Well,
I haven't posted for a while. I have been contemplating many things and I have balked at trying to broach the topics that interest or concern me at this point in my life. I struggle with my inadequacy at expressing myself. Anyway. I figured I would give it a shot.
First off, some housekeeping type business. I have opened my blog. Mainly because I am no longer in Afghanistan and therefore unlikely to accidentally let something slip that could compromise "operational security" (although it is not my intent to focus on military type issues or expound on my own personal military experiences, though they have to a great degree been critical to the formation of my current concept of self). Also, I have occasionally feared that some of my thoughts could possibly be viewed as being overly politically opinionated for a member of the military (although I have never ever ever intended to speak as a military person). So if anybody is actually reading this, and feels that someone he or she knows might be interested in a certain topic or posting or whatever, it is now shareable.
I know the title of my blog "Merklemania" is silly, but I will explain it. I had the privilege of serving in the Siberian city of Tomsk for around 9 months as a missionary. In the late 90s Siberia was a bit behind western Russia in a lot of things so a lot of things Communist (such as the statues of Lenin) were still standing. I was walking to district meeting with my companion, two elders, and two sisters (basically my district) and we happened to traverse Lenin Square. At that time Lenin was still standing there (and he may still be). I commented that one day, in the future, my statue would be standing in Lenin's place. One of the sisters (who is Ukrainian) commented that I was suffering from delusions of grandeur. In Russian that is more literally stated "mania of greatness". Thus, Merkle-mania. Now to get the train back on the tracks.
I am about to touch on something that is pretty sensitive. I am doing so mainly because I want some ideas from people out there regarding what I have to say. The topic is one that is to most, considered untouchable, so I ask for some patience and understanding in this.
In Alma 32 (in The Book of Mormon) Alma says that faith is like a seed. You plant it and nurture it and if you do everything it will grow and the fruit will be great. I am honestly getting to the point in my life that I feel I have been watering and watering and waiting... And the only real fruit I see is more faith. Not denying that I am blessed and I feel a divine hand in my life, but I don't know that I can attribute that necessarily to a certain (what seems to me) restrictive and dogmatic concept of God. I am not, in saying this, declaring open war on religion, or my own particular religion, I am just trying to come to grips with myself and God and the universe and everything.
I struggle because I feel I am being torn in two all the time. I guess it is the whole two masters thing. I know there are many people wiser and intellectually superior to college degree not holding me who handle the whole religion thing fairly well, so I am interested on whatever input you might have. Please, however, I beg, plead, exhort, beg, do not answer my questions or concerns with a testimony or the response that I just need to have more faith. I understand that perspective. I struggle with discussing serious matters with religious people due to the fact that it seems people are trained to respond to question with something along the lines of "I know without a shadow of a doubt from the depths of my soul that..." Not to denigrate the faith or beliefs that I know are very important to a lot of people out there, but I understand that perspective, in fact it is the very thing I find myself struggling with.
My battle is between two powers that are very important to me. Faith and reason. I feel torn because what I have been taught to believe, and generally accepted in the past, to be a loving, fatherly god-figure, gave me a brain that is constantly asking questions. He gave me (all humans really) the ability to question and judge and to some degree understand. And then it seems he expects me to turn that whole part of me off whenever it comes to anything that could possibly fall into the strictures of a certain religion, which is guess is really the crux of my problem. Maybe it is because I feel I am living in a very myopic culture, overly dependent on conventions that I do not be leave to be inherent in the Law or the Good News, or the divine Plan. Maybe I have had excessive exposure to the outside world, Babylon, call it what you will, and seen too much beauty and good external to the ranks of the Chosen or the Righteous or the Saints. Maybe I am just deficient. A lot of "religious" types tend to think that if you struggle or you question that you are somehow either deficient, or a serious sinner. I do not consider myself perfect, but I do not think I am a heavy sinner, nor do I feel I am deficient, so I am putting my thoughts out there to get feedback from people I respect, not only personally, but also intellectually.
It seems to me the more organized a religion is, the stricter and more confining its definition of divinity is, and also the greater it conflicts with science.
I guess the clearest example to me is the conflict between Christ and Darwin. More appropriately the conflict between the "followers" of Jesus, and the "disciples" of Darwin. It seems to me that is the clearest line of demarcation between religion and reason. Or at least between the more highly structured conservative Christian type religions and science. People read in the Bible (which many in the first group strongly, strongly believe to be completely and definitely literally true and infallible) that man was created on day six in the image of God, and they accept that to be unassailable truth, and therefore not only discount the theory of evolution in its entirety, along with things like natural selection, but pretty much a great deal of biological and social science progress that has developed since Darwin.
I am not saying I necessarily believe that man came down from monkeys who came down from some sort of less complex mammal who came down from some sort of proto-mammalian reptile who came down from some sort of amphibian who came from some sort of soup who came down from a bunch of goopy cells millions-billions of years ago. What I struggle with is the idea that the things we are able to observe personally, first-hand, like the fossil record, all kinds of anthropological, geological, and tangible stuff are often put in direct conflict, by religious people, with deity, and at the same time all things divine or deistic are under steady assault by men and women or science.
I guess I really struggle with the fact that we have this whole world out there full of information that we admittedly are unable to interpret appropriately or completely, but that definitely conflicts with a lot of religious dogma, and the only answer to all of that is faith. I have a hard time understanding, or in a sense wanting to understand a divine, loving, creative being that throws all that in our face just to test us or whatever people out there want to think it is.
Well, I failed miserably to get anywhere near a point with any of this but I will leave it there because I am curious to see if firstly, anyone reads this, and secondarily, what anyone who actually gets to the end of this might have to say.
This is again, not meant to be an assault on anything anyone out there holds holy. I just feel that organized religion has spent thousands of years putting god in a box. A very small box that strictly defines what god is and gives god anthropomorphic features.
I mean it. I feel like I am being torn in half. I have faith and it has always been very important to me, and I realized recently that I need that faith, but I am really struggling because I have a hard time accepting, and even not hating, a creator who would make me the type of person I am, give me so many questions and so many wonderful things to think about and ponder upon, and then make me feel damned for not knowing where to draw the lines where it comes to what questions I am allowed to ask and all that.
Also, I do not believe that even if the concept of God and eternity and life and such I have been raised with and generally accepted is true, I do not believe that at death everything suddenly makes sense, I personally think that would thwart agency and really diminish the value and import of mortal existence, so please don't tell me to hold on and wait till I die when it will all make sense.
I hope I have gotten my general idea out there. I haven't even gotten to politics and the literalness of scripture (particularly the Bible) or the current composition of the Bible (how it was established which books were canonical and which apocryphal) and many other things that would definitely be taboo, or I perceive to be taboo, in many religious circles.
I realize my knowledge of the universe and life and divinity is definitely, and the universe and truth are infinite, so it may seem arrogant for me to ask some of these questions. I hope the sincerity of my questioning is apparent, as well as the futility I fee. Seriously, I go to church, and feel like I am on a rack. Pulled two directions. I either need to find a balance, or pray I break in such a way that whatever is left of me benefits from its position.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A seed...
Posted by Joe at 9:22 PM
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5 comments:
I think that you would benefit from talking to my Biology teacher who has spent most of his life struggling between science and religion. Struggling with other church members who claim that you can not believe in both.
I appreciate your comment. I do not believe that it is impossible to believe in God and also accept science. One of the issues I have however, is that a lot of religious people tend to make it seem like that is not possible. Continuing along the whole evolution example, the official position of the LDS Church is there is not position. However, President Joseph Fielding Smith, who was one of the persons personally responsible for codifying and standardizing Mormon "doctrine", as an apostle, personally acted without the official support or sanction of the First Presidency and published anti-evolutionary literature. His publications influenced LDS culture to large degree, so while there is no official position, I would guess I would be right in stating that the majority of "good" Mormons view the acceptance of evolutionary science as blasphemous.
Let me know if you would like his e-mail address and I can give it to you. He let class out early one day and invited people to stay and talk about his religious views, he has a lot of good view points on evolution and survival of the fittest and what not...
I was fascinated reading your latest posting and am amazed at your command of expression! Well, not really--you have always done extremely well at writing. I am putting some thought into response to your intense questions and dialogue. Suffice it for now for you to know that many within our faith (mself included) struggle with questions, issues, etc. The struggle is part of the journey, isn't it?
Joe,
It would take a lot of time and discussion to even begin to address your questions in the manner they deserve. I can, here, only offer a beginning.
Let me start by saying, there is nothing wrong or bad about asking questions or feeling torn between reason and belief, particularly in this age and time, when knowledge is accumulating at an alarming rate and information is accessible as never before. Asking questions can, of course, be corrosive, if you are arrogant and lazy. But if your quest is true, and you approach it with humility, and are willing to pay the price of a good deal of learning and effort, understanding will come. Almost everyone is familiar with the quote from Pope "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing..." But few know the full quote: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow droughts intoxicate the brain; and drinking largely sobers us again.”
It's worth thinking about what Pope is saying if you are going to go questing after knowledge and understanding. Faith works just fine for many people - it's a necessary beginning - and to tell the truth, absolute knowledge is something of a quixotic quest for a finite being (our current state). You have to be in it for the long haul, and you have to remain teachable, and keep your sense of humor (a taste for irony is, I find, quite useful). As for the alleged conflict between science and religion, I find this to be red herring. Why would a loving Heavenly Father bless us with the ability to learn and understand how the universe works and then ask us not to put it to use?
There are those who fear knowledge because they think it threatens faith, but this is nonsense. If we are to progress and become like Heavenly Father, and one of his attributes is intelligence and all knowledge, then why would he not want us to - nay, expect us to - seek after and grow in knowledge? The problem, of course, is that the quest often leaves us, in the short run, uncertain, and uncertainty is an uncomfortable state for many - patience truly is a virtue. Still, I find it exhilarating. It means I am progressing - a work in progress, rather than in a state of foreclosed and shallow certainty. Sure, we can get stuck, and confused, and frustrated, but that is part of the joy of struggling through difficult and challenging problems, and oh what joy when the epiphany comes - line upon line, precept upon precept! As I said, you have to be in it for the long haul.
There was a time, for example, when I thought evolution can't be true. But, the more I learned, the more I began to see I had not even begun to understand the issue. After many years of struggle, reading, study, testing alternatives, etc. I began to see the whole issue differently I don't have space to detail what I have learned, but I think I understand what Darwin meant at the end of his master work, the Origin, when he said "there is grandeur in this view."
Unfortunately, too many people (including some Church leaders - I know this comment will distress some, but I mean no disrespect. I'm just not much into the cult of worshiping personalities, no matter what their station in life. I reserve my worship for the Lord) pontificate on issues and matters of which they have very little by way of either knowledge or understanding. I have great respect for Church leaders, but they are not experts in every area of knowledge, nor need they be. That's not their calling. As Paul says, there are many gifts, and not each has every gift (I'm paraphrasing).
Now, there are many more things I could say, but let me end with a caution. Not only should your motive for pursuing knowledge be true, not only should you remain humble and teachable, not only should you be patient and painstaking, but you should seek the companionship of the Holy Ghost as a guide always. Lastly, you need to keep in mind that the pursuit of knowledge is not the only important thing in life. It is important not to become so obsessed with it, that you cut out the other dimensions of life - family, friendship, duty, service, play, beauty, etc., all add to the richness of becoming. Finding balance, and patience, is a difficult thing, but it can be done. That is the true meaning of integrity.
Well, I have barely scratched the surface of some deep and vexing issues. Perhaps, it's my hope at least, my comments will be of some value. We all have to find our own way in the end, and each of us is unique. I know you are not asking for a testimony, but let me say that I truly believe each of us has the potential to grow in knowledge, understanding, strength and character - there is nobility and beauty in each of us, and if we honestly, and humbly, pursue these things, we can attain them (though it can take a while!), and the Lord wants us to!
Reinhard Lindner
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