without their limits.  As Huston Smith notes: "At worst, they build up a false world in which people are reduced to stereotypes and our actual feelings are camouflaged in honorific titles.  Second, even when their description of experience is in the main accurate it is never adequate; they always dilute the intensity of immediate experience even when they do not distort it.  Finally and most important, the highest modes of experience transcend the reach of words entirely." (The Religions of Man, Mentor Books, 1959, pp.135-136)

While that last sentence seems to shift into the realm of existentialism, its not really outside the scope of the average person's experience.  We've all witnessed sunrises or waterfalls or childbirths or paintings or musical performances that created in us sensations that completely defied explanation.  We often call such experiences "awe," "imagination," or "enlightenment," knowing even as we utter these words that they are inadequate expressions of what we've just experienced.  All we can say for certain is that, for just a moment, we have enjoyed a sense of smallness, connection, serenity and peace that simply cannot be explained.

In Eastern thought, such word-defying experience is the essence of life, and all religions attempt to bring their adherents to a point of living in such states more as a matter of routine than as sporadic rapture.

(3) A common theme in Eastern thought is that we are made of three parts, our bodies, our minds and our spirits.  Your body feels, your mind thinks, and your spirit Is.  This is, again, not so weird as it initially seems.  It is common in Western conversation to refer to our bodies in something very near to the third person.  "My foot hurts."  "I hate my hair!"  "Do you think I should get my ears pierced?"  It seems that, on a subconscious level, we think of our bodies as something other than Self.

Likewise, we often do the same thing with our brains.  A young autistic man whom I had the privilege of watching grow up frequently commented in his youth that he had a "bad brain."  He would make such comments just as any one of us might say "My left eye is slightly smaller than my right," or "My toenails grow too quickly;" almost in the third person. "Sometimes, my brain forgets things."  "My brain doesn't always do what I want it to." Yes, we're talking about ourselves, but ultimately, we're not talking about our Selves.

So, what is Self, then?  In Western philosophy, Self is just an illusion; a convenient construct to make social navigation easier.  In Eastern philosophy, Self is the Spirit.  The part of each of us that words cannot describe.  The part that transcends both emotion and thought.  The highest level of Being.  It is our Spirits that are capable of reaching out to and understanding God and one another.  As a Western thinker, you've been taught to dismiss such ideas, but, I submit that, like Dr. Phil, you ask yourself, "how's that working out for you?"

Why do I believe in God?  Watch the news.  Scroll through your social media feeds.  Think back about how your day went yesterday, or the day before.  Look at where we are as a nation, a society, a culture.  You're surrounded by the results of Rationalism, Materialism, and all the other -isms of Western thought.  Centuries of trying to do things the Roman way, over and over again, have gotten us...well, nowhere, not to put too fine a point on it.  Each successive generation blames all the world's ills on their predecessors (with their outdated Western ideals) and believe that, as soon as the old folk die out and the youngsters (with their newfangled Western ideals) can take over, everything will be great.  And yet, here we still are.

What has our Rationalism gotten us?  Okay, yes, we can cure a few more diseases, but we've also managed to invent new ones that we can't.  We have faster ways of getting around, but we're destroying the earth by deploying them.  We've outlawed slavery, but racism and poverty are still rampant.  We have instantaneous global communication, but when was the last time you actually engaged in meaningful and mutually beneficial discourse with someone whose opinion differed from your own?  Taken as a whole, I'd have to say - any real Rationalist would have to say - that as for Western culture's overall net effect on the human condition, any appreciable improvement over the last two millennia has been, at best, negligible.  Despite our "chronological snobbery," as C.S. Lewis put it,  the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -  Conquest, War, Famine and Death - still ride among us.  As my granddaddy always used to say, "if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got."

Maybe it's time to try something different.  Maybe those Eastern thinkers were onto something.  Just sayin.'

Pax