The Pastafarian deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, creating “Meathead,” the first man.
LIKE MANY RELIGIONS, Pastafarianism is a parody religion, only intentionally so. Satire is used to provoke debate over various religious creeds and doctrines of other religions, as a way of pointing out the “absurdity” and lack of “sustaining evidence” for these notions, often including God.
In this time of relative scientific enlightenment, all evolutionary religions are more or less struggling to maintain their fetishistic belief in a wide variety of variously accumulated man-made dogmas. Concepts like Hell, Noah’s Ark, Creationism, Intelligent Design, and others rightfully bear the brunt of this ongoing theological thrashing. Top of my list? Hell. The Virgin Birth. Creationism. The Atonement Doctrine. The "Wrathful" God. The "chosen people" idea, in all its incarnations. It's a freakin' long list.
Yes, the Pastafarians can and will make fun of your religion, and maybe you, too; but a corrective sifting of more than two thousand years worth of religious error is going to happen one way or another. And before it's done and God sticks a fork in you, you just may find yourself letting go of some of the man-made dog-crap-ma stuck on your soul; if your intent is to keep your religious compass pointing true.
In letting go of antiquated and, in some cases, simply false ideas that over the last couple centuries have attached to religious faith, don't lose sight of the fact that the relation between you as a human creature, and God as the divine Creator, is a living experience; a dynamic religious faith which cannot be precisely defined. Nevertheless, it can be experienced, and with a progressively profound and often ineffable certainty.
It seems like common sense, but it is critical to realize: No one can live your faith for you; you have to live it yourself. You can start to do that by believing what is validated in perhaps the deepest part of who and what you are— your soul— and then courageously trying to live the truth you've discovered there. So go there; search there; take whatever truth you know with certainty and use it to do good, to increasingly live that truth, and to realize beauty in everything, and everyone.
If you're up for a serious walk in the weeds on this, hop over the Cannoli.
Most clear-thinking people realize that the progress of science, along with the philosophic elimination of religious fear, has greatly increased the mortality rate of false gods; and it’s not done yet. Even though these casualties of man-made deities (including you, FSM) and dogmas can occasionally blur the spiritual vision, they are eventually successful in destroying a good deal of the ignorance and superstition which obscures the reality of a loving God. And if it takes a Flying Spaghetti Monster to make that happen, then there you go.
From a spiritual perspective, there are just two basic classes of human beings: those who know God, and those who do not. Those who know God have experienced the fact of his presence; such God-knowing persons hold in their personal experience the only positive proof of the existence of God which any human being can offer to another.
A true religionist ultimately has faith in a personal God of personal salvation— and such faith is something more than a mental projection, or even a sublime hypothesis. They have faith in a God of love; and love will always be the true essence of any worthwhile religion, whether it's institutional or individual; regardless of any and all associated erroneous doctrine.
THE POWER OF FAITH
Many people are more or less confused about the true nature of religious faith. This number very likely includes as many professed religionists as it does atheists and agnostics. That's understandable, because a person— a personality— must actually exercise faith in order to experience what it is. Perhaps the most common yet egregious error we can make is equating faith to mere belief; living faith is a spiritual experience; not an intellectual one. But one thing faith certainly is not — is a simple intellectual definition.
It's essential to recognize that faith and belief differ in fundamental ways. Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is always expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, keeping a person locked in a non-progressive spiral; true faith liberates, by constantly enlarging your personal horizon.
Most importantly, living faith has the power to transform the philosophic God of probability into the saving God of spiritual certainty; that happens through our personal religious experiences. Yes, skepticism may challenge the theories of theology, but confidence in the dependability of personal religious experience affirms the truth of that belief which has grown into genuine faith.
A person can usually develop convictions about God through reasoning, but they can only become truly God-knowing by faith; through their own personal experience. Once contact is made with cosmic reality, when meanings and values are engaged with living faith, certainty of the divine can be experienced. A God-knowing soul can say, “I know”— even though their “knowledge” of God can be questioned, even ridiculed by those who deny any such certitude can exist because it is not wholly supported by intellectual logic. Still. It’s not a semantic accident that the believer can logically withstand any such questioning with the veridical reply, “How do you know that I do not know?”
Regardless of such certitude, reason can always question faith, and it should. But faith can always augment both reason and logic. Faith has the power to transform possibility into moral certainty; spiritual experience. Assuming God is the source of all reality, then he is likewise the source of all truth; he must be absolute truth. Therefore God is the first truth, and the last fact; all truth has its origin in him, and all facts must exist relative to him.
As truth then, we may come to know God. But in order to understand— to be able to explain God intellectually— we must explore the fact of the universe. And this vast gulf between the experience of the truth of God— and our general ignorance as to the fact of God— can only be bridged by living faith. Reason, alone, simply cannot achieve harmony between infinite truth and universal fact.
Science!
THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE
If you've seen it once, you've probably seen it a hundred times: An atheist caviling in the comment section of an article on religion, parroting the tired trope that if there were even a shred of evidence or proof for a god, they would be the very first to weigh it fairly. However, there's no need, because,
Science!
Completely overlooked is the error in logical thinking, which is fatal to any real likelihood of discovering the world of spirit reality. Science, or specifically the “scientific method,” is an intellectual yardstick used to measure the material universe. And because it is material and wholly intellectual process, it is utterly useless in the evaluation of spiritual realities and religious experiences.
Nevertheless, to true science God must at least remain a possibility. To philosophy, a probability; but to religion a certainty, an actual religious experience. Reason demands that a philosophy which can’t find the God of probability should at least be respectful of a religious faith which can— and does— find the God of certitude.
Nor can science simply discount religious experience on grounds of credulity; not as long as it persists in assuming that our self-conscious intellectual and philosophic faculties emerged from increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, finally taking origin in primitive sludge which was and still is utterly devoid of any capability to think and feel, let alone become self-conscious.
Intelligent men and women should use the consistent logic of adulthood: a logic which tolerates the concept of truth as well as the observation of fact.
Intelligent men and women use the consistent logic of adulthood; a logic which tolerates the
concept of truth as well as the
observation of fact. For example, the facts of evolution should not be argued against the truth of the certainty of the spiritual experience of the God-knowing individual. Organic evolution is a
fact; but purposive or progressive evolution is a
truth— which makes consistent the often contradictory phenomena of continuing evolution. And scientific materialism has gone bankrupt when, in the face of each recurring universe phenomenon, it refunds its current objections by referring what is admittedly higher, back into that which is admittedly lower. Consistency calls for the recognition of the activities of a purposive Creator.
LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD
In our day-to-day lives, mere beliefs may not always be able to resist doubt and withstand fear. But faith is always triumphant over doubting, because faith is both positive and living. The positive always has the advantage over the negative; as does truth over error, experience over theory, and spiritual realities over the relative nature of facts. Nevertheless, the only real and convincing evidence of this spiritual certainty is the social fruit of the spirit which believers can produce as a result of their genuine spiritual experience.
No matter how you finally choose to arrive at the notion, this temporal existence must eventually come to be visualized as the experience of the reality of the human upreach in concert with the divine and saving downreach. Only then will you— as a potentially eternal, individual consciousness— find the true certainty that lives in faith.
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