Maybe this is important.
The god I worship/posit/yearn for, no matter what the realm, is wreathed in a sense of certainty. Why else would I worship him/her/it in the first place? Spiritual institutions find a good footing in this arena and even go so far, on occasion, as to criminialize those who doubt what lacks all doubt.
But this is overreach in my opinion. To hope for, pray for or concoct a god that lacks doubt is one thing. To suggest that because god lacks doubt means I must therefore have no doubts about god is a little like saying
All tables have four legs.
My dog has four legs.
My dog is therefore a table.
God, as proposed, has no doubts.
I am a different kettle of fish. And not just a different kettle of fish, but also a kettle of fish with a quite positive attribute: Doubt.
Maybe this is important.
Criminalizing or dismissing doubt is to reinforce the footing that doubt already has. "You shouldn't doubt our god" is a pauper's plea.
Better, I think, is to acknowledge and investigate every doubt ... right down to the ground. How else could anyone be shed of doubt? Doubt ... doubt the doubts ... right down to the ground.
Anything less would leave people in a world of doubt.
Got so many doubts here, no room for a god. lol
ReplyDeleteAll of sudden this afternoon I recall an old anecdote you shared before about your childhood. Approximately, I read about how as a child you had went on a trip with family and the snow came while you got lost if I recall correctly - fortunately chanced upon a cave which was a decently fitting shelter while the snow ensued, the outside was snowing, yet within the cave-ish shelter it felt very cozy, so cozy that somehow or rather it felt safer being where the entrance was, as ironic as it was, where it was perhaps colder with the snow.
ReplyDeleteI took buddhist triple gem refuge a while back, what was poignant about it all was that I had memberships in all kinds of entities or organisations along the way. Take as an example, I was in the national army before as a conscript, I also did my schools, as well as my offices. Whenever each of these organisations get too cozy as a refuge or a shelter, hanging around near the main entrances i.e. exits made more sense than staying too long in them.
It came part and parcel of skeptical doubting.
Maybe an old analogy by the Theravadin monk Ajahn Brahm made sense - "we love our suffering". We doubt, we also suffer, and we love our doubting minds and our suffering bodies. It's the very doubting minds and suffering bodies that make us who we apparently are. Heh :)