GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

204. From God To Jerry To You- The Spiritual Supermarket and the Practice of Discernment

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In a world where beliefs are as assorted as the aisles in a spiritual supermarket, seekers encounter countless options and spiritual pathways to consider. 

With Dr. Jerry L. Martin, explore the evolution of religions up to the pluralistic landscape of today, where spiritual discernment invites openness to many truths. The choices about how to live and what to believe become radically personal, moving beyond tradition toward an individual spiritual calling.

Founder of Theology Without Walls, Jerry presents a fresh, transformative approach that transcends the cathedrals of fixed beliefs, opening a world of spiritual possibility.

Join the podcast on a journey where discernment meets timeless wisdom in the search for meaning.

Visit godanautobiography.com for more information and to get your copy of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher—the true story of an agnostic philosopher who heard the voice of God and recorded their conversations.

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Scott Langdon 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 204.

Scott Langdon 01:00: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I’m your host Scott Langdon. On the podcast this week we return to a favorite series of ours, From God To Jerry To You, and bring you a portion of a talk Jerry gave on the challenge of spiritual discernment at the Center for Process Studies not too long ago. A good friend to the podcast Christopher Denny had proposed this hypothetical person he called Derek who stands in a sort of spiritual supermarket attempting to choose amongst the religious offerings out there. Where do I find the real truth, he might ask. How do I choose which one is right, or at least right for me? Well, that’s where spiritual discernment comes in. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Jerry L. Martin 02:00: Well, back to Derek, who's our guy in the spiritual supermarket. He could pick one religion kind of prefix, you know. You just buy the whole menu and they bring it all out. Or he can go a la carte and pick and choose what beliefs to accept, what practices to accept, and that sounds high risk. But if you look at practice I would say that's what most Americans do.

Jerry L. Martin 02:38: I've got Catholic friends. They do not believe everything the Vatican tells them, infallibility or not, if they disagree with one of the points they say well, I believe the rest, but I don't believe that. Or sometimes even the word “I believe” seems to be a little bit in scare quotes as if well, I'm willing to go along with that, with this or that doctrine, I have no objection, but on these others I do have an objection, I go my own way. 

Jerry L. Martin 03:08: So people within a tradition, in a kind of American pluralistic context, tend to do that and I'm told by people who study this sort of thing that around the world in kind of urban, especially kind of educated urban people tend to be very much the same way that they may have moved to Mumbai from some village. And in the village they may have been very entrenched with a very specific religious tradition, understanding, set of practices and so forth. They move to Mumbai, encounter different views, become much better educated about the options in the world and who knows what else, just have a different set of personal experiences and they start becoming well, Mumbai is more pluralistic than the village they came from and part of what it was Christopher Denny who introduced the case of Derek from his own classroom experience.

Jerry L. Martin 04:14: It kind of points out that in a way this is what all of our religions are. They all evolved, they came about. You can think the Bible plopped down one day but it didn't quite. And the creeds emerged later and were fought over and modified and so on. And so it's wrong to put up the myth of the great religions as though they're well, they have beautiful cathedrals, but intellectually they're not quite that planted and firm as the cathedrals or the other monumental architectures look.

Jerry L. Martin 05:00: And of course here's where we start getting, where push comes to shove, because one way or another, you got one spiritual life to live the way you got one life to live in your romantic life, in your professional life, in every other part of your life, and leaving out reincarnation, but anyway, you're in this life, you're living it. You've got to make choices and it's urgent to you to choose what's valid rather than invalid, what's up rather than down, what's going to move you forward rather than what's going to distort you. And then the question and I also, in my own personal views, I wouldn't say this is an automatic definition of TWW, which mainly just says don't limit your understanding of the divine or the ultimate just to your confession and not, if you want to know the fullest story possible, don't limit it in that way. So Theology Without Walls mainly just starts with one negative thing. And then, once you decide, okay, now we're going to try to take in more understanding of the ultimate reality than just what is in our tradition, then you've got a lot of work to do and a lot of discovery.

Jerry L. Martin 06:28: And because this is somewhat new as a kind of self-conceived enterprise, we don't quite know how people are going to come out. And I've made a point of not overly defining it at the beginning, because there are a lot of brilliant people out here who are spiritually deep and let's see what they all come up with. And in the course you two just took or just finished, you're reading a lot of what in a rather same spirit, a lot of the people came up with what Panikkar or someone like that came up with. I take it well, and I take it that those are all options and what we need to do is live them out and think them through and see which ones stand up well. There's some that look promising 50 years ago, that don't look so good today, that have not held up to scrutiny so well.

Jerry L. Martin 07:31: And my own view that I was going to say I don't take to be definitional of TWW, but my own view is that the decision is, you might say, “radically personal”, and I don't mean personal in the sense of subjective or arbitrary, any more than which medicine you should take is subjective or arbitrary, but it is personal. You know, each person my wife has a condition called which starts with the horrible word what is it? Idiopathic is the word I'm looking for, the horrible word idiopathic, which means we do not know what it is. It doesn't fit this disease, this disease, this malady, that malady, it's just your body doing this and for her condition about a third of the people are idiopathic, and idiopathic isn't a category, it's an array of different people.

Jerry L. Martin 08:22: Well, the spiritual life is idiopathic, except it's not pathic. Well, what's the word we want if we want to make it healthy? It's idiomedicinal, let's say. And that the task of discernment isn't just which big picture is right, or even. You know, there are various spiritual practices designed for spiritual growth, to move you forward or deeper, whatever metaphor seems apt, and you can try them. That's an advantage of those. You see, though you still have to have the discernment to see, am I flaking out or am I actually growing and becoming deeper, more insightful, more integrated, and things like that. But there's also the question of your life as a kind of spiritual drama, and what is your role in that drama? What is your future, what is your mission, what is your calling?

Jerry L. Martin 09:26: When I found out that you know, I started in all this back when I was just a secular philosopher and was learning it, learned that every minister or priest and I don't know if there's something like this in the Eastern tradition, but you're supposed to have a calling, not just a job description, not, you know a little, I remember in high school they gave us career things. You'd be good at this kind of thing. It's not just that, it's supposed to be a calling. That goes beyond that, that God, or the ultimate or whatever, has tapped you for this assignment. And so I've started asking people, and somehow you know kind of dramatic stories to tell. Father Clooney, whom I asked, said well, it was like a finger pointing at him, it's like tapping him in the chest, you know. And I asked this Southern Baptist minister I was talking about a friend of ours, lives in our town and he said, well, God laid a burden on my heart and I didn't probe. Well, how did you know that burden?

Jerry L. Martin 10:27: But you know, talk about a challenge of spiritual discernment. There is one. Is that his ego, is that something else, or is this the real deal? And I think the main clue is we always want a litmus test, a single principle, single rule. No actual human inquiry does that.

Jerry L. Martin 10:49: Even on science, which is the most, I started to say, rigidified but that's not quite what I mean. Kind of highly organized, articulate, explicit in how it does its business, and I'm thinking especially of physics. Even there you look at the literature and philosophy of science, there are no criteria for what makes a good scientific theory. There's no criteria for what makes a hypothesis worth investigating and you find people again like Polanyi, who was a very prominent chemist, saying you need to talk about connoisseurship. You sort of develop a sense of what lines are going to be fruitful and you pursue them. It's not infallible, but that's your best way to go is to follow your instinct, and it's an educated instinct from scientific practice. But we're really in the realm that I find it most useful to think of as judgment, and that's why I was mentioning ethical judgment. You're in the realm of judgment.

Jerry L. Martin 11:59: Judgments are particular. They have to do with you and your situation. That's true of practical judgments. It's true of moral judgments. When you ask should I tell this person such and such an uncomfortable truth, as I see it; should I share this with my friend? Well, I notice I said my friend. It depends on, well, who are you? What is this other person to you? Are you just butting in or is it in some way your responsibility to let this person know this uncomfortable thing you happen to know, to reveal a secret or something?

Jerry L. Martin 12:33: All of these particularities go into judgment and what I have found on and in a way the literature on spiritual discernment tends to support in its own way the tradition it's kind of new called virtue epistemology, where it just seems over and over the key criteria and I think in different traditions I use the bad word criteria, but I think different traditions would discuss this in ways that were at least analogous. That the way I think of it just in my own life is you've got to get the clutter out of the way. You've got to make sure this is a perception, a judgment, a course of action that proceeds from you in your most centered, integrated way, where you're not being distracted, your own desires aren't sweeping you away, your own cynicism isn't holding you back. The kind of virtues…It's called virtue epistemology because the virtues are always a kind of middling between extremes and you can be too gullible so that every crazy thing comes along, you accept, wow, that sounds good. Or just you hear a speaker who's sort of charismatic and sweeps you away and oh, so there, you go over the clip. That's a mistake, you know. You need to come back to your center. At the same time to sort of either to cynically reject everything that seems to you like a spiritual insight, every direction that you feel called to saying well, I don't really know to reject.

Jerry L. Martin 14:29: If you look at Jung's category of synchronicities that occur in your environment, to say it's of everything, it's a coincidence, even when it's begging for the dots to be connected in a way that tells you something. And so to be overly cynical, doubtful, skeptical is also a mistake. And the key does seem to be a kind of spiritual growth, such that your own emotions aren't sweeping you away, your ego isn't, your fears aren't. You can even have too little ego so that you think, oh well, I'm not good enough, or I'm not up to it. You can be too self-critical. That that's the area of well, that's just kind of the key, that's sort of how you know you're proceeding in the right way.

Scott Langdon 15:32: 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.