Floating Life

You will see that I have been adjusting things here, moving things around, adding this and that. You may especially note the Vodpod which is unique to this blog. Its contents reflect my own interests.

I will be avoiding anything that separates one person unnecessarily from another, and the first casualty is the idea that any religion — and I mean any religion — has a privileged position on truth. While I believe God speaks to us in a variety of ways — what that means may become apparent in time — I do not believe he* has spoken to any people past or present exclusively. Yes, that does mean I do not accept the infallibility or unique authority of any scripture, which does mean I regard scriptures as inspiring and special, but also as human products, and texts that emerge as all texts do in contexts of culture and history. There are no exceptions to that. None. The idea that there are exceptions is powerfully uniting and community-building for those who accept the idea, but is also the most divisive and destructive idea humanity has ever subscribed to, especially in an inevitably pluralistic world.

As I said at church last Sunday. We were discussing one of our church’s better-known fundamentalists who had made an ill-judged intervention in the real world of the outer Sydney suburb of Camden. Sydney people will know who I mean and what he did, but you might also read The place where we are right and Interim post updated on my WP blog. In fact those posts relate very closely to what we were discussing at church as I had said similar things during the service.

Talking with another worshipper after the service I said: "When it comes to God as an old man sitting on a throne somewhere above the sky, I am an atheist. When it comes to a God who writes or dictates books that are valid in all details for all time, I am an atheist. When it comes to a God who may however be found in such books, among other places, whether the Bible, the Qu’ran, or the Tao Te Ching or wherever, I am a believer. When it comes to the Virgin Birth and literal resurrection of Jesus, I am somewhere between agnosticism and belief." The reply I got: "Absolutely; that really is the only honest position." The  conversation had begun with my asking her if what I had said during the service had been out of order.

I was of course pleased, but I would hesitate to accept even that as endorsement in too total a manner. It is a work in progress.

The core values, however, do not require belief. Even atheists may practise them… I do perhaps respect a little more than they do some of the traditional sources of what is unfashionably called "wisdom" — which is not to say I have attained that degree of poise. Expect dialectic here sometimes rather than solidity. In fact I would call that state of suspension "faith".

Pomo is true: that’s what is so awkward about it, even if I find many expressions of it unnecessarily obtuse, and even more if such a statement is itself not consistent with pomo… But whoever said I should be consistent obviously doesn’t know me, or (perhaps) has not really come to terms with the way things really are.

* No, God is not male as we understand it. On the other hand, I am not a pronoun Nazi either. I suspect we can be inclusive without tying ourselves in linguistic knots, even though I normally practise inclusive language forms for, I think, very valid reasons.