Reason

October 3, 2006Posted inBook Review, C.S. Lewis, ReasonNo Comments

He [John] turned to Reason and spoke.

“Tell me, good lady. Is there such a place as the Island in the West, or is it only a feeling in my own mind?”

“I cannot tell you,” said she, “because you do not know.”

“But you know.”

“But I can tell you only what you know. I can bring things out of the dark part of your mind into the light part of it. But now you ask me what is not even in the dark part of your mind.”

“Even if it were only a feeling in my mind, would it be a bad feeling?”

“I have nothing to tell you of good or bad.”

Most people with a background in western spirituality will have read, or at least have heard, of the book by John Bunyan called The Pilgrim’s Progress. But in the 20th century, a similar but no less great book came out called The Pilgrim’s Regress. It is an allegorical story of a man named John whose spiritual journey that started with him having faith as child soon turns to doubt and then to rejection of his faith. Most of the story is about what he encountered on his journey to understand life afterwards.

There is a good chance that most of us will grow up in a household where one or both of our parents are religious to some degree, or at least the sub-culture we find ourselves in is religious, and we just kind of adopt it as best we can and believe it to be true. However, those of us who are prone to thinking sooner or later must come to grips with the reality of this thing called religion. We must either adopt it as true with our new independent minds or throw it out and start on our own spiritual journey to find the truth. The author, C.S. Lewis, took the latter road, and so did the protagonist. This book is an autobiography of his spiritual journey – a journey from childhood religion to atheism to the real spiritual life.

Avoiding “religion”

October 2, 2006Posted inLove, ReligionNo Comments

If you have been following some of my previous posts, I have been working on a short series on religion and the spiritual life. So far, I have concluded that to live a thriving spiritual life, “religion” has to go. In an amatureish attempt to explain the spiritual life allegorically, I concluded that it is simply living in a fiery romantic relationship with God. Attempting to live a spiritual life other than this way is like putting your spouse in a glass case and visiting once a week, being entralled by his/her beauty, saying some nice things to them, and then walking away, never even listening to hear if they are speaking back to you and ignoring the tears running down their cheeks as they watch you walk away.

The problem with living the spiritual life in the world we find ourselves in is that by being human, we are by nature drawn to understand and relate to God not in a love relationship, but through the system of religion. Even for those of us who hate religion and are drawn towards God and enter into a relationship with Him, we are still sucked unconsciously by our culture into their mindset, and are thus drawn away from the intimacy and slowly put God back into the glass case.

So what does this religious system look like? What are the signs that we will see if we are slipping back into it? I have tried to come up with a list of common signs and how to avoid them.

“Religion” vs. the spiritual life

September 30, 2006Posted inReligion7 Comments

As usual, my mind starts brewing when reading stuff by the folks over at MindonFire.com, which usually leads me over here after making long comments over there to finish my thoughts. :). In one post, the question of the day was “What is religion?” In terms of the book we are reviewing together by Sam Harris called The End of Faith. I tried to answer that as best I could, but only briefly.
I just want to make this statement: Religion is the destroyer of the spiritual life. If anyone wants to live a thriving spiritual life, they must throw it out. It is a sinking ship – if you stay on it too long, you will die spiritually.

Overview of The End of Faith

September 24, 2006Posted inBook Review2 Comments

Over at mindonfire.com, it’s author John Remy, inspiried by some of his regular readers, decided to band together and read a book relating to spiritual issues in our world today and talk about it, either on their own blogs, via comments on his, or meet together in person. I thought this was a great idea, and decided to read the chosen book and try posting some thoughts on it of my own on this site. The book that was eventually chosen was The End of Faith by Sam Harris.

The book was tough for me to read at first (as one of the regular visitors at MoF, Miko remarked). Harris is very acidic – he regularly uses insulting ways to describe people of faith and their beliefs, but like Miko also said, there must be something true here that needs to be heard or understood. I couldn’t agree more. I got so mad I had to put the book down for a while. I eventually skipped to the end to read his “solution” to faith, got a good laugh, felt a little better, and then proceeded to read the rest of the book.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the book, because it had some very thought-provoking sections, which might make people think “huh?” because I best define myself as a “moderate” Christian, which he attacks even more than fundamentalists. Anyway, if you’re interested, read on…

Analogy of Religion

September 20, 2006Posted inReligion, WorldviewsNo Comments

“Religion” is a hard thing to define. Here’s Dictionary.com’s take:

A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

From my perspective today, the key part of this definition that makes it called “religion” is after the word “usually.” The phrase before that is what I would call a “faith-based worldview”, but combined with what comes after, it becomes what I would call “religion.” Religion is a combination of a faith-based worldview + a human owned and operated institution. The bad part is the human owned and operated institution.

Thinking inside-out

September 20, 2006Posted inBelief, Divine Revelation, Philosophy, ReasonNo Comments

I was just reading a though-provoking post over at my favorite spiritual blog mindonfire.com. It was about being moved spiritually, out of nowhere, by a familiar song. John talked about this experience and then asked the readers what they would do with it. Having a similar experience, I tried to explain what I thought was going on and gave an example of this happening in my life, but forgot to answer the question. The gist of what my guess was going on is that music is a vehicle for spiritual truth combined with myth gleaned from both the melody and the lyrics, and we are sometimes moved spiritually by the messages in it. (You can read my comment for more details)

What I began to think about was the benefits of this mode of communication. I believe that this is the divine speaking to us, not unlike Jesus did when speaking in parables. The one obvious benefit is complex spiritual truth understood instantly. This is a great benefit, but I believe there is a second and no less important benefit.

Socrates and World of Warcraft

September 11, 2006Posted inC.S. Lewis, Love, SocratesNo Comments

I was reading the Symposium (Plato) and I came across the speech by Socrates which has come to be known as “The Ascent.” I was absolutely astounded by his insight. I read a similar description of this concept long ago by another author I greatly admire — C.S. Lewis, who was talking about the same subject – love. The idea is that all objects of our affection, whether they are people, places, things, causes, etc. are all pointers to greater objects. Once experienced, they appear to be not as wonderful as you thought them to be — their reality comes crashing down upon you and it is no longer so beautiful a thing as you once imagined before you had it.

Living the way I was designed

September 9, 2006Posted inDesign1 Comment

I realized the other day that in order to live well, we must live in accordance with how were are designed. Since we are multi-dimensional beings, being both spiritual and physical, it stands to reason that we are designed to live a certain way in both parts.

First of all, it is important to note that we are in fact, designed. This is an easy observation. We are not a product of evolution from a lesser life form and the sum total of millions of years of random mutations that ended up being the incredibly complex thing we call human today. I’m not debating exactly how we came to be or how long it took, I’m just looking at myself and saying that it is pretty obvious that I am the result of an intelligent, conscious designer, not the result of unconscious random forces acting on rocks and water that eventually become human. There are many parts of me that tell me so — I have a hand to hold, grab, and manipulate objects, I have senses that allow me to interact and receive feedback with the world around me. I have skin that allows me to live in certain environments and not others.

The self-preserving nature

September 6, 2006Posted inMotivations1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about the players of my inner life for days now. I’ve been trying to figure them out and what role they play. The self-destructive nature, my spirit, my self-preserving nature, the conscience, the will, etc. There are so many pieces, and I might be missing some, but I want to at least try to make sense of it all. For today, I want to settle on one piece — the self-preserving nature. So far I have determined there is a self-destructive one, so I believe it is reasonable to assume that we also have a self-preserving one, or else we would have died out as a species a long time ago.