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When I said I wasn't going back to Slacktivist, I reserved an exception for Left Behind Fridays, in which Fred "reviews" the series--ie, takes it apart bit by bit. Unfortunately, it's become somewhat irregular, but a couple of days ago, I found this.
I have to admit, I've never really understood this perspective on awe--something I rarely experience, if ever. To me, to "wonder at" something is a matter of disbelief rather than belief. It says, "I've seen it and I still can't really believe it." I trust my senses, and I have faith that things may lie beyond them. The idea that I should half-disbelieve the things I believe in because they're out-of-the ordinary...I don't really understand it. But I encounter it all the time.
I was wondering if anyone could help me understand better.
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I'm not sure if this is what you are talking about or not, but to me "awe" and "wonder" do not imply disbelief at all. I am often filled with awe and wonder when standing on a great height (whether a mountain, cliff, or tall building) looking down at the land below. I don't dis-believe what I see. I'm just seeing it from a new perspective. It's usually a humbling perspective. It's a sense of other in the sense that it is magnificence that has nothing to do with me.
I get this feeling whenever something forces me out of my own mundanity.
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I don't think it's amatter of disbelief so much as a profound humility before something you are seeing but aware that you do not comprehend.
When you think about the forces and pressures at work in the sun and you realize what is involved in giving us light and warmth to survive by, and realize you have no comprehension of what that would be like... of what temperatures of thousands of degrees or gravitational forces so strong they stretch your body because your feet experience noticeably more pull than your head... of great gouts of fusing helium, thousands of times the size of our planet and driven by magnetic fields strong enough to contain and control the energy of thousands of thermonuclear warheads... of what any of that really *means*
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Foust> I used to write comments there regularly, but was repeatedly vilified by the liberal primary audience. This inflamed my ire until I was unable to restrain my urge to smite the foe--verbally, of course. Unfortunately, my purpose in being at Slacktivist (beyond reading the LB reviews) was to provide a rational conservative point of view--to answer the periodic questions about "how can they possibly believe this?" After repeating the cycle several times, I realized that I was not going to be able to provide any understanding, nor were the majority of the readers really looking for it. They just wanted to label people like me as evil woman-hating fundie bigots.
Karl and Jim-Me> Perhaps it's me.
I was raised in a church--and it definitely was the church, not my general environment--that tends to exalt the rational mind as a virtue. I consider that a good thing, not a fault, but I began very early to absorb the literature of writers to whom dry reason, devoid of so-called higher passions as well as lower, was the pinnacle of human achievement--what Fred calls "Gradgrindish" in the linked post on the same topic. To me, the kind of Gnostic, mystic faith that liberal Christian writers tend to espouse is far more anti-rational than any Christian fundamentalism I know of.
So when Fred complains that the In Case of Rapture video sounds like a corporate training manual, I tend to think "That's how it ought to sound!" When he complains about the absence of mystery, that "Even God and the workings of God are fully known, fully understood," I see that as the result of having properly paid attention to God's explanation. (In context, that is--the passage referenced by that post doesn't attempt to describe God in full, but only in terms of the specific event of the Secret Rapture (tm).) I don't get mystery. I don't get awe. They seem like disbelief to me. I get the need for results. I get the didactic.
See also the comments section: "Sounds like a criticism of Bultmann's demythologizing project. This passage in LB is another example of how the supposedly "pre-modern" fundamentalists are actually quite modern! It's not about "spirit" in the sense of the spirit blowing where s/he will. It's all about the facts, the chronology, the schedule, the timetable, making it look reasonable and scientific," sex someone called keith.
I don't know if this makes me less human, or just an arrogant know-it-all pain-in-the-ass.
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