My Worldview, and Welcome to It
A local church website concisely summarizes their worldview in four paragraphs (which could be shortened to four sentences or less). I have a worldview, you have a worldview, my wife has… and my cat, Kat, has a worldview (one of two sorts: predominately relational or linguistic). Having concise summarizes are needed as all worldviews cannot be considered at book or even essay length by any one individual human given their time (one lifetime) limitations.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a mainstream Protestant church with approximately 19 million members worldwide, including more than one million members in North America. The Seventh-day Adventist Church seeks to enhance quality of life for people everywhere and to let people know that Jesus is coming again soon.
Adventists believe a Trinity of three persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — make up one God. They made salvation possible when Jesus, the Son, came to earth as a baby in Bethlehem and lived a sinless life in accordance with the Father’s will. When Jesus was crucified for the sins of the people of the world and arose from the dead on the third day, victory was won for everyone.
When He returned to heaven following the resurrection, Jesus left the Holy Spirit to serve as our Comforter and Counselor. He promised to return to earth a second time to complete His plan of salvation and take His people to heaven. Adventists are among the believers who look forward to that day.
Adventists believe that God is concerned with the quality of human life, and that everything — the way we live, eat, speak, think, treat each other, and care for the world around us — is part of His plan. Our families, our children, our jobs, our talents, our money, and our time are all important to Him.
The shorter of it:
Our church is a mainstream Protestant church. Adventists believe the Son died for our sins and He is coming back soon to complete His plan. God loves you and you need to love Him (not Satan) to join Him now and forevermore.
As a stranger in a strange academic land (a university), I, as student, was inclined to befriend foreign students. Of all the students I had occasion to know, Muhammad, from Iran, was, as a person, the one most like unto myself. He was a Twelver Shi’ist and provided me with a scholarly essay written to introduce the worldview of the largest branch of Shia Islam to westerners in impressively erudite language familiar to them such as all other worldviews, whose adherents seek Western academic approbation, have done.
All twelve must be and so were/are free from error and sin. The Hidden Imam (Muhammad al-Mahdi) and Jesus are prophesied to return together at the end of time to defeat tyranny and establish global peace and justice. And that’s all you need to know about that.
My worldview changes daily on the margins to correct for error, ignorance, and illusion, but core presuppositions are less frequently corrected even though my need to correct for core error, ignorance, and illusion is greater as members of the 17 local (city population 3,930 in 2026 est., down from 4,015 in 2020 or 7,868 service area residents) would likely agree.
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Of the extended area population, 26.8% (2,109, 124/church, claim active adherence or membership to a local church congregation, all are Christian). All agree (I started a local group, ‘Church Goers of Coquille’, to attend, as a group on a rotating basis, all churches multiple times to verify, or not, my presuppositions) that my worldview requires foundational correction.
As Ruben Nelson has pointed out to me, correction on the margins requires reflexivity, and core correction requires meta-reflexivity. “To add… to the quote from Spinoza [’The highest activity a {modern} human being can attain is to endeavor to understand, because to understand one’s condition is to be delivered from it.’]: First, for [modern] humans as persons/cultures the capacity to see/think/imagine and know reflexively, even meta-reflexively, is required in order for us to ‘understand one’s condition’. Second, MTI [modern techno-industrial] persons and cultures are WHOLLY averse to reflexivity [emph. added]. It is not only the case that reflexivity is NOT required in order to be a successful MTI person/culture; it is the case that the reflexive manner of being that is required for us to be ‘delivered’ from our condition is ACTIVELY suppressed [emph. added]. This feature of MTI ways of being and living is at the heart of our being in what I characterize as civilizational overshoot.”
Kat
‘Our’ cat has a simpler worldview. Reflexivity (much less meta-reflexivity) is likely not possible for her brain to do. Humans she has gotten used to aren’t so bad, considering — most of the time. At times, Kat wants to be with us and the dogs (who don’t want to kill her) and wants nothing more than to be petted and lay with us purring on the bed like a normal cat.
But then there are the other times when the formerly trusted humans show up unexpectedly and move towards her with obvious intent to kill her. She flees in terror to hide. They let her hide. So far, this pattern has worked to make humans tolerable to her for 13 years ever since, as a kitten, they took possession of her (as a free to good home give-away item in a feedstore).
Sometimes a strange human comes into the house to kill her and she has to hide for a week or so until her feelings of betrayal subside enough to allow her to risk showing herself. After a recent move, she has her own room and her humans put a cat door in the door so she can come out into the house whenever she wants (the door is too small for the dogs to use).
For a week or so she came out at night to prowl, but that was then. There are things out there. Now she stays in her room. If the food and water run out, she meows. If the humans don’t try to kill her for some months, she may start to feel comfortable, even trusting, again.
At times she feels loved, appreciated, respected, and safe. But then they try to kill her and she feels hated. [Her humans guess that as a kitten she was traumatized, a condition that altered, by no fault of her own, her brain’s amygdala-cortex interaction as f-MRI scans could verify (have per studies of human brains) resulting in strong activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to as perceived circumstances.]
And my worldview? The shorter of it is more than my current 7,869 neighbors (including Kat) care to consider (a hypothesis I have not yet verified):
My Worldview (with idiosyncratic parts 3–4 of a nature-centric worldview) in Four Sentences
1. Normal humans are storytelling animals.
2. No worldview — system of abstractions about the world, is the world system.
3. Modern humans believe in “true” stories that are to live (or die) by/for.
4. A story that modern humans are denormalized animals cannot be believed in.
Note that if any story were (believed to be) truly true, point 2 is denied and 4 confirmed.
