And Now for Something Completely Different...

I'm tired of Iraq. And Afghanistan. And the new desire to attack Iran. And more attacks on Somalia. I think I'll do something completely different today. I was talking with a friend recently about religion. What did I think? Why didn't I attend church regularly? Am I a Christian? I think today, I will explore those questions. It has been a long time since I have done any serious study on this topic, so I will not have ther regular level of citations and references. This will instead be something written directly off the top of my head; it is for my edification, and as such, may not flow well for the casual reader. Cut me some slack. 1 - Do I believe in God? The traditional interpretation of God is one of an omnipotent Father; that is, everything that happens is through His express will and plan. I do not subscribe to this view. I will instead offer a different view of God; one that is consistent with Christian scripture, as well as my own ideas. This is easiest for me to do through a simple example. Say you want to know what time it is. Time is reflected though clocks and all manner of other time keeping devices. Some clocks are more accurate than others, losing only fractions of a second over a millennium. Depending on a person's disposition, a certain level of accuracy may be required. However, it is essential to remember that clocks are only a reflection of time, and not time itself. In the same way, Christian values, no matter how stringently revered, are mere reflections of the actual virtue. In the time example, the goal is to understand "true time", which is beyond human understanding. We instead use crude substitutes, and then argue over the granularity of the substitute. In the Christian value structure, the "true" virtue - i.e. "true" charity, "true" love, etc, is similarly beyond human understanding. This does not, however, mean that it does not exist; much as nobody would argue whether or not Time exists. My interpretation of God is a manifestation of all of the "true" values of humanity. If one could collect perfection in all human virtues, they would have the embodiment of my God. This has some basis in Christian scripture, as I will describe here. In the Gospel of John, 14:6, Jesus utters one of the most important phrases in the New Testament: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." This statement is John's answer to an age-old question. The Gospel of John is sometimes referred to as the "Platonic" Gospel because of John's study at Plato's Academy in Greece. At the time, the pre-eminent theological questions was this: Are virtues virtuous in and of themselves, or are they virtuous because God says they are? This may seem like splitting hairs, but either answer to this question creates a serious theological problem. 1 - Virtues are virtuous in and of themselves: If this is the case, God is not omnipotent; He cannot change the nature of virtue, which exists outside Him. Given that God is God The Father Almighty, this is a problem. 2. Virtues are virtuous because God says they are: In this case, virtue and morality are arbitrary, because God could have just as easily chosen something else - the definition of arbitrary. To answer this question, one needs to look deeply into John 14:6 - particularly at "the Way", or Hodos, in the original Greek. Hodos is usually translated to mean a road or highway, as in a path to take to God. However, there is another definition- a course of conduct / behavior. Place this definition into John 14:6 and you have: "I am the behavior and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except THROUGH the behavior and the truth and the life that I embody." So, in order to come to God, you need to follow the behavior of Jesus, as well as truth and life. I believe that this is because that the behavior of Jesus is the embodiment of God - perfect virtue. So, to answer to ancient theologians, I say: "Virtues are virtuous because they are a REFLECTION of God, who is the embodiment of all that is good. Virtue and God are synonymous, and as such one does not rule the other." This also gives some credence to the notion of the Holy Spirit - God and Jesus in Me. If God is the embodiment of virtue, than the part of virtue that resides in all people is the Holy Spirit. In answer to the questions regarding God's "anger" in the Bible - Lot's wife, Sodom and Gomorrah/fire and brimstone, Noah and the flooding of the Earth, etc., I say that his is not God, but rather man's interpretation of God; and imperfect interpretation. All of this is a long-winded way of saying, "Yes, I believe in a series of virtues that are beyond human understanding, the embodiment of which has been termed God." Don't worry, the rest of the points will be shorter... 2 - Do I believe that Jesus was God's only son, and that he died for the forgiveness of our sins? I group these 2 together, because I think they are intertwined. The purpose of Jesus (on earth, and in his death) is to cleanse man from his sins, purportedly all the way back to Original Sin. This assumes a belief on Original Sin, something that I struggle with. I believe that man is flawed, but not necessarily in the mechanism of Original Sin. I expect that this is merely a metaphor for the fact that man is born imperfect, and as such will not continue to examine the question. This is a very tantalizing possibility, one now has a possibility of escaping his failings and getting to Heaven. However, my thesis on God is that Jesus is to serve as a role model and the embodiment of the acts necessary to reach God (perfect virtue), and therefore the original perfection or imperfection of man is not necessary to determine. I don't believe that Jesus is necessary; whether or not he existed to serve Biblical purpose doesn't matter to me. Whether my human shortcomings are forgiven by a mans death, or accepted as a part of man, the result is the same. I saw a movie on an airplane one time called The Body. It's about a corpse which is dug up in Jerusalem, and has all of the Biblical markings of the body of Jesus. The Vatican, Israelis, Palestinians, and a bunch of other people get involved in trying to prove and disprove Biblical history, all to serve their own ends. This is how I view alot of these theological questions. They are ancillary to the true message: How should I live my life, such that I do so in the best way possible? This is the message of Socrates, Aristotle, and many other great historical thinkers. I do not see the core Christian messages to be fundamentally different. I would like to think however, that if Jesus is the Jesus of scripture, that he is like the one portrayed in Last Temptation of Christ; a man with human doubts and insecurities, but still ready to do what is required of him. 3- Why Don't I attend church regularly? Ah, a question that begs for a philosophical bludgeoning. The short answer is that the Church does not support the same type of values that I support. Allow me to explain what I mean. Organized religion is full of bureaucracy, intrigue, demagoguery, and all sorts of other despotic scandals. More people have died for the Glory of God than for any other reason in history. Unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the Church since its inception. This is all well-known; however, there is another layer of intent, especially among the Church leadership. It is to augment the "intellectuals" from my post Fear, Education, and Indoctrination with a religious, and not just an academic, voice. Mikhail Bakunin writes of this in his unfinished work God and the State. In it, he details the use of religion in the suppression of personal liberty and religion's place in the service of the State. he attacks the age-old adage of Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion." Bakunin instead says that it would be necessary to invent him, so that he could be destroyed. "God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave." While Satan is "the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds." Here, he is talking about the God of scripture. This God, he contends, holds Man down through a kind of induced slavery, and condemns free thought through a comparison to Satan. Only through the destruction of this type of God can man ever truly be free. Bakunin continues to attack the story of Creation and a series of other Biblical stories, which are not essential to this analysis. What is important, however, is the recognition that God and religion can be used against the populace in the same way that education can. Religion is also an excellent tool because of its basis in faith, sometimes to the contrary of all else. This is especially useful in controlling a populace. In recent years, a stark decline in Church attendance among the younger, more educated sectors of the country has been noted. I believe this is not a rejection of the tenants of Christianity, but a rejection of the overt ideological indoctrination that comes with organized religion. It is due to this phenomenon that the "intellectuals" in Academia have begun to fill this void. Educational indoctrination is more important now than it was 100 years ago because religious indoctrination has lost some of its power. Not attending church is not a rejection of Christian virtue, merely a rejection of the thinly veiled indoctrination that chokes and suppresses the message. 4 - So, are you a Christian? Well then... it all comes down to this. I suppose, measured against the Apostles Creed, I fail more of the stanzas than I pass. However, I consider some of the tenants more important than others. So, here is what I believe: 1. I believe that there are things in this world that are greater than I am. These things include virtues as well as shortcomings. The virtues, taken together, can be called God if desired. 2. I believe the most important thing a person can do is to strive to attain the virtues and to limit the shortcomings. 3. I believe that, even though #2 is impossible to complete perfectly, that the impossibility should not stop a person from trying. 4. I believe that concerted thinking and discussion on the topic can be mutually uplifting, even though the answer can never be truly be found. So, I ask you, am I a Christian?