"What do you believe?"
When talking about the spiritual aspects of life and recovery, that question gets tossed around a lot. I don't answer it much, anymore. If I'm being polite I just say something about "Twelve Step Spirituality" and hope to hear more about what the questioner believes.
It's not that I don't want to share.
But they didn't finish the question.
"What do you believe?" is about as meaningful as "How high is up?"
When talking about the spiritual aspects of life and recovery, that question gets tossed around a lot. I don't answer it much, anymore. If I'm being polite I just say something about "Twelve Step Spirituality" and hope to hear more about what the questioner believes.
It's not that I don't want to share.
But they didn't finish the question.
"What do you believe?" is about as meaningful as "How high is up?"
And all too often, it's asked for the purpose of giving them just enough information to hook me into their assumptions, and then they can plop my "belief" into a particular mental cubbyhole and either move on (assuming they know something important about me now,) or convince me that my "belief" isn't as correct as theirs.
Instead, ask me "What do you believe about xxxxxxx?" The more specific your question, the more responsively I can answer.
Of course, there's still a problem with that, because we humans have these things called "theologies" that attempt to string immense and complicated layers of belief together into coherent systems that define rules and devolve into absolutes so that we can base "religions" on them.
We're trying-- and it's a most worthy effort-- to establish common frameworks that will allow us to thrive in groups without having to resort to kill-or-be-killed levels of evolutionary simplicity. And being a naturally selfish (as well as naturally altruistic) species with a strong streak of oppositional 'you're-not-the-boss-of-me' instinct, most of those systems finally resort to a kind of heirarchical trump card: 'God sez.' And an elaborate rationalization of theology to back it, and a squad of anointed god-botherers to interpret and enforce it.
The "plague on all your houses" version of atheism is easy to understand.
But reality is incredibly complicated. What we can perceive, what can't. What we have the tools to measure and describe, what we can intuit, what we can grope toward by understanding other things, but still can't pin down with a powerful microscope or telescope or spectrometer or other tool, keeps getting bigger by the moment, hour, day, year. And the dilemmas of life keep getting more difficult as we wrestle with questions of "fairness" and "justice" and "right versus wrong" in an ever-expanding world of people different from us.
So our religions and theologies have to explain and encompass and find solutions for all of it. They grow. They accrete, they acquire interpretations and yes-buts and new revelations and prophecies and hermaneutics and exigesis.
It all gets more and more complicated until somewhere, somehow, the need for simplicity and a 'quick reference' set of binary good/evil rules becomes so overwheming that it devolves back into fundamentalist passion, and usually bloodshed.
So when you ask me "What do you believe about xxxxxxx?" the temptation might be to try and fit the answer I give into a known framework, and assume that because my answer is congruent with something in some belief system or theology or religion somewhere, the rest of my beliefs must fit in with that, too.
They won't, necessarily.
Because to me, the Divine IS six impossible things before breakfast.
Instead, ask me "What do you believe about xxxxxxx?" The more specific your question, the more responsively I can answer.
Of course, there's still a problem with that, because we humans have these things called "theologies" that attempt to string immense and complicated layers of belief together into coherent systems that define rules and devolve into absolutes so that we can base "religions" on them.
We're trying-- and it's a most worthy effort-- to establish common frameworks that will allow us to thrive in groups without having to resort to kill-or-be-killed levels of evolutionary simplicity. And being a naturally selfish (as well as naturally altruistic) species with a strong streak of oppositional 'you're-not-the-boss-of-me' instinct, most of those systems finally resort to a kind of heirarchical trump card: 'God sez.' And an elaborate rationalization of theology to back it, and a squad of anointed god-botherers to interpret and enforce it.
The "plague on all your houses" version of atheism is easy to understand.
But reality is incredibly complicated. What we can perceive, what can't. What we have the tools to measure and describe, what we can intuit, what we can grope toward by understanding other things, but still can't pin down with a powerful microscope or telescope or spectrometer or other tool, keeps getting bigger by the moment, hour, day, year. And the dilemmas of life keep getting more difficult as we wrestle with questions of "fairness" and "justice" and "right versus wrong" in an ever-expanding world of people different from us.
So our religions and theologies have to explain and encompass and find solutions for all of it. They grow. They accrete, they acquire interpretations and yes-buts and new revelations and prophecies and hermaneutics and exigesis.
It all gets more and more complicated until somewhere, somehow, the need for simplicity and a 'quick reference' set of binary good/evil rules becomes so overwheming that it devolves back into fundamentalist passion, and usually bloodshed.
So when you ask me "What do you believe about xxxxxxx?" the temptation might be to try and fit the answer I give into a known framework, and assume that because my answer is congruent with something in some belief system or theology or religion somewhere, the rest of my beliefs must fit in with that, too.
They won't, necessarily.
Because to me, the Divine IS six impossible things before breakfast.