QuakerInfo.com Forum

[DavidT]

We live in a culture rampant in beliefism, and I am wondering if it's even a relevant concept to Quakerism. Belief is an interesting conceptual way of seeing the world riddled with conceptual dangers that lead nonsense. I mean really isn't the Nicene creed the most nonsensical document ever produced where a literal "We Believe" is followed by a literal cut and paste of text. It's validity is based on "We believe" which is purely a circular self reinforcing statement that isn't even logical.

Quakers were somewhat overrun by evangelicalism in the 1800's which is really an independent franchising of Catholic belief-ism grounded in ultimately in the Nicene Creed. if there was validity to beliefism I'm pretty certain we wouldn't have 38,000 denominations with a bunch of them promoting their brand Of God coupled to idea's that strike them as being from God. Is belief-ism bad, well no it's not and it's a part of the growing process but I suppose it depends on how the growth is taking place and in what context.

Jesus Taught Before you remove the sliver from your neighbor's eye, you need to remove the log from your own eye. The question becomes which eye is he exactly talking about. I have no sliver in my physical eye? Is he stupid. What is it mean to see. And if I see, then do I believe? With 38,000 Denominations it appears that belief is closer to what Heraclitus describes as own private understanding, so I do not think belief and Logos have much in common.

From my take on beliefism, if belief is important to you, and you cannot see and metaphor is difficult for you why be a quaker? Be an evangelical, a catholic one is a single church or the other is a branch of the other. I think George Fox was onto something in his time and that was breaking from beliefism of his day and getting back to the text experientially. Who knows, maybe in this day and age just like in his day, information "The printing press" changed the way people conceptualized so today with the "internet" people will start to change as well. Beliefism is usually absent of any real logic and I'm pretty sure that Fox, and other's were being pretty logical in how they approached life in context to their times. I really don't see the need for beliefism in Quakerism where as process may be a better type of understanding rather than beliefism. Who know's i"m probably in the minority on this topic I am sure.

John 1:1 Teaches in the beginning was the "Logos". This is a concept that reaches deep into Greek thinking all the way back to Heraclitus.
"The idea that all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos"[22] and "the Logos is common,"[23] is expressed in two famous but obscure fragments:
This Logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this Logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep. (DK 22B1)
For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the Logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.

[Shay]

Welcome to the board, that's a pretty interesting first post to make, can you explain where you are getting the term "beliefism" from? It's not one I've heard of before.

[DavidT]

Shay
I want to be sure no one feels I'm attacking them because I'm not. But rooted deeply in the reformation movement was an element of experientialism. This is an interesting topic in and of itself in context to religious experience and to what the nature of that exactly is.

If I hold a belief, and then I experience we can tend to reinforce our belief as being true based on our experience.

To give a more secular example that might be easier If I build a building that is incredibly hard, the first time through the building I am experiencing the process. After the first time I can look back and see how it was built and the problems and make adjustments. I can continue to build the building over and over say 30 times till every step is worked out flawlessly. I now bring in a new generation of people who have never built the building tell them every step and they will build the building correctly if they follow the step's I've laid out for them. They then pass that along to a new generation and they follow the steps, another generation they follow the steps. Pretty soon generations after are following the steps and that is building the building with no real idea how the process of the development of the steps were created in the first place. In order to make sure everyone is building the building correctly well we right the steps down you see, we now have an orderly process generation after generation after generation. Are people experiencing the process as it was in the beginning or are they experiencing the process through the steps. Do they understand the process that gave rise to the steps they follow?

This is a difficult topic to say the least, but in a more secular humanistic belief framework apparently, each individual has their own belief which is to me Christianity really gone bad. Although, I am pretty sure, there is a large portion of the not religious population that yearns for a spiritual communal type of experience that makes sense but mostly what is passed around is just another belief and so they don't bother.

George Fox was an interesting person and I"m not sure he put much credence in beliefs. I am also not sure that Religious experience has to be in opposition to other types of experiences such as oh say observational, or Math, or science etc. There exists a divide where logic has not played a role in context to what we define spirituality in our culture, and I'm not sure that spirituality can be ever devoid of logic in any way.

Again Shay I want to be careful here we as a culture are so engulfed in belief as being a valid way of understanding our sense of spirituality or the world for that matter, that I'm afraid some people might be offended. I"m a staunch experientialist and I'm not sure why belief is foundational rather than oh say training wheels in church. Certainly I read Paul as expressing this rather clearly. I suppose if training wheels becomes the norm well then it becomes foundational.

[Shay]

I'm not offended, I'm just not understanding what you're referring to as belief or beliefism. I think I get what you're saying with the building, which is that people who start a system should be sure to explain why they're doing what they're doing, not just what they're doing and that it's important, but I'm afraid you keep using the word 'belief' in places that seem contradictory to each other.

When you say belief, beliefs, or beliefism, can you give a definition of what you mean?

[Kiahanie]

Yes, please, DavidT. The only related definition I can find is for "beliefist" which refers to "prejudice or discrimination based on an individual's belief system." That doesn't seem to fit your context. Or maybe it does and I'm missing the connection.
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"There is a field out beyond right and wrong. I'll meet you there." --Jellaludin Rumi

[DavidT]

well let me try some more..

Belief and hypothesis are closely related where as I see the term faith maybe a more accurate term for the Christian walk. I think for most, the path is not clearly visible so to speak, but there is intuition. They follow this path because it comes from the heart deeply not out of a belief but something deeper. They tend to not be judgmental, oppressive, narrow minded, myoptic and have a tendency towards leaving the text alone and true to itself and allow themselves to change over time. They tend to not understand Christianity through definition but understand it as expression. the expression is invariably we are not self determined, there is a that which is deeper than us that determines us that both draws us to it as it guides us along our path.

There is some deep logic to that, in that logic is in and of itself not allowed at it's deepest levels to be reductively defined, we can't define ourselves independent from ourselves. Christianity holds the high ground of non reductionism in context to consciousness, cosmological development ordering, and a text with a teacher who's speaking directly to and from the mind's eye constantly about the nature of who we are. "Worry about the log in your own eye before worrying about the slivers in others" There are some who understand this and practice always with all people.

Belief does play a role in our development but when does the sliver become a log. When does the belief determine reductively who God is, how God works, and When God works, and Why God works. If allowed to go to far God simply becomes a magic Genie, wizard of Oz which the reductive secularist's love to march around and laugh at for good reason. The funny part is, most of them have equally nonsensical ideas such as "independent observer" that gives them the impression that they are independent from reality in someway, not unlike overly reductive Christianity. Sometimes I look at reductive tendencies in christianity and the secular and just think 'One has God of the Box, the other is simply stuck in a box made by themselves" they all look sort of aspergerish to me in how they approach life. Engineers, very literal about everything metaphor seems difficult for them to Grasp.

I may not have answered it directly, because I don't have an easy answer to this, but I do know that Christianity is not only rooted in a deep book, it's also rooted in a deep philosophical tradition of non reductionism and proper ordering as laid out by the Platonist's reaching back into Heraclitus. Maybe the current change from a singular self referencing universe to an unbounded infinite multiverse of unique universes will give Christianity a chance to move it's conceptual framework to a more contemporary level consistent and in someways more authoritative in context to observational vs conceptual realities.

My take from George Fox he was more grounded experientially non reductive conceptually as being true, rather than reductive observational as being true. Beliefism to me anyway is getting stuck at the literal eyeball level of reading. I've told friends my Theology professors were like confused algebra professors teaching poetry. Allegory "this relates to that" seemed to be the norm. That brings me back to the beginning of this post. Belief has a tendency to BE how we see reality through the lens of belief, where as hypothesis does change, although not all people in science are happy about it when it does happen. In the math world it's even worse. I currently do not find the deep divide between science and religion an acceptable notion and somewhere belief, or beliefism as I've coined it plays a role in maintaining that divide on both sides.

Sorry for the long post.

[DavidT]

An added bit about my own Quaker "inner light experience"

I come at the notion of belief from a slightly different angle that I thought might shed some insight into what I articulated earlier. Also, I'm lefthanded, i literally see things a bit differently than "normal" people.

In 1978 when i was a young guy just starting out in life, at around 21 I was starting my own business. I was at a party in a small town, I think passing a joint around I do believe talking about starting a business and the other guys there mentioned I should start attending church. My church background was zilch except for christmas and to be honest I grew up in an atheist home and I wasn't even atheist. I had no real ability to form any formalized belief system. I had figured out at about age 8 that infinity was well endless, logic therefore was endless and that was for me God. God wasn't a being as much as the phenomena that put this thing called life together. I was stuck being me and well, I was certain that my fellow humans weren't the smartest thing in the universe, and that the smartest people in the universe were saying we aren't the smartest people in the universe, there is smarter than us. At age 8 I had this figured out, not bad actually but I"m left handed..

So I took up my stoner friends from the party and picked the biggest church in town which just happen to be an Evangelical/Quaker church. I used to never put the slashes between those two words I do now for a reason.
I started to attend and after a month of no new job leads, as I passed my business cards around during the coffee hour (I obviously didn't get it and people's faces told me that) I decided to hang out with the college kids. The first time I hung out with them, there was no beer, and the kids were being nice to each other. A rather novel concept to me that I liked. I had grown out of drinking, partying etc. as being fun, actually, boring mostly and rather pointless and here was a novel way of relating to each other I hadn't seen in my peer group aging very much.

One week we were sitting around reading Dietrich Bonhoffer's cost of discipleship and situational ethics, and rather enjoying the discussion about Hitler etc, a girl started to cry during sharing time. This struck me rather profoundly in that I could see her just struggling with life, in what struggles life can be at that age. On Sunday, I once again showed back up to church, slept through silent time as usual, woke up for the sermon (evangelical remember) and started to daydream as usual (lefthanded). In my daydream I visualized this girl struggling off to my right and off to my left was the party crowd. I sort of sat back for awhile and realized and said to myself "I can see you, you are not alone" in regards tot he girl, and thought Maybe God I'll go down this path (Christian) for awhile. To me that was like oh a 3 month exploratory lark. As soon as I did this WHAM, it was like getting struck in the head with a lightening bolt, my brain flashed white and it was like every atom in my body flipped over from God being a concept to as real as concrete. I walked outside that day and looked at the trees, the grass the plants and it was like I had never seen them before.

Being the logical guy that I am I thought, well I've had this rather outstandingly strange experience, that has completely shaken me up from what I thought "was and was not" and since I was In church I better learn about this stuff since they are talking about it with some authority.


You have to remember, No Jesus, No salvation, Nothing, just daydreaming and WHAM Experience. I was an extremely young, naive, psychologically and emotionally unprepared in learning for the first time in my life, how to believe. What a strange surrealistic time but everything turned out ok and eventually got past that.

[orPowers]

I'd say that the main point is that what became the Cathoic Church built a religion on the idea that what you believe is even more important than how you live or experience your relationship with God and your fellow humans. Bad track.
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Romans 8:38-39

my blog: http://mild-side.blogspot.com/

[DavidT]

Agreed and that is a very bad track

I started the post, but in writing I also realize that beliefs are an expression. Even when they are understood by the individual to be a definition or treated as the gospel truth so to speak it's only an expression of how they see the world. I actually pay little attention to people's beliefs I could careless, I'm always looking directly at the person independent of what they believe anyway.

At the end of the day, maybe the best part of quakers for me is an hour of silence. In this busy era of cell phones instant communication emails, getting a group of people to sit and be quiet for an hour is rather magical to me. Maybe my aversion to evangelicalism is simply too much talking for me, To each his own I suppose...

[Kiahanie]

Thank you for taking the time to flesh out what you mean by "beliefism," David. I think I understand you now. (OrPowers' nutshell was helpful, too.)
_________________
"There is a field out beyond right and wrong. I'll meet you there." --Jellaludin Rumi