DavidD

Anything this simple that explains everything must glitter, but what is the truth beyond the sparkle? The most ubiquitous opposition apparent to everyone is sexual reproduction. The Greeks thought there must be some ancient unity that was split apart to explain how hungry people are to get back together. One can find metaphorical truth in this. Life was once asexual. It still is for many species. DNA exchanges are made between like organisms, which then go on to make daughters cells without the death of the mother. Maybe someday we’ll go back to this in some technological way and just have sex for fun. In reality this process in nature developed where there was a differentiation of who made eggs and who made ######, allowing additional specializations as well, both of them having death programmed into their genes to get out of the way for the next generation. Who decided on this duality? Biologists are quite happy seeing this as being driven by the natural advantage of bringing in outside DNA, liable to have many advantageous messages compared to one’s own and vice versa, and the advantage for the older generation to die off and leave the species and available resources to their offspring. It’s a powerfully flexible system, as every recovery from mass extinctions has proven. At a minimum, one needs two to do this. Getting three together would be many times more complicated and apparently not worth it or life would have found that. So here is a duality. Now is it the dualism that gives this any meaning? I don’t see how. For one thing, male and female still have much more in common than different. They’re not like an electron and positron that will blow each other up. To use the language that’s been used here, this is much more of a process that involves differentiation and integration in various ways, even though the opposite sex is what has this startling effect on most of our consciousness. Yet this duality gets lumped in with dualities such as electrical charge. That’s an opposite, but does that opposition have any meaning? A positive charge is some place where electrons are scarce. A negative charge is where they are abundant. This is a spectrum over various values of electrical charge. Does it matter that zero is in the middle of the spectrum? The overall electromagnetic force never involves one kind of charge without the other. At the same time, in places of like charges it is repulsive. That’s what keeps gravity from pulling me down through my chair into the Earth. Is any of that a meaningful dualism? That the electromagnetic force tries to bring all net charge down to zero is not a real duality, only if one insists on seeing it that way. The force has one goal, toward zero charge, from every direction possible, namely too many electrons, too few electrons, or already at zero. The balance between electromagnetism and gravity that keeps me in my chair provides me a moment of stability in an evolving universe. So will every mechanism of homeostasis be a balance, but only because that’s the only way to have homeostasis in a universe where the fundamental physical forces never rest. An unopposed force will always knock something somewhere. If “one” can’t work, and “two” does, there are going to be many examples where nature didn’t go on to “three” or more. There will be more than two only when it doesn’t cost anything or there are advantages to have more, like limbs. It’s not mystical every time two shows up in the world. I’m not sure if there are any meaningful dualities at all. The ones I see certainly seem to be the natural result of a process that is fundamentally one process, like life. That doesn’t imply unity if one totals up all the processes. To say all life is one sounds incredibly reductionist to me. Nor does there need to be unity within a process, such as any sort of unity within all of life, within a species or even within an individual. I think people try to make it too simple. It’s human nature. It drives me crazy when people argue some version of “everybody’s right” or “ancient people were just as smart as modern people.” Yes biologically it seems people have been the same for many thousands of years. But culture has changed a lot. The culture of knowledge has changed so much in the last 100 years that I’m not surprised people can’t keep up with it. But it’s not that hard to see that the old stories were just stories to fill in a gap in knowledge. The problem with any metaphor like the Greeks used to explain sexuality is that huge pieces of the real story are missing in the metaphor. Looking for generalized abstract principles suffers from the same problem. Maybe Fred is right and God is much more involved in the universe than some think. If so He will teach us through His reality, not through abstract words that seem to send people off in the wrong direction as often as not.

So then why isn't this other Being, Reality, etc. called God? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Maybe because the ultimate creator is too impersonal or otherwise distant from us to be of interest? For many years I would have guessed that "God" and "good" had the same root. It's not the case. One day I finally happened to look through the section on Indo-European roots in my dictionary from college. "God" is from gheu-, meaning to call or to invoke. It is about something one can interact with, even too much as the Germanic word meaning possessed by God became "giddy" in English. I would rather be devoted to God, whoever and whatever God is, than to a character in a book or to something constructed by philosophers to be the ultimate in all things. Why are they any better than astrologers at their work? I'm sure there's something greater than me worth calling God. I don't know why that God should conform to what people just as human as I am insist God must be.

As someone whose undergraduate degree was in physics and got the highest grade in the class at quantum mechanics, I'm curious where such a world view as this comes from. Why would anyone see the quantum world as different from the material world? Does a prayer begin in the mind, the brain or when spoken, orally or subvocally? I don't know. I would think God knows unspoken thoughts, but maybe it matters to make the actual committment involved in saying something. Is the power in the prayer or is it in God, with the prayer just being a signpost? What is the path of communication between my mind and/or brain and God. Is there one, or does God living in us represent that there is no separation between the mind of God and my mind apart from something imaginary? I don't see much hope of getting a definitive answer to such questions. I learned to pray effectively in Al-Anon. I was skeptical of the place that prayer had in the 12 steps, but had many amazing moments with prayer while doing the steps, such as asking for a longstanding resentment to be removed from me, and suddenly it was. Atheists would label that something else. I myself am unconvinced that physical miracles ever happen. But I'm sure that prayer has some benefit, even if it's just for me to lower my resistance to something God wants to do.

I haven't been able to read everything here carefully, but to continue from the other thread about the problem of evil, I notice that the comments here and there are focusing on God as Creator. My biggest problem with the way everyone talks about God is making this fit believably with all of God's other attributes like power, love and goodness. If someone wants to define God as whoever or whatever created the physical universe, spiritual universe, however much there is, I would welcome such specificity. I find that to be a rather distant God, with no reason to care about me especially, so I can understand the attitude that natural disasters are just the way there are, so deal with it. I listen to many scientific colleagues say they have no need for such a God to understand the universe. It's not that they dismiss any possibility of God in creation. Cosmologists talking about this universe being created out of another one can cast God in the role of some hobbyist who was caught up in the creation much as Fred writes of God being involved in the creation rather than crafting it. Why favor traditional views of God as Creator over that one? My favorite definition of God is that God is the one who answers when I pray, "God help me!" Is that the same thing as the Creator? It doesn't have to be. They don't have to be related at all. I admit a bias toward the God Aletheia described as a bell boy. There are other ways to see that, God as Helper. I don't know exactly how much God hates suffering, if at all. If not hate, is it a different sort of determination to ease excessive suffering, if indeed some suffering is necessary? I just know that the God of my understanding is centered around intimacy and love. I can see that in a Trinitarian way or more generally, but it is hard for me to look at everything people say about God and say that it fits with this Helper part about which I feel most sure. As far as the problem of evil, it was an obstacle to me in my twenties, then some time after I started praying and pursuing God again in my thirties, it disappeared as a problem without my deciding on an explicit solution. I don't see anything God does or anything natural as evil. I see people doing evil. I think why they do is more complicated than Adam's sin and a fallen world, but whatever it is, I don't hold it against God. Then again, I'm sure we're not all talking about the same God.

Ah, now fathers are especially not to be trusted in a situation like this. As a father with one married daughter and another who makes poor choices, I wouldn't want to leave their happiness to chance.

"IF we are co-creators with God,and I truly believe we are,maybe we can help God choose." I don't see God as Fred sees Him, but I wonder as he does what we could have that could help God. Maybe we do. Maybe God didn't know joy before us or having joy just from doing something mundane. Maybe it's some existential darkness instead. Maybe our empirical ways are new to God. Maybe He was used to just doing things once, not experimenting, though I doubt that. I'm sure God can still be something greater than me and need something from me, if only being His body parts as Aletheia said, but if He's not greater than me in some way, boy have I been off being a Christian.

I say something's WRONG! It could be a little wrong. It could be a lot wrong. The thing that puzzles me about those who try to explain this away is that the answers are always so limited in their possibilities, such as the original premise that God is all powerful. Why not nearly omnipotent, 92% omnipotent, powerless, or any point in between? I understand why people try to limit the possibilities they have to think about, but why can't people see that that is what they're doing? The universe is not black and white in any sense, no matter how strong the human tradition is to see it that way. I appreciate the ideas Aletheia presented, but these are all as if things are black and white, "No cancer, but no babies." I can think of things in between the two extremes of there being absolutely no cell division and cell division just as there is now. Can't you? It may very well be that there can be no water planet without hurricanes. I can live with that, but imagining a God who is omnipotent and does everything by going poof means that everything should be the best that it can be without the limitations of physics that would require there to be hurricanes on Earth. Yes some suffering is necessary to build character, but every bit of suffering we have? Not a chance. Such contradictions are inevitable for a God with absolute attributes. Why does He have to be so absolute? Would people even listen if God said that's not who He is?

Rocks aren't so bad. It's these hidden things that I feel incompetent about, and the older I get, the more hidden things there are.

I recently learned watching Jeopardy that the short story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” was written in 1882. I hadn’t realized it was that old, no doubt older than anyone here. For anyone who didn’t read this in school, it’s about a hero who is given a choice. I forget why. There are two doors. He is to pick one. Behind one door is a noble lady and wealth. Behind the other is a tiger, who will kill him. I took this at face value in school, like everything else I was told. I remember the story coming back to me as a young adult, by which time I was no longer taking everything at face value. What if there were tigers behind both doors? What if this was just someone’s perverse approach to execution while dangling out the possibility of reward to the audience? Maybe some more suspicious students thought of this at the time. I don’t remember it coming up. I think we were all pretty trusting at my school. I forget what I was facing at the time that made me think of that, some routine falseness, I suppose. There’s enough of that in our society for all of us to learn eventually that things aren’t always what they are said to be. Another aspect of this story came back to me some time later. You know, even if the original premise is true, a 50% chance of being mauled to death is not that great. If everything is set up so that’s really the choice, one might have to hope for luck, but is there a better way? I know one I would try. I’d ask for help in making the choice. I’m not sure when this was, but it was before the modern game shows where people can ask for help. Still if any of the options available in these shows were available, like polling the audience, calling someone smart, whatever, I like that better than dumb luck. Maybe someone knows that most people go to the right, so that’s where they put the tiger the last 10 times. I’d especially like to get help from someone who knows 100% what’s what, whether that’s the king or some insider. Ah, but by this time I was old enough to be suspicious. Those who know might have orders to lie, making the chances of a good outcome 0% instead of 50%. I can see someone going through these possibilities and deciding to go with dumb luck after all. But is there a better way? In reality this is where I started my last version of this story, with this Helper instead of guessing about others. What if one can genuinely let God choose? What if one can say a prayer, receive an impression of what to do, and do it? I’d hate to practice that on this situation. Praying about yes-or-no decisions is where it’s easiest to understand wrongly, in my experience. I doubt that God is perfect, but even if He is, I’m certainly not. I’m curious how many people would trust prayer in this way for a serious decision vs. trusting in their own ability to reason their way through a decision, with whatever they believe will guide them, the Bible, smart people, dumb luck. I bet a majority of conservative Christians trust themselves over God in this way, or conform to whatever their church does. I bet George Bush went to war that way. Either that, or he’s really a rookie at listening to God. Even fewer of my fellow progressives seem the sort to trust God directly. It’s so hard to know about the experiences of others in something like this. I think there’s no substitute to asking God and seeing what happens for oneself. That’s what I decided in coming to pray about all decisions, and trusting whatever answer I got. There is a part of me that wondered about being set up this way for some really big decision down the line, some Twilight Zone version of this process. It’s largely faded. If you can’t trust whoever answers your prayers, whom are you going to trust? So if I were ever before two doors, praying for direction, and the answer was to back away, that it’s too dangerous to make any choice, then I will back away. I can live happily without the lady, especially if there are really tigers behind both doors.

Who are "they"? James Kennedy? James Dobson? How many votes do they have? No matter how many millions it is, it's not enough to change the US from the constitutional democracy that it is to whatever you mean by theocracy. I hear many people like you who speak as if those of us who once swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States were just fooling around, that maybe George Bush was just fooling around when he swore that oath. I didn't vote for Mr. Bush. I think he's foolish for thinking there is any moral problem to stem cell research. But no, he's not going to subvert the Constitution. Religious conservatives are giddy with what they perceive to be their poltical power. They forget that it's only an alliance with economic conservatives, the current weakness of Democrats, and that Bush happens to be such a conservative Methodist that makes it seem that God is with them. They are deluded. It's too bad that those who fear them take those same delusions as reality. Yes, Roe v. Wade could easily be overturned. It could easily have been overturned in the eighties. Intellectually it's not a very solid decision. And so it might only be certain states where abortion is easy. Having lived in California in the sixties when abortion became legal here, it is a strange development to watch. When abortion first became legal, I heard nothing but relief from not having to treat young women with septic abortions any more. Catholics with other views were pretty quiet about it. But eventually the unborn child became the idol that everyone knows today. That and the stretch that it took to find a right to abortion in the Constitution may put abortion back to the states. Are you afraid of that? Why? It's just an ordinary business. Abortion was illegal for a long time before the sixties. Women managed. Being the child of adultery, I might have been aborted, except abortion was illegal. There was a half-hearted attempt as it was. It would have spared my family a lot of stress if I had been aborted. I have a lot of sympathy for a woman in such situations. I don't think government has any business with abortions at all. Still you can't fight city hall. If you have strong feelings about it, would it be so much to move? I say the first thing you need to do is state your position accurately. Conservatives do not want to say who can marry whom in general. They want to prohibit same-sex marriage. I'm sure many would want to prohibit same-sex cohabitation or whatever other restrictions they could think of, as controlling people are prone to do. There are Christian schools now where their science classes are too weak to fulfill requirements for admission to university. I have heard no one say that public schools should be weakened the same way. Who would allow that, I mean realistically? Either you or a non-Christian can rant hysterically about what a threat conservatives are, whether Nazi-like, Commie-like, whatever. Yes, there are such people in the world, from many directions. Then there are the unscrupulous business people who want to fleece you of your money, violent men who would rape and murder you, virulent microbes that will give you a slow, gruesome disease. Yes, if you don't have a faith that let's you have some detachment from such things, the place to start is not with evangelical boogeymen. It's in the mirror.

I would like to see a liberal church that is so attractive, conservatives would give up their megachurches to be liberal. God knows if that will ever happen. It won't happen soon barring some spiritual event that would make my jaw drop. Liberalism is about freedom. Conservatism is about conformity. That's one problem for liberal religion becoming popular. Liberals are free to be liberals in many ways. They can be utterly rational. They can be utterly mystical. They can be close to traditional. They can reinvent the wheel. It's hard to find a lot of liberals who are liberal in the same way. I do think that it is up to liberals to examine their own faith rather than say something like, "If only those conservatives would see the truth." We play with the cards we are dealt. We each come to the God of our understanding from that and go from there. Why would someone whose own faith works well for them feel threatened by conservatives?

Do you know how we wind up with five digits at the end of each limb? It's not that five centers of growth develop independently in each limb bud. Instead there is a chemical signal that is structured so that four areas of cells die between what will become our digits. I used this once on the internet to illustrate "addition by subtraction", but the dialogue deteriorated into whether this process really illustrates that saying instead of pausing for a moment to think about how common this process is of using death or destruction to do somethinng good. It's always hard to know. Was it a waste of time when something falls apart? Was it a learning experience? I've never gotten around to studying the Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer and restorer of worlds, to see how much there might be true about this tradition. Whatever there is, I do understand the necessity for what might appear tragic to exist. Death is programmed into us. Our species is stronger as all species with sexual reproduction are stronger because our individuals get out of the way and die eventually once we've reproduced. It lets us be much more adaptable than if no one died. Beyond the biology a certain amount of suffering does build character, as Paul wrote about. Not everything painful is evil. Yet the amount of suffering in our society seems much more than could have a good purpose, even though I guess it's less than before modern technology and medicine. I could see a malevolent spirit contributing to this, but if one looks at suffering scientifically, it hasn't been necessary to go beyond natural suffering and man's inhumanity to man to explain the excess. Why in the world would an omnipotent God have any reason to tolerate more than those two things? And maybe a powerful but less than omnipotent God would prefer not to tolerate even that much. My impression is that there is no reason for the devil, that there's plenty of evil coming from us to account for evil in the world. I even heard a joke once that a special prayer finally made God disintegrate the devil one day, and nothing hapenned. Both the devil and God had been fooled into thinking the devil and his minions actually were doing something when in fact they had just been conditioned into showing up at the right place at a bad time. I don't think the betterment of our world is about how much of God's power is coercive or persuasive. Whatever the mix is it hasn't ended poverty or war. It seems to me God needs our help if this world is to be better than it is. Maybe there are other worlds where the message of God became creature was better received. Maybe we're underacheivers. However it is, the traditional theology makes no sense to me. Neither does moving only a short distance away from it.

Fred, I'm not an expert on the literature of evolutionary psychology, but you would find there ideas on how we can have a natural morality. One book that discusses that is Religion Explained by academic anthropologist Pascal Boyer. It's a pretentious title. It really only addresses beliefs, not all of religion. It doesn't prove God didn't make us the way we are. It won't be a complete story until genetics demonstrates all 25,000 of our genes and sees if the genetic traits hypothesized by evolutionary psychology are in fact genetic. That still wouldn't prove there isn't something spiritual to our morality, but this is how an atheist would respond about how there can indeed be evil without God determing that.

Fred, I've written elsewhere of how Jesus is in the needy, starting with Matthew 25, and how I witnessed in my own profession and volunteer work how I became a conduit for God's love which went to help some other aspect of God in others, how I could learn from that about the godliness of giving love from myself and receiving love to help me. I have also wondered if we're all God's finger puppets. I don't mind if we are, unlike many people. That still leaves me puzzled, though. If God is that involved with us, even more than is implied by "coercive" or "persuasive", can't He do better with us? What is the resistance? BrotherRog, I have also tried to let God off the hook, saying sometimes that God is limited by the material He has to work with, but I wonder if the limitations are greater than that, too great for "persuasive" to be the best word. Cynthia, one can say that either the liberal church or the traditional church is of the devil to explain whichever one is farther from God, in one's view, but what would keep God from persuading the wayward side (even if the waywardness came from standing still)? My most consistent prayer is to follow His will, not mine. My liberalism has become even more intense with that. I'm sure many conservatives genuinely want this too, to follow God, not pride or idols. Maybe God's will is taking us in different directions for a good reason, not anything demonic. Maybe all the political strife I hate is good for us. I long for the explanation to be simpler, though, that it's just not that easy to follow God, that our communication from God is nowhere near effective enough to be "persuasive", but takes more from us than many might think. flow, why do you think God allows the devil? My mind isn't closed to the idea of a devil, but the absence of God would seem to play a similar role to me. Of course that would be different from what Fred was describing. Between natural suffering and what our culture has put into our minds, I'm not sure what the point would be for any malevolent spirit, especially one with whatever a quantum computer is. Fear and anger can be gifts, you know. Fear can be prudence. Anger can be determination. There's a lot more fear and anger around than that, but such is nature. Nature can be too plentiful sometimes, too stingy at others.

One point has been sticking in my mind from Brother Roger’s list of features of progressive vs. conservative Christianity. It’s the distinction between progressives believing in a persuasive God and conservatives believing in a coercive God. As a heretic, I face a number of intellectual challenges. One is that I need to make sense of how the orthodox church could be so wrong about so many things, about theology, about the reality of how little it helps the needy despite Matthew 25: 31-46, about the problems of an agenda that is anti-abortion, anti-evolution and anti-homosexual. For the orthodox, it’s easy to say they’re not wrong. Beyond any detailed arguments to that effect, how could their omnipotent God allow His church to go so off track? How could so many Christians in agreement be wrong? How indeed? My bias is to start talking about the cult-like mentality of conservative conformity, but where is God in that, coercive or persuasive? Here is a God who confronted Paul on the road to Damascus, Paul’s testimony about this seeming quite believable to me. If that was all about God’s power, wouldn’t God indeed be able to maintain His church as being just what He would have it be? What if much of it was about Paul being prepared for such an experience, even the complete turnaround that it was, maybe with misgivings about the zealotry with which he was pursuing followers of Jesus, maybe because of the devotion he had already toward God, just needing a new idea of who God was. If God could do this with all of us, persuasively or coercively, wouldn’t He have us all seeing the same God? Someone can say that it’s some impenetrable mystery that God doesn’t give everyone faith like this, that God has some good reason to choose when and where to be persuasive or coercive. Maybe God looks at the imperfections of the many religions around the world, even many religions within Christianity, and still supports these many faiths, knowing that some faith is better than none. I can’t make sense of such ideas. To me what makes sense is that God is not in charge of people’s beliefs, not coercively, not persuasively. It is just like the argument about God being omnipotent. How could this world be the best that an omnipotent God would do? Just to make 144,000 or some other magic number of followers? It doesn’t make sense. How could the world’s religions be the product of any very powerful God? Is the truth so strange that no one can get it right even with such a God’s help? It also doesn’t make sense. My favorite definition of God is that God is the one who answers when I pray, “God help me!” I have experience that helps me believe that this God is about power, love, and goodness, but the ideas that He must be perfect in these things don’t come from anything real. When I went back to praying in my thirties, it was as a last resort. With time, it became my first resort to pray to God for direction and about whatever emotions came up for me. God has become very real to me this way, and while Jesus Christ is my Lord and my Savior, it is also true that I am devoted to God, whoever and whatever God is. I wonder if I could look back and see the spiritual truth of everything that happened in my life if I would see God intervening countless times to get me to my current faith or if there were no interventions at all. If there were, what loving parent would forego being coercive on occasion, insisting on only being persuasive? If there were none, then that would confirm for me that “cooperative” would be a better word for how God works than either coercive or persuasive. I’m interested in how others see this.

After 4 hours of not thinking about it, her name suddenly came to me. It's Sheila Walsh. There are a lot of places on the internet about her. Memory is such a strange thing.

I don't remember the name of Pat's previous co-host, but the story about her was that she became deeply depressed and had to be replaced. I forget where I learned that, but it was memorable because of the contrast between her illness and the "God fixes everything" mentality of the show. I know at least one evangelical who became deeply depressed after the Y2K scare turned out to be nothing, making him feel discouraged about all these men he trusted who said it would be a big deal. That depression went on and on, unhelped by medicine, bad enough for him not to leave the house for months. His wife finally had him committed, and he came back with electro-shock therapy. His faith was the same afterward as before. It is possible to say that all such things are God's will, but I would wonder if there is another message in becoming so ill and not getting better but for a physical intervention.

I can’t imagine any statement of liberal or progressive Christianity turning out as crisp or dogmatic as that of Bible-believing Christianity, but to me, the 8 points seem more vague with words of compromise than I would think desirable. For example there’s point 1: “Have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.” “approach”? “way” would have been offensive or have undesired implications? Is this about following God? Is this about having an understanding of God or a relationship with God? Can God substitute for my earthly father who didn’t love me? I know I can agree with this point to the extent that it says Christianity is about Jesus. Does it say anything else? I don’t mind if it doesn’t. I believe in liberty in coming to the God of my understanding, different things from God for different people. I just would prefer it say something clearly. It seems this sort of language is used for the sake of being inclusive. This goes too far for me in point 2: “Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God’s realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us.” If I thought that the God of my understanding was utterly subjective instead of having some basis in reality, I don’t know that I’d bother with Him. There is objective truth. There may even be absolute truth. Who knows enough to deny that? I can’t imagine God condemning Gandhi while favoring someone who just gave lip service to Jesus. Well, I can imagine it, but if so, I’m way off on knowing who God really is. Still the idea that God decides whom to favor, not me, is a long way from saying, “All religions are true.” I think a better argument can be made that all religions are false to some degree, including Christianity. This is one of the tensions of our time. 200 years ago the mainstream of biology was to believe in the special creation of species. Now it is evolution. The mainstream of geology 200 years ago was Noah’s flood. Now it’s plate tectonics. Fundamentalists strain to deny any problem to their faith from this, yet it is an absolute truth that the order of creation presented in Genesis is contradicted by the fossil record. The Bible is wrong, unless one accepts a metaphysics by which science is meaningless. It is at least objective truth that the Bible is wrong, if not absolute truth. So who is going to respond to fundamentalism by saying that they have their truth and we have ours? I can’t go along with that. How about for Scientology? How about for atheism? Lots of us prefer being nice guys to standing for anything, but I don’t think that’s an attractive position. I am inclusive to some degree, maybe even to the same degree as those who crafted points 2, 3, and 4, but there are some limits to that in practice. Love is inclusive, but it’s not utterly permissive and passive. I wish to come across a strong statement in favor of experience-based Christianity, where it is said explicitly that the Bible does not replace God, but provides an experience that while it is unique, as it is the sole source of writings about Jesus, it is writing with the shortcomings any other human writings have. I remember hearing a sermon by an Episcopal member of TCPC on science and religion. He described himself as having one foot in the Bible and one foot in science. This describes liberal Christianity in general, I think, being still heavily attached to tradition while trying to respond to modern stresses like evolution. When are people going to trust God while moving into the 21st century? I don’t want one foot in the Bible. I want both feet in God. I find that I can have both feet in both God and science at the same time. Maybe I couldn’t do that if I were the sort of scientist who denies spiritual experiences, but I don’t. I don’t find reasons to believe in physical miracles, but God can have powerful effects on us mentally, even miraculously so. So I live with some tension between being like the most skeptical scientist or the most gullible mystic, but somewhere between those two, God speaks to me. I don’t know how many liberal Christians are ready to say that empiricism and faith are not only perfectly compatible, but require each other, that one can learn who and what God is from looking out in the world and measure one’s own devotion to God by looking inside us and looking at our actions. Prayer doesn’t require knowing how it draws us closer to God, but it does require something positive to keep going. More points aren’t going to help me with that. I want to hear clergy who aren’t ashamed of experience-based Christianity. I want to hear clergy who aren’t embarrassed to call for an end to poverty. In my retirement, I volunteer at a charity helping a variety of needy people. When clergy make them more of a priority, I’ll notice. Otherwise, the 8 points are just words.

Whatever determines that process, flowperson, I've noticed it applies just as much to political "truth" as it does to religious "truth". It is easy to be self-serving when one decides what is the most objective truth, but I will always like the technique of trying to understand everyone's point of view. Partisanship has people looking so quickly for things to attack and things to defend in what someone is saying. I think it is helpful to see if there is anything I can agree on in listening to anyone and then think about that. That's not on everyone's agenda. Fred, yet those who you see as having an epistemology of authority also embrace alternative medicine such as nutritional supplements or high colonics. Until they developed their current political power, they were suspicious of government. They are still suspicious of bureaucracy. They don't go for just any authority. The Bible is a special authority not just to conservatives, but to many liberals as well, who feel the need to say Bible stories are at least metaphors from God rather than say they are ancient myths, some of which being completely useless today. Like many today I prefer empiricism as epistemology. Of course, "seeing is believing" is not a modern invention, but the success of science does give a standard for how well empiricism can work. That it doesn't work as well for spiritual experiences is more about how difficult it is for us still to reach inside someone's mind than about empiricism not applying to some part of life. It's interesting to me that while "seeing is believing" comes naturally to us, so does filling in all gaps with fantasy, even if that fantasy is an atheistic fantasy that no intelligent person should even consider the existence of God. People manage to be very opinionated despite the lack of data sometimes. I think that's beyond any dualism to explain. It is our nature. How many factors determine how our nature and culture interact remains to be seen.

I like Marcus Borg's 2003 book, The Heart of Christianity, regarding what's wrong with emphasizing correct beliefs as fundamentalism does. The rest of the book is about what Borg thinks Christianity should be. I disagree with some of that, but I think that is the reasonable order of things, for different people to see so many invisible aspects of spirituality differently, not that there is one true church. Regardless of one's beliefs there are plenty of people to say you're going to hell for them not being correct, for not worshiping on Saturday, for not having some other essential belief. I think a lot of people feel they should be immune to such attacks. Even after having progressed in my beliefs for about 20 years, I can still wonder if I'm wrong about some things. A large group of believers in the exact same beliefs I have would help, but as a liberal I don't have that. Having learned to live without that, to trust in the God I know through prayer, through life and through my intellect, I think I wind up with more trustworthy beliefs than those who have just gone with their crowd since their youth and believed in apologists regarding the problems with orthodox beliefs. I am convinced that with guilt or any other negative emotion, the best place for me to start is with prayer. Doing that convinced me there is a God and that He is not depicted perfectly by the Bible. In the end, it is He to whom I want to conform, not those who thunder how right they are and can't understand anyone else to the contrary.

I like Brother Rog's contrasts between "progressive" and "conservative". As a liberal Christian I am resigned that for the foreseeable future liberal religion will mean many different things from having one foot in tradition and one foot in secularism to many idiosyncratic theologies, from complete rationalism to a degree of mysticism that would even make conservatives uncomfortable. I am sure there are various dimensions one can describe such as who and what God is or rationalism vs. mysticism. One approach is to have an orthodox position on each one of these, to which megachurches can acheive complete adherence, or to promote freedom to come to God in whatever way God and the human seeking God work out. I trust the latter process much more. I wouldn't if I could have orthodox beliefs, but I tried those. They are unbelievable to me, as are the conservatives who try to sell those beliefs. Instead I find God to be decidely unorthodox. So I am a liberal, progressive, whatever. I'll even accept heretic as long as no one wants to burn me for it.

I’ve heard a lot of discussion about Paul, about parallels with other religions of the Roman Empire, etc. Some of it is to give Paul credit for Christianity, but those who blame him for making Christianity something it shouldn’t be have kept my mind thinking about this for some time. Isn’t the question about whether Paul hijacked Christianity quite simple? If there is not an interventionist God, Paul had no idea what he was talking about, so who cares? It’s interesting as far as the cultural evolution of religion, but not all that important. If there is an interventionist God, why would God allow such a hijacking? The only thing that would make sense to me then would be that if there was a hijacking, God did it, not Paul. Now I realize that debating the existence of an interventionist God is not that easy, but that one is an important point no matter what else. Once one has taken a position on that, though, doesn’t that essentially settle whether Paul was a mover and shaker vs. just a pawn, maybe even God’s finger puppet? It seems to me that would save wasting a lot of time arguing about this aspect of whether Christianity is what it should be. Can there be agreement on that, or am I missing something?