Healing Power...
Faith, lets start there... I was brought up in the Anglican Church. My mother has always been involved to some degree or another with community or church or both. My father was not a church goer... something happened in his childhood and his mother (my Grandmother) took Dad and his brothers out of the local Sunday school. What the issue was I've never bothered to clarify, but there were single sentences around, implying that popular past-time of a small minority of the priests of old...
So here it was - Mum went to Church every week, Dad went about 3 times in all the years I lived at home. It may well have been more than 3 times but I can't recall more than that... and those 3 times weren't consecutive so... Anyway as each Sunday rolled around Mum and the boys would go off to church and Dad would tell us to go... it seems from this perspective a fairly rare occasion that we were allowed to stay home. So were am I going with all of this, and how does it fit into the Mature Society?
What do I believe? Do I believe in God? Where is my faith? What is its standing vs. the Church? Why do I miss Church some weekends? And who is this God person anyway?
What do you believe Craig?
Well I certainly believe that people like Jesus Christ and Mohamed and a few others were real people who profoundly impacted on societies of old. In terms of teachings and beliefs, because I have no childhood indoctrination in anything other than the Anglican version of the Christian faith I am most certainly based in my Christianity...
That being said, I find the teachings of Jesus to be applicable to me regardless of his relationship to a God. If the story of Jesus came down to me as being that of a person born of a woman and a man who went on to live an extraordinary life I would still think that here is a morality and a way of life I would have my children grow up with. However, thats from my upbringing - other views and facts could lead you to wonder if Jesus ever really existed...
Do you believe in God?
Well that's a tricky one, I think God in the Christian/Jewish/Islamic faiths, with full blown personification, is something I find hard to identify with. It is impossible to reach a complete definition of God, for if we can define God we can have a complete concept of reality and then it is a valid question to ask what is beyond it, i.e. what is beyond God? In "The Night's Dawn Trilogy" (Peter F. Hamilton), confronts a post Sol, peak Nanotech society with the reality of a soul, a purgatory and something after life. No God, an artifact mistaken by aliens as a God, but no omni-potent judging mechanism - just the self judgement of self and experience.
I guess the biggest problem I have with the "faiths" personification is that every faith seem's to make us dependent on a Him/Her. If things go wrong, we should pray to God to fix it, in fact we should get as many people as possible to pray because this will somehow make it more likely that God will intervene. Don't get me wrong, we pray in our house to give thanks for all the things in our lives... but we don't ask for more rain or money or please solve this problem for us. In this household if a problem needs solving then we set about doing what we can do, we don't say "well we can't do anything about it so we'll ask for help" rather we recognise what is in our ability to do and continue from there. This of course brings me to the questions "Why do we pray? What good does it do?" - there's a whole book in those two questions.
Earlier this year I broke my neck and back in stupid 4WD accident, stupid because I thought I was driving safely enough and obviously I wasn't. Doubly stupid because my daily job is OH&S for my brothers forestry based business. At the time of the accident I had no idea how much damage I had done to my neck and back, in fact the main part of the accident I can't remember at all. One of the most vivid things I do remember is thanking God for my life and all the wonders in it, my wife and children, my parents, my brother and friends. I also asked him to take them all into his care because I clearly thought it wasn't going to be in my ability to do anything.
Ability - I guess this is the crux of it all. Every human being alive on this planet is full of ability - given to us by our heritage. (For the record I'm not a creationist nor a believer in Intelligent Design) Whether you believe that evolution or God gave us the mind/soul that is us, it is irrelevant. Weather you believe God to be aloof or interventionist or patriarchal it is irrelevant. Things that seem certain, within the bounds of our upbringing, our brains and our societies, are that we have "Freedom of Choice". We can choose to speak up about issues, we can choose to remain silent, we can choose to do something, we can choose to get a new job or stay in our current one. We can choose to eat that extra piece of cake or to forgo it. Even a person locked in a prison in a country that doesn't believe in Human Rights can choose how much they let the "real" world affect them. For the most if you can read this article you have more choices and power than millions of others on our little planet - therefore you can choose to do something with your day each and every day. In fact its a fair bet you can look at every decision you make and not blame circumstance/God/some other hapless person for it going badly... Likewise its a fair bet that if you bother to actually think about every decision you will make different ones and with practice be happier with the results...
So, back to the question, I clearly believe in a God but I think that any being/force that would bring about the universe where creatures so wonderful and so flawed as humanity can come about would expect the universe and its inhabitants to stand on its/their own feet. Finally it brings me back to Why do I believe in a God? Well as far as I can tell its because of my upbringing/indoctrination as a child, but by traditional values it hasn't taken very well. In a deep programming sense I clearly revert in times of duress, such as my accident, why? So, why doesn't this deep programming drive/guide me in detail, and why in some people does it drive them to point of fanaticism?
As I feared, this whole post is generating more questions than I'm answering, onto the next one...
Where is my Faith?
My faith is in humanity, you only have to look around you to see it, if you don't have a similar faith you should ask yourself: "How isolated are you? How estranged am I from the wider community?"
When the Universe hits us with a massive Tsunami or a devastating hurricane or a catastrophic earthquake people can run in several directions. Like a few people you could run around screaming about the portents of Judgement Day, wail and gnash your teeth, or in a positive pro-active way you could donate funds, volunteer for a fund-raiser or take a massive step and volunteer to work in one of these disaster zones. All of these positive actions will have a measurable better outcome for those affected by the disaster at hand - and if the Judgement Day people are right I'm sure God in one of his forms will front up to you & me and let us know that we can stop doing these things. Personally I would rather be donating money or helping out when the big fella taps me on the shoulder and tells me the games be called on account of the end of time.
It doesn't take a Tsunami to see my faith in humanity justified - when I broke my neck I was surrounded by people helping out, the majority of them volunteers or like the farmer that found me, just passing by.
Enough for now... I'll answer the other 3 questions in my next post...
