I recently received a long epistle at my work email address from a fundamentalist Muslim trying to correct misperceptions of them as all terrorists, etc., but also trying to tell me I was eternally doomed if I did not convert to Islam.
It was likely a total waste of time in terms of any effect on him, but it was valuable for me to write the response below, since it challenged and crystallized my thinking and means of expression. It also addresses pressing questions I've received from some of those who have trouble rationalizing their religious needs and understandings in this modern world. I have since edited the letter and added further appropriate thoughts as they have occurred to me.
I don’t like this use of the word “fundamentalist”, which, in my opinion, should mean those who base their views on fundamental principles, which is a good thing. However, it has now come to apply to those who take even the most superficial, and anything but fundamental, aspects of their faith as literal and absolute. Because this meaning has become the standard interpretation of the term, I will nevertheless respect this modern usage.
----Reply to Original Message Follows----
Subject: Re: Islam, God's message to you, Isn't it time you take it seriously???
Hello, Mohammad. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, but am no longer fundamentalist in my outlook. Truth is the only thing I ultimately value. Every fundamentalist in every religion will tell you he/she has the truth of God (or Allah, as you say in your language). I am extremely familiar with this mentality, since my father and grandfather were both pastors and I have many relatives who think my search for truth has led me astray, and that I am therefore "lost".
My spiritual orientation is inclusive, rather than exclusive. Fundamentalists are always exclusive. I call them "good clubs". "We're on track and everyone else is missing the boat!" Well, I agree that truth is not arbitrary, nor is it simply "relative". Water doesn't boil at 32 F and freeze at 212 F. No matter how strongly someone of that opinion believes it does, that opinion will never build a working steam engine. So on that point I'm sure you, other fundamentalists, and I agree.
The difficulty lies in the very nature of spiritual truth. Sacred scripture has no choice but to use the language of humankind with its gross, materialistic vocabulary and concepts. It uses this language in creative ways to point to spiritual truths that cannot ultimately be expressed in words, but must be directly experienced. Some people fail totally to understand that God's glorious truths are not and never can be adequately understood through literal interpretations of sacred scripture written in the language of material creation.
God's truth can ultimately be revealed to us ONLY through direct inner experience, and God's revelations of Himself in human beings are by their very nature self-evident once we experience them. Scripture can point the way, but cannot of itself provide true spiritual understanding. The Christian scriptures themselves tell us this, that true spiritual understanding is the "living word", and is "written on the heart". I do NOT refer here to emotional experience! One may have an emotional reaction to a true spiritual experience, but that no more characterizes the nature of the experience itself than a laugh tells us about the joke that provoked it.
All the sacred scriptures of the world's major religions directly declare or imply in one way or another that God bears witness to Himself from within in our own hearts. God's glorious truth can never be bound up in any book of paper and ink. It cannot be adequately expressed in human language. Books can only point the seeker in a direction that will lead him/her to a direct, personal experience of divine truth.
I call the literal-minded search for meaning in scripture a newscopy mindset with headlines like "God Creates Frog Today!" Absurd isn't it? So why stay stuck there? It is a kind of hell on earth. It is the worst kind of "spiritual" materialism, and it’s usually fear-based, meaning, “If I don’t cling to this particular belief system, I might suffer eternal damnation,” or some similar idea. Its deepest conception of "truth" is on surface, material values, that is, physically literal-minded, like whether or not John went to the grocery store yesterday, but inappropriately applied to the truths of God, thereby sadly profaning them.
Sites written by such people abound on the Web. I find such minds frequently incapable of abstraction of any sort. They honestly believe that things are simply the way they look on the surface. They use “common sense” arguments that naïvely assume superficial sensorial appearances are “reality” and everything else is some kind of sophist’s manipulation designed to mislead, and they often treat God and spirit as if they were physically local entities (even though God is not hiding just around the corner, which is NOT to say that physically local humans cannot become aware of Him and commune with Him).
As an obvious example to the contrary, the most fundamental and universal experience, that is, common to all of us not in a coma, is our own awareness. Awareness is abstract in the extreme as an intellectual concept, yet as a personal experience it is absolutely universal and quite concrete, even if we have a bit of trouble putting it into words. It is awareness and only awareness that is common to all our experiences. Without it we don’t experience anything.
This is the nature of anything that unifies. It is always the most global or non-localizable, least specific component of our understanding, yet it is the most concrete, simple, and obvious of our experiences when appreciated directly. We may not have an explicit awareness of, or know why we recognize the general complex of posture and movement in a friend at a distance. Yet these things clearly reflect for us that particular personality, and we know. It is concretely our experience that it is that person and no other.
So literal-minded, “common sense” negations of the more global, universal aspects of our experience ignore this fundamentally important aspect of our perception and experience. Such negations are common to both modern “scientific” materialism and religious fundamentalism. I regard them both as false religions.
The "scientific" materialists arrogantly assume we are, as relatively miniscule subcomponents of the universe that fostered our evolution, nevertheless a uniquely intelligent, aware epiphenomenon of matter and energy structured in just the right way by mere accident. They assume that matter and energy are primary and the appropriate complexity of their structures the causal factors underlying awareness. They tacitly, blindly ignore the intelligence implicit in the natural laws that designed and drove their own evolution. Such ignorance denies the most fundamental tenets upon which communications and information theory are based.
In short, they negate out of hand as absurd any possibility of intelligence or awareness operating in the grand system of which they are ironically such tiny subcomponents. We would think their own intelligence and awareness should serve in principle to give the lie to this sadly, ridiculously arrogant negation. Instead this awareness and intelligence remains abysmally short-circuited in the appreciation of what should be their own obvious implications concerning the awareness and intelligence implicit in larger, more complex systems and ultimately the Whole of which they are but a tiny end product. They are like precocious but arrogant babies absurdly, impudently denying their dependence on their parents.
Their futile efforts to explain awareness work backwards from local to global, from concrete to abstract. They ignore the clear implication of their own science and mathematics that explanatory power moves from the general, the global and abstract to the specific, local and concrete. They believe in the law of conservation of energy and matter, but unwittingly subscribe to magic in the assumption of awareness suddenly manifesting from energy and matter at some arbitrary threshold of somehow perfectly appropriate structural complexity, or more absurdly, concoct amazing behaviorist arguments designed to deny their own awareness as some kind of illusion. Let’s leave it to them to resolve the riddle as to who or what is the victim of this illusion and what sense the term “illusion” makes divorced of awareness!
On the other hand, "spiritual" materialists buy, lock, stock and barrel, the "scientific" materialists’ argument that evolution implies no God, no intelligence, no awareness inherent in the operation of nature or its laws. Buying into these short-circuited, atheistic arguments consequently forces them to concoct the absurdly off-base “scientific” and “scriptural” arguments collectively designated “creationism”.
Spiritual truth completely transcends the level of understanding common to both of these modern, materialistic religions, and can never be approximated by it even crudely. I abhor the "scientific" materialism of our day, but this kind of fundamentalist "spiritual" materialism is just the reactionary side of the same sad ignorance.
I revere the scriptures of my religion, the Christian bible, in that they, like the great scriptures from other cultures around the world, including Islam, point to the eternal truth of God's witness to Himself within us. I do not mind that the chronology of our Judeo-Christian bible implies a world created only about 7,000 years ago even though the light from the other side of our own galaxy started toward us about 50,000 years ago and that from our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, about 5 million years ago. And these are just in the immediate galactic neighborhood!
The eternal truths toward which these scriptures point are not dependent on the provincial perspective and limited, culturally conditioned language of the ancient cultures that transmitted to us God's revelations to them through those scriptures. I do not doubt the validity of His revelations of Himself through them simply because of the superficial trappings of their culture and the language through which they had no choice but to express them.
This does not detract in the least from the eternally glorious power of His revelations to us, but we miss it all if we lose ourselves in the literal interpretation of the surface, restricting our sense of truth to mundane things and events rather than the timeless truths they incarnate and act out for us. (For example, what do we think "Christ was crucified even before the foundation of the world" means, and many other “mystical” statements, not all of which the “authorities” were able to excise from canonical scripture?) We miss the mark totally if, in the "bargain", we confine the "spiritual" currency of our understanding to blind faith in religious authorities and/or authoritative institutions of historically questionable and often merely politically expedient origins, no more trustworthy than those represented by the seeming zealots who crucified Christ or oversaw the Inquisition.
Blind trust of sinners in religious authority for perpetual mercy and forgiveness was a very politically expedient commodity for the Roman authorities wishing to establish control over a far-flung empire. History records their cruelty in extorting it as they eliminated the gnostics as "heretics". Even the gnostic belief in the institutional cultivation of true growth toward knowing God, tailored to its various stages, a personal knowledge ultimately independent of their authority, was not the theology of choice for reasons blatantly obvious to all but the blind modern adherents to their obsolete political requirements.
Most serious biblical scholars not already beholden to some particular, provincial theological perspective now believe that Christ was a gnostic. This is certainly supported by His behavior, many of His sayings, and His clear isolation and persecution by established religious authority as recounted even within canonical scipture. This is doubly reinforced if we take recourse also to the writings in the Nag Hammadi scriptures and Dead Sea Scrolls, which archeological finds are associated directly with the gnostic communities that existed during the first few centuries of the church, and who saved these from the book burnings ordered by those in power in the church. How many so-called Christians today have the slightest clue that what they view as canonical scriptures were "purged" and "selected" (read that "edited") in an atmosphere of the most bitter infighting among a group of Roman Catholic bishops as late as 367 A.D!?
Although the protestant reformation rejected the institutional authority implemented through the church by the Roman Empire under Constantine, it ironically replaced it as ultimate authority with the same canonical scriptures selected by that authority even if they narrowed them a bit. The protestant churches also inherited the “blind faith” tradition and applied it to narrow, superficial interpretations of scripture, perpetuating the Roman tradition of rejecting the gnostics' belief in direct, experiential knowledge of and union with God as heretical. ("Heretical" derives from a Greek word meaning "thinking other than the way I do".) This is in spite of the multiple passages remaining within canonical scripture that unequivocally support such direct knowledge. The result has been the creation of huge religious enigmas for many thoughtful people and sadly, often rejection of all spirituality.
However, even after subjection to politically motivated chopping and editing, our canonical Christian scriptures do not describe faith as blind trust, but on the contrary, as the "SUBSTANCE of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things unseen". This is quite a different matter. "Unseen" does not even imply "unknown", much less "outside the realm of experience". Both scriptural context and the Greek terms that are translated as faith, as well as specific scriptural statements regarding their meaning, clearly communicate to us that true faith in this spiritual sense is not synonymous with the often misguided trust we place in others from our side.
Scripture tells us unequivocally that this kind of spiritual faith is not born of us, but is “granted” by the “grace of God”. It is the faith that is born of spiritual knowing; the faith of those who have had the very "substantial" experience, the self-evident cognition or better, recognition, of that which is "unseen". We have only to make the choice of opening ourselves to receive it and become its stewards.
Scripture also states we are made “in the image of God” and Christ declared that “the kingdom of heaven is within you”. So it follows clearly that God has structured within us the potential for recognizing His image in us. Faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” implies not a blind faith in even scripturally based external authority, but something much more SUBSTANTIAL, and obviously not in a material sense: an act of His grace available to all of us, re-enlivening the image of Himself that He has structured within, thereby granting every one of us the glorious possibility of at first resonating, re-connecting, and then reuniting with Him.
THIS faith then is a substantial, totally appropriate, well-earned, perfectly-placed trust granted us through direct experiential knowledge of God in the same non-material sense as that which directly appreciates our own awareness even though we can’t see or touch it! This is how we can know and understand the deep truth embedded in the scriptures as it resonates with our own personal EXPERIENCE of God.
Absent this experience, the scriptures become abstract and confusing, vulnerable to every sort of misinterpretation. With valid, personal spiritual experience, we immediately recognize their essential truth, even allowing for biased translations, or worse, perhaps distortions of scripture as it has been passed down, not to mention the limitations cited earlier, imposed by provincial cultural perspectives and the fundamental inadequacy of human language to fully communicate spiritual truth.
The essential issue underlying materialism of every ilk is the failure to understand as real anything unseen or not perceived via the senses. In this modern scientific age the irony of this persistent naiveté is all the greater, since most of what we now understand of material structure is locally imperceptible in terms of material or energetic objects, just as our own awareness is.
It is precisely this focus on the superficial, materialistic aspects of reality, whether "scientific" or "spiritual", that constitutes the GREAT LIE that entraps most of humanity. The insidious intelligence underlying and perpetuating this lie is labeled Satan in Judeo-Christian scripture. “Spiritual” materialism is just the flip side of the same coin on which “scientific” materialism with its modern atheistic bias is inscribed.
This lie embraces and deceives even those souls who profess great religious zeal as they remain stuck in the ugly quagmire of materialism, blinded my mere surface values. This is a blindness for which the other blindness, unquestioning faith in external authority, cannot ever be the cure, whether it is placed in ecclesiastical institutions or words inked on paper absent the inner illumination of God's "living word" that is "written on our hearts". Whether in the narrow, superficial, literal-minded interpretation of scripture or the sterile materialism of one's everyday life, this delusion is just as false. It is Satan's subtlest, most comprehensive and universally successful lie.
Yours in true spiritual growth,
Robert
