1
My purpose in this blog thread is to offer some thoughts upon the topic: Faith without Religion.
Why? So many people are not being engaged by various communities of faith for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be helpful to some to create a "liminal" space outside of official religion language for persons to reflect upon the impediments that they have experienced in their participation in religious communities or in the observance of members of various communities of faith, particularly the official spokespersons and authorities of faith communities. Further, can persons in this "liminal" space ponder some "correspondences" with persons of faith and religious communities that might pertain to universal aspirations for justice, love, beauty and ethical and moral practices that might be shared, no matter what one's valued commitments are in life?
Why use the word "faith" without religion instead of the more popular "spirituality" instead of religion? ("I'm spiritual, not religious movement") I choose the word "faith" because it seems to me to be less metaphorically removed from actual human practice. How so? Spiritual deriving from "spirit" involves the metaphor of breath or wind to describe an inner invisible essence of the human interior. Since no one can see "spirit" but place a metaphor in place of the invisible it seems to me a bit more removed from accessible grasp for broader communication. Spirit and spirituality can imply many preconceived notions of the geography of the human interior life. My perception of the "I'm spiritual" movement tends to be heavy upon individualism and embraced as a deliberate way to avoid community participation and it is easier to be a "quietist" politically if one is spending a good portion of personal time "contemplating" one's navel (to exaggerate a tendency to see spirituality as a result of disillusionment with other people because of contacts in churches and other group projects).
I find faith to be reflective of more accessible human practice. But I use faith as it found in the Greek word usage for pistos in Aristotle's Rhetoric. pistos is also the New Testament Greek word for "faith" or "belief," and while its usage in koine Greek of the New Testament drifted from the functional use of pistos in Aristotle's Rhetoric, there is a kernel of meaning which connects both its use in Aristotle and in the New Testament. What is the goal of rhetoric in Aristotle's title of the same? pistos. And what does pistos mean in Aristotle's rhetoric? Persuasion. The goal of rhetoric is persuasion. Persuasion involves being volitionally committed to something such that it drives one's life actions. And how is this reflective of the New Testament pistos? To have faith in Christ, to believe in Christ is to have come to a place of persuasion about Christ.
I find the notion of persuasion to be more accessible to a greater number of people than the notion of "spirit" or "spirituality," because no one in life escapes the situation of being persuaded by privileged values which motivates one's life actions. One may be passively persuaded by mob and herd participation and not conscious of how one has reached persuasion to be expressed in one's action, but it would seem that no one escapes being a "persuaded person" of some sort. The questions remain are how is one persuaded and about what is one persuaded and what are the ethical consequences of living out those values about which one is persuaded.
So, I find it more useful to say that everyone lives a "persuaded" life in some way than to say everyone is "spiritual" or everyone has a spirit, since the latter assumes a certain essential inner psychological mapping that may not be embraced by everyone.
I hope you can see how I would make the case for all persons having "faith" without religion and this can lead to the inter-dialogue between the relative adequacy of the many different "faith" perspectives. Can one make the case about the adequacy of what one regards to be worthy of being persuaded.
2
Many people have come to think that they can live without religion, without active participation in a religious faith community. However, people cannot live without faith, faith as I defined it using the definition of Aristotle in his use of the same Greek word for "faith" as is used in the New Testament. Faith is that which one is persuaded about and no one lives without persuasion about what motivates the acting and thinking and speaking of one's life. One may be more intentionally connected with what one regards to be one's persuasion or one may live in passive unreflecting ways about the outcomes of one's persuasion in one's behaviors, actions, thinking and speaking.
Some people live just ignoring religion in their lives; others are so distressed by religion that they become persuaded to be become evangelical about resisting or erasing the effects of religion in society. They in fact live, persuaded by the need to resist what they regard to be detrimental to their vision of an enlightened humanity; they are driven to resist religion and its effect.
For the resisters to religions and their effects, resisting instantiate the power of religion in the lives of the resisters. It is almost like having one's life center around a negative, like a terminable disease. One begins to define one's life by the negative toward what one is resisting rather than celebrating a lost enlightened positive because one's image is formed by being in a "war" against an enemy. Chesterton said, "If there were no God, there could be no atheists." This highlights the sea change which has to occur in language, since in the normal use of the word God, the word approximates how Anselm defined God, as "the one than which no greater can be conceived." An atheist, has to grieve the entrance of the word God into the human vocabulary as a meaningless concept and use logic to show the inconsistency with which the word as been hypocritically used by persons to profess religious faith.
But are other "God-oid" words functioning in a meaningfully significant ways for people who have faith but not religion? We use the word "universe" as a meaningful notion but we cannot prove that there is "one world," since we cannot prove a world outside of our own anthropocentric musings. We use the word infinity as though it was meaningful and when we add the notion of time, then infinity would include the not yet, or the dot, dot,dot,dot........, the "to be continued" sense of everything.
It could be that people of "secular" faith, i.e., alternate persuasions to religious faith, are perturbed that people of religious faith live and hold traditions that have come to language and culture and societies which claim to have a precise knowledge about things which cannot be proven by the methods which have come to predominate in scientific inquiry. And instead of being "humble" about their "revelations," people of religious faith come to take pride in the obvious violation of their revelations to the most brilliant way to actuarial probability living, namely, the methods of science. The methods of science fleshed out what once was just regarded to be "common sense" and "naive realism" in very systematic ways so that replication of experience and predictability could be enhanced in actual planning one's life for the future.
Just as secular people of faith have come to have their lives dominated by their resistance to people of religious faith in living out degrees of obsession to rid this world of religions and religious influences, so too religious people of faith have come to have their lives dominated by secular skeptics of religious faith. One might even say that the threat of secular faith, especially the scientific method in becoming definitive of what "pragmatic truth" is, has made religious people take on an inferiority complex. Science and modernity have challenged the precision of "revelation" knowledge of religious people. People in the Middle Age were given precise knowledge about the afterlife of purgatory even while they did not know the actual existence of Tokyo. But as Enlightenment and world travel became actual empirical experience, suddenly people from Europe could know and get to Tokyo, even while there began to grow a skepticism about any precise knowledge of an afterlife place of purgatory.
What came to be questioned was the credibility of Holy Books and their contents. And if the scientific method became the very model of what really is pragmatically true, then what happens to the "revealed truths" of Holy Books?
Faced with an inferiority complex due to the success of the scientific method, many religionists came to accept the truth of science, which is in effect, the truth of empirical verification. Something is only meaningfully truth, if and only if it can be empirically verified. So, religionists began to argue that all things Scriptural were true because they "could have been empirically verified," even though most of the incidences that they held could have been and were verified (according to witnesses in Holy Book accounts) had to be relegated to "unique, one time occurrences. This eludes the empirical practice of something being able to be repeated and replicated, given similar conditions.
Religionists in awe of the truth and the pragmatic industrial outcomes of science, which they integrated into their everyday lives for ease of living through machines and technology, began to defend the Bible and its stories as though they were "scientific, empirically verifiable" events and this gave rise to what has come to be "biblical fundamentalism," or sometimes just called "biblical literalism." The fundamentals had to do with making Christian poetry into science. The efficacy of the actual blood of Jesus cleansing from sins. The biological empirically verifiable Virgin birth. The treating of the words of the Bible as inerrant and directly inspired, almost to the degree of believing that the words of the Bible caused the world to be as we know it to be, in a causatively absolute way. In an ironic way, fundamentalists believe the Bible in a similar way as do Muslims about the Qur'an, namely, the Bible is regarded to be the "uncreated" Word of God, presuming it did not get filtered or anthropomorphically altered by being delivered through imperfect human beings. What fundamentalism denies is that interpretation happened in the coming to language of the biblical words. They assume that there is one singular correct interpretation of those same biblical words and presume to have the insider knowledge of one correct interpretation, (wink, wink, I have the Spirit and you don't so I know that true and singular meaning of the Bible). There is a very naive belief that the meaning of biblical words are magically "self evidential" to those who really have the Spirit. Ironically, there are myriads of "fundamentalist" groups to disprove the exact and precise self-evidentiality of biblical words, and so one must assume a very oxymoronic notion of there being many "Spirits" of fundamentalism who are leading to variety of interpretations of the the Bible. Another tenet of fundamentalism is that the apocalyptic words of the Bible refer to an exact predicted future and lots of fundamentalism today is really an apocalyptic fatalism in wishing for a quick end of the world when Jesus will return and establish "them" as the true good guys who knew and were elect and had it correct all the while. It is a kind of prideful spiritual elitism of knowing more and better than anyone else. The apocalyptic fatalism of fundamentalism results in behaviors of abhorring this world: God doesn't really love the "fallen world" of our beautiful environment since this earth ship is going to be abandoned in favor of a new heaven and earth. There is no reason for environmental stewardship in the apocalyptic fatalism of fundamentalism; only domination and exploitive use while we wait for this earthly ship to be abandoned.
My purpose in this blog thread is to offer some thoughts upon the topic: Faith without Religion.
Why? So many people are not being engaged by various communities of faith for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be helpful to some to create a "liminal" space outside of official religion language for persons to reflect upon the impediments that they have experienced in their participation in religious communities or in the observance of members of various communities of faith, particularly the official spokespersons and authorities of faith communities. Further, can persons in this "liminal" space ponder some "correspondences" with persons of faith and religious communities that might pertain to universal aspirations for justice, love, beauty and ethical and moral practices that might be shared, no matter what one's valued commitments are in life?
Why use the word "faith" without religion instead of the more popular "spirituality" instead of religion? ("I'm spiritual, not religious movement") I choose the word "faith" because it seems to me to be less metaphorically removed from actual human practice. How so? Spiritual deriving from "spirit" involves the metaphor of breath or wind to describe an inner invisible essence of the human interior. Since no one can see "spirit" but place a metaphor in place of the invisible it seems to me a bit more removed from accessible grasp for broader communication. Spirit and spirituality can imply many preconceived notions of the geography of the human interior life. My perception of the "I'm spiritual" movement tends to be heavy upon individualism and embraced as a deliberate way to avoid community participation and it is easier to be a "quietist" politically if one is spending a good portion of personal time "contemplating" one's navel (to exaggerate a tendency to see spirituality as a result of disillusionment with other people because of contacts in churches and other group projects).
I find faith to be reflective of more accessible human practice. But I use faith as it found in the Greek word usage for pistos in Aristotle's Rhetoric. pistos is also the New Testament Greek word for "faith" or "belief," and while its usage in koine Greek of the New Testament drifted from the functional use of pistos in Aristotle's Rhetoric, there is a kernel of meaning which connects both its use in Aristotle and in the New Testament. What is the goal of rhetoric in Aristotle's title of the same? pistos. And what does pistos mean in Aristotle's rhetoric? Persuasion. The goal of rhetoric is persuasion. Persuasion involves being volitionally committed to something such that it drives one's life actions. And how is this reflective of the New Testament pistos? To have faith in Christ, to believe in Christ is to have come to a place of persuasion about Christ.
I find the notion of persuasion to be more accessible to a greater number of people than the notion of "spirit" or "spirituality," because no one in life escapes the situation of being persuaded by privileged values which motivates one's life actions. One may be passively persuaded by mob and herd participation and not conscious of how one has reached persuasion to be expressed in one's action, but it would seem that no one escapes being a "persuaded person" of some sort. The questions remain are how is one persuaded and about what is one persuaded and what are the ethical consequences of living out those values about which one is persuaded.
So, I find it more useful to say that everyone lives a "persuaded" life in some way than to say everyone is "spiritual" or everyone has a spirit, since the latter assumes a certain essential inner psychological mapping that may not be embraced by everyone.
2
Many people have come to think that they can live without religion, without active participation in a religious faith community. However, people cannot live without faith, faith as I defined it using the definition of Aristotle in his use of the same Greek word for "faith" as is used in the New Testament. Faith is that which one is persuaded about and no one lives without persuasion about what motivates the acting and thinking and speaking of one's life. One may be more intentionally connected with what one regards to be one's persuasion or one may live in passive unreflecting ways about the outcomes of one's persuasion in one's behaviors, actions, thinking and speaking.
Some people live just ignoring religion in their lives; others are so distressed by religion that they become persuaded to be become evangelical about resisting or erasing the effects of religion in society. They in fact live, persuaded by the need to resist what they regard to be detrimental to their vision of an enlightened humanity; they are driven to resist religion and its effect.
For the resisters to religions and their effects, resisting instantiate the power of religion in the lives of the resisters. It is almost like having one's life center around a negative, like a terminable disease. One begins to define one's life by the negative toward what one is resisting rather than celebrating a lost enlightened positive because one's image is formed by being in a "war" against an enemy. Chesterton said, "If there were no God, there could be no atheists." This highlights the sea change which has to occur in language, since in the normal use of the word God, the word approximates how Anselm defined God, as "the one than which no greater can be conceived." An atheist, has to grieve the entrance of the word God into the human vocabulary as a meaningless concept and use logic to show the inconsistency with which the word as been hypocritically used by persons to profess religious faith.
But are other "God-oid" words functioning in a meaningfully significant ways for people who have faith but not religion? We use the word "universe" as a meaningful notion but we cannot prove that there is "one world," since we cannot prove a world outside of our own anthropocentric musings. We use the word infinity as though it was meaningful and when we add the notion of time, then infinity would include the not yet, or the dot, dot,dot,dot........, the "to be continued" sense of everything.
It could be that people of "secular" faith, i.e., alternate persuasions to religious faith, are perturbed that people of religious faith live and hold traditions that have come to language and culture and societies which claim to have a precise knowledge about things which cannot be proven by the methods which have come to predominate in scientific inquiry. And instead of being "humble" about their "revelations," people of religious faith come to take pride in the obvious violation of their revelations to the most brilliant way to actuarial probability living, namely, the methods of science. The methods of science fleshed out what once was just regarded to be "common sense" and "naive realism" in very systematic ways so that replication of experience and predictability could be enhanced in actual planning one's life for the future.
Just as secular people of faith have come to have their lives dominated by their resistance to people of religious faith in living out degrees of obsession to rid this world of religions and religious influences, so too religious people of faith have come to have their lives dominated by secular skeptics of religious faith. One might even say that the threat of secular faith, especially the scientific method in becoming definitive of what "pragmatic truth" is, has made religious people take on an inferiority complex. Science and modernity have challenged the precision of "revelation" knowledge of religious people. People in the Middle Age were given precise knowledge about the afterlife of purgatory even while they did not know the actual existence of Tokyo. But as Enlightenment and world travel became actual empirical experience, suddenly people from Europe could know and get to Tokyo, even while there began to grow a skepticism about any precise knowledge of an afterlife place of purgatory.
What came to be questioned was the credibility of Holy Books and their contents. And if the scientific method became the very model of what really is pragmatically true, then what happens to the "revealed truths" of Holy Books?
Faced with an inferiority complex due to the success of the scientific method, many religionists came to accept the truth of science, which is in effect, the truth of empirical verification. Something is only meaningfully truth, if and only if it can be empirically verified. So, religionists began to argue that all things Scriptural were true because they "could have been empirically verified," even though most of the incidences that they held could have been and were verified (according to witnesses in Holy Book accounts) had to be relegated to "unique, one time occurrences. This eludes the empirical practice of something being able to be repeated and replicated, given similar conditions.
Religionists in awe of the truth and the pragmatic industrial outcomes of science, which they integrated into their everyday lives for ease of living through machines and technology, began to defend the Bible and its stories as though they were "scientific, empirically verifiable" events and this gave rise to what has come to be "biblical fundamentalism," or sometimes just called "biblical literalism." The fundamentals had to do with making Christian poetry into science. The efficacy of the actual blood of Jesus cleansing from sins. The biological empirically verifiable Virgin birth. The treating of the words of the Bible as inerrant and directly inspired, almost to the degree of believing that the words of the Bible caused the world to be as we know it to be, in a causatively absolute way. In an ironic way, fundamentalists believe the Bible in a similar way as do Muslims about the Qur'an, namely, the Bible is regarded to be the "uncreated" Word of God, presuming it did not get filtered or anthropomorphically altered by being delivered through imperfect human beings. What fundamentalism denies is that interpretation happened in the coming to language of the biblical words. They assume that there is one singular correct interpretation of those same biblical words and presume to have the insider knowledge of one correct interpretation, (wink, wink, I have the Spirit and you don't so I know that true and singular meaning of the Bible). There is a very naive belief that the meaning of biblical words are magically "self evidential" to those who really have the Spirit. Ironically, there are myriads of "fundamentalist" groups to disprove the exact and precise self-evidentiality of biblical words, and so one must assume a very oxymoronic notion of there being many "Spirits" of fundamentalism who are leading to variety of interpretations of the the Bible. Another tenet of fundamentalism is that the apocalyptic words of the Bible refer to an exact predicted future and lots of fundamentalism today is really an apocalyptic fatalism in wishing for a quick end of the world when Jesus will return and establish "them" as the true good guys who knew and were elect and had it correct all the while. It is a kind of prideful spiritual elitism of knowing more and better than anyone else. The apocalyptic fatalism of fundamentalism results in behaviors of abhorring this world: God doesn't really love the "fallen world" of our beautiful environment since this earth ship is going to be abandoned in favor of a new heaven and earth. There is no reason for environmental stewardship in the apocalyptic fatalism of fundamentalism; only domination and exploitive use while we wait for this earthly ship to be abandoned.
The public dominance of "fundamentalism" of religions in thinking and in practice has come to be the "faith" and the "belief" in God that most agnostic and skeptics of religious faith cite as the reason for their non-belief, atheism and general skepticism of all religion. Most atheism which comes to writing consists of cataloging the bad behaviors and the bad thinking of people who calls themselves people of religious faith and belief in God.
To explore the divide between people of religious faith and people of secular faith we will next explore some of the many examples cited regarding the bad behaviors and bad thinking of religious people, which includes their own inconsistencies within their own traditions particularly regarding significant "scientific" innovations like the switch from flat earth to round earth and "social innovations" of the modern world regarding issues like slavery and the subjugation of women.
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