Religious faith as a human creation

[Snowfire]

After reading many religious threads here over the years, it struck me that many here and before have very different interpretations on religious belief. I'm sure that's not just my own analysis. Trying to comprehend the vast differences between those that worship the same God, as many differences as there are posters on the subject, is to say the least very confusing.

As a result I asked Spot if I could pin down exactly how he viewed God and his own faith ......

John. Having followed some of the debates in the religious threads, I'm fascinated with your particular Christian belief. Having only ever really been exposed to the middle of the road Christianity that I was taught in Sunday school, or the "Fear of God, fire and brimstone" versions often found here, I'd like to examine you're thoughts and how it differs from most of those here.

I'd like to start a thread - if you think it's appropriate - but I'm not sure how to activate such a debate. Would it be fair to suggest that your Christianity isn't "conventional" ? Id like to explore the differences

Paul


He very kindly agreed for me to start a thread......

I think it's an accepted middle-of-the-road approach to Christianity, actually. If you have a quick look at the summary of Don Cupitt, for example, and The Sea Of Faith movement, you'll see it's bedded firmly in the present Anglican church and has an explicit history over at least the last century. I may be odd but I'm not out on a limb. I doubt whether anything I've written on FG about faith or history or God would be considered peculiar in those circles. I doubt whether I'm capable of having invented my opinions in a vacuum, it takes genius to achieve that.

By all means base a thread on God being a changeable human subjective interpretation of reality - start it with these two PMs if you like, that would establish the groundwork. I'll happily join in.

John.


Having had a cursory look at the links he gave, it appears to me to be philosophical as well as religious, which is not a view I had come across before but one I would have thought would contradict the beliefs of the traditional, for example 'a fully demythologized version of Christianity'. Certainly the traditional view is, is that Christianity is certainly not man-made but given to them by God.



Quoted from http://www.sofn.org.uk/sof/who_we_are.html

God has no ‘real’, objective or empirical existence, independent of human language and culture; God is ‘real’ in the sense that he is a potent symbol, metaphor or projection, but He has no objective existence outside and beyond the practice of religion.


Its sort of what I had gleaned from Spots posts in the past and why I asked the question

[Ahso!]

I've also found Spot's representation of religion intriguing because its not dogmatic or rigid. I'm presently of the opinion that religion in some form and a representation of God is necessary for human unity and this one is about the best I've come across. Morality and values have to be the cornerstone of any religious grouping because they are uniquely human but they must be very tolerant and flexible in order to encompass a wide variety of opinions as well as circumstances.

Personally, I'm satisfied with no God at all. It fits me fine but I've been having a lot of internal debate regarding morality with where and how it can serve to unify rather than be used to divide individually.

[spot]

I apologise for any perceived Messianic tone in this post and for its unusual length, nothing here is The Truth, it's just dialogue in a thread.

The good news is that there's a lot everyone can agree to whether they're atheist, Christian, fundamentalist or - I nearly said alien but let's not assume alien, let's stick to people.

Here's a paragraph I take to be unassailably true: people since long ago have had a word equivalent to "God" which has invariably had the implication of referring to a cause, to the reason things have happened. Some of those people have left records of what they or their society said about God, in the form of stories and philosophical speculation. The stories and the philosophies, taken together, are contradictory. Each coherent collection of stories and philosophies is a religion.

Now if anyone would like to say no, that paragraph contains an inaccurate statement, we need to work on it before agreeing we have a workable common ground from which we can extrapolate. I'll assume for now the paragraph is true and I have a meaning of "God", as a word, which we can all use in good faith regardless of what else it means to each of us individually.

I want three more words and again I spell them out so we can all use them in common. What people sense, the smell and taste and feel and sound and appearance of their surroundings, is the experienced world. How they understand this sensory world, the common assumptions and imaginative hypotheses and the theories they develop, is the interpreted world. The underlying invisible physical components they experience and interpret is the real world. However close the experience and however powerful the interpretation, neither is real. The experience is invariably subjective and personal regardless of how closely it's measured. The interpretation is only a model of reality, invariably flawed and capable of improvement or replacement.

Philosophy ought to say that if this and this are true then that and that follow. There's no belief involved, there's solely speculation which is recognised as depending on the assumptions started with. If it's good philosophy it doesn't cheat by picking different word meanings from one step to the next, too.

Belief, on the other hand, unlike philosophy, doesn't start with a recognition that its initial statements are assumptions. Belief starts with statements which are dogmatically undeniable. What develops through belief is a set of dogmatic conclusions. Worse still when the desired conclusion is already known, a belief system backtracks and discovers what initial statements are required in order to construct the belief as a logical whole. It then pronounces the bedrock and produces the logical steps as justification for its rightness.

Interpretations of the world invariably rest on assumptions. Belief exists only when the real world has been revealed directly, without interpretation of the senses. People can't achieve such revelation.

Some people believe God can. They take our commonly agreed definition of the word "God" and extend it. It's no longer the cause and reason things happen, it's capable of revealing the real world directly. That capability transforms God from a commonly shared word into a dogmatic article of belief. People saying "I don't believe in" are making a statement about belief. It's very confusing because besides God as a dogmatic article of belief there's the original statement I made about God which everyone agrees with. "I don't believe in" doesn't negate that original unassailable truth. Separating those two uses of the word is essential.

The strand of religions (those coherent collections of stories and philosophies) which developed into Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Mormons has an early underlying dogmatic assumption that God is omnipotent. Many other religions don't share that assumption but those all do from their shared origin. They also have a deep-rooted assumption that God is good. The tension between those two inherently incompatible foundations has led to outrageously twisted dogmatic consequences, not the least of which are redemption, judgement, salvation and consequently damnation, all of which were worked out by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and shored up by subsequent apologists.

Many of these philosophical outrages can be abandoned in Christianity by rejecting the validity of belief as a means of interpreting the religion, of going back to that common ground definition of God. Rejecting belief as a valid practise isn't a rejection of Christianity, it's a way forward. What it leaves is a technique for exploring history, experiencing God as an aspect of the interpreted world rather than an externally imposed revelation and living a holy life without the distorting lens of an omnipotent creator.

[Snowfire]

So if God is just a non-real, potent symbol, he doesnt need to be the Hell and Damnation of the Old Testament but anything you want him to be. He just symbolises the philosophical religious faith and rejects the dark, menacing judgmental God that, say, a fundamentalist would insist one should worship of fear the fires of Hell ?

From http://www.sofn.org.uk/sof/who_we_are.html

Non-realism therefore entails a rejection of all supernaturalism - miracles, afterlife and the agency of spirits.


I've always had a problem with miracles. I could never fathom that a God would allow an earthquake to kill a thousand men, women and children, only to allow us to bask in his glory for allowing one child to survive...."It's a miracle !"

So does it also reject the concept of Creation ? Its fair to suggest that creating the world in 6 days is supernatural

Would it also suggest that Jesus, the son of God, by default would , if he existed, be nothing more than an extraordinary man in an extraordinary time ?

[spot]

Every question there is essentially related to religious mysticism which, in Christianity, is a trip well signposted by a whole stack of previous practitioners. It's a mental exploration of the inner space of the experienced world and the consequent development of a personal interpreted world. It's where "your mileage may vary" is all you can be certain of. One observes, one participates, one experiences and one interprets. As in anything else, one never reaches reality. Being equipped beforehand with a basic set of Christian ideals (or Jewish ideals, or Muslim ideals - I hesitate to mention the Mormons again) the Practise Of The Presence Of God changes the practitioner and consequently affects his way of life. And, of course, that changed behaviour feeds back into the mysticism, neither can have an independent existence.

I said it was well signposted so I needn't speak solely from a personal perspective, all I need say is that whatever unreachable unknowable reality actually is, it doesn't contradict at an observable level the interpreted world one unfolds. When it contradicts scientific finding at an observable level then science throws out the old weakened paradigm and adopts a better model capable of conforming to observation. Not being a cutting-edge Nobel-candidate research mystic I've no idea whether a post-Christian religious paradigm will eventually evolve through such a contradiction but I've no reason to think that the Christian life is any better or worse than the equivalent Jewish or Muslim experience. What I'm sure of is that they differ while bearing deep similarity, from which I'd guess that a multiplicity of traditions is potentially a net gain. Hard though it might be to see why, looking at the world today.

What the signposts indicate in those traditions is that faith changes the world. Not just through any change in behaviour but the world itself. The only meaningful interpretation I've ever found is that each of us is the centre of the world. A Christian prays to God for, say, peace in order not that God should impose or even enable peace but that the person praying should create that peace through an act of faith. The prayer is the enabling event, the faith is the action and the otherwise powerless God is the actor. There's a great deal written in the Gospels about faith, none of it expressed in those terms but all of it equally dynamic. I'd not use the words "God is non-real" from your quote but I'd most certainly use the words "God is non-external but within you". Real is unknowable, within you is part of your experience. Is "the dark, menacing judgemental God that, say, a fundamentalist would insist one should worship or fear the fires of Hell" within the fundamentalist? One can only pray otherwise and have faith that it's not so.

As for creation, the personal manifestation I've described is simply meaningless in such a context and I'm not interested in inventing a hypothetical second God just to pull the on-switch. I'm far more confident in science eventually producing an attractive model which carries both conviction and a predictive payoff.

We're all extraordinary people, all times are extraordinary. Delving into the possible meanings of the phrase "Son of God" is societal archaeology, it held a meaning before the time of Christ's ministry, it certainly held a different one by the time Jerusalem burned, and by the time Christianity ended up holding synods to debate the Creed it wouldn't have been recognised by either bunch because they'd invented the Holy Trinity by then. Your average high-church Anglican in mid-Victorian times would have turned his nose up at any theology Jesus might have held. What remains of his actions in the written record suggest that his theology was a minor part of his life, something to which we might all aspire.