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Engaging with Diverse Perspectives on Spirituality and Belief · Tracking Wisdom

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  Views, interpretations and opinions expressed are not advice nor official positions presented on behalf of any organization or institution.
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  They are for informational and entertainment purposes only.
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  Thanks for joining the discussion.
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  In this episode we address tendencies to take scripture out of context, to support a position, the idea of human perfection versus perceived imperfection and contradictions in teaching.
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  Of God's tone and sentiments.
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  Now join Ryan and Peter for another episode of the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
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  There are people who adamantly assert that it is clear in the Bible that homosexuality is, is a sin and is and is like the fast track to hell, so to speak.
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  I'm not fully clear that that is in fact true.
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  Okay, here, here's what I'd like to put forth.
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  I've had conversations with people in general and this goes to the idea of the safe environment for conversation and that there tends to be an opinion put out by some strongly affiliated religious practitioners that, that it is like,
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  like asserting a fact that it is written in the Bible.
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  Xyz and yet when you ask to go deeper into that or like show me they can't.
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  So I guess to that extent your comments previously in other recordings, if nothing else about it not necessarily being the people, but the leadership, right, that you have institution of some design with leadership that is putting forth to
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  the people the message that this is written in the Bible.
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  And instead of going in evaluating that for themselves, they just parrot it.
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  This reminds me of a YouTube clip I saw from West Wing where Martin Sheen as the president, castigates a right wing radio host.
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  Have you seen?
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  I haven't seen it.
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  So it's, it's really great.
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  I think it's called President whatever his name is, trashes the Bible.
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  Thumper is the name of the clip.
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  But basically he pulls out all these Bible quotes and says so you know, he starts out facetiously saying, oh, I really like your position on homosexuality.
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  And he, and then he says, so but tell me, I have a question.
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  Should I stone my daughter because of this?
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  Because in this line it says if you do this, you'd be stoned.
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  And he goes through this huge litany of crimes and punishments from Old Testament.
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  But as far as homosexuality goes, my understanding is that the biblical foundation for that sin is Old Testament.
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  And I wanted to ask you about New Testament reference to this, but I guess you don't have it.
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  The Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah where they were punished, the Sodomites were punished because the.
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  These men had sex with other men.
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  But that the historical, cultural, context of that was that these Angels took the form of men and went into Sodom and went.
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  Were raped by the sodomite men, because that was a practice, that was a form of attack, was to rape strangers.
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  And so my understanding is that the actual crime in the Old Testament was to rape strangers.
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  Like, don't go out and rape people.
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  It was not an injunction against consensual sex.
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  Right now I'm just telling you what I remember from what I've heard.
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  I don't have any direct scholarship on that, but, gee, it kind of makes sense.
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  Sure, it makes a lot more sense than the idea that, well, Jesus told us we should hate people who love other people of the same sex because he wants us to hate some people, right?
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  Like love everybody, love your neighbor.
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  Unless that neighbor's like this anyway, which.
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  Is obviously contradictory to Jesus's message.
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  But it does raise a good point.
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  Point that, and this is something that is pervasive within just the general population, having any conversation amongst themselves is to point to, to extract a sound bite right out of context and then assert that that is now saying
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  that when if you put it back in context, it becomes clear, it becomes at least that there could be another possible explanation for it.
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  And people tend to, I think, intentionally or unintentionally pull them out of context so as to prevent any question that then goes deeper than.
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  See, it says it right here.
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  Now, I don't have extensive education or even experience in Old Testament, and I tend to lend myself more to Jesus as my teacher than the Bible in its entirety, possibly, interestingly enough, because it is really just adopted from
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  another faith system where my practice, the faith system in which I am engaging, tends to focus more on the good news and the message of Jesus.
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  And sometimes those things seem to be contradictory, you know, to your, to your point earlier.
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  And if I'm going to find contradiction, I'm going to generally err on the side of the message of Jesus based in love and compassion and acceptance of other people and service than the, the tone that is typically struck
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  with an Old Testament writing.
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  And I can rationalize that to myself due to the ancient nature of those texts and the, you know, I'm certain that it started, you know, being passed down verbally and then, you know, Moses started writing some of this
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  down.
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  And it would be very hard to convince me otherwise, that there was no loss of translation there.
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  There's no human component being injected into that message.
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  And likewise with, with the Gospels as well.
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  But it's a newer teaching and I'm basically, I guess what I'm saying is I tend to latch on to the message of Christianity, which I believe came.
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  It was the primary message of Jesus, which was love and compassion and service to each other.
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  Love God, love each other, serve each other.
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  So if I can't digest a reading or a teaching within that framework and perspective, then I tend to reject it.
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  I have a couple thoughts, and I think by.
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  By nature, this episode is a lot of tone, or rather our early recordings are a lot of tone setting where we're deciding how do we want to present ourselves to the pot of sphere, whatever it's called.
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  So I heard myself be very, very snarky about someone's particular belief.
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  And so I kind of want to clarify that because obviously I took a very disrespectful tone.
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  And you know, what I'm criticizing is the intellectual rigor.
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  If you believe that gay people are sinners and have a specific basis for that, I'd be interested in hearing it.
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  I'm open to that discussion and I will not mock you for having the conversation with me.
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  One thing, the reason that we're doing this is that we are both intellectual and we both like to be intellectually rigorous.
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  So that is our bias.
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  We'd like to hear your position.
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  There are different ways of thinking about things.
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  Right.
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  And that's what we're interested in.
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  We're interested in different ways of thinking about things.
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  You know, if I had the opportunity to safely have an exchange, I.
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  I would welcome that.
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  Yeah.
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  So that's just to say, you know, if you heard me be very snarky about something that maybe you believe, I did not mean to ridicule your belief.
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  I was only questioning the thought process.
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  And I'd like to know what thought process is, if that.
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  If you actually have that thought process.
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  Yes.
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  The other thing I want to kind of call back again was kind of for the other end of.
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  Of listeners, the nuns, the questioners, the.
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  The wanderers is the idea of selectivity in.
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  In reading, selectivity in scripture, in belief or in participation.
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  I can be part of this denomination and not 100% believe everything that they're putting forward.
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  So I kind of want to address a potential listener who is currently unaffiliated and doesn't want to affiliate because, well, there's nothing where I believe everything like, oh, I like this church I joined.
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  I enjoy the community, I like the leader, but they say they believe this thing.
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  And so I can't be in this church because I don't believe this thing.
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  And what I originally was coming from was something attributed to the Buddha again, where he said, you know, don't believe what I'm teaching because I taught it.
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  Believe it because it's useful to you by your experience.
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  Apply what I am teaching.
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  And if it works for you, then take that on as your practice, not even as your belief, but just do that because it works for you.
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  Which is to say that there is, you know, at least one tradition, that there is an ancient tradition of being selective in your beliefs.
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  You know, not every religion and not even every Christian denomination would require that you 100% accept all of their creed.
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  And something from my own background, from my childhood as Presbyterian, one day I learned as a teenager of the doctrine of.
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  I think it's trans.
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  Transmutation or transmogrification.
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  Have you heard of this?
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  It's the idea that when you take communion, the.
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  The bread, the host in your stomach literally transforms into the flesh of Christ.
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  Which blew my mind and still does, because as far as I know, it is still part of the creed.
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  At the time, I was, I think, quite a devout Presbyterian, but there was no way I was going to believe that.
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  So anyway.
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  Yeah, that's interesting.
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  Yeah, I had not heard that.
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  I know that in Christianity there's a number of interpretations on communion in the host and what all that is and means.
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  That's a hard one from the perspective of the institution.
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  Like, how do you figure that one?
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  You know, I think that so many of these things are just glossed over.
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  You know, by definition, the majority of people who practice, the majority of religions are not very critical.
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  Right.
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  Because otherwise it just would not work.
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  I mean, how do you get these institutions.
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  There's a Darwinian process here where on the whole, these institutions and their doctrines and rules and elements work because these things are huge superpowers of faith now.
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  Right.
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  So clearly the majority of followers don't question the things that we're questioning.
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  And it works for the institution and I guess to a large degree, works for the followers.
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  I don't know.
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  Yeah, I mean, that's.
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  That's a good question.
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  I wonder how many people sit in church questioning something and looking like left and right and being like, am I the only one that is questioning this?
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  Or.
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  Or how many people are deeply unhappy in their religion but really don't see a way, you know, really believe that they must continue.
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  Right.
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  That even though they're.
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  Well, I guess this is something we touched on for.
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  Even though they're deeply unhappy now in heaven, they'll be.
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  They'll be happy in that they're.
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  That's the payoff.
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  They're waiting for the payoff after they die.
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  Right.
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  So one thing you mentioned that I think is a question that I had was talking about the intellectual rigor.
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  And to me, the intellectual rigor needs to start with defining God.
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  Defining God is really kind of impossible because God can't be bounded.
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  But I think, I guess where I'm going with that idea is if your idea of God is that God is the everything and is, you know, all knowing and all powerful and all loving, and then go into talking
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  about how God hates all these things and wants you to behave a certain way and if you don't, you're going to be in deep trouble.
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  Those are contradictory in my opinion.
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  And that's where the intellectual rigor breaks down in discussions I've had with people.
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  You know, is on one hand you're telling me that you believe God is all these amazing things, and on the other hand, how horrendous God is.
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  And I don't find alignment with that.
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  I align with the idea that the ultimate existence is loving and God is in all things, the reverent and the profane.
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  Right.
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  You know, even my wife gets hung up sometimes saying things and like, oh, that's sacrilegious, or oh, I'm gonna go to hell for that.
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  God can have a sense of he's a big boy and that, that, that is also God.
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  Yeah, yeah, all of it is God.
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  And that's why we say, you know, humanity is imperfect, but humanity is actually perfect, in my opinion, because everything is God and God has it, is all exactly as it's intended to be.
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  And for us, I think we struggle from this perspective to see that because we still have some doubt about the ultimate existence and that somehow this is like the important existence where it's not necessarily.
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  Well, so that's interesting.
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  So you're saying that this life is not necessarily the important existence, which existence is not necessary.
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  Yeah, I'm talking about the earthly life.
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  And not that it's not important, but that just that it's all as it should be.
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  Instead of the perception that we need to fix something, we're broken and we need to atone for something or in some way do something in order to get to the next level of existence or to be forgiven and
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  accepted into the next.
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  The next plane of existence.
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  And it is my assertion that everything is as it's intended to be and the ultimate outcome is a foregone conclusion.
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  We're all destined to get there and to be there.
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  And this is something we do in the meantime kind of thing.
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  And yeah, learning and growing and all that, but not that it's imperfect and not that we're some terrible beings.
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  In fact, in conversations with God, there was a comment, I feel I'm going to be quoting this book quite a bit.
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  The analogy that.
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  So this being from a perspective of a parent and their children, right.
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  Earthly parent and children, you create a safe space for them and you want them to be safe and you send them out to go play and you don't care if they play tag or if they play hide and
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  seek or pretend, because whatever they choose to play, you know they're going to be safe.
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  And you know, they come back home and everything's good and the next day they go out and you're not going to care what they play then either.
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  And also, you don't get, you don't get upset with a child who is naively or ignorantly wrong.
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  Right.
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  You, you give them the opportunity to correct and, and learn again.
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  And that's kind of the perspective that I think like that what we're, we, we have the opportunity to do terrible things to each other in this realm and in the ultimate existence.
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  We haven't done terrible.
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  Okay.
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  Okay.
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  And so we perceive it here as like, look how awful we are, but it's not the reality, I guess, or so.
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  So, so.
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  Two comments.
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  So one, you, you know, you said you're probably going to refer to this book a lot.
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  And so this is more tone setting and I think we're going to keep on saying this throughout.
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  It's okay.
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  Yep.
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  You know, your perspective right now is through this book as well as, you know, Jesus teaching in the Bible, mine is in Buddhism.
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  So we are going to talk from those perspectives.
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  And you know, the, the listener has to accept we're, we're going to talk from those perspectives, but we really want to hear other perspectives.
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  We're not saying this because this is.
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  We're not talking from those perspectives because they're the only ones we're talking because those are the ones that are most important to us, that speak to us most directly, that help define our own spiritual, religious experiences.
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  So I have the same feeling of kind of want to qualify what I'm saying because, oh God, I keep on talking about Buddhism.
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  I don't think we have to, you know, constrain ourselves at all or feel embarrassed about speaking from our perspective because, I mean, we will go and seek, we'll talk about other things in the future, and we're never going
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  to stop talking about Conversations with God.
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  We're never going to stop talking about Buddhism unless we find personally that there's a need for us to move on from that.
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  But other than us intentionally creating content where we go out and say, well, let's learn about Islam, and now we're going to talk about Islam.
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  We're going to talk from our perspective, and it's up to the listeners to create dialogue with us and bring in those other perspectives, because that's really, you know, one of the big purposes that we have.
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  And I'm like, actually really feeling excited now to say this.
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  One of the big purposes we have in engaging in this activity, of creating a podcast is to engage with people who are out there that are stimulated by what we're saying and.
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  Yeah.
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  And have something to say to us about it.
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  We're really interested in having those conversations and meeting people with more information or different information than we have.
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  So you answered, kind of.
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  You answered, you know, one of the things I was going to say about.
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  In response to your comments about, you know, ideas of God, you know, why is God so angry?
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  And hopefully there are people who can answer this, that question, in a way, you know, can have that conversation with us.
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  Why.
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  Why is.
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  Why is your concept of God so angry?
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  We don't see it that way.
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  We'd like to know why.
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  If, you know, if you have an idea of that, we would like to know.
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  You had said something about this life, and then you explained that this is not the only life and it wanted me to.
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  I think I'm probably going to keep on coming back to this, that this life is important while we're living it.
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  Yes, I agree with you that there's more than this existence, and I look forward to experiencing more than this existence.
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  At the same time, this life is very important.
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  This world is very important while we're living in it.
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  And my attitude towards faith is that if it's not helping you in this life, I personally don't have much use for it.
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  Now, that's not to say that I don't know of very joyous, happy Christian practitioners.
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  You know, they are, you know, working for the afterlife and enjoying this life and helping people and doing good and.
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  And I think.
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  I don't want to continually apologize, but I want to be very clear that we are not castigating organized religion and saying it's of no use to anybody.
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  No, it helps a lot of people, but we're concerned with helping the people that it's not helping, basically.
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  Yeah.
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  And.
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  And God, I almost thought we were ministering.
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  I mean, in a way, I mean that's our we think that it's a very moral thing for us to do to have conversations that potentially help the people who aren't being helped by organized religion.
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  Yeah, that's, you know, the other point of our doing this other than, you know, engaging with people who have other ideas.
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  It's to learn about ourselves, learn, clarify what we think and examine our own thought process, to have contact with people who have different ideas than us and hear from them and have conversations with them and to help people
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  to help other people if someone needs help and this is helpful to them.
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  That is one of our goals and probably our first goal.
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  Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
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  Join us next time as we continue the discussion.
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