ParSal190

Also what Plumer says about church leaders was striking –

 

“Sometimes the battles are over LBGT issues and other times it may be about politics. But far more often, the conflict is rooted in theology and ideology. Frankly, with rare exceptions, clergy cannot freely teach what they learned in seminary or more importantly, what they have come to believe about their own understanding of the Christian religion, the bible or their faith. The resultant message is often mixed or muddled and almost always without passion.

+1. And while I hear Plumer about our calling to take responsibility as PCs for at least trying to turn the situation around, make no mistake it can be a hard, lonely road. In our town, for example, even (of all places) the local UCC congregation is at least majority fundamentalist, and institutionally supports religious right causes. They're good, kind people who do their best by the light they have, but they have fixed ideas about what a proper Christian is. And they don't, to my own understanding, understand how these ideas can hurt people.

Hi Rivanna I posted my own "harshie" as it were in another thread last week. It happens. I hear you on the lack of women regulars, and I don't really know what to say, especially being male myself and still somewhat new here.

Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh in that post...

Hi again, and thank you all for your kind responses. I do normally try to enjoy the moments my wife and I have together, but I've really redoubled this the past few days. Mike, your reference in particular to Borg's comment about our not dying into nothingness but rather into God was particularly meaningful. Also to Mike, at least some of the NDEs in Long's book that I noted apparently actually were, or at least the subjects experienced them to be, out of body experiences. I don't know what to make of this, but it is a bit more difficult to explain purely in terms of the physiology of body death than other more common facets of NDEs.

I have unique kinds of interior strength of my own, in retrospect, but one of the things I love and envy about my wife is her rock-solid faith in the basic goodness of the divine. That's one of the things that didn't change about her even when she converted out of Christianity. In many ways she's more spiritually attuned than I am. I think it adds up to she trusts the processes more. In fact she once told me of a pre-birth experience she believes she had. As the story goes, she apparently had lived a previous life as a golden retriever, and was talking to God still in that animal form about her next life. Apparently he offered her the chance to be a human in a coming life, saying she would do much good in her life but that it would be hard. She accepted without question. I don't know what to make of her story regarding its objective reality, but I know that having this vision in this life was very meaningful to her and it did, and does, impact the kind of person she is. And she has in fact had something of a hard life, and she has regardless done a lot of good.

I am feeling, if not precisely "well" regarding this issue, at least a bit better. I can't honestly say I never will fear for myself or my wife again, but your comments have helped me put my mind at ease somewhat. Again, thank you all.

Hi everybody,

You seem to have discussed this at least sporadically in other threads in this section, so I apologize if I'm rehashing things.

I am, as the topic suggests, interested in your views on the afterlife. But while I'm interested in all perspectives, I'm particularly solicitous of those of you who don't believe in an afterlife, or at least take seriously the possibility that there's not one. I'm frankly wondering how you handle it. I don't mean that in the sense that I'm challenging you or otherwise trolling. I just need an example for gathering strength.

If it were just me, well, yes I do for myself feel anxiety and even sometimes fear at the possibility. But lately I've been worrying more about my wife.

I told you somewhat about my wife in my intro thread. I love her very much. One of the unusual things about us is that she is somewhat older than me, enough so that while I'm not in my declining years yet, she...she's at least close. The odds are good that she'll die well before me. And lately it's really been killing me. I've not been sleeping well and I've been edgy. It's about 5 AM local time as I finish this. Yes, I've made some other posts tonight but part of it has simply been passing time because I can't sleep. My wife is snoring contentedly in the bed behind me at the moment, but I live every day lately in fear of the day or the night the snoring will stop.

I'd like to believe in an afterlife. About a month ago, I got Jeffrey Long's "Evidence of the Afterlife" from our local Borders trying to garner evidence for some objective reason for hope. The near death experience stories are compelling, and as anecdotal evidence goes it's not bad. But it's not anything like absolute proof, of course, and I can think of all sorts of reasons why what they're experiencing is pure physiological, the last gasps of the brain on its way to death.

The kicker is that my wife is far more sanguine about this than I am. As a Wiccan, she believes in reincarnation, with a stopoff between lives, if I understand her correctly, in a realm called Summerland, which is sort of like Heaven but more of a nature abode.

I must sound so solipsistic, but I'm really in pain over this. I can't understand why life even hypothetically has to end with bodily death. Even with all the pain this life offers, I can't understand why any good God would order it that it would just...end. Forever, and for everybody.