Starting Over Commentary

[Audacia]

Here I invite you to comment on my blog, "Starting Over." I encourage constructive criticism, your thoughts and opinions, or anything else you might like to add.

[Dance]

Here's some - I want to see Audacia write a short story! Now!

+Rep to set you off!

[Hitai de Bodemloze]

A fascinating blog, I'm looking forward to reading more I'm just coming to the end of my college course in Religious Studies and I take quite an interest in theology and historical Christianity (mainly East Asian Christianity). Although I'm not religious myself, I find the subject fascinating, so I look forward to hearing your thoughts as you (very bravely) set out on this spiritual journey +rep!

[Legio]

:@

It is good to see you taking the time to reflect on your personal experience and how that has informed your faith, and vice versa. It shows great maturity. Your writing conveys the sense that you are taking a truly critical look at what you have seen and been taught. I have not read any of Mr. Bell's work, but I might check it out. Apart from the books I mentioned on Steam, check out God and the Astronomers. I am interested to see where your questioning leads you.

For anyone interested, here are the books I recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Late...late+antiquity Supremely readable, nice overview, famous scholar.
http://www.amazon.com/Virgins-God-As...virgins+of+god Bit dry for some (it's a monograph, after all).
http://www.amazon.com/Q-Aurelius-Sym...ymmachus+sogno I LOVE HER GET HER BOOK AND THEN LOVE HER AS MUCH AS I DO.
http://www.amazon.com/Alienation-Exp...tigone+samella Very good. Very expensive. LIBRARY.
http://www.amazon.com/THE-CLIMAX-ROM...climax+of+rome Another readable book by a famous scholar.
http://www.amazon.com/Specters-Paul-...f+paul+dunning Excellent scholar, great book.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Astronomer...he+astronomers Not about Antiquity, but about God. And SCIENCE.

Those are all secondary sources. For primary sources, I'd recommend some of the Vitae as well as generally famous works like Ammianus et al.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Later-Roma...us+marcellinus Good translation of Ammianus.
The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla (available online, GOOGLE), as well as the Life of St. Matrona, are good. Be sure to check out the Martyrdom of Perpetua as well.

You may notice that I've left out Augustine--he's recommended reading, but not necessarily enjoyable. Of course, you can also find the letters of the Church Fathers (Jerome's letter to Eustochium is interesting).

If you're into film, check out Agora.

[R-teen]

With that being said, I have discovered a viewpoint presented in Rob Bell’s book that I am particularly fond of. Rob talks about God being an energy present in everything in the universe. He describes moments where we feel incredible depth of feeling, moments where we step back and say, “This matters,” moments that send chills down our spines as examples of the divine energy that is God. He talks about God being with us, inside of us, and everywhere around us. Because, it seems, many of us think of God with limited knowledge of what exists outside of humanity. We think of God having human characteristics. We have created God in our own image. We fail to realize that God is spirit, that he or she or whatever God is lacks form or structure. This idea of what God is sounds a lot like the Force, I know. Yet if the divine truly exists, it makes the most sense to me that it exists as the energy behind everything that is felt, created, accomplished, and achieved.

I'm not sure if it's the right place for arguing what users write on their blogs, so pardon me if I'm posting this in the wrong place. The idea of posting in the Ethos is terrifying for me , as my debating skills are severely lacking, but I thought maybe sharing my thoughts about your latest blog post may not do much harm and hopefully it can help me find an answer or two for the questions I have in mind.

The thing is, I find it a little disturbing to associate God with energy. Energy as a physical concept, although its true nature and fabric vague, has ways of showing itself to us, and those ways are pretty much clear and sensible. Heat, a moving body, mass itself, etc. The validity of its definition can be observed when you release an object to free-fall, when you touch a hot body, etc. Associating such qualities with an entity who lacks either of those or suchlike manifestations seems to me more as baseless act, IMHO.

Checking through dictionaries, I saw that many had resorted to physical contexts in order to define energy. See for example, what I've quoted below from Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

a : dynamic quality <narrative energy>
b : the capacity of acting or being active <intellectualenergy>
c : a usually positive spiritual force <the energy flowing through all people>

2
: vigorous exertion of power : effort <investing time andenergy>

3
: a fundamental entity of nature that is transferred between parts of a system in the production of physical change within the system and usually regarded as the capacity for doing work

4
: usable power (as heat or electricity); also : the resources for producing such power

The other non-physical definitions given are all either neurobiological processes of the human body (or rather, living creatures), or are too illogical for us to try to match with what is commonly believed as God.

So, I guess it is not too bold to say that energy is a vague concept, and by saying that God is energy, you have given next to nothing information about it. Furthermore, stripping God of all its characteristic qualities that he/she has been regarded with throughout the history, is kind of like denying its existence altogether. Let me elaborate further. Would you call that sensation one gets after one near misses a fatal accident a sense of the energy of God? And so that sensation one gets after hitting an important milestone of one's life? And also that feeling a prisoner experiences, who, sitting alone at his cell, is counting the seconds he has until he's executed at the morning? Such an entity whose only signs are the feelings of excitement and the likes—which are controlled by the human mind, to be more precise—is so inexpressive, so volatile that I think it is not worth acknowledging, let alone respecting, loving or even worshiping. It can easily be associated and dissociated with everything. After all, what is the point in acknowledging such a transparent entity who doesn't exist in the conventional sense, doesn't do anything and on top of that, getting to know it doesn't bring is neither good nor bad?