Contemplating Wisdom

Hard to put a finger on the exact date but somewhere around the time personal computers were baffling everyone there appeared the most astoundingly simple books, "Computing for Dummies" and "The Complete Idiots Guide to Computing". Clearly I was born too early for these books spawned a concept that would have made my sophomore year so much easier. Today there are a plethora of "Dummies" for every subject including the one I needed most: philosophy. Perhaps a bit more serious are two books recently discovered that have helped me wade through the swamp to a stable ground for understanding the history of thinking: Karen Armstrong, "A Case for God" (she is on the best sellers list more than once) and Robert Wright, "The Evolution of God" (more accurately the evolution of philosophy and religion but titles sell books you know). There are few original thinkers currently among us six billion on this third rock from the sun and I'm no...

Grab a cup and let's talk. There is an old saying, "When the sun comes up every gazelle knows that to survive the day he must be one step faster than the fastest lion. When the sun comes up every lion knows he must be one step faster than the slowest gazelle if he is to survive. So whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up you better be running." In the ancient world survival was the primary concern but on the road to the Forum a funny thing happened. Civilization matured as agriculture changed the way people lived, as societies evolved, as cities were formed, and eventually people didn't have to run. Thinking became a parlor sport. Well, actually more than just thinking, contemplation: How did I get here and what am I suppose to be doing? The chief architects for contemplation in Western thought were three Amigos: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates was so focused on contemplation and dialogue about thinking that he refused to write down his tho...

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates 400 years before the current era. Socrates is understood by many to be the father of modern day philosophy even though he would likely not recognized what philosophy has become. The beginning of that quote reads, “ It is the greatest good for a man (sic) to discuss virtue every day....” Socrates' goal was virtue, or, finding the best life possible. But unlike our modern philosophy his dialogue was not about promoting intellectual ascent to ideas nor was the dialogue he engaged in intent on bludgeoning an opponent into intellectual submission. For Socrates dialogue was a spiritual experience of self emptying. The highest knowledge is to reach a point of silence arrived at when a person has exhausted all they know and realizes that they really don't know. Unlike the modern day talking heads we see on television and Internet who seem maliciously intent on beating us up with what they know for certain, Socratic conversion, or...

With technical help from friend and web site designer Nathan Delle I recently redesigned our church's web presence www.fumcgarland.org. And, thanks to Google Analytic, I realize just how important are web communications in this age of the Internet. We are urged by those who know to have a presence on things that didn't exist a few years ago: The Web, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs. Why? Because it is the culture of communications for the current and next generation. A quick scan of history finds numerous examples of how popular religious figures used the changing landscape of communications to reach the masses with words of hope and courage. John Wesley was mortified when invited to take the preached word out of the Holy Church and onto the hillside outside the mines of England. The success was phenomenal and evolved into putting preachers on horseback to literally "pony express" a message of hope to where the people lived. At the turn of the 20th century Aimee Semple ...

Time to pick up where I left off. In case you were wondering, I felt like I said all I needed to say. So why start again? Well, I've continued to read and reflect on many issues, some too narrow or technical to be inspirational. In the last month or so I've read and re-read Karen Armstrong's book, A Case For God . It has challenged and changed my thinking in an important way. A Case For God starts at the beginning of religious exploration and really grounds itself in the thinking of the earliest of the great philosophers, Socrates. Plato and Aristotle would come later but Socrates set the stage for thinking that has carried us for centuries and should still be our model for the now post-modern era. Socrates' premise in regards to the eternal questions, "how did we come to exist and what are we doing here?" is simply "we don't know and there is no way to find out." So why are we talking about it? Well, in admitting that we don't know gives us...