Went to church today, where a 20-year-old girl (who will be baptized tonight at a special service with some other people) gave her short testimony.
She's an ISxx of some type (don't know her well enough to go further) and I like her so far, she seems quite nice. But her testimony basically involved all "spiritualese" terminology.
("Went to Catholic church growing up but it never meant anything to me, then I started going to this church and I felt something i had not had before, but I was running away from the Lord into a life of sin, and then I was reading in my Bible and struggling and felt God knocking on the door of my heart and so I gave up living my own life and now I live for God, yada yada.")
In the past, hearing testimonies similar to this really bugged me a great deal, because it all sounds so cookie-cutter and thus "inauthentic" -- like people just repeating the standard Christian testimony and not really describing anything personal or involved.
Then, today, I was thinking about her, since she was so young, and trying to hear what was UNDER the surface... and realized that just because she's expressing herself in a fairly conventional way doesn't necessarily mean she did not experience something unique and personal. It could merely be an attempt to "communicate" with other like-minded people, using the language of Church-ese, sort of an Fe convention among Christians. People who aren't naturally communicators fall into the trap, anyway, of using cliche phrasing to describe what could easily be a deep and meaningful experience internally.
So I'm thinking that, just because I didn't much like her delivery, it was no excuse for me to automatically dismiss her... and I wonder how much of the stuff from SJ types that I might have routinely dismissed is actually authentic... but just poorly articulated, or at least is articulated in a way that doesn't speak much to me but speaks a great deal of others who share that mindset.
Ideas?
My argument for the impossibility of epistemic Christianity
As far as the feminist assertion that the Bible fails to honor egalitarianism is concerned, a meta-ethical approach can be taken to give this phenomenon a fair treatment. In the body of this essay, I have shown that anthropomorphism is a common theological error. As we know that religions require dogma because they tell us about ideas that could not be visualized in our world of sense perception. Hence, everything that we have come across in this world, we have taken in through one of our five senses. Therefore when someone told us about God, we have taken in that information either through our sense of sight (we read about Him), or through our sense of hearing (someone told us about him). God must also have been described as something that we could perceive through our senses, hence it is no surprise that he is thought of as a being who has many human qualities. Both physical and that of character. Some theologians regard him as compassionate and powerful in the same manner as they would regard noble human individuals as having those qualities of character. They would even go so far as to say that God has a face, or that God laughs, or smiles when we please Him. In other words, they claim that we can see God engage in similar behaviors that we can see human beings engage in. And that he has many human qualities, so in short, as far as ethics is concerned, they maintain that God , for some strange reason shares our tastes and prejudices.
It can very easily be shown that it is a mistake to think that God?s ethical preferences are exactly like ours(that is, our human nature tends to value compassion for example, and therefore God values it also, hence God shares our tastes and prejudices, as Literalist Theologians would have us believe.), or that he has any human qualities at all. Once again this is the error of anthropomorphism, the act of not trying to take in God?s qualities for what they are (or rather admitting that whatever they may be, we can not fathom them), but imposing our prejudices onto God. The reason why anthropomorphism can not work is because, we have acknowledged for God to be infinite, yet our minds are necessarily finite. Hence, this is the reason we see the World as having time, space and matter. As we can not grasp infinite, we break the world down into fragments of time (this clause was initially stated by the Great German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, taken further by Schopenhauer, and finally reaffirmed by the 20th century physics.), space is rendered possible by the substances that we project onto the world, hence it is also subjectively conditioned. And in order for one to be in time, one must both have mass and be subjected to light, and space is rendered possible only be the existence of light, so this furthermore reaffirms the clause that space is subjectively conditioned. Hence space, time and matter derive from a source that is inaccessible to us, which for Kant, is the noumenal world. So, we look at this noumenal world, and get the phenomenal, a world that is broken down into fragments of space, time and matter. This is a double aspect theory, the noumenal world is all that exists, yet because we can not see it for its face value, we translate it into what we can fathom, namely the phenomenal world. In order to do these ideas justice, another inquiry into the synthesis of early modern metaphysics (Kant/Schopenhauer) and modern Physics (Einstein) is necessary. That is not the focus of this essay.
According to Kant God is the noumenal world, or at least the personhood of God resides in the world that we can not fathom. Hence, if we were to go to heaven and observe God with our minds that are divorced from the body, we would run into something that we have never seen before. Because there we would be working with our infinite minds which do not rely on subjectively conditioned space, time or matter and would be seeing reality for its face value. And this furthermore reinforces the clause that God does not inhere in matter (as Einstein has shown that matter as a thing in itself, is comprised of a constantly changing set of atoms. So this is a theory of metaphysical flux, it was first propounded by the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus and then reaffirmed by Schopenhauer, to whom this flux was the Will. I have addressed this subject in greater depth in Module 4.)
Because God does not inhere in matter, he can not be grasped with our senses, and everything that we have knowledge of in this world could not have come from anywhere else but our senses, and this evinces that anthropomorphism can never work. By these merits I have shown that there is NO reason to regard God as a HE. That is not only can we not understand God?s physical attire, but we can never understand anything about any quality that he may have. Therefore as Theologians would tell us that the Bible is a translation of what can not be understood (noumenal world, outside of the reach of sense-perception and outside of human understanding) translated into what can be understood, the phenomenal world. David Hume, in the History of Natural religion gave a very comprehensive account of how religions evolved from harmless polytheism into dogmatic monotheism, and that the reason why people were able to justify a myriad of moral obliquities is because they have been presenting their prejudices onto God?s qualities and preferences. (Anthropomorphism). Accordingly as we began to see eyes on the God of Sun and swords in the arms of Mars, the God of War. Essentially, many of the Biblical stories should be interpreted allegorically not literally. As they were told by common man who supposedly had been influenced by God. Essentially, even if they were influenced by God, the shortcomings of human nature would be unavoidable. And it is clear that the writers of the Bible would be unable to extricate themselves from their personal and cultural prejudices. Though, there is one claim that we can make safely on behalf of Jesus and one that we could extrapolate to have something to do with God?s personal preferences: Surrender of the self to a higher purpose (as closely linked to the Buddhistic notion of how altruism is the chief source of all good, and egoism the chief source of all evil, thus surrendering to God can help us accomplish altruism without having to go through the self-abnegation as many Eastern sages had to), and what follows as an entailment of that is universal love. Love thy neighbor and Love thy God should be merged into just one command. The Second command is superfluous. The love of the neighbor should follow as an entailment of one?s love of God. This is the only Christian truth that there could be, love thy God. The rest is bound to commit the egregious error of anthropomorphism. We certainly can not go as far as to say that we know that this is what God wants, or that we have any knowledge of God (as he is in the noumenal world), as again we would be treading a dangerous line on anthropomorphism. But we should accept just this one claim because it is the one that provides the most objective overture of Christian ethics and is nonetheless the safest one. If we say that the Bible tells us HOW the neighbor is to be loved in the name of God, than we necessarily will be imposing our prejudices onto the divine character. This opens the door for Phariseenism. The purpose of Christian regulations and practical politics of the Church should be no other than making it possible for people to worship God. This is the heart of Christianity, this is the only thing that it must accomplish, without it, all its other achievements would certainly be worthless. The task of practical politics is not to tell us what God is like, but to make it possible for us to practice spirituality. Spirituality is necessarily a private affair, politics are not. Accordingly, the feminist complaint about how Christianity (according to God?s likings) does not honor egalitarianism is meritless. They can argue about how the Christian culture does not honor egalitarianism because of the way it has been influenced by the writings in the Bible, but they are not in the position to maintain that true Christian faith insists on men being regarded as superior to women. This notion runs into the incommensurability problem, and can not be addressed at all without having made the error of anthropomorphism. Accordingly, God and true morality are outside of sense-perception (noumenal world) and as Kant has shown, noumenal world can not be grasped, therefore it necessarily follows that God can not have any human qualities or be as anything that we could imagine for him to be. Hence, it is not possible for God to be a male chauvinist, or that to be a Christian one must entertain some measurement of male chauvinism. This may be true about what one must do to be part of the Christian community, or what beliefs one must hold to avoid heresy, but true Christianity(honest spirituality that is, not shallow politics that strives to do nothing other than debauch it for selfish human ends) shall have nothing to do with it. Christianity is about God and accordingly shall have nothing to do with the petty logistics of man-made practical politics