The Incomplete Cynic

whakahekeheke:

gadgetry asked:

Apologies if you’ve addressed the subject before, but what are your religious views (if any)? What is your opinion of supernatural faith in general?

Don’t have any religious views by most definitions (institutions of organized religion, belief in canonical doctrine, etc.). I currently identify myself as agnostic, irreligious, and a Jesusist.

…

After doing labwork in cell bio and studying scientific methodology (specifically Popper) and epistemology (Wittgenstein, Feynman, etc.), I tempered my position and became an agnostic. I realized that “supernatural” was a non-concept: we have no empirical understanding that limits “natural” to anything. We don’t know all the laws of nature and are probably enormously ignorant of them.

The real issue is not what you believe regarding metaphysical speculations about “God” or or anything else, but rather what you believe is appropriate to do to other human beings. Here is where I think Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. are wrong. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamism or the Inquisition or the state atheism of Soviet Russia - the problem was not their position on “the supernatural,” but their ideological position on other human beings.

Well said.

I like most of the things the Q document Jesus is reported to have said (hence I’m a Jesusist)…

Why do you choose Q, rather than the Gospels themselves? I’m interested because as far as I know (I’m a seminarian with interests in historical theology and criticism) Q remains a hypothesis, contingent on other hypotheses: the priority of Mark, that Matthew and Luke didn’t know one another, and - most important - that external guidance (i.e. the Spirit) could not account for the similarities. It seems odd to refer to a document that has not even been confirmed to exist, when the documents that led to the hypothesis are known and accessible.

Theological debates bore me.

This isn’t a theological question, just a practical one.