Nobody is purely objective and everyone speaks from a perspective. Nor do I think anyone should, since everything is not relative. Anyone who truly thinks everything is relative needs to call up the Flat Earth Society and tell them that they are right as long as their view is right for them. According to the modern world, if someone believes something strongly enough, then that belief if "true". But the world is still round, even if everyone decided to start believing it was flat again. God still exists or he doesn't, despite what individuals believe.

I am a student of Religion, but I am also personally religious. I am a Christian Protestant, raised in an non-denominational environment, but lately feeling the pull toward more structured Liturgical forms of worship, particularly the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but have currently settled on the fence of the Episcopalian/Anglican Church, keeping one foot in my Reformationist roots and the other foot in the Liturgy of the older higher Church traditions. This allows me to hang on to my Evangelical zeal and Luther's insistence that the individual is the final judge of doctrinal truth, yet still take part in some of the ancient unchanging forms of the Church in it's modes of worship as they have existed for millenia, and experience doctrinal truth as interpreted by Church tradition. So I'm a denominationally challenged Protestant/High Church fence-sitter. That's as clear of a label as I can give myself currently.

My education is in Philosophy, having earned my degree at San Jose State University in 1987. Thus, I deliberately expose myself to differing views, both religious and agnostic. I am "tolerant" of all views in the sense that I approach other traditions with respect and a sincere interest to learn, but I don't let distinctions blur into a politically correct haze. All views are not the same, any more than all scientific theories are not the same. Holding science to the rules of real distinctions but questions of religion and God to everything-is-right blurs is just schizophrenic. So, I approach religion as a Christian who believes that Judeo-Christianity represents the Truth (with a capital "T", as opposed to a lower-case "t", which would be the modern idea of relative truth) and that other religions are closer or farther away from the Truth. Just as I hold Galileo to be closer to the Truth than the Flat Earth Society.

This is not "tolerant" in the current sense of the word, towards a view where everything is the same as everything, and that Truth is like an ice-cream store, where you need only point to the truth that tastes best to you. But it is tolerant in the sense that I don't hold people of other traditions in contempt or fear. I seek to learn the landscape of opinions and I consider Truth to be self-evident if it really exists. I'm not looking for archetypes that I think should be the basis of the Truth, but reality as it really is. If the Universe is ruled by the Devil instead of a benevolent God then I want to know. And I think it can be known, and is not just an exercise in personal psychology.

So, I think anybody who is a fellow seeker of the Truth should follow all of these links and learn what they say. But at the same time keep in mind the central point of Western religious history: The nature of the Universe is antithetical . There are real distinctions and everyone needs to weed through them. This is the opposite view as held by Eastern traditions, which consider distinctions to be just misleading surface features of an underlying unity. Much like many people today who blow off all religious claims as just so much posturing from a bunch of people all basically talking about the same thing. But all is not One. Truth has a specific form and it can be described. Woody Allen put it best when he said "No matter how hard I try I can never feel at One with the Universe. I feel at Two with it..."

Regarding my growing dissatisfaction with my Protestant heritage:

Just a glance at the sheer volume of religious traditions in America, given the approximately 28,000 different Protestant denominations currently active, (as of 1997. Roughly 270 new Christian denominations are formed every year) I've come to agree with Harold Bloom's argument, in his book 'The American Religion', that modern America shares it's religious attitudes less with traditional Christianity than it does with the ancient Gnostics. Everyone has their own personal salvation, each one is their own guide to the divine. Instead of striving for a singular unity as existed across Christendom pretty much up until the 11th century, and no later than the 16th century, American Christianity has taken on a decidedly Gnostic form, with each cell of a denomination holding the true path to God, against all the misled and lost sheep around them. American rugged individualism as applied to our religion has produced a vast canopy of Gnostic isolation. How long Christianity can have a relevant influence on the secular world in this form is a perplexing question, since the logical end of this pattern is every person a denomination unto themselves, every opinion a conduit to the divine. Collective discipline toward objective reality is lost.

I see this in the vast success that Charismatic churches have had in America and the Third World over the past few decades. Mystical trends have often had initial success throughout history - and Charismatic worship is a mystical trend in it's purest form, with the heavy emphasis on direct emotional and ecstatic contact with God without the clutter of intellectualism and thought-out doctrine, almost Shamanistic in many ways - but the eventual result is usually the same: with such deliberate trivialization of the mind and intellectual pursuits one ends up with a movement with an addiction to personal emotional satisfaction. Sort of like a spiritual orgasm. This happens with a monk isolated in his cell focusing on the spiritual orgasm achieved by intense spiritual meditation, and it happens with the person being 'slain in the Spirit' in a Pentecostal Revival. The goal is the same, and the resulting difficulties are often the same; a difficulty in dealing with complex real-world problems. It's much like sustaining a marriage solely with good sex; not necessarily a bad goal in and of itself, but it's not a very sturdy one to sustain a life-long commitment on.

As ironic as it seems, I think the Charismatic/mystical movements of the past 20 years have resulted in promoting a decidedly Gnostic form of Christianity. Will a movement that sustains itself largely on such emotional addiction survive two millenia in the future in the way that the Church has survived over the past two? I'm not sure, but it clearly has produced a generation of Christians who are emotionally satisfied but often deal with doctrine and the world of ideas in a very reactionary and simplistic manner. There are many exceptions, but this seems to be the dominant pattern.

I understand that Charismatic/mystical worship satisfies emotional needs in a religious life, and as such it is not a negative thing. Quite the contrary; touching God personally is anything but just an intellectual pursuit. Transcendence is a whole experience, encompassing mind and emotion. But it is this balance that is so easily lost. The dry academic study of religion from a distance is informative and descriptive but ultimately dead, since it has no passion, much like trying to describe the experience of falling in love by only measuring the levels of adrenaline in the blood stream. But swimming in the waters of emotional ecstasy without navigating with the mind is as far away from that necessary balance as the academic without emotional passion. It's a narrow road with a ditch on either side; fall into either ditch and you loose your way. If Truth is ultimately realitive and all ways are equally valid then there is no need to use the mind in religious life. But if Truth is specific, and if you can be closer to it and farther away from it without paying attention, then sustaining one's religious life primarilly on emotion and shallow doctrinal platitudes is a dangerous distraction.

Jesus said that Christians are to love God with our heart, soul, strength, and mind. We ignore the last of these four at our own detriment...