Time and Tide

Yesterday, I was cleaning out the inbox from my email (that's the kind of exciting thing I get up to when my Dearly Beloved is not about), when I stumbled across my quiz results for the Select Smart Belief System Selector web quiz. I had taken this quiz in a moment of idle curiosity some years ago, and the results were sitting in my inbox, forgotten until I rediscovered them.

Now, I take these quiz thingies with more than a grain of salt, largely because, methodologically speaking, they are quite simplistic in their either/or format, and are thus open to manipulation. You can pretty much produce the result you want by thinking about the answers you need to provide in order to arrive at said results. Self-reporting is a notoriously unreliable process. (That's why, among a whole host of other reasons, I think the entire Myers-Briggs getup is a load of dangerous pop-psychological garbage - but that's an entire other issue!)

Anyhoo, these qualifications aside, I normally try and answer these quizzes as honestly as possible, even when I think the best answer I can give to the questions provided doesn't really reflect my point of view at all. I'm usually pretty sure of what the result will be notwithstanding, although, on occasion, I do manage to surprise myself - or is it that the quiz surprises me?

The point being that, last time I took this quiz, these are the top ten results (in percentage terms) that my quiz produced (the results go up to 26 rankings, but I'm not going to impose them all upon you):

#1: Humanist (100)
#2: Unitarian Universalist (92)
#3: Theravada Buddhist (85)
#4: Atheist/Agnostic (81)
#5: Liberal Quaker (76)
#6: Neo-Pagan (63)
#7: Taoism (60)
#8: Orthodox Quaker (54)
#9: Mainline Liberal Protestant (47)
#10: Mahayana Buddhist (46)

Now, there are a few interesting results here that require a bit of discussion in light of my present status as a Christian who is studying theology and hoping to candidate to the ordained ministry of the Uniting Church in Australia.

The Humanist rating doesn't surprise me much at all, given that, at the time, I was not a member of the church and still identified myself primarily in terms of the Stoic moral philosophy I had first encountered in my early 20s. Neither was I terribly surprised by the appearance of Theravadan and Mahayanan Buddhism in the top ten. Aside from the fact that Buddhism is a non-theist faith, thus aligning it somewhat with the humanist philosophical tradition, Theravadan Buddhism might be described as the "monastic" tradition of Buddhism, reflecting my own sense that had I been born in another era, I might have ended up as a member of a religious order; whereas Mahayanan Buddhism, whilst the more "popular" school of Buddhist practice, nevertheless preserves the traditions of meditation and contemplation toward which I am personally strongly inclined.

The atheistic/agnostic tag did surprise me somewhat. I have never been an atheist personally, despite all my struggles with coming to an understanding of faith over the course of my life. Moreover, the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" are not interchangeable; they are not similes, and do not represent the same thing; but this confusion between the two is not uncommon. I can only surmise that the appearance of this rating in my top ten reflects the level of scepticism I held at the time about matters of faith; and which, to an extent, I still hold today as a necessary part of faith. That is to say, my belief that faith, and the claims of faith, must be held with a certain humility in the understanding that God is not who we think God is, that God is wider than our thoughts and our capacity to comprehend, and is revealed as a transcendent mystery and not a mapped-out, pinned down, packaged in a box certainty.

The appearance of Universal Unitarian, Liberal Quaker, and Orthodox Quaker puzzled me, as I knew - and still know - next to nothing about these traditions and their theological perspectives. Perhaps I'm more ecumenical than I thought! The Taoism suggestion wasn't that much of a surprise, as I have read the Tao Te Ching (as well as the Analects of Confucius and the Book of Mencius) and found much within it that resonated with both Buddhist and Stoic moral philosophy. The Neo-Pagan rating had me frankly scratching my head; to be brutally honest, I think the "pagans" are a bunch of cultural-imperialist, cherry-picking from other traditions to suit themselves tossers! Especially the "druids" and all the others who carry on with "Celtic spiritual" practices, not least because the truth is almost next to nothing is now known of the ancient druidic traditions and beliefs, and what they actually stood for and practiced (the Romans did a very thorough job of wiping them out).

The interesting one is the appearance of Mainline Liberal Protestant. Although at number nine and less than 50%, it does, perhaps, reflect the fact that I was starting to drift toward a Protestant church as a possibility for re-connecting with a faith community. Indeed, I had certainly started to become increasingly aware of the Uniting Church in Australia, and was intrigued by its bringing together of three denominational traditions, and also impressed by its commitment to social justice. Now, I know the Uniting Church does not define itself as a "liberal" church - it is far too broad and diverse a community for any single label to do it justice. But perhaps what this quiz result reflected was that, although I still predominantly identified myself in humanist/Stoic terms, perhaps the possibilities of faith and a place in a Christian community were starting to make themselves apparent.

The upshot is that, stirred by curiosity as a result of stumbling across this quiz, I decided to do it again. And this time, the top ten results came out like this:

#1: Mainline Liberal Protestant (100)
#2: Liberal Quaker (88)
#3: Orthodox Quaker (84)
#4: Hinduism (82)
#5: Unitarian Universalism (81)
#6: Eastern Orthodox (74)
#7: Roman Catholic (74)
#8: Neo-Pagan (73)
#9: Seventh Day Adventist (71)
#10: Sikhism (66)

The most significant outcome of the quiz was that Mainline Liberal Protestant has shot up to the #1 position. Hardly surprising given the fact that I am now a practicing Christian and member of the Uniting Church (bearing in mind my caution about applying the term "liberal" exclusively to the UCA), and reflective also of the theological conclusions and resolutions to which my struggles with faith have arrived.

Interestingly, both the Buddhist and the Taoist influences seem to have declined, despite the ongoing reverence for, and resonances with, both traditions that I continue to feel to this day. I think this reflects two developments: firstly, that I have come to a particular and specific theological conviction in terms of faith practice and identity; and, second, that they have not so much disappeared from my life as moved from the psychological and philosophical foreground to the background. In this respect, they reflect the change which the influence of Stoic moral philosophy has undergone in my life; Stoicism now forms part of the philosophical bedrock of my Christian spirituality, but is no longer part of my up-front, "headline" theological thinking.

I was surprised by the Neo-Pagan rating still making it into the top-ten, especially given my views about "pagans", expressed above (it dropped from 6th to 8th position on the list, but actually increased in percentage terms). And I'm frankly astounded by the Seventh-Day Adventist aspect, especially since I regard Seventh Day Adventism as, at best, a kind of quasi-Christian sect inhabiting the extreme fringe of the Christian world (along with Mormonism, Christian Science, and other products of the so-called Second Great Awakening in 19th Century America). The relevance of the Liberal and Orthodox Quaker elements, and of the Universal Unitarianism, remains, as with the previous quiz result, a complete mystery to me.

The two developments which really grabbed my attention, however, were the appearance of Hinduism and Sikhism in the top ten, as well as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Regarding the former, whilst I have a little knowledge of Hinduism, I am hardly an expert; and I have next to no knowledge of Sikhism other than that it is (I think) an offshoot from Hinduism. Given the affinities between Hinduism and Buddhism (although there are, obviously, critical differences), I would have thought that the disappearance of Buddhism from the top ten would have mitigated against both Hinduism and Sikhism making an appearance; but apparently not!

And as for the emergence of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy into the top ten, well, I think that can be explained in two ways. Firstly, it simply reflects the affinities between all denominations of the Christian community, the shared theological traditions, worship practices, liturgical resources, and doctrinal bases. My location with a mainline Protestant church necessarily involves my location within the wider Christian church, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy included. Secondly, I think my finding a place within a Christian faith community, and the theological and philosophical conclusions which doing so necessarily involves, combined with my theological studies at an ecumenical faculty, means I have re-engaged with the Catholic traditions in which I grew up, and from which I became alienated in my youth; and this necessarily precipitates an affinity for the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Catholic and Orthodox churches in many respects being mirror images of one another.

An example of this is sacred music: I have always loved the Western Church's tradition of sacred music, and in recent years have discovered the sublimely beautiful sacred music tradition of the Eastern Church. Partly because they are similar and serve similar purposes; but also because of the differences. For example, whereas in the Western church, the voices of the upper register tend to get emphasised, in the Orthodox tradition, the voices of the lower register tend to be more prominent. Rachmaninov's stunning All Night Vigil and Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom being ethereal, spell-binding examples.

So what can be made of these results? Probably not much. But I do think they reflect, however imperfectly, the philosophical, theological, and intellectual journey on which I've been engaged for much of my adult life, and the incredibly rich and diverse opportunities for growth and understanding that have been opened up to me as a result.

Talk to you soon,

BB.

Quote for the Day: To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before. (Marcus Aurelius)