Alright then, let's throw out all the bibles together. From where and from what do you gather your faith?
This is a great question, and I'm still trying to understand it honestly, and to fully understand my own answer for myself. In short though, it comes from my own personal search for what is 'good', from trying to determine if the Universe has a purpose, a 'good' purpose, despite the excess suffering (that I believe) is embedded within in it. I don't have a complete answer, but below I'll try to summarize more of this personal process as it has happened for me. It's gonna be a long one lol, but I want to share the parts I believe are important, and writing all this down helps me too. If you do decide to read it, I appreciate it. I'll put the conclusion here, in case anyone is a little interested but would rather not invest much time reading.
Conclusion tldr: If you take away one thing from all this, I think it should be that a person's path towards finding GENUINE faith is very personal, and it may require us to really contend with the limits of what we CAN know, to really open up humbly (even slowly) to ideas that we may be skeptical of, like Christs divinity or God's existence. Importantly, I think it also helps to not be motivated by a need for personal salvation, by a fear of death, but instead by a desire to content with the world's suffering.
Whole thing: I've always been interested in Truth as it is, which is why I've tried to learn a lot about science. I really value clear and logical reasoning, with definitions for what is discussed, and I think these traits give science (and especially math) success. Independently of this, I've always been an empathetic person, and I love animals, I feel a connection to them because we are both aware beings.
Learning about the world, and evolution specifically, I realized evolution and natural selection thrive on the brutal competition that creates so much suffering. Pain, and eventually suffering, ensures that each conscious being gives their ultimate effort to survive, even innovate; it commits us to this life. To add to this, it was predation that led to the Cambrian explosion that gave us new complexity in life, and that eventually allowed for highly intelligent animals (like humans) to evolve and even leave the planet, marking what I consider as another 'step' in the natural evolution of the Universe.
Seeing things this way, it causes me pain, because it shows me that not only is suffering here on Earth enormous (millions of years in the making), but it seems to be baked into the blueprints of the Universe. If life, even in another chemical form (or otherwise) were to naturally emerge in the Universe, say in Galaxy far far away (lol), it would follow the same natural pattern of brutal competition, meaning the scale of suffering matches the scale of Universe (space x time, in this case).
This is not a worry that is alleviated by a promise or even genuine belief of
personal salvation either, instead, it requires some answer to question of the
character of the Universe, whether it is
good in some sense, despite these observations. So, the question of the 'character' of the Universe, to me, is extremely important, more so than the question of whether Heaven or hell exist, whether The Bible is true. Even if I were to die and go to Heaven, the idea of (what I see as) innocent beings suffering endlessly hurts.
Science, despite its success and reliance on reasoning and logic, does not help here. Science tells us an enormous amount about HOW the Universe behaves, how it changes, and how within all the chaos even life can emerge. But it is incapable of answering questions on the purpose or character of the Universe, on 'why'. More generally too, reasoning and logic have a fundamental limit, in that we need axioms or assumptions to reason about any conclusions, so these tools are unable to reach the answer on their own. I think recognizing this limit is part of opening up.
For a while I took the position that there might be no purpose, that it all could just 'be as is' and we should make the best of it. But I began to learn more about history, and I became convinced that even if Jesus is not divine in any sense, His influence is still enormously positive and powerful, because he helped to spread a humanist message during brutal times, and that influence is felt politically throughout Europe for 2000 years, impacting the development of ideas and guiding humanity to be more humanist. I opened myself up to the idea of following Jesus, since I believe His message is a powerful force for good, for bettering what we have. I began to wear a cross despite not believing every little thing a traditional Christian would.
I think this was crucial, opening myself up to the idea of Christ. Opening myself up to the possibility that God could exist, and that Jesus could indeed be divine, and His message divinely inspired, I think allowed me to find faith eventually. One day, I believe God led me to try to imagine a symbol that could represent the overall character of the physical Universe. After some thinking, I felt that a being eating itself and growing anew, was a good 'summary', since the physical Universe is constantly recycling itself on multiple levels.
Googling a bit about this, I found the Ouroboros, and eventually what is known as 'Gnosticism', a loose 'group' largely misunderstood in my opinion, with a diverse set of beliefs, but an overall emphasis on a personal understanding and personal spiritual experience, and a distrust for orthodox authority. These groups were inspired by Jesus and His message, but in the period of 150 AD - 400 AD they were persecuted, they were the original heretics I believe.
Some of these groups believed the physical Universe was evil, that it was created by an evil and lesser God, while others believed that the physical Universe was imperfect (not evil), and that the intention behind for creation of the physical Universe was good, but the creator (a kind of lesser God) was also imperfect and flawed. Regardless, and very important for my story, all of these Gnostic groups emphasized other nonphysical creations by a truly supreme being.
Having found all this, I read more and thought a lot more about it, but for a while I was not convinced. Despite feeling a strong personal connection to these ideas, especially in the manner I found them, the claim of many Gnostic groups that the physical Universe was evil really gave me a lot of pause on Gnosticism as a whole. That said, the general emphasis on 'nonphysical' creations really stuck with me, and I began to think about what the nature of these 'nonphysical' creations could be, to see if we could experience something like this despite being physical beings.
I realized that we COULD, and that my own field of math is full of examples. The most famous is probably the Pythagorean theorem. For context, a theorem is a statement linking some 'mathematical' assumptions to some conclusions. The Pythagorean theorem in particular, links the axioms of Euclidean geometry (like the parallel postulate) to a conclusion about ALL right triangles, namely a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Importantly, the IMPLICATION itself, (Euclidean geometry axioms) => (All right triangles satisfy a^2 + b^2 = c^2) is a tautology, meaning that as a logical statement, the truth of this implications depends ONLY on the meaning of the terms alone, like the meaning of 'triangle'.
That is, as a logical statement, the Pythagorean theorem is true here on Earth, during Pythagoras's time, when the dinosaurs were around, inside a black hole. It is a pattern that exists within meaning itself. Pure math is filled with these examples, all timeless and completely independent of the physical Universe, and yet they are observable and discoverable by physical beings which can somehow comprehend that meaning, they are features within meaning itself, akin to mountains or rivers in the physical world. I realized that, more fundamental than the creation of the physical Universe, was the creation of what I consider to be a 'structure within meaning', which allows for the existence of consistent axiomatic systems, like
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory - Wikipedia, which allow for so many rich and infinite logical patterns we find in math, and which inform what is consistent in physics.
Seeing it this way, I am still in awe of the sheer Awesomeness of it all. It is humbling, to realize that the question of 'what preceded God' is nonsensical, since God is responsible for the creation of much MORE than time itself, God created a structure in meaning from which everything hangs, on which physics itself depends, we are incapable of even comprehending the question of what 'preceded' the physical Universe, much less what 'preceded' God.
There exists much more than just the physical Universe for us to discover, and I believe I was guided to this realization (and to these Gnostic ideas) so I could find true faith in a supreme Being. I feel confident to trust my intuition on this and conclude that Jesus was sent to Earth to guide our evolution as a species for the better. Beyond that, I believe the physical Universe is imperfect or 'limited', but not evil, and that it was made with a good 'overall' purpose, by a lesser and limited, but good God. This limited God is different from the Supreme God that created the 'structures in meaning' I try to allude to.
Now, if you take away one thing from all this, I think it should be that a person's path towards finding GENUINE faith is very personal, and it may require us to really contend with the limits of what we CAN know, to really open up humbly to ideas that we may be skeptical of, like Christs divinity or God's existence. Importantly, I think it also helps to not be motivated by a need for personal salvation, by a fear of death, but instead by a desire to content with the world's suffering.
I'm sorry but the concepts mean nothing to me.
Or rather, if I told you what they mean to me, I would be insulting and crude.
You can assume that my 'purpose' is in preventing child abuse, even though it's much more.
BTW, thank you for you sincere efforts. I've learned something from it that was never going to come from Ding.
Thanks, I appreciate knowing something positive did come of this. One of my goals (besides better understanding of this in general) is to cross boundaries dividing people, try to understand them and reach a balance somehow, I think it's part of the purpose of all life being here.
