conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

Trying to wrap my head around this:

"I do not think that these movements should be pitted against the so-called conservative religious right [I agree] as much as they should pit themselves against reason - a reason that is held over and above faith and spirit and not in concert with it."

a reason head over and above faith [etc]? i am confused by this statement.

this is one of those times where speaking is easier than email...

"The charity was to reveal the mystery...and then when the mystery was embraced, charity is then fruit of the Spirit...an expression of growing perfection."

I am going to ramble here...trying to figure out what I am saying....

I think these sites are intended to be a place of charity...allowing for the mystery to be revealed. i have been going to streetprohets.com since it opened. there is a daily post that i check at 10:30 and 3:30 (the times the bell rings at Koinina Farm for prayer). It is an open place to put joys and requests. It is open to all...theyre are catholic, protestan, wiccan and even athiest who particpate...it is a place of mystery, and there is a presesnce there. that mystery is caused by the charity in the place. it is one place where disagreements are ignored and embracing is accepted.

The problem with these sites is they are created in the politcal context, framed as "libneral" x-tian sites.

instead they should be framed as places of charity. come discuss...yes, we all may agree and be libreal, but tread those who disagree with charity. through that charity i thinkdivision can be healed.


--in cohearant ramblings of an insane white man

This is good.

I linked to some posts that might clarify what I mean by reason. I think "rationalism" might be the problem and thus the better term to use. I dunno. I still struggle with it myself.

What is a rational response to an action or situation? Torture? Perhaps. Feeding the poor? Perhaps. But I think that faith takes us beyond the reasonable and into something else.

But I think that faith takes us beyond the reasonable and into something else

yes!

that is what i was trying to get at....faith is absurd. faith is not natural. faith is not rational. faith is not reasonable. faith is beyond these things. but i think through the lens of faith, we can then see what is rational and resonable...in God's wisdome...thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

i think the problems is when we try to rationalize and makes faith in our own image, then we run into problems.

this is where i really see the wisdom in Larry's sermon last week. being god filled will help us.

but to do that once again we need to rely on faith....tis a crazy circle...

in order to be faith filled, we need to allow god to fill us...but to do that we need the faith THAT god will fill us...

And yet, and yet... that same dismissal of reason enables people to crash into violent territory in the name of "faith." That's the risk. Or, A risk.

It can be, butI would say that it is not faith that does this, it is sin. Systems of belief can become stratified, concretized to the point of being graceless. And when this happens in Christianity, it ceases to be Christianity but something else entirely.

Briefly, I think that this struggle expresses itself when we get into the question of "the greater good" or "the lesser of two evils". The right of a woman to control her reproductive destiny vs. the right of a life to continue (even though the chances that the quality of that unwanted life will be poor are high). Shall we go to war to stop evil or is the evil that our war creates worse than that which we purport to stop.

To those of us that follow the rational train of thought, the expression of God's will is to lift the scales from the eyes of humanity so that the reasonableness of charity is obvious. I believe that God is God in large part because the expression of charity is fundamental to God's presence in the world. The fact that this is such a basic part of who God is to me makes it easier to take the leap of faith and believe that God can change lives and cause things that I believe to be impossible to be possible. Admittedly, I'd like to witness it directly more often, but that's why Thomas is in the Gospel - to help people like me realize that faith without seeing is a big part of the definition of faith.

Regarding the religious left (of course Jim Wallis and Sojourners also come to mind), it's possible to be orthodox and well-meaning but wrong about the political and economic solutions to the world's problems. To paraphrase the great G.K. Chesterton liberals are right about the world's problems but wrong about the solutions.

But I'd add it's the duty of a well-informed Christian to study these different proposed solutions and choose the best ones. You can see which ones I think they are from reading my blog. Hooray for the market and liberty. The state is at best a necessary evil and not the cure-all. To paraphrase the black militants of 40 years ago it's not the solution (as the religious left tends to think) but part of the problem!

All of our political alliances, left, centre or right, as Christians are provisional and not dogmatic/part of the faith! Otherwise we run the risk, as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity', of preaching a hybrid not Christianity: 'Christianity and Spelling Reform' to use one of his examples.

As some of you may have read I've touched on the recent discussion on faith and reason (not faith vs reason but faith vs rationalism) in my blog, which has a link to the Endlessly Rocking entry.

In short: reason as the Schoolmen and classic Anglicans understood it isn't rationalism but conforming yourself to objective reality. And of course Christians believe that charity for example is part of that reality.

Megan wrote: 'And yet, and yet... that same dismissal of reason enables people to crash into violent territory in the name of "faith." That's the risk. Or, A risk.'

Exactly - that was one of Pope Benedict's points. Divorce faith from reason and you get not utopia but a more obnoxious version of Wahabbi Saudi Arabia.

Tripp wrote: 'Systems of belief can become stratified, concretized to the point of being graceless. And when this happens in Christianity, it ceases to be Christianity but something else entirely.'

That happens not from systemisation and dogmatic definition in themselves but when those systems stray from objective truth into men's fancy, from Calvinism (which in pure form I understand is a brilliant but monstrous system - if you buy its premises it's perfectly logical) to Scientology and Unificationism (Sun Myung Moon)!

That said, as Catholics from the Eastern Christian mystics to St Thomas Aquinas himself have said, of course the Catholic systems (note the plural - Eastern and Western) are true (and not provisional) as far as they go but don't reveal everything about God, which of course would be impossible. (Towards the end of his life the Angelic Doctor famously stopped writing after a mystical experience, saying everything he'd written was straw compared to it.) They're only approximations that we can understand.

In other words, like I said earlier about praxis, they're learning aids and not the learning.

Rich wrote: 'The right of a woman to control her reproductive destiny vs. the right of a life to continue (even though the chances that the quality of that unwanted life will be poor are high).'

That the end doesn't justify the means is basic Christian moral teaching. Not to be confused with double effect in Catholic theology - abortion for example is always allowed to save the life of the mother. (The same goes for just, defensive war - it is the taking of lives but not murder.) Killing the child simply because the mother doesn't want him or her (which is what 'controlling her reproductive destiny' really means here) never is.

The Nazis also thought in terms of 'an unwanted life'. Margaret Sanger as a committed eugenicist agreed. It's no better if a person chooses to kill that way than if the state orders it.

A rape-and-incest provision really means 'your mother has the right to kill you because of the terrible thing your father did'. That doesn't fly.