What follows are three quotes which detail Tolkien's successful attempt to convert a youthful C.S. Lewis from agnosticism/atheism to Christianity.
Tolkien to his son Christopher, on the subject.
“Lewis was a man of immense common sense and reason, and reason for him was the natural organ of truth. The imaginative and the mythological had to be reconciled with reason before he could accept faith.”
On the night Tolkien and Hugo Dyson made their breakthrough with Lewis.
“Christianity is the true myth—a myth that works on us in the same way as others, but with this tremendous difference: it really happened.”
Lewis on the same discussion.
“Myths were not lies, but the best way that man could express truth. And Christianity was a myth that was also a fact.”
Myth is perhaps a clumsy term. A better summary might be a moral intuition accompanied with a story which points us towards greater truths and human universals, unlike superstitions which generally mislead. Did the teachings of Jesus lead us to better ourselves and the world around us? Yes, faith in the wrong hands can harm- Jesus himself told us this, but overall the arc of Christianity has been massively positive and at a deep ethical level is responsible for most of the good things in the world around us we take for granted. It's not by coincidence that as Christianity has faded, so to has the moral character of the West.
Instead of focusing on miracles, ask yourself whether an ordinary human being could be so wise in the time in which Jesus lived? The answer, of course, is no- we are only now beginning to prove the veracity of many of his insights about human nature.
There were other Great Souls- the Buddha and in the modern era the closest would have to be Gandhi, but I would argue that as a human being you deserve to be healed and made whole, to have a source of comfort to which you can always turn. People can exhibit all the physiological signs of freezing to death when trapped in a freezer not switched on- who is to say that belief cannot be harnessed to an altogether more positive purpose?
Self-belief and self-help can only carry us so far- ultimately we need an external source for our belief to make what merely seems impossible possible.
Thank you so much for this illuminating comment. I have no argument to counter it at all. I am just not able to make that leap of faith, and as I said in my post, I believe there are a lot of people like me. We're sort of waiting for a religion we can believe in, and in the meantime, we'r sort of kind of weak Christians because it is, as you say, still the best thing we have. Thanks for reading!
Ok. With the specific warning that it's unwise to attempt spirit contact, because of the potential for deception, have you thought about exploring Christian Spiritualism? It's a less doctrinal approach to Christianity and has room for the types of themes you explored in your essay.
I'm of a similar mindset myself. I think there is a lot more than the simple story of humanity and believe we are part of a cosmic process, meant to expand the boundaries of potential existence. For example, I don't believe that music (or our appreciation for it) could have evolved in this reality alone, and is probably a refinement of more rudimentary systems spanning over several realities.
I would suggest reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin- the Divine Millieu and The Phenomenon of Man.
Let's put it this way- if you were God, a consciousness spanning everything, omniscient and omnipotent, the only limits would be imagination and the only exploration the exploration of deliberately limited individual subjective perspectives. In this conception, each individual soul housed in a human body becomes like a probe sent out to explore a universe of infinite possibility, and destined to return to a loving creator with a world of unique experiences.
The question is can we then tie this concept to the roots of Christian thinking and the Trinity? I believe the answer is yes. In this scenario, God the Father becomes God the eternal, residing in a null entropy plane he's created so that our spirits (coherent energy) can exist independently outside of a body without degrading. God the Son is a form of first contact, meant to guide towards a healthier mode of being, and as recognition that as we suffer, God suffers with us- but that this suffering is temporary, and worth it in the end, for the pursuit of wisdom and future modes of being. And the Holy Spirit? In this view, God the Spirit is the origin of God- if you anything about potential hypotheses for Big Bangs, singular or multiple, one theory is that nothingness possesses the properties of quantum flux, and it's my view that given infinite time and infinite iteration, this quantum flux or oscillation would ultimately create a super consciousness fully capable of creating the universe and everything in it. This last idea is somewhat based in Kabbalistic writings on the origins of the universe, which happen to coincide with the modern theories of physics.
In this conception, Jesus is still a path to salvation, but it's also about the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and elevation.
You know a lot more about the complexity of faith than I do. I have not read Teilhard I years; maybe I ought to refresh my memory? I particularly like your idea that God exists in a quantum state and that music is somehow a divine thing really resonates with me. Thank you for caring enough to engage on a difficult topic at length. There is a long tradition of Christian Mysticism and the official Church has never approved of them. I probably would fit in there, somewhere...
Maybe check out the Celtic Christian Church? The see the sacred in the everyday, cultivate the mystic approach (especially through nature) and place a strong emphasis on community.
What follows are three quotes which detail Tolkien's successful attempt to convert a youthful C.S. Lewis from agnosticism/atheism to Christianity.
Tolkien to his son Christopher, on the subject.
“Lewis was a man of immense common sense and reason, and reason for him was the natural organ of truth. The imaginative and the mythological had to be reconciled with reason before he could accept faith.”
On the night Tolkien and Hugo Dyson made their breakthrough with Lewis.
“Christianity is the true myth—a myth that works on us in the same way as others, but with this tremendous difference: it really happened.”
Lewis on the same discussion.
“Myths were not lies, but the best way that man could express truth. And Christianity was a myth that was also a fact.”
Myth is perhaps a clumsy term. A better summary might be a moral intuition accompanied with a story which points us towards greater truths and human universals, unlike superstitions which generally mislead. Did the teachings of Jesus lead us to better ourselves and the world around us? Yes, faith in the wrong hands can harm- Jesus himself told us this, but overall the arc of Christianity has been massively positive and at a deep ethical level is responsible for most of the good things in the world around us we take for granted. It's not by coincidence that as Christianity has faded, so to has the moral character of the West.
Instead of focusing on miracles, ask yourself whether an ordinary human being could be so wise in the time in which Jesus lived? The answer, of course, is no- we are only now beginning to prove the veracity of many of his insights about human nature.
There were other Great Souls- the Buddha and in the modern era the closest would have to be Gandhi, but I would argue that as a human being you deserve to be healed and made whole, to have a source of comfort to which you can always turn. People can exhibit all the physiological signs of freezing to death when trapped in a freezer not switched on- who is to say that belief cannot be harnessed to an altogether more positive purpose?
Self-belief and self-help can only carry us so far- ultimately we need an external source for our belief to make what merely seems impossible possible.
Thank you so much for this illuminating comment. I have no argument to counter it at all. I am just not able to make that leap of faith, and as I said in my post, I believe there are a lot of people like me. We're sort of waiting for a religion we can believe in, and in the meantime, we'r sort of kind of weak Christians because it is, as you say, still the best thing we have. Thanks for reading!
Ok. With the specific warning that it's unwise to attempt spirit contact, because of the potential for deception, have you thought about exploring Christian Spiritualism? It's a less doctrinal approach to Christianity and has room for the types of themes you explored in your essay.
I'm of a similar mindset myself. I think there is a lot more than the simple story of humanity and believe we are part of a cosmic process, meant to expand the boundaries of potential existence. For example, I don't believe that music (or our appreciation for it) could have evolved in this reality alone, and is probably a refinement of more rudimentary systems spanning over several realities.
I would suggest reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin- the Divine Millieu and The Phenomenon of Man.
Let's put it this way- if you were God, a consciousness spanning everything, omniscient and omnipotent, the only limits would be imagination and the only exploration the exploration of deliberately limited individual subjective perspectives. In this conception, each individual soul housed in a human body becomes like a probe sent out to explore a universe of infinite possibility, and destined to return to a loving creator with a world of unique experiences.
The question is can we then tie this concept to the roots of Christian thinking and the Trinity? I believe the answer is yes. In this scenario, God the Father becomes God the eternal, residing in a null entropy plane he's created so that our spirits (coherent energy) can exist independently outside of a body without degrading. God the Son is a form of first contact, meant to guide towards a healthier mode of being, and as recognition that as we suffer, God suffers with us- but that this suffering is temporary, and worth it in the end, for the pursuit of wisdom and future modes of being. And the Holy Spirit? In this view, God the Spirit is the origin of God- if you anything about potential hypotheses for Big Bangs, singular or multiple, one theory is that nothingness possesses the properties of quantum flux, and it's my view that given infinite time and infinite iteration, this quantum flux or oscillation would ultimately create a super consciousness fully capable of creating the universe and everything in it. This last idea is somewhat based in Kabbalistic writings on the origins of the universe, which happen to coincide with the modern theories of physics.
In this conception, Jesus is still a path to salvation, but it's also about the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and elevation.
You know a lot more about the complexity of faith than I do. I have not read Teilhard I years; maybe I ought to refresh my memory? I particularly like your idea that God exists in a quantum state and that music is somehow a divine thing really resonates with me. Thank you for caring enough to engage on a difficult topic at length. There is a long tradition of Christian Mysticism and the official Church has never approved of them. I probably would fit in there, somewhere...
Maybe check out the Celtic Christian Church? The see the sacred in the everyday, cultivate the mystic approach (especially through nature) and place a strong emphasis on community.