Sometime ago, Psychology--as a field--moved in the direction of including spirituality as an important dimension of peoples' lives, and away from the longstanding position that God [and religion] was an unimportant concept...Now there are trainings, books, college courses on addressing the spiritual concerns of clients in therapy. As I was attending one lecture on this subject It got me to reflecting on the Essentials concept...it would be foolish to reject out of hand "any good thing," such as the concept of energy meridians or recent scientific discoveries about how the body [and brain] process pain signals, or the nuances of someone's culture and how it affects their viewpoint--that having been said, I propose that holding to a set of Essential beliefs and behaviors, while helping to define a spiritual position, should not be allowed to create an unassailable, Monolithic viewpoint...there is always diversity in religion [even within denominations]...this is probably good...but I also think that Essentials could Unite peoples across spiritual viewpoints...for example, one tradition may hold that the world is "Broken," and that this explains the existence of a disease like cancer, while another tradition might hold that the world is "unbroken," and that cancer can be understood in the context of naturally existing factors...neither needs to necessarily be rejected--both may be of use--if we become TOO EXTREME in our holding out the Essentials, we risk unhealthy fundamentalism...identifying the Essentials needs to be about sharing what we believe, not harming those who disagree...I welcome your many thoughts!
David Moyer Posted: I am a Christian Engineer/Scientist and I have no problem with conflicts between the facts of science (as opposed to some hypotheses of science) and the teachings of scripture. I know literally dozens of other engineers and people with doctorates in technical fields including medicine, veterinary medicine, biology, etc. who also see no conflict. I was once a staunch evolutionist and I could easily teach a high school or community college course on evolution. There are some aspects of evolutionary theory/hypotheses with which I have no quarrel. But nearly the entire field is a matter of hypotheses with very little of it proven by the scientific method, because so little of it is falsifiable. It certainly does not deserve to be classified as a theory- that is a hypothesis that has been tests by real scientific methods so often that almost no one can devise another test that might disprove it. Remember, that scientific hypotheses are not proven, but rather
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I do think that there are improper interpretations of all sorts of scriptures that lead to all sorts of conceptual problems and practical problems. For example, consider the proposition that "from sin came death" ... a phrase from Isaiah quoted in Handel's Messiah. From a scientific standpoint, the idea is ridiculous. All physical beings die, and that death has nothing to do with sin. But if one interprets the phrase while thinking about the Hindu idea that if we hurt others we will suffer, it is easy to see how sin can cause a kind of spiritual death. In this case sin does cause death, not physical death, but death nonetheless.
As for energy meridians, I'm sure that there is something about the way the nerves are routed longitudinally through the body that causes the term and much of the body of lore and practice around it to make sense, even if the literal interpretation seems like nonsense.
I think there is great value in stopping to hear and understand what people with other viewpoints are saying. And sometimes the harder it is to understand each other the more necessary it is for one or both parties (speaker and listener) to listen and to be heard.