Considerations from Christianity ⛪️

My exploration into the world of christian faith and developing a relationship with the unknowable

In my earlier life (10-16 years old) I identified vehemently as an atheist and more recently (16-21 years old) as spiritual but not religious. I was never open to the possibility that Christianity had some truths that could transform my life.

Until recently, that is. A few public intellectuals captured my thinking and helped me open to the possibility that Christianity is worth understanding -- John Vervaeke and Jordan Peterson in particular.

Especially this specific episode of Vervaekes.

In which he dives into the ways that Christianity is more than just a set of propositional beliefs. Growing up, I'd always dismissed the religion on the basis that it's beliefs were out-of-date, dogmatic and frankly, silly. In many ways, I still perceive it to be all of these things.

But what people like Vervaeke, Peterson, Barron and Pageua have opened me up to is the potential that Christianity can actually be experienced as something fundamentally more than a set of dogmatic beliefs. That there may be a fundamental transformation of being that can result through right relationship with God.

That perhaps, there are certain things that can only be known through participation and transformations of being. Vervaeke has helped me see that there are entirely other ways of knowing and coming in relationship with existence that have nothing to do with propositional beliefs. What he calls: participatory and perspectival modes of knowing.

Seeking Genuine Understanding

The core reason that I decided to dive so deeply into Christianity is because I feel like the biggest problems facing our world, especially my pocket of it here in the states, is the polarization and in-group out-group mentalities that plague us.

The alternative to polarization is genuine understanding, which starts with surrendering the precious feeling that my worldview is the correct worldview. Through opening up to the reality that I only share a fraction of the truth of existence, I’ve come to desire to genuinely experience the truth’s that other people cherish so dearly.

A Few Insights From the Christian Worldview

Although I’m quite a novice at this Christianity thing, I'd like to share a few insights on the key worldview distinctions that really hit home.

1. Our Experience of Life is Deeply Shaped by Values

Reality isn't just a blank slate that we impart our values on top of. It's a relational dance where the frames/values that we inhabit influence our perception of what’s real. In other words, the world we live in is literally shaped by our values. Holding different value sets can lead to living in entirely different experiential actualities.

On some level we all subconsciously know this. Just think of the paranoid that lives in an utterly terrifying world and one relates to people as if they're threats rather than friends.

Similarly, much of the population experiences the world as deeply meaningless, strife with suffering, and indifferent. What I’m suggesting is that if you believe that the world is this way, it actually IS this way. Contrarily, if you perceive the world as meaningful, beautiful, good, and containing an abundance of love then that’s ACTUALLY how the world is.

There is no objective way that things are. It’s all relative. Which brings us to the importance of god and love.

2. Relationship to God can Change How We Experience Life

There is this deep, vast, unknowable reality that we inhabit. Like fish in water, we’re immersed in this profoundly spectacular beautiful unknowable reality. A reality that is subject to the frames that we put on top of it. If we choose to believe that this reality is a cold, dark, scary and frightening place then that’s what it becomes. On the other hand, having faith that this reality is ultimately made of love and that even our pain is in service of something greater feels much warmer and more meaningful.

2. Everyone worships something

There’s no escape from worship. If there’s no god in our lives, then something else will take it’s place. Maybe it’s the pursuit of money or more magical travel experiences or collecting psychedelic mystical experiences. But ultimately, if it’s not the ultimate unknowable essence of reality(aka God) then it’s missing the mark.

By worship I mean: to hold as one’s deepest value. For some, the most meaningful pursuit in one’s existence is the accumulation of material abundance. Nothing wrong with this, but for this person wealth IS their god.

What do you worship?

3. Ethics isn't irrelevant

Everyone has an ethical framework, whether explicit or implicit. Furthermore, some systems of ethics are better than others.

There are multiple different worldviews and each of them have a different ethical framework. Some are able to more readily justify behaviors that others stay away from. Things like subtle types of lying in order to benefit the ego or choosing to not love to the fully capacity of your being justified by “it’s all meaningless in the end right?”

4. Christianity is "a way" not a "set of statements to belief"

“Followers of Jesus weren’t originally known as that — they were originally referred to as followers of “The Way.” Because that’s what Jesus was teaching, a “way” to achieve these insights and this “fore-giving” of agape.” - John Vervaeke

What originally drew me to taoism is the framing of it as “the way” or “the path” and not a static set of beliefs. In Taoism, the tao is presented as something that is constantly changing and can’t be tied down, similarly the Christian path can be understood as “a way” or an orientation towards life. This is something that I learned recently from Marcus Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity.

What might it look like to put love of reality (of god) as the primary reason for our existence as opposed to the pursuit of money or social acceptance or other finite forms of love.

Beyond Propositional Dogma

Through seeking to understand Christianity, John Vervaeke introduced me to the idea of Agape. That there is a kind of love and transformation of being that is central to the Christian tradition. He paints a picture of it by saying:

Because people loved you before you were a person you have become the person you are. Love turns non-persons, animals, into moral agent persons. It’s like somehow if I could just care about my sofa enough, it would turn into a Ferari or something. It’s powerful. - John Vervaeke

“All agapic love is fore-giving love, because it is giving before the person that is receiving the love can in any way be said to have earned it.” - Vervaeke

Love deeply transforms who we are as human beings. It's not just some irrelevant emotion that has nothing to do with objective reality (as many scientists may say). It can be argued that love is more central than even matter.

Through this love we can experience metanoia (what up to this point I've been calling a transformation of being), a shift in one's whole orientation towards life. A personal Kairos, a turning point in our lives.

The problem with that metaphor of “turning” is that all turning is still ego-centric. The turning here is going from ego-centric to being centered around someone else. - Vervaeke

Vervaeke then goes on to show that the original role of Baptism was to initiate a personal Kairos of the soul. A turning point in one’s life where one comes into a different relationship with the absolute and chooses love. I appreciate this perspective.

Meaning in the Modern World

I was especially in awe at this roundtable conversation. Especially when they talk about scientism (the ideology of science). They talk about how science is amazing, but you're getting ever more precise evidence-based descriptions of the cave.

There are certain facts that can't be proved based on evidence. We're left with the problem of meaning, and it isn't obvious that science can address this crisis of meaning.

The Bible & Western Culture

As Jordan Peterson mentioned in the trialogue, Shakespeare was writing plays from the christian lens, C.S Lewis wrote his novels from the vantage point of Christianity and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I just have this sense that so much of the world around me has been influenced by judeo-christian thinking that it’s almost hard to spot. The class fish in water example. The world that I grew up in was a largely Christian world and yet I haven’t even begun to understand how.

What is Faith?

Based on what I’ve gleaned from Jordan Peterson, Bishop Barron and Marcus Borg here are the conclusions that I’ve come to regarding the nature of faith.

In this conversation between Jordan Peterson and Bishop Barron, Peterson notes that without faith there would be no reason to do anything. We’d be asking “why?” ad infinitum. With rationality there is no end to the reasons that we can come up with for our actions, but there’s this missing piece of the core motivator of our actions. According to Christians this is the why behind existence.

Then Barron mentioned a quote which was something along the lines of “I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning unless I believed in God.”

Although this quote is a little extensive, I feel like the core message is good. A trust in life itself, in reality, in god, is a reason to get up in the morning. Without a relationship to something larger, it’s all to easy to slide into depression.

If we feel that the universe is utterly meaningless then what reason would we have to get out of bed in the morning? This quote hit me so deep because I’ve felt degree of nihilism and it’s palpable. This isn’t some imaginary, theoretical depressed person that is contemplating Nietzche and thus falls into nihilism. A feeling that there is no meaning to any of it has become the modus operandi of culture itself.

The meaning crisis as John Vervaeke likes to call it. It’s plays out as extraction / growth-seeking capitalism. The feeling that work is all there is That life amounts to nothing more than the 9-5 grind (and the weekend drinking benders).

What I’m perceiving in Christianity is that there is this pushback against the nihilistic worldview that capitalism engenders. There’s this feeling of “Hey I know this 9-5 grind sucks, but this isn’t all there is, God is beyond any of our understanding and by being in relationship with it we can cultivate a sense of love and meaning that’s missing in the money-hungry cultural regime.”

God as the Unconditioned

I like when Bishop Barron (in the interview linked above) said:

“God could be defined as the good in it’s unconditioned form.”

How I interpret this is that anything that is conditioned (or in material form) is not God. There is nothing on this earth that IS god, just aspects of god. We are all part and porcel of god, but none of us are the entire thing (OBVIOUSLY).

Let me riff on that a little more. When Bishop said unconditioned how I interpreted that is that it is: something that cannot be materialized. In other words, everything we do can strive to get ever and ever closer to the unconditioned ideal, but it well never attain it because it’s unconditioned.

Aspects of the unconditioned include:

• Beauty

• Truth

• Goodness

There’s something about these three unconditioned aspects of reality that are always a little out of reach, but nevertheless worth striving towards.

I am an infinitely beautiful and intricate being as are you. This is the essence of god. Everything in the universe is intelligible. Upon looking into a human eye all that I can see is pure god — pure beauty. What a miraculous organ.

The fact that we’re alive at all is astounding. This is the foundation of faith — through my eyes.

Even Evil is a Misguided Longing for God

This is something that I’ve felt for a long time. That everyone is doing the best they can in life and that because of suffering and pain that good get’s distorted and ends up causing suffering to others.

In his interview with Peterson Bishop Barron talked extensively about how even the most wicked person is drawn to the good. Even the person that commits suicide is doing so in search of god. Perhaps they feel that the world would be better without them. Well, that’s an act of the good. They believe that if they take their own life then the world will be better (aka GOOD). Even though it’s misguided because we’re all fundamentally lovable at our core.

All of the evil and twisted things that we do are all in search of the good.

When Barron said “Hell is the resistance to god’s love.” this really reshaped my understanding of hell and it’s purpose. Perhaps the nature of the hell is just resistance to the good. There’s this feeling of being righteous that comes with hell.

As of right now, I believe that hell is a state of mind. It’s a reality that we live in. When we’re constantly paranoid and scared of everything in the world, this is a living hell. There are some worldviews that literally elicit a feeling that this world we live in is hellish.

Conclusion

All in all, I feel that I still have a long way to go but that there are a ton of valuable insights from the Christian tradition that I have yet to unpack. These days I’m more curious than ever around how this tradition can support me in developing a relationship with the unknowable substance of reality (aka god).

There is so much that I can’t possibly understand about the universe and that’s why I choose to develop a relationship with the true, good and beautiful.