Redefining Faith: An Introduction

Reido,

Although I'm not sure that "Existential" is even the correct word since Heidegger (I think it was) made a point about differentiating between existence and being, your point reminds me to refocus on the goal of finding faith in living (being?) aside from, or in spite of, systems that define faith, truth and knowledge relative to their own centers or datums.

This very short introduction has been through hundreds of words, its stubby length due to my eventual realization that I just couldn't get it all together in one post. Not even the little bit that I know about the subject. Besides, some of the other pieces (yet to come) should be skipped by those who've managed to grow up without hangups over the term.

I was just sitting down to begin organizing the various uses and definitions of faith for subsequent parts when I read your comment and realized that I'd really rather go to the end next, and then work my way toward the middle. But that's what got me so muddled before, attempting to start with the new definition and work my way backward with the whys and wherefores.

Still, this is the web, and it's alive. We can start wherever we want to, and restart, too.

bill

Bill

In my view I think Existential would be fitting.  I'll let the taxonomists argue over the fine points since I don't attach any claim to their turf.  What I feel is good about this chapter is I think we (collectively, as people of Faith) will visit the "Redefining" many times. 

Years ago I wrestled with the meaning of Worship and the way the taxonomists break it down into this and that with all the nuances of language and lexicography.  The idea of living a transformed life as spiritual worship (Ro. 12:1-3) was fascinating.  Faith in process has become something that fits well into a wider meaning of worship.  Seems to be alive and flowing in the continuum instead of fixed in time and place.  For that reason, I find my many visitations with Redefining Faith to be something of a comfort -- like an old friend.

reido

Anon,

You make a good point about not fighting the obvious. At some point, in order to maintain (or regain) intellectual honesty and to better understand ancient scripture, we must recognize that it was written by and for people who thought mythically while we think rationally, moving toward something else. Pretending that nothing has changed over the past 5 centuries or so is like living in denial. An important consideration for us now is that we are in the midst of another shift. I guess this is the Einsteinian shift. We still have a lot to learn.

Faith is ultimately about trust and trustworthiness. So, lying to ourselves and others means we lose before we ever get a turn at bat. As long as we define Faith as the opposite of Reason, we allow argument, marketing and debate to take the place of trustworthiness. Whoever has the best argument wins the debate, even if they are not worthy of trust. Is there any wonder that we continue to elect people who let us down. We fall for argument and promise because we don't trust trust. Or maybe it's so rare that we don't know what to look for.

I'm preparing to make some sort of point that Faith is related in someway to the deeply held need for trust and unity or belonging to mend what Erich Fromm calls Separateness of the human condition. It's the East of Eden condition. Thrown out of the garden, we look for belonging without losing our identity and integrity. Trust comes ultimately through being trustworthy; mercy from being merciful, etc. I think we know intuitively what it is, but we've lost our ability to consider the subjective.

 

Thanks for your comments.

 

bill

Anon

I am not disagreeing, but interested in how this worked to strengthen Faith?  Some of my friends who are atheist found Reason and the physical universe to have the opposite effect.  Personally, I found their conclusions were reasonable, but not what I came to.  What I also found difficult for them to comprehend was how my own Redefinition of Faith could be so close to their own Negation of Faith -- I found this to be true mainly because so many atheists define Faith in terms of religion.

reido

I can really only tell you what has worked for me. I went back to Deism and then Pandeism some years ago. I read Paul Davies' book, The Mind of God, and it very much got me thinking about the complexity of the Universe, and what must be behind that. I think that is the best place to start building faith, by looking at things like evolution or the Big Bang and wondering, well where did they come from? If there is a design to the universe, why is there? If our existence is intended, why is it needed? So for me Pandeism has come to make the most sense, that something with enough power to create the universe would become it, basically to experience something that it really couldn't any other way.

Of course, believing this is a matter of faith, but I think so is believing in any particular model of the Big Bang, or in "subquarks" for that matter.

Anon--I am interested in the Pandeistic approach.  I do believe it is one of the most viable approaches available. Wonder if you could explain a comment you made: "So for me Pandeism has come to make the most sense, that something with enough power to create the universe would become it, basically to experience something that it really couldn't any other way."

When considering Pandeism, I've never considered a distinction between the creator and the created, yet you've mentioned it as a key precursor to the creator deciding to merge with the created?  Very interesting indeed.

Well there is Pantheism and there is Pandeism, and both can be traced to ideas by John Scottus in the 800s (who was just trying to be a good Christian, but was posthumously hereticized for his writings anyway), who suggested that God wasn't in a position to figure out what exactly he himself was (or it itself, I guess) so God became a Universe full of people who would look at God from this sort of outside perspective and figure it out.

 Going further back there's a lot of this in Vedic ideas of the Universe being an illusion emanating from the Brahman, who has become this illusion in order to enjoy the experience. The latter, I think, makes more sense. God becoming the universe in an entirely physical way, to feel it through ourselves.

You're right, I was describing Pantheism.  Now Pandeism redefines the whole problem, doesn't it? In Pandeism, then ,e we're not talking about God at all--we're talking about something not quite formed and something that can be INformed, but with this amazing power to create and morph, split and observe and , it seems, learn.  The learning God, or whatever you want to call it. (I forget who the author is, but I read something a couple years back about a God who is indeed learning.  He started out very impetuous and violent, ala floods and fires and  the like--much more direct than He is now.  But over time, He has  matured and withdrawn somewhat, allowing the humans to play it out, as it were) .  Hmm, whole different take--not so much pressure on God to be God.?  Seems there's a little more leeway, not so much certitude and puts God in a less judgemental  position. Sort of whimsical and attractive, I must say.

The idea of a judgmental God is just at odds with the way the universe seems to work. Why create something flawed only to punish it for being flawed? And why create this whole, entire, vast universe just to sit in judgment on what Carl Sagan likened to "a dust mote suspended in a sunbeam." There's an entire universe out there. We aren't "it" but we're part of it. If all of it is God, we're part of God, and if (as Pandeism suggests) the purpose of God is to feel out this existence, then our ability to feel makes us an important part after all!

Anon, I'm with you right up to the point where we're small.  I think it is a giant blunder for us to fall into that trap, where just because our planet is physically small in the scope of the entire universe, we as individuals are therefore small.  I don't think there is any evidence to support the smallness of "person-ality". Unless we are just the sum of our biological makeup, then the size of the planet in the context of the universe is irrelevant.

The major point that Davies was making in his book, and that I have seen in a lot of similar literature, is that if the universe is the product of design, it appears that design is fairly carefully calculated to eventually yield intelligent life - Deism and Pandeism both seem to demand this, Deism because whatever happens in God's clockwork universe must have been established at the beginning, Pandeism because of this and also because intelligent life would seem to be a most valuable part of God's experience of the universe.

In either case, and especially in the latter, I can not fathom that we would be the only intelligent life to arise in the universe. Nor are we likely to have already reached the ultimate goal of God's plan. We are still evolving, and may yet reach a plateau of even greater powers of cognition, realization, and self reflection, which allow God to share in even greater insights.

 I believe that our value to God is not based on physical size (in which case we would be virtually valueless compared to a dust cloud) but in the quality of our experience.

Anon, I am going to sound confrontational in my response. I just don't think I can avoid that but I  just want to make it clear that I have no interest whatsoever in an argument. That's not my goal here.   I do however really like the dialogue.  I also want to say that I'd like to return this dialogue back to the spirit of this website, which is the investigation of faith.  I believe that faith is inconsequential within the constructs of modernism, post-modernism, pantheism and pandeism. There are other dynamics at work, but faith ain't one of 'em.  

We are still evolving, and may yet reach a plateau of even greater powers of cognition, realization, and self reflection, which allow God to share in even greater insights.

The blunder is to fall into the modernisitic, scientific way of thinking and  make God the bandleader. I am emphatically against evolution theory as applied to the "soul", or whatever you want to call that immaterial thing in which we as individuals find our identity. We have electricity and better gadgets but I don't think that is evidence that we are evolving as a race.  We may be learning, but that is different than evolving. As I said in a recent post, human progress tied to better cognition, self-refleciton, etc...is wrong-headed, I believe, for many reasons, one of which is that it renders the mentally challenged as wasted life, or at least chaff. 

I am all for playing the team game.  My background is in team sports and the military, so I do understand that situation.  I don't think however that my place as an individual is to represent one data point in the experimental evolution of the human race to satifsfy the curiosity of a God who has to work out his Godness.

 I can not fathom that we would be the only intelligent life to arise in the universe. Nor are we likely to have already reached the ultimate goal of God's plan.

I'm certainly not positing that we're alone in the universe. As for whether we've reached the ultimate goal of God's plan...there is a whole lot or presupposition to work through wrt that statement.  

Arti

Hope this doesnt interrupt your thoughts with Anon:

Can you clarify a little of this for me?...  " I believe that faith is inconsequential within the constructs of modernism, post-modernism, pantheism and pandeism. There are other dynamics at work, but faith ain't one of 'em."  

Do you mean that faith cannot grow out of these constructs?  Or that it is severely limited in some way? Or, possibly, do you mean that having faith is inconsequential within these constructs?

 

thx

reido

Reido, My sense is that the four constructs I mentioned are deterministic in their own ways.  Seems that protags for modernism and the "pans" allow for volition, but not freedom with consequences for individuals: The larger purposes of the Universe or God supercede. A person's faith or lack thereof is an interesting phenomenon as a "coping mechanism", an interesting vestige of barbarism/ tribalism/ superstition but not an operative catalyst of consequence.  

 This is the notion of faith I carried into my comment that "there are dynamics at work but faith ain't one of 'em": faith is not faith unless there is something on the line.  Or, put another way, faith involves committing to some extraordinary circumstance/person. In this case, I was thinking of faith, "the act" or "the commitment", involving some level of moral courage; not faith, as in "a body of belief".  The spirit of my comment was to express a distaste for constructs that focus on the race as a whole and minimize the inherent value of the individual. I can accept God having larger purposes and "using" me as a means to ends. However, I'm arguing for God, the  being who can both "use" me as a means to ends AND treat me as an end in myself, and here's the kicker: with perfect Justice.  Trusting in this extraordinary circumstance takes some cajones, i.e., faith. It is a particular challenge for humans to manage both the particular and the universal simultaneously--and the modernists and pans are loathe to allow God to do it better. So, is it cajones, or is it lunacy? 

I think another popular/key issue, and what's really hard  to accept, is the possibility that God intervenes in natural and human events... and THIS (random tornadoes, mass killings, baby seal beatings, etc...) is the way it goes? THIS God must be incompetent, or better yet, we need to reconsider God altogether because this is ridiculous. What kind of sick supreme being takes joy in watching its creation careen toward nuclear holocaust or slowly microwave itself to death via globally warming?  If that's God--no thanks!

Arti

While you wait for Anon...

Speaking for myself, I learned that my Faith is the product of my experience with Modernism, PMi, Panentheism, and to some degree Mysticism.  So much so that I confronted my own Soul to ask, is Faith itself a construct? 

I admit that there are limiting aspects in any Construct, for instance note the degree of dependency (total mindset) on Science and the Industrial Age. But even in an age deeply influenced by the Death of God, there is still Faith.  I find it in the balances -- that is, in times dominated by what was defined and fenced in as Faith, there was the idea of the "not God."  The antithesis grew.  So, I can see how constructs that appear to limit Faith, could actually contribute to it.

This was wierd, so let me know if I need to try again...

reido

First ,an alibi--I think I over-generalized when I said the Mondernists and the pans are loathe to let god deal with the univrsals and the particulars.  I should have left out the pantheists and pandeists, in that case.

 reido, I think I hear what you are saying. Sure, I can see faith as a construct.  I might prefer to call it a mechanism, or a mode of operation or even a catalyst but I'm not really compelled to quibble.  I want to understand what you are saying on YOUR terms.  

 The overriding sense I get from your statements regarding your Faith is that it is the outcome of a sort of deconstructive experience and maybe it hasn't found its object, or maybe it has no object. Would that be accurate?  Or maybe the point is the non-distinction between subject-object, if we're talking the intersection of mysticism/pantheism/post-modern science?   

Arti

You are a very analytical thinker -- it reminds me of the engineering mind since that is the field of work Bill and I are in. 

I have not worded "maybe it has no object" in those terms, but it likely is accurate.  There certainly was a stage of radical deconstruction that left me for a period in a state of a failed epistemology and waiting for something to develop.  What did develop in time was a comfort zone (call it home) in subjectivism (not the radical kind that posits nothing, but the state of continuum that I see as the Journey of life). 

What I find comforting (perhaps offering a sense of comfort and encouragement to others) is that Faith has survived.  Not only has it "passed the test" but Faith thrives in this Continuum.  Of course, it makes poor preaching because the only folks who would comprehend what I mean are likely the limited few right here who took up the Journey some time ago together (Brian and Bill...and I hope others who know me).  Each of us has undergone tremendous change but knowing the persons, I feel we each have survived with Faith intact, but have radically redefined what that means.

While the autobiography may sound somewhat self-indulgent, rest assured that what I seek is not to be coddled and petted as a poor lost Soul.  My real interest is in learning the only way a Subjectivist can -- from subjects (that is real people on their own Quest).  The challenge as I see it is to find the common thread of Faith in all -- even those who claim not to have it.

reido

some of the earlier posts here to get caught up on the conversation.  The analogy that comes to mind reido, when you describe your faith, is a stream, which is on a constant journey and kind of finds its way naturally. It most certainly has a destiny, but it's in no hurry to get there and after all, come to think of it, it carries it desiny all along the way. Or: it is its destiny. Or: once it meets its destiny, it loses its own identity--no longer a stream.  

Arti

A stream is a fine analogy.  I find it remarkable that Jesus often used such comparisons in his teaching.  Why not simply say what it is instead of teaching by comparison?  Can that even be done since there is no Object to use as the referent?  If not, does that make it Subjective?  Oops! That looks like a logical construct doesn't it?  Actually,  it is not meant to be a snare -- more of an open-ended question.

I have read several of your posts -- don't answer every one of them, but do think about all.  I sense that you are quite comfortable with these conversations, and really don't read any need on your part to catch up.  We are all different here, and that is a good thing.

reido

Arti,

The book that you mentioned sounds like Jack Miles' God: A Biography. I never quite figured out whether Miles wrote of man's developmental understanding of God, or of God's own developments. But hey, it is literature. Miles' book, that is. But the Bible taken also as literature, is an interesting and educational perspective.

 

bill 

bill, the book you mention sounds pertinent but the one I'm thinking of  is something else.  It was actually recommended in a George Will column a few years ago. Google is not helping.