time will tell

'the conservative soul' by andrew sullivan.

i usually shy away from the word 'conservative'. it makes me nervous. and although i do not know this mr. sullivan...i like him. i like what he had to say in time magazine at least.

iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad is hoping to help usher in the armageddon he believes is quickly approaching. he, along with billions in the muslim world, are turning toward this fanaticism. he has said that 'peoples, driven by their divine nature, intrinsically seek good, virtue, perfection and beauty. relying on our peoples, we can take giant steps towards reform and pave the road for human perfection. whether we like it or not, justice, peace and virtue will sooner or later prevail in the world with the will of Almighty God.'

pope benedict XVI gave a speech that made a lot of people mad. only, most of them missed the point. he was trying to reach us here in the West more than the islamic population. he says that if our 'subjective conscience' tells us something different than his teaching...it's false...not of personal integrity, but of sin. he insists on absolution in abortion, homosexuality, interfaith dialogue, role of women, etc.

bush has said that his faith 'frees him'. frees him to 'make the decisions that other might not like'. frees him to 'do the right thing, even though it may not poll well' and frees him to 'enjoy life and not worry about what comes next'.

perhaps sullivan is right...religious certainty is back.

'there is, however, a way out. and it will come from the only place it can come from- the minds and souls of the people of faith. it will come from the much derided moderate muslims, tolerant jews and humble christians. the alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

if God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass all human understanding. not entirely. we have scriptures; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. but there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know- because God is beyond our human categories. and if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. we cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. there will always be something that eludes us. if there weren't, it would not be God.

in that type of faith, doubt is not a threat. if we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? true belief is not about blind submission. it is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. and it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our own fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. we do not know. which is why we believe.

in this sense, our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. a christian is not a christian simply because she agrees to conform her life to some set of external principles or dogmas, or because at a particular moment in her life, she experienced a rupture and changed herself entirely. she is a christian primarily because she acts like one. she loves and forgives; she listens and prays; she contemplates and befriends; her faith and her life fuse into an unself-conscious unity that affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also make it her own. in that nonfudamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love is more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle'.

-sullivan in the oct. 9th edition of time

'if God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that i would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, i would with all humility take the left hand, and say, father, i will take this- the pure Truth is for you alone'.

-gotthold lessing

well sullivan, i concur. let's just see what the rest of the world thinks.