10 Questions Video

My brother sent me the following link and asked me what I thought. Here's the YouTube video:

10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer

This was my response:

Thanks for the video! I used to ask exactly the same sorts of questions about 6 or 7 years ago, and would get very angry with Christianity, until I learned that there are higher states of consciousness, awareness, perception, and interpretation. There are many ways to see and comprehend our existence and many ways to explain why life exists. This topic (i.e. the credibility of faith, religion, believing in God, etc.) is HUGE and would be very interesting to discuss in person over some delicious wine or other beverages. :-)

Before I point out a few things, I would just like to say that I do not have any agenda. I am not interested in proving that I am right and you are wrong, or that everybody should convert to Catholicism. I am still and always have been very open-minded and tolerant. I used to call myself an atheist. I dabbled in Buddhism and Taoism. I see value in all spiritual paths and even the path of no path. I'm just going to try and explain a little bit where I'm at spiritually these days, and how I would respond to such questions as are in the video.

Again, the topic is so huge that I really cannot convey, in an e-mail, all of the ways of looking at religion, or Christianity in particular. But here are a few points to think about:

The video is clearly coming from a very rationalistic, scientific point of view. There is nothing wrong with that, but that's not the only way of comprehending reality. We in the Western world, since the time of the philosopher Descartes (who came up with the concept of "I think, therefore I am" which put a very powerful mental dividing line between body and soul, matter and spirit), have stopped seeing the world from a unified spiritual or transcendent perspective. Instead, we are all taught to dissect and explain everything with a rational, scientific mindset. People in our society are concerned with proving that something is true or false. This also, in turn, leads people to read the Bible literally (and actually that was the kind of response that created Christian fundamentalism: some Christians got scared of science but ironically ended up applying the scientific ("prove it to me") mindset onto the Bible itself to prove, in the terms of science, that the Bible is true; the same can be said in radical Islam - fundamentalism is a radical rejection of scientific materialism and modernity).

The mistake in all of this is that you cannot take the Bible, God, faith, spirituality, etc., literally. Of course you cannot prove there are such things as miracles or that God exists. Of course God is not going to regrow an amputee's arm or give you a raise rather than feed the starving children. God is not some fairytale creature who magically dispenses healing or rains down punishment (the "angry Father" type of God of the Old Testament is a primitive projection, showing the stage of development of the people who wrote it at the time). That is taking the miracle stories literally, which misses the point of religion and leads people to ask the wrong kinds of questions.

Certainly it is fine to read the Bible on the literal level or as poetry or as a piece of literature; but there are many more levels than that (which, by the way, Freemasonry, leads you to experience). Virtually all spiritual texts, as far as I know, contain an inner (esoteric) truth and an outer (exoteric) truth. Remember watching Joseph Campbell? The same is true in mythology (and yes, Christianity is a mythology, too; mythology contains truth, especially inner truth). The outer truth is what everybody is getting hung up on. The outer truth is to take the words of the Bible literally, or to apply blanket black-and-white thinking like "My God is the right one and yours is an idol" or "Gays are going to Hell", etc. People love to argue at this level, and many think that that is the only level there is in religion. The outer level is also where most of the arguing about morality and ethics takes place.

But it is the inner truth that people should really be concerned with. If you read the Bible in the mindset of that inner esoteric truth you will find that concepts like "miracles" are referring to an interior state of consciousness. Take any story in the Bible, whether it is the birth of Christ, Noah's ark, the tower of Babel, whatever it is - these things are not necessarily literally true (they may or may not be - that's not the point and it's actually not really that important!!), the key is that they point to an INNER truth. You apply these stories inwardly, to your spirit, heart, or mind. It is about your inner development as a human being, realizing your divine nature and oneness with all that is. It is NOT about proving whether there really was a Noah or not, or even a real Jesus. The purpose of religion is to guide you, your mind, heart and spirit, into a greater awareness of the divine nature in you and in all of creation. It is to learn, experience, and apply a transcendent form of love that includes all beings. This is a transcendent awareness or consciousness. This is what God is really all about - that experience of oneness, that is true reality.

This type of consciousness is beyond rational understanding or proof by scientific means. Of course science is going to poo-poo and say this is all garbage. Science is good for explaining things within the realm of science (i.e. the material world, bodies, planets, things, physical existence). But it is a misapplication of science to try and use it to explain spirituality or the transcendent mindset of God consciousness. The West has gotten into trouble by deciding that the scientific mindset is the ONLY valid mindset, the ONLY way to interpret reality, and that it can be used to explain EVERYTHING. That is not true. Science is very limited and cannot explain everything. If we could break out of that viewpoint and see that there are higher stages of being, higher states of consciousness, awareness, perception, and interpretation, we would stop fighting over the lowest levels of consciousness (literal fundamentalism), and start to realize there are larger realities we have been missing. Science has validity in the realm in which it is concerned - science, but we shouldn't use it as our sole foundation for explaining everything.

What are your views?