RELIGION - FAITH OR FALLACY?

Jonathan: I am talking about higher shades and modes of consciousness and feeling extending up to what has been known as 'God'

My own life, in a way, has been shaped by each of these shades and modes. Nor do I believe in agendas, systems, saints or apostles. They are a cultural no less than a manufactured phenomenon. Above all I don’t subscribe to salvation or eternal life in any religious sense. Those are strategies of a theological kind evolved, in my opinion, as a moral means of shoring up against universal uncertainty. Religion is, in substance, little more than an acceptance of cultural norms. It simply cannot exist in an ideological vacuum. Hence, there is no freedom to its dogma. It merely fosters the theological differences that tend to crystallize into conflicting social priorities and religious wars.

Bretwalda: In the end, all philosophy is speculation but a living faith provides the proof which is not apparent to those who intellectualize the cosmos.

Nor do I make any judgements about Christ. It is my own belief that his birth was sufficient joy onto itself. In comparison to the immeasurable certainties of scientific experience and cosmological perception, such a detail can hardly be considered either universal or eternal. It is true, he made statements about God in much the same manner as one would about a scientific absolute. Nor do I disagree. It just awes me that his belief was so consummate. To put matters bluntly, all it really meant for him was that from the moment you learn to walk on water, you are no longer under the necessity of getting your feet wet. And on the basis of this ascertainable fact I find much in his faith which is powerful and much which is imputable.


Andrew: The human mind is inextricably entwined in the fabric of being; this immense truth reflected in the New Testament: "Before Abraham was, I Am."

The New Testament is, indeed, testimony to the psychological susceptibility of circumstances to faith. It’s an illustration of Christ’s utter self-belief: He knows his place in the universe; it is assured, as He is. Nothing will take that away. Nor do I believe that Christ was attributing to himself unreasonable abilities. If anything, he was a master-craftsman, the redeemer of faith and circumstances. Albeit that not Christ, but the principle of faith itself, is at the heart of the matter. Faith alone operates as a law of selection. Its limits are determined less by God than by doubt. It is equally manifest in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the Hindu Vedas, occultism and tribal superstition and reflects in no way on the nature of God other than that it confirms its own selective principle.

Jonathan: This idea that the universe is shaped by our minds seems like a return to a pre-heliocentric cosmology, which put the earth at the center of the universe.

This is perfectly accurate. Except, of course, that it isn’t! Science is the most powerful form of “faith.” And as such, it can mutate the universe. Believing in something can make it true. Its limits are determined less by knowledge than by doubt. Cosmology for the theoretical physicist may appear to have become a study of spatial relations, but consciousness is no longer an observational means external to different bodies in space-time, but a conceptual property of space-time itself. And that distinction is fundamental. The laws of physics may describe the real world, but they are not reality itself. Perhaps we need to be reminded that the principle of physical uncertainty is at the basis of reality, and that certainty is a fallacy. Or that the laws of physics have been formulated by human observation, not of the “thing itself,” but of the world we observe. And remember that, in a homocentric universe, human conception always triumphs. It is a “faith” of great power and creativity. Man is a bystander but also a participant, if not The Creator.


Do I find it viable that God exists? I can find no evidence to support the notion that He does not.


Dreamy