What I Believe

By Romana Annette  08/13/2009

I have always had a sense of what is scientific and what is philosophical.  This is the difference between fact and opinion.  For years, I just concentrated on the facts, but facts are not everything, since so much that concerns living things is more subjective than objective.  Objectivity is necessary for proper grounding in reality, but living things are emergent subjective phenomena that seldom behave by moving or thinking in any predictable way.

I never used to evaluate my beliefs, but now I do it all the time.  Perhaps I am recovering from numbness caused by Asperger’s Syndrome (AS).  Perhaps, as an emerging transwoman, I actually am an Agokwa, a transgendered shaman, of my Ojibwa heritage.  It could also be because my brain encounters too many oxygen-rich red blood cells, polycythemia, as a result of my mild leukemia.

On the other hand, maybe it is just may be a mean streak in my personality, that never allows me to accept any subjective arguments until I have had time to apply my usual technical analysis and express an (often dissenting) opinion.

I have been attending various churches since January 2002.  I managed to do fairly well with the Unity version of Christianity, but I had outgrown their somewhat static teachings by 2007.  I had visited the Saltwater Unitarian Universalist church several times as a guest over the years.  I had previously viewed the Unitarian Universalist faith to be lacking coherence, and was maybe not even a major player on the American religious stage.  This situation may not have changed or improved, but I decided to join anyway.  I took the online test, Are You a Unitarian Universalist without Knowing it?  Despite my effort to do otherwise, I scored 100%, but I do not seem like that great a fit.

As an AS person, I feel I have to put up with a lot of subjective noise, followed by endless subjective excess, a type of liberalism.  There are endless philosophical conclusions being passed as facts.  Some think ancient scripture is absolutely correct, despite problems translating from an emotional language, such as Aramaic, to an intellectual language, such as Greek.  Holy trinities, virgin births, and most fairy tales about deity are absurd.  There are even unholy extremists, preaching unrighteous Dominionism and Theonomy (bible-law,) who dream of a world where I can be executed for my (lack of) belief.

I am trying to avoid being oppositional, so I can meet a lot of beliefs halfway.  Religion has a lot of standard rituals and urban legends, and smart people know quite well that it is historically incorrect and philosophically inaccurate.  It can be pointless for me to throw out the baby with the bathwater; especially, when only a small, vocal minority rigidly holds to obvious incorrectness.

I will cover some of my basic beliefs, based greatly on my studies of Process Theology:

·      Teleology: I do not believe that human beings exist because of any special creation or preplanned design.  I do not believe that we are the only intelligent species, or have the only technological civilization in the Universe. We are here because of we evolved this way through a series of non-determined choices followed by determined circumstances.

·      Belief: I see no reason that any meaningful connection to reality would specifically require belief in God or belief in Jesus Christ.  Reality is totally relative and relational; so nothing can be supplied which anyone can explicitly believe in.  There are no absolute states, so beliefs can only be intuitive, not factual.  Faith and hope emerge from an understanding how the processes that drive reality function, or from a deep resonance with such processes.

·      Freedom: I do not believe that reality can coexist with any kind of coercive divine interference; only persuasive interference can actually work.  The democratization of natural processes is so thorough that it is beyond the power of any entity to reasonably deconstruct or reverse-engineer reality.

·      Evolution: I believe that the only way anything new can come into being is through evolving processes.  Evolving processes have a bottom-up hierarchy, through which primitive structures can become more complex structures.  There is no way to go magically from a totally blank reality to a fully-fledged reality.

·      Diversity: I believe it is the nature of reality to produce as much diversity as possible.  This is a direct outcome of bottom-up hierarchy: the large number of components in a given entity means that differing entities can be constructed from the same components.  I do not believe that diversity is in any way meaningless or wasteful.

·      Identity: I believe that identity is relative, and that identity consists of collections of processes that can be named.  The units of identity are called entities, and entities are often hierarchically nested in a bottom-up fashion.  While entities can be quite diverse; such as atoms, molecules, living cells, animals, people, planets, stars, galaxies, universes, and even God; they are all part of a larger whole, a super-entity or multiverse.

·      Knowledge: I do not believe that knowledge can spring from nowhere; it always has to be based on past experience.  Preexistent (but extinct) states in other realities have also contributed to our body of knowledge.  Knowledge has an emergent nature, in that unrelated ideas can join to create new ideas.

·      Observers: I believe that any living entity can be called an observer, and that observers are needed for reality to function, or else they would not exist.  One obvious goal of evolution has been to improve the ability of organisms to see what is happening, and maybe even evaluate ongoing processes.  Rather than assume that living things are accidental parasites, we should instead examine how the sum of living experiences adds to the body of all experience.

·      God: I believe that evolution denies the possibility that there can be an omnipotent, controlling God: a CEO of all reality.  This does not mean there is no God; in fact, I fail to see how reality can function without a conceptually more plausible version of God, a God of Process, but this Process version of God can only supply continuity and feedback.  Thus, God becomes the perfect parent who dispenses all sorts of advice with no strings whatsoever attached.

·      Purpose:  In a totally relational reality, I do not believe that any ultimate purpose or meaning can never be found outside the relationships we develop between each other and with our environment.  If an inherent purpose were to be known, all outcomes would become predictable, thus truly rendering reality to be pointless.

People tell my quite frankly that my conclusions are not popular.  It is not that my conclusions are wrong; rather, my conclusions lack emotional depth.  However, people should be glad that I lack charisma; otherwise, I might actually be scary and dangerous.

Some might say my comments are very intellectual in a manner that Unitarian Universalists expect, but I would dare say that there are few if any members of Saltwater Church that practice my form of extreme rationalization, which is a form objective excess.