VISION (Why we do this) To facilitate growth beyond what is available in the epidemic of dysfunctional institutional church models. To help individuals have a dynamically increasing capacity for love, connectedness, meaning and agency in life. To give people a means whereby they can assess their orientation and progress in their journey of transforming into the image of Christ.

SITUATION

Religion and Science The perceived divide between science and spirituality has resulted in dysfunctional institutional systems. The scientific world view has resulted in an over-emphasis on propositional knowing at the expense of the other kinds of knowing (participatory, perspectival, procedural). This disproportionate emphasis has affected religious institutions leaving both science and religion incapable of cultivating wisdom in their institutional forms. Religion historically failed to adapt to the dynamic environment and devolved into irrelevance and obsolescence. The scope of science necessarily excludes the reasons for science (why should truth be valued?) and is thus incapable of inquiry beyond its own scope. Science has become regarded as a body of conclusions rather than a self-correcting set of processes, and the compilation and presentation of those conclusions is employed in political strategy and tribalism more-so than it is an earnest endeavor to put in order the facts of experience and reality.

Propositional Tyranny and the Left Hemisphere of the Brain The overemphasis on propositional knowing corresponds to the tendency to operate societies and communities from the perspective of the left hemisphere of the brain, which is suited toward apprehension but not comprehension.

The Left hemisphere creates a re-presentation of reality, and people interact with that representation instead of interfacing directly with reality. Reality is proxied by an overlay of beliefs and premises that may have very little to do with reality. Thus, they are connected with a faux version of the components of reality, including people and entities. As this perpetuates, it festers. The lack of genuine connectedness translates to lack of meaning.

This produced people who are oriented toward apprehension and have confused it and preferred it above comprehension. This leaves people and communities with no sense of what is not comprehended. This is a huge blind spot in life. These people constantly add quantities of data to their knowledge inventory while never transforming into the type of individual that can increase in qualitative comprehension. Or, as the Apostle Paul puts it, they are ever learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

This leaves religious people with mountains of pretend information and supposed life wisdom but with debilitating nihilism. They believe things that make them feel virtuous and righteous while simultaneously making them ineffective. Systems designed for apprehension cannot cultivate wisdom. People need an ecology of practices that qualitatively transforms them into one who can both walk in wisdom while continuing to cultivate wisdom.

Nihilism and Suffering

This has resulted in a nihilistic society in secular and religious domains. The religious people are worse off because their nihilism is masked by a faux but ineffective righteousness coupled with virtue signaling. Just as no good deed goes unpunished, the “righteous” deeds of the religious leave a wake of suffering which inflicts people for multiple generations, often long after the ineffective religious person has died peacefully in their sleep with the false perception that they are “in the will of God.” Beyond the Fundamentals orients itself in faith toward the notion that this suffering and nihilism is avoidable and systemically reversible.