IS THE BEST ANSWER,
"I DON'T KNOW?"
I was just having this conversation with my email friend Phylis when I discovered that Sullivan had re-posted a sensibility from Rev. Tom Honey that I can truly relate to.
"When I stood up to speak to my people about God and the tsunami, I had no answers to offer them. No neat packages of faith with Bible references to prove them. Only doubts and questions and uncertainty. I had some suggestions to make - possible new ways of thinking about God. Ways that might allow us to go on, down a new and uncharted road. But in the end the only thing I could say for sure was I don't know, and that might just be the most profoundly religious statement of all."
5 comments:
It is truly impressive when a religeous leader has the courage to say " I don´t know!". Far more human than being bombarded with facile repetitions of apostles and mealy mouthings devoid of comfort and humanity. Mere words said to promote the Preachers ego and to impress, not to comfort listeners. i can respect a man like this.
There is nothing profound about saying I don't know.
Something more profound is the ingenuity in the human mind that has allowed us to understand how natural disasters happen and to understand the mechanics of our beautiful world. This sort of ingenuity is what is going to help us predict these events, make provisions and evacuate people to avoid a horrifying loss of human life. It is going to be a combination of science and luck that will help us prevent the sort of trauma afflicting these poor people, not some message from the Gods, whichever one you choose. While this Reverend finally having the guts to say "I don't know" is commendable, given the religious context, it is something that should have been touted by all religious "leaders" a long, long, time ago.
Perhaps what he should have said was "my sheltered life has rendered me useless in consoling you because my loved one's are not dead, my house is still standing and I have still have a job in my sheltered life, paid by the everyday religious consumer. By the way, this is great publicity for me". Religions business these days, it's about as spiritual as an oil spill and twice as damaging.
I didn´t say it WAS profound.There is NO power in a point of view based on an erroneous arguement .
Opening a completely different subject can easily be done without trying to be right about something so obviously correct. Also checking on spelling might help to impress more in the end.
I'm not going to bother with a rebuttal on the whole spelling issue. Mainly because there is a spell checker built into the comment box. I even feel petty adding this initial paragraph.
But still, I'm sorry if I've offended you in some way and I would like to say that I don't believe in "right" or "wrong" simply varying shades of points of view, I expressed mine about the Reverend you were praising and on reflection I guess I could've been a little less caustic. Still I must support the fact that my main point was about the article itself, I was simply trying to add a greater scope to the picture, to help support the statement I made. Also the reason I opened with "There is nothing profound about saying I don't know" was because the last line of the article said "But in the end the only thing I could say for sure was I don't know, and that might just be the most profoundly religious statement of all."
I'm sorry if you took this as a personal attack, I was just being objective in my statement. I thought the article would be open to discussion about the subject matter rather than the persons involved. I shall refrain from posting any further comments, I didn't realize my tone would be interpreted as antagonistic.
As a final point I must add that I hope you do not mean erroneous as in "immoral or indecent" as I feel strongly that there was nothing immoral or indecent about what I said.
I didn´t find any comments antagonistic. I just find the whole subject redundant.
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