@xris,
xris;105350 wrote:I dont come from a position that god is impossible, only that he is beyond our comprehension. When ever certain believers try to develop a new view of this god, I'm inclined to ask for the details. The details usually drift back to the same basic idea of a god and the usual inconsistencies. Don't you think a convinced agnostic, as I, have not considered all these alternative views? Every new kid on the block imagines he is the first to come up with a new description,they aint..
My impression is that you - not only you - are holding God to account for all the misery in the world. The subsequent comments about children who die in poverty and misery seem to indicate this.
Well in some respects I am agnostic too but I am probably nearer to 'believing' than yourself. But belief makes me uncomfortable as well. I think my 'conception' of deity, and I use quotes for a reason, must have been shaped by an experience of it. I am pretty vague about the details of that also. I can't really recall the specifics, and it might have been the cumulative results of lots of expriences. All I know is, I caught glimpse of something unbelievably great - the ultimate AHA moment. (It is usually a flash.) That is probably not going to do you a lot of good as an explanation but it is all I have. But that is why, I think, I spent so much of my life reading spiritual books - to validate something which I thought I knew or had experienced. None of it is certain yet, although I do have growing conviction. I am learning to map my experience and intuition against various accounts of 'the sacred' (not many of them Biblical in my case).
I have met people who have really embodied a special quality. One was the Head Sister at an Emergency Ward where I worked as a wardsman during my mis-spent youth. Sister Mary Louise, always turned out in starched habit and steel rim glasses, all bustle and efficiency and in charge of the other nurses. It was an emergency ward so the ambulance bay doors would fly open and God knows what would emerge. One morning it was an old couple who had been sitting by the electric fire having breakfast. The draft had blown a piece of newspaper onto the fire and it had burst into flames. It set alight the old lady's nylon night gown. The old man had bad burns on his hands from trying to put out the flames. The wife was wheeled straight into theatres and the poor old fellow, still in his dressing gown and in terrible shock, was in casualty having his hands bandaged. A doctor came in the door and looked at him and it was clear from the look that his wife had'nt made it. The man just dissolved into tears at this point. Sister Mary put her arms around this old guy and cried with him. She was completely open to him, totally with him in his moment of need - no longer the starchy old matron but a Sister.
And it was not even morning tea yet. There in the casualty ward it was just another day, and this kind of thing happened all the time.
Now I know it is a very sentimental story, but I saw something in that moment. This hospital was called 'Mater Misercordae', 'Mother of Mercy'. I saw there was something real corresponding to that name. I felt it was something more than the outome of a belief or a personal conviction. Perhaps you can say 'spirit' is 'the spirit in which something is done', as in the 'the spirit of mercy' which gives completely of itself in the moment of need. But whatever it was that I saw, I knew it was real in that moment.
It was a conversion experience. But I didn't become Catholic as a result of it. I worked there for about 7 months, and saw many other incidents. But the sense of 'spirit' that I saw that day stayed with me ever since. And I do indeed have a lot of respect for Catholic spirituality and philosophy, even though I have extremely critical views of the Catholic institution (but that is a whole other thread).
So I guess the moral of that story is that the understanding of these kinds of things is not so much a matter of working something out, but having something happen. I don't think many people get to understand Deity through thinking about it. Many of the prophets were dragged kicking and screaming. In addition to that very conventional experience, I had others that were considerably less conventional but hard to relate. I was also lucky to meet some great spiritual teachers over the subsequent decade who had a big impact on my outlook (and I am quite aware that there are many fakes and fakirs in this game.) But again, I think the experience of meeting them outweighs what you think about them. In India, meeting a sage is called 'darshan'. It is said if you can meet a real sage, you can learn in a moment what might take lifetimes otherwise.
It is all a work in progress still but there is something going on, on a deep level, that is very good, whatever it is. So I always want to say, there is a good that has no opposite, unlike all our ordinary goods which always have a bad. I can't prove it, but I am trying to get to where it is. All I can say is that we need to be open to that sense, that possibility, by whatever means it takes.
