What a magnificent, God-blessed couple of days we had a week ago here under the beautiful River Tree. The old codger and his beautiful bride ventured out energetically against the fetid detritus that winter brought us.
We were courageous, but age limits us, and totaling up the score, we struck some significant blows but awoke afterward aching, sore and wondering if and when we’d recover.
The same might be said for us all as citizens of this republic in these days of trial before us. Our senses are challenged every day to take in the avalanche of “data,” whether it be fact or fiction, that we’re seemingly inundated with every minute of every day.
Some of us, like the old codger, will be turning over the reins of our struggle to “take the wheel” of this beautiful republic too soon. Nevertheless, we are that republic. We are collectively that future.
We mentioned in our last column a number of topics potentially worth exploration as we build that future. Let’s take a shot at one of them: the potential benefit from an embrace of faith.
To be clear, embracing a spiritual belief system is, and must be seen as, an individual decision on the part of each of us. Nevertheless, the old codger’s convinced that embracing a faith system which advocates clear moral and ethical precepts focused on loving and caring for our fellow human beings is not only logical, but promotes a more functional, positive and productive life for each of us, as well as holding out the potential for promoting a more functional, productive and sane society for us to both live and thrive within.
Why logical? Through most of history, there’s been the perception of a life-and-death struggle between what we’ve come to call scientific learning and faith. As we, as human beings, have learned more about this beautiful home we share, we’ve realized that what we've been learning appears to conflict with some of our specific spiritual beliefs and teachings. The old codger doesn’t want to get too much “into the weeds” about specific teachings, but let’s just say that spiritual scholars have gradually realized that emphasizing teachings that aren’t central to their core faith and are clearly refutable by science was just not productive.
In other words, most theologians decided they didn’t want to proverbially “die on the hill” of the age of the earth, the specific creation story, the earth being the center of the universe, and so forth. In other words, maybe our early religious storytellers were not always as prophetic as they thought they were.
Meanwhile, as scientific learning has progressed, it’s become more apparent that while it can explain a tremendous amount of what is going on around us, it also reveals more and more that is inexplicable through our current understanding — whether it be multiple universes, dark matter or even the potential for miracles. In other words, it’s become apparent that not all things are explainable through known science.
That’s simple logic. Where does it leave us if we accept the positive potential of embracing a functional morality, love and social justice-based faith system?
The old codger would ask us to always embrace the potential for functional and productive faith in our lives.
