Neon Genesis

As Thomas Paine said in the Age of Reason, the problem with subjective personal religious experiences is that they're only convincing to the people who have them and to everyone else they're hearsay. If you find personal subjective experiences of the supernatural to be helpful to your religious walk, that's fine for you, but you can't expect anyone else to believe it or get upset when a scientist disagrees with you if you don't have any objective proof. If subjective personal experiences are proof of religious claims, then any claim of a subjective personal experience is just as valid as any other no matter how dangerous it might be to claim it. If you're skeptical of Benny Hinn and other faith healers' claims to miraculously be able to heal people's diseases, then you'll understand why Shermer and other skeptics apply the same logic more broadly. And this is a problem because? Has there been some other method that's successfully explained the origins of the universe? Do you actually know any materialists or what they actually think or are you just making stuff up about materialists at this point? Invoking God of the gaps arguments have done nothing towards solving scientific problems either. So disbelieving in personal subjective experiences is worse than religions that circumcise women, encourage terrorists to bomb buildings so they can get 72 virgins when they die, or religions encourage murdering abortion doctors and gay people? Yes, fear the dreaded materialists because we're far worse than religious terrorists because at least the terrorists believe in God. How inclusive and open minded of you. It seems to me that you don't consider anyone who's not religious to be an enemy, in which case are you any different than the fundamentalist Christians? Perhaps you should listen to Jesus' own words about plucking the shard out of your own eye before you go around calling everyone else who doesn't agree with you dogmatic. Now this is the last straw. As a materialist and someone who is also a spiritual atheist, I have tried to be nothing but kind and respectful to everyone on these forums and this is how you repay my kindness? I find your claim that materialists are somehow denying our sense of humanity to be bigoted, closed minded, and insensitive and hurtful and I for one demand an apology from you.

As a materialist myself, I don't see the problem with this view. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To proclaim there is scientific proof of a soul or a supernatural realm beyond death that we live on in after we die or that there exist a supernatural creator god which intervenes with the natural world is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. If there is a supernatural realm which exists beyond the natural and materialism is such a poor philosophy that doesn't stay true to the actual scientific method, then why is there no evidence yet of the supernatural? I think you're oversimplifying materialism here. Not all non-believers in the supernatural deny subjectivity and both atheists and theists are equally divided over this issue. For example, on the issue of morality, some atheists like Jeremy Bentham and Sam Harris have taken the position that morals are objective and can be determined through science while there are other atheist philosophers like J.L. Mackie who took the position that morality is subjective and something that humans created rather than discovered and Nietzsche took subjectivity to such extremes that he believed there was no point to morality and meaning. On the other hand, many postmodernists take relativity to the opposite extreme to the point where you can't say anything objective about reality at all. Likewise, religious believers are also divided on the issue of whether or not morals are relative or objective and I don't think invoking God is a solution to the problem either. I could list off several examples where society would be worse off with religious morality too. I've heard an interview with Shermer on the Point of Inquiry podcast and in fact Shermer is a defender of progressive Christianity and has argued that atheists should work together with Christians who support evolution to combat intelligent design. I think it's unfair to give Shermer the short end of the stick when he's in fact willing to work together with progressive Christians on these issues simply because you have different theological conclusions. Why shouldn't all ideas be open to criticism? And which materialists think that everyone should be reduced to objects?

When Galileo disagreed with the church about whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe, the church accused Galileo of trying to destroy faith and placed him under house arrest. When Darwin opposed the literal belief in Genesis with the theory of evolution, Christian fundamentalists accused anyone who believed in his theory of worshiping Darwinism as a religion. New Age practitioners accuse medical doctors of believing in "scienctism" because they don't use dangerous and unproven "alternative" medicine to cure people. To quote Daniel Dennet, I'm not trying to be insulting to Mike and I have a lot of respect for him, but if you think there's proof that materialism is wrong or that God exists, you should present your proof to refute Shermer instead of resorting to personal attacks against him. Too many times we demonize fundamentalists as being the only Christians of being anti-science and again I'm not trying to mock Mike or accusing him of being anti-science, but we should be careful of our own biases and sacred cows. If we believe in the third point of Progressive Christianity of being inclusive of different world views, should we not be inclusive of Shermer's world view and taking it into consideration that he may have valid points instead of immediately shooting down his ideas before we give what he has to say a chance? Even if you disagree with Shermer and other materialists, should we not love him like Jesus loved his enemies?

I have to disagree as I think more talk about the issues will help build bridges and change people's views. One example is with my own mother. My mother was raised a fundamentalist Christian and she used to take the perspective that homosexuality was evil and that marriage should be between a man and a woman and that gays were part of a secret agenda to destroy Christianity. But recently my mother was watching the View and they were interviewing Lady Gaga and they were talking about Elton John being a gay father and showed clips of him with their baby. My mother was gushing over how adorable the baby was and then she said out of the blue that there was nothing wrong with gays wanting to get married and raise children. I think if we all just shut ourselves from the world and didn't ever discuss these issues with anyone then people like my mother would never get exposed to these kinds of ideas like tolerance and loving others and my mother might still have her old homophobic beliefs. The surveys all show that if you know a gay person, the less likely you are to be homophobic. This is why I think it's important for gays who are able to come out to come out and speak openly about these issues to let the world know we're just like everyone else, that there's nothing to be afraid of to change people's minds and hearts. If we don't fight these battles and share who we are with the world, who will? Nobody ever won a civil rights battle in an ivory tower. And for what it's worth, Rob Bell's new book Love Wins, which argues against the existence of hell, is number one on Amazon.com's list of top religion books, so apparently the debate over the existence of hell is still a hot topic (no pun intended) among Christians.

Of course I don't think you'll ever convert the hardcore believers but there is a subgroup of Christians who might believe homosexuality is a sin but could be converted to supporting LGBT rights like Philip Yancey and Tony Campalo who could help reach the evangelical community in a way that a hardcore liberal like Spong couldn't and we're missing out on all sorts of opportunities to build bridges if we just excommunicate everyone that doesn't agree with us on the moral aspect but might be an ally in the political aspect.

So what does everyone think about Spong's gay manifesto? As much as I greatly respect Spong, I have to disagree with his suggestion that we should just stop debating this issue and pretend it's already been resolved. On the one hand, as a gay man, I can understand Spong's frustration with homophobic Christians who claim to be representing the love of Jesus and I think there are some people you just can't have a dialog with on this issue like the Phelps and David Bahati. On the flip side, I think there are many Christians who are good people with good intentions but are being misinformed by their churches on the issue of homosexuality and I think it would be a disservice to the church to cut off dialog with these people simply because we disagree on this issue. I'm a member of the message boards at the site GayChristian.net and I like the healthy balance they try to take on this issue. They have two sides on the issue about homosexuality that they label as "side A Christians" and "side B Christians." "Side A" Christians are Christians who believe homosexuality is approved of by God and that it's possible to be a Christian and be in a same-sex relationship while "side B" Christians are Christians who think homosexual acts are sinful but it's not sinful to be attracted to the same sex. They have a lot of members on both sides of the issue and they've had Christian guests on both sides of the issue on their podcast to foster a dialog of tolerance and acceptance within the church. The one side they won't accept as part of the dialog is the side that claims even thinking homosexual thoughts is a sin and lies about how homosexuality can be changed but I think this is a more productive dialog then Spong's suggestion. Do you think we should continue having dialog with Christians who think it's a sin but still want to have this dialog or should we just stop debating it like in Spong's manifesto?

First of all, Isaiah 7 was not a prophecy about the Virgin Mary but it was a prediction given to King Ahaz about his child. Second of all, the entire virgin birth myth was based on a mistranslation of the Isaiah prophecy. Matthew based his reading on the Greek translation of the OT and so he mistranslated "young woman" as "virgin" and the whole virgin birth is based around this mistranslation. You're essentially trying to argue that abortion is murder because Mary would have murdered Jesus if she had an abortion and the messiah never would have been born. Even if Mary did have an abortion, the notion that God couldn't have found some other way to bring the messiah into the world is just silly and is putting limits on the power of God and this is just an argument from emotional appeal. So why did God drown all the babies in the world in the flood and why did he murder all the first born babies in Egypt?

It also makes one wonder what the relationship was between the Roman centurion and his servant that Jesus healed.

Bishop Spong argued in his book Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism that in ancient times, it was considerable acceptable for men to engage in sexual relationships with younger boys as long as the older man was the top when having anal sex and this was especially common among Roman soldiers and their servant boys. So it was ok for a young boy to be the bottom when having anal sex with another man, but once he became an adult, the younger boy was expected to give that up and engage in sexual relations with women. A man who continued to be the bottom in anal sex as an adult was considered an abomination because he was degrading himself by allowing himself to be used as a woman and this is what it means when Leviticus condemns men who have sex with other men as if a woman and why lesbianism wasn't condemned. The sin was not gay sex itself but a man degrading themselves by taking a "woman's role" in sex. P.S. Please forgive me if this is TMI. I wasn't sure how else to explain it with euphemisms.

I think this Jack Black video pretty much sums up every debate on homosexuality ever made:

There are also passages in the NT attributed to Paul where he says slaves should obey their masters and other passages attributed to Peter where he says women are the weaker vessel yet most Christians today do not believe in slavery and if you told a woman she was weaker than men, you would get a kick in the hard place. There's also some debate that Romans 1 doesn't condemn homosexuality but pagans who had sacred prostitution to worship Dionysus: http://www.gaychristian101.com/Romans-1.html

This is the old "It's Adam and Eve; not Adam and Steve" cliche fundamentalists love to quote but my experience has been if your argument could be fit into the size of a bumper sticker, you should be skeptical of its merit. If God intended the Adam and Eve story to be a condemnation of homosexuality, surely he would have mentioned it then. Yet nowhere in the Genesis account is homosexuality ever mentioned or condemned. In fact, God explicitly gave Adam and Eve permission to do whatever it was they pleased to in the garden expect to eat from the fruit. Presumably, if God created other people in the garden of Eden for Adam and Eve to have sex with, God would have allowed them to engage in same-sex relationships as the only commandment in the garden of Eden was to not eat the apple. The Garden of Eden story has been used by fundamentalist Christians to justify all sorts of horrific actions. Because God told Adam and Eve that they had dominion over the Earth, many anti-environmentalist Christians have used this as an excuse to destroy the planet and waste our natural resources. Because it was the woman who sinned and not Adam, Christians have used this as a justification for why women should be considered inferior to men and why women should be banned from voting or from ever having any leadership roles or from having a job. Other Christians used the passage where God says to be fruitful and multiply as a justification for overpopulating the planet and banning birth control and abortion. On the flip side, the Genesis creation account doesn't say anything at all about grandparents and single mothers, so grandparents and single mothers must be sinners then.

I'm not saying I believe in the doctrine of hell myself as I find the doctrine of hell to be the most immoral doctrine of all of Christendom to be honest. But I also think that while Jesus certainly was revolutionary in many ways, if he was a human like us, then it's not out of the realms of possibility that Jesus shared many of the same cultural biases and influences we still deal with in modern day churches. Having said that, if Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, I don't think this means Jesus was an evil person or crazy like C.S. Lewis suggested in his Trinitarian trillema. But apocalyptic prophets were a dime a dozen in Jesus' time and so it would be understandable to me for him to share some of those beliefs given the corruption of the Roman government and their treatment of lower class citizens. Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet would also fit in within bible scholars' standard of the criteria of embarrassment in which passages in the gospels that would be embarrassing to early Christians are deemed to be more likely to be historical than those passages which confirm Christian bias. Jesus failing in his prediction of the end of the world would certainly fit that criteria to me. Having said that, while I think hell is taught in the bible, I also think the doctrine of universalism is in the bible too though I think it's found more in the OT than in the NT in the form of Sheol. I just think we should be careful of any attempts, whether liberal or conservative, to try and find a harmonized, universal agreement of doctrine in the scriptures and we should also be skeptical when Christian authors' image of Jesus starts sounding like their own beliefs and values.

That's an interesting argument and I haven't heard of that interpretation before but Bart D Ehrman argues in his book Jesus Interrupted that Jesus never intended to die on the cross but that he and the apostles thought the end of the world was going to happen within their lifetime and the Son of Man (who Ehrman sees is a separate supernatural being from Jesus) will establish an actual kingdom of God on Earth that would be ruled by the apostles and the Son of Man. But after Jesus was executed and the end of the world never happened, the disciples of Jesus couldn't understand why the prophecy didn't happen so they reimagined the teachings of Jesus so now the kingdom of God was a spiritual realm that wasn't of this world and that rather than obtaining salvation from following the ethical teachings of Jesus, salvation came from having faith in the resurrection of Jesus. I've also heard other arguments from John Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack that the apocalyptic scriptures attributed to Jesus represent a later tradition in the Q gospel that was written after the destruction of the temple rather than being a prediction before its destruction. Rather than the gospels portraying one single view of Jesus, the gospels present several views of who Jesus was and the Q gospel's view of Jesus evolves from Jesus being a Cynic sage to an apocalyptic prophet later on in the tradition of the Q sayings. It's good to see you posting again, billmc! I missed your presence on the forums and I hope we'll be seeing more of you again.

The way I see it is that the bible contains both views of universal reconciliation and eternal hellfire. In the Hebrew scriptures, the afterlife is not heaven or hell but Sheol, which literally means the grave and was a place where everybody went to when they died. Although there are passages in the gospels where Jesus speaks of Gehenna rather than hell, there are other passages where both Paul and Jesus predict the end of the world will happen within their lifetimes and how God will cast the sinners into the outer darkness where the worm burns for all eternity.

Another good PC-themed song I would like to add to my list is this song God Help The Outcasts from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKPEDjUhRO4 I love the part where Esmeralda sings "I thought we all were the children of God" which I think is a beautiful reminder that Jesus' message was one of inclusion and not exclusion and the gospel was meant for everybody, not a social club for the elites of society.

What are your favorite songs that express the values of Progressive Christianity? They don't have to be explicitly Christian or religious songs but any song from any genre that you like that you think expresses the eight points of Progressive Christianity. Two songs that come to my mind are Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth: and also Lady Gaga's Born This Way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvFqQ0ALhhA

Speaking as a gay man, the way I see it is any god who would torture someone for all eternity simply because of who they love is not a god worthy of worship and thus cannot be God at all. Whatever the OT says about homosexuality is irrelevant because Jesus' death superseded the old law and Christians are not required to follow the old law. Fundamentalists are cherry picking the bible when they cherry pick the Leviticus condemnation of homosexuality while ignoring the condemnation of eating shrimp or wearing clothes of mixed fabrics. Whether or not Paul condemned homosexuality or if it's all a mistranslation is also irrelevant because Jesus is supposed to be the center of Christian teaching, not Paul. Jesus never said anything about homosexuality and even assuming the traditional reading of Paul's views on sexuality are correct, Paul only spoke about homosexuality twice. Both Jesus and Paul spoke far more about religious hypocrisy, sectarianism, and judgmentalism than they did homosexuality. There are passages attributed to Paul that support slavery yet literalists have no problem ignoring those verses. If it's acceptable to "cherry pick" the bible verses on slavery, I don't see why we can't do the same with the two whole verses of the NT on homosexuality.

Have you tried the Metropolitan Community Church?

And in my closing, I will simply post a link to the anti-homosexuality bill itself and let the actual bill speak for itself: http://wthrockmorton.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/anti-homosexuality-bill-2009.pdf Now here's the quote from Leviticus 20:13

What facts have I gotten wrong? You claimed only true Christians can understand the meaning of morality yet "true" Christians are using their literal belief in the bible to form a "kill the gays" bill in Uganda or are you denying there is such a bill? This is not a premise. This is going on right now in Africa. You can see for yourself that this is a real bill inspired by literal beliefs in the bible:

I did not say that the book of Leviticus makes people gay. I think you're missing my point. My point is that you're claiming only bible-believing Christians can have a true understanding of morality if you believe the bible to be literally true. Yet bible-believing Christians in Uganda are trying to pass a law to execute gay people because of their literal belief in the book of Leviticus which commands gay people to be executed because God thinks it's an abomination. These Uganda politicians have specifically cited the teachings of western evangelical Christians like Rick Warren and Richard Cohen as the inspirations for this anti-homosexuality bill. And it goes even further than that, the evangelical Christian, Scott Lively even helped to make this bill. If you can only have a true understanding of morality if you're a bible-believing Christian, why didn't being a bible-believing Christian stop these people from trying to execute gay people or make them more moral people? But there's also a fourth option which many people in the ancient world believed, that perhaps the universe was created by an impersonal god but there's a pantheon of multiple personal deities who worship the impersonal deity.

Sorry, this double posted for some reason.

So, if we can only understand the meaning behind morality through Christianity, why are there Christians in Uganda who are trying to get a bill passed that would execute gay people simply for being gay because of their absolute literal belief in the book of Leviticus? I think this is a good point to bring up, Mike. Even if you believe in God, there are still unanswered questions people have about God that have no easy answers to. Even St Paul says in his famous love chapter that we only know in part now and are seeing through a glass darkly. One example of a question with no easy answers is the problem of evil. For centuries since Epicurus first asked the question, both believers and skeptics have questioned how could a universe filled with suffering be compatible with the existence of a loving, personal, god. Likewise, many believers and skeptics have tried to come up with universal absolute answers to these questions but none of these answers have been universally accepted by everyone and people on all sides of the religious spectrum continue to ask this question and the "answers" continue to lead people into completely different directions.

You claim only true Christians can have meaningful morality so why is it that bible-believing Christians are no more moral or holier than thou than non-Christians are? The bible says you'll know who Christians are by their fruits, so where are your fruits that only true Christians can have a meaningful morality? All you have presented in favor of your understanding of morality being correct is theological arguments, but you have no evidence in favor of your arguments, so if you believe Christianity is more than just a leap of faith, where's the evidence that it's more than a leap? On the other hand, I have posted evidence to the contrary that bible-believing Christians are not morally superior to non-Christians at all or understand morality any better yet you dismiss it as being unimportant while insisting non-Christians are going to hell unless they accept your beliefs without evidence.