In the following diagram below, I show how I start with what I call G.O.D., an acronym for the Good Operating Dimension. In that, I believe there is this divine realm acting as an algorythm, that when followed, produces The Good. The Source of that alogritm would by "God" or a Higher Power, whatever you want to call it.
Stephen Covey wrote a book called The Divine Center before he wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I believe in that idea of a Divine Center, from out of which effective habits and the Character Ethic manifests The Good. So I begin with that. That is the start of my "faith" in something Divine.
Note that the word faith in the New Testament, in the original Greek, meant something more like trust: wherein faith was trusting (or having a reasonable expectation) that God would do what he promised if you followed his ethical guidelines; it meant having hope and trusting in a certain future outcome based on past experiences of trusting God's way of say Radical Hospitality. In other words, faith is simply trusting that your allegiant loyalty in abiding by the ethics of God puts you in harmony with the Divine, which results in your prosperity (as emphasized in the Old Testament) and your resurrection and immortality (according to the New Testament).
I drew the following diagram below depicting how my "faith/trust" is in the Divine Center, or belief in the Good Operating Dimension, and how that belief ripples outward to other beliefs:
The outer layers of the diagram represent my experiences. So I begin in the center with my belief in G.O.D. (The Good Operating Dimension) and
The Divine Center as discussed in Stephen Covey's book by that title. I then move to the next circle which is: I believe there was a real experience (a "Christ-experience") in the first century that produced what Paul calls the "fruit of the spirit." I think that even non-Christian anthropologists would admit that there was some kind of profound experience going on with the first Christians. Even if one were to naturalize it as a product of neurology, psychology and sociology, you would still have to admit that there was a genuine and real experience, a profound emotional and social phenomenon that occured. I have experienced it myself at different times in my life, this "Christ-experience." I first experienced it as a child attending church and listening to the parables of Jesus. I have experienced this feeling of deep interconnectedness and unity within the body of Christ-followers, a real synergetic feeling of warmth and serenity and ethical "hiving." So I believe the first century Christians were having real experiences that did in fact motivate them to produce The Good all around them. So I believe in the Christ-experience and the goodness it generates.
The next circle out in my diagram above, is my firm belief in a metaphysical or objective Good and Evil, and/or Right and Wrong. I believe this because even when I went through my atheistic phase, I could never erase my deep down, core belief in Right and Wrong. I very much believe in the LDS phrase, "Choose the Right."
In the next Outer Circle of my diagram I mention Victor Frankl's will to meaning. It took me some time to realize that Viktor Frankl was correct, that one of the driving forces in humans is to find meaning and purpose for their life. This drive to me is some evidence for the existence of the Divine.
In the other Outer Circles, I mention Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning and Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, which provide evidence that all the religions of the world provide deep psychological reservoirs of meaning and patterns of wisdom, that can guide us throughout our lives. I also reference John Crossan's book The Power of Parable, and the work of Richard B. Hays on how the New Testament authors were practicing figural reading: in that they were finding ways to retell the stories and characters of the Old Testament in new ways by creating new stories and characters in the New Testament. I then mentioned the word midrash, which is the subject of the book, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel by John Spong; that explains that the Gospels are midrashic: meaning basically that they are less literal and more metaphorical.
What the scholarly works of the author's above did for me is help me realize that I could appreciate the New Testament more by not constantly asking myself, is this story or event literally true; and instead asking myself what was the author's intent as a literary artist in telling the story or using this metaphor? I began to realize that there was a powerful social phenomenon taking place in the early Jesus Communities. It was quite common in the pagan world to describe a divine being or god as a capricious jerk, for example the god Zeus was a rapist. So in my view, the Gospel authors were experiencing a Divine Reality driving them to retell the spiritual stories of their culture in newer and better ways. So that the gods and heroes were not to be made in the image of capricious jerks (as was common in much of paganism), but instead God was Love and manifests Goodness. In other words, from a psychological perspective, they were inspired to create images of God based on the the kind of persons we today have grown to value as a noble hero and charitable benefactor.
Parables like the Prodigal Son (and the father in the parable) provided metaphors for what God is like. At that time, when gods like Zeus were capricious and unforgiving, this new imagery for the Divine was quite radical and revolutionary. The fact that this took place in human history is kind of like the Cambrian explosion in biology. This could have happened naturally of course but the fact that it did happen does leave room for at least the plausibility of divine intervention in my mind.
We modern people do not fully appreciate just how powerful these stories and metaphors (in refiguring the image of the Divine) were in changing the moral consciousness of the last two thousand years since the birth of Christianity. Just one example will make this point most clear, in ancient Greece and Rome it was normal to own slaves and treat them as sex objects for non-consensual sex, and this was legal and tolerated. When Paul speaks of "sexual immorality" (porneia in Greek) this is part of what he is referring to: the emotional and sexual abuse of human beings as slaves/property. And while the New Testament does use the language of slavery/servitude at times, which was culturally common at that time, Paul nevertheless encouraged Philemon to basically treat his Christian slave as if he were not a slave. Nevertheless, Paul refers to Christians as "slaves of Christ." This obviously didn't mean slaves as sex objects but slaves as "servants" of the Christ who do his will. We can't judge Paul for using the language of slavery because it was the social norm of that day and age. What is remarkable is that Paul chose to eradicate slavery and nationality within the sociality of his churches/assemblies through mystical union with Christ (see Galatians 3: 28): so that in Christ, there is no longer human slavery but people become "servants" of God by producing the Good. Then, by the time we get to the Johanine community (years later after Paul), Jesus no longer calls his disciples servants (slaves) but friends in John 15: 14-15. Thus, we see a continuous trajectory in the growing moral consciousness of the New Testament authors; so that we see a moving away from even the language of slavery/servitude and toward treating people as if they have intrinsic worth (and not as property). I consider this moral trajectory evidence of the Divine.
This new reimaging of God and the ways of the Divine, was so powerful within the cultural movement of Christianity, that biblical scholars believe that a scribe was inspired to paste the story of the woman taken in adultery into the New Testament manuscripts. In other words, the story of the woman taken in adultery is probably not in the original but was added by a scribe later on. I choose to believe that scribe was inspired to add the story; and in my mind it speaks to the possible divine interventionism in the path the churches took in growing toward a higher moral consciousness.
Part of what drove this moral trajectory toward the idea of civility -- and belief in everyone having inalienable rights we enjoy today as Americans -- is this early Christian belief in the soul. I believe in the soul, if not for any other reason than it is practically useful to do so. But more than that, something beyond my rational faculties leads me to simply intuit the idea that we have a soul. When I first began questioning religion and spiritualty, I remember watching the 1991 movie Mindwalk, about a scientist, politician, and poet in conversation. The scientist, named Sonia, presents her atheist position along with an organic appeal to "systems theory" and everything being interconnected in nature; but yet she still remains reductionistic (though not mechanistic). Meaning she is against treating nature like a "mechanical clock" and things being more mysterious and interdependent; yet she still reduces things down to component parts and systems like a mechanic taking apart an engine, so that it loses its mystery and splendor.
The poet character then asks her towards the end of the film, "Where are the other people in your system, Sonia ... the one's you love? The real people, with their qualities ... their longings, their weaknesses. Where are you inside there, Sonia? Where's Kit [her daughter]?" See YouTube clip here. I never forgot that scene after watching it. It clung to me during my entire atheistic phase, the inner poet in me kept believing people are more than just systems, that their is a self, a soul.
Since then I have come to intuit even more that there is a soul and there is a God (or at the very least G.O.D.), which is intertwined with my belif in The Good that I believe does exists, in contrast to real Evil I perceive. I know I believe in Divine Goodness because I want justice in the world. I believe in fairness and what's right. This belief that there should be fairness makes no sense outside of the belief in God, or a Higher Power, or a Divine Ideal. My belief that humans deserve justice is grounded in the belief in a Just God or the Divine Principle of Justice. Reading Nietzche helped me realize this. Because Nietszche rejects G.O.D., The Good, and the soul, and thus in his worldview-philosophy there is no Right or Wrong and no justice deserved. Thus, reading Nietzsche I was able to really feel, taste, and experience that kind of anti-Christian, pagan thought-world, during a year long reading of his main body of work. I realized that it was distasteful to me, unpleasant, and quite horrifyng a thought-world to swim in. I found Nietzsche's attempt to create meaning within nihilism through his dinoysian pantheism, to be an utter failure (as Jordan Peterson puts it in many of his interviews, "Nietzsche was wrong!"); and Nietzsche's amoral ideas gave the Nazi's a "blank check" to cash in their evil ideology.
The next cirlce out is my belief that the inner cirlces produced this next outer circle of democarcy and the law; and swearing on a Bible, "I swer to tell the truth the whole turth and nothing but the truth so help me God." As well as civility and the Bill of Rights, which are clearly derivied from the idea of the soul and a Just Ideal.
Again, I saw all of this more clearly after reading Nietzche, where in his worldview there is no God, no afterlife, and no soul; and so humans don't have what Jefferson called inaliable rights endowed by their Creator. In Nietzsche's view, humans are no different than any other animal and human rights is made up nonsense. In this view, a master caste enslaving a lower class is "good" from the Darwininian perspective, and "truly honest atheists should get with the narturalistic program" according to Nietzsche.
Finally, all these cirlces lead to the last cirlce which is my belief that the New Testament is still practically useful, because not only did it inspire the inner circles, but humans are a story telling species, and the New Testament is a grand Meta Story about the Good triumphing over the Evil. There is power in parables and without this New Testament literature of superheors and villains, the morality we apapreaciate today would not exist as it does.
I choose to believe that the stories in the Bible were inspired. When I compare the moral trajectory of the Bible stories and events, from begining to end, I see something divine in the whole unfolding. The biblical stories may be allegorical fiction a lot of the time, but that does not take away from the deeper truths behind the symbolic messages. There is scientific truth and then there are deeper "spiritual" truths: like "what's right," what is just, and the intrinsic worth of a person. I can't scientifically prove my feelings of love for my family for example, but that truth is deeper than a labratory experiment. A poem to my girlfriend may be full of fictional metaphors and ideas that may not fit into a scientific equation, but the metaphors and exaggerations are still true in that the convey how I feel about her on a deeper level, coming from the heart; and are pointing to phenomenal truths beyond literal atomistic truths.
A lot of times, people come to the Bible as either representing literally true stories or it is all nonsense. I have grown to to see that like a love poem, there is the "spiritual possibility" within the biblical metaphors, that a Divine Reality could be inspiring the authors along the way to produce poetic art that speaks to deeper truths. I made this diagram to illustrate this:
I also don't think that supernaturalism need be the only method of the Divine. Why can't the Divine Realm work through our psychology as well as the supernatural? Why do things have to be physically true or false? Why can't a Bible story be seen as psychologically true, as metaphors or signposts to deeper truths? For example, the "evil spirits" causing havoc in the New Testament can be interpreted as real psychological phenomena, like mental disorders, phobias, anxiety, or the mob mentality; or as representing what Daniel Goleman calls "negative emotional contagion," or the negative attitude of a bully that has spread his atttidue onto others, etc. Even if these events are described in the supernatural language of that day, it doesn't mean they are not pointing to higher "truths" about human nature hidden behind the allegorical stories.
So I start with a belief that something happened in the early Jesus Movement and later Christian communities, something I am willing to call divine, a spark of insight or illumination; an experience from a potential Higher Realm which inspired them to come up with what they did; that led these authors to express divine insights through allegorical stories and metaphors.
That Divine Reality need not have communicated some top down "revelation," but the Divine Intelligence could have simply produced small sparks of insights, that then were filtered through their own human brain and body and individual creativity within their own cultural context, life experiences, personalty type; and through their ideas, language, and culture; which they then put "ink" to sheep skin and created art, divine art. I tried to illustrate this below:
So I personally don't come to the Bible stories asking if every story or event is factual or not. I come to the story or event, asking, "What is the underlying message and intent of the author in telling the story?" I also use my PEEL method, and often learn that one story or event was part of a grander progressively emerging narrative, leading to a later change in thinking that led to other changes in thinking, etc. So even if I don't like a particular story or event in the Bible, I personally don't feel the need to wed myself to it. I often look at each story or event in the Bible as a stepping stone in a larger, growing and developing moral consciousness, that is expanding and progressing. In other words, I believe that God, as The Good Operating Dimension, was working through fallible humans to produce the better way within a "Messy Bible": the Bible as a library of human writings that builds upon itself and improves itself, self-correcting itself, always following a moral trajectory toward The Good.
I also like the way John Shelby Spong describes the God-experience as something beyond human conceptions and dogmas, as the Source of all life, love, and Being; which is a practical way to think of God in the 21st Century. Literalistic forms of theism often present a particular local deity that has to be imagined in our minds (isn't that an idol?), with certain ideas about this deity that often does not square with reality as we experience it. Meanwhile, atheism seems to go to far in denying the possibility of the divine. However, there is a post-theistic yet non-atheistic way to think of God that goes beyond atheism and theism. As Spong puts it:
Both theists and atheists agree, that there is a Reality we all experience, that is beyond believing or disbelieving in a particular god-concept. This Shared Reality is not under dispute. We awake into consciousness, breathe in and out, we see the sun rise and set, and understand that there is an underlying Existence grounding all matter and energy. The only difference between the atheist and the believer, is that the believer gives Existence a poetic story, a meaning. Paul personifies Existence when he said in Acts 17:28 (NRSV), "For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ ..." I see nothing wrong with personifying Existence as a personal God within Christianity and/or as Heavily Parents within Mormonism. Who's to say these concepts are not true? What matters more is what psychological effect do such ideas have on the human being? I think the scientific literature is clear that imagining God or Reality as a parental force of benevolence has a positive effect on the psyche.
Einstein did not like the crusading atheist and argued that it's important to see the universe as a friendly place. Well Paul is doing something similar by personifying Existence as a parental Force. On Paul's view, to fully live and be willed into our fullest humanity we need to connect with this lovingly unfolding Ground of Being; and just as an acorn grows into a tree, and flowers bloom, to grow into the Good is to worship God. Wayne Dyer argues eloquently in a PBS Talk called The Power of Intention, that the Divine Source is a "Field of Intention" (that many scientists recognize but don't refer to it in terms of "the divine"); and this Source Power responds to our intentions. So to exist with intention is a form of worship. I remember listening to this talk for the first time and it giving me hope in the possibility of the Divine, even when I was going through an atheistic phase. So I highly recommend Wayne Dyer's talk.
Rob Bell suggests that to simply breathe is to connect with God since the Hebrew name for God may be the sound of breathing. This has practical utility, as we see with Rickson Gracie emphasizing the importance of breathing in managing our physiology. For we can pay more attention to our breath when we are anxious or angry, and thus noticing our breath changes our demeanor, so that we are more centered and at peace; and this will allow us to speak to people more effectively and kinder as we pay more attention to our breath.
In the New Testament, to love is to experience God, as "God is love" according 1 John 4. So to be in love, to give love, and connect and unite in love is to reveal God. In Galatians 5, Paul describe's the fruit of the spirit as producing love, joy, patience, self-control, and peace, etc. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul describes God as Love in that the Divine Energy generates The Way that produces loving acts over dogmatism, charitableness over greed, humility and thoughtfulness over egocentric selfishness, and peacemaking over squabbling and endless strife.
Note as well how Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that "we know in part." We can't fully know the form and mechanics of God, but "his" creation (Reality) reveals God. As Huston Smith puts it in the diagram below, The Ineffable God is beyond conception and visualization through human projection, but the Attributes of God are revealed through Virtue:
As we can see, God can be seen as real in that "God" is felt through mystical union with Reality and experiencesd via agape love. God is experienced in union with others who manifest God's divine attributes, and is witnessed through human acts of virtue. Thus we see that the New Testament is less focused on proving the objective existence of God as an empirical fact, and more focused on revealing the described nature of God by God's attributes: that are to be felt and experienced interdependently among a spiritual people united as one.
1 John 4:19-21(Contemporary English Version):We love because God loved us first. But if we say we love God and don’t love each other, we are liars. We cannot see God. So how can we love God, if we don’t love the people we can see? The commandment that God has given us is: “Love God and love each other!”
Even non-theistic scientists are open to the possibility of life on other planets. They argue though that to think that these extraterrestrials would be humanoid in anyway is not likely. They point out that given the laws of physics and the way evolution would operate on a different planet, with a different atmosphere, would produce different kinds of organic forms that would not necessarily look human. Well if scientists are willing to allow for life on other planets, then why can't there be a divine "something" outside our physical universe? In other words, just like an alien form will think, act and look different on a different planet with different physical properties than on our planet, then wouldn't a God or a divine "something" outside our laws of physics and matter and energy be equally different and mysterious? If that is so, as a plausibility, then why would we demand that God must be in the form of a human that could step up to a podium and speak through a microphone? Couldn't there be a Divine Intelligence that is capable of that but simply operates through other means?
