GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines:

To live out goodness, fairness, and love

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GOD-centric & GOOD-centric

"Now I am suggesting that maintaining the tension between seeming ‘opposites’ is the chief way to cope with most of our dilemmas in the modern world. And this is just about the hardest attitude imaginable for a race of beings conditioned for millennia to swing to one opposite or the other, to view life as an immutable dualism between the ‘good’ (my way) and the ‘bad’ (your way)… Adopting a middle-of-the-road position is usually just tepidity and timidity, but to grasp a paradox and to hold it in tension, requires courage and wisdom… Holding the polarities in tension means finding the optimum point at which they work together best; and this is not necessarily the middle."

~ Sydney J. Harris, The Authentic Person: Dealing with Dilemma

As you may know, Loyal Reader, I made acrobatic efforts not to allow natural evil to slay my faith in an always loving, good, and fair God. It took me years to allow the facts to slay me; but, maybe I missed something or perhaps my perceptions are too limited to understand something:

There is, there can be only a single and external truth…No prophet ever reveals it for the first time, no seer discovers it.  All only rediscover it.  It never changes or evolves; only its form of presentation does that.  But before it can manifest in our world, it must find human minds sufficiently prepared to be able to receive it and sufficiently developed to be able to comprehend and teach it. (Paul Brunton, The Spiritual Crisis of Man)

Let's dwell in possibility with Emily Dickinson and Possibilianism with David Eagleman while we hold the tension between the polarities of GOD-centric and GOOD-centric and religion and science:

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same time to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. (Rollo May, The Courage to Create)

If Truth is thus a never-dying process, then our answer may yet be found in "and" rather than "or": GOD-centric & GOOD-centric, a paradox and, hopefully, a love story. On one hand, science has discredited many religious assertions and asked questions so big that they cast a shadow over life's having any decipherable meaning:

GOOD-centric: 1

GOD-centric: 0

On the other hand, though spooky, quantum entanglement, the observer effect, and epigenetics give some hope that nature supports leading a meaningful life centered in love, goodness, and fairness because doing so may affect unrelated particles at a distance, the manifestation of what is observed, and the genetic makeup of future generations:

GOOD-centric 1

GOD-centric 1

If particles can affect each other across space and observations not only disturb what is to be measured but produce it and social experiences can be passed down genetically, then my living in and out love, goodness, and fairness may have a questionably supreme and perhaps not eternal but objectively external referent beyond myself after all. Perhaps science is revealing that nature is a conduit for our love, goodness, and fairness. Perhaps this is just my wishful thinking.

I have not devolved into that New Age type who believes that our loving, good, and fair thoughts will defeat dark matter. I am still seeking something hardier than crystals and positive vibrations. Nature is amoral. If God created the natural order, then God created an amoral order and what does that say about God? If God created an amoral natural order but also created epigenetic and other natural means by which we can bring morality to amorality, what does that say about God?

Is nature itself an example of bottom-up emergent phenomena? Could God be less a central planner and more an emergent phenomenon influenced by our living in and living out love, goodness, and fairness? Does this questionably supreme and perhaps not eternal but objectively external referent possibility bring us back to Alfred North Whitehead's process theology which I discounted as not satisfying the GOD-centric always loving-good-fair filter in GOD-centric? If so, then I still advocate being GOOD-centric since an emerging God does not yet stand solidly on always loving, good, and fair ground and I welcome GOOD-centricism's loving, good, and fair influence on a possibly emerging God:

Rabbi Tarfon taught: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either." (Pirkei Avot 2:16)

I am not satisfied with my wishful thinking or my questions; but, I am also not satisfied with strict materialism and neither is science. Science is far less straight forward and more chaotic than just Newtonian physics: "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet." (Niels Bohr) Apparently, any possible god does in fact play dice with aspects of the universe. Science invites us to open our minds and learn more. The process of discovering Truth still unfolds.

Let's carry on, my wayward GOD-centrics and GOOD-centrics, there may be peace when we are done:

“Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“In Memoriam AHH”