Finding Faith - Selected Quotations
These are quotations (with some commentary by me) from Brian McLaren's book, Finding Faith - A Self-discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest. I have previously reviewed it here and here.
"Bad faith is often the result of a psychological need for belonging. Maybe no one is coercing me to believe, but if I am so desperate to belong that I will claim to believe anything the desired in-group requires of me, how can my faith be authentic?"
Everyone wants to belong somewhere, even if they do it by purposely being "different." I've heard this desire for belonging is a major reason why people join cults. I can definitely sympathize. I sometimes have wished I could find a nice cult to join, but they seem to take a dim view of questioning established policies so, it never worked out.
"Doubt is part of the human condition. Nobody gets a guaranteed anti-doubt vaccination, short of a lobotomy."
I would have to agree. Does anyone disagree with this quote?
"In our society, the way we think we really come to know something is to doubt it, to question and test it … to analyze it by breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces - pieces we can control and feel we can explain. We will never know God that way… The very opposite approach would be more appropriate, don't you agree? to trust God, not doubt; to see God as big and whole, not in disintegrated pieces; to submit to God's superiority … to recognize that we are fully understood by God, not to pretend that we ourselves fully understand… in short, to worship God."
"Obviously, skepticism, analysis, dissection, and testing have their place. They are the tools of many trades, absolutely appropriate in the domain of shoppers, engineers [etc]. But sometimes our tools take control of us, and they start using us rather than us using them. So far, we know of only one being superior to ourselves … and it's hard to resist requiring God to climb on our microscope slides or testing apparatus as we require of nearly everything else. It's hard for us to even imagine 'knowing' anything through any other means than critical analysis. Except when we fall in love."
I really liked this part. It's true that so many of our normal ways of knowing things simply don't work well when we use them to try to understand God. I like the example of falling in love. I wonder how many agnostics or atheists who don't believe in God because they can't get him "to climb on our microscope slides" bother to apply the same standard when they fall in love?
Technorati tags: Finding Faith Brian McLaren Belonging Doubt Spirituality How to know things
"Bad faith is often the result of a psychological need for belonging. Maybe no one is coercing me to believe, but if I am so desperate to belong that I will claim to believe anything the desired in-group requires of me, how can my faith be authentic?"
Everyone wants to belong somewhere, even if they do it by purposely being "different." I've heard this desire for belonging is a major reason why people join cults. I can definitely sympathize. I sometimes have wished I could find a nice cult to join, but they seem to take a dim view of questioning established policies so, it never worked out.
"Doubt is part of the human condition. Nobody gets a guaranteed anti-doubt vaccination, short of a lobotomy."
I would have to agree. Does anyone disagree with this quote?
"In our society, the way we think we really come to know something is to doubt it, to question and test it … to analyze it by breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces - pieces we can control and feel we can explain. We will never know God that way… The very opposite approach would be more appropriate, don't you agree? to trust God, not doubt; to see God as big and whole, not in disintegrated pieces; to submit to God's superiority … to recognize that we are fully understood by God, not to pretend that we ourselves fully understand… in short, to worship God."
"Obviously, skepticism, analysis, dissection, and testing have their place. They are the tools of many trades, absolutely appropriate in the domain of shoppers, engineers [etc]. But sometimes our tools take control of us, and they start using us rather than us using them. So far, we know of only one being superior to ourselves … and it's hard to resist requiring God to climb on our microscope slides or testing apparatus as we require of nearly everything else. It's hard for us to even imagine 'knowing' anything through any other means than critical analysis. Except when we fall in love."
I really liked this part. It's true that so many of our normal ways of knowing things simply don't work well when we use them to try to understand God. I like the example of falling in love. I wonder how many agnostics or atheists who don't believe in God because they can't get him "to climb on our microscope slides" bother to apply the same standard when they fall in love?
Technorati tags: Finding Faith Brian McLaren Belonging Doubt Spirituality How to know things
posted by Freethinker at 8:10:00 PM
2 Comments:
I agree that we "know" something when we fall in love and it isn't knowledge gained via critical analysis. But, life shows us that many of the people who "knew" they were in love, a couple of years later "know" that they aren't. So maybe that kind of knowing isn't quite that reliable and maybe not the best analogy. On the other hand, faith in God is what really lets us know him, ironic as that may be (cf. Hebrews 11).
Well, I think it is a great example for what it was intended for. Some things we cannot figure out much about by rational, scientific means. And yes, that means that we're unlikely to get completely satisfactory answers.
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