Sunday, March 11, 2018

More of My Questions

So with my last post, I talked mostly about my questions regarding the nature of the deity that a religion worshiped.  I want to be clear that at the time I developed these questions I personally did not accept the existence of such a being.  Those questions were just things that arose when others tried to explain their idea of deity.  I cannot accept or worship a deity that is described by most religions out there, and those questions helped me determine if their deity met a standard of rationality.  But I was on a quest to discover if there was a God.  If there was not, my problems would be easy to solve, so if I had a bias, it was to the non-existence.  That would certainly be the easiest path to follow.  However, it felt intellectually dishonest and altogether too convenient to assume that I knew enough to definitively determine that God did not exist.

I am well aware that it is impossible to prove the non-existence of just about anything, but in particular, the non-existence of God.  One who makes such a claim is either intellectually lazy, or deluding oneself.  My goal in asking the questions I was developing was to be s rigorous as I could in asking the questions that would make me feel that I had not taken the easy way out in saying that I was an atheist or an agnostic.

There were many other categories questions I had as I was searching.  Toward the resolution of my quest, I learned to ask those in the first group first, because if they were not satisfactory, there was really no need to ask any farther.  Early in my efforts, however, I had many other questions that I asked that also helped me to weed out religions or philosophies that were problematic.

4) From whence do people come?  (addendum)  I did miss a part of my category 4 questions in my last post, and that was a final point that since most of the belief systems I encountered taught a continual creation, I was left troubled that such a creation could be undone.  A being that creates a life at whatever point could also snuff it out.  That power would be a lot more merciful than the suffering of unbelievers who never had a chance to believe.  And yet, few of the Christian religions taught such doctrine.  Of course, for my purposes, such a snuffing out was tantamount to there not being a God.  So, a logical conclusion has to be that if one have an eternal soul, that eternity must continue in both of the directions in time of which I can conceive.  So for me, the only rational situation is that of me somehow always existing in some form and destined to always exist in perpetuity.  No Abrahamic religion I knew of carried that concept.  Some of the ancient and eastern religions almost have it with their concepts of reincarnation, but s I posted before, those religions really only amounted to philosophies to my understanding.

6) Organization of a religion.  One of my concerns about religions is the form and function of the religion itself.  Many of the preachers I talked to belonged to no formal denomination.  Many other people will protest that we don't need organized religion.  Again, to me this is just lazy thinking.  Organization is necessary to get anything done.  If God exists, He will want to be known, and it is necessary that a God worthy of worship would care that His Truth were taught correctly.  That mandates some sort of formal organization.  That formal organization additionally has to have some means, consistent within the belief system to ensure that the Truth is taught.  I had first-hand exposure to the inconsistencies in the teaching of Catholic dogma.  But at least they did have a Pope, cardinals, and organizations for maintaining some consistency.  Too bad their doctrines were completely unacceptable.  As I met with the professors at LA Baptist College, I found that they didn't have the consistency they thought they did.  Different professors had different interpretations of some of the biblical scriptures I asked about.  And my girlfriend's dad (a Baptist pastor) had ideas different from them all.  I also developed a huge dislike for the idea of people who make it a career to be a minister.  I saw too many examples of pastors who bent the doctrines they taught to placate their board of elders.  When a person's livelihood is on the line, one cannot trust that they will make the calls to repentance that the influential members of the congregation need to hear.  I had one preacher, upon my challenging a softened teaching of his, that he knew that saying the truth would lose him his position.

7) Role of faith versus knowledge.  Many churches teach that God can only be known by faith.  I can accept that, but I have to know why?  This gets back to why people exist.  If God creates people to worship Him, what is the purpose of faith?  Why is it that He doesn't just reveal Himself to everyone?  Once again, the answer I got from most leaders was that it was too hard for us to understand.  Or that it was a mystery.  The God being taught is omnipotent, and our creation is to have worshipers.  If the only reason we exist is to provide a source of worship, why not just skip the painful rigmarole of this living by faith?  Once again, for most religions, there is no good explanation of this.

With these question categories, I am full-blown into ontology and epistemology, which I may decide to post on later.

8) Role of commandments.  It always seemed clear to me that if there were a God, He would have a set of requirements.  I don't understand why some people want a good explanation of why God would have a particular commandment, but I did see a need to understand the purpose of commandments in general.  Some religions, like Judaism and Islam taught that it was just a duty, others that it makes society better.  Both of these explanations leave me wanting.  A better society is a good thing, but that's hardly a great motivator for most people.  Are the commandments a set of tablets to bash us over the head with?  That's what I got from most of the pastors and preachers with whom I talked.  It seemed to get back to "trying to appease an angry God".  As far as motivators, fear and guilt are pretty poor.

9) Role of ordinances.  As stated before, the Bible seems clear that certain ordinances are required.  The question is why?  What purpose do they serve?  I just did not get meaningful responses to this question.  In fact, most protestant religions downplay ordinances.  That caused me to immediately dismiss them, since I felt it was inconsistent to say "sola scriptura" and ignore the ordinances that were clearly required in the New Testament.  Even the Catholics fell into this trap by trying to answer the problem of so many unbelievers in hell by their made-up doctrines of "baptism of desire" and baptism by fire".

This captures most of my question categories, perhaps I shall go into the answers that I found at a later time.

Sunday, March 4, 2018

My Questions

I have had a few people ask me to mention the questions I had whilst on my journey of discovery. The questions that I asked of the religious leaders with whom I spoke, and which I had no satisfactory answer until I posed them to a 15-year-old Mormon girl, Donna Anderson.  In my posts I have tried to avoid sounding too critical of any particular religion or sect, so I was somewhat reluctant to put them out there, since I was afraid I would sound like I was judging these groups.  To be clear, I do judge their doctrines, as presented to me, as being inadequate at giving me an explanation of the divine that I could accept.  I do not judge anyone for believing such doctrines or tenets.  I would invite any who find these ideas and questions thought-provoking to contact me or some other faithful Latter-day Saint for further discussion.

The questions I discuss here are not exhaustive of my original list, nor are they presented in the order I discovered them.  The order herein is merely that of my memories, and I have categorized several of my original questions under the following over-arching groups.  The order is probably how important I view them from my perspective now, but it may not accurately reflect that either.

1) Am I an eternal being?  As mentioned in a previous post, if the answer given by a particular religion is no, then that religion or philosophy is of absolutely no use to me.  The obvious result is that my actions make no real difference, since this will all pass like the dust.  I am free to end my suffering or obtain my pleasure in any manner I choose.  Any moral framework built upon this philosophy is of less value than dung.  At least dung can be used to promote plant growth.

In this assessment, I am not saying that believers in a philosophy such as this are bad people.  On the contrary, they can be very good.  It's just that this philosophy cannot have any real power to help a person become better.  The goodness of an adherent will either be self-motivated or motivated on artificial constructs.  When I was searching for answers, I was in great pain, so such a belief system was too hollow for any practical purpose.  From my current perspective, I need a faith that can motivate me to becoming better than I can be by mere self-encouragement.

2) What is the nature of God?  Many of the religions and philosophies I studied taught of a "universal force" or a "collective will".  Once again, for my purposes, this is about as useless as you can get.  Such a belief cannot teach me how to be a better me.  I have no way of understanding what such an artificial deity would want of me.  Its constructs are as artificial as those of the philosophies that teach that I exist for a limited time.

Closely related is the God preached by many of the Christian religions: a God who is omnipresent, ineffable, or otherwise beyond any human comprehension.  While I believe that God's thoughts and motives are far beyond mine, I cannot relate to a God that I cannot understand in any way.  Teaching such a God is, in a practical sense, the same as teaching that God does not exist.  How can I follow or obey a being I can't understand?  How can I have faith that the course of action I am undertaking is in accordance with His will?  The canned answer to this is that He has given us His word in the form of scripture.  There are several problems with this that I may address in a future post, but suffice it to say that this explanation actually introduces far more problems than it resolves.

3) Why did God create the world?  I know that this question assumes that God did create the world.  Once again, any God that can be worshiped must be the source of all that is around everywhere.  If God somehow just came into control, there is always the possibility that someone or something could wrest that control away and my future is as bleak as if there is no God.  That settled to my satisfaction, the question still remains: why? To what end?

Every one of the priests, pastors, preachers, rabbis, and imams that I talked to were unable to give a satisfactory answer to this question.  To some, it was either "No one knows", "For His own mysterious purposes", or "To have beings to praise Him".  The first two are equivalent and equivalently useless.  The third is ridiculous.  Why would a perfect being need to create others just to praise Him?  That intrinsically demonstrates that He was imperfect, since He had a need to be filled in this act of creation.  Even if we accept that this ridiculousness occurred, that opens my fourth category.

4) From whence do people come?  As I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, the Roman Catholic Church taught me that God is intimately involved with the conception of each human being, and that such a conception results in the creation of a from thence immortal soul.  Most other Abrahamic religions teach something similar, varying mostly in the timing of said creation.  Some with fetal viability, others with baby's first breath, yet others as late as weaning.  No matter the timing, they all suffer from what is to me an unacceptable result: most of the souls so created will not ever be in the realms of glory.  For a while the Catholics invented the non-scriptural "limbo" to address the horror of billions of babies in hell, but that has since been declared by recent popes to be no longer Catholic dogma.  Other churches have tried to say that the ordinances mentioned in their scriptures are not really required, but that left me with the feeling that any God who did not have a consistency in His ordinances can not be worshiped in faith.  Changing the rules without a way to know how or in what way they are changing results in a capriciousness that destroys confidence.

5) How does God relate to man today?  It seems clear to me that the world has changed enough that I need to know what God, if He exists, wants me to do in today's world.  Some religions have a centralized authority, but since I demonstrated to myself that those religions have dogmatic problems, I cannot accept the pope or archbishop of any city to be a source for knowledge of God's will.  On the other hand, protestant churches reject the only claimed authority on the earth at the time of their organization and almost universally went to "sola scriptura"as their authority, since they could not rightly claim any other.  As mentioned in a previous blog post, and one that I have hinted I might write in the future, the very fact of so many different interpretations of all scriptures out there, along with the variations that are out there in the Christian Bibles, this basis of authority is patently lacking in any merit.

There were other categories of questions, but I am all blogged out.  I hope to get back to this soon.