Don’t fret about the title I am not here to bash or hate on Christianity that would be stupid. The idea of an absurdity is something that logically does not add up. I have been taking a world philosophy course and as I have been reading and studying there is one fact that has been made very clear and apparent to me. Reality including the Ultimate Reality (God) is a contradiction. According to Aristotle, something that is a contradiction is ultimately illogical and as i stated earlier and absurdity. So the next question is: what does this have to do with me or Christianity?
While I cannot take credit for the above statement "reality is contradiction", I can however take it to another level. Jesus Christ my Lord and savior who is eternally begotten of the Father is a perfect example of this idea. Christ was 100% man AND 100% God. Now this is something that almost every Christian knows. Maybe not understand, but they know it to be true. So if you "break up" Jesus into two parts you wouldn’t have to halves but two wholes. Lets first take a look at the one we are most familiar to us as humans the human part of Christ.
Humans since the beginning have been sinful in nature. Although we are created in the image and likeness of God by no means do we live up to him the most perfect and divine one. Humans at the very beginning disobeyed God and thus we are all born with Original Sin which is the desire to disobey God. We have a tendency to think of ourselves and in today's society don’t care who we have to step on to get where or what we want. However, the biggest characteristic of humans is that we are finite. At a certain point in time our biological timers stop ticking and we will die. This is an unavoidable fact. Now let’s discuss the second "half" of Jesus, the part we strive to encounter, the Divine.
Divine defined in the dictionary is: proceeding from God, characteristic of or befitting a deity. Now in Christianity if you didn't already know has one God and it is the same God that the Jewish people worship. Now because at this point in time my mind is finite I can only come up with finite ways of describing that which is infinite, and because I am an imperfect being any words I use to describe that which is perfect will of course fall short, so humor me if you will. The divine is something that is perfect; it is something that never ceases to exist and in the case of God, was not created. It always is and was and always will be. The Divine will not cease to exist; it is the creator and the absolute, the Alpha and Omega. So now that I have to the best of my abilities defined the finite and infinite let’s see where the Truth lies.
Logically speaking it is impossible to put two opposing forces together and achieve harmony. You cannot have life and death in the same room, at the same time, in the same person. You cannot have darkness in a room that is filled completely with light. Yet when we speak of Jesus Christ we have just that, we have the finite living in harmony with infinite, thus you have the contradiction. So does this mean that because Christianity’s core belief is a contradiction that there is not truth? NO!
Life in itself is one big contradiction after another. You cannot have hot without the knowledge of cold. You cannot know what the dark is without knowing the light. You cannot have life without death. We have such an easy time excepting the previous examples as truths and yet we will not embrace Christ as the Ultimate Truth because it’s he is a contradiction, he is the finite AND the infinite. If I was Chinese I’d say he is the Tao in the flesh (not that every Chinese person is a Taoist but you get the idea). The Tao is what most people will associate the Yin Yang with. It is the foundation for most eastern religions the idea that one thing cannot exist without the other. That hard cannot exist without soft and when they come together they are in harmony as one entity. For us that one entity is Christ he is the human and the divine, the finite and the infinite, the Contradiction which is the Ultimate Reality.
There will be many people in life who will never understand this concept. They have been programmed to think one way and instead of thinking outside the proverbial box simply sit in ignorance and refuse to come out. The biggest cause of ignorance is a refusal to think. Jose Ortega y Gasset stated in his book What is Philosophy? that “we must not rest content on the surface” this suggests that we look beyond that which is right in front of us. Philosophy when all is said and done is simply thinking about the universe and our place in it. Theology is the same thing only instead of the Universe it is God that we are thinking about.
So in conclusion my final challenge for you, assuming you are still reading this, is to look beyond the norm. The ideas presented in this article came from something I read out of a book about Zen Buddhism, and yet I have not spoken ill of my faith nor have I favored Buddhism. I simply took two ideas East and West and was able to make coincide harmoniously.
No comments:
Post a Comment