My 'Profession'

The term professor has become more or less another term for a teacher or lecturer and has lost its original denotation as someone who professes. Though I am not a college professor, professing is a good way to understand the prolegomena of a person and why they orient their lives the way they do. And so I profess. I have blogged for a while and have indirectly professed what I believe and how I choose to orient my life, and why. But I have not set forth a prolegomenon that may shed some light on the content of my blog. The explanation is not simple, but a life-time in the making. And the exciting part is that who I am and what I believe is plastic. There are core values that I hold to be truth, all of which derive from a valuation of people. Thus ethically, I tend to orient my thinking with the idea of the freedom of the will iterated by Kant, with a little less emphasis on reason, but depart by placing more emphasis on relationships, an idea derived from Joseph Butler's view of the conscience and a point of view held by a professor friend of mine and my wife.

Growing up in a Christian family that always attended church on a Sunday morning, my original orientation of living was a derivation of my belief that incorporated the doctrine of the Presbyterian Church (USA). God was always forefront and sovereign. Towards the end of high school the Christian-orientation did not fit with my studies and was not convincing enough for me to have faith in something I never really understood from day 1. I went through the motions, worshipped, prayed, attended functions, volunteered, and God was always the explanation for the loving community, always the explanation for fellowship, and always the excuse to withdraw from culture.

But why was God the reason for such things when I had never seen or experienced Him to my knowledge; plenty of other peace organizations and humanitarians experience the same sensation of community that I experienced at church, so what made church so different? And why was my church so obsessed with 'saving' people who did not want to be saved? It felt like I was a door-to-door salesman trying to clandestinely and underhandedly steal the souls from neighbors for a God who could have been evil for all I knew at the time, who apparently were going to hell? Why was the supernatural element to miracles always emphasized when common-day miracles (within nature) happened all the time? Church was never a reality for me growing up.

Needless to say, questions kept spawning from questions and my faith in God diminished. However, my interest remained. So what did I do? I studied Religions, learning about Buddhism, Islam, Hindu sects, Christianity, Taoism, the Ba'hai, Scientism, Capitalism, and many other -isms. Religions are characteristic of humanity and it is too bad that critics only focus on the few that make the papers. Aren't malls a contemporary place of worship for consumers?

All religions offer something valuable, a part of a universal truth, I realize. Each seeks truth but touches upon different aspects of it. Thus the plurality of the world seeks truth from certain points of view (not to be too confused as a relativistic view of life).

Conversion experiences, talking in tongues, meditating, shamanistic passages, rituals, et al are not only anthropological observations of culture, but are examples of a human striving for passion. In an intellectual age where objectivity rules the day, people find themselves longing to feel. In fact I read an article just the other day in a magazine that articulated the rising rate of teenagers especially who cut themselves to feel or to lower stress. Thus, objectivity may be an effective research method for causality (not to be confused with determinism), but it does not define human nature.

Religion tends to represent a creative and artistic humanity in search of truth and the answer to the world's 'why' questions. The artists, for me, are those that realize and experience truth and thus, for me, all of art is religious art and reveals much more about human nature than does objective studies.

Human nature is not inherently evil or corrupted as I had grown up being taught. My conscience and my free will remind me that I have a choice and the ability to decipher right from wrong (using my conscience), which does not appear to me to be something completely corrupted or 'fallen' as most Christians say. The 'fall' was not complete.

Secondly, I believe in a God so powerful that he limits himself by not directly interfering with human activity. Think about it. Without choice, then none of us really has the ability to truly love, nor the ability to make decisions on our own. But we do. But this lends another question: Does God create morality or is morality something that transcends God, or rather something in nature? I do not dare presume to underestimate the power of a deity too much because of His notably cosmic qualities and so cannot use the famous C.S. Lewis analogy that God cannot make a circle-square, because both a circle and a square are categorizations that human beings have attached to the shapes. Would this not be putting God to the test (using biblical terms)?

Thus it follows that I have adapted a view of process philosophy and theology that expresses the idea of the dynamic and changing world. God did not create once, he still creates in and through nature and still exists in nature. He does not directly interfere with actions but is a whisper in nature that sustains life and influences decisions (perhaps by means of his gift of the conscience).

But why believe in a God at all? or why orient myself as a Christian? To these questions, I will never have a sure answer in this life-time. But at present God is a reality because love is a reality, life is a reality, my experience is a reality. None of these I can truly explain and so neither is less true than another. It makes no sense that life accidently spawned from conditions so perfect that it was able to come into existence. But despite this, why does nature, does life adapt and evolve? Why is change and process so characteristic of nature? Why is life constantly trying to evolve into something more able to survive? Survival of the fittest mentality does not fly with me and nor does 'because God made it that way.' And so the idea of a creator is just as possible as a deterministic reason set forth by natural evolutionists or objective cosmologists rather.

Christianity is attractive because of my study and because of my experience. The bible is invaluable as a metaphorical and hyperbolic book that expresses so much truth. It was a book compiled by a community in process of becoming during different paradigms in history. It is a work of art, it is myth. Though the passages, when referring to 'God's right hand,' are obviously metaphorical as God, the Father is not human and so does not have a right hand. But this leads to more inquiries of other passages which may or may not be metaphorical or hyperbolic or expressive of a certain idea. To literally read scripture is dangerous especially when numbers are involved because many of the numbers represent perfect numbers within a particular culture or within the Christianity or Judaism of the time. For instance, did God create the world in a literal 6 days resting on the 7th? No. What is a day? And does it matter how long it took, whether millions of years or a few thousand? Not really. It changes nothing for me. In fact a million years is much more interesting.

Christianity is attractive because of its intellectual challenge as well as its life challenge. Many Christians are willing to dialogue about issues in community and wrestle with challenges of biblical interpretation or experience. The willingness to accept all and the forefront priortiy to help those on the margins satisfies my valuation of people. But Buddhism is attractive as well, and in fact I have adopted much meditation technique into my prayer and contemplative prayer life (which is essential to knowing the self as well as communicating with something greater than the self).

I do not believe in Hell or the Devil/Satan/The Evil One (because I find it more a metaphor for an embodiment of evil). Evil comes from wrong choices (whether ignorant or deliberate). The Devil versus God just adds to the dualism that permeates modernity.

I haven't talked about Christ yet. Christ is hard to talk about because I oftentimes find it hard to have faith in Christ, while not as much having faith in God. But I can relate to Christ and I admire his orientation of living. Each gospel portrays a different picture of Christ placing more emphasis on various characteristics. But which characteristics are accurate? Perhaps it does not really matter. It did not matter for the people who wrote the gospels or other letters and books uncanonized. Relaying a message to a specific audience is what really mattered so that the message would talk to and reveal something to that community. Whether Cosmic Christ, the historical Jesus, his identity as a Jewish rabbi, his actions in life made the difference. His words are important and they ring true, but his actions in correspondence with his words (his holistic orientation) are significant. To live is to act, not just to think. Christ actively taught, preached, and died, when understood in light of the cross, reveals much about not only his cosmic identity, but in his humanity, much about human nature. The Christ 'myth,' I use this lightly and probably ill-placed, has had some impact on humanity which still professes the faith two centuries later. There is a power in paradox, which I am still wrestling to understand and will continue to do so.

This is just a start...to be continued