It is another moment when I interrupt this historical journey for a sidebar. I think it is important to point out a couple of issues as we continue this pilgrimage: how we got to this point in our churches and society at large… the total loss of interest in factual truth.

Mike, aren’t you overthinking a simple faith?

This is an accusation I hear quite often, but it appears to me that any thinking, especially critical thinking, in this climate of anti-reason, is now considered “overthinking.” The real problem is wholesale underthinking. We are now in a war with Iran because of underthinking by our administration. Most societal problems are the result of underthinking. While underthinking itself is not a moral issue (I don’t think), underthinking is the first step in many moral problems.

A husband may underthink, “This problem is my wife’s fault. I will scream at her, or hit her, in my rage of blaming her.”  With careful thinking, that husband will find out that the problem was not his wife’s fault, and that she is not the simple scapegoat. And that he has a problem with anger. Cognitive therapy is an incredibly effective tool in psychological counseling. It requires careful thinking to find the real truth, rather than emotional reasoning, as exhibited in the above example.

Even when you look directly at the Christian faith, by not thinking, not seeking knowledge and wisdom, that faith is harmed. While this present anti-reason climate has created a new type of Christianity of just feeling without thinking, that was not the original nature of the faith. The book of Proverbs centers on thinking and knowledge, leading to wisdom, as in Proverbs 18:15: The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, for the ears of the wise seek it out. In New Testament verses such as 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul exhorts Timothy to study to show himself approved by God, handling the truth. But the whole Bible is about learning, training, thinking, and being wise.

The idea that the Christian faith is an unthinking, irrational faith is part of this great problem and the great irony: when you choose not to think, just believe, that reason is of the flesh or the devil, you then don’t study to show that the root of those very concepts is not a Christian idea, but one of other philosophies. Ignorance is not bliss.

I am a great advocate of a simple faith idea. I have said over and over that 99% of what we call Christian is extraneous. The complex organizations, the litany of “essential” doctrines we must believe, a certain language we must speak (devoid of emotional words), even the clothes we must wear and music we listen to. When you read the Bible honestly, you will see that Jesus simply called those who follow him Christians, and their only duty is love, especially the “least of these.” Profoundly simple. But it is the lack of knowledge that leads to making Christianity more complex than it needs to be.

Dualism

You will see me referring to dualism over and over again in this philosophical saga. Philosophy deals with three major categories: the nature of reality (metaphysics), the scope of knowledge (epistemology), and the rules of right and wrong (ethics). I believe that the primary error that has led to this dysfunctional post-modern age, where we no longer believe in factual truths, lies in metaphysics and epistemology, which can influence our ethics. The first failure, for the Christian, is in metaphysics, especially the adoption of dualism.

Dualism is simply dividing reality into two arenas, one of those being superior to the other. Sometimes the lesser is considered evil. This philosophical error has haunted Christianity since its conception. It is like a bright blue dress in a woman’s closet that she just can’t throw away. Every few years, she pulls it out again, tries it on, and wears it for a while.

The boundary of this division varies from time to time, but primarily is between the material, physical world and the “unseen” or abstract. For Plato, the unseen was perfect, theoretical mathematics, human reason, and concepts of beauty and love, what he called the ideals. For the Christian Gnostics, the good, unseen was the “spiritual,” God, angels, etc. For them, the evil was the material, our bodies including our reason, the earth, and such.

In my story, I am just getting to the junction where the newly empowered church (empowered by Constantine) adopts a dualistic perspective, basing it on Plato, yet in practical terms, it fits the description of the Gnostics’ dualism more closely.

Someone may be asking themselves, what does it matter?

As I left evangelicalism, I wanted to make sense of that experience, knowing that it was out of touch with reality. After years of study, it became clear that the problem lay completely within this false notion of dualism. To put it in hillbilly terms, as I am from Appalachia, we were “too heavenly minded for any worldly good.”

In contrast, I found the Bible’s description of metaphysics to be profoundly monistic (meaning non-dualistic). When I first started this blog over twenty years ago, it was called The Christian Monist, for that reason. Yet, even that name, among those who had no idea what I was talking about, became a point of contention and hate mail as they assumed, falsely, that I was talking negatively about the Trinity. Absurd.

But if you read the creation story in Genesis, it is profoundly monistic. It is the good creator (God) who created the material world (not the devil or a lesser god as the Gnostics believed), and that good God called creation good. That goodness covers nature, our bodies, our minds, and our reason.

If this all seems abstract, let me show the practical application of the Christian dualism that we have seen take over the church. The group in America that is against environmental laws the most, who believe in climate change the least, are the Christians. They don’t give a damn about this Earth, because they see it in an inferior realm than the so-called “spiritual.” As I am typing this, Russell Vought, a self-declared Christian Nationalist, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is working night and day to dismantle our schools, universities, libraries, science, research funding, and money to help the poor around the world. These deranged Christian lunatics are profoundly dualistic, not caring about this world, the world that our God has called good, or our knowledge about this world. That’s why understanding this journey is so important.

I admit that life and history are complex, and my reducing the major harm to this metaphysical issue of dualism is over-simplistic. But making it more accurate and more complex will make it harder for those not interested in philosophy to be more interested in this journey.

Respectfully, Mike

Next time, Augustine