This book and Oprah’s discussions with Eckhart have triggered some interesting conversations around the internet. I blogged at RobinMaiden.com about a video on YouTube - The Church of Oprah, and how it was a brilliant application of New Media. I left the spiritual discussion for this blog.
Even among my friends, this video has spurred conversation. I wanted to share my thoughts on biblical literalism and fundamentalism in any religion. Here is an email response I sent to a friend on this subject:
I thought the bible said to be a Christian, all you had to do was accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior… A very simple prayer was all it took.
XXXX, we will probably never agree on this. I am not a biblical literalist. I take the world around me in a very figurative fashion. I see the concrete, measurable world as only half of what exists. There is the other half that is completely non-material and un-measurable. How do you measure love? How do you quantify it? Is it a force? Is it real? Absolutely. So, is it is with the bible. How can human words and language define and measure the unmeasurable? Our mere human-ness limits and constrains the incomprehensible. What is a soul? How do you define it in concrete terms? Don’t bother. It defies definition, but we all “know” what I mean when I say “soul.”
God to me is SO big and SO magnificent that to try to describe God in human terms deminishes God. That is why I choose to read and interpret the bible in a figurative sense rather than a literal sense. Taking the bible in a literal way makes God small enough for my human-ness to grasp. I believe God is bigger than that - bigger than I can comprehend with my human mind.
So, am I not a Christian if I don’t believe the literal sense of the bible, but believe in a bigger, grander, barely comprehendable God whose only slightest essence can be captured with the limits of the human comprehension, let alone, language?
I believe it is about the teacher, not the school. I also KNOW, experientially, there is a God. I don’t have to have FAITH in that fact. I KNOW. I am not about beliefs, or faith. I am about KNOWing. I KNOW God is real, but don’t ask me to define, describe, or put God in a box. God defies all boxes.
I hope you can take my ramblings with the truest sense of love with which they are written. I am not an attorney. I don’t get into the details or dogma when it comes to religion. I try to take it all in the most general fashion believing we are all trying to grasp and comprend the incomprehensible using the limited words, langauage, and capacities we all have as humans.
with true, unfiltered, unmeasurable love, Robin
2 comments ↓
Re: religion/spirituality & politics ~ I’ve learned for myself that if we can open up and listen to one another with respect and compassion, much can be shared and lives can be enriched. Not with the intent that beliefs or “knowing” or faith has to be changed on either side…we all have a choice…Sharing/Discussing does not insist on changing beliefs, only increasing growth–maybe.
Great website Robin! Thanks for it.
I thought I would share someone elses words to voice my agreement with your lack of literalism:
One of the best descriptions about the psychology of religious fundamentalism was stated by civil rights activist Reverend Howard Thurman who was interviewed in the late 1970s for a BBC feature on religion. He told the interviewer, “I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can’t handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind. Meanwhile religious experience goes on experiencing, so that by the time I get my dogma stated so that I can think about it, the religious experience becomes an object of thought.”
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