Aug 12, 2024

Article #3 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume XI, Number Two, August 2024

Application #1 from

A Succinct Summary of the Theology of Gary Marvin Davison and

Extended Thoughts Thereon

 

     

Humanity is still working through the insights of the Enlightenment, seeking to reconcile the theology and practice of the families, communities, and societies that are part of the environment in which they have dwelt through life.

 

The impact of scientific discoveries and the explanatory power of those discoveries turned many people away from religion. 

 

Some religious people developed theologies compatible with science, transforming religious myth into metaphor and acting upon the best in the ethnical systems of the major traditions. 

 

Others clung to the religions of the past.

 

Ot those responses, the first tends to lead to a firm grasp of observed terrestrial reality but is often accompanied by resistance to, or habitual blockage of, spiritual impulses that emanate from places of worship, music, art, and natural beauty.

 

The third response tends to proceed from those mired in ignorance, fear, resistance to ineluctable change, or inability to think independently;  since conservative and reactionary religion is hard to reconcile with the insights of Enlightenment and the revelations of science, such religious practice  often proceeds upon an nagging undercurrent of doubt that results in intolerance, cynicism, and hypocrisy.

 

The optimal response is the second, allowing religious and spiritual impulses to enter one’s consciousness, finding metaphorical power in religious expression, but basing action on rational evaluation of religious and spiritual emotional responses.

 

In society as of the year 2024, many people are ethically adrift, muddling through life in the absence of a firm moral code:

 

Some people are troubled by an absence of a sense of meaning and become seekers, very often moving from one spiritual practice to another or embracing one of the established religions of the past that she or he had turned against or disregarded.

 

Others forever cling to traditional, typically inherited religious expression in the absence of individual critical evaluation.

 

Others just continue to muddle through, going to their graves as confused as when life began;  and in the deeper recesses of candid consciousness, this oft becomes the fate of the seekers and the clingers, as well.

 

Those live best who go forth with rationality as their guide but who are able to incorporate the metaphorical power of religion, music, art, and nature into a life in which the governance of the rational is balanced with a sense of the Divine.

 

Such a person then lives abundantly, gratefully, in awe of the Cosmos, and with a commitment to making the best possible life for as many people as possible. 

 

Such a person is ever open to spiritual insight but, genuinely confident cognitively and spiritually, is able to focus intently on the life of terrestrial reality, applying firmly developed ethics to the betterment of humankind. 

 

Such a person is cautiously optimistic, acknowledging challenges but eschewing defeatism and pessimism, committing to sequential action guided by an overall plan that is adjusted along the way as informed by experience and reflection. 

 

Such a person stands firm, does not retreat to an exclusively personal safe harbor, but rather utilizes safe harbors to venture forth circumspectively onto the oft-gentle but inevitably turbulent seas of Existence.

 

In her or his vocation and much of that person’s avocation, such a person commits to a life of service to humankind.

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