anyway.

I, for one, am curious to read what you have to say about it.

1. Welcome!

Welcome to anyone reading this. If you have no idea who I am or what prompted this post, you should first read my declaration of faith (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=246#7891 - Vincent, could you make that a link?), of which this is merely an elaboration and a (partial) explanation.

Some overdue acknowledgments:

Vincent, thank you for hosting these discussions. Thank you especially for inviting me, more than once, to testify to my beliefs. In our sparring, you have landed a few blows that hurt, but that's inevitable, and my admiration and love for you have only grown.

Everyone who has participated in these dialogues, thank you for your honest engagement and for your patience with my often prolonged discursions.

Thanks, especially, to those of you who have disagreed with me. You're my best teachers.

And thanks in advance to everyone reading this. Please remember that I cannot claim to speak for all Christians, let alone for Christ. I speak for myself alone, no more—and no less, for I speak for all of me, to my uttermost heart. I take on this greatest of subjects in all humility and in full awareness of my shortcomings as a witness. My hands are shaking slightly as I try to type.

May the words that I write, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable to You, O Lord.

2. Clear your mind.

When it comes to salvation, damnation, and justification, as in so many other subjects, there are some things we have to unlearn before we can start to learn. Our society in particular—and the Church has all too often been culpable in this—has surrounded these issues with a haze of sloppy thinking. I find myself, as I write and rewrite this essay, having to approach the truth backwards, starting with the misconceptions and then stripping them away.

Many of the worst mistakes arise out of lazy or simplistic readings of the metaphorical language of the Bible, uninformed by the two thousand years of careful interpretation that tradition offers. All too often the fundamentalists take the metaphor literally at the expense of its meaning. All too often the secularists respond by debunking the literal misinterpretation and then assuming that there never was any meaning there at all.

So, among other things, please set aside ideas like these:
- In Heaven, people in white robes sit on fluffy clouds and play harps.
- In Hell, people sit in fiery pits while wailing, gnashing their teeth, and being prodded with pitchforks.
- The Whore of Babylon is an Iraqi hooker.
- The Last Judgment is a legal forum to assess each individual's good and bad deeds.
- "Belief" means "intellectual agreement with a certain set of statements of fact."
- "Resurrection" means the soul lives on separately from the body.

3. The reassuring news: You do not have to call yourself a Christian to be saved.

My father was not a Christian. He was born Jewish, grew up assimilated, and expressed a bemused disdain for any system of religious belief. He died in 1997. I love him fiercely, and I don't think he went to Hell.

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)

This is the verse that fundamentalists cite when they claim that anyone who does not acknowledge Jesus as Lord is damned. But even they cannot bring themselves to such ludicrous literalism as to damn pre-Christian prophets like (for example) Moses and Elijah—who the New Testament explicitly says appeared side-by-side with Jesus on the Mount of Olives and spoke to Him the night before his death (Mark 9:5; Matthew 17:4; Luke 9:33). Let's aside aside the conceivable but tortured argument, "Well, they were prophets, so they knew about Jesus before He was born, so they were ok." (Old Testament prophets weren't soothsayers or prescient, anyway: They generally say something like, "God has threatened to do X if this goes on, but He has promised Y when you eventually repent, so stop being so horrible to each other.")

So whatever Jesus meant in this passage, it has to be something more open than "if you weren't lucky enough to hear about Me, or if You did hear about Me but didn't believe I was your savior because my followers didn't explain it convincingly enough to overcome your understandable skepticism, or you originally believed but then something horrible happened and you changed your mind, or whatever, then tough, you're gonna fry." Nor can I find any passage in the Gospels that equates "coming to the Father... through me" with thinking some specified thought, or saying some specified words, or performing some specified action.

One answer tradition offers us is the idea sometimes called, awkwardly, the "anonymous Christian" (and thanks to the person who provided that link to the work of Karl Rahner): To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, such a person practices a religion other than Christianity, or adheres to an entirely secular system of values, and yet over time comes to deemphasize those parts of the religion that conflict with Christianity, and emphasize those parts that agree with Christianity, until he or she believes and lives as a Christian in some essential way despite the outward differences. All of which is an annoying but useful way of thinking about things.

To uncramp the idea a little: All human ways of understanding God are incomplete, for we are flawed, limited beings and He is not; but God has put enough of His truth into every system of belief for any of us to find the way to life, if we look hard enough. And in truth, we have to look no further than the first line of this same Gospel to understand how broad "the way" along which we come to the Father through Jesus could be:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made... (John 1: 1-4)

Jesus is not only a specific human being—although that God thought so highly of humanity that He chose to become one of us is extraordinary Good News. Jesus Christ is both human being and God, and specifically He embodies that aspect of God which created—well, everything. "And God saw that it was good" is the refrain of the creation story (Genesis 1). I don't take the six-day timeline literally (and Genesis 2:4-8 sets out a contradictory sequence of events anyway); but I do believe that everything that exists comes from God and has some spark of that essential goodness at its core, however befouled and scabbed over it may have become by accumulated evil. Which means we can come to Jesus through anything, for everything comes from Him.

4. The caveat: You don't have to be a Christian—but it helps.

Just because we can find a spark of the divine in a housecat, model trains, an Italian-style sub with extra hot peppers, or (Heaven help us) in the fictional pantheon of man-eating, bad-smelling squid-things invented by H.P. Lovecraft, that doesn't mean those are particularly good places to start looking. The signal-to-noise ratio is poor, and your odds of finding the way to truth and life are less than your odds of finding another way that leads nowhere or worse. Your cat (or Cthulhu) may teach you that true joy lies in sharing love with your fellow creatures, or you might decide that life is about sleeping a lot and torturing mammals smaller than yourself. Most likely, you won't be able to extract any cosmic moral imperative more urgent than "hungry now."

If nothing else works for you, well, the long way round could get you there eventually, but it's still longer and harder than it has to be. It really helps to share a belief system with more than one person, so there's at least someone else around to help you out, and with more than one generation, so you have some history to learn from, if only about what not to do. No one should be surprised when I say that it particularly helps to be a Christian.

That's not because Christians are better people. Hardly! As C.S. Lewis points out, it only makes sense that the easiest, most obvious path would the one followed by the people too weak to get to God the hard way—people whose shortcomings are so blatant that they can't pretend even to themselves that they don't need serious help: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). Ever since Jesus began to preach, respectable folks were shocked, not by any excess of lofty purity, but by the wrecked and broken human beings who flocked to Him: tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and people like me.

I was baptized in the church, Sunday-schooled on and off over the years, and confirmed at age 13. But while taking my confirmation classes, I decided that the whole idea of someone else having to die for my sins was unjust, irrational, and frankly insulting. I spent the next six years trying to be a good person on my own power. I failed. (I hope people understand that I won't offer details). So as I sat in church with my mother for a Christmas Eve concert in 1996, having come for the music but suddenly realizing that there would be a Eucharist offered as well, I decided in that moment to stand up, walk forward, and accept the bread and wine. "I'm falling," I thought. "If You're really out there—catch me!"

Since that day I have considered myself a Christian. I still struggle to be a good person. I still fail. But now I understand that my success or failure isn't the question at all.

4. The disturbing news: We cannot earn Heaven by doing good; we cannot earn Hell by doing evil.

The belief that, after death, good people go to a Good Place and bad people go to a Bad Place isn't a lousy idea. It's certainly an improvement over certain pre-Christian belief systems that said that eternal life was the reward for performing certain esoteric rituals, like getting your body properly mummified, bathing in bull's blood, killing farm animals at set times of the year while reciting certain verses, or whatever the Hellenic mystery cults did (they didn't publicize the details, which is why they're called "mystery cults"). The problem is you get into a horrible tangle over who's good and who's bad. The absurd extreme is our pop-culture image of Saint Peter standing in front of pearl-encrusted gates like the bouncer at the universe's most exclusive nightclub, looking the newly dead up in a big book that rates every person's every action on some kind of point system.

"By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 12:33), but in practice it can be very hard to figure out a person's moral character from the results of their actions. Circumstances get in the way. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis again, one person may lose his temper and cause the deaths of thousands, while another person loses his temper and just gets laughed at. Conversely, anyone who's been involved with a non-profit organization probably knows at least one person whose constant good-doing is driven by relentlessly self-agrandizing ambition; put the same person in a street gang or a warlord's militia and they'd act from the same motives by hurting people instead of helping them—and still feel equally smug at the end of the day. So to make any kind of judgment, we have to start considering intentions, which are so notoriously unclear that I, personally, don't always know my own true motives, let alone other people's.

Now, an omnscient God presumably knows what is in your heart and your unconscious, and can determine everyone's actual intentions, which would square this particular circle. But the Christian doctrine of salvation doesn't say that: It says we are saved by faith.

Some Christians seem to think this means that as long as they "believe," they are saved, guaranteed. There's even one heresy that argued you could commit any atrocity you wanted as long as you said, sincerely, that you accepted Christ. This is roughly equivalent to saying, "I love my dad, and my dad loves me, so it doesn't matter that I wrecked his car, stole his wallet, and beat my brother senseless with a baseball bat, 'cause we love each other." The logical response is, "Dude, where's the love? Because I hear you saying it, but I'm not seeing it." If you really love someone, you at least try to make them happy at least some of the time: "By their fruits, ye shall know them."

Now, a lot of us bear pathetically small and unripe "fruit": the alcoholic father who beats his kids one night and tucks them into bed with a kiss and an apology the next; the office drone who manages to look the waitress in the eyes and say "I'm fine, thanks, how are you?" and actually waits for an answer before his eyes drop back to his Blackberry; the self-professed Christian whose most daring act of witness to date is to spend most of his workday typing a blog post on theology (hi!).

But here's the knife in the gut: Even if I left my desk this minute, gave all my belongings to the poor, and devoted the rest of my life to healing the sick, freeing the oppressed, and deposing tyrants by sheer force of will, I would still screw up a lot. I would still let other people down. I would still die, one day, and all my good works would come to nothing over time. I would still, in short, be human.

And here's the light in the dark: I don't have to do everything right. "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect," Jesus says (Matthew 5:48, right after "love your enemies" and "if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out"). But He knows we can't. Even as He calls us to the highest of ideals, He knows there is no ideal worthy of the term that a human being has the strength to live up to—not completely, not consistently, and often not at all. Left to our own devices, we all live with constant failure and end in death.

But we're not left to our own devices.

5. Grace.

Everything comes from God. That includes us. Evil is a parasite with no power to create, an absence of the good with no existence of its own: Everything that makes it possible for us to do evil—strength, intelligence, willpower, the desire for pleasure, even existence itself—is in itself a good thing, a gift from God, however it may be misused. And we are free to misuse them. Given our shortcomings, in fact, we are bound to misuse them, some of the time. Our choice is not between being good or being evil, because no human being is ever going to be entirely either. Our choice is whether or not we keep on trying.

The Good News is that, if we try, God has promised to help us, even if it kills Him (and it did). Every time we believe his promise, accept that help, and try to do what's right, succeed or fail, we strengthen that inmost part of ourselves that struggles to choose the good. This is faith as a deeply engrained habit, not an intellectual belief; and like any exercise program, it takes repetition over time. It takes failing, over and over, and then picking yourself up and trying again: That's true repentance, not just saying "sorry." Or, of course, we can decide to stay down, curl up, and sink into the cesspool of our own shit. We can choose to get comfortable with our failures, to prefer picking at our scabs to healing them, to think about our own small concerns instead of anything else, until we are so twisted in upon ourselves that we cannot escape.

Hell is not other people: Hell is being trapped with your worst self, forever. Hell is closing yourself off from God so completely that just brushing up against a trace of goodness burns like fire. I hope God does not grant such souls immortality. But if the gift of the Cross cannot be taken back—if some part of us continues beyond death no matter what—then we have infinite time to make ourselves more and more miserable until boiling pits and pitchforks sound comfortable by comparison.

But if death is not the end, we also have infinite time to make ourselves better, bit by bit, with God's help, until we can stand up straight before the Lord and open ourselves completely to the good. I don't know what that Heaven will be like. If I were capable of comprehending it, I suspect I would already be there—like Elijah taken up bodily in his chariot of fire. I do know I am promised the resurrection of my body, somehow perfected, not some ghostly shadow-existence: God created my flesh, after all, and He called it good. I dare to believe I will be changed, but not dissolved, that I will not disappear into God like a drop of water into the ocean, but be set at last in the right place for my existence to have beauty and meaning, like a tiny colored tile added at last to the great mosaic. I dare to believe that when I rise again, it will be the end of the world, but only the beginning of my real life.

God is within me. God is the source and essence of my being, and of yours, and of everything else that is. If it helps you, you can call this inner fire "the Holy Spirit."

God is beyond me. God is the glory that exceeds my understanding, the joy greater than I could hope for, the truth which said "I AM" before I was conceived and which will endure forever. You can call this universal good "our Father, who art in Heaven."

God is with me. God is the guide that leads the God-within towards God-beyond, the bridge between what I am and what I could be, the sacrifice that blazed a trail for me through death and out the other side. God is the friend who walks beside me in human form, knowing intimately all my human weakness, my sorrows, my fear, my mortality, and showing me a path that I can walk, even through the valley of the shadow. You can call this Jesus Christ.

Lord, I believe: Help thou my unbelief!

Vincent, thank you for hosting these discussions. Thank you especially for inviting me, more than once, to testify to my beliefs. In our sparring, you have landed a few blows that hurt, but that's inevitable, and my admiration and love for you have only grown.

I want to echo these thanks, andextend them to you too, Sydney. That this kind of discussion can take place, with such starkly contrasting viewpoints, on the internet, without bitterness and offense and hurt feelings, is an amazing testament to friendship. it makes me wish I knew you both, as well as all the rest of you in the discussion.

A few standout bits on first reading:

So whatever Jesus meant in this passage, it has to be something more open than "if you weren't lucky enough to hear about Me, or if You did hear about Me but didn't believe I was your savior because my followers didn't explain it convincingly enough to overcome your understandable skepticism, or you originally believed but then something horrible happened and you changed your mind, or whatever, then tough, you're gonna fry." Nor can I find any passage in the Gospels that equates "coming to the Father... through me" with thinking some specified thought, or saying some specified words, or performing some specified action.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made... (John 1: 1-4)

. . .Jesus Christ is both human being and God, and specifically He embodies that aspect of God which created—well, everything. "And God saw that it was good" is the refrain of the creation story (Genesis 1). . .everything that exists comes from God and has some spark of that essential goodness at its core, however befouled and scabbed over it may have become by accumulated evil. Which means we can come to Jesus through anything, for everything comes from Him.

This is what I've been trying for the last few years, in a broken and awkward and frustrated way, to say to anyone who'll listen. You've stated it brilliantly and succinctly.

Hell is not other people: Hell is being trapped with your worst self, forever. Hell is closing yourself off from God so completely that just brushing up against a trace of goodness burns like fire. . .we have infinite time to make ourselves more and more miserable until boiling pits and pitchforks sound comfortable by comparison.

But if death is not the end, we also have infinite time to make ourselves better, bit by bit, with God's help, until we can stand up straight before the Lord and open ourselves completely to the good.

I assume you've read C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, 'cause what you've said is basically the cliff notes. Reading that book changed mythinking radically, and probably meant the difference between me altering my understanding of Heaven and Hell in Christian doctrine, and just rejecting it utterly. If anyone hasn't read it, it's a thing of beauty, a communication of truth through story without being allegory.

I do know I am promised the resurrection of my body, somehow perfected, not some ghostly shadow-existence: God created my flesh, after all, and He called it good.

To continue the Lewis love-fest: "God likes matter; he invented it." :)

Thank you, Joel. Yes, indeed, you're reading my Lewis references right.

My recommended reading list:

TO BEGIN:

First, read all four Gospels—though I would read them slightly out of the traditional order: first Mark, which is the shortest and most straightforward, and then Matthew, Luke, and John. These are short "books," collectively the size of a slender paperback novel: Reading them all won't take long, and it's worthwhile to get multiple perspectives on the same truth.

Then, read C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, another short book, and the most useful work of plain-English theology I have ever read. Be tolerant of the chapter on a woman's subordinate role in marriage and remember that (a) he wrote this in the 1940s and (b) he hadn't gotten married yet.

You can also start reading C.S. Lewis's trilogy of "Planetary Romances," starting with Out of the Silent Planet, which are his theology in science-fiction form. I would not tackle most other Lewis yet: You won't be ready.

TO GO DEEPER, once you feel comfortable with the two readings above:

First read the Old Testament books of Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, and Isaiah. That will give you the creation story and the first patriarchs, the liberation from slavery in Egypt, a canon of poetry that wrestles with profound spiritual issues, and a taste of the prophetic-messianistic tradition.

Then read the New Testament "Book of Acts," also known as "the Acts of the Apostles," and as many of the letters (epistles) as you can manage. Hold off on Revelations (the Apocalypse of Saint John) for the moment.

Now you're ready for C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, about Heaven and Hell.

ADVANCED READING:

Read the Bible. All of it. Cover to cover. Including all the "X begat Y" and including rereading everything listed above. This will take a while and might best be attempted as a daily exercise, taken in little bites day by day over about a year: That's how I did it.

Read Saint Augustine's Confessions. Go on to City of God if you feel comfortable enough with late Roman Imperial history to understand the context. (If you're not, read Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity first).

Read any C.S. Lewis you like. At this point you've caught up with me.

Sydney,

If we can come to God through anything, because it is all of Him, why be Christian at all or specifically?

Now, I have my own answer to this question, but I am curious about your answer.

Raven:

4. The caveat: You don't have to be a Christian—but it helps.

...

If nothing else works for you, well, the long way round could get you there eventually, but it's still longer and harder than it has to be. It really helps to share a belief system with more than one person, so there's at least someone else around to help you out, and with more than one generation, so you have some history to learn from, if only about what not to do. No one should be surprised when I say that it particularly helps to be a Christian.

Sydney's answered your particular question. No one will be surprised that I think he's omitted a particular idea: No one should be surprised when I [Sydney] say that it particularly helps me to be a Christian.

My grandmother-in-law is Vietnamese, and follows a form of Buddhism I can't comprehend. There's all sorts of laws, and they seem capricious. Apparently, you can't have sex on Chinese New Year, for example. She knows the Face of God, though, or whatever your tradition calls it. For her, it would not particularly help to be a Christian; and for me, it would not particularly help to be her type of Buddhist.

I grew up in a very Christian home. Some of the dogma did not agree with me, but the tradition was marked on my brain. Even though I can't call myself a member of any mainline Christian religion, I still feel the tradition in my heart, and attend a Unitarian fellowship where I can follow my tradition. Christianity particularly helps me because of my background.

Sydney's point about having others to help you out along your spiritual road is really awesome, though.

Sydney: I wish I had a question for you, but as someone who grew up Baptist and then attended an Episcopalian church for many years, I understand what you are saying, and also how brave you are to say all this publicly. Thank you for sharing your faith with us.

Sydney - you are witnessing in great detail to people who are truely interested and engaged.  Seems pretty worthwhile to me.

Two questions:

1) On the origin of evil - how can it come from free will?

God can restrict or allow us freedoms at will.  He appears to have left me without the free will to fly.  So presumably some restriction on free will is okay.  Why didn't he restrict my ability to stab people in the head, instead of my ability to fly?

2) On the need for a Christ

I still don't understand why an all powerful being required some incarnation of himself to live as us and die for us.  I've heard this is to earn us forgiveness, could he not just give that forgiveness?

One answer I've heard is that He is just, and therefore can't forgive sin just like that.  But making someone else suffer for me doesn't seem just.  Could you explain this for me, as best you can, please?

Okay, I have been struggling with how to post this, even whether to post it, but it won't leave me alone.  I keep coming back round to it in my thinking.  I have been struggling with this since you first replied, Sydney, and now I am finding the proper words.  In true confessional fashion, let me mingle my history with the message.  Because everything I am about to say is qualified by this being my experience, my truth.  I say it, though, because it might have some truth for you, too.

Sydney, the reading list you detail is the one that drove me to abandon christianity.  I was a seriously devout child, read the Bible like the thirsty man drinks water, had all sorts of mad skills to make it fit together.  Reading Lewis, though, made me realize how much artifice (in the negative, Rube Goldberg sense) I had put into making it all work.  And how good it felt when I let go of it all—that there was a real spiritual core to all that I had been working on, but that staying close to christianity, both as institution and a tradition, did more to hide that core than nurture it.

Augustine...wow, I came back to him more recently and he still has fire to give.  But it's all in the Confessions—those are strong, powerful, personal, sincere, one of the best exemplars of 'bearing witness.'  The City of God, though, leaves me cold, even a touch angry.  In it, I can see Christianity reaching toward the sword, and that is a decision from which Christianity has yet to recover.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think Augustine has picked up the sword, yet, but he's stretching toward it.

And that is what keeps from Christianity—the corruption of the sword.  I see it even in Lewis, in his desire to explain, for there is a hidden blade in all apologetics.  I am, by my nature, prone to apologetics, to the process of explanation and justification.  I shy away from Christianity to protect the spiritual core that keeps me alive from the corruption I have seen it undergo in the hands of Christian apology.

And, god, it's not that I think Lewis isn't sincere.  He is, but I really and truly believe that he found that sincerity outside of his apologetic work, and that he found the heart of his faith elsewhere.  And I don't think it's wrong to read apologetics, esp. when you belong to the faith, when it is not about defending your faith, but stoking it.  It's like poetry.

Why am I saying all this? I am speaking to you, asking you to consider whether this sort of discussion is good for your faith.  I am not saying in any way, shape, or form, that your faith is not powerful, important, and meaningful.  I am saying that placing it in this context (defending, explaining the faith) may be bad for it, puts you in danger of separating yourself from the truly personal roots that nourish and sustain faith.  You, of course, are the only proper judge as to whether the lesson that I share from my experience has truth for you.

I think there is good reason why Jesus asked that you pray in private, because it is easy to lose the true power of it before those who do not share it with you.  The goodness that you are and the goodness that you live are the best expressions of your faith—not words said to defend and forward the faith.  The Good Word is not found in words, but action.

If those around see the goodness it serves for you, and wish to share in that with you, it is a beautiful thing.  If they see it and admire it, while seeking their own nourishment elsewhere, it is a gift.  That gift is to my mind the foundation for a strong modern society into the future.  I fear that without that admiration of other sources, we steal from others and lose ourselves.

Clinton,

Thank you. I did see that. Sydney's explanation for why he omitted the particular idea you note is specifically what I was asking about (though apparently not very clearly).

Obviously, I'm a big proponent of the "for me" idea. And it seems to me that while Sydney is saying these are all good paths, Christianity is the best path, and not just for him. Maybe he's not saying that, and I'm misreading him.

Sydney?

Ian, I am, by my nature, prone to apologetics, to the process of explanation and justification. I shy away from Christianity to protect the spiritual core that keeps me alive from the corruption I have seen it undergo in the hands of Christian apology.

And, god, it's not that I think Lewis isn't sincere. He is, but I really and truly believe that he found that sincerity outside of his apologetic work, and that he found the heart of his faith elsewhere.

Yeah, Lewis would agree with you, in fact: "Nothing is further from the eye of faith than the doctrine which one has just successfully defended." He talks a lot about how apologetics is deadly dangerous to oneSELF, for that very reason. And I can testify that it bears out in my own experience. For a while I thought that the apologetics of my youth were just shallow, not tempered against actual opposition. But now I think I realize that ANY apologetic is insufficient to communicate the heart of your faith to yourself OR others, and is in fact even harmful to that purpose.

I think there is good reason why Jesus asked that you pray in private, because it is easy to lose the true power of it before those who do not share it with you. The goodness that you are and the goodness that you live are the best expressions of your faith—not words said to defend and forward the faith. The Good Word is not found in words, but action.

Well said.

Interestingly, Sydney, that reading list is pretty much mine as well. It's well ordered, and I might try working through it in the sequence you describe, to see what slides into place.

Peace,
-Joel

Everyone—especially Clinton and Tris—thanks for your kind words and honest questions.

Clinton: No one will be surprised that I think he's omitted a particular idea: 'No one should be surprised when I [Sydney] say that it particularly helps [me] to be a Christian.' My grandmother-in-law is Vietnamese, and follows a form of Buddhism I can't comprehend....She knows the Face of God, though, or whatever your tradition calls it. For her, it would not particularly help to be a Christian; and for me, it would not particularly help to be her type of Buddhist.

Raven: it seems to me that while Sydney is saying these are all good paths, Christianity is the best path, and not just for him.

Ian: that is what keeps from Christianity—the corruption of the sword. I see it even in Lewis...

Ah, blast. Hit "submit" instead of "preview." Apologies.

Ian, "the corruption of the sword" is a tremendously complicated issue, and it's also a red herring, since I can't think of any belief system, religious or secular, that has not been used, sincerely, to justify brutality and oppression.

I live in Washington, DC: Maybe I'll be blown up by a religious fanatic tomorrow, and maybe I'll be carjacked and shot in the face by some gang kid who believes that all religion is crap and each individual stands alone in an uncaring cosmos. Both of them are acting sincerely on their beliefs when they kill me. I'm dead either way.

I don't think we can choose which belief system is best by toting up body bags and finding the one whose adherents have murdered the least people in its name. There's too much historical accident involved: "One man may be so placed that his anger causes the death of thousands, and another so that he just gets laughed at."

Raven, you're reading me exactly right. I think Christianity is the best path for everyone.

Now, I suspect it would do Clinton's grandmother-in-law little good to convert now: As Clinton describes her, she has come a long way down her path towards our common goal, the Lord, and would waste a lot of time, energy, and spiritual confusion backing up.

In the abstract, I think a world entirely composed of orthodox Christians—specifically of Episcopalians, in fact—and with every other religious tradition from animism to Zoroasterianism relegated to the textbooks (but not forgotten!) would be a better place. What would be best of all is a world entirely populated by some kind of as yet unknown Christian denomination whose theologians had carefully examined every other belief system in the world and picked the best from each to enrich their own practice would be even better; in that future, I'd be happy to see my own flawed understanding of Christ be superseded and my own imperfect tradition extinguished.

But as a practical matter, turning advanced and well-versed Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, and so on into fumbling neophyte Christians is likely to do them more spiritual harm than good. And as I've said before, I think the world's great spiritual traditions generally do a good job. I'm not worried about their sincere adherents.

The people I worry about are those who follow no tradition at all, or who patch together their own syncretisms out of multiple sources (see the companion thread), or who practice in one of the great traditions but without passion, commitment, or understanding. These people generally have a lot less ground to give up by backtracking, and I think they'd do well to embrace Christ right now—and indeed most converts start as just such spiritual wanderers.

Then there is the group of people who have been wounded by what I'd call Christian malpractice—people raised in the Christian tradition but by a congregation or family where the Word was garbled by the Christians involved out of intolerance, insecurity, inability to love one's neighbor as oneself, or simple ignorance. There's a lot of that in the world, particularly in these threads.

I understand anyone who's suffered such malpractice would be, logically, reluctant to put themselves in the hands of any Christian congregation ever again. Some of you simply can't come back, and I respect that, and regret it, and I wish you Godspeed on whatever path you find. But I'd encourage you to understand that there are ways and ways of being Christian, and one of them might be your way if you give it a chance.

The thing is, the bible is so clear about there being many paths to God that its actually the fundamentalists that have to engage in the mental gymnastics to define Christianity into their own narrow view.

Read the story of the Tower of Babel again...Genesis 11, I believe.  It occurs right after Noah and the Flood.

All of the people of the world were of one language and one speech.  All of them.  They got together to build a tower to God...the same God.  All the world worshipped the same God.  That's immenently clear.  And its not just some people...its "the whole Earth".  They all worshipped the same God.

God confounded their speech and sent them on their way, giving them all different languages.  The story is clear about giving them all different languages.  But its also clear in what it doesn't say.  It doesn't say they started worshipping different gods.  It doesn't say he picked some to continue to worship him and gave others false dieties.  No...he confounded their speech...not who they worshipped.

All of the people came to Shinar worshipping one God and speaking one language.  When they left, they spoke a multitude of languages...but they still worshipped one God.  No matter what language they speak...or ethnicity, or culture...or even religion...they all still worshipped the same God.  The story is pretty clear to anyone not caught up in literalness.

The events depicted in the story didn't actually take place.  No one actually tried to build a tower to heaven.  The story is there to show how all of the people of the world, despite their differences in language and culture all ultimately worship the same God.  Why do they have different languages, cultures, ethnicities, and religions...because God wants it that way.  Why does God want it that way? We couldn't possibly understand his rationale...so we're given a story of Hubris we can understand.

Tris! You asked the two most important questions and I completely overlooked getting back to you:

evil - how can it come from free will?...He appears to have left me without the free will to fly. So presumably some restriction on free will is okay. Why didn't he restrict my ability to stab people in the head, instead of my ability to fly?

I don't know.

Clearly, our choices in life are restricted by all sorts of circumstances. But it seems that we are always free to choose between doing good and going evil. Clearly it's important to God that we are free to make that choice. But I've never seen an explanation of why that makes sense to me.

I still don't understand why an all powerful being required some incarnation of himself to live as us and die for us.

Again, there are many answers and little certainty on this question. But one way I like to think of it is that Christ died for me in the same way I tie my two-year-old daughter's shoes for her: She can't do it by herself, not yet, and the only way to teach her is to do it and show her how. Remember that Christ did not only die for us: He rose from the dead for us as well.

The death on the cross is Christ's answer to everyone who ever railed at the heavens and said, "Who are you to tell us what's right and wrong? You haven't been down here! You haven't suffered like us! You don't understand!"

The resurrection is Christ's answer to everyone who ever groaned, "It's all useless—we can try and try, but we're all just dust in the end."

When Christ says, "Pick up your cross and follow me!," He is not only urging self-sacrifice. He is like a commander leading his troops through fierce fire to victory, like a pioneer blazing a trail straight through death and out the other side.

Here's my honest question.

That's all stories, though, isn't it? I mean, you say "God does this" and "Jesus did that," but is there any reason for me to believe that any of it, y'know, actually happened?

Athena gave success to Odysseus, Jesus rose from the dead, King Arthur invented chivalry, Moses parted the Red Sea, the Easter Bunny lays chocolate eggs, Titania fell in love with Nick Bottom. Stories, you know?

I love stories. I'm reading Old Testament stories to the kids for bedtime stories just now; they're really interesting. But they do not at all sound to me like things that really happened to real people in real life. They sound like stories.

What reason on earth do I have to think otherwise?

Hey now, play fair Vincent.  You don't really think there's anyone in the history of anywhere that could begin to answer that question for you, do you?

But more importantly, why does the answer even matter?  Flip it around...what reason on earth do you have to not think otherwise?  That's at least an answerable question for you.

Sure, I can answer that. The reason I don't believe that God exists is because I trusted God to exist and He let me down, very consistently. Sooner or later, light dawned: I was doing everything He demanded, it wasn't me that didn't exist.

I retract the question. I'll see if I can think of another that both a) matters and b) doesn't just boil down to this one again. Wish me luck!

I thought of one! It's a two-parter.

Presume that I don't care about my eternal soul. Heaven, hell, don't care. (In fact, if I cared what happened to me after I die, I'd investigate Hinduism or something - all else equal, I'd rather be reincarnated than go to heaven.) So leave my eternal soul out of it.

Part 1: What benefit should I expect from becoming an Episcopalian? Spiritual, emotional, familial, whatever, but in this lifetime - how would being an Episcopalian make me happier than I am? Especially, what benefit should I expect from becoming an Episcopalian that I couldn't expect from converting to Judaism or Taoism or back to Mormonism or something?

Part 2: Say that I decide to give Episcopalianism an honest try. How long will an honest try take me, how much effort will it require, and how will I know at the end whether it's paying off or not? If x happens, that's how I'll know to stick with the religion; if y happens, that's when I can reject the religion with confidence. What are x and y?

(Aside:

In fact, if I cared what happened to me after I die, I'd investigate Hinduism or something - all else equal, I'd rather be reincarnated than go to heaven.

Heh. My father the ex-UU minister said to me recently: "Of all the religions, I like Buddhism. If you don't get things right this time, you're reincarnated and you get to try again.")

Y'know, I should add: I'm asking for serious insider goods here, Sydney. If you sat down with me and said that you were thinking seriously about Mormonism, and you know that I don't believe it but what fair standards would I recommend for you to hold it to, to give it an honest try and judge it fair, I'd tell you.

I know you've thought long and hard about your religion. I want you to tell me, impartially, what I would have to do to find out whether Christianity's worth it for me to take up, and how I would know if it's not.

I can't think of any belief system, religious or secular, that has not been used, sincerely, to justify brutality and oppression.

Dude, totally missed my point.  You are reading me far too literally.  I am making a point about the modes of religious discourse and choosing the ones in which we engage very carefully.  Moreover, if you read what I wrote, you will see tons of respect for the Christian faith, the ways in which my spiritual position rests closely upon my relationship with the Christian tradition even as I consciously avoid participation in it.

Let me try something more simple, more direct, and less true thereby: What are you hoping to get out of this discussion?  There are dangers to trying to demonstrate the value of faith to those who do not share it.  I believe deeply that the evangelical dimension of any faith can lead many people away from their spiritual heart, to resting upon empty rationality.  It shifts the evangelist out of their connection to their spiritual heart toward an explanatory language inimical to that intimate experience.  And it can happen remarkably easily.

I'm not trying to score an intellectual point—I'm trying to make sure that you know you are on dangerous spiritual ground.  That you know and are taking the appropriate precautions.  If I knew you in person, I probably wouldn't need to ask this.  But I don't, so I am.

Vincent, are you asking whether someone of another faith should convert to Christianity, whether an unspiritual/unfaithful person should convert to Christianity, or whether you personally should convert to to Christianity (hypothetically, of course)? The answer will change slightly depending.

I'm asking how I'm to judge whether converting to Christianity is the right thing for me to do - and in very practical terms.

Sydney,

Raven, you're reading me exactly right. I think Christianity is the best path for everyone.

And then you go on to explain how it wouldn't be a good choice for people who are already deeply invested in another religion, and I understand that.

But you don't really answer my question, which is WHY is it the best path for everyone in the first place? What makes it better, for everyone, than Buddhism, Islam, Asatru, or Hinduism (etc)?

1.
Iain, got you. I appreciate your concern, but this discussion has done more to strengthen my faith than anything I've done in a long time—not only by forcing me to think hard and systematically (and yes, I suppose I could over-intellectualize), but more importantly by giving me an opportunity to stand up and try to be brave for once.

2.
Raven and Vincent, why is Christianity best? "Because it's true," obviously, but that's not entirely an answer. Christianity has one thing no other faith has, and that's Jesus Christ. My God doesn't hand me down commandments from a mountaintop; He comes down and becomes human and shows me what to do. Teaching by example is the most effective way to teach—and leading by enduring everything you ask your followers to endure is the most inspiring way to lead.

You see that I'm not particularly focused on the life to come, other than the fact that it's there, in some form, reassures me that death, evil, and entropy don't ultimately wipe out everything I care about? What I'm looking for is strength to live today. "One day at a time."

Although, when it comes to afterlives, are you really attracted by reincarnation? Oh, Lord, we have to do all this again? I'd much rather get to do something radically different, even learning to play a golden harp really well and piloting my fluffy cloud—and of course whatever salvation is, it'll be a lot more interesting than that. Remember Heaven is not the place you go when you die, in orthodox Christian theology: You die, you stay dead, and then you rise again at the end of time, at which point (assuming that, y'know, Judgment Day goes well for you) you take your place in whatever God has planned next—which, given how cool this universe is in spite of sin, suffering, and death, has got to be pretty spectacular.

Episcopalian I like in particular because of the "scripture, tradition, reason" logic—the very deliberate emphasis on balance, on dialogue, on showing respect and yet being willing to challenge, on holding to the old truths and yet constantly seeking new ones. That this posture has put the Episcopal Church on or near the front lines of social equality since the civil rights era is particularly gratifying.

Honestly, though, Episcopalianism varies widely from congregation to congregation, and if your local Episcopal parish happens to be one of those old-fashioned upper-crust social-climbing ones with spirits as dry as dust, or a reactionary bunch considering defecting from the church in protest against gay bishops, or just screwed up because of personalities and internal conflicts, I'd advise you to check out another church of whatever congregation. Baptists aren't Episcopalians, but it's not like the difference between following Christ and following Cthulhu. The theological and organizational differences among mainline Christian denominations are much smaller than the local and personal differences among congregations.

An "honest try" to see which parish works for you is probably about three Sundays, to be brutal about it. An "honest try" to see if Christianity changes your life? God knows—three years?

3.
And now the big question:

Vincent: That's all stories, though, isn't it? I mean, you say "God does this" and "Jesus did that," but is there any reason for me to believe that any of it, y'know, actually happened? Athena gave success to Odysseus, Jesus rose from the dead, King Arthur invented chivalry, Moses parted the Red Sea, the Easter Bunny lays chocolate eggs, Titania fell in love with Nick Bottom. Stories, you know?

Vincent, I know what you mean. I keep on wondering, "God loves me? Personally? Really? And wants to help me not die? C'mon, that's got to be wishful thinking." And it might be. I might be utterly wrong. It happens.

But having been trained as a historian and have made my living as a journalist, I can say I like the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth a lot better than the evidence for Athena, or even Odysseus, or even Moses parting the Red Sea.

The Gospel stories break the laws of physics a lot less badly, for starters: Multiplication of loaves and fishes, calming of storms, a bunch of healings, and two resurrections (Jesus but also Lazarus), versus Athena erupting fully grown out of her father's head and the entire Red Sea shifting bodily sideways.

And I've got four Gospels, at least one (John) of which many scholars believe were written in the lifetime of people who had seen Jesus personally—that, in fact, the Gospels were written because the first generation of Christians was dying off and people wanted to get their memories in writing first. They don't feel like they've been polished by generations of oral tradition or by a single author; they feel like the products of frantically getting down everything any eye-witness could remember:

a) They are choppily written, full of abrupt breaks from scene to scene and with striking quotations remembered out of context from what must have been much longer sermons and dialogues. (C.S. Lewis notes a particularly lovely example in the Book of Acts, in the trial of one of the apostles, where there appears to be a verbatim transcription of an attorney's opening statement, with all its flowery classical rhetoric, and then a swift degeneration into synopsis, as if the author suddenly realized he couldn't transcribe fast enough).

b) They contradict each other all over the place on secondary details: Was Jesus born in Nazareth or Bethlehem? How many people were fed with the loaves and fishes? Did it happen twice or once? Did Jesus preach for one year or three before being crucified? At the empty tomb, one angel or two? Real eye-witnesses to complex, highly emotional events contradict each other like this all the time; it's the bane of prosecuting attorneys.

c) But all four Gospels are remarkably consistent on the essential touchstones of the story: Jesus grew up in Nazareth, was baptised by John, went into the desert, healed and preached, gathered 12 close companions and many other followers, went to Jerusalem, was arrested by the Jewish religious authorities and executed by the Romans, then rose again.
By contrast, compare any two versions of the King Arthur legend: Was Mordred the product of incest or not, or was he actually King Arthur's ally? Did Perceval find the Grail, or did someone else, and who did the Grail heal anyway? Did Arthur die or sail off to Avalon or what?

There's even a near-contemporaneous acknowledgment by a non-Christian that Jesus existed, namely a reference in Josephus's The Jewish War—written at the end of the 1st century AD about the revolts against the Romans—that mentions Him as a rabble-rousing preacher and the bastard son of a Roman soldier. That's a damn sight better than "well, maybe this Ambrosius Artorius guy we have actual historical references to is the basis for Arthur, sort of."

We also have the historical oddity that of all the mystery cults and messianistic movements in the 1st century Middle East, only one exploded across the Roman world in the short run and flourished globally in the long run. And it exploded not after its founder conquered a vast area (as Mohammed did) or led a people out of slavery into their own country (like Moses), or became a revered guru with many acolytes (like Buddha), but after its founder was brutally executed and his followers dispersed. And yet the apostles don't act like defeated men: They change the world. And they create a tradition—yes, tradition, again—that endures 2,000 years and covers the world.

4. And some questions back to Vincent:

You said: The reason I don't believe that God exists is because I trusted God to exist and He let me down, very consistently. Sooner or later, light dawned: I was doing everything He demanded, it wasn't me that didn't exist.

Vincent, I'm being sincere, not rhetorical here, though it may sound brutal:

Was it God that let you down, or your family, or your community, or the world, or yourself? God's in all of those things, of course; but God's not the only thing in any of us, I'm afraid.

How do you know you were doing what God wanted? If you were in the wrong religion, then you were getting garbled instructions to start with. And, guess what, I'm not a Mormon, I don't believe Jesus appeared in the Americas to bring additional teachings to the people there, and I'm very sure that "polygamy is cool" wasn't one of His teachings to anyone anywhere, so I'd say you were in the wrong religion (a heresy, to get technical). Even if you were in the right religion but with the wrong people, you were still getting garbled instructions—that's them exercising their free will to choose to fail you miserably, you see.

Why do you think the issue is "doing what God demands"? Quite the contrary, Christianity assumes we'll screw it up most of the time, being human, which God expects and forgives.

Conversely, what exactly did you think that doing what God demands, if it were humanly possible to do it, was supposed to get you in return? I don't know exactly what you mean by being "let down," and it's probably not my business to know the details. But for what it's worth, Christ is NOT promising that good things will happen to you, or that the world will make sense to you, or that horrible things won't happen to people you love, or that you yourself will not do horrible things to people you love—God knows I have done on occasion.

Christ is promising you to stick with you and give you the strength to keep going in spite of all the evil in yourself and the world, even death itself: "Take up your cross and follow Me."

Back in 1991, I spent the summer at Vincent's folk's house. I was getting the "missionary talks", because it was the thing to do, plus, I'm always interested in comparative religions. We reached the end of the lessons ( several weeks of them), and they got to the 'now you will convert' part.

Now, I'd read the Bible, I'd read the Book of Mormon, and here sat these two guys slightly younger than myself, sincerly inviting me to set aside my evil, sinful, amoral ways and join the one true faith. I've rarely been so insulted. I flat out do not buy the concept "all the evil in myself". Sure, I occasionally feel rage and envy and lust and jealousy and apathy same as the next person, but I don't see myself as evil. I see myself as human, with a compassionate human's approach to channeling and moderating the aspects of my self that I choose not to feed.

Secondly, it has always seemed to me that, in order for much of Christianity to be appealing, you have to fear death. And I don't mean just regular, ordinary I-don't-want-to-die-yet, basic survival thing, I mean you have to be afraid of dying because of what comes next. I had an *amazing* two hours-long conversation with Sebastian (then aged 8), about why the people in The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen were so afraid of the angel of death, and why death was so often depicted as being so scarey, and how death and the idea of Hell were combined for so many people throughout history. He didn't get it either.

Lastly, Sydney, what's up with "if you were in the wrong religion"?? If this God is so picky that I need to not only belive the right things but believe them with the right people, that's just weird. And it totally does not jibe with my very real experiences with the Holy.

Sydney: And yet it's precisely the impossible elements of the story that you're asking me to accept. If I say "yeah, Jesus was probably a real guy, some kind of rabble-rouser in Roman Judea who got crucified (as rabble-rousers might), but he obviously wasn't God incarnate and he obviously didn't rise from the dead and he obviously didn't die for our salvation," I'm not a Christian.

Christ is promising you to stick with you and give you the strength to keep going in spite of all the evil in yourself and the world, even death itself...

Turns out that I have that strength without Christ. In fact, it turns out that once I stop spending half my time and energy cutting God slack for not pulling His own weight, the strength I have to keep going doubles.

If that's all Christ's offering, what use is Christ to me? I'm to spend three years or God knows how long finding out that Christ gives me what I have anyway? That sounds like a scam.

Hey, yeah, that's a thought. Is someone making money off this? Who? How much cash would leave my account and land in Episcopalian coffers during my honest three-year try? (If the true answer is "none" then that's fuckin' awesome, that's way better than most religions. And I'll eat my hat.)

Answers re: was I really praying to God? to come.

this discussion has done more to strengthen my faith than anything I've done in a long time

Good, then here we go.

But all four Gospels are remarkably consistent on the essential touchstones of the story: Jesus grew up in Nazareth, was baptised by John, went into the desert, healed and preached, gathered 12 close companions and many other followers, went to Jerusalem, was arrested by the Jewish religious authorities and executed by the Romans, then rose again.

Because they had editors.  If you start to cut into the historical period of most of the gospels, you find competitors galore as to what was going on with Jesus.  The Bible is consistent because it is as much a political document as a religious one, a political document used to secure the place of a particular sort of Christianity.

And I am always, always suspicious of appeals to Christianity's virtues that rest upon its historical survival and wide spread existence.  Both of those have a lot to do with its connection to imperial powers—powers that wipe out the spiritual world of those it takes over, leaving a vacuum for Christianity.

And let us not forget that a lot of that Christianity is syncretic—not 'pure' but mingling local spiritual traditions with the biblical ones.  There is a lot more diversity to the Christian tradition than there is unity—and if you need evidence of that, sheesh, history if full of'em.

Inquisition anyone?  People, including Christians, like to think that was all about attacking pagan witches.  It wasn't—they were the innocent casualties.  The inquisitions carried out across Europe were most frequently used to weed out Christians who weren't Christian enough for the inquisitors.

This is where the discussion of Christianity and the sword is never a red herring.  Every spiritual faith faces the question as to how it shall relate to the sword.  Time and again, though, Christianity has embraced the sword, not just literally, but in its evangelical discourse, the way in which it trains its missionaries to go to other places, tear down the existing spiritual practices by a number of subtle coercions (argument being only the most obvious) in order to 'make way' for Jesus.

Worse yet, unlike Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism, it has systematically avoided thinking through that relationship.  Individuals, yes, have made those steps, but there advances are left, with too few exceptions, unincorporated by the broad spiritual paths of the faith (Simone Weil is luminary for me in this regard—read her).  So, worse then being of the sword, it uses the sword even as it is in the process of denying the sword.  Jesus the Lamb washes their hands clean before they have even begun.  How red with blood must that poor lamb's wool be now?  With remarkable little sarcasm: look at it for Christ's sake!

And horrors of horrors, do you know how I have heard good Christians defend this? "It was all part of God's plan to bring people to the faith" or, as you have said, "I can't think of any belief system, religious or secular, that has not been used, sincerely, to justify brutality and oppression."  Do you see the problem, do you hear it?  Because if you cannot, if it does not trouble you to your very soul that your faith has been complicit in this, then your Christianity is worth less than nothing to me.

If you are so invested in tradition being an essential part of your faith, you cannot shirk this by pointing to other faiths.  I'm not talking about any faith, but yours.  Don't go telling me Joseph Smith rolled the lemonade stand down the street.

Vincent: And yet it's precisely the impossible elements of the story that you're asking me to accept.

Pretty much, yeah. Did you ever read Douglas Adam's Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul, when the hero (Dirk Gently), a supernatural investigator, says that Sherlock Holmes had it exactly backwards, and the real rule should be that whenever you rule out everything implausible, what remains must be the answer, even if you thought it was impossible? Either the vast majority of human beings throughout history were completely deluded about something that mattered immensely to them and on which they spent a tremendous amount of energy—which, y'know, is entirely possible—or our idea that God/gods/whatever are "impossible" needs rethinking.

Meg: it has always seemed to me that, in order for much of Christianity to be appealing, you have to fear death. And I don't mean just regular, ordinary I-don't-want-to-die-yet, basic survival thing, I mean you have to be afraid of dying because of what comes next.

Really? Because that's not been my experience or that of the Christians I know (and, of course, that's a small self-selecting group, but it at least proves another way is possible). I'm honestly not that afraid of dying: I saw my grandfather and my grandfather's sister and my grandmother's brother-in-law and my father suffer horribly in their last years, and I longed for them to die, and when death came I was grateful—I once wrote a vaguely John Donne-ish poem whose first line was, "Come, friendly death..."

I am afraid of every good thing I ever cared about coming to nothing, but I don't think that's what you meant. And I certainly did not stop being agnostic because I was terrified of Hell! In fact, belief in damnation is something I've come round to slowly over the years, after careful thought, and rather in defiance of modern liberal-Christian thought, which thinks Hell either doesn't exists or exists but is empty because God is too loving to let anyone stay there.

So fear of death, no. Fear of oneself, yes, and that's a place where we might differ.

Meg: I flat out do not buy the concept "all the evil in myself". Sure, I occasionally feel rage and envy and lust and jealousy and apathy same as the next person, but I don't see myself as evil

Vincent: Turns out that I have that strength without Christ.

You two may well be better people than I am. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," e.g. me, because our problems are so obvious we know we have to run for help. It's only after consciously accepting Christ as my savior in 1991 that I was able to stop seeing myself as evil and consider the possibility that I could be loved and forgiven—which is something I'm still struggling with, honestly. It's a battle in which my mostly secular upbringing is my worst enemy and my beloved wife is my best ally.

Ian, I really don't have the energy to get into "the corruption of the sword" at this point—or, conversely, into "the corruption of pacifism," the idea that maintaining one's own moral purity is more important than stopping the barbarians or the child-beaters or the warlords or the ethnic militias from dragging people into the streets and butchering them. Someday we can ask Vincent to start a thread on that; for now I'm honestly exhausted.

Oh, and finally, "show me the money":

Vincent, if you go to an Episcopal church, at a certain point during the service (after the readings, before the Mass), they will pass around some kind of plate, and pretty much everyone will put some money into it. Most people at my church drop in a dollar. If you don't put anything in, people usually assume that you don't have any cash that day, that is if they actually notice at all. Sometimes the person/people passing the plate gets confused and they miss a few rows, anyway.

If you keep going to an Episcopal church, someone should approach you, welcome you, and try to get your name and contact information. At this point you'll start getting mailed invitations to special events, parish concerts, etc., and of course solicitations to donate money, which will reach a fever pitch around November in most places. If you don't give any money, a few people might be annoyed at you, but as a rule the staff and volunteers doing the fundraising are pretty scrupulous about not letting slip who gave what. I've done it for my church in past years, and there is at least one significant and relatively prominent member of my parish who says, basically, "look at all the volunteer stuff we're doing, I'm not giving you any of what little cash I have too." And that was okay.

Oh, and Meg: Lastly, Sydney, what's up with "if you were in the wrong religion"?? If this God is so picky that I need to not only belive the right things but believe them with the right people, that's just weird.

Yeah, that would be weird. Let me clarify.

Remember that "believe in" or "have faith in" is not about checking off the right ideological boxes (though, sadly, plenty of Christians throughout history have missed that point). When I say to my wife, "I believe in you," I don't mean that I'm intellectually persuaded that she exists: I mean that I think she is worthy of my trust and faith, and I believe what she says. When I say, "I believe in God," I use the phrase the exact same way.

Human belief systems, religious and otherwise, are basically attempts to answer the question, "how can I, my loved ones, and people in general be happy?" If a belief system's reply to that question boils down to, "buy more stuff!," or "kill those foreign-looking types over there," or "give us 10% of your income and let us worry about the rest," or "hold yourself aloof and pure from other, lesser people," or "marry as many of your underage cousins as possible," then I would consider it wrong, in the very straightforward sense of "if you attempt this solution, you will not only fail to make anybody happy for very long but actually make most everyone pretty miserable."

Most of the great, time-tested traditions, from Christianity to Confucianism, answer the big question with some variant of "treat other people the way you'd like them to treat you, form a community with other people of this tradition to help each other, and morally recalibrate yourself on a regular basis with personal and community rituals."

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions add "...and the fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos is goodness." (I'm sure other religious beliefs have a similar clauses, I just can't speak for them with enough confidence.)

Christianity adds "...and know that you have love and forgiveness for the asking, always."

for now I'm honestly exhausted.

No problem.  I hope you get a chance to read Simone Weil (avoid starting with Gravity and Grace, if you do)—even if we never actually have that discussion, I think you might find something important there.  Just in case it is unclear, neither of us advocate pacifism as the alternative to the corruption that troubles me.

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.

Hiya Sydney!  Quite a project you've volunteered yourself for.  I'm a big fan of theology, in my own loving, often irreverent, "let's rassle" sorta way.  I've got no end of respect for your beliefs, and you've clearly thought about them a heck of a lot more than I have, and therefore I will now compel you to explain and defend them so that I can scam the answers from your homework for my own benefit.  Here goes!

I look at Christianity and I say "Man, that is one fine religion, but people sure do get focussed on the supernatural mysteries."  Vincent asked "Why do you ask me to believe in such, bluntly, wacky stuff?" and you've answered "Well, it may not be as wacky as all that."  That's cool.  The evidentiary debate isn't what I'm particularly interested in.  Whether or not it really happened, what's the motivation to believe in it?  Why not just say "Jesus was this really incredible guy ... a human guy who did miraculous things in a way that you or I could and should aspire to."

As you've pointed out, the miracles are ... not huge.  There's not a one that I couldn't point at and say "Hey, this is just an author holding an allegorical magnifying glass up to the kind of minor miracles we achieve by being really good people and caring for each other.  Stripping away the supernatural trappings, this is the kind of thing I should be doing."

I am more moved by the mundane, human, non-allegorized versions of these miracles than by the supernatural light-shows.  I am moved by the Jesus who talked to a woman who couldn't see her path, and when she could see again told her "Hey, that wasn't me ... I was just listening.  Through your faith you have found the way."  I am hugely more moved by the image of Jesus on the cross, dying ... really, for-keeps, dying, all because he did the right thing ... and in that moment still confident that everything he did had meaning, that the world was a good place nonetheless, that the mission was never about just him.

I can care about that guy in a way I can't care about the living incarnation of divine creative power.  I look at the actual gospels, and I get, between the lines in the intricate little fillips of phrasing (comparing many translations, because my greek and aramaic aren't all they should be) the impressions of a real person.  A person with a wierd, quirky sense of humor, a vast patience but a nasty temper, and a wicked little streak of conscious irony.  Jesus gets pissed off.  Jesus makes jokes.  He sounds like one of the genuinely good guys.  I feel like, person to person, I owe something to his memory.

When I set aside the notion that he's off-limits, that he's God and I'm just human and there can never be any comparison between us ... I look at it and say "Yeah, that kind of potential is in all of us.  I dunno where it comes from, but it's there.  I'd better get off my ass."  A hard-headed look at the gospels as a poetic embellishment of non-supernatural miracles makes me want to achieve miracles myself.

By contrast, it seems to me that the supernatural trappings are largely there to tell people that they can't do that and shouldn't worry about it.  Centuries of accumulated mysticism that boil down to "Don't try this at home!"  That worries me deeply.  And, moreover, it seems so unnecessary.  Why not try it at home?  It might work!  I genuinely don't get the fixation on the supernatural.  Whatever actually happened back then, today you've got a story that can be read either in a way that encourages you to take chances, make yourself vulnerable, and maybe change the world or in a way that tells you to keep your head down and wait for the cosmic cavalry.  I've never heard an explanation that convinced me of the value of clinging to the latter, disempowering message.

If you've got an explanation, I'd really value it.  I rate the odds that you'll convince me, personally, to change how I think at somewhere around zero, but the odds that I'll learn to better understand people of differing beliefs are much better, and I'm eager for that opportunity.

I grew up in a rural, Baptist setting myself, and one of the things that always-ALWAYS-struck me, even when I was a good little credulous Pastor's Kid with all the answers in Sunday school, was thatwe were taught a tradition of miracles, of seas parting and water to wine and lame walking and fiery chariots and lepers cleansing, and also of people prophesying and God speaking audibly and visions descending from the heavens. . .but of course, of COURSE, you see, God just doesn't work that way NOW. No flaming chariot for YOU, young man. No word of the Lord coming to you and demanding to be spoken. No healing of affliction. No signs and wonders. Oh sure, we have "miracles," meaning ANYthing good that happens especially if we prayed for it, is a miracle, I guess. But yeah, Tony, there was a definite "don't try this at home" vibe over the whole thing. And dammit, I wanted to try it. I wanted to move a mountain into the sea. Because the Bible told me I COULD. And I wanted God to speak to me in a voice. Have a conversation with me. Make things a whole lot easier and clearer. I wanted the whole miracle deal.

Now bear in mind, I wanted Middle Earth to be real too. I wondered just HOW long ago and how far away the Galaxy, and wished I could go there. I think all children want wonders, and depending on a million factors, this leads either to bitter disappointment or a deep and abiding joy as one matures. And I've certainly matured; I still have that ache for Narnia, Valinor, the Promised Land, but I'm sort of learning bit by bit what the ache is for. (Hint: Read Lewis' Surprised by Joy and Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories.") I'm learning that a conversation with God doesn't have toinvolve soundwaves. I'm learning what Tony just said and that Jesus always knew, that all the divine razzle-dazzle in the world is no substitute for loving people and healing their soul's hurt. As my Political Science teacher always said about Jesus' healings (he considered them acts of acceptance—being willing to touch a leper): "It was a social miracle. The real miracles always are."

I'm ambivalent on the actual divinity issue and ressurrection issue. I do feel that Jesus is someone I can talk to, and who talks back, whose presence is more than just a mere impression of his personality gleaned from an ancient text. But on the other hand, especially viewing the gospels as a story, I tend to side with Tony, that Jesus' "for-keeps" death means a hell of a lot more than the last-minute divine save. On a related note, my brother and I felt ***Spoiler*** that Superman's survival at the end of the new movie was a bit of a cheat, that his sacrifice on the behalf of humanity would have meant far more had it "stuck," and furthermore, that was the BEST DEATH OF SUPERMAN ever.

Anyway. I don't know what value these ramblings have, it's just Tony's stuff struck a chord. I hope I haven't stepped on your toes, Sydney, though I suspect your answer will differ sufficiently from the above. And that's all I have to say for now.

Ian, I'll look for the Weill books. Thanks.

Raven, I'm with you all the way on there being plenty of pre-Christian stories of gods dying and being reborn, of gods walking among us, even of gods being born as human beings so that they can save us—Krishna comes to mind. As I've said elsewhere in these discussions, there is truth in all the world's great faiths, and any of them can be a way to "come to the Father through me." I just think that Christianity is by a considerable margin the least imperfect of many imperfect human understandings of God and the easiest path, especially for those "weak in spirit" like myself.

Raven, Tony, Joel, I see your point about "don't try this at home" being an unproductive message, absolutely. And we humans do have a tendency to insist that potential role models are incomparable prodigies (even in as small a thing as trying to get organized for the next GenCon...) as a way of getting out of doing the work ourselves. Here's the thing, though, or rather two things:

1.
That Jesus Christ is God—not merely a really good person, but an incarnation of the driving force of the cosmos—did not make life, suffering, and death easy for Him. It's fairly clear from the Gospels that He somehow set aside His omniscience, for example—e.g. Luke 8:44-45: "She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. 'Who touched me?' Jesus asked."

In fact, except for the rather ambiguous incident of the 12-year-old Jesus talking to the priests in the temple, we hear nothing that indicates He actually knew who He himself was until His baptism by John, when "At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased'" (Matthew 3:16-7, for example)—which is such a shock that He immediately goes into the desert to think and only then begins preaching and healing. In His prayers the night before His death, it's clear He knows He's going to die, but it's also clear He is afraid: "Take this cup from me" (Mark 14:36). On the Cross, He apparently despaired: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). It strikes me that Jesus was no more certain that God existed than you or I—and that He perservered even unto death in spite of that uncertainty. He didn't cheat death: He died for real.

Jesus's being God doesn't make His life and death any easier for him; what it does is make His resurrection possible at all. Instead of looking at the life of Jesus and saying, "another good man murdered and defeated," Christians can say, "death and evil didn't win for a change!" That thought should give us courage to act in the world.

2.
I did "try it at home." From age 13 to age 18, I tried tremendously hard to be a good person, as I understood it, on my own power, without God (of course my understanding of what "good person" really means is limited now and was even more limited as a teenager). I actually resorted to practicing a kind of Pavlovian conditioning on myself to reinforce positive behaviors and discourage negative behaviors. It didn't work. All I did was make myself miserable, and by the way pretty unpleasant to be around.

Now, maybe I'm just tremendously fucked up. Maybe everyone else reading these posts is so much better at being human than I am that they can do the right thing, consistently, all the time, and never fail and fall and need a hand to reach out to them to offer forgiveness and the strength to try again. Maybe that's just me. I doubt it.

Sydney, you believe in God the way you believe in your wife.

I stopped believing in God that same way, before I stopped believing in Him as a real entity. I kept faith with God until it became clear that He wasn't keeping faith with me - and only afterward did I realize that, duh, of course He wasn't keeping faith with me. It was my expectations that were the problem. Santa Claus won't keep faith with you either, no matter how sincerely you expect him to.

And you're right that I'm not going to go into the details here. I probably won't ever tell you them - not because I wouldn't, just because we will always have more interesting and more important things to talk about. But I'll try to explain why you should accept that it was God who let me down, not some non-God.

Say I'm an atheist, but it comes into my head that I should pray, so I do. If I sincerely pray "Lord, Heavenly Father, I know that I am a sinner; I know that Christ died for my sins and so that all may come to You. Please forgive my sins and give me strength in the face of temptation. Please bring me to a surer knowledge of You and Your will, so that I may be a better servant to You. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen," have I prayed to the wrong God, or according to garbled instructions? Having asked God sincerely for bread, will He give me a stone?

Say I'm a Mormon. I sincerely pray the same prayer. Same questions: have I prayed to God? Will God hear me?

Obviously I'm not asking you to make promises on God's behalf. I just hope and expect you to agree with me that, if God is as you believe Him to be, praying that prayer, I might reasonably expect God to hear me.

I imagine that C.S. Lewis would say, and I imagine you'd agree with him too, that having heard my sincere prayer to be brought to a more sure knowledge of Him, God would lead me out of my false beliefs and into truer ones, until I woke up one morning and became an Episcopalian or something. As it happened, I led myself out of my false beliefs and into truer ones, until I woke up one morning and set God aside.

My expectations were not exorbitant. "Dear God, please give me laser-beam eyes and a pony or else I'll know you're not real, love Vincent." I asked God to bring me to a surer knowledge of Him and to strengthen me against temptation, and I expected Him to keep faith with me, that's all.

Now, I still haven't forgiven God for giving me a stone instead of bread - witness my rancor - but I'm getting there. Things fall into place and into peace, gradually. Soon one morning I'll wake up again and I'll realize that no, everything's worked out great despite my really broken expectations, and I'll forgive God for not existing (not His fault, really), and after that I won't even remember what we were fighting about.

What an amazing convesation to be able to have.

The people I worry about are those who follow no tradition at all, or who patch together their own syncretisms out of multiple sources (see the companion thread), or who practice in one of the great traditions but without passion, commitment, or understanding. These people generally have a lot less ground to give up by backtracking, and I think they'd do well to embrace Christ right now—and indeed most converts start as just such spiritual wanderers.

My question is, why are you worried about them? Do they seem more in doubt of ever finding any path? Is it that their soul is more in jeopardy from worldly issues? In your earlier comments, it seemed that you were focusing more on the harm that can be done by picking and choosing among traditions without looking at the ramifications of them as noted by their long term adherents and historical precedents.  I suppose I'd worry more about the non-passionate practitioners, if anyone.

For myself, as a steadfast picker and chooser and dyed in the wool syncretist, the value this path holds is that each grain of truth you find is more likely to have been sifted deeply, and chosen for the resonance that it has with your own simple and true self. Or at least that possibility is there.  There is truth in everthing around us, words, people, nature, patterns.  That's where I look for truth, and have found much more of it than in any religious text or tradition.

it has always seemed to me that, in order for much of Christianity to be appealing, you have to fear death.
I'm not sure if this is how Meg meant it, but this certainly sounds like the leveraging power that Christian theology uses to convert people from other paths.  Without this, why not be part of another equally beneficial religion?

You two may well be better people than I am. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," e.g. me, because our problems are so obvious we know we have to run for help. It's only after consciously accepting Christ as my savior in 1991 that I was able to stop seeing myself as evil and consider the possibility that I could be loved and forgiven—which is something I'm still struggling with, honestly.
Thanks for sharing your real struggles, Sydney.  This is what everyone struggles with. It's my feeling that religions are a human technology for dealing with consciousness and being human. We have this tremendous propensity for emotional existence which can be hugely challenging.  The 12 step programs put this into stark relief: quitting an addiction can require a spiritual element. "Turning things over" to your higher power, is what all religions offer for the many trials of life, of self-doubt.  And also, that higher power, or belief, or faith, can be many things. At least, so I find.

Sydney, let me echo Emily about how awesome it is to be able to have this conversation, and offer my gratitude and recognition that you're bearing the main effort (both logistically and, I suspect, emotionally) of making it possible for everyone.  So many thanks for the response.  It strikes me as being slightly non-parallel with the questions that are in my heart, if not the questions that were in my words.  So, attempting (for once!) to be non-confrontational I'm going to try to set the stage for followups.

1.  I think I get the idea that death was painful for Jesus-God.  I can even accept that it was an infinitely more excruciating type of pain than even the human pain that a human being would have felt in his place.  But it's not the human pain, and that distances me from the story.

Which would be the end of my questions if that were a necessary distance, if the divinity were the only way you could tell that story.  But, to my mind, it's not.  I'm going to pull out one of the touchstones of my own, personal, Holy Writ.  On April 3rd, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King gave a speech in Memphis, Tennessee.  He recapped the epic struggle, to that date, for civil rights.  He told people what was coming next, what challenges lay on the road ahead, and what strengths they would need to find within themselves to rise to those challenges.  And then he closed by saying:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The next day, at 6:01 p.m., Dr. Martin Luther King was shot through the throat.  One hour and four minutes later he was pronounced dead.

If you want to tell me a story that will make me know that there is a power over which death can have no dominion, you don't have to look further than that.  I don't need to roll back the boulder and find the cave empty.  I don't want an angel to announce the blessed news.  One good man, leaving a legacy that endures forever ... for me, that's the story.

I get that the resurrection story gives you something that this mundane story does not.  But I still don't feel that I know what it is.

2)  This one ... I don't get.  I totally accept that it is absolute gospel truth.  I immediately grant that everything you have said about your own life is objectively, unquestionably accurate and complete.  I just don't get it, and I'd seriously be thrilled if someone could explain it to me.

If I grant every supernatural tenet and every doctrine, it looks to me as if we have this:  Jesus is inside you.  He's God, God is omnipresent, etc.  So if you're looking inside of yourself, Jesus is there to be found.  How can you say that the strength to try again is not in you to be found?  Or is that a short-hand for "I was looking inside myself in the wrong way"?

I mean, I know religions that preach salvation and purification from without ... ones that say "No, actually, that power isn't inside you to be found," but Christianity explicitly isn't one of those religions, right?  This inability (entirely on my part) to reconcile deeply held conviction in practice with equally deeply held conviction in theory fascinates and frustrates the heck out of me.  I want to understand it.  Can you help?

I want to say that religion should not be used as a substitute for good, solid psychological care. I'm not throwing stones; this is a pitfall that I myself fell victim to. If you feel bad about yourself, or are stricken with chronic feelings of hopelessness or despair or anger or the like, and religion helps you with that, awesome. But go see a therapist, too. Suffering continuously is not an intrinsic part of being human. Upon us all, a little rain, sure. But if it's chronic, get some professional help.

Vincent, please believe me when I say that I am not being glib in what follows.  I have a simple question, and there is some possibility for humor in it, as there is humor woven into many of the most important things in the world, but I would never, ever, want that humor to defuse the discussion.

As it happened, I led myself out of my false beliefs and into truer ones, until I woke up one morning and set God aside.

Couldn't this be God's answer to you?

As paradoxical as it seems ... the fact that you came to a conclusion that you needed to stop looking to God does not mean that God didn't answer your prayers and lead you to that conclusion.

Which is not to say that you should reconsider that conclusion ... indeed, if you were led there by God then it was probably for a damn fine reason.

Just ... I don't know.  I look at the many different people out there, and I see how they need different things, and ... If there is a conscious God I don't think God would try to pigeonhole us all into the same answer, and so I don't see a diversity of answers as evidence of an absent or uncaring God.

Emily, "religions are a human technology" - YES! Which means we don't get to handwave and say "oh, all points of view are equally valid, only you know what's true for you," we should actually start to make comparisons and value judgments about what works and what doesn't. I say "start" because our current understanding of the principles underlying this "technology" is pretty primitive: We're like medieval farmers who know what to plant, when, and where in our familiar micro-climate, but don't know anything about underlying principles like nitrogen balance in the soil or the dangers of monoculture.

Vincent: I asked God to bring me to a surer knowledge of Him and to strengthen me against temptation, and I expected Him to keep faith with me, that's all....I imagine that C.S. Lewis would say, and I imagine you'd agree with him too, that having heard my sincere prayer to be brought to a more sure knowledge of Him, God would lead me out of my false beliefs and into truer ones....

Vincent, I don't know. I really don't. My life of prayer is a weak and fragile thing, and while I'm willing to take on explaining theological theory, I'm no master of spiritual practice.

In terms of tangible results, for what it's worth, you're not a Mormon anymore. As I've stated earlier, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of that tradition, I strongly suspect Mormonism starts with false factual premises (about the pre-Columbian history of the Americas, that there was additional post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus in the Americas, about the origin of the Golden Plates) and proceeds to problematic moral / spiritual / ethical conclusions. To the Mormons reading this thread, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude or disrespectful, but I honestly think you're wrong, and in the context of this discussion I owe you my honest assessment.

It certainly sounds like Vincent, personally, is better off not being a Mormon. Where he goes from here is up to him. He's being thoughtful and taking this seriously; he's willing to engage seriously with me and to lots of other reasonably well-informed people; and he's not trying to kit-bash his own religion of reinvented wheels based on grabbing what looks cool without proper study and reflection. I believe in Vinent, and I have faith in his choices, whatever they turn out to me.

As for prayer in general, I trust my limited understanding far enough to say this one thing:

We don't pray to God because He doesn't already know what we need, better than we know ourselves. I pray for the same reason I used to lift weights—to make myself stronger, more disciplined, more clear about what I can do and what I need to do. I pray not because God will give or withhold based on whether or how I ask, but because my own ability to receive what God is already offering will grow.

Tony, yes! It's very funny that my prayer was answered.

Sydney, btw, thank you.  This discussion has allowed me to wrest something important from the wreckage of my Christianity—the confessional.  I don't often revisit my spiritual past, but I have not yet taken all that is good from it.  That mode of presentation, that does not demand, but invite and display...powerful, powerful stuff.  It may be the one true heart of spiritual communication.  And I would suggest that Vincent's post, the post that began this all, is a very good exemplar of it.

Wow - crossposting.

Ethan: Don't worry, I've been in therapy at least once a week for the last five years, and I'm discussing this thread with my current practitioner, who happens to be (1) an MD and (2) Jewish.

Tony: Yes, Martin Luther King is inspiring (and I would argue divinely inspired), and his legacy endures beyond his death. Even my legacy will endure beyond my death, assuming my daughter lives to old age, and especially if she has children in her turn, who have children in their turn, all of which is probable but hardly certain. Ultimately, though, our civilization will fall and be forgotten, the human race will go extinct, and the stars will flicker out like candles. This may seem like borrowing trouble, but it bothers me, and the only answer the secularists can give me is "well, thanks for trying, anyway." Religion in general offers me the answer, "someone eternal remembers the good you did, and cares." The Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition in particular offers the answer, "Okay, the universe is over, now we can start the really good stuff."

Tony again: Yes, God is within me, as well as outside me. But it's different aspects of God, and the God-within-me is radically incomplete. There's simply no way I, as an individual human being, can ever express all the aspects of divinity: I don't even think the whole universe can express everything about God (here is where I differ from Hindus, to the very limited extent that (a) I understand them and (b) they agree with each other). But I certainly can express more of God than I do, so my challenge is to open myself up more and more, strengthening and broadening my God-within to let the God-beyond pour into and through me.

A poem I once scribbled probably expresses this thought better:

I am a compass, and you are True North
I am the planet that circles your star
I am at the point where metaphors fail me
I am what I am, and you are what you are.

Sydney, I also want to thank you for being frank and honest and open in these threads. Now, here's something you've repeatedly said (in one way or another) that I want to respond to:

Now, maybe I'm just tremendously fucked up. Maybe everyone else reading these posts is so much better at being human than I am that they can do the right thing, consistently, all the time, and never fail and fall and need a hand to reach out to them to offer forgiveness and the strength to try again.

It's not an either-or thing. I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in Original Sin or of sin of any kind. That being said, I believe some behavior is better than others, and I believe and accept that I am a flawed person. As Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary would say, I'm a badly programmed robot. Not because I'm inherently flawed, but because environmental factors have led me to develop bad programs. I've grown up and accumulated baggage, and this causes me to react badly to situations. So, I'm not perfect by any stretch. I've done bad things. I've hurt myself and others. And I still do (although I'd like to think I do it less now than I used to).

That being said, I can't recall ever feeling I needed any god or messiah or who/whatever to give me the strength to make me a better person. I've never felt the need or desire to pray for that strength or will. It's always been a matter of paying attention to behavior that's harmful to myself and/or others and doing my best not to continue doing it. Some behavior is easier than others to stop. But I do my best to be the best person I can be.

This will sound horribly corny and geeky, but...the closest I come to any kind of prayer to an external being is this: sometimes, when faced with a situation where I'm not sure what to do, I ask myself, "What would Superman do?" Usually it's about something that seems just a wee bit hard or time consuming or inconvenient to do. The easier thing would be to just walk away and do nothing, but Superman wouldn't walk away, so even though it's inconvenient, I'll do what Superman would do.

My point being: you may feel that you need Christ to give you the strength to be a good person. Not everyone feels that way, even while they acknowledge that they make mistakes and act like no good shits. It doesn't mean we're better people than you. I certainly don't think I'm a better person than you.

Good stuff.  I disagree, but I understand.

1)  You're saying, I think, that the value you get from the supernatural elements is a hope that you can't believe in, within the context of the natural world.  A hope of literal eternity, of defiance of entropy, forever and ever amen.  Yes?

I'm down with that.  I've got a different take, but yours makes sense.

My take works with a more personal version of eternity, a sort of EternityLite, which is either "eternal enough for my purposes" or "happily ever after until the sequel" depending on the day of the week.  For me the miracle of eternity is present in the moment, and literal eternity isn't a concern.  I totally get that this is a cop-out, and so I can totally see the appeal of a super-nature that has the real, literal, eternity in a way which I genuinely didn't see prior to this conversation.  In fact (as I'll discuss below) I now see two new appeals of the super-natural.

2) You're talking about having a unextinguishable spark of God within you, but not the whole world-creating flame, or at least a keyhole through which a spark can travel, but not a wide-open door (depending on whether we talk about God being inside you by containment or by projection).  Yes?

I'm down with that.  I've got a different take, but yours makes sense.

My take is that God, like a hologram or a piece of the T-1000, is always entirely present no matter how small the expression.  "Hear Israel, the Lord God is One."

Which means that something I said earlier is just plain wrong.  I said "The story of divine suffering isn't the story of human suffering."  I now believe/see that I was wrong.

My second explanation for the importance of the supernatural in the story of Jesus is precisely to help people see past that distinction.  The suffering of God and the suffering of man are of the same nature.  The miracles of God and the miracles of man are of the same nature.  The allegory and the divine light show are the same thing.  The spark in your eye when you speak with passion is the same spark as the lightning bolt that reaves the ancient oak.  The mysterious shape of our own ideas, hidden and vast beneath the surface of our mind are of the same quality as Leviathan, the great beast whose creation astounded Job.

I can look at the vast expanse of the universe (however I think that came about ... and I do hold a lot of contradictory ideas in my mind on that topic, all at the same time) and then look at the vast potential of the human mind, and see them both with the same awe, as the same sort of expression of divinity/spontaneity/whatever.  I like that.  It is intimidating and empowering.

And you see it a diametrically opposite way, but talking with you about it helped me to see it this way.  We live in an age of miracles, eh?

So that's a lot for me to think about, and probably means that this will be my last post before I bow out and do some heavy reflection.  Sydney, I think it would be totally legitimate for you to consider that a personal victory.  You've directly helped me to take another step in my life-long spiritual journey.  Thank you.

Everything I love will be dirt, someday soon. That doesn't mean I don't love it. I love it all, with all my heart.

My dad died. He's just now starting to turn to dirt; I can show you the place. They didn't embalm him so he really is turning to dirt already. I love him still. I'll keep his memory until I die, but someday soon there won't be anyone left anywhere who remembers him. He designed buildings; I suppose that his name will last as long as his buildings do. Someday soon they'll all fall, though, and then they'll be dirt too, and no one will ever say or read or think of his name, ever again.

Does it bother me that he's not immortal? No. It makes me sad that I can't call him on the phone and talk to him, but I only care about that now, while I'm alive. Pretty soon, I won't care about that anymore, or anything else either. I'll be dirt! What's dirt got to care about?

While I'm alive, I love. When no trace of me is left anywhere in the universe, nevertheless, when I was alive, I loved.

Joshua, thanks. I'm not interested in Original Sin in the sense of "Adam and Eve did a bad thing, so now we're all going to be punished forever"; I am interested in being originally sinful in the sense of "all humans screw up, by nature"—and no, I don't think that's merely unfortunate environmental influences, I think that's how we are inherently.

Vincent, understood. I just want love to win in the end.

Tony: You're giving me useful ideas, too. In particular: My take is that God, like a hologram or a piece of the T-1000, is always entirely present no matter how small the expression. I think what I'm trying to say that God is fractal: Any piece of Him, from the Holy Spirit within me to the Holy Spirit within a grain of sand, is infinitely complex in a way that reflects the complexity of the whole, but the whole is still more than any one piece, or even the sum of all the pieces.

Hi! I hope you don't mind me coming in here (long-time lurker, never-before poster) but this thread has been very timely for me.

Some background so you see where I'm coming from—I was raised atheistic, in fact, my father in particular was derisive about religion in general,  but I always felt that there had to be more, more something divine in the world, from the time I was very small (my mother tells a story about me very seriously telling her about a conversation I had with God when I was two or three or thereabouts) so I spent a lot of time in my younger days looking for it—and I ended up becoming a Christian. I took many history of religion courses in college (I went to a religious college, due to the fact that I was able to get a scholarship to it). I got married, had kids, moved to a town where it wasn't easy or even really very possible to go to an organized church, so the overt relgious aspect of my life was allowed to dwindle.

This last week, I turned 50. I'm a grandma now, have been for four years, though I've got a new grandson just a few months old, too.

This summer, my daughter (who'd originally said she was allergic to churches as a teenager) finally admitted to me that she was not a Christian and that she didn't believe in Jesus—that she couldn't believe all this "supernatural stuff".  I realized at that moment that I had failed as a parent—that I hadn't communicated my bone-deep beliefs to her—and I resolved that I needed to start back at the beginning and re-examine my faith and why I believe it.

And the thing that I keep coming back to is that I simply cannot believe that death is the end—there is too much of
a personality, a being—divinity, if you will—in any one person for it to be wiped out like that. So I'm just saying—Vincent,  your belief that we just become dirt is one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time.

I want to thank everyone who's talked in this thread and the other ones for giving me a lot of things to think about and to chew on as I go back to redefining what I believe and what I want to do with the rest of my life—what good I can do for the time I'm here.

Twila, I hear you. I am struggling with what and how to teach my sons about religion(s), both so they are culturally literate and so they are grounded in their own beliefs and understand mine.

This may be horribly overly simplistic, but, if you find the idea of becoming dirt sad, find and read the children's book The 10th Good Thing About Barney. Becoming part of the Earth is something I think of as profoundly sacred. It's part of what offers me great comfort when I contemplate death. It doesn't mean my life will lack meaning. It doesn't mean I won't be remembered. It doesn't mean I wasn't loved and won't be mourned. It means I'm now something utterlly, transformatively different. And what happens to the energy/spark/soul/chi that is unique to me, that's a great Mystery to me. And that's really, deeply, ok.

Sydney, yes, humans inherently do stupid things. We fuck up. We hurt ourselves and each other. We make mistakes. But, y'know, making mistakes is not really all that big a deal to me. I mean, I'm not aiming to be a saint. I don't want to be perfect. I'm not a rapist or a torturer or a murderer. I've never sold drugs to kids. I've never made money from the munitions or tobacco industries. I've never been a party to genocide, war, enslavement or child abuse. At the end of the day, the worst thing I've generally done is made someone I care about feel lousy, because I lost my temper or I was feeling spiteful. So, the next day I'll apologize and do my best to let them know they're a good person and I appreciate their existence in my life. So, yeah, humans do stupid things. We're weak, we're foolish, we're mercurial. I don't see that as a bad thing or as a source of despair. I don't feel I need the strength to overcome that. Heck, I don't want to overcome that. If you want to live like Superman, it means you have to be bumbling, stumbling, dorky, cowardly Clark Kent at least part of the time.

Also...

I find Vincent's "dirt" bit intensely profound and uplifting. I'll admit, I sort of wish I were immortal, or at least extremely longlived, because I'm horribly curious about what will happen to humanity. But really, I think immortality is a bit weird. If I become dirt when I die, if there is no such thing as a "soul" and after I die I'm just dead, that's really pretty cool to me. All things must pass. Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes. But while I'm here, I'll do my best to make the people I care about happy. I'll do my best to make the world around me a happy place. And then I'll be gone. This is not a source of despair for me. Dirt is good.

Sydney, why do you assume that just because that if we love and we die and when we die we are dirt and what does dirt have to care, that love has lost in the end. Why do there have to be winning and losing conditions at all?

"So I'm just saying—Vincent, your belief that we just become dirt is one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time."

It IS sad, at least for me.  I find it horrifying (though oddly enough I feel a little comforted that the dirt is likely to get wiped out in some sort of cosmic even involving nuclear fire at some point)!

But there's really no credible alternatives being presented anywhere.  I'm not going to accept anybody's assertions to the contrary just because they're nice assertions - that's doing myself a profound disservice.

Joshua: I'm not aiming to be a saint. I don't want to be perfect. I'm not a rapist or a torturer or a murderer. I've never sold drugs to kids. I've never made money from the munitions or tobacco industries. I've never been a party to genocide, war, enslavement or child abuse. At the end of the day, the worst thing I've generally done is made someone I care about feel lousy, because I lost my temper or I was feeling spiteful.

Joshua, with all due respect, you're setting out a really, really low standard here. And "at the end of the day," I'd guess that the vast majority of human suffering is the result, not of some act of historic evil or grotesque criminality, but of ordinary people being unpleasant to each other. It adds up.

My wife and I both have plenty of unhappiness in our families, and there's not a child abuser or tobacco industry executive on either side for as far back as either of us knows about. (Okay, my mom is dating a retired tobacco exec, but that's a recent thing, it doesn't impact our lives particularly). But nevertheless there was enough ordinary human misery, of the largely self-inflicted variety, for us to look at each other and our daughter and say, "this shit stops rolling downhill as of now."

It bothered me for a little while, that pretty soon I'll just be gone, with no more subjective experience of myself ever again. But then I realized that I've already been gone, with no subjective experience of myself at all, for billions of years, because I didn't exist yet, and I realized that that didn't bother me a bit. Why be bothered about my nonexistance in the future? It'll be just the same as my nonexistance in the past. And it stopped bothering me.

Twila, you're very welcome here. Thanks for posting! I can't help it if it seems sad to you. It doesn't seem sad to me. It seems like just a thing. I barely ever think about it.

Vincent: It's not personal non-existence that bothers me; it's the non-existence of everything. If God exists, well, at least He keeps existing.

Twila: Thanks for joining in. For what it's worth, you have not "failed as a parent"—not any more than all of us fail, which we all do in small but significant ways—because your child cannot share your intellectual belief. What matters more is passing on an emotional habit of basic human decency and a sense of wonder. And if my fellow parishioners' experience is any guide, she has not stopping thinking about this, and as her children grow and ask her questions, she may come back to the church.

So, to both of you, I guess my moral is: With God, never assume the story is over.

Sydney, I don't share your botheredness. I don't care if love wins in the end, whatever that could possibly mean. I don't care if anything or nothing happens a billion years after I'm gone.

What you're saying sounds like nonsense to me, on the order of "you know other planets in other solar systems? Wherever there's life, I just hope that they're democrats! Or greens, that'd be even better, but I guess I shouldn't hope for too much."

I'm like, buh? "Love"? "Wins"? "In the end"? That doesn't even make sense.

I'd just like to put in a note for physical cosmology:

It's only a few cosmological models that the Universe just ends kaput, that's it, no more.  To classify the physical view as "everything becomes dust" is a little lame.

Humanity probably won't have a lot to do with that future, mind you.  But, still.  If you propogate "science says everything become dust!" you're ignoring a whole lot of work done by a whole lot of smart people in the last 50 years.

I realize that this is beside the point.

yrs—
—Ben

I for one am very open to hearing about possible different things that might happen with the universe and everything over the long term.

I'm still going to be dirt before any of that comes to pass! I'm going to be dirt, like, really soon.

Hold on, if I'm cremated and I rise as smoke and get scattered as ashes, does that still count as being dirt? Let's say that it does, for the sake of me not having misrepresented my fate.

I guess by "I'm going to be dirt" I mean that the stuff of which I made is going to be more available to its local environment's use than it is now. Like, right now, I don't lie still so that worms can use my protein to make little baby worms with.

Thanks for the welcome, Vincent.

I know you don't find it sad, too. And that's okay.  You are going to believe what you do, and I just hope that one day we'll meet in person and I can tell you why it makes me sad in a way that makes sense to you, if we get to that topic...  But right now, I'm not very articulate about what I believe and why—I'm just beginning to think through these issues, partly because I want to explain them to my daughter and to myself, as well.  I don't expect her (or anyone) to just change her mind because I say it's important—I need to find out what makes it true to/for me, so I can explain it in a way that, with luck/hope/God's grace (or a bit of all three), will give them insight into what might make it true for them.

And, y'know,  I kind of like the idea of my physical body becoming one with the elements when I'm done with it (though I still want to be cremated and bound into a book and snuck into the library of congress, because I love me my books, yes I do). It's just that I think there is more to me than just this shell. God, there had better be, because I don't do well with this old shell that I've got—it's creaky, and can't see, and I've lived most of my life inside my head, where the true self of me lives.

Okay, too, I've got a lot of people I want to have words with when I'm where they are—if they're just gone, that leaves quite a lot of things left undone in this life.  My boss/best friend, who committed suicide—I want to find out why. I want to tell her I loved her, and that I wish she were here so often, even after eleven years without her. My mother-in-law, the mother of my heart, who I miss with every day that passes, and who I want advice from about parenting in the very worst way... My father—who I know was so much more complex than I ever saw him—because he had a stroke when he was 44, and could not move or speak or communicate for the next twenty years (I believe sincerely that the person he was before that stroke died that day) and who suffered so much before he finally died—and I want to get to know the boy, the young man, the person he was before life flattened him and made him so angry, so abusive—and I hope that I will be able to learn who he was, how he was, what shaped him and why.  Because I want that with all of my heart and soul, and because I do not think that there could be just a cessation, a blackness, after we die, because what would be the POINT of living and learning and spending fifty or seventy or a hundred years here if we couldn't exist somehow after that?  All of what we are evolves while we live, and there has to be a point to it all.  Even loving and being loved and giving birth to new life and seeing that continued to the next generation—what point does it have if we don't continue, or at least our essential selves don't continue?

And that's where I am right now. Maybe this outpouring will make sense to you, maybe it won't.  I'm exploring things here, getting them out "on paper" as it were.  It is hard. But this place is a place for honesty, and that's what you're getting.

Thank you for letting me explode all over your space like this.

Sydney, maybe I'm "setting the bar low," but my basic point (which maybe I failed to get across) is this: yes, humans make mistakes, they do stupid things, they act out of fear and anger and loneliness and anxiety and jealousy, but I don't see this as a sign that humans are intrinsically "bad" or "flawed." Both of my parents did some pretty crappy things to my brother and me while we were growing up. This doesn't make my parents bad people, it makes them good people who weren't always sure what the right answers were and sometimes acted out of fear and sadness. That's called being human. I don't set humans up against some ideal and find them lacking. I set humans up against themselves and find that they sometimes act crappy and sometimes act wonderfully. I don't think humans are inherently "sinful" or "bad" or "flawed" anymore than I think monkeys or cats or mushrooms or snakes are. Yes, we sometimes do stupid and hurtful things. I don't think it's a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I certainly don't think it points to any great statement about humans being good or bad overall. We simply are what we are.

Which is, I suppose, why I've never felt the need for God or Christ or any other external religious or spiritual force to give me strength to be a better person. I don't want to be a better person. If I do something hurtful, I'll try to change my behavior. And, yes, I sometimes feel like I might be a "bad" person. But I feel that kind of thinking is just more psychological stupidity and an awful waste of time. Worrying about whether I'm a "good" person or a "bad" person is exactly the kind of hurtful behavior I want to stop doing.

Twila: Thank you for speaking out. I can't say much more than "I know how you feel," and, "God bless you."

Joshua: I don't want to be a better person.

You don't?

If we were having this conversation face to face, now would be the awkward pause where my eyes dilate and I splutter incoherently for a few minutes.

Joshua, I want to believe we are speaking the same words without understanding each other's meaning at all, because what you've written implies a level of self-satisfaction that I find appalling. There can't be literally nothing you want to do better in your life, surely? You said "If I do something hurtful, I'll try to change my behavior"—do you have no hurtful behaviors you are still struggling to change? You have no positive behaviors you'd like to do more often and more effectively?

It's not like you can grow to a certain point and then say, "Okay, I'm done," either. As with a lot of other aspects of biological development (and let me set aside all the spiritual stuff for a moment), psychological and ethical maturation do not reach a steady-state: As soon as you stop growing, you start decaying.

I get the impression that a lot of people think that "being a better person" and "being a saint" and "being saved" all have to do with holding specific, slightly weird intellectual positions and performing certain ritualized actions, and have nothing to do with trying to be happy and make the people around you happy. BULLSHIT. Sainthood starts with trying to be decent to the people you see every day.

Sydney,

The assumptions in your statements to Joshua are "humans are not good enough" and "humans can't become good enough on their own."

I've got a question for you about this. Christianity is predicated on this sort of attitude; that is, that humans are inherently evil or bad. There's a secondary thing I saw in an earlier post of yours where the world is also considered evil or bad.

As someone who thinks that humans are inherently good (and I mean that - good at nature and at heart, beings that will choose the moral action if given the chance to) and that the world is beautiful and wonderful, how can I accept Christianity? How can I resolve the two, or can I not?

Like Joshua, I don't want to be a better person, not in the way you mean. I want to be a better human, and that just involves trying each day.

Sydney, of course I still do stupid, fearful, hurtful things. And yes, I strive not to do those. Now, unfortunately, I'm going to get semantic here, which I'm usually loathe to do. When I say I don't want to be a better person, I mean this: I don't think I'm a bad person, and I'm not striving to be a "more good" person. (Sometimes I do actually think, "Man, I suck. I'm a horrible person." Like I said, this is exactly the kind of hurtful—in this case, hurtful to myself—behavior I strive to stop doing.) Yes, I want to change. But change doesn't mean "bad to good." I want to learn more, be less afraid, be less selfish and thoughtless, be less hurtful to myself and others. But I don't want to think of myself as a "bad" person who needs to be a "better" person. Most of the time, I am, in fact, a happy person. I'm married to my best friend, we have an amazing daughter, my job is exactly what I want to do with my life for money, I have terrific friends, and things are good. My wife and I don't make as much money as I'd like, I wish my cholesterol level was lower. But I am overall happy with who I am and where I am in the world.

Here's a thing: my wife has some health issues that come from years of her abusing her body through various eating disorders (bulimia, anorexia, binge eating). She engaged in this behavior because she was concerned with controlling herself and perfecting herself. Seeing what this thinking has done to her, it seems to me that obsessing over being a "better" person can be horribly damaging. You know what I think would be much healthier? Not trying to be a better person but instead being happy and satisfied with who you are, right here and now. My wife makes me insanely happy. She makes our daughter happy. She makes our friends happy. She doesn't need to be better. She does, however, need to stop worrying about being "bad" and stop worrying about how she needs to be "better."

This is all incredibly simplified, and my thoughts on "good" and "bad" people are much more complex. Too complex for me to get down here, right now. (I'm at work, so I really shouldn't even be posting here right now.)

Joshua, an entirely sensible response. I think we're agreeing, actually, in spite of the semantic static. I spent much of my life fixated on the badness in me and ignoring the goodness, until the fixation itself became the greatest evil in my life. Coming to Christ in 1991 was my first step towards breaking that fixation and learning to focus on the good. Subsequent steps involved meeting my wife and spending a lot of time in therapy, not just in church.

Now, Clinton put an apparent contradiction particularly well, so I want to address it head-on:

Clinton: Christianity is predicated on this sort of attitude; that is, that humans are inherently evil or bad. There's a secondary thing I saw in an earlier post of yours where the world is also considered evil or bad. As someone who thinks that humans are inherently good (and I mean that - good at nature and at heart, beings that will choose the moral action if given the chance to) and that the world is beautiful and wonderful, how can I accept Christianity?

First, to get it out of the way, an area where I think we actually disagree: I don't think humans will invariably do the right thing if given the chance, which is what free will is all about—although since we all live in a world of imperfect options and negative influences, it's possible that no human being has ever really been "given the chance" to make a completely unconstrained choice, and the theoretical question is irresolvable.

Second, more important in this case, the area where I think semantics are getting in the way:

1. I think all people are inherently and essentially good.
2. I think all people are to some degree bad.
3. I do not think anything is perfectly good except God.
4. I don't think anything at all is completely bad, because it's good to exist, so something that is completely bad by definition does not exist.
(See Saint Augustine for fuller explanation).
5. I think the world and everything in it is inherently and essentially good.
6. I think the world is broken, because it is full of suffering, and it did not have to be.
7. I think that while all people, and the world as a whole, are fundamentally good, we have the potential for much greater goodness—a potential of which we as yet fall short, but which we can achieve by the grace of God.

I'm trying to avoid the word "evil" here because our language tends to reserve it for extreme and aberrant malice, and while I see glimmers of evil in the minor cruelties and apathies of everyday life, other people are clearly confused by my use of the term. So I'll just keep saying "bad."

Understand that I'm not using good/saintly and bad/evil to describe some sort of binary either-or. I am speaking of a spectrum, with utter nonexistence at one end and God at the other, and with everything in the universe somewhere in between. There is badness in the greatest saints (just look at poor Saint Paul), and there is goodness in the worst villains (Hitler really did want to be an artist and make beautiful things). We are all a mix of good and bad: The challenge for each of us is to improve the relative proportions.

And, again, Clinton: The assumptions in your statements to Joshua are "humans are not good enough" and "humans can't become good enough on their own."

To be precise, I was trying to set those assumptions aside in that specific response to Joshua (post 62 above), but yes, in general I've been arguing from those assumptions.

But: "not good enough" for what, exactly? Here's what I mean by it, italicizing the necessary additions for clarity:

"Humans are not good enough to avoid causing themselves and one another suffering, and humans can't become good enough to create personal lives without self-inflicted suffering, let alone a world without such suffering, on their own: We have to move beyond the very real but very limited goodness within ourselves, and open ourselves up to the greater goodness in one another, to the even greater goodness in the universe as a whole, and ultimately to the unlimited goodness of God."

Clinton, and company, does this make things clearer, and hopefully a little more hopeful?

Yes, I think it's clearer. But I don't agree. Or rather, I think the question of anyone or anything creating a world without suffering is a blind alley. Suffering is a part of life, just as joy is.

Joshua, that's a logical response. But I have more hope for the world than you do.

An odd reversal has happened over the course of these discussions. In the original "screwed expectations" thread about polygamy and alternative religions, I was the one saying "wait, wait, these ideas are disproven by history and won't work," and (almost) everyone else was saying, "Sydney, you're so negative and bleak." Now, (almost) everyone else is saying, "Sydney, these ideas are disproven by history and won't work," and I'm saying, "allow yourselves to hope."

Hope for what?

For the record, I'm not saying what you've said is "disproven by history and won't work." I'm saying I don't want to live in a world without suffering, because a world without suffering is a world without joy. And I was never saying, "Sydney, you're being negative and bleak." I was saying, "Sydney, you're denying the possibility that other people may have sussed out the best way to live and it may be a completely different path than yours." The fact that you think polygamy wouldn't work doesn't mean that other people can't figure out a way to make it legitimately work for them. The fact that you think mixing and matching mythologies and symbols is dangerous misses the fact that people have done it and it's worked for them (with no more danger than following an established tradition).

The fact that you've found strength and inspiration in Christ is wonderful, Sydney. But in these threads you told us what you think Christ has to offer us, and it doesn't appeal to me at all.

Can you explain why it doesn't, Jeff?  (Okay, forgive me if you think I'm missing something that you wrote upthread, I'm running on four hours sleep and could easily have missed it.)

In some ways, I am beginning to think that some of us are hard-wired to believe in God(s) and some of us simply are ... not.  Because so much of why I believe what I believe is not something logical or that you can point to or write about clearly and say, "yep, this makes sense in a very sensible way". Because it's feelings and intuition and certainties that resonate within my being, things that I've felt since I was very small.  My experience of the world has been that these things must be true, or else how will I make sense of it all?

Vincent's declared a break from religion, so I'll hold off on answering your question, Twila.

But I will say this: why do people so frequently call me "Jeff"? Is it because of my last name, Neff? Do other Joshuas have this problem? Do people accidently call Joshua A. C. Newman...um..."Jewman"? (Oh, man, I hope not.)

Mmmmkay, I hadn't seen that from Vincent.

And I'm sorry.  I think it was two things about your name—the "neff" and the fact that I have a brother called "Jeff", and welll.... I must've elided.  I do apologize. Will try to pound it into my head that you're "Joshua".

This is in response to something waaaay up there that Vincent wrote, about the Bible being just stories.

If there's one thing that I find particularly compelling about the Bible, it's this:

The Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a copy of the Old Testament that dates back to the 1st or 2nd century BC. Jesus was born around 0 CE, give or take a few years. Why does that matter? Because in the scrolls there are prophecies concerning the coming Messiah, which Jesus fulfills to the letter, at least 100 years after the scrolls were written.
Those scrolls also contain the stories about Moses and the great kings of Israel, and the not so great kings of Israel, and the history of the Hebrew nation. So if something is true about what hasn't happened yet, why wouldn't it also be true about what has already happened?

It bothered me for a little while, that pretty soon I'll just be gone, with no more subjective experience of myself ever again. But then I realized that I've already been gone, with no subjective experience of myself at all, for billions of years, because I didn't exist yet, and I realized that that didn't bother me a bit. Why be bothered about my nonexistance in the future? It'll be just the same as my nonexistance in the past. And it stopped bothering me.

I share Vincent's view that when I die, I will become dirt.

But...
I don't particularily see myself as having "not existed" for billions of years. I see myself as having existed in little pieces -
All those individual molecules that make up Joe McDonald, they were individual molecules of a bunch of other stuff before me. And they will break down into individual molecules of other stuff after me.

Probably dirt, for the most part.

Personally, I don't believe in a soul. I believe that I'm just a large lump of stuff.

So, when that large lump of stuff disbands into smaller lumps of stuff (dirt and dry bones and such), it's not really me not existing... it's just me not existing in my current form.

I don't really have any fear of death, because death, to me, seems like an arbitrary line.

Does that make sense?

Joe: All those individual molecules that make up Joe McDonald, they were individual molecules of a bunch of other stuff before me. And they will break down into individual molecules of other stuff after me.... it's just me not existing in my current form.

Vincent: It bothered me for a little while, that pretty soon I'll just be gone, with no more subjective experience of myself ever again. But then I realized that I've already been gone, with no subjective experience of myself at all, for billions of years, because I didn't exist yet, and I realized that that didn't bother me a bit. Why be bothered about my nonexistance in the future? It'll be just the same as my nonexistance in the past.

This may be an ironic position for me to take, especially since I'm a self-declared plan of Saint Paul, but:

I think people are thinking about this one too hard.

To join the overthinking for a minute:

What I call "me" is a particular pattern of standing energy waves, a pattern that has changed over time as I mature and decay but recognizably continuous with itself over time. Primarily it's atoms formed into molecules formed into cells formed into tissues formed into organs formed into a body, combined with a lot of loose water. Given conservation of matter & energy, and given that matter doesn't convert to energy or energy to matter very often, almost all those atoms have been around without me before I was born for billions of years, and will be around without me for billions of years after I die.

So what?

You can look at Sydney the baby 32 years ago, Sydney the man today, and Sydney the senile ruin fifty years from now and say, "Yeah, they're all different forms of the same thing." You can't look at Sydney the assorted dirt particles 100 years ago or 100 years from now and say that in any meaningful way. There's such a thing as having too much perspective, people.

So death and birth are not any kind of "arbitrary line." There's something recognizably me that comes into existence when I'm born (or arguably at conception; I'm not going to get into that debate now) and that ceases to exist when I die. And there's a definite difference between being born and dying, because my birth adds a good thing to the universe, a good thing that is unique and not quite identical to anything that has existed before or since, and my dying takes that good thing out of existence. No matter what suffering my death may have freed me from, no matter how joyful and complete my life may have been, dying is a bad thing, and I am right to be afraid of it, and my family and friends will be right to mourn me. (At the death of his friend Lazarus, "Jesus wept" - John 11:35).

Note that I'm not talking about my soul not dying or about wafting up to Heaven or anything: As best as I can understand it, the New Testament says that death is real, not an illusion—even the death of Jesus Christ—and that the dead are really dead, and it is on the Last Day that they shall be raised, in a perfected "spiritual body," but still in the body. And the resurrection narratives in at least three of the four Gospels emphasize that the resurrected Jesus ate and drank with his friends, and that He still bore the wounds of the cross and even invited the apostle Thomas to touch them: We are not talking about a ghost.

But honestly, personal life after death is not my primary concern. I'm primarily interested in living a better life now—making more happiness for myself and my loved ones and my "neighbors" (in the very wide sense of the Gospels, anyone I come in contact with)—and my prospective life after death in a new body is simply a continuation of this one in a higher octave, not a different song.

And, as I've discussed this with all of you, I've come to realize that what truly bothers me about death is not that I myself will die (although I will), nor that the universe as a whole will die (although it probably will, as I understand the latest findings), but that anything and everything I love could die at any moment—that my whole family, for example, could be wiped out by a bomb or bird flu or a bad driver. I don't want to be told that my daughter will continue to exist as dirt. I don't even really want to be told that she will continue to exist as a translucent, smiling, Hollywood-style spirit. I want some reassurance that the good in her will somehow endure, that there will be someone somewhere who will at least remember her, if not resurrect her. That is why the idea of an eternal God is comforting to me.

Whatever. The dirt I'll become won't be me in any meaningful way. I'll stop existing when I die.

If I were looking for comfort, I'd look to reincarnation, like I say. But I don't figure there's real comfort to be had, just reassuring baby talk. Better to find a way to deal with it.

Vincent, you may be right. I honestly don't know. (If I had no doubts about my faith, I'd be a different person, one much less slow and half-hearted about doing good when it cost me something to do it).

So for now, I'm just trying to be a better human being in this world. I'll leave the next world in more capable hands.

Josh: The fact that you've found strength and inspiration in Christ is wonderful, Sydney. But in these threads you told us what you think Christ has to offer us, and it doesn't appeal to me at all.

Twila: Can you explain why it doesn't, Jeff?[sic]

Now that the 24 hour break has ended, I'll do my best to explain.

Basically, it's like this: I don't know if I have a soul or not (immortal or otherwise), I don't know what will happen to me after I die, I don't know if there is a God (or gods) or not, and I don't know if Jesus was really the Christ or just a cool philosopher. And frankly, the answers to all of those questions are irrelevant to me. The Bible doesn't offer me any ethics or morals that I feel I'm lacking (and gives some ethics and morals that I find useless at best and reprehensible at worst) and it doesn't offer me a cosmology that I find engaging or useful. Sydney has said that faith in Christ gives him the strength to try to be a better person. I don't feel any need in myself for that. Maybe, as you say, it's a hardwired thing, but I just can't have faith in any gods (and if I were going to enter into a relationship with supernatural beings, diplomacy and bargain make more sense to me than worship and veneration and subjugation). It's just not something I find easy (or particularly appealing, since, as I said, I don't feel the need for it). When it comes to spiritual beliefs, I find Buddhism and Taoism much more appealing and grabby to me. On a fundamental level, Christianity doesn't make any sense to me, even after Sydney and others have gone to great lengths to explain why it appeals.

Deep down, I don't believe there's any grand narrative to the universe that is applicable to humans. I don't believe, or even hope, that "love wins in the end" because I don't believe (or even care) if there is an "end" and love is just a human concept (not to mention a really vague word that means different things to different people in different contexts). To quote Joss Whedon, "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." The universe is a vast, uncaring place (and I do not find that a depressing thought to say the least) and someday I will be dust (also something I don't find depressing) so the only thing that matters is how I live my life and what I do with my limited time. And the easiest way for me to use my energy, the easiest way to live, is to be a nice guy who treats people with respect and caring. I don't do it because I think some supernatural being or force wants me to, I don't do it because I fear for my eternal soul or because I believe I'm fighting for some cosmic good. I don't *need* or *want* any great explanations or reasons to life. I don't *need* or *want* there to be anything more than our actions.

So, Christianity has nothing to offer me.

Does that work as an explanation?

I don't know if I'm feeding a troll or not here, but it honks me off when people try to take my religion for their own purposes.

The Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a copy of the Old Testament that dates back to the 1st or 2nd century BC. Jesus was born around 0 CE, give or take a few years. Why does that matter? Because in the scrolls there are prophecies concerning the coming Messiah, which Jesus fulfills to the letter, at least 100 years after the scrolls were written.
Those scrolls also contain the stories about Moses and the great kings of Israel, and the not so great kings of Israel, and the history of the Hebrew nation. So if something is true about what hasn't happened yet, why wouldn't it also be true about what has already happened?

OK, Christians love to bandy this about. There's a big theological hole, though: unless the dead are walking around right now, Jesus wasn't the messiah. There's no mention except in Christian texts about the Messiah coming once, kicking the bucket, and then coming again. It seems kind of anticlimactic to me, really.

So: prophecy that has not come true: evidence for the veracity of the prophetic document?

You be the judge.

Um, am I allowed to just show up here and start talking? If so, thanks! If not, apologies.

I hang out at Story-Games quite a bit, hence my initial interest in this site, but I was surprised and delighted to come across this thread. Especially to see the openness and respect being practiced in it.

So, a slightly alternative viewpoint to Sydney's ??? my own angle only, of course, I don't speak for anyone else even though there are some other people who broadly think the same way.

Vincent asks 'way upthread at #15, That's all stories, though, isn't it? I mean, you say "God does this" and "Jesus did that," but is there any reason for me to believe that any of it, y'know, actually happened?

And I say: Well, stories. Let's think about stories. Yes, the Gospels (and much of the rest of the Bible) consists of stories. I think everyone can agree on that. Where we start to hit static is in the "stories that are about things that didn't happen are less important" assumption that seems to underlie Vincent's words. (Apologies if I've completely read that in.)

There's a spectrum of stories. Some are nearly history with some bits tidied up. Some are completely invented and make no bones about it. There's a very large middle ground, and I don't, myself, know exactly where the Gospels fall, though I suspect it's closer to the History end than, let's say, the Aesop's Fables end. My question is: Why is their exact location on the spectrum the most important thing to find out about them? It seems to me that's a post-Enlightenment obsession that we can usefully deemphasize (though probably not totally abandon) in favour of other questions such as:

* What happens if I read this as a story about me?
* What happens if I imagine myself into the scene?
* What happens if I hold the story in my mind, not analyzing, not judging, just letting it dissolve like a lozenge in my mouth?

I would agree with Sydney in saying, If you want to deepen your understanding of Christianity, if you want to give it a "fair trial" or something, definitely read the Gospels. Founding documents, right? If we're not paying any attention to them, I wonder why we'd call the result "Christianity" rather than something else. But the idea that what we primarily are looking for is intellectual content for our mental assent? I question that. That's an assumption that seeped into Christianity very early, when Paul preached to the Areopagites in Athens and it became another one of those ideas they argued about.

My provocative suggestion for you (all) is: Approach Christianity not primarily as a set of ideas to be evaluated, but as a path to be explored, as a mystery to be experienced, as a way to be practiced. I can refer you to some books if you want them, but part of the point I'm making is that reading and talking are like putting on your shoes rather than going for the walk. Put on your shoes by all means, but if that's all you do, you haven't gone walking.