It was a nice week. Probably a little above average on the angst-o-meter when the subjects of politics and religion came up, but otherwise, nice.
We went to church together on Sunday. We visited an Assembly of God church. Really nice website. Interestingly, the AG has always been on my short list of denominations that I wonder, "do these people know how this denomination formed, and when?" The Southern Baptists are another. While the SB formed as a result of Northern Baptist churches rejecting slave-owners as potential parishoners and missionaries, the AG formed (as they outline here) as a result of the Bethel Bible College (Charles F. Parham) "speaking in tongues" renewal, and subsequent Azusa Street Mission revivals. The year of BBC was 1901. There is another AG internal article here, by J. Roswell Flower, the first secretary-treasurer of the AG (1914), entitled, "The Genesis of the Pentecostal Movement." It seems historical so far as I can tell.
The denomination (AG) is well-known for its emphasis on the "evidence" of God's "baptism of the Holy Spirit". To them, God's presence in a believer's life can be "improved" by participating in this experience, which ought to involve "speaking in tongues". Doctrinally, whether they like it or not, this divides Christians into two classes: those "baptized in the Holy Spirit", and those not. This obviously begs quite a few theological questions, which I may delve into later, but not for now.
What moved upon me during the service was not contempt for these people's experessions, emotional outpouring, and exuberance. I have participated in those things first hand. I tried, not all that long ago, to stir up some feeling of God's reality in my life with such worship. Rather than contempt, I felt a kind of sadness. Not for them, per se, but for all of us.
What I was thinking about relates to the subject of yesterday's Shawshank Sunday (just published today): hope.
There is nothing wrong at all with hope. The real problem, and what stirred up such deep sadness in me, was that so much hope is misplaced. So much of our hope is put where other people tell us it must be placed. There are only so many things we know for certain in this world, but so many uncertainties. So many things we cannot control. I am of the persuasion that placing my hope in things that I will never know until I die is like putting your money in a trust for your grandkids: it is great if you have that much to work with.
Most of us just don't have that much hope to spread around. And so why shouldn't we choose to place it in places we can see it come to fruition? Why not hope for the graduate degree that you are going to have to work your tears out for? Why not hope for the job that it might land you? If you can't place hope in your own achievements, if you can't put your expectations on positive footing in your own life, how can you put hope in your failures?
The philosophy that starts out with the basic premises:
i) man is utterly depraved, anything good about man is external (divine)
ii) man can accomplish nothing of note or of worth, everything he accomplishes is imperfect
iii) perfection is demanded by god, thus man depends wholly upon god's grace for anything, everything, and can achieve nothing without god
Leaves one with only one logical place to put their hope: in death.
To me, that is worshipping death. That is placing death itself as the horizon to which we ought to strive. Jesus minced no words when he said that to follow him meant to bear one's cross. Dying to self is the paradigm of the Christian. Buddha, Confucious, and countless others have taught the same. These take for their basic premise that death is certain, and that our life ought to mimic our death in order to truly live.
To me, my basic premise is that life is certain, though its extent is not. I read Atlas Shrugged recently, and it got me looking into Neo-Objectivism [edited note: not a Randroid, just interested in how their basic philosophy works and how they claim it justifies government-free economics and egoism]. As such, I believe that subjective metaphysics are philosophically necessary, and pragmatically healthy to a degree, but I do not believe that one's quality of life is instrinsically linked to one's take on metaphysics. What I am thinking of by "subjective metaphysics" include things like one's appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, and even the appraisal of "value" and "purpose" in life to some degree. These are often the purview of religion, but shouldn't be because aesthetics has a rigorous philosophical background. Further, I believe that those who place subjective experience and mysticism above objective reality are doomed to misery in this life. In Rand's words,
[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.Ayn Rand's ideas on morality, like the one outlined above in her fiction, are ridiculous. I agree that it is morally wrong to delude people, however, it isn't the "only moral crime"...
Her view on egoism as motivation in morality, though shared in part or in full by so many other philosophers, are perhaps some of the closest in their articulation to my own. I do not accept all the tenets of Objectivist philosophy fundamentally. I despise all forms of close-minded fundamentalism. To close one's mind and become dogmatic is, in essence, to say, "I already know everything, and no knowledge can shake my certitude...my hubris is equivocated as faith."
I reject assertions that life's quality is linked to someone else's subjective experience, and not to my own. If I cannot reason through a set of premises and assertions, then ought I to accept them as true? Why? I reject philosophical premises which are definitively subjective as having any authority over my life. Life's quality, instead, must depend upon objective reality, as mediated by reason. Reality depends largely on your perception and largely on your effort, but most of all upon your reason. What you know to be virtual, versus what you know to be "real", is 100% dependent upon your reason, unless we are all just brains in a vat.
Fear comes when reason is pushed out. Living your life in fear is the same as living your life in death. Living in fear and living as if "dead" to one's self, to one's rational self-interest, is, I am persuaded, worshiping the unknown as the known and death as life. Placing your hope in death, and consequently living one's life in fear, thus becomes belated worship.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Fear
