A Ramble About Worldviews

I was teaching a history lesson to my daughter today on the Latter Day Saints and their migration to the Great Salt Lake. It actually surprised me that it was in the US history textbook which I was using, because it had never been in any of my textbooks when I was in public school before. But, there it was, with a whole chapter (all of about four or five pages) devoted to it. It was, in general, a generous treatment which I felt glossed over a number of the negatives of the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The picture it gave was of a sincere religious leader and his devout followers bravely facing persecution, and traveling westward to found a religious haven.

As a result, I had to spend a short time explaining some of the things about Latter Day Saint history which the textbook didn't cover. I had to explain that Joseph Smith was most likely a charlatan and his original six followers were in on it; and that the Book of Mormon was most likely a manuscript which had been stolen from a publisher before it was published and altered by Smith and his men to fit the scam they were trying to impose on sincere but uneducated people.

I then had to explain that while Smith and his original followers had lied to the people who followed them, the people who believed the lie and perpetuated it themselves hadn't been a part of it. They had believed what they were told and then told it to their children as the truth, who then told it to their children, and so on down to the present day. As a result, there are a large number of devout, Latter Day Saint followers who are, on the whole, good people. They do believe in Jesus Christ, and practice their faith with sincerity. When they go out to evangelize others into their Church, they do so with no ulterior motives except to bring salvation to them as they understand it. But for all their good intentions, the things which separate Mormon Christianity from Orthodox Christianity are based on a lie, and there's no getting around it.

Modern Judaism is in much the same position. Almost two thousand years ago, the Sanhedrin which had illegally railroaded Jesus Christ into being crucified told a whopper to their people and said that His disciples had stolen His body after the resurrection. This story, like the Book of Mormon, was perpetuated from the liars to otherwise honest people who then perpetuated it unknowingly to their children and followers down to present day. This lie is what separates Orthodox Judaism from Orthodox Christianity. There are good, honest Jewish people who only want to follow God and His Torah as they've been instructed. They look forward to the coming of their Messiah never coming to terms with the fact that their Messiah has already come.

When confronted with the truth, in the case of either of these two groups, the usual response is disbelief. The first defense the mind has is to defend it and reject the contradiction. You're challenging a “truth” upon which the rest of their beliefs and faith are established. But if you succeed in convincing them, once that “truth” is eroded or removed, the rest of their belief structure can come crashing down and that's not something which the mind easily handles or recovers from once it has happened. Consider that a person's whole belief in Jesus Christ may rest on the belief in the veracity of the Book of Mormon and its origins. What happens when you destroy that belief? When you disrupt a foundational belief like this, how then is the person able to trust that what you're telling them is the truth? How do you keep them from spiraling downwards into a black abyss?

If you think about it enough, you realize that most of our foundational beliefs about our world, other people, and even (and especially) God are themselves based on erroneous assumptions and explanations. They are based on erroneous assumptions because we do not know the absolute truth about everything. Our very nature as created, limited beings precludes this kind of knowledge. We observe things, we theorize about why those things are the way they are, and then we test those theories to see if they have real explanatory power. This is a tried and true method of learning about anything, and the only method we have at our disposal. But if we have learned anything we have learned that the explanations which serve us today may be proven inadequate or completely wrong tomorrow. This is the nature of human knowledge. We must be satisfied with only partial and incomplete explanations on which to base our worldviews so that we can have a worldview that allows us to function. But we must be careful with it or else we run the risk of having it crash down around our ears and we being driven insane when new information contradicts the foundations of that worldview and that new information itself can't be contradicted at the time.

God knows this and understands this about us, far better than we understand it about ourselves. When He works with a person to draw that person closer to Himself, He always works within the worldview of the person in question, and gently leads the person into a better understanding of Himself over time as the person is able to handle it.

Jesus taught “Don't judge so that you won't be judged.” We can all only make sense of the information about the world around us when we filter it through the worldview we each of us possess, and we react to that information based on that worldview. When we pass judgment on another, we run the risk of unraveling that person's worldview, which could then unravel the person beyond recovery of his faith, or even of his sanity.

St. Paul wrote, “Now accept one who is weak in faith, but not for disputes over opinions,” (Romans 14:1,WEB). In his letters to the Romans and the Corinthians he addresses the problem of eating something which has been sacrificed to an idol. For some of the Christians of the time, it wasn't an issue. They realized that the idol was just a carved piece of wood or stone and it didn't bother them in the slightest. For others, however, who had converted from the pagan religions, their worldview saw these idols as being representative of very real and powerful demons. Eating the meat of an animal which had been sacrificed to one of them was the same as taking part in the sacrifice yourself. Paul's instruction regarding this was to respect the worldview of the other, saying “who are you to judge another's servant?To his own Master he stands or falls.”

We should always work to bring a person into a more full knowledge of the truth, but we must always do so with humility, recognizing that our knowledge of the truth is limited at best. And we must always do so with compassion, seeking to recognize the limits of how much “deconstruction” of their worldviews the person we're working with can handle at any point in time. It must always be their choice to make those changes, and they may not be able to safely. Sometimes as in the parable, we must allow the weeds (false teaching) to grow alongside the wheat (faith) until harvest time so that we don't lose the wheat when trying to pull the weeds.

A Ramble About Two Kinds of Death

I've recently been reacquainting myself with Battlestar Galactica, the most recent version done a few years ago. Truth be told, I've been a BSG fan since I was three or four years old, when it originally came on television, as well as the Galactica 1980 spinoff. I never missed a rerun of the original series on Saturday afternoons when I was growing up either. The original series was far more kid friendly than the recent series, yet the recent series is far more realistic in terms of human characters, responses, and relationships under the extreme stress and trauma of having your whole world destroyed and having to rebuild everything from scratch (literally). This, I believe, is what made it do so well, even though it is also what makes it difficult to watch and unfit for kids of any age.

In one of the episodes from season four, a leader of rebel Cylons (Cylons generally being the bad guys) addresses the Colonial Quorum (the government of what's left of the good guys). In her address she expresses that humanity's greatest flaw, being mortal and subject to death, is also what makes humanity whole. When the Cylons had the capacity to download their consciousnesses into new bodies, time was pretty much meaningless, and so was their existence. But when they lost that ability, when they became mortal, suddenly every moment of life became precious to them because they knew those moments were now limited.

In the book, and later the movie, The Bicentennial Man, the android Andrew Martin spends his life, from the time he is switched on, pursuing a goal of being human, and being accepted as an equal among human beings. In his journey he underwent radical physical upgrades so that his robotic body began to resemble and function like a human body instead of a machine body. As he spends his two hundred years making every change imaginable, he watches his human friends and “family” grow old around him and pass away, much to his grief. In the end, the thing which held him back from the recognition he sought was his own inability to die. It's when he takes steps to allow the circuitry in his positronic brain to permanently corrode over time that he finally wins the recognition, and peace, he had spent so long in search of.

The Bible says that death entered the world through sin, and death was one of the punishments for Adam for doing what God said not to do, “but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you may not eat; for in whatever day you eat from it, you shall die by death.” (Genesis 2:17, Saint Athanasius Academy Septuagint)

We know from modern science, that natural death was in the world millions if not billions of years before human beings, modern or otherwise. Death on its own is a part of life and the processes of life. As something dies, it contributes to the nourishment of the life of something else. In fact, life can't exist without death, be it the death of a plant or of an animal. In order for one form of life to be fed, another must die and this is true whether we are talking about a plant or animal or single-celled organism. Something must die and decompose into the soil in order for a plant to be nourished and grow and bear fruit. The bread you may use in a sandwich was made of the seeds of the wheat plant. Those seeds, the embryonic young of the wheat plant, had to die in order to feed you and sustain you. Every hamburger is a heifer or steer that died so you could eat fast food. In the human body cells are continuously dying in order to make room for new cells. The uppermost layer of our skin is made up of dead skin cells, which are constantly shedding off as new skin cells are born from the bottom and grow their way to the top. It's a fact that the human body itself completely replaces itself every seven years as the cells within the body die and are replaced with new cells. Cancer, one of the most heinous diseases, is a malfunction in the cells where they start reproducing out of control and don't die like they're supposed to. There is no life without this kind of death. If this process were to be interrupted, biological life on this world would end. It is so important that it's built into our very genetic coding as telomeres.

But the death which came as a consequence to Adam and Eve's disobedience was something else entirely. It had to be. Everything God created was good, and the natural cycle of birth and death is necessary for that creation to function correctly. The death which came about by Adam and Eve's sin is destructive. It feeds no one and nothing but itself.

“Adam” means “human being” in Hebrew. Whether the Scriptures are speaking of a literal Adame and Eve as the ancestors of all human beings, or if they are speaking in general terms of Adam and Eve as representative of the human beings at the time, this destructive death spread to every human being then and now. Instead of a continuing cycle of life, death, and rebirth, humanity would continue on in a cycle of death and destruction which would end in the death of humanity as a whole, and the destruction and suffering of many other forms of life on earth in the process.

Often, “eternal life” is seen as a synonym for “living forever.” But consider, would living forever really be a reward or a blessing? Would endless life in our current physical bodies really be something to look forward to? If it was only a select few, we would have to watch friends and family pass away until we were alone, and would be afraid to make new relationships for fear of losing those to death as well. If it was everyone, the Earth wouldn't have the resources to sustain an immortal population if it continued to grow. It is likely every other species on Earth would be pushed out and go extinct as we made more room. If it didn't continue to grow it would stagnate and people would eventually begin to despair that there was nothing new, and quite probably wish for death. No, there is something perverse about living forever under these circumstances. It is a selfish desire born of a fear of something which is a natural part of life and the cycle of life. We're so afraid of the possibility of not existing that we're willing to sacrifice everything else to keep it from happening. This is not the eternal life talked about in the Scriptures. It isn't even the proper translation of the Greek phrase.

In order for there to be life, death must come first. In order for us to take our natural place in the creation, we too must die and be able to die. It was through Christ's death and our joining to His death through baptism which bring us our salvation. And in order for us to be raised with Christ as undying just as He is undying, we must first die to the life we now have. We must not interfere with its natural course, either in trying to avoid the death which comes naturally to us (which is an exercise in futility), or in trying to take control of it ourselves and hastening it (which is murder and damaging someone else's property). But this is not the destructive death, which nourishes nothing and only causes more destruction and death.

That kind of death is produced by fear, greed, and selfishness. This kind of death can be seen easily enough as one selfish action produces a chain-reaction of pain and misery within the person who committed the action and especially with those who surround the person who committed the action who are directly and indirectly affected by it. This kind of death is futile and accomplishes nothing positive or beneficial.

In reality, our natural ability to die can be one of God's greatest gifts to us. It allows the human race, as it is, to continue without overtaxing our resources. It allows us to move on into greater union with God through Jesus Christ unencumbered by the malfunction which plagues the human race. And it gives us the chance to be at peace regardless of who we are.