Embracing Such Moments

I realize now that "Roused, Readied, Reaped" characterizes accurately more than I had imagined.  The notion of continual, overlapping experience-arcs of many types and durations is nothing other than the experience of life.  We are the inwardly- and outwardly-directed experience-phenomena of our more-or-less coterminous, more-or-less multiple private consciousnesses.  We are our own individual moments.

For me, this realization is usually most important as regards the teachings of Jesus.  The notions of foundation-upward faith strengthening, of increasingly unshakeable belief, of intentionally-cultivated and inculcated Christian worldviews--in short, the notions of belief as a consciously-bolstered tendency of thought--is meaningless in view of the teachings of Jesus.  In the teachings of Jesus, we are moments of addressing (or not addressing) ourselves to that which is pertinent to the Kingdom of God.

In the teachings of Jesus, we are granted insights by divine bestowals rather than by efforts at attaining enlightenment, we are capable of abandoning those insights in a moment and earning a kinship with the devil, we are expected to perform feats of faith that nobody could sustain for more than a moment, we are told that every feat of faith that we ever performed or will perform is of negligible amount--and yet if ever we could attain that negligible amount we could move mountains in an instant.

In the teachings of Jesus we are told that we know little, that the little we know is shot through with errors, and that every personal utterance in which we place confidence holds the potential to reap for us a heaping measure of adverse judgment.  We are told that we must be on our guard moment by moment, and we are told that we must string together such wary moments in a continuity that extends to the very instant of our death.

A true understanding of belief renders moot the idea of religion, which entails a conscious attachment to a belief system.  In the teachings of Jesus, a belief system is no more substantive than a conceptualization of earthly existence--since all such conceptualizations are fallible, and since any conceptualization of the supernatural (any "religious belief system") would encompass all and not just heavenly realms, then anything we "know" is insubstantial in light of the Ultimate.

Indeed, since an atheist can conceptualize religious belief, and it is difficult to imagine atheism existing in the absence of a thought about what it opposes, then an atheist who claimed to be entirely free of religious belief would be as believable as a person who claimed to be free of unconscious biases.  This assertion would seem to be an imperious claim that all people, including atheists, worship something, if it were not for the fact that the teachings of Jesus are predicated on the assertion that ALL beliefs that people hold are momentary and--in light of the totality of existence they claim to encapsulate--insubstantial.

In our lives we forget God until something we cannot conjure up reminds us of God--neither habit nor ritual can be assumed to be of substance.  Atheists are not really people who deceive themselves into thinking they do not believe in God when in reality they do.  Rather, believers in God are people who deceive themselves into thinking they themselves possess conscious conceptions of God, when "possession" of belief is unplanned, unmanageable, and momentary--and intrudes itself upon everyone in some ways, some forms, and some intervals.

All that we can do to try to hold religious belief is nothing more than the philosopher, whether theistic or atheistic, can do to try in good conscience to live the "examined life."  That is, all we can do is ask to (or aspire to, if you will) experience more and more powerful and insistent moments--and respond with more and more powerful and insistent embracings of such moments.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" can be uttered by the greatest in faith in the most faithful moment, and it can be uttered by the least faithful in the most consciously-constructed and soulless of performances.  Moreover, the assertion that there is no God, inasmuch as each such assertion is unique in the momentary holder's sincerity or conceptualization of God, can set a person farther from God, or ultimately draw a person closer in a manner that no other moment might equal.