Transcendence--Part 2

‘Liberal’ Christians admit Jesus and the NT authors were mistaken, but in so doing they are trying to pole vault up a steep incline while sliding down the slippery back slope of increasing doubt and skepticism. If the NT isn’t historically accurate about such a key doctrine as the return of Christ, many ask, how could one rely on Scripture's accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, ascending into heaven, etc.

How can the Christian religion be true and accurate about anything else?

After all, the bar of requirements for historical writing has been set very high in the modern age. All things, people think, need to be factually accurate, inerrant to be of real value. So religion, the spiritual, and the transcendent all need to be judged with the measuring tools of science.

A compass of accuracy needs to discern the geometric lines of theology and faith, to eliminate and banish any heresy that deviates from the factual.

What a very high raising of the TRUTH bar for us thinking humans to catapult over!

The nature of truth is a difficult subject bar none (to throw in a word play to lighten this heavy post;-)

The difficulty of hope versus illusion-delusion (false hope) and reason versus despair (false reason) is a very high bar indeed. Can any hope of the transcendent be found at all?

Millions of humans think not. So they quit 'pole-vaulting' and settle down on the ground of Materialism/Atheism/even Nihilism and Subjectivism/Relativism. Such thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Yuval Noah Harari, Sean Carroll, Brian Green, etc.).

In striking contrast, many other thinkers and scientists created the ENLIGHTENMENT/Deism/generic theism, etc. Their new outlook based in reason and the scientific method--Not revelation--managed to clear the bar of required evidence.

All of them strongly hold to modern evidence--evolutionary biological, geological, astronomical, rational--but don't think such evidence proves that Reality is meaningless, subjective, etc. Instead, they think that Reality is ultimately transcendent, moral realism is true, all humans have inherent worth, etc. They state they base their hope in reason and cosmic regularities, Life itself, etc.

In the LIGHT of the True, the Good, the Just, the TRANSCENDENT,

Daniel Wilcox




SIDE NOTE:
on more historic difficulties for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-- 'revealed religions' of doctrinal claims Another difficult raising of the bar of religious hope came 1,500 years after Jesus, in the time of Galileo and Copernicus.

The Creedal Church claimed supreme understanding and control in all matters. Yet a minority of scientists contradicted the teachings of the Church and, allegedly, the Bible. They claimed to have proved that the sun doesn’t round the earth each day; indeed, the earth is not the center, not the focal point of all creation as Genesis claims.

Soon science increased its evidential findings--our sun is actually only a very minor star, Not the Center of Reality.

Contrary to the Scriptures’ statement, “God made the stars also,” in actuality, those stars are cosmically vast than our puny solar system. We are on an edge of a galaxy, which is one of millions of other galaxies!

So much for the literal understanding of the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and common sense!

Scratch!

Of course, multi-millions choose to twist the plain text in the sacred scriptures. They argue Genesis describes the creation of the sun on the fourth day from the perspective of God’s Spirit at the level of the surface of the planet looking up!

So God looking up from planet earth's surface does make it seem like the sun comes after the earth rather than before. What has happened? A dense, heavy cloud of vapor had hidden the sun during the first 3 days. The sun finally appeared above the earth on the 4th day.

There is a very bad case of Not only 'scratching' but of cheating!

But the verse in Genesis doesn’t speak about the sun appearing from behind fog on the fourth day; on the contrary, it says: “And God said, 'Let there be light in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.' And so it was. And God made the two great lights…” (Genesis 1:14-16)

Other religionist wrote of a dualistic existence, where science concerns itself with the observable and the factual but religion concerns itself with the spiritual and moral. Many theists of the present time manage to make this philosophical leap.

Then the discoveries by Darwin and many other scientists that life proceeds not by a sudden miraculous creation 6,000 years ago, but by a combination of cosmic luck and survival of the fittest over millions and millions of years.

Later in succeeding years, other scientists tabulated their technical findings and showed the earth came about 4 billion years ago, not 6, 000, and the universe has existed at least 16 billion years! This setting of the sacred bar careens outrageously high so that only the most blind, or most compartmentalized, or the most irrationally determined can leap the bottomless chasm up and over the cosmically high bar of hope.

Good grief, what convoluted hypocritical rhetoric!

Multi-millions of human beings have 'scratched'. Been Disqualified.

Plugging the Spiritual Sieve

Growing up in fundamentalism and evangelicalism of the Christian religion, we were continually warned about the “slippery slope of doubt and liberalism.”

My subsequent trials and steep learning curve of a university education at the University of Nebraska and Cal State Long Beach, and the many 'travailed'-roads of a spiritual journey
through lots of theological and scientific tomes and evangelicalism’s too many ‘easy-isms’—all that, has brought me too close to the dangerous cliff of a faith'd demise.

Which shows the question of the truth of that fundamental “truism” is both yes and no.

Slip and slide...

However, this short blog reflection is based not so much in the slippery slope metaphor,

but more in other striking images,
that of the “spiritual sieve” of Christianity--

How so much of religious faith is drizzling down through millions of small holes.




Or that of a wide funnel
and the eventual swirling down
at a hectic rush of all that used to provide
security and hope.





Or it's like an individual who runs around in his upward-bound basket of faith,
trying to patch the balloon above to keep the helium of his beliefs from leaking out
all the puncture wounds caused by secular learning.

Or like the boy in Holland who stuck his finger in a hole in the dike to keep out the flood of the sea.

But here in the bulwark of Christianity, tragically, there are thousands of holes to be plugged in order to keep the flood waters of fact and rogue waves of speculation--yes, the ocean of doubt, evil, and nothingness from drowning everyone.

And every thinking believer needs to run around constantly sticking his faith fingers in those endless holes, trying to stop dark gushing seawater from washing in and drowning us all.

A few of the Jagged Holes of the "Unholy" from the perspective of my childhood--

Evolution:
We were never "young earth creationists" in our family. My dad was a history major in college, and eventually earned 3 degrees. He considered Neanderthal and other ancient primates related to homo sapiens to be real, not the nefarious lies of atheistic scientists. So we accepted some form
theistic evolution.

But we strongly opposed natural selection. When I grew up, I constantly fought against Darwin's ‘unholy’ inundation; this ‘evilution.’

We Christians learned over and over again that Atheists held to this false ‘theory’ because of their sinful ways, that anyone could see there was no factual basis for Darwin’s concept, and it contradicted Genesis and the New Testament.

But in my first science class--Geology at the University of Nebraska, I quickly discovered, the whole issue was much more complicated and the evidence for secular science very overwhelming.

And I was totally turned off by the lame arguments that creationists used against evolution and for a world-wide Flood. After I completed my term paper on the latter, I was never the same, indeed, had moved into a modern scientific outlook.

Then came classes in anthropology, books on biology and many discussions. After years of intense struggle and a constant study of religion and science, I finally bowed the knee to objective fact, to the overwhelming evidence of geology, biology, chemistry, and physics.

So much for religious dogma, Christian illusion.

I did so finally because I could no longer deny hard evidence. I wanted to find out the real truth, did think that all truth is God's evidence. I no longer wanted to hang onto the security of questionable religious doctrine.

But believe me, I came kicking and screaming (to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis) into an acceptance of modern Darwinian evolutionary theory with its emphasis on "survival of the fittest" and random mutations.

It's very hard for religious humans to give up, essentially, their whole understanding of the nature of life.

But, especially, after Francis Collins (a Christian evolutionist) and other scientists finished the Human Genome Project which again showed the high probability of common descent of humankind from primates, I realized I had lived in a delusion based on faulty, and at times, ludicrous arguments.

Better late than never, though I wish I could have gotten there years earlier.

Many anti-evolution Christian books were so weakly reasoned and so missing in substantive factual evidence. Some even put forth ridiculous views such as claiming God had hidden dinosaur bones in the earth to mislead modern scientists! At least my parents had never believed in that!

If I hadn't seen horrific ethics displayed by non-religious individuals at university, I probably would have changed sooner (but that's another article to be explained later).

Inerrancy:
It was at 11 years of age that I first encountered severe doubts about part of the Bible. The story of Elisha and the 3 Bears;-) Well, it was only 2, and it wasn't cute or funny--because on order of God, the bears mauled 42 kids (2 Kings 2:23-25)!

We were taught this story in Sunday School. I remember becoming very upset, and telling our teacher and the other elementary students so.

How cruel and unjust! All that the boys had done was only make fun of Elisha's bald head.

And the fact that the Bible repeatedly defended and condoned slavery also troubled my mind as I entered the teen years.

Still, I remember saying (when I was about 13 or 14), I would quit believing in the Bible if one comma was missing from the text. But then I discovered to my chagrin that punctuation was only inserted into Scripture in the late Middle Ages.

Later textural study opened huge wide holes in my spirit and mind.

And I learned scriptural transmission, literary interpretation, history, etc. until my balloon of faith in the Bible became one droopy stretch of plastic in a pig sty of natural slime.

In so many portions, there are horrific immoral, unethical, unjust stories like in Judges, Joshua, Samuel and Kings.

Theological Determinism:
Denial of the Good News for most humans by Augustinian-Reformed theology. Original Sin, Evil Infants, Predestination, Hell...

The first time I encountered a Calvinist was at a high school Bible study when the adult leader claimed that sometimes God would order us to commit immoral actions! And he told me personally that I should be willing to do what is immoral for God. Whew!

Then there was a famous Bible leader's almost obscene claim. That happened, when as a young adult, my friend and I visited a Presbyterian church.

The leader lectured the assembly that “every murder and every rape are planned by God” and that God only wills/predestines for a limited number of humans to be saved.

I became extremely upset and utterly confused! That was the first death knell for me of secure, simple Christian faith and the beginning of a death battle that has lasted through many years. I’ve survived, but at times I actually no longer wanted to live.

Obviously my faith changed drastically as I studied Christian history and learned that most Christians believed in determinism and that God had created most humans to be foreordained to eternal damnation for his own glory!

And that the Good News I had heard and loved and admired as a kid was a heretical aberration of orthodox Christianity!

When I read a large volume on the creeds of the Christian religions, I was horrified by their immoral ethics, and totally skeptical of their theological abstractions.

What did any of these complex, convoluted, despairing statements have to do with the Good News?





But after having already checked out Hinduism, Buddhism, and various forms of Atheism, and found them worse, I stayed with a form of liberal Christianity associated with Anabaptism, Quakerism, and the Enlightenment.

And I still experientially had inner trust in Jesus like when I had met him as a young person, the night I “asked Jesus into my heart.” Back then we were taught God loves everyone and Christ died for everyone.

But not a day passes now but which I need to do battle against the despairing determinism which is being promoted by famous Christian leaders of “limited atonement, unconditional election," and other such ilk which inundates modern Christianity.

This horrific hole is as vast as a galaxy.

A cosmic sieve into the abyss...

More unholy holes next time...

But for now, the wholly:-) Good News…

Despite the countless punctures which have emptied Christian doctrine and theology,
my experience of Jesus,
my trust in God, the Ultimate Reality,
my faith in ethical truth
my hope in human rights, justice, equality, compassion, honesty, fidelity, and so forth
are alive and well.

It’s not the holes in human religious constructions which count, but the whole Truth.

Thanks to life struggles and extensive learning I've gained a deeper, more complex faith in God.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

The Beginning of Wisdom

Remember we spoke last time of how Scripture is paradoxical, of how the Bible is mainly pictorial, symbolical, and mythical and less often or seldom logical, philosophical, and scientific. Poetic utterances come forward more often than journalistic prose.

So how does this help us to understand biblical contradictions? Consider Psalms 110:10-112:1 saying "The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom..How blessed the man who fears Yahweh..." versus I John 4:7-21 saying "Beloved let us love one another, for love is from God..God is love..There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love."

First, notice that humans are "blessed" who fear God. In Scripture, to be blessed is a wondrous happiness. Obviously, the writer isn't dealing with the kind of fear that we often think of when we use the word today. When a person says he has a fear of terrorism, he is not "blessed."

Second consider a rather simplistic analogy: I both fear and love the Grand Canyon. I've never cringed toward the Canyon; that is not what I mean by fearing the Canyon. Rather, when I was on one of my many trips into the Grand Canyon backpacking, I had to crawl across several rocks slides and move along a trail only as wide as a large book and slanted toward a cliff which plummeted straight down over 1,000 feet!

The wind was blowing, yanking on my 60-pound backpack. Let me tell you, I was aware of the awesome danger--that this was real not some virtual game or safe tourist area. I feared the Canyon!

Yet contradictorily, I loved the Canyon. Few times in my life have I ever felt so in love with any place, any scene. To descend down dangerous trails, being able to look back geologically millions of years and outward visually for miles and miles, the vista so vast that I almost ended in ecstatic awe!

Extrapolate this basic example to fearing and loving Absolute Goodness, Total Truth, Ultimate Reality. Fearing and loving God are complimentary responses/actions. Ecstatic awe and deep intimate relationship with the Eternal are together as one. At least that is Jesus' view.

When I John writes that there is no "fear in love" he isn't speaking of absolute awe. Rather the writer is saying that an individual who responds to God's love will no longer have a cringing kind of fear of God. He or she will live in the Beloved.

Consider this modern version of these scriptural passages: "The Love of God is the beginning of wisdom."

In the Light of God,

Daniel Wilcox