Remnant Ideology and Majority Constituency
February 8, 2007
It seems common to many groups of religious and institutionalized theoretical or ideological belief to eventually have a Purist strain. As with most of life accretions, developments and adaptations occur, wanted or unwanted. A similar counterbalance, or antithesis, occurs which attempts to “correct” the developments through either reform or revolution. As an outcome a new state is attained with resemblances to the former state corresponding to the degree of reform or revolt. I believe this Hegelian dialectic of history is representative of much of religious history. Read the rest of this entry »
Toward an Existential Epistemology
January 20, 2007
Though William James isn’t regarded as an existentialist, he made an interesting point that can facilitate developing an existential epistemology. He said in “The Will to Believe”
“As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why…Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”
When it comes to epistemology, I think James is right. Most of the information we obtain is through secondary sources. There’s a limited amount of first hand analysis that we as humans engage in, and I think necessarily so. One reason is that we are historical beings. Read the rest of this entry »
Ethical Dissonance
November 6, 2006
The following explications of the 10 reasons for wandering are more like memoirs than hard logical reasonings. While I do hope to engage in dialogue concerning the validity of any reasoning used in the posts, my wanderings are not purely reason based. I don’t think that all of our reasonings are ever purely rational or logical. I am an emotive, historical being with a matrix of epistemological, aesthetic and ethical inheritance. I know I operate out of that, and even rejection of it is delineated by the contours of it.
Ethical dissonance is probably the most difficult and personal issue for me. I’ve heard many times before the debates and discussions concerning the topic, but it still hits me at an existentially deep place. I don’t understand how there can be such a history of difference between the way that christianity has behaved and the teachings of its founder. The most common explanation I’ve heard is that those who behaved in such a way were not acting in accordance with the teachings of Jesus. One apologist has said that the actions of say the Crusades were not the logical outworkings of the teachings of Jesus whereas something like the Holocaust were the logical outworkings of atheism or social Darwinism. If there are other approaches I’d love to hear and discuss them. However, I have a few problems with any such, or similar, approach.
