The End

Today is the end of my slavery. :)

Since I have changed so much, I don't think that I can maintain continuity with my old entries.

This blog will die, and the new one shall be born again. :)

going full circle, the necessary journey of truth seeking?

Truth seeking is an extremely important part of my live. Jesus has said that first seek the kingdom of God and the rest will be given to you. This phrase has always stuck in my mind. Unfortunately many of us have it backward. They think that it better to first obtain what we lack, and then look for answers to the Big Questions later.

None of us have any control of our innocent minds as we grew into adulthood. First our minds were filled with teachings of authority figures such as our parents, and then there was indoctrination from the public educational system. At the same time, we were all exposed to various cultural and societal programming from bill boards and advertisement, pop culture, talk show, news media, movies, television, and etc…In one side of the globe, I was exposed to various values and beliefs. In the United States, I was exposed to another set of values and beliefs. It just seems as though we don’t really have psychological autonomy, but we were all simply programmed to be a drone to function in a society. I suspect that all the beliefs and values were simply installed in our minds in order to maintain stability and status quo.

The journey of truth seeking has not been easy for me, and I have gone through various stages of spiritual awareness and belief.

The first stage of one's spiritual awareness is "taken-for-granted-credulity". I thought I believed in Jesus when I was in high school, but what does it all mean to really believe in Jesus. Does a person believe in Jesus the same way that a five year old believe in Santa Claus? Much of my belief was culturally indoctrinated driven by fear and motivated by acceptance of peers or authority figures.

The next stage I have gone through is the opposition stage. I wouldn't call it "rejection stage", because I was in opposition but not outright rejection. It should be common for those of us who are capable of critical thinking. There was a lot of anger, cynicism, and skepticism after realizing the contradictions, irrationality, and all the abuses and exploitation in the name of religion in history. More specificially, there were immediate shocks and disbelief upon the realization that our sacred text is neither magically protected throughout history nor is the text quarantined from subjectivity, personal bias, and delusion.

Most people I have known are stuck at the first two stages and trapped by the false dichotomy of complete acceptance or rejection. Unfortunately most people in my school is still stuck in the first stage, and many of my atheist friends have outright rejected religion because they are disillusioned by mainstream organized religions.

The next stage is what Marcus Borg called the "post critical" stage. It is when someone has gone completely 360 back to where the person started with. But this time this person is able to examine all the facts, doctrines, and teachings carefully while armed with the tool of greater logical intuition, heightened spiritual awareness, and BS immunity and is able to dig into the rubble and find the truth underneath centuries of distortion and disinformation.

Original Sin?

Is the Christian doctrine of original sin rational at all? I am surprised that how many people take the doctrine of original Sin at face value even though it is easily the most illogical concept of all Christian thought.

The most extreme case which I heard from my Baptist days is that everyone is inflicted by the original sin which is like a cancer that needs to be removed. And everyone is going to hell by default unless the sin of the person is atoned for.

The Lutheran doctrine of original sin is very similar to Catholicism. Original sin is the root of all sins and is not something that can be removed from this life time, but a person has to be regenerated and saved in order to avoid eternal damnation.

I think the doctrine of original sin is best understood with this parable. Let's suppose that there is someone who makes cars. Unfortunately none of the cars can run properly. Much to the chagrin of the maker, none of the cars can drive in a straight line and breaks don't work much of the time. So instead of blaming the car maker (God), we think that it makes more sense to blame and punish the drivers (people) instead.

I don't actually deny the existence of original sin. In fact almost all religions in the world have some form of original sin in their teachings. But one difference between Buddhist and Christian idea of original sin is that the Buddhists don't label original sin as bad but rather the original sin is simply is. It is there, and we (and God) have to deal with it. Therefore, for the record I have no problem with people saying that Jesus died for our sins. I only have problem with the way the doctrine is formulated.

The Problem of Western Philosophy

I have not blogged for nearly a year and half. For various reasons, I have lost desire to blog. For me blogging is more or less a personal exercise of weirdness, but it is a good way to collect my thoughts. Because I have grown and changed so much in the past year and half spritually, cognitively, and emotionally, I am afraid to even look at my old blogs and rediscover my silliness.

I used to be an avid student of Western Philsophy, but since a year ago, I gradually started to realize the futility of it. The whole endeaver of reducing the reality, as complex as it is, into all encompassing laws and principles decribed by languages, signs, and formulas, and finding ways to catogorize them is obviously absurd for those of us who have any kind of philosophical traning and common sense. But I believe that the problem is much bigger.

Western philosphy is entirely based on the premise that human perception is accurate. (it has to be right?) Whether you are an empiricist or rationalist, the starting point of all philosophical inquiry has to be our perception because it is the only way for any of us to tell what exactly is "out there". Before images and sound appear in our brain and ideas sprouts from our mind, there must be pure, unadulterated, and objective perception of reality otherwise whole premise of our inquiry crumbles. And a faulty premise will most likely lead to a false conclusion.

From my study of science and psychology related to my ministry in the past year, I no longer believe that our perception is as infallible as we think they are. The fact it s that all stimuli which we take in from our senses have to be interpreted and process by our brain before we see, understand, and make sense of it. That fact, along with many other facts, dismisses the silly idea that human beings can possess true objectivity. Basically all we see and hear are a function of the conditioning of our minds. If scientists are telling us that our minds inteprete our vision and the rest of our senses, and different minds can produce different perceptions, is there even such thing as true perception?

One extreme example is someone with eating disorder. Because their minds are messed up, they see a fat person when they look at the mirror even though they are about to die from malnutrition. That is because their visions are interpreted by their minds which are conditioned by their beliefs and a host of other things. Since they believe that they are fat, they see a fat person even though they are skinny. Another example I ran into is Hmong people. They see ghosts and spirits all the time in their homes and random places, but Westerners don't see them. Again, the perception is determined by the conditioning of our minds which is in this case is determined by the culture. Hmong are spiritualists and are trained to be aware of the ghosts and spirits. The minds of Westerners are trained materialists and therefore dismiss the experience the Hmong people as utter foolishness.

I used to think that without true perception, we're all screwed because certitude would then be impossible to come by. But I guess my worst fear come true. But there are many other reasons that Western philsophy is no good. The good thing is that I don't have to read as much stuff anymore.

Determinism versus Free Will

Today is "A day in the life of Luther Seminary" in school. I met with about ten perspective students for an entire evening and tomorrow to assist discerning their calls. The lecture by Lois Malcolm was really something. It was almost like an intense and invigorated hour long homily. She mentioned that our will is bonded to our sins but Jesus liberated us and bestow us with complete freedom to serve our neighbors. Basically she mentioned that our will is still bound, but in regard to service for the kingdom of God, it is completely free. It is not her idea but Luther's. I have no qualms with that. One issue I struggled over the years is that I don't think predestination and condemnation are compatible concepts.

It has been said that the universe is a representation of wills. The interesting question is do mortals, sentient beings, have any contribution to this representation. I think the sovereignty talks from the Calvinists are quite silly. The God which they put inside a box is incapable of choosing against having total and exhaustive control of everything in the universe. That idea actually renders God completely unsovereign. If God is truly all powerful, He can still use, combine, or work around our wills dispite the fact that our wills don't necessarily align with His. Another problem with the whole idea of sovereignty and predestination is that how can any of us be blamed for anything we do wrong if they have been planned out and determined from the beginning, and all we do is to act it out?

On the flipside, I don't think we have free will. We have a will, but is neither free from external circumstances nor from our internal personalities and preferences. The will is bound, not free. The reason I wrote this blog is because I was influenced by Lois Malcolm speech today and Karen Gutzman's comment a few Monday's ago. My decision to write this entry is based on external factors and internal factors. I am an introvert and a nerd, and that's the internal factor. It is affected by my genetic predisposition which I did not choose. People with more money and powerful might have better control over their circumstances or contigencies of their environment, but nobody is truly free from it.

The concept of free will is a modern invention and is popular in today's modern world and often goes unchallenged. It matches with our ideas of "the American dream" or "those who tries hard will succeed." Or the current idea of justice: "if you committ the crime, you do the time." We put a bank robber in jail and not members of the person's dysfunctional family in jail or creators of violent movies or music or whoever else contributed to this person's circumstance or whoever put the idea in this person's head in the first place. If a person truly has free will, is the person guilty of his or her crime? I would argue the opposite. If a person's will is so free that it completely transcends this person's external and internal contingencies, then whatever this person did is created ex nihilo. It has absolutely nothing to do with this person. Well, then, how can such person be credited or blamed or anything good or bad?

Determinism vs Free Will is really difficult to understand. I want to pull my hair out just by thinking about it. Hopefully I'll have better ideas in the future as I receive more education.

The Meaning of Truth

My last blog entry seemed to have transpired a light year ago. This inactivity is attributed to my full time school and full time job. I have a lighter work load this spring. My thursday night class was cancelled due to the lack of students (damn you! Grey's Anatomy!), and I don't plan on adding another class.

I felt obliged to write this blog because questions about the meaning of truth have surfaced in many of my classes and private conversations. What is the definition of truth? What do you mean objective truth is unattainable? It is nearly impossible to provide a satisfactory explanation in a class room setting because, quite frankly, I believe that a philosophical system which can be fully explained in two minutes is no use for human intellect. Obvious there is not enough time for a long discourse in this matter during a class. However, I really do need to find a quick and dirty way to explain this. It is good for me now to practice articulating my ideas about this very subject. I am sure another discussion about the concept of truth will emerge again in the very near future. With luck, I'll might even get some feedbacks from one or two of you who actually read my blogs.

The simplest way I can define truth is this: truth is a proposition which is logically coherent within a given set of other propositions. This implies that an absolute truth is logically coherent with absolutely everything including phenomenon that are completely beyond our senses. This definition sounds really bizaare and intellectually unsatisfying, but I don't think there are other definitions that work. Just hang on a little bit.

A common sense definition is that truth is what the Reality is. There are two difficulties with that definition. First of all, we really have to prove that there really is something out there. Second of all, that definition is completely useless. From the human perspective, the reality can always be logically defined as a set of known's and unknown's. How can we attest that the truth that we obtained can correspond perfectly with the unknown portion of the reality? This is the problem with science right now. At first we thought Newton's laws perfectly represents the reality, but physicists found out that they are merely approximations. At our present state of science it has been said that if our ignorance is the sea, our knowledge is merely a drop of water. We are not anywhere close to attainment of omniscience of the universe.

Sadly, the definition I proposed rendered truth a relative property. The implication is that genuine knowledge is not grounded on the Absolute but rather grounded on logical coherence. Thusly it is paramount that we expand our body of knowledge as large as we possibly can. Because in order to establish genuine knowledge, we not only have to test it against our observations but also against other bodies of knowledge. Therefore, the larger our body of knowledge is, the more accurate the model of reality is.

Everything I have touched on so far can be applied to biblical exegesis. A "True" interpretation is the one which is coherent with the reality. Unfortunately we have neither the access to the authors nor the non-known portion of the reality which I spoke off. There are just so many things in the biblical worlds which we don't know about.

Why do we worship God?

Why do we worship God . . . . . . if we can worship the most holy and glorious lady, the Mother of God? Okay don't worry, I was kidding! I'll try again.

Why do we worship God?

I don't know.

People probably assumes that I write something because I have something to tell people. Not true. Part of the purpose of writing is to explore and to search for answers. Is the purpose of having a readership at all is simply to invite to people to join the same search and exploration? Oh No! It's overrated. Sometimes I prefer to be in a safe and secure intellectual bubble in which we achieve self-gratification by petting each other in the back and simply just confirm what we already believe. That sounds like a plan.

Why do we worship God? What is the whole purpose? Is it just because it is something that we have to do? But why? If we don't do it, we go to hell. But why is that the case?

First of all, I don't think God needs anything from us. Our Holy Scripture can attest to the fact that God is in a state of perfection. If God needs anything, then God lacks something. If God lacks something, He is not perfect anymore right? Second of all, because God is all powerful, he can have whatever he needs instantaneously. Whatever humans can provide is abysmally meager compare to what God can provide for himself. I really don't think God needs our worship or our love.

From our own perspective, I also think that it is preposterous to worship God for the reason of getting something in return. One pastor told me that the more we worship God the more spiritual power we gain. Others have told me that by sincere and continous worship, we will be blessed with happiness and financial prosperity. I don't like this line of thinking either. Is God some sort of vending machine? Someday when tragedy strikes in your personal life or when you are not prosperous, you either think that you did something wrong or God is not real enough to you. Also when tragedy happens to other people, you think they did something wrong. I don't think accumulation of wealth is a personal goal that Jesus would endorse.

Many of told me that the purpose of worship is to glorify God. That explanation also has problems. What does the word "glorify" mean? When Moses went up to Mount Sinai, he asked God to show him his glory. What happened next was visual, mystical, and tangible. There was bright white light and thunder and lightning besides the fact that God can actually be heard. If that is what we mean by "glorify", we are doing a terrible job. I think today's context, glorify means to extend the manifestation of God's presence. Does God "need" to be glorified? I think any beings that created this universe is already glorified. Through this creation, his glory already manifested itself. I can't say this idea makes sense to me completely.

One idea that sort of makes sense to me is that through worship we honor God. Because God is our father in heaven, and we are called God's children, we need to honor God like children honor their fathers. In the OT, the idea of honoring parents has paramount importance from the perspective of God. This seems really strange in today's culture because nursing homes are proper place for our parents when they get old.

Anyways, personally I worship neither because I expect anything in return nor do I consider it an act to please God nor to placate the wraith of God. I do it simple because I want to, and it is a joy for me to do so. Wow! I sound irrational for a change. I am proud of myself.