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My mom sent me an article from Christianity Today: Isaac Asimov Believed the World Could Go on for Thousands More Years. Why Can't Christians?, comparing Christianity's current assumption that the end of the world was just around the corner (an assumption having been made for the past 19 centuries or so) vs Asimov's "Foundation" series where statistical study (like.. prophecy, but science-y) shows that the Galactic Empire will soon fall into a 30,000 years Dark Age - or one of only 1,000 years if the titular Foundation can make and preserve an "Encyclopedia Galactica" to help humankind reboot itself.

30,000 years dwarfs the thinking of most eschatology-minded Christians (I guess they do think of a 1,000 year reign of Satan) even when they claim to be thinking of "forever and ever"

There is a more resilient and thoughtful flavor of Christianity that understands there is value and strength in the religion even if straightforward readings of Revelation are misguided (or if the scriptures really mean it when they say "no man knows the day or hour") Heck - "preterism" says Revelation already happened, and did a good job calling the destruction of Jerusalem and he persecution of Christians under Nero.

That's a serious problem with going all or nothing in the rightness and correctness of your religion - the idolatry of saying this Book is inerrant, absolutely preserved by God in its long history of translation and compilation and curation - and must be taken more or less literally (i.e. maybe just poetic in some of the bits, like saying "4 corners of the earth", but overall never metaphorically)

The "inerrant" view avoids some heresies of ordinary joes picking and choosing what they want to believe (and so permits the church to wield doctrine in authoritarian ways) but boy does it create a rigid and ultimately brittle structure. And seemingly contradictory - the mental gyrations you have to go perform for what "generation" means when Jesus said "Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" 2,000 years ago is a wonder to behold.

And this sense of All or Nothing reflects the brittleness that cracked open my own faith a teen. It seems like most believers are not very think-ful about why so many other folks believe so many other things - refuse to consider the nature of why they believe what they believe as anything but God-given, and aren't we lucky that were given just the right belief in this sea of wrongness, and can't we feel that in our heart, don't know about those other heathens. What a stunning lack of sympathy, a myopia that ignores what other people are seeing and lacks almost any introspection, just a feeling of "God must have graced me with the singular belief that happens to be correct."

I guess the thinking is if "Left-Behind" style readings of Revelation isn't correct, then who knows what other readings might be misguided? And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the fear that people might pick and choose the parts of the faith that seem convenient. (Almost like, you know, how many Christians seem to ignore that bit about rich people being radically unlikely to get into Heaven... camels through eye of the needle must mean something different.)

And that's what we have today. Mainstream folk Christianity forgets that Jesus was a radical leftist teaching generosity and compassion and sacrifice, and so degenerates into a tool to enforcing the status quo and nostalgic views of how things used to be - ignoring the work it took to morally GROW into supporting obvious markers of equality, like that woman are fully people who can vote, or that black people are fully people and can't be owned. (And yes, flavors of Christianity helped this country make that growth, but not the mainstream reactionary bent in ascendancy today.)

But a flavor of "All or Nothing" that has most molded me is the universalism of The Salvation Army and evangelical Christianity - that the most important Truths apply to (and are potentially available to) everyone, or else they are not worthy Truths I should rally for. The unlikelihood that Salvationist Protestants got it right while everyone got it various levels of wrong led me to conclude that this flavor of belief wasn't as universal as I needed it to be.

So I embrace the uncertainty. My Faith is- there IS a singular, universal Truth, and one with moral implications. But the other tenant of my Faith is that we can't be certain what the overarching Truth is. It might even have many forms, many paths to God - a view the New England flavor of the UU church leans into. But I think - almost by definition, a shared-reality based Objective, transcendent overarching Truth is the bedrock of everything that is. (heh - I realize I still tend to think of Truth as something on high... maybe I should switch my thinking to think of it as what's supporting the ground we walk and build on. Underarching, not overarching.)

So what's weird is this doesn't just put me into opposition with normal "we're right, they're wrong" faiths, it also puts me in opposition to "there is no single truth, so everyone has their own truth" existentialism. The idea that there is a yardstick we should be thinking of to frame our morality - no matter how dimly we can see it - is different than saying everyone has their own totally legitimate wooden ruler, and so we have no way of evaluating other people's Truth.