Hi Billy,if i may -- I'm still working through the thread responding, but as you have just posted and we are both online, I'll reply immediately to this...
Yep.
Absolutely. And I'm not saying that "Anglicanism" is really true in an absolute sense (if i did hold exclusivist views like that I would almost certainly not be an Anglican, a denomination which allows for a wide spectrum of beliefs). I came to theism, and then, having studied world religion academically for many years I started to think through which form of religion appeared to me to map well my perception of the truth.
I don't think any religion equates to the truth of ultimate reality: religion is by nature a human response to an ultimate reality. Every single religion on Earth could be falsified without in anyway falsifying the God(s) hypothesis. Let's take Randi as God for a moment: we all have various levels of eperience of James, differing constructs of who and what he is, depending upon our experience, our understanding, our contact. Many of those are dluded, incorrect, and all are less than total understandings of the "divine Randi". Yet even James does not really understand Randi I'm guessing - and so all our attempts to understand him are doomed ot failure. They will be at best partially representative of the truth.
Ditto Christianity and the reality of God. We see through a glass, darkly. Christian theology is a model of the experience of God, one that is refined, debated, and changes as our understanding change. It's a map of ultimate reality, not the ultimate reality in itself. Perhaps because of my instrumentalist bent (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism) I'm ok with that - it's how useful the map is that concerns me. IT's not the map that gets us to the cornershop taht matters, it's the getting there, and the journey. So I decided to test the Christian hypothesis, and see how the journey went -- and the first obstacles were the incarnation, and whether it actually referred to an actual set of historical events. I believe it soes as it happens, YMMV. SO I became a Christian. I don't believe the map is the territory, but I do believe that one can test the claim made upon the map as one walks. So I don't have any faith in 2000 year old books descriptions of the geography of Jerusalem - but by walking the streets I can check out the claims, and see if they add up?
Yep, that is a fairly common evangelical belief. God never spoke to me in this way, or if he did I was listening to the
Dead Kennedys on my walkman at the time. The requirment to have a bells and angels experiential revelation is certainly stressed in some denominations - recently some lovely Mormon missionaries have been doing all they can to try and convince me that God is giving me a sign I should join their faith - but I have few religious experiences. Well I had one. I'll tell you about it actually...
I never have religious experiences, but I had one recently - well in the Summer. I am not sure if I told the story on the forum or not, but briefly - I was walking over to my mate Dave's house to help him with an essay, when a sudden rainstorm caught me and I sought shelter - in the local Charismatic Church, a place I would normally never enter (and never had before I think.) It wa spacked, and there was much singing of choruses and people touched by the Spirit, and i was sitting making mental notes comparing them to people in altered states in various animist religions and rather cynical at the back, when suddenly I saw a dove, or rather what looked like a glowing white dove, come down over the stained glass above where the altar would be if there was one (in fact it had a rather good band whose music put me in mind of the acid fuelled explorations of Jefferson Airplane more than any religious music i knew - the album
After Bathing at Baxters sprang to mind.)
Anyway the dove dove (no pun intended) towards the missing altar, in the classic iconography of the Holy Spirit descending, and I instinctively touched my eye to see if I got a double image (ie. were light photons bouncing off it or was it an internally generated hallucination) - too late. I then thought for 15 seconds and rushed back two rows to ask the guy on the mixing desk if he could replay the light projection. Nope, he insisted they had none, and I believed him. A projection on the window would have varied as it passed over the panes of glass and lead framing.
I sat around for a few minutes trying to puzzle it out, and then the sermon began, and I discovered it was Pentecost Sunday - how incredibly appropriate! I'm not exactly in tune with the liturgical year, and had not been to church for maybe a month or two - I'm fairly lax, partly owing to work habits which take me away many weekend, partly because I'm lazy - I know, I'm rubbish. [qimg]http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif[/qimg] I certainly was not consciously aware it was Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles etc).
I suppose I should have praised loudly, danced around and been impressed. In fact I was mildly confused, and stepped outside for a cigarette - great thing about "megachurches" with all that talking in tongues and dancing in the aisles - they never notice if you slip out. I noticed the rain had stopped, thought - go back in and see if I feel more, or help Dave with his essay - well I'm afraid I decided Dave's essay took priority, and I wandered off, figuring God would not mind me visiting a sick mate and helping out, and He knew where to find me if he wanted me.
Maybe it's attitudes like that which stop me having profound spiritual encounters - I was pleased, but still wonder if I somehow imagined the dove - but I don't think so. I went back on another occasion, and played with the reflections, trying to see what led to it, but without success! Still, it did not convert me in to a bouncy charismatic - not in the slightest - but I guess that is my testimony. Sorry if i told it before, and bored you by recounting it again! (I cut and pasted this from something I wrote elsewhere...)
To me the question has to be "how
much truth?" in any religion, as they can never approximate an absolute description of God and ultimate reality. There is no way of fasifying or verifying a whole map. You must test each individual aspect against reality. Some but not all of Christianity, Judiasm, Wicca etc, etc may be true. I will not accept or reject the whole thing wholesale - because i already accept it can not be a 100% accurate model of ultimate reality, but is a description of
peoples experiences of ultimate reality - I need to test the claims, each individually. So I test them against Science, Reason, Experience, and for internal consistency. You do this by exploring them, and attacking individual doctrines or beliefs. You can of course simpoly accept the experiential, put on the coat and walk in it, and many do -- but ultimately for a sceptic like me that will be a hazardous endeavour. There are too many coats, and some stink, and i may get very wet before i get to the shops...
Yes, the choice of faith is a choice: but like the chouice ot follow say Darwin, Gould, Dawkins, Lamarck, Henry Morris or Chambers on evolution, well not all all evolutionary theories are created equal - and the DArwinian-Mendelian synthesis wheter you understand it in a gradualist sense or as punctuated equilibrium is clearly closer to the truth than say Darwin's mechanism proposed in
Origin, or that of Lamarck, Chambers, or Morris the Creationist. Religious truths can be treated with critical thinking in a similar manner to scientific ones?
Dunno if any of this helps. God help me, I'll probably get called a "philosophical Christian" again! I'd actually argue I was fairly typical of most Christians, at least Anglicans?
cj x
There was a great thread on the Philosophy of Mathematics earlier this year, I'll have to try and find it and link it!
, it's always possible that each of the different paths are merely different ways for different folks to reach the divine, whatever that is.
