thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-11, Rev. Raven Daegmorgan wrote:
Sydney,
Let me thank you for sharing the reasons for your faith and your faith itself so publically. What follows is not meant to be a counter to any of that.
In fact, it can not be one because what you have described gives you strength, and there's nothing I can say—or should say—to change that or cast doubt on the basic idea that the story of Christ gives you the strength to be a better person despite your own failings.
But, very seriously, that story does not give me strength; it does not even particularly inspire me. For me, the story of the Buddha—a man, a suffering, imperfect, mortal man just like me—attaining enlightenment through his own means is a far more inspiring story than the story of an already divine being taking flesh and coming down to save me.
Because the former says "I do not have to be special to reach God. I do not have to be perfect. I do not need to be the son of a divinity to find the path. I can be a broken, flawed, imperfect man and it will not count against me." whereas the latter simply does not. Not to me.
Note that I say this as a former Christian. One who was very devout and once made many of the same arguments and had many of the same feelings you do. I do not say it as one whose faith was weak or tested and failed, but as one whose experiences with the Divine broadened and deepened my faith in It even as it led me to abandon "Christian" as a label and as a limiter to my understanding of It.
Consider, for many years I was a devout Christian, specifically Roman Catholic. As a teenager, I was seriously considering joining the priesthood, so I know the Christian faith very well. I have read the Bible—yes, the entire Bible—a number of times. I have read its apologetics and philosophy and theology, as a believer.
And yet I reject it. Not as "untrue", but as "incomplete" and, for me, "uninspiring" or perhaps "no longer inspiring". I had an experience where God opened up and revealed more of Himself—though I should say Itself—to me than I had ever believed, and more than I understood. God said, "I am bigger, I am more complex, I am more vast, and I have more faces than you think I do."
I was the blind man holding the elephant's tail, realizing that the trunk was just another aspect of some other thing—that the tail and the trunk were pieces of a whole I couldn't fathom, but that neither tail nor trunk were any less real or true than the other.
Ultimately, what I think you should take away from this is that Christianity can not be the one world religion, because not only does it just not work for everyone, but because God is bigger than that—bigger than whatever we choose to call It with our limited human senses.
That because of where we live, how we live, how we think, and our own history, the Divine cannot talk to each of us in the same way. It is simply as impossible as the southern road to Rome being the best road to follow for everyone, even anyone coming from the North.
But keep this in mind, what you described is not invalid: it was how God reached you and gave you strength, and that's very important. Just don't fall into the all-too-human trap of thinking the way He reached you is the best way for Him to reach everyone, or all there is to Him. We are not, all of us, You. And we should not be, because that's not the way we were meant to be. He is more than you See and your faith—any faith—Sees.
Anyways, I'm starting to get preachy. Apologies. Again, thank you for bearing through all this and sharing with us, Sydney.
...
Oh! PS: I feel compelled to point out, as a matter of interest to you, that you should know the event you describe is not a thing that Christianity alone has that other religions do not. The self-sacrificing god-child is a motif in many faiths, and the gods moving among us, as us, is another.
Christianity really isn't all that original as a faith in its various parts, which isn't a bad thing, but does mean talking about it as though it is is a mistake and, I think, inhibits our understanding of our own faith.
