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I'm done with church


FireDragon76

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There are about five active people left.  We don’t even need more than one section.  This board could easily be a group email.  
 

The last thing we need is bullying people through petty rules and ‘organization’.

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9 hours ago, Burl said:

There are about five active people left.  We don’t even need more than one section.  This board could easily be a group email.  
 

The last thing we need is bullying people through petty rules and ‘organization’.

Burl,

This is the last public comment I will make here as Admin because we don't want threads to start becoming debating points about why we follow the Forum rules here that we have all agreed to (unless you want to start a thread on that matter).  Further comments off-topic will be deleted as we also don't want off-topic posts clogging up the thread.

2020 is a new start for all and I, as Admin, will try to help ensure we stay on track.  We may only have a small active group, but we have thousands of people each year who review our threads - I'm sure one big email would be unattractive to them.  Plenty of people have come before us and more will come after we are gone.  I'd like them to have access to what we have been fortunate enough to have access to, you included.  I hope you and others can appreciate that. 

This is not bullying, this is active Administration according to our own, agreed, guidelines.

Paul

(As Admin)

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On 12/27/2019 at 9:16 PM, FireDragon76 said:

I finally came to the realization a few months ago that I'm done with my church (conservative ELCA congregation).  I do not agree with evangelicalism approach to spirituality anymore, even in a relatively tolerant, quasi-mainline form.  There's too much potential toxic religious ideas there.

So, I'm not sure what I do now... if I consider myself Buddhist or just become a religious none.  It's a new thing for me.   I accept the conclusions, more or less, of the Jesus Seminar, especially Marcus Borg's views on the subject.  I'm not a pure skeptic, but I am a pragmatist and since I don't have a realist view of God, I would need a really good reason to remain identified as a Christian.

I suppose my worldview is Jungian, something closer to that.  I'm not a materialist, nor am I inclined towards scientism.  I just don't accept the dogmatism and anti-intellectualism that's part and parcel with evangelicalism.

So, why am I done with the church? Well, let me first state that I am done with certain churches or, better, certain expressions of and practices of Christianity that are embodied by certain churches. However, I am not done with Christianity.

One very specific reason I am done is because my schooling and study have enabled me to look more critically at some churches' biblical interpretations and theologies. One thing that really caused me to be done was a literalist interpretation of the bible, specifically the NT and even more specifically the book of Revelations. I considered myself a progressive Christian and actually did and was before I even became familiar with that term. I don't accept the conclusions or, to be fair, all the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar or even Spong as I favor theologians like John Hick and John Macwuarrie.

I do have really good reasons to remain Christian and my world view is definitely Christian dialectic theism, otherwise called Christian panentheism.

 

 

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