*NOTE: Yesterday I had a power outage, which knocked out the Wifi for 24 hours. I wasn’t able to get online to make a post yesterday, so today we’re doing another double feature!
Ego Arc
Undoubtedly as a result of the past month’s inquiry, I’ve started to notice just how wide the influence of materialism reaches. Whether in-person or online, I’ve been encountering what feels like an onslaught of rationalist, scientific and materialistic perspectives. Unsurprisingly, these take on the form of either ardent atheism or agnosticism, and both sides sure want to make everyone know they’re right (granted, this is also the case for many religious people, especially Christians).
I’ve also started to notice something else: most people think they are the smartest person in the room (or chat forum). I, myself, can often be a culprit of this. We all have views and opinions that matter to us, and people with different opinions can put into question our perceptions of the world. The simplest answer is to fervently defend, but as we’ve all seen from today’s political climate that often leads to a shit-show. Our egos are in everything. With this in mind, I’ve started to piece together a trend in terms of beliefs. It can be be used for any belief system, really, but for obvious reasons I’m going to apply it to belief in God. I call it the “Ego Arc”.
Look at the simple graph above. Let’s say that the x-axis (left to right) represents the amount of knowledge/intelligence someone possesses. The further right you go, the more knowledge/intelligence - simple enough. Let’s say that the y axis (up and down) represents openness to the belief in God (and in our case Christ). The further up you go, the less open you are to believing in God. Now, notice the arc: with less knowledge, openness to God is high (which in our case means closest to the x-axis). As one gains more knowledge, the openness to belief in God starts to rapidly diminish as the arc gets further and further away from the x-axis. It’s at that point, however, that a strange thing happens: as even more knowledge is gained, the arc begins to return back to the x-axis, meaning the openness to the belief in God starts to increase once again. Eventually, it lands back on the x-axis, suggesting that the two extremes - very little knowledge and vast knowledge - are both as likely to be open to the belief in God.
So, what exactly am I saying here?
I want you to think of a child. A being that presumably has little knowledge (this isn’t exactly true, but you understand my point). Depending on what faith that child grows up in, I’m sure we’d all agree that that child would be completely open to connect with that faith/belief system. I’m sure many of you grew up in religious or quasi-religious homes, and at some point in your life believed in the God of your parents. I know I certainly did. In that case, little knowledge led to high openness to belief.
Then comes the world. Then comes science, evolution, rationality, materialism, dogma and the realization that humanity is severely flawed. Over the course of years, knowledge and information are gathered at a tremendous pace, especially now in our digital economy. Much of this information is (seemingly) in direct opposition to the things we learned as children. The perfect example of this is the creation story in the Bible vs. evolution. Sure, there are plenty of creationists out there, but for many of us, it is precisely in encountering these snags that our openness to belief starts to dwindle. Add on more years, more information and more experience and that dwindling starts to solidify. We get “smarter” and put aside “foolish” beliefs such as God (and the incarnation of His Son).
Many of us die on this hill. Given all the information at our fingertips, I can understand why. If we take into account physics, the laws of nature, evolution and various other processes - and take them as complete and unalterable truth - then yea, justifying the supernatural nature of books like the Bible becomes quite difficult. Is that it then? Let’s see what happens when add even more knowledge to the mix!
I think we fail to realize our place in time and history. We are by no means the be-all, end-all. I can’t give many guarantees, but one that I can give is the guarantee that in a thousand years from now, we’ll be looking at our reality in a completely unimaginable way. That’s just how it goes, that’s just how human consciousness works. We will have realized that the “truths” from this age were only partially true or simply stepping stones towards greater truths. The interesting thing here is, it’s already started to happen and most of us don’t even realize it.
If you look into the works of great thinkers like physicist Jean Gebser, mathematician Alfred North Whitehead and psychiatrist Carl Jung (to name only a few), you’ll start to see the seeds of something that I can only describe as extraordinary. These minds were centuries, if not millennia, ahead of their time. Gebser’s transition consciousness, Whitehead’s process philosophy and Jung’s collective unconscious suggest that there are incredibly novel ways to view existence, and as a result they challenge everything science claims to be true. You don’t even need to look much further than mainstream science to realize something’s up - with the advent of quantum physics and the little we know about it, there are quite literally worlds of possibility before us.
The most interesting part of all of this to me is the fact that the works of these great thinkers all encompass spirituality and God as a formation in their theories and assumptions. For minds that’ve been drenched in materialism for centuries, these claims seem counter-intuitive. It’s as if we’re pre-inclined to believe that all of life’s final answers will, in fact, spring from the ingenuity of our human conceptions. All the answers will therefore be material and clear…
That my friends, is the farthest thing from the truth. I don’t have the time now to dive into Gebser, Whitehead or Jung, but trust me when I say this: we know nothing. That brings us back to our nifty little graph. If we seek with true earnestness and humility, knowledge starts to remove the very shackles it created in our minds. Once again we open ourselves to the belief in God, simply because it becomes evident how little we actually know. It’s that great quote from Socrates:
I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
When I look around at my brothers and sisters - my fellow humans - I see so much discord, bickering and malice. I can’t help but think that so many of us are stuck at the top of the arc, solidified in our belief systems and surrounded by those who reinforce those beliefs. Sometimes I wish I could build a time machine and take us all far into the future so we could look back and laugh at all the things we thought we knew - all the things we defended so ferociously. That certainly would have changed my perspective over the course of the last few years.
This segment is an introduction to what I’m going to call a system of Christian Metaphysics. There’s so much more to be said on this topic, and I will begin discussing it at length in tomorrow’s segment (I’m quite excited for it). For now I’ll leave this here, and I’ll let you know if I manage to build that time machine…
30 Days
I’ve been writing about Christianity and Jesus Christ for thirty days. That means I have seventy days left to go. Some days have been more enlightening than others, but I’m not even a third of the way there and this has already been a remarkable experience. I haven’t had any speaking-in-tongues-writhing-on-the-floor type experiences, but I’d say that’s a good thing. That’s not what I’m looking for. After years of sulking in my lonely castle of intellect, I’m starting to feel my preconceived notions melt away. Not just in terms of God, Christianity and Jesus, but in everything.
I now see in others that icy state of pride that had me frozen for so long. I’m by no means out of the frost yet, but I can feel the sunlight for the first time in a long time. The beautiful thing about this is that my first inclination is less towards judgment and more towards understanding. It’s a very similar experience to when I got sober. I’ve been there. So many of you have supported me in this journey thus far, and I hope I can pay that forward by continuing this work. Quite frankly, I don’t know if I’m going to stop this after one hundred days, but we’ll see. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the feeling of “this is what I’m supposed to do” more than this very moment.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned thus far, it’s the importance of acting on seeds. What I mean by that is simple: at the beginning of this inquiry I had a mountain of prejudices and biases, and even the idea of writing about Jesus made me recoil a bit. What I did have, though, was a little seed of hope, possibility and wonder. Despite what my ego and rationalistic mind told me, I just kept writing. Despite the nights when I had nothing to say, I found a way to make it work. That’s really all this process has been - sticking to what I said I’d do and doing it. It’s simple, but it really does work.
I can confidently say that I’m coming to believe. As you’ll see in the direction I take this over the course of the next month, it’s probably not in the way you’d think. It certainly hasn’t been what I thought it would be, and that’s probably the most amazing part of it all. Right now, I’m just filled with awe and excitement. My mind is making connections in ways it never has before. It turns out that all of my studies in philosophy and metaphysics were more related to the topic of Christ than I ever could have imagined, and there’s certainly more to be revealed.
I want to thank you all for sticking with me thus far, and I want to welcome all of the new subscribers. I’m simply a man who lost his faith, and this my journey to reclaiming and reinventing it. I’m beyond grateful that you are here for the ride.
👏👏
Acting on seeds. Awesome.