WORLDVIEW DICTATES DOGMA

Changing Worldview, Changing Dogma

Worldview is a personally and socially developed consciousness. Personal consciousness dictates personal dogmas, the package of beliefs that inform personal life. Institutions have their worldviews and dictate their own dogmas. The disconnection of personal, social, and institutional worldviews/dogmas is a problem. Warring worldviews and dogmas drive people apart and create chaos. To begin the conscious-shift away from self-induced violence, humankind needs to get on the same page with nature.

Authentic rationality relentlessly pursues truth, self-destiny, wellbeing and instincts of mindfulness. In universal perspective, religion in the least is consciousness pursuing what is right and true. Religion/theology understands in principle that “grace supposes nature”, that spirituality/consciousness belongs to the natural order. Energetic change (evolution) is the universal mechanism involving the connected dynamics of transformation.

What is worldview? It is a mosaic of many details of personal and social understanding that governs transformational relationships. Briefly, worldview is a mental picture of bits and pieces depicting personal sense of reality. Change is a pace faster than consciousness. To fix on a moving target is more difficult than to fix on a standing target. Everything about life and the world is changing, and, point-of-reference would be lost except for the enduring understandings that make up the basis of faith and personal worldview. Change is the reason people have difficulty with evolution; change is difficult to deal with it. But, neither least particles of subatomic matter nor larger processes of the cosmos and life can be stopped; fortunately, there are patterns that help understanding.

Observant self-reflectivity makes connections all the time, at the subconscious and conscious levels. The cosmos, stars, planets and life are energetically interactive at the deep subatomic wave/particle level. Worldview is an interactive aspect of connection. The pursuit of truth is pursuit of necessary and purposeful connections. As knowledge expands it takes in more data that open consciousness and enlarge consciousness of web connections. Insights continue throughout life to weave connected strands and to put them online so they inform life’s menu of options. Worldview is the menu script of natural necessities that enable personal destiny.

Worldview takes everything into consideration. It’s what we believe. Its weave is never finished. The deeper we get into things the fuller our sense of worldview. Worldview is our conscious inside world. Knowledge we don’t own cannot be integrated as part of our worldview. Worldview can shut us out from growing or it can keep us open to growing. It can find answers or avoid questions. If we are mindfully curious we work to enlarge our worldview. Active interest and time together fill out worldview. The more threads we roll into the ball of consciousness, the fuller is our worldview.

What are “dogmas”? They are the “enduring understandings” that give credibility to life, humanity to relationships, and morality to living. Dogmas are those beliefs that define who we are to others. We cannot be who we are except we “own” understandings that authenticate the dogmas of our personal lives. Dogmas are core beliefs; they are faith, hope and love; other consciousness is peripheral to these, detrimentally or constructively. Changes occur around these—but faith, hope and love endure; these are what make religion authentic and civility real.

Dogmas mean to capture truth that confirms reality—bedrock understanding that endures through all twists and turns. Dogmas are distillations of insights that affirm certitude sourced in the authenticity of experience and knowledge. Dogma operates to facilitate “grace” in the order of nature. But we must realize, if dogmas are constructed on/from misinformation, they will misinform and misdirect. Many believe that dogmas dictate worldview and operate outside the order of nature. Not so.

The connections fixing our personal worldview are dogmas that we own. The manner in which we assemble the fixing agents of faith/dogmas and worldview is the same way in which collective consciousness does. Human insight into deep energy/matter in cosmic evolution is information that mostly has come together within the last century

Throughout history, social and religious cultures have developed beliefs and theologies, and transmitted them in myths, stories and scriptures; in the Western world experience these are inherited traditions of Abraham — Jewish, Christian and Islamic. Just as stories and scriptures of one time derive from the worldview of the time, so do cultured dogmas and beliefs. It needs to be kept in mind that the scriptures of the times are very much in the context of the politics and culture of the times and that scriptures contain a mix of prevailing theology and politics. This happens in every culture, in every time. Consider what’s been going on in US politics and churches over the last decade and more.

Theology (God consciousness) and worldview (nature consciousness), the experience of encounters with nature, life, and each other, are handed down in stories as for example, in the Book of Genesis and the story of the creation of the universe, man and woman. The Genesis account of creation has God first creating Adam (man) and then creating Eve (woman) from the rib of man.

The development of this story over a very long period of time meant to include political lessons. The political message of this account is that man is superior, woman’s link to God. Woman is God’s after-thought; she is taken from man, therefore dependent from/on man and subject to him. She is the property of man. This understanding is worked into the theology of “dominion”, which we are heir to until now. From the biological history of human evolution, modern insights are informed that the order of human creation, man and woman, is in reverse order of the Genesis account, that cell-division (mothering) precede male sex differentiation from female. And that lays bare the big mistake under the dominion presumptions of religious/political history.

As long as the old worldview (dogma) of woman’s subservient relationship to man was credible, the politics of male dominion could be made to work. But, now that the old view of the man/woman relationship has no basis in fact, it is no longer credible and old dominion theology can no longer work. And that is where we are at today—religion and politics bedeviled by the changes that have to be made.