In this compelling conversation, host Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin engage in a poignant dialogue about pressing global events and explore the profound need for connection and unity in today's world amid the darkness and turmoil we face. God's message, as conveyed through Jerry, remains especially relevant in our interconnected world, serving as a beacon of healing and understanding.
This episode dives deep into the timely nature of God's revelations, emphasizing the significance of understanding diverse religious perspectives instead of dismissing them. Scott and Jerry eloquently discuss how this comprehension can foster unity, alleviating division and strife.
In a unique departure, Jerry reveals his forthcoming book exploring the implications of his revelation from God in Radically Personal.
The dialogue navigates the delicate balance between individual revelation and collective guidance, exploring the unique intersections of personal enlightenment and the broader context of spiritual guidance within a group. Scott and Jerry address the challenges of today's interconnected world, reflecting on the evolving dynamics of spirituality and religion. Through thought-provoking discussions on various religions and their aspects, listeners are offered an intriguing lens into the diversity and complexity of faith.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
Resources:
Hashtags: #whatsonourmind #godanautobiography #experiencegod
Would you like to be featured on the show or have questions about spirituality or divine communication? Share your story or experience with God! We'd love to hear from you! 🎙️
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube |
In this compelling conversation, host Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin engage in a poignant dialogue about pressing global events and explore the profound need for connection and unity in today's world amid the darkness and turmoil we face. God's message, as conveyed through Jerry, remains especially relevant in our interconnected world, serving as a beacon of healing and understanding.
This episode dives deep into the timely nature of God's revelations, emphasizing the significance of understanding diverse religious perspectives instead of dismissing them. Scott and Jerry eloquently discuss how this comprehension can foster unity, alleviating division and strife.
In a unique departure, Jerry reveals his forthcoming book exploring the implications of his revelation from God in Radically Personal.
The dialogue navigates the delicate balance between individual revelation and collective guidance, exploring the unique intersections of personal enlightenment and the broader context of spiritual guidance within a group. Scott and Jerry address the challenges of today's interconnected world, reflecting on the evolving dynamics of spirituality and religion. Through thought-provoking discussions on various religions and their aspects, listeners are offered an intriguing lens into the diversity and complexity of faith.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
Resources:
Hashtags: #whatsonourmind #godanautobiography #experiencegod
Would you like to be featured on the show or have questions about spirituality or divine communication? Share your story or experience with God! We'd love to hear from you! 🎙️
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube |
151. What's On Our Mind- Radically Personal Faith | Exploring Diverse Spiritual Narratives
Scott Langdon [00:00:17] This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 151.
Scott Langdon [00:01:03] Hello and welcome to episode 151 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, and this week Jerry and I bring you What's On Our Mind. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that are very dark and sad, and with the internet at our fingertips, we can immediately see what we're doing to one another, what we're doing to ourselves. As human beings, we're connected in ways we have never been before, and we long for that connection. We need that connection in order to heal. That's why God's message to Jerry is so timely. It couldn't have happened before now. This week, Jerry and I discussed the timeliness of God's message and why understanding different religions instead of desiring to do away with them entirely can lead to our unity instead of this terrible division and war. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon [00:02:02] Welcome back, everybody, to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, and we are so glad that you're listening and so glad that you've tuned in. And if you have listened to us for a while, you realize a certain few things about the podcast. If you are just joining us for the first time, we want to welcome you. If you have been listening for a while, those few things that you probably know about the podcast are that the first 44 episodes, episodes one through 44 are the audio adaptation of Jerry Martin's book, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. It's not the complete audio book version, it's an audio adaptation, and so that's the first 44 episodes, and we did that as the initial project. And after that, we just-- we've kept going. We did interviews with one another and then we started bringing folks in to talk about the book. Jerry and I talk about the book, and now we've developed these series of episodes that we have and we bring you on a weekly basis. And those series are: From God to Jerry to You, where Jerry talks straight to you, the audience, about things that God has told Jerry. We talk about-- We have a life wisdom episode series, The Life Wisdom Project, we call it, where guests come in and talk with Jerry. Jerry interviews them about the book and about specific episodes of the audio adaptation. And then we have something called What's On Your Mind, where folks email us, listeners, readers of the book, they email us and ask us questions, make comments about their experience with God, their journey with God, or their wanting to desire to learn more. And finally, we have this episode series, which you're listening to today: What's On Our Mind? And this is one of my favorite episodes that we put together because Jerry and I get a chance to have a conversation, and virtually every week and we talk about the things that are on our minds regarding this project, this revelation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, what was told to Jerry. And what this weekly podcast is, what it should be about. This week on What's on Our Mind, we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to pass it off to Jerry to start off with, and he's going to talk about a work that's been ongoing and related to God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, but in a radically different way, radically personal, different way. So, Jerry, it's always so great to talk to you, and I want to hand it over to you to talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:04:42] Yeah, well, thanks for that outline of the whole series, Scott. That's very helpful to get the big picture. But yes, we keep throwing the word radical back and forth, and that's because the title of what I call my book is Radically Personal. I never call God: An Autobiography my book because it's about 85% God talking after all, and I am doing it entirely being led through it all by God. But here it was my own effort to think, well, now what are the implications? As I think through them, my own effort at faith seeking understanding, just taking this experience and these revelations in. And what's one of the things that struck me, you know, we haven't talked a lot about the multiple religions, though we've alluded to it from time to time. And it's right, of course, in the podcast series- a podcast about the different religions where God is telling me going all the way back to very old religions, Zoroastrianism, Akhenaten in Egypt and so forth, what God was up to with these different cultures and religions, and God was trying to get something through and on the whole did with one culture after another and one set of ancient scriptures after another. And each one has a lot of the truth and in fact gives God an opportunity to show an aspect of the divine self, and that's one reason they're so different. It's not that they're contradicting, but that God is very complex and has many, many sides. And each one is kind of picking up on one of those sides and really, you might say exploring it with depth and in commun-- and with God in the background, whether they conceptualize it in a theistic way or not. I do. And that's how it came to me, but that doesn't really matter how you conceptualize it that much, but the implication is the cultures, after all, have many diverse strands in them. The religions have many diverse strands. They have many sacred text, many prophets and leaders and seers and gurus and saints and so forth. And then just people who make up the followers and the members of the congregations or the ones being taught by the gurus and so forth around the globe. Well, what is their story? Each of those people has to figure out, what does this mean to me? And that seemed to be the final indication. It struck me as so strange at the beginning. And of course, I report this in the first couple of chapters of God: An Autobiography, so improbable that God is talking to me. As far as I knew, God only talked to people like Moses and Jeremiah and so on and so forth, and not to people like Jerry Martin in the 21st century America. What? It just didn't make sense. And I then learn more. Well, God is on record as having spoken to various people since then, Joan of Arc and George Fox, who founded the Quakers and so forth. Still, it's a kind of rare phenomenon. But the conclusion I came to in part by, you know, as we often discuss in the What's On Your Mind series, people report their own experiences. I'm not the only person talking to God. You're talking to God. Abigail was talking to God. People, if they're paying attention are talking to God, and even if they don't pay attention, God is talking to them. If you just have a sense of conscience. Well, that's from my point of view, now, a divine voice, that's not just part of your biological equipment. That's a divine voice. And you don't have to call it divine. There are a lot of good upright humanitarian right living atheists. Right? But they have a conscience. I mean, they have a moral sensibility. Well, that's from my point of view, perfect-- as divine as anything around. So, if God is talking to each of us, then each of us in our own very different lives because we're all very different from each other. We have different personalities, different family situations, different personal histories, different talents, untalents, you know, burdens, limitations, different prospects in life, certain things we'd like to do or perhaps should do or have the capacity to do, and well, we have to sort all that out. And we ought to sort it out with ideally the divine pole of human existence as part of that story. Again, I always speak in personal, theistic terms, but with God as a partner, I would put it. But whatever that is and it might just be in a more Eastern mode, you go meditate and then you kind of know better what you're supposed to do that day. Well, that's fine too. We don't have to put the God word on every single thing that comes along. That's good, too. And that's up to the individual. So anyway, that's-- the implications of that basic insight are enfolded as best I can in the book I'm writing, Radically Personal.
Scott Langdon [00:10:20] This idea of you receiving your revelation, your personal enlightenment, and I receive mine, this is something that I feel like I was in touch with at a very early age. We talk about me often, you know, eight, nine year old in the Lutheran tradition. When we lived in South Philadelphia before we moved into New Jersey, at which point when I was about 13, I guess we went into a more evangelical Christian community. But the idea of this is how God is coming to me. And God is very real in this Lutheran tradition, but I never had the sense that my Jewish friends, for example, didn't have the right-- they just had their message, and we have ours, and it just it didn't occur to me in that way. It didn't ever feel like in my early growing up that I had to exclude something. But then when we moved into this more evangelical tradition, the idea of you receive yours, I receive mine kind of got the idea of different strokes for different folks, and that was a bad thing. Even within the Christian tradition you had, there was a very narrow swath of folks who were getting it right in the Christian tradition. And I knew in my heart that that just didn't sit right. It just didn't feel like-- because I had a lot of friends who were not Christians in the tradition that we were in and even further out were Jewish or Hindu, some friends growing up, and then even further out maybe then that would be just atheist friends who didn't believe it all just weren't raised in a church. And I knew these people to be, as you mentioned before, loving, caring. My growing up in the theater, I knew those people to be loving, caring, first ones to help you out if they could. So that impulse to do loving good things extended beyond my sort of closed view of what was going to be satisfactory and good living to God. So this idea of you receive yours, I receive mine, you say it's not relativism, it's not subjectivism, but yet that there is something that we need to get right and there is things-- there is a way that we can get it wrong. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:12:53] Yeah, that's often very puzzling to people because we do have these-- the tendency to kind of rigidity whenever we think about any of these things, disagreements between people, how can they both be right if they're arguing with one another? And this affects our political life, our cultural life, our social life, our business life and whatever. People are always arguing and disagreeing and then it's I'm right, you're wrong. It's even the title of a book, I'm Right, You're Wrong. But the fact is, there could be something, think of medicine, there can be something that's right for Scott, that's not right for Jerry or for Abigail. Right for Abigail. Not right for Scott or Jerry. And when I say right, you know medicine is objective. It depends on your body and your religion, your medical history and your prognosis and so forth. But it's quite objective. Your body will either respond well or badly. And the religions and not just religions, but just any insights, guidances you get through prayer or meditation or just by singing a song or walking in the woods, These can be either good guidances or bad. And then it's you don't have a litmus test. You often don't even have that for medicine. It's one of the things frustrating often in seeking medical care. Well, we're not quite sure what's wrong with you, but you don't have a simple litmus test that, okay, acid or base bang. No, you have what we're always talking about here, Scott, is spiritual discernment. God did give us a capacity or we have a capacity, evolved the capacity, if you like, to kind of tell if something, as you might say, just spiritually higher or lower. You know, have a sense of direction, much like a bit of a compass. We have a moral compass, and that's part of why they picture conscience sometimes as little angels, a little angel on one shoulder, a little Satan, little devil on the other shoulder. But yeah, we know we have these conflicting sides within us. We know that some are high and noble and serving mankind and ethically, you know, righteous. And we know that others are wanting to cut a corner in some way or other. And our spiritual life is like that. We can kind of tell if we pay careful attention. Oh, is this spiritual input that I'm getting, or is it, oh, I just got carried away. Powerful preacher, or who knows what, and so it threw me in a kind of shock and a sort of irrational state. Why do people join cults, for example? Well, these are human weaknesses, and you almost have to slap yourself and wait a minute. You know, this is a cult. Let's step out of this or whatever. But anyway, there's something right for Scott that's not necessarily the same thing, right for Jerry. Again, on the medical analogy, but this is spiritually right. And again, in my theistic language, God may want Scott to do something different than God wanted Jerry to do. God wanted Jerry to write this book. God has not asked Scott to write this book. Might ask you, Scott, to write some other book or to do these podcasts, but you have a different assignment. Abigail has a different assignment yet and so on down the block I live on. They each have an assignment.
Scott Langdon [00:17:20] It's undeniable that the world seems to be very, very dark right now in a lot of ways. There's a war in Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia. There is now, I think six days ago, I guess, of this recording, this terrible war now with Israel and Hamas. And in the day and age in which we are living with social media and with the internet and everything, it gives us such an immediate feeling that we know things. You know, we're only getting bits and pieces of information and of course, but we at least know in a very general way, a lot more in a more immediate way than we ever have done before. And we hear a lot of voices with a lot of opinions and things, but we also see things that trend- ideas that trend. One of the things that is trending in times like these that have to do with war and specifically war that has religious back and forth in it somehow, the song Imagine by John Lennon. The theme of which is basically and this is one of the lyrics straight away, "Imagine there's no religion." So the idea these days is that there's so much war and there's so much peace and it has to do with your religion versus mine. I'm right. You're wrong. If we would just do away with religions, then that would take care of everything, that we would just go with our natural conscience, as you've explained, to go right and wrong. But that gets to the not just the duality of oneness versus otherness. It's another kind of duality that I've been thinking a lot about, which is my seeming individuality, the Scott Langdon, the Jerry Martin, the Abigail, these individuals, and how we are, as you say, receiving our own sort of personal-- what is it that's God message and what is it that's not? Like how to interpret that and discern those things about what I should do with my daily. But then there's also this other sort of collective thing, like what should Christians do in the face of their Jewish friends who are, you know, being bombarded by these-- There are these other-- groups that these individuals make up. And so we can't escape the duality of I'm an individual and I have this sort of pull. I have this need to also work within a group. So this radically personal aspect that you're talking about, does it start with the individual or does it start with the group? Because a lot of the individual is shaped by what the group tells the individual.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:31] Yeah, I guess the way I put it is not so much the question of where does it start, but who holds the ball. You know?
Scott Langdon [00:20:40] Right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:41] Well, wherever it started, you know, you grow up in a religious tradition and sometimes that's very thick and heavy and you can't imagine at about the age of 12 let's say, that you might ever be anything different from a Catholic or different from a Jew or different from this or that type of Hindu or whatever, Muslim. But at a certain age you have what in our church we call the age of reason steps in. And it was always before that you're innocent and if you die, you automatically go to heaven, after the age of reason, uh oh, you're at high risk.
Scott Langdon [00:21:19] High risk.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:21:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And well, that's how it is. At some point, the ball is in your court. Shall I stay in this religion? Do I still believe that? Does it still connect me to the divine or does it merely connect me to my family or my neighborhood? You know, if I'm in a Catholic neighborhood or Muslim neighborhood or something, I know Mormons who somewhat struggle with this question, deep family connections within the Mormon community, and especially if they live in Utah. And yet sometimes their thought has rather gone beyond the limits of that set of scriptures and beliefs. Okay. They have to struggle with that. Well, the ball is in their court and one has to navigate those factors. Hopefully whatever navigation would be, you take into account your obligations to family and community and even to your past. You know, you may have obligations that derive from, you know, your parents came here as immigrants and you're celebrating that culture still, the bravery and hardships of their journey here. Okay. You have those obligations. At the same time, I guess from the spiritual point of view, the question is, well vis a vis the divine or ultimate reality- what are you supposed to do? And you take into account these, you know, the social nature of human beings and the cultural heritage every human being has of some sort, you take those into account, but they're not the whole picture. And there is a divine element.
Scott Langdon [00:23:10] One of the things that you and I talk about often is the idea of the timing of this revelation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. That God had said there really was no time before now for this to be done, this work that needs to be done. And when I think about the timing of now, what we're living in, I'd see in my life when I was younger, and I knew people who could say growing up something like, "I've never seen a black person in person before. I hadn't seen a black person in my life in person until I went to college," let's say, went away to college. And think about that in the history of things like people who have lived their whole life and never saw a Native American or never-- And with technology and everything that we-- there is so much that we see and know, the way we know things is so different now, that this idea of what to do with the religions, who the regions which have spent themselves as God has said, they sort of lost steam, and yet this surge in the desire to be spiritual but not religious, kind of things, that's the checker, that's the checkbox that a lot of people have- I'm spiritual but not religious. There is that movement toward how to live collectively because we can't really say very often anymore, especially in America, I've never seen a Muslim before. I've never seen a Jew before. It's there right in front of us. So what should we do? Well, instead of fighting each other, which one's right? Which one's the best? God answers by saying what's true about each one of these things.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:25:06] Now, that's a very important point, Scott, because we were talking about that feeling that you had growing up and that you were given, especially when you moved into the more evangelical or fundamentalist sort of environment. And each religion has a version of that where it's my way or the highway. There's one right view. And if this is true, that must be false. Well, that doesn't actually follow. You know, many things can be true that are quite different. You know, there are different ways of telling the story of the American Civil War. There's the moral story, there's the economic analysis, there's cultural conflict and so on. And while they're very different stories and one is telling one version of it, then that person needs to kind of bore down on that. However, you step out of that and each of the other stories adds something. There's even a geographical analysis of all these different aspects to any human situation. Well, we live in a world like that, and then the question is, well, if it's not, there's only one truth and one way of saying the truth, but, with each religion the question is what's true and what's not true? It's not that which is the true religion, but what's true about each one and what's false or a way I prefer to put it, is use a more like a perspectival analogy. If you're standing here in this tradition, it can be a worldview, it doesn't have to be a religion we're talking about. But if you're standing here, this enables you to see certain things the way if you're standing at a certain point, you can see the Grand Canyon a certain way, but you go stand on the other side, you see it a different way. Okay. And those are objective facts. It looks different from here than it looks from there. So what does each point of view show and what does it sort of hide? Because if you look at the building from the front, you can't see the back, you know, and you can't see the smaller building behind it. You'd have to walk around from that side, you see something different. And so what does each one show and what does each one either occlude, you know, block the view of or perhaps put it so far in the distance that it's just a tiny thing, you know, because that's part of the laws of perspective, and they apply to one's belief systems as well. If sin is so upfront that other kinds of human problems can barely be seen, even though in a quiet moment one might say, well, there are these other problems, you know, that people have and some religions address other aspects of those problems. You know, the kind of the way the Buddhist addressed the issue of suffering, for example. Well, that's different. And yeah, that's real too. Right? Suffering is real and they have an angle on that. And it may not again show everything, but it's going to show a lot. And so that's the way to think about religions. What does each one tell you? And there are parts that don't tell you much, that block you from seeing other things, and there are parts that may just be kind of wrong. The caste system in India, which is very central to historic Hindu doctrines, almost no current Hindu really celebrates. You know, it's thought, well, that was the sociology of the time of the revelations. And that sociology got built into the doctrines. And the real doctrine is something more like what is your dharma? What is your divine role in life? And discovering that and that got attached to something roughly like what is your social class? Well, it's not. Of course, your divine calling is not a calling that goes to your social class to what ethnicity or stratum you're born into. It depends on what the divine mission for you in this life is. And so you need to think about true and not true and so forth in a more subtle and differentiated way. And then you'll be on beam. You're not going to run around with hatred. You can still uphold your faith, be a strong Catholic, for example, and say, okay, this is the religion I think I belong to, I connect with the divine here, but I recognize that other ways are also ways of connecting with the divine. They are also showing some element of the ultimate truth. And other people relate to what's ultimate in their lives better this way, just the way other people may need different medicines than I do. They relate to the divine better in that religion than in mine. And the only change you'd have to make is to stop the claim of exclusivisms. Stop the my way or the highway way of talking and just say this is-- as Abigail's rabbi used to say, "Jews know they're not going to take over the world-- this is what our tradition teaches. Okay? The Catholic can say that too. This is what our tradition teaches. And I try to live by it because it guides me well. But you look over and, you know, the Buddhist tradition is teaching someone else something else. And in my own view, is perfectly possible to partake in a bit of both. You know, you don't have to be just one thing. There are people who go to church and then go meditate in a Buddhist or Hindu mode. That's fine, they're taking in more.
Scott Langdon [00:31:25] Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.