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Disclaimer
Christianity makes some basic assumptions about our place in the world, and how the world came to be. I think these are just asserted, like I assert my own assumptions, and neither has a stronger claim to truth over another.
That’s why I think choosing a spirituality is looking for something which emotionally resonates with oneself. This is not to downplay spirituality, but to propose different criteria and methods for determining what is ‘true’.
Sin
- God loves us (i.e. created us, provides for our needs, and determines our purpose), so we should trust and obey Him.
- Since we do not trust and obey God, we are sinners.
- Love is not transactional (i.e. love is given without conditions and expectations).
- If God loves people, he shouldn’t expect them to trust and obey him.
- Sin is any action or thought that goes against God’s will.
- If God no longer wills people to trust and obey Him, then there is no sin and no need to be saved by Jesus.
There is a paradox of divine love and yet divine justice in Christianity. Love implies forgiveness yet justice implies punishment. Many people nowadays can accept the forgiveness in the new testament but don’t know how to reconcile that with the wrathful and authoritarian God in the old testament.
My view is that there is no sin. There is only divine love.
We do wrong things (e.g. disobey, sin) and should be punished.
No, this sort of guilt is not productive. On the political and sociological front, it’s a form of social control. On the psychological and spiritual front, it doesn’t lead to healing.
A related point: I don’t think children are guilty of what their parents did.
Hell
I met a good friend of mine who’s a Christian. She described hell not as a place of suffering, like the popular portrayal of souls burning in hell. In fact, hell would look like where we are right now. The difference is that one lacks any hope of attaining universal love, which she attributes to God.
(By universal love, I refer to agape: ‘profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance’.)
My view is that the Christian God is only one way to attain universal love. There are other ways, and I’m excited to learn about all the ways that people have found to do so. One friend of mine does it with her own spirituality, which inspires me to think that spirituality is an entirely individual creation.
Faith
Note: I wrote this out in one go and haven’t edited it yet.
Faith is the attitude of 1) trust and 2) endurance, towards the idea that God’s plan will be realised.
- Trust in God is hard enough. People want to understand why things are — ‘why?!’ Also, the emotional trust, to give up one’s sense of self-reliance and be emotionally intimate with someone who seemingly doesn’t respond to your prayer and spiritual seeking, is hard.
- If trust weren’t hard enough, being enduring and retaining this trust over time is hard^2.
Faith is a really interesting concept — it appears fundamental to any spirituality.
Even in science, you could say there is faith towards the objective and regular recording of data through instruments. When scientists release a probe to Mars, they’re faithful that the probe will send back accurate data. One might say they have evidence to believe this. But ‘evidence’ comes from other instruments and methods of measurement — like whatever tests they put the probe through before sending it out. Ultimately they perceive these tests through their senses. So they still have faith in instruments.
Spiritual faith is about the supremacy of some emotional and interpretative themes over others. Devastating circumstances, like the suffering of the Palestinians attacked in the Gaza strip, tests people’s ability to return to these fundamental themes. They should return to trust and the silent hope that eventually things will be good, over their fear and anguish. Likewise, they should return to the belief that God will bring justice, over all their other beliefs that injustice is everywhere and keeps happening.
So that’s how faith is ideally done. How to 1) detect what one is faithful about, and 2) deepen that faith, is the thing that still eludes me. Well, to do these things takes emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Emotional intelligence is learnt by mirroring when you talk to emotionally intelligent people. Whereas self-awareness is learnt by reflection and meditation… probably, I always had a high level of self-awareness so I didn’t need to consciously learn. So sure, even if I broke down the skills required, it’s still… too theoretical and not emotional. It’s not enough. I’m still seeking.
The practical attempts to promote faith I’ve seen are quite dissatisfying. Perhaps this is because most Christians I’ve met are everyday people — they aren’t experts in Christianity, and think about it or engage in these themes as an adjunct to whatever they usually do. These Christians I’ve met, as friends and in church events, don’t seem to be able to share their faithfulness very well, to reassure other Christians who begin to question their faith. They just repeat in some language or other, with some scripture or personal experience, to ‘have faith’. It’s possible to express this message in a way that’s emotionally stirring. It’s just that I haven’t met any such Christians before.
Logic
Note: This was a series of text messages I sent to a friend.
Do you believe that logic would contradict religion?
Rarely, and that’s why religion/spirituality is so interesting. A thoughtful person can loophole their way out and make huge claims.
If you question someone’s spirituality enough, you’ll arrive at philosophical and introspective questions that logic can’t answer. Like:
- Is everything designed by an intelligent being?
- Would everything turn out good and make sense in the end?
- Is death truly the end, or do we get to live and try again?
Given the limits of logic, spirituality allows emotional intuition as a valid source of knowledge :O You could see it as another paradigm of knowledge. It deals with:
- different questions
- different tools to find answers
- different criteria to assess what makes an answer good
So while it’s not as rigorous as science, that’s not the point… its goal is to be meaningful.
Meaning must be coherent, so it includes logical rigour, but rigour alone is not sufficient.
So you believe that some parts of spirituality exceeds the boundaries of logic, and therefore you can use emotion to answer it?
Yeah, I think it’s ultimately about meaning.
- Questions: as above
- Tools to find answers: emotional resonance, personal experience, logic, etc
- Criteria to assess what makes an answer good: meaning
Today, many of us value logic — we find it meaningful. But people didn’t always value logic in the past. They might’ve valued tradition, utility, or grandeur instead. So their spirituality formed around that.
Yet no matter what time you live in, meaning is emotional. As such, those who are the most inspiring and helpful in spirituality are emotionally intelligent and self-aware.
In other words: people who are logically intelligent, yet steamroll your feelings, are bad examples to learn spirituality from! :p Let the arrogant ‘atheists’ frolick about in their mud over there…
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