My name is Matt. I’m a full-fledged Catholic, a convert from secularism and everything. I am interested primarily in theology and morality, to the extent of making religion my primary concentration here. I am fascinated by ethics and metaphysics.
To start off what will hopefully be a fruitful experience of blogging across religious lines, let me explain a little bit about why I am interested in Hinduism, which is, after all, why I’m here at all. My conversion to orthodox Catholicism was (or rather, has been – formulating belief is a wonderfully dynamic thing) a long, slow process that took me on a little world tour of religions, or at least as much of a tour as I could get from the confines of public-schooled Connecticut suburbia in middle school and high school. I had tried to live my life as a universalistic-relativist-pluralist-absurdist with only a very strong belief in a very vague God. As with many efforts at making your own morality, it failed miserably and left me pretty disillusioned with my own ability to just do what felt right. And, I discovered that different religions made different claims about the universe (gasp).
So I set out to find a code of morality and a metaphysical worldview that made sense. Along the way, I found that religions have a lot that they hold in common: a belief that our actions matter, both for ourselves and for the cosmos; a conviction that there is a moral code embedded in nature that we ought to try to conform to, rather than a need to do morality your own way a lá Burger King; and an awareness that there is more to life than the senses can perceive. Religions find it far more fascinating to look at what we know of human existence as humans ourselves and try to figure out the world from there than to try to reduce people to consequences of conditions and impersonal “forces;” of history, of society, of the universe. I agreed, not least because it seemed absurd to limit the possibilities of humans to conform themselves to a higher standard and way of living in a world with Gandhi and Mother Theresa, the Buddha and Pope John Paul II.
Eventually, I came to consider the differences between religions, and found that the Catholic belief in a universe created by a personal, Trinitarian God, which saw humans as naturally good but fallen into pride and sin, and which placed its trust in God Himself coming as a human to bridge the gap we created through sin, to be more compelling than any other religion’s worldview. And unlike many Protestant sects, the Catholic Church believes that natural reason can know God and discover natural morality, which helped me to find a place for all of the good, true, insightful things I had seen in my forays into Hinduism, Zen, Islam, Baha’i, and other religions.
I have become more orthodox as time has gone by, and I still find great value in seeing the beauty, truth, and goodness in different religious traditions. That is why I have taken three classes on Hinduism so far, two that have explicitly compared the theological arguments set out in Hinduism and Catholicism. That is why I have worked with the Interfaith Council, and why I have written an argument in favor of interreligious study for the Harvard Salient, the right-wing rag where I love to rant against socialism and progressivism on the weekends.
To bring us back to the theme/self-justification of this article, I am here because I believe firmly in beauty, truth, and goodness, and as St. Augustine quoted an earlier writer as saying, “I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.” I am eager to see the human spirituality and longings that are such a big part of my life in light of the human spirituality and longings that have defined much of India’s life, particularly in Hinduism.
I hope that we will discuss our views and beliefs, and not merely read each other’s posts. Please do comment. Please do question. Please do disagree, or criticize me should that ever be in order (and it is my hope that it will be on more than a few occasions). Dialogue, meaning “two words,” has to be about more than just offering up platitudes on the things that we agree on. Words, after all, have the power to change the world. They deserve to be shared critically and respectfully, in order that we can all seek out veritas together.
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