User:Andrewa/what I believe

Religion-wiki — for all religions and none

This is an evolving description of what I believe.

Welcome!

It may get some order some day, but for now it's a bit of a ramble, and far from complete.

In that it's a statement of what I believe, it's not obvious to me how edits by anyone else would be helpful. But I welcome discussion on the talk page, and of course it's released under the GPL if you want to copy any part of it, or set up your own annotated copy. TIA. Andrewa

I am a Christian. I seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, aka Jesus Christ. I believe he was a historical person, and that studying his life and applying his teaching offers a unique and supremely effective way to fellowship with God.

I believe in God. I believe that God created the universe and continues to act in it. I find attempts by others, including some ministers in my particular denomination and most others, to claim that they believe in God when they deny his acting in any meaningful way, to be intellectually dishonest.

I believe that the basis of a good relationship to God is worship. There is formal worship, both private and corporate, and they are both good things. And there is less formal worship, which ideally includes everything we do. I find that however sincere they may be, a person's worship is generally a far better indication of what they really believe than their theology is, and I include myself in this observation.

I especially believe in prayer. Jesus prayed.

I believe in miracles. In a sense I don't want to, they make me uncomfortable, especially the resurrection. This is at least partly due to my over-linear upbringing as the son of a scientist who it was always assumed would become another scientist, in an era when science became a god. But unlikely as I find them, I find rejecting them even more unlikely.

I believe that miracles continue to happen today. I find the claim that they ended at the end of some "Apostolic Age" unsupportable. This would make this event, at which God changed his whole modus operandi, the most important event since creation. Again, this rationalisation has an initial intellectual attraction, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But I also find that many of the miracles, and similar phenomena like prophecy, that I investigate are fakes. And that is not surprising, it has always been so.

I believe that the following things (and many others) are inherently good: Human life. Pleasure. Joy. Loyalty. Beauty. Kindness. Love. Knowledge. Truth. Life.

I believe that human life is especially precious. I believe that every person has a right to be treated with dignity, and that whenever this right is violated, both parties are the poorer for it.

I believe that every person has two parents, and that to conceive a child who is not wanted by both their parents is one of the most obscene human rights abuses, and should be actionable as both a civil and a criminal matter.

I believe that God has quite deliberately concealed from us the moment at which life begins. To say that a human life always begins at some definable point, be it birth, conception, or any arbitrary point between, is intellectually attractive but patently false in the light both of human experience and of Biblical evidence.

I believe in the Bible. I don't care much for debates about its status, I just find that when I read it I become a better person, and when others read it they become Christians, or better Christians. My favourite book on Biblical scholarship is Darrell_Huff's How to Lie With Statistics. I think many people have the same problem with the Bible: If you sit down with the Bible and a preconception that you want to support from its pages, you'll eventually convince yourself that you've succeeded. And of course that proves nothing, however eloquently you can express this rationale. Obedience means listening. I am equally appalled by simplistic assertions such as the children's song that goes "every single word of it is true". This is a meaningless concoction of weasel-words, and even the kids aren't impressed.

I believe in an open canon in theory, but a closed one in practice. If Paul's third letter to the Corinthians turned up (well, it would be the second probably) I'd want to consider adding it in, depending a bit on what exactly it said. I see no reason that it wouldn't be possible. On the other hand, except for sorting out differences between denominations, I don't really expect the canon to change.

I believe in obedience. I hear many asking "how do I know what God is saying?" and it always seems to really mean "I know very well what God is saying and I don't like it".

I believe in the Church.

I believe that whether you're a Christian or not is between you and God. I notice that when Jesus talks about people going to hell, it's always because of what they have or haven't done, never because of what they have or haven't believed.

I believe that there are three authorities to which a Christian should submit: The Church, the Bible and the Holy Spirit. I believe these three say the same things: If they don't seem to at times, then it's not a democracy. The two that agree can't just outvote the third. What needs to happen is to work out how you've misinterpretted one or more of them.

I believe that baptism is repeatable. I see no evidence that John, or Jesus' disciples, or anyone else in the Gospels thought it only had to happen once. Jesus was probably baptised only once, but he's a rather special case, and we don't even know that for sure. To deny a believer the right to be dunked just because their parents had them sprinkled as a baby, as many churches do, is kinda grotesque. I can't imagine John or Paul or Cornelius objecting like that.

I believe in the Holy Trinity. I struggled for a long time with this, and I still do. I've come to suspect that it is a property of our vision, not just of God's nature. I think that the three spatial dimensions we see and measure in physics are probably the same: This number three says something about us, rather than something about the universe. But this is uncomfortably close to several heresies of past eras, so there are things I'm still struggling with.

I believe that anyone can preside at communion. The idea that we should ordain people to hog the highest privileges such as serving communion in the hope that this will help them to set an example of Christlikeness is just plain revolting.

I believe that Jesus was wholly human and wholly God. I struggled with this for ages too, until I realised that I didn't have any problem in considering an electron as both a particle and a wave. Well, actually that's not true; I have all sorts of problems with this. It's a puzzle. But I think on balance it seems to be true. So if an electron can be both like that, I think I can accept that Jesus could be both, too.

I believe that global thought is logically prior to linear thought. I believe that putting these two back into perspective is what postmodernism is all about, and I love it.

I believe in the power of logical, linear thought. It's one of God's finest gifts, and one of God's own properties.

I believe in the validity of naive religion, and of naive set theory. We may never understand either, but they both work.

I believe in marriage. I think that marriage is intended to be exclusive and permanent. (And exclusive in the sense that you don't fool around before marriage either.) I think that marriage is heterosexual, but I don't have a problem with the idea of ordaining homosexuals, or allowing them to get married in church. There are more important things to worry about. I do have a problem with people who seem happy to split the church over the issue, on both sides of the debate. I think people who would do this are all badly off beam. I suspect that many of them are so far off beam as to be just plain unfit for Christian leadership until they work it out. But I also recognise that there are many people of good will who are caught up in the whole mess. If King David "a man after God's own heart" could have such a problem with his sex life as to commit murder to promote it, then there's hope for us all.

I believe in divorce and remarriage. Marriages do fail. Didn't Jesus say something about second chances? If you intend your proposed new marriage to be permanent and exclusive, then I say have another go.

I believe in evangelism. I think that to be a Christian and not committed to evangelism is a logical impossibility. If you think it's true, and you love others as Christ commanded, wouldn't you want to tell them about it? But I also think that there has been an enormous amount of bad teaching about evangelism. People have been scared off it because some idiot made them feel guilty if they didn't assault their fellow bus passengers with a printed copy of Two Ways to Live (an excellent tract, just not a suitable tool for that purpose). Their whole body screamed, rightly, that they couldn't do it.

I believe in the equality of women and men. I find John Paul II's claim that priests and popes have to be men because Jesus and the twelve were all men quite ludicrous. Jesus and the twelve were all Jews, too (Luke came later), so by that same logic, JP II himself would be an antipope, as he wasn't a Jew. Where do you draw the line?

I believe that science and theology complement each other. I think Robert Heinlein put it well when he said The job of science is to describe the universe. The job of theology is to put man into the picture (that may not be word-perfect). I don't see any conflict between Darwin's Origin of Species and the Book of Genesis, and find them both awesomely good reads. I do see a lot of conflict between Genesis and those who have an agenda of discrediting it and use science in this attempt, and that is not surprising surely, and between Origin of Species and those who attack it in a misguided attempt to defend Genesis, which is equally unsurprising. I also note that the dogmatic faith in science in which I was immersed in primary school in the 1950s and 1960s is now a bad joke. The interpretation of the Miller-Urey experiment is probably the most spectacular failure (they got it wrong by about 100 orders of magnitude) but certainly not the only one.