I started by praying about hope. It is the grace I think of least, but the one I most often feel. Love and faith are rare experiences for me, and they normarlly come together. Normally I do feel hope though even when I am not particularly loving or faithful. I always want to be loving and helpful.
Hope is possible with doubt. Doubt is incompatible with faith and hope. Because of this hope can exist throughout anything, even when I am doubting, and for me it has been a most useful gifts.
Thinking about faith, I am often faithless. I often do not have a sense of God's existence, but I know that faith is the key to my live. I could not go on living without it as a basis for how I live. The complaint against faith is that it is allows the acceptance of certainty for things we cannot be certain. It is an epistemology that can be anti-reason. I stress that no one can say it is essentially anti-reason. You can make faithful arguments that are reasonable. For example, I might by faith come to the idea that the sun will raise tomorrow. This would not conflict with reason. I would go as far as saying that reason needs a faith of some sort.
Faith is saying "it is as it is" without needing any further proof other than something that some have described as a feeling or intuition. If someone said how can you believe in God when your notion of God is unprovable. My answer would be that God is as He is. And many would say that it is not acceptable.
But let me ask the atheist why he is atheist, and he will say that it is wrong to believe in God because the belief in God is untrue. Then I might ask, "What is the value of truth?" One might say the truth is inherently valuable, which is an "it is as it is" argument. If we try to give a reason we might say that the truth helps us to do develop better survival strategies, and if the strategies help us to live or to pass on genes, as we have been designed by evolution to do, then I would say why does that matter? Even if we only exist because of the evolution of genes, this does not say anything other than we exist by chance. There is then no inherent good, and if there is no inherent good, then there is no value and if there is no value then the truth is not valuable. Besides, religion might make my life easier and might help me in terms of survival, and then be just as valuable as any truth. So then the atheist does not really have an argument.
Love is all that really matters. I have faith in this.
Friday, 14 November 2008
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Pascal's wager
Pascal's wager has seemed to me to be extremely logical for an extremely long time. It is true that if God does not exist then it does not matter what we do because life is due merely to chance and therefore is meaningless and random. But if God does exist then following his laws is obviously the right thing to do. Some people have complained that even though this is logical to an extent, it is still not possible to have faith from a theory like this as faith is a gift. Also belief very rarely comes about by logical postulations. We only believe things that we are capable of accepting by our environmental conditioning. I believe that the an atheist would not be convinced by such a logical argument because faith is outside of their mental concepts. To have faith for people like these is nothing more than miraculous. Ultimately the problem with Pascal's wager is that which tenets of which God should we follow? The Catholic, the Protestant, the Islamic, the Buddhist, the Vedic? In other words even if we accept that it is better to live assuming that God exists because you do not lose anything by doing so but you may gain something. However, we cannot logically choose which god by reason. That is a gift either of faith or environment.
Thursday, 3 July 2008
Adam and the Cave
After the fall, when Adam had eaten the fruit that Eve had given him, and the knowledge between good and evil could be understood, Adam cursed God, “Heavenly Being, why did you create this rebellious spirit, this snake to tempt my love? And why did you give me such a being that I should love and obey and therefore sin against you? Would it not have been better when the world was being created and you saw what had happened that I had never been created?”
God spoke, “I value freedom. Do not ask me why, that is a mystery you must discover in relationship to me, but to even try to be in relationship with me you must understand that in order for me to love you, you must be capable of loving back, and for you to love Me, you must be free. Freedom and love are part of one being, just as you are body and soul. Because love is what I am, and freedom is necessary for love, then freedom is ultimately good.”
Adam cried, “But love is so painful and freedom so frightening, Father! Love asks so much. This rebellious spirit in within me, the snake that has crawled into my bosom, tells me that I should be afraid of love. I don’t know if I want this freedom.”
Adam took Eve by the hand and went away from the Garden, and outside the Garden they discovered a Cave. Adam said to Eve, “Let us stay here, away from the beautiful garden, the garden that always reminds us that we are not God. Here in the darkness of the cave we can live and multiply and eat whatever the rains wash into the cave and gobble up whatever animals seek shelter here. It will be difficult to find the food, and we will have to feel and scratch in the dirt, but hopefully our eyes will become accustomed to the darkness.”
“I don’t know if I want to become accustomed to the darkness. Can’t we just go back? You saw how God looked at us. He still loves us; it was clear to me by the way he spoke and moved towards us and looked at us. If we go back, he may forgive us. I am so sorry to listen to the snake.”
“You can go back if you like, but to accept his forgiveness is to accept another thing from Him!”
“But he is freedom! I would go but I am too afraid to leave you. I do not think I can go to him on my own. It makes little sense to be there without you.”
“Don’t pretend that you love me, after the way you lead me here, the way you tempted me!”
“ I do love you in some way. But at that moment, with the snake, I had forgotten who God was. I thought I wanted to be God, forgetting that I was already created in his image and likeness.”
“How so?"
" I think it is in our capacity to love. My heart feels like it grasp hold of all infinity. This heart is like God's heart, our love is like God's love."
" We will forget what the love of God was like. Our eyes are already growing used to the darkness.”
“ For now I still remember his Love, and I know he will come into this cave, and bring us back to the Garden. I shall be the first to see it.”
“ I am hungry, and cold and we must scratch and dig in the dirt to find something in the darkness of this cave.”
God spoke, “I value freedom. Do not ask me why, that is a mystery you must discover in relationship to me, but to even try to be in relationship with me you must understand that in order for me to love you, you must be capable of loving back, and for you to love Me, you must be free. Freedom and love are part of one being, just as you are body and soul. Because love is what I am, and freedom is necessary for love, then freedom is ultimately good.”
Adam cried, “But love is so painful and freedom so frightening, Father! Love asks so much. This rebellious spirit in within me, the snake that has crawled into my bosom, tells me that I should be afraid of love. I don’t know if I want this freedom.”
Adam took Eve by the hand and went away from the Garden, and outside the Garden they discovered a Cave. Adam said to Eve, “Let us stay here, away from the beautiful garden, the garden that always reminds us that we are not God. Here in the darkness of the cave we can live and multiply and eat whatever the rains wash into the cave and gobble up whatever animals seek shelter here. It will be difficult to find the food, and we will have to feel and scratch in the dirt, but hopefully our eyes will become accustomed to the darkness.”
“I don’t know if I want to become accustomed to the darkness. Can’t we just go back? You saw how God looked at us. He still loves us; it was clear to me by the way he spoke and moved towards us and looked at us. If we go back, he may forgive us. I am so sorry to listen to the snake.”
“You can go back if you like, but to accept his forgiveness is to accept another thing from Him!”
“But he is freedom! I would go but I am too afraid to leave you. I do not think I can go to him on my own. It makes little sense to be there without you.”
“Don’t pretend that you love me, after the way you lead me here, the way you tempted me!”
“ I do love you in some way. But at that moment, with the snake, I had forgotten who God was. I thought I wanted to be God, forgetting that I was already created in his image and likeness.”
“How so?"
" I think it is in our capacity to love. My heart feels like it grasp hold of all infinity. This heart is like God's heart, our love is like God's love."
" We will forget what the love of God was like. Our eyes are already growing used to the darkness.”
“ For now I still remember his Love, and I know he will come into this cave, and bring us back to the Garden. I shall be the first to see it.”
“ I am hungry, and cold and we must scratch and dig in the dirt to find something in the darkness of this cave.”
Monday, 30 June 2008
The Ones that I Loved
I can give you three people, three people that I would say I loved. I mean in the romantic sense. A gregarious person like me loves a whole lot of people, but only these three persons have I loved in that ball crushing way. Thinking of them always makes me anxious, as it did before I had ever met them.
In my early, zit-picking, not-knowing-what-I-am touching life I had that crushing, Smiths-type feeling like I was being weighed down by something and that only love would be able to get that weight off me. However, I was desperately afraid that love would not actually do that. I preferred (and perhaps I still prefer) my fantasies of love than the real thing. Gym Class Heroes would definitely say that I was afraid of being caught in "Cupid's Chokehold". I was an independent person and wanted to remain that way, so I developed this platonic process of dealing with people so that all my teen years I never thought of anyone sexually.
When I read that Scripture passage from the Sermon on the Mount, “If you should look at a woman with lust, you are already committing adultery,” I decided not to fantasise about people at all. Naive, you might think? Well, it worked. In my sexual fantasies, set up scenarios in which I would seduce, philander with, and penetrate fictional characters. This got around my vice-like sense of guilt because I felt that I was not treating any real human being with lust, as they were not real people. This technique allowed me to get close to people in a very different way from most people. I was never interested in sex with actual people. Therefore the first person I loved was in my life during this phase, and our relationship was strange.
She was not someone I allowed much sexual feelings to develop for until I went to university and realised how unhealthy my attitude to sex was. I will call her Dorothea. I call her Dorothea because she reminds me of the character from Middlemarch, being Mr. Fantastically intelligent, Little Flowerishly religious, and Shehulk-like in emotional strength (as an aside she lent me the George Elliot classic, and I lost it on a ship to another island for a family holiday. That pissed her off). The problem about Dorothea and me was that we came from different religion backgrounds, and where I came from this mattered very much. Not only was I very religious, but her father was a missionary whose main goal in life was to convert people away from my religion. She and I used to have theological arguments and because her arguments were so heartfelt and well-thought out it made me much hotter for her. And that mischievous twinkle in her eye told me she felt the same way. The relationship was romantic in that Elizabeth Bennett-Mr. Darcy way. Despite my methods, I found myself relating everything to her. When I saw a new movie, or discovered a painting, or heard a song, it was to her I wanted to speak to and show them to and allow her to experience them with me, to share them with her. Whenever I sinned, I thought of her; I always felt like I needed to apologise to her, that whenever I wronged God, I wronged her. She was the Madonna; she never really became the whore. The situation remained this way all through my high school years, and though I made out with other girls in my drunker moments, she never went out with anybody. I started drinking when I was sixteen, and it felt like that was something we couldn’t share. I hated coming in on Monday mornings, as the rumours of my drunken escapades over the weekend saturated the high school halways, and I would see her staring at me with disgust and disappointment. I can only imagine how much that hurt her.
Our relationship never developed past the intellectual and spiritual. She was never my girlfriend, but she was the most important woman in my life. She was way too important. I was so afraid of her, of not being good enough for me. She seemed equally afraid of me; why this was so I never knew.
We both went abroad for university. We decided to write to each other, not emails but actual letters. We both found it romantic even though our relationship was not supposed to be romantic. I wrote to her about my new friends and my spiritual disconnect from them. She wrote about her loneliness and about how she was jealous of my ability to make friends. We both spoke about everything in relationship to God.
Before entering the seminary, I was asked to get references from my friends. No one new my spiritual life like her, so I asked her. She said she would write it, but when she received the forms, she could not write them, saying she did not believe that priesthood was the life God wanted from me, and that I would make someone a good husband and father. When I entered the seminary, after much prayer, I told her that I would like to marry her if I were to leave the priesthood. She agreed she would have liked to marry me to, if things were different. She said her mother used to say how I would make a good husband for her, if only I was not Catholic.
A few months after taking my religious vows, she told me she was getting married. It was arranged by her parents as was the custom in her indigenous culture. She did not love him, but he was intelligent, religious and very strong. He was a perfect match. They married last month, and she sent me the pictures. She looked extremely beautiful in her snow white dress (she was certainly a virgin). What pleased me more was that she and her husband did not seem to fit together. He was not as good looking as she was, certainly not as good looking as I am. In those pictures, her smile seemed force, the laughter fake, the eyes without sparkle. Still, there was emotion on her face, and it was determination. She would make her marriage work, and she would live a good life, and she would love her husband. But, I kept thinking, sadly, he would never be me.
In my early, zit-picking, not-knowing-what-I-am touching life I had that crushing, Smiths-type feeling like I was being weighed down by something and that only love would be able to get that weight off me. However, I was desperately afraid that love would not actually do that. I preferred (and perhaps I still prefer) my fantasies of love than the real thing. Gym Class Heroes would definitely say that I was afraid of being caught in "Cupid's Chokehold". I was an independent person and wanted to remain that way, so I developed this platonic process of dealing with people so that all my teen years I never thought of anyone sexually.
When I read that Scripture passage from the Sermon on the Mount, “If you should look at a woman with lust, you are already committing adultery,” I decided not to fantasise about people at all. Naive, you might think? Well, it worked. In my sexual fantasies, set up scenarios in which I would seduce, philander with, and penetrate fictional characters. This got around my vice-like sense of guilt because I felt that I was not treating any real human being with lust, as they were not real people. This technique allowed me to get close to people in a very different way from most people. I was never interested in sex with actual people. Therefore the first person I loved was in my life during this phase, and our relationship was strange.
She was not someone I allowed much sexual feelings to develop for until I went to university and realised how unhealthy my attitude to sex was. I will call her Dorothea. I call her Dorothea because she reminds me of the character from Middlemarch, being Mr. Fantastically intelligent, Little Flowerishly religious, and Shehulk-like in emotional strength (as an aside she lent me the George Elliot classic, and I lost it on a ship to another island for a family holiday. That pissed her off). The problem about Dorothea and me was that we came from different religion backgrounds, and where I came from this mattered very much. Not only was I very religious, but her father was a missionary whose main goal in life was to convert people away from my religion. She and I used to have theological arguments and because her arguments were so heartfelt and well-thought out it made me much hotter for her. And that mischievous twinkle in her eye told me she felt the same way. The relationship was romantic in that Elizabeth Bennett-Mr. Darcy way. Despite my methods, I found myself relating everything to her. When I saw a new movie, or discovered a painting, or heard a song, it was to her I wanted to speak to and show them to and allow her to experience them with me, to share them with her. Whenever I sinned, I thought of her; I always felt like I needed to apologise to her, that whenever I wronged God, I wronged her. She was the Madonna; she never really became the whore. The situation remained this way all through my high school years, and though I made out with other girls in my drunker moments, she never went out with anybody. I started drinking when I was sixteen, and it felt like that was something we couldn’t share. I hated coming in on Monday mornings, as the rumours of my drunken escapades over the weekend saturated the high school halways, and I would see her staring at me with disgust and disappointment. I can only imagine how much that hurt her.
Our relationship never developed past the intellectual and spiritual. She was never my girlfriend, but she was the most important woman in my life. She was way too important. I was so afraid of her, of not being good enough for me. She seemed equally afraid of me; why this was so I never knew.
We both went abroad for university. We decided to write to each other, not emails but actual letters. We both found it romantic even though our relationship was not supposed to be romantic. I wrote to her about my new friends and my spiritual disconnect from them. She wrote about her loneliness and about how she was jealous of my ability to make friends. We both spoke about everything in relationship to God.
Before entering the seminary, I was asked to get references from my friends. No one new my spiritual life like her, so I asked her. She said she would write it, but when she received the forms, she could not write them, saying she did not believe that priesthood was the life God wanted from me, and that I would make someone a good husband and father. When I entered the seminary, after much prayer, I told her that I would like to marry her if I were to leave the priesthood. She agreed she would have liked to marry me to, if things were different. She said her mother used to say how I would make a good husband for her, if only I was not Catholic.
A few months after taking my religious vows, she told me she was getting married. It was arranged by her parents as was the custom in her indigenous culture. She did not love him, but he was intelligent, religious and very strong. He was a perfect match. They married last month, and she sent me the pictures. She looked extremely beautiful in her snow white dress (she was certainly a virgin). What pleased me more was that she and her husband did not seem to fit together. He was not as good looking as she was, certainly not as good looking as I am. In those pictures, her smile seemed force, the laughter fake, the eyes without sparkle. Still, there was emotion on her face, and it was determination. She would make her marriage work, and she would live a good life, and she would love her husband. But, I kept thinking, sadly, he would never be me.
Sunday, 22 June 2008
Who is Jesus Christ for me?
Historical: Born around 3AD in Palestine, he was a Jew of the Davidic line. He died in 36AD, after a few years of miracle working and wisdom teaching. He lived within the Roman Empire and his teaching is an amalgamation of Hebrew religious thought and Greek philosophy. A native of Galilee, a Hellenised area of Palestine, he probably trained as a carpenter but was certainly educated in the local synagogue. His knowledge of the Prophets in particular was exceptional. He was crucified for coming into conflict with the Temple authorities in religious matters.
Religious: Part of the Trinity, the Son, God who came down from heaven in order to take on human flesh, and in so doing, redeemed humanity from its sinfulness. After his death on the Cross, Jesus Christ was resurrected on the third day, conquering death and sin in the process. His Kingdom has now come, and sin is defeated. He inspired the establishment of the Church through the first apostles, with Peter having a special leadership role. He continues to act in human lives though his Spirit.
Sexual: His sexuality is something controversial, especially due to such books as the Da Vinci Code, but I believe he was human even in his sexuality, meaning he did have sexual urge, though he did not fall to the temptation. I do believe he was celibate like the Essenes he was clearly influenced by. As for my relationship in term of him, while I cannot rule out some homoerotic attraction, I do not believe it is the strongest part of my attraction to him. I have not felt a very sexual attraction to Christ, unlike we see in saints such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Gerhard M. Hopkins, but I see him as like a family member that I do not allow a sexual relationship to develop with. I could be kidding myself.
Ideal: Jesus is my ideal, and I want him to be my everything. What are the traits that I have seen in Him through Scripture, Tradition and Prayer that I wish to emulate? The emphasis on love: I want all my actions to be loving which means, while acknowledging sinfulness in myself and others, knowing that I and others are deeply valued by God. Wisdom; Jesus had an amazing amount of knowledge of the Scriptures and knew how to deal with people as individuals. I must also develop my religious knowledge, but more importantly, I want to reach people as the individuals that God loved. Sacrifice; Jesus emphasised the sacrificial nature of love, which shows me that pain in living is inevitable. Freedom from fear, while Jesus was probably afraid, he would not let it conquer him, not even in death. I wish to be free from fear as well. Jesus’ loving, without a doubt, is his most important quality, and by seeing how he loved can show me how to live.
Religious: Part of the Trinity, the Son, God who came down from heaven in order to take on human flesh, and in so doing, redeemed humanity from its sinfulness. After his death on the Cross, Jesus Christ was resurrected on the third day, conquering death and sin in the process. His Kingdom has now come, and sin is defeated. He inspired the establishment of the Church through the first apostles, with Peter having a special leadership role. He continues to act in human lives though his Spirit.
Sexual: His sexuality is something controversial, especially due to such books as the Da Vinci Code, but I believe he was human even in his sexuality, meaning he did have sexual urge, though he did not fall to the temptation. I do believe he was celibate like the Essenes he was clearly influenced by. As for my relationship in term of him, while I cannot rule out some homoerotic attraction, I do not believe it is the strongest part of my attraction to him. I have not felt a very sexual attraction to Christ, unlike we see in saints such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Gerhard M. Hopkins, but I see him as like a family member that I do not allow a sexual relationship to develop with. I could be kidding myself.
Ideal: Jesus is my ideal, and I want him to be my everything. What are the traits that I have seen in Him through Scripture, Tradition and Prayer that I wish to emulate? The emphasis on love: I want all my actions to be loving which means, while acknowledging sinfulness in myself and others, knowing that I and others are deeply valued by God. Wisdom; Jesus had an amazing amount of knowledge of the Scriptures and knew how to deal with people as individuals. I must also develop my religious knowledge, but more importantly, I want to reach people as the individuals that God loved. Sacrifice; Jesus emphasised the sacrificial nature of love, which shows me that pain in living is inevitable. Freedom from fear, while Jesus was probably afraid, he would not let it conquer him, not even in death. I wish to be free from fear as well. Jesus’ loving, without a doubt, is his most important quality, and by seeing how he loved can show me how to live.
Introduction
A place to explore my mind, especially the parts I never go with other people, and the places I rarely even allow myself to go. The total anonymity of this space is what I need. I could be anyone at all. I might even be you, and if you are an intelligent person, you know that you are capable of anything, good, bad or neutral. I will take the stance that all thoughts are neutral, not sin or virtue. This makes it easier for me as I am a religious man. My position in my religious community means I often have to wear a mask, which I find difficult. They wish or I perceive that they wish for me to be perfect, being a leader of sorts. How can reconcile this being pharisaic with being Christian, when Jesus so clearly spoke against such a manner of living? I cannot, and that is the reason for this journal. I hope it will make me a better Christian as well as a better person. I hope it will help me to better live with myself and with the person people want me to be.
I believe the topics here will be related to several issues that I do not often talk about.
1. Sexuality
2. Psychological framework
3. Religiosity, faith, and Spirituality
4. Relationships
These are interrelated strongly, and require self-observation and analysis. The only requirement is total honesty, which will require a lack of fear. This fear of myself has led my whole life. I require freedom for it to live my life, as I want to live it. I need to work out my ideals, and see if they realisable. For me this means firstly looking at the person of Christ.
I believe the topics here will be related to several issues that I do not often talk about.
1. Sexuality
2. Psychological framework
3. Religiosity, faith, and Spirituality
4. Relationships
These are interrelated strongly, and require self-observation and analysis. The only requirement is total honesty, which will require a lack of fear. This fear of myself has led my whole life. I require freedom for it to live my life, as I want to live it. I need to work out my ideals, and see if they realisable. For me this means firstly looking at the person of Christ.
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