It is a timely question, especially since there seem to be many people who, faced with a world gone bonkers, are reconsidering their ideas about faith, spiritual questions, and metaphysical stances. And it is a question that has been recently discussed in a very insightful conversation between Rupert Sheldrake, Philip Goff, and Paul Kingsnorth, which I recommend.
It seems to me we desperately need to make a distinction here: between propositional belief and faith in the unseen world.
Propositional belief is all about positive statements such as Jesus existed historically and was born to a virgin; God exists and has this and that attribute; the universe was created by a supernatural being as described in the bible; etc.
Faith in the unseen world, on the other hand, is faith in "that which is much bigger than us and our current perspective." It is about recognizing that our knowledge and our very existence are pathetically limited, and that there is an infinitely deep sea out there that we do not perceive directly, yet that affects everything because it has been bringing us into existence forever.
Faith in the unseen world is the gamble to align ourselves with Truth and Love, because we are dimly aware that this a choice which is offered to us, and that it might lead to enlightenment, purpose, and growth towards the light, if you will.
It is precisely statements like "we are called to grow towards the light" that are not propositional statements, but statements about a fundamental experience that many of us can relate to. You cannot prove or disprove it. But you can refine your understanding of it and find out for yourself whether it is true.
This is why religious apologists are right when they claim you will find out the truth about God only if you make a commitment and embark on the journey. However, this truth is not about propositional belief: the true journey will not lead you towards affirming a list of dogmas. Such propositional beliefs concern the earthy realm and should be subject to proper study and evidence.
No, the truth that will be revealed by making a commitment and following the path, aligning yourself with the higher while paying strict attention all along the journey, is more like a sort of deep sigh: "There is so much more to all this than meets the eye..." And you will know, feel, the unshakable truth of it.
People confuse what used to be called the heavenly realms — the world of spirit — with the material, "fleshly" realm of bits and pieces. This confusion, or shall we say conflict, plays itself out among believers and non-believers alike. The "fleshly" forces in religion insist upon propositional belief, which is rightfully perceived as a stumbling block by many non-believers. And "fleshly" non-believers insist that propositional belief is all there is anyway, and that everything else is nonsense by definition.
But once we have disentangled these two domains, the discussion becomes easier, and much of the fog clears.
For example, the dispute between atheists and "believers" can be made more intelligible. Atheists have great arguments on their side when it comes to propositional statements: everything in the bible is true? Well, no. There can be no question that Jesus was a real historical character, more or less as the Gospels depict him? Nah. The 10 commandments are the one and only forever-valid rules of morality? Bullocks. The atrocious old-testament passages can and must be argued away? Well, how about just calling them out. God exists and is omnipotent, all-good, and all-powerful? What are you even talking about. The various authors and redactors of the bible never had any nefarious agendas? Give me a break. And so on.
Where atheists don't have great arguments is when it comes to the spiritual world, that vast sea of unknown terrain that we can only discern indirectly if we have eyes to see (not that all atheists or agnostics make such arguments). For example, when they dismiss ancient wisdom as nonsense because it comes in religious language, they betray their incapability of connecting with that language, which would enlarge their vision. The higher world can be talked about in all kinds of ways: using metaphors and stories, religious words like God, Spirit, Heaven, etc. that we intuitively understand if we don't get hung up on dogma, art and poetry, and even treatises about alchemy or metaphysics.1 Modern people (and modern philosophy, especially of the analytic kind) tend to dismiss such as mere idle confusion. But that just shows their ignorance and lack of intuitive imagination, which would make it possible for them to connect such expressions to the "unknown sea" in which our existence seems to be embedded.
If both sides of the debate constantly confuse these two forms of belief — propositional belief and growth-attempting "feeling around" for something higher that is worth aligning with, how can we ever hope to get somewhere?
A Forest Full of Squirrels
Here's a little analogy, although, like all analogies, it is of course imperfect:
Imagine a squirrel in a forest. By way of observation, it has figured out that there seems to be a pattern when it comes to the felling of trees: every so often, certain trees disappear, and the disappearance follows a certain system. Now our squirrel constructs a whole general theory from this observation: how this pattern rules everything in existence and is at the very root of it. After all, it seems to explain and predict so much!
But the truth is that not only has the squirrel never left the forest and has no idea that there is a whole world out there, but it doesn't understand that its precious pattern is generated by the management of the forestry. What's more, these decisions by the management are made based on the global timber market, which in turn depends on decisions by investors, on current fashions in furniture design, on the demand for firewood based on a political crisis somewhere, on current biological theories...
This gives you an idea of the true scale of our possible ignorance. It might take a while for us squirrels to figure out the global timber market (and perhaps it's impossible in our current state of development), but if we are truth-seeking squirrels, at the very least we can get closer to an understanding of what might be going on by feeling our way around, using everything we got, including our intuitive concepts about the "bigger world" out there on which our "smaller world" depends and which makes it tick.
But of course, you will always have these squirrel-neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Nuts-Jones, who insist that nothing exists except your forest, that life will always be like it has always been, and that you should stick to nuts. Until one day that harvester shows up to destroy the forest because some guy in the management has decided that due to climate change, they should plant different trees...
Which brings us back to our distinction between propositional belief and belief in the sense of faith. You see, faith has a lot to do with facing resistance from the world.
The Issue of "Belief" in The Bible: Lost in Translation?
In his paper Markan Faith, Daniel Howard-Snyder investigates the Gospel of Mark and its use of the Greek word pistis, which is sometimes translated as faith, sometimes as belief. 2
There are two issues here: first, pistis can be used as a verb, whereas the English faith cannot. This is one reason why the translators have used "to believe" when the Greek used something like "to faith." The other reason is that the English word belief had a somewhat different connotation back in the day — it was not (only) about believing in propositions, as we moderns understand it.
Based on an analysis of how the word pistis is used in Mark, Howard-Snyder comes to the conclusion that it has a specific meaning which is quite different from "belief." A few examples from the Gospel as it is usually translated:
- repent and believe in the good news
- And he was amazed at their unbelief
- All things can be done for the one who believes
"Resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of one's overall positive stance towards the object of faith."
He gives many excellent reasons, one of which is Mark's story about Bartimaeus, the blind man:
They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!' Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!' Jesus stood still and said, 'Call him here.' And they called the blind man, saying to him, 'Take heart; get up, he is calling you.' 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him, 'What do you want me to do for you?' The blind man said to him, 'My teacher, let me see again.' Jesus said to him, 'Go; your faith has made you well.' Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.So here's a blind man who cannot even see Jesus, and presumably can't hear what's going on because of the large crowd and his distance. Then he gets chastised by the crowd for speaking up, but he keeps going. What's more, the guy had nerves of steel since in those days, purity laws forbade the blind to mix with the regulars, which means that not only had he to fight against his own internalization of these rules, but he would potentially face punishment from the crowd. Alas, he preserves and receives his reward — because he showed resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of his overall positive stance towards the object of faith.3
In other words, if we translate the Markan use of pistis right, it is not about "believing" something, but about choosing the right object of faith, and then overcoming all the challenges that the world keeps throwing at you, with your inner vision sternly focused on that object of faith.
As Christopher Marshall puts it: "Without doubt, the leading characteristic of Markan faith is sheer dogged perseverance."4
In Mark's story, the object of this unshakable and courageous faith is not a "belief in Jesus," or even Jesus the man, but what Jesus represents: a fully realized life not according to the earthy laws, but the higher spiritual order. The gaining of sight is, of course, a symbol for opening one's "spiritual sight" as a consequence of faith.
No, it is not at all about believing in a set of propositions; rather it's about aligning oneself tightly with a path that leads "up," the light towards which we are called to grow, and sticking to that life-altering decision even while we face resistance. Mark's gospel is brilliant in that regard because it is all about the struggle between a "fleshly" and a "spiritual" understanding of things — and how easy it is to miss the point, to close oneself to that subtle vision, and, instead of developing "sheer dogged perseverance," giving in to the pressure all around us.
Dogma and propositional belief? Mark, and Mark's Jesus, would have none of it.
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1 This also means that there can be value in traditional theology, church doctrine, and so on. It becomes a problem, however, when we isolate certain statements or dogmas, treat them as propositions, and demand belief in them, instead of seeing them for what they are: attempts to express the inexpressible in their own ways, a feeling around to get closer to spiritual truth, an author's attempt to learn.
2 Daniel Howard-Snyder, Markan Faith, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2):31-60 (2017)
This paper was mentioned by Philip Goff in the conversion I linked to above and provided the inspiration for this post. Thanks, guys.
3 By the way, how anybody could possibly mistake this obvious parable for historical truth is beyond me. Heck, Jesus literally tells us that he teaches in parables! So why have so few people made the straight-forward inference that the whole thing is, in fact, something like a parable? I mean, Mark reads like a well-crafted story that seeks to make various points, just like when you ask some wise guy a spiritual question, and instead of getting a straight answer, he offers a deep sigh, only to proceed with "Let me tell you about a wise teacher who once lived. One day, one of his students asked him, ..."
4 As quoted in Markan Faith
Reader Comments
"Living out of Time" - a good song by Robin Trower check it out I'm too lazy to post it.
I am the one and only living out of time
Two other passages that talk about faith are the mustard seed and the centurion. What do they tell us? A seed has no awareness as the plant that it will sprout and grow into; its simply responds and grows to the laws of the life force. The centurion does not need Jesus to visit his attendant, because he understands there is an order, as there is in the military, that follows that law.
He is the scientist who has developed the theory of an informational field, called either morphogenetic or morphic field, that animals and humans connect to. As an example, if an animal learns a new beneficial behavior, this affects future animals of that species and they learn it faster. For human beings, consciousness is that informational field, that we affect by changing our own consciousness. Here is the first of several old interviews with David Wilcock and Rupert Sheldrake. Wilcock's vanity can affect your response to his presentations, so you have to accept that. [Link]
The universe lays down a cosmic groove (like a the grooves in vinyl records) and then we all dance to it.
Almost all religious people I know clearly do not really 'believe'. If they did, they would not fear death and grasp desperately to every last second of life, no matter how diseased or decrepit they are.
Me? I just wish the greedy assholes at Pig Pharma and Pig Medicine would let us plebes in the USA have the one thing that I do admire the EU/Canada for: liberal euthanasia laws. It's called dying with dignity. In a way, it is the ultimate freedom.
I want to choose when and how I go, if I possibly can. But these greedy scum know they make the most money off us in the last six months of our lives, as we die without dignity, often alone and in pain, all for their ever-increasing corporate profits...... :-(
An interesting point there was made contrasting randomness with purpose. One type may subsume every tragic circumstance under a higher purpose, sees in some sense the possibility for integration, healing what's broken. Another type zeroes in on a collection of parts and what it has to do with the self, despairing at their lack of omnipotence, basically in this sense wishing they were God, a hubristic foundation for their emotions. Whereas the first type acts out this part of God, trying to understand how to pick up the pieces. Both rely on objective observation, one has the sense that it all fits together, whether or not it appears to at the moment. With a view of the whole, which the priest's wife in the movie was capable of, time loses meaning, the proper choices can be made; relief, resolution, humor, and patience are possible.
How does that tie into belief as independent of commitment? Some belief seems necessary for commitment, in the written piece above there are clear beliefs in the metaphysical, in light or truth, in teleology. If nothing presents itself to be believed, then a moment of inspiration is necessary, after some experience gives it a potential opportunity now I'm rambling
This video by Lauren Daigle played next, [Link]
A history that could not be more timely
A lot of attention these days is being focused on the results of the Israeli elections, where Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud bloc managed to secure a decisive win of 64 seats in the 120...There is the story of the Dogons of West Africa. Like other Africans and near easterners they have a creator God, but they also have a practice of circumcision, because the foreskin is pretended to be "female" and the clitoris is "male," so removing those is like claiming sexual identity. Though now a plurality are Muslim and Christian, apparently some guy from the 1930's revealed their tradition to have been that aliens from Sirius had long ago come to teach them science. Unlike other traditional mythological traditions, they thought the earth was a sphere, Jupiter had moons, and that Saturn had rings. Additionally they thought Sirius was a triple-star system, however, so far, we can only tell that it is binary.
However, that could easily have been due to Western influence by that time. Much like Mormons incorporated aliens and spherical planets into their myths.
So there has been little proof of advanced civilizations passing on their knowledge, although for whatever reason I'm sure it's true. Maybe not for Dogons, but that's the type of thing that could be convincing. The bible appropriated too much to say that it's advanced knowledge, unless you count spiritual knowledge.
So when Jews (specifically prophets, magi, the elite) observed these pictographs, they used Akkadian techniques of ascribing multiple meanings to Akkadian words. In this way, the same word could mean Eden/wilderness, garden, east, and snake. Divide it up phonetically, look at homonyms, look at it again in its entirety, and the same word corresponding to a constellation could mean carrier, messenger, anointed one. Combining constellations creates a story.
If you want to know truth, or have an itch you can’t scratch towards finding answers & understand the truth go to the sources.
One of the oldest sources know at this time is the Pavidi Texts / Bundahišn (meaning primal or primordial creation) [Link]
[Link] The Bundahishn ("Creation"), or Knowledge from the Zand [Link] It’s also the oldest documented & known source of Astrology.
The Gathas, a set of seventeen hymns that likely date to sometime in the second millennium BCE, are the oldest Zoroastrian text and one of the oldest religious texts of any kind. The language and structure of the Gathas, as well as the pantheon of deities and the type of society they evoke, are very close to that found in the Rig Veda, so much so that it is not unhelpful to consider the two texts as rival interpretations of a common original worldview. Both come from the common prehistoric oral tradition of the Indo-Aryans, a sub- group of the Indo-European family whose languages and mythologies incor- porate the Greek, Latin, and Germanic as well as the Indic and Iranian. Both the Gathas and the Rig Veda reflect a patriarchal, warlike, pastoral-nomadic society that probably originated on the steppelands north of the Caspian Sea sometime around the fifth millennium BCE. What most distinguishes the Gathas from the Rig Veda is the approach to their common pantheon of supernatural beings. In the Gathas, the deity of wisdom (Mazda) from the divine class known as ahuras (Sanskrit asura) is elevated to the status of supreme being, with the other ahuras as his adjuncts in the cause of good, while the daevas (Sanskrit deva), praised in the Vedas, are demoted to the sta- tus of demons in league with the evil deity Angra Mainyu (Ahriman). The two sides—originally order versus disorder but interpreted in later texts as Truth versus the lie—are engaged in an ongoing cosmic battle, in which every human being must choose a side.
The answers are known about religions. The path & gate is narrow & chock full of deceptions/diversions. It’s takes effort, thinking, perseverance, patience, discernment, open mind, ability to critically think for oneself.