Over spiritualization.
I was having an interesting conversation with Tim yesterday about the possibility that we overspiritualize things.
Meaning, we ascribe some events to God’s direct intervention that weren’t, in fact, him intervening… example:
Tim’s dog (Duke) was very very ill, (urinating blood, among other things). It would have cost them $170 to take him to the vet emergency room to get looked at, so they decided to just pray for him instead. The next day, Duke was just fine, acting normal, (not urinating blood).
We have one of two options here for a conclusion. God miraculously healed Duke (a dog) in response to Tim’s prayers, or, perhaps Duke would have gotten better anyway, perhaps he was simply passing a foreign object through his system, and when it was gone, his bodily functions returned to normal.
This lead me to some other interesting thoughts. A lot of atheists say that God is a construct we developed to help give some meaning to our meaningless existence (see Matrix Revolutions), to help give us hope and comfort in a hopeless, uncomfortable world.
I don’t know about you, but I believe in God because I cannot deny his existence. With everything I know and have experienced about this world, and everything I see that other people know about this universe, I cannot believe that there is no God, no higher source, no creator. It simply is not reasonable to believe so.
But perhaps, on the other hand, we can have a tendency to attribute things to God that aren’t in fact of him; character qualities, attributes, actions; that aren’t of him so that we CAN find some meaning in our lives, have some hope in the face of hopelessness, find some comfort in uncomfortable situations. Hypothetical example: an unbelieving relative (say, a parent) dies. We then create a sort of unitarian philosophy that somehow allows some non-believers eternal salvation, outside of what we know to be true from scripture. (Real world example: the beginnings of infant baptism were in the dark ages during the plague when distraught parents wanted to know if their baby, or child, was going to go to heaven or not)
By adding this “fluff” (extra scriptural philosophy/theology) to religion, we make our religion shallow, we trivialize God’s nature, we make him into a nicety nice grandfatherly figure.
I have more, but chew in this for awhile :)
Hm… are my comments working?
They weren’t yesterday. They should be fixed now.
I have long thought that The Rock, as a whole, has a tendency to overspiritualize things. That could be because I tend to be more of a cynic, because I’m not very spiritual, because I have little faith, because there in fact is that tendency, or perhaps some combination of the above (this coming from the guy who prayed for massive amounts of snow and ice so that he wouldn’t have to go to work on Wednesday (blog pending)). While it can be incredibly comforting, I think it can cause people to overlook/ignore free will, which is hardly an unimportant part of Christianity. The fact that I am having trouble reconciling all of this in my head may be the cause for some of my hyper-awareness, but it is also the cause of me deciding that this is a good time to stop typing.
Overspiritualization is a dangerous thing…
It can lull to sleep in regard to sin: “it’s okay, God will forgive me”
It can lead you to irresponsibility: “well, God is in control, so nothing TOO bad can happen”
Or, as is the case with me, can lead to a pious fatalism: “Well, God is in control, if he wants it to happen, it’ll happen and there is nothing I can do about it”
Just out of curiosity, how do we contrast overspiritualization with teachings that all of life is spiritual (e.g. Tim’s banana example) and that God is intimately interested and involved in every aspect of our lives? I’d really appreciate your perspective.