So here’s my first blog post. And I’m going to write about the fact that I don’t have all the answers. The things I am confident of I have either experienced for myself, or rely on Scriptural authority to assert. As mentioned on my welcome page, I love how Jewish rabbis value questions so highly, and agree that God’s just impressed He’s being discussed.
Let’s face it, how much could God really expect us to get right, from His perspective?! Well, as a percentage, it’s probably less than 1% if we aggregate the collective knowledge of the entire human history. How much can a child know about the realities its parents face? Some things are just beyond comprehension because of where we’re at.
It’s great that science and religion have progressed in understandings over the centuries, but at each stage they were pretty confident about their conclusions. It would have been smarter to be very sure there’s a hell of a long way to go in our understanding. So that’s where we should be now too. I’m pretty sure no one can say they have exhaustive knowledge of every nook and cranny of the universe.
That’s why I respect the position of agnostics more than atheists. The word agnostic comes from the greek word “gnosis”, which means knowledge, literally meaning then, “no knowledge” or “I don’t know”. Who does know? I don’t, but I believe. I believe God knows. Him and everyone in the next life.
When Jesus was 12 years old, we read of his parents losing Him, only to find Him in the temple talking with the priests. He impressed them not with His knowledge, but with His questions. Jewish thought has so many valuable paradigms for us. I understand it was actually the exam for aspiring rabbis to give good questions, and not answers – so Jesus was already proving his qualification as a teacher to His people, something us gentiles can’t appreciate without the cultural context of a Jew.
Another admirable aspect of Jewish thought is thinking of life as a circular journey, not linear. With our Greek thinking, we value starting at point A and “arriving” at point B. A Jew never thought he’d arrived, but perhaps just completed a level, and that all lessons could be relearned with deeper understanding, as well as new lessons to be learned.
So The Philtheist is hoped to be an exploration of my questions, not my conclusions or my answers. Feel free to challenge my assertions and assumptions, because together we might get a little closer to deeper understanding.
