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Primitive Christianity Revived, Again
The Belief Factor
I used to be intrigued by science fiction stories that played with the nature of scientific laws & facts-- imagining that the Earth was flat until someone realized it couldn't be, for example. One of these, Richard McKenna's 'Fiddler's Green' really took me over the edge. McKenna had a small cabal of occultist passengers sabotage and sink a freighter in a very empty place, off the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean, a place so far from other human psyches that collective reality, "God" as they said, "was thin" enough to punch a hole through. They then persuaded the lifeboat crew, dying of thirst & without other hope, to join them in the effort to collectively create a new world, and live in it together.
In the late sixties, overwhelmed by the imperfections of this world, but also seeing what a perfect whole humanity formed, how much we needed one another and how much I needed the solidity of the physical world, that story kept coming back to me with existential horrors, over months & even years.
Most Americans seem to assume that the physical world is primary, we and our beliefs existing as part of it. But there's much evidence, including the Bible, that the universe is more than "atoms and the void," or "matter and energy".
You don't need your perceptions altered to see improbable events. One can calculate that a certain number of unlikely, meaningful "coincidences" would happen just as a matter of course-- but unless you pride yourself on being a Skeptic, after awhile it becomes clear that such events happen far more than probabilities would demand, and that they're happening precisely because they do have meaning; they are addressed to us!
It is not possible to prove to a true Skeptic that belief influences physical reality. His belief so influences physical reality that inconvenient evidence doesn't happen to him. It is obvious to the Skeptic that this explanation is ridiculous, so I won't try to argue it further.
In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, "Jesus said to them, 'Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.' And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief." More than once, when Jesus is shown healing someone, he says "Your faith has made you well."
That always puzzled me; could he or couldn't he? Why would Jesus need someone else's faith to heal them?
Just a notion I picked up, trading comments on another post: This is because "that of God in us" really is God, really possesses the power by which God created and maintains the universe.
It is a universe, not a chaos. We don't fly apart into disconnected realms of clashing belief-systems. But where our attention is, there also is our local, personal influence. It isn't given to us to over-rule God in our jurisdiction; it belongs to us because God breathed it into us all, beginning with Adam.
Used heedlessly, without awareness, by people behaving as "isolated individuals", belief can be destructive. Some people, clinging to old pieties, or following Newage beliefs, try to change their beliefs in the service of their egos... and they don't entirely manage to change their beliefs or their experience. Beliefs are, to a large extent, given.
But people can open (or close) their minds. They can ask to know what God is working towards, and put their faith in that, seeing that it must come. If not now, when it is time.
How? By praying for wisdom, to know better what is worth desiring, what we come to desire most deeply as we grow in the Light to recognize that.
Quoting Julian of Norwich on prayer: "For though the soul be ever like to God in kind and substance, restored by grace, it is often unlike in condition, by sin on man’s part.
"Then is prayer a witness that the soul willeth as God willeth; and it comforteth the conscience and enableth man to grace. And thus He teacheth us to pray, and mightily to trust that we shall have it. For He beholdeth us in love and would make us partners of His good deed, and therefore He stirreth us to pray for that which it pleaseth him to do."
In the late sixties, overwhelmed by the imperfections of this world, but also seeing what a perfect whole humanity formed, how much we needed one another and how much I needed the solidity of the physical world, that story kept coming back to me with existential horrors, over months & even years.
Most Americans seem to assume that the physical world is primary, we and our beliefs existing as part of it. But there's much evidence, including the Bible, that the universe is more than "atoms and the void," or "matter and energy".
You don't need your perceptions altered to see improbable events. One can calculate that a certain number of unlikely, meaningful "coincidences" would happen just as a matter of course-- but unless you pride yourself on being a Skeptic, after awhile it becomes clear that such events happen far more than probabilities would demand, and that they're happening precisely because they do have meaning; they are addressed to us!
It is not possible to prove to a true Skeptic that belief influences physical reality. His belief so influences physical reality that inconvenient evidence doesn't happen to him. It is obvious to the Skeptic that this explanation is ridiculous, so I won't try to argue it further.
In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, "Jesus said to them, 'Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.' And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief." More than once, when Jesus is shown healing someone, he says "Your faith has made you well."
That always puzzled me; could he or couldn't he? Why would Jesus need someone else's faith to heal them?
Just a notion I picked up, trading comments on another post: This is because "that of God in us" really is God, really possesses the power by which God created and maintains the universe.
It is a universe, not a chaos. We don't fly apart into disconnected realms of clashing belief-systems. But where our attention is, there also is our local, personal influence. It isn't given to us to over-rule God in our jurisdiction; it belongs to us because God breathed it into us all, beginning with Adam.
Used heedlessly, without awareness, by people behaving as "isolated individuals", belief can be destructive. Some people, clinging to old pieties, or following Newage beliefs, try to change their beliefs in the service of their egos... and they don't entirely manage to change their beliefs or their experience. Beliefs are, to a large extent, given.
But people can open (or close) their minds. They can ask to know what God is working towards, and put their faith in that, seeing that it must come. If not now, when it is time.
How? By praying for wisdom, to know better what is worth desiring, what we come to desire most deeply as we grow in the Light to recognize that.
Quoting Julian of Norwich on prayer: "For though the soul be ever like to God in kind and substance, restored by grace, it is often unlike in condition, by sin on man’s part.
"Then is prayer a witness that the soul willeth as God willeth; and it comforteth the conscience and enableth man to grace. And thus He teacheth us to pray, and mightily to trust that we shall have it. For He beholdeth us in love and would make us partners of His good deed, and therefore He stirreth us to pray for that which it pleaseth him to do."
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Rosemary Gould on
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I love the parable of the woman who nagged the unjust judge to help her until finally he did. It helped me back when I was starting to attend church and felt very skeptical about God. I read it and said to myself, "Ok, I'll give this a try. I'll pray (i.e. nag) God incessantly, asking for faith, and see what happens." I did it in a very dubious sort of way, and yet I felt a real longing for faith or I wouldn't have been there.
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Permalink Reply by Eric H-L on
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Hosea 6:4 (New Century Version)
The Lord says, "Israel, what should I do with you?
Judah, what should I do with you?
Your faithfulness is like a morning mist,
like the dew that goes away early in the day.
Hosea speaks my mind lately. My beliefs and faith are always changing and prayer is a struggle.
I read a lot of Sci Fi back in the 70's. I am getting a copy of Fiddler's Green.
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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on
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Brrrr! Interesting stuff! A little later, in 10:12+
"...It is time to seek the Lord
that he might come and rain righteousness upon you.
You have plowed wickedness; you have reaped injustice;
you have eaten the fruit of lies.
Because you have trusted in your power
and in the multitude of your warriors,
therefore the tumult of war shall rise against your people
and all your fortresses shall be destroyed."
All that sounds like the country I live in. Let's hope we all come out of this better than the people who heard Hosea! (But won't that require a change in course? Can we believe this possible? Was that a rhetorical question?)
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Yes it is chilling! I meant that particular passage I quoted in isolation spoke my mind. I was thinking of my own wavering faith not of a church or people or a nation. When I read more of this Prophet I think:It has not been given to me that God is in the punishment business. (which is how I read much of Hosea) I know you have written before about the angry God. Although I don't want to believe that God would mete out collective punishment in the form of warfare, it seems obvious that people have fulfilled this prophesy again and again. Is God letting us do this to each other? Free will?
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I don't think God is "angry"! But I know people suffer; and I don't think that could be purposeless.
Hard to know what constraints God accepts in creating this world and its people: some sort of artistic consistency? (Think about the sort of constraints a novelist--despite 'unlimited power' over his story-- accepts.) People can change... but the change has to leave them recognizable; if it were like a replacement of one person by another person, that would be a type of violence which I think God avoids... It would be forcing a change which even death, as we know it, does not accomplish. That is, death puts people beyond contact with us, but doesn't remove them from God's vision, or do violence to who they are.
God arranges circumstances to fit what human beings need, which is not always what they'd like. A little scary, admittedly, but I've come to trust "Him" despite that.
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Okay, thanks, Eric, for leading me this way!
That bit from Hosea turns out utterly relevant to this subject!
It is not that God punishes people with war and other violence; faith in violence produces violence.
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Permalink Reply by Rickey D. Whetstone on
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Forrest
Please explain in more detail . . . when you wrote "Beliefs are, to a large extent, given."
thanks
Rick
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There can be a complicated difference, between what people believe and what they think they believe. If you can walk on it without fearing it will collapse under you; that's one test.
When I was a kid, I didn't really believe that a monster would come out and Get me on my way through the basement. But I was afraid, sometimes, because sometimes in dreams I'd be thinking: "No, there's no monster here; I won't run out of here." And then, there he'd be!
But when I was awake, even though I might be scared, I could walk through there and no monster would appear.
I can't really decide what I will, in fact, believe about anything. That's what I mean by beliefs being "given."
When my beliefs about something are inconsistent, changing perhaps, I can look at them critically: "Is this really the truth here? Could I be mistaken? Fooling myself in some way? Is this really what I think?-- or is it just something I'm 'supposed to' think?" When I went from being a materialist atheist to knowing God as a dependable reality, there were many small steps, much drifting back and forth between thinking of material life as the "real" world, and increasingly seeing that what happens in my life is what God intends.
It would be a distortion to say that I "believe in" God, any more than I "believe in" my own foot. There it is. My foot is more obviously there, while God is present in a more subtle way, via the fact that anything whatsoever happens and perceives itself happening... I've been a very long time learning to trust God, through more and more experience of trusting and having that trust confirmed. It's not a logical sort of testing, because misunderstanding God's intention in some situation would not "disprove" what I know; it would just confirm that I do make mistakes.
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So . . . our beliefs should be changing as we mature spiritually?
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Yes, unless someone had it all down when he started! If God is here "to teach his people himself", it follows that we must have things to learn.
This is something I find increasingly problematic about the way contemporary Quakers have been practicing: that they seem to be finding their peace and sleeping in it, quite content with who they are and what they're doing with it.
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Isn't this the problem? . . . with any denomination after . . . lets say . . . starting with the second generation of members . . . that build their spiritual foundation on denominational information and rules and regulations . . . instead of communicating with God.
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My turn for questions: Why is it so very hard to convey that denominational rules aren't the point, while living in communion/communicating is?
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