romansh

Should we do so when we know how harmful certain beliefs and indoctrination can be?

 

Should we stand against fundamental Christianity when we have experienced the harm it can cause, or should we let fundy's continue to live their beliefs as they see fit, and continue to push those beliefs and/or indoctrinate children, without voicing a contrary opinion?

Is standing for what we believe standing against what another believes?

Incidently in the scientific arena it perfectly OK to say I think Theory Z is wrong because we have evidence, a, b, c, d ... . Science thrives on comparing evidence to the theory.

Surely we are not suggesting NOMA?

. LIve and let live.

Hmmn?

In a small way you have stood up to the homosexuality is a sin group. Is this Live and let living? I don't think so myself.

When I see a child being taught that Earth is six thousand years old as a fact, what should we do, live and let live?

When we have school boards insisting that intelligent design is a scientific theory, should we live and let live?

I can't help thinking this stridency in New Atheism is a result of positions held by Christians where they feel science needs to be directed to a particular end result ... exemplified in the Wedge document (see above). The Wedge document (and the attitudes embedded behind it) is likely due to science slowly but steadfastly marginalizing certain theological view points. Did science (or scientists) do this intentionally? I don't think so.

 

Good question Rom. It seems to me we are prone to do harm to others most when " I and my beliefs are inseparable"

 

Joseph.

I do try and avoid beliefs ... fail miserably of course.

With a little bit of introspection ... the thoughts that do pop into my existence are combinations other peoples' thoughts, events that happen in my perview and other physical things like foods etc.

So while I might have more sympathy for a strong atheist point of view than say a literal interpretation of the Bible, I realize the literal view, the atheistic view, the progressive view and my view for that matter are simply a reflection how a particular part of the universe has unfolded.

So for me, ascribing properties, like Hate, to New Atheists or stupidity to fundamentalists is ultimately pointless. Might make us feel better or superior in some way ... but that too is an illusion.

I'm pretty confident in what God ISN'T - just trying to figure out what he/she/it IS.

 

Namaste

 

 

I can agree with this.

Just about every god I have managed to envisage it ain't

I don't think "New Atheists" as such condemn anybody. This seems to be the perogative of certain versions of God that throw certain sinners into some firery furnace.

People like Dawkins are probably totally bewildered by beliefs like a God that created the Earth ca 6000 years ago, at which time man walked peacefully with dinosaurs, despite the evidence to the contrary. To be frank so am I.

I think if New Atheists condemn anything, it is the reasoning and logic that goes into the belief; and they don't condemn the person.

An interesting question is where does a person end and the belief begin? Sometimes we are so tied to our beliefs, I and my belief are inseparable.

I don't see any difference between them either.

They are human and products of their experience, circumstances and the way the universe has unfolded in general.

An interpretation of the Christian message under discussion I like ... not sure it is logical, is ... it's not that we should not have enemies (or go to war or put people in prison etc) but that we should do it respectfully.

All to often we demonize the opposition, just think of the prewar Germany. Or 9/11 on both sides.

I think people pay lipservice to this .... love the sinner but not the sin.

Curriculum Vitae

Or resume in American.

edit

Tot siens Coen

Ummmm... I've read the Masks of God volumes and watched Mythos 1 & 2 a couple times, but Joseph Campbell's a bit deep, n'est ce pas?

Something I find with Campbell ... his oral work that has been transcribed I find much more accessible than his purely academic writing. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I got to page 27 and turned to the last page.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I guess I should have been more specific. Where in the John Shelby Spong repertoire would be a good place to start. There are so many it seems.

I can't recommend Jesus for the non religious. As an agnostic I found the book tedious ... a disection of Biblical quotes that supported a non traditional interpretation.

Whoever this book was aimed at ... I did not fit the bill.

Ummmm... I've read the Masks of God volumes and watched Mythos 1 & 2 a couple times, but Joseph Campbell's a bit deep, n'est ce pas?

Alors, mais oui

I have read several of Campbell's books .. My favourite is Power of

Myth ... available from library interlibrary loans as a DVD.

Having said that preferred the book .. glossy coffe table version.

close runner ups are:

Myths of Light and Pathways to Bliss

Joseph Cambell is a must.

A response to Spong's twelve theses, which I thought was interesting

https://www.phc.edu/UserFiles/File/_Other%20Projects/Global%20Journal/9-1/Stephanie%20Monk%20vol%209%20no%201.pdf

 

Thesis 1: No Theism
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.

 

Thesis 2: No Incarnation
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

 

Thesis 3: No Creation or Fall
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

 

Thesis 4: No Virgin Birth
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

 

Thesis 5: No Miracles
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

 

Thesis 6: No Substitutionary Atonement
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.

 

Thesis 7: No Resurrection
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

 

Thesis 8: No Ascension
8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

 

Thesis 9: No Moral Standards
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

 

Thesis 10: No Effectual Prayer
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

 

Thesis 11: No Guilt
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

 

Thesis 12: No Discrimination
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

 

Wright's position is when a society falls on harder times the gods also become a little harder.

For me in isn't an issue because I don't believe in an interventionist God.

 

Personally I am on the the verge of actively disbelieving in an interventionist/personal god, much in the same way I disbelieve in unicorns being literally real.

When I have too much time on my hands I watch what the bots are reading. Came across this interesting thread.

Taking a fairly broad interpretation of the word religion - to reconnect.

Relativitism and pluralism are both descriptions of the way some of us see the world. Taking the scientific world view it is easy to see relativitism as a reasonable description, from Galeleo and Newton to Einstein they all realized that at least the physical world can be described in relativistic terms. Science itself can be quite pluralistic - it divides and conquers, When a scientist does an experiment she does her best to isolate the variables from extraneous factors. End of the day she realizes no matter how how good a job she does the rest of the universe has not been isolated.

Our understanding of gravity, magnetism and quantum mechanics predict the effects extend to infinity. The amazing thing about Schrodinger's cat is not (would not be) a dead and alive cat in juxtaposition, but the box that could keep the universe out.

Science for me points to a monistic description of the universe where everything is connected (hence religion). So both relativitism and pluralism are useful like Father Christmas in pointing us in a particular direction, but they are ultimately false.

The Four Horsemen

Here is my take on the original sin:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever "--

Therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.

So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden.

Man was not thrown out Eden because he is in some way evil (commits evil acts, or is sinful) but because he learnt to differentiate between good and evil (parsing things into is and is not). To get back into the GoE we need to stop thinking in terms of evil (bad) and good. This is what the original sin means to me. It's almost the exact opposite of today's traditional Christian message.

To be fair this was Joseph Campbell's interpretation and I have taken it on. Where he got from I don't know.

The gloves really came off with this document

When googling came across Romans 14

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+14&version=NKJV

Yes, the main problem is their assumption that the Bible is flawless.

I think the book is probably what it is; though I suspect some interpretations/assumptions are closer to being flawless than others.

Can I suggest Lamb: The Gospel of Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

The book is ficticious, hilarious, respectful of Christ and imagines what might have happened during these years. It also points to the various Eastern influences in Jesus's teachings.

This is book I think would make it to my top ten all time reads.

For what it is worth ... here is my point of view.

A disclaimer first, my point of view is from a fairly devout agnostic point of view. I can't really call myself a Christian in any traditional sense of the word, and I don't think I fit into a progressive Christian definition, but I suspect many of my thoughts do overlap.

I think that the many versions and and interpretations of the Bible have stopped (to some extent) evolving (being tampered with or partially forged) after the James VI version came into being. Sure we have had refinements and perhaps supposedly more accurate translations and hence more refined interpretations. But the whole thing has been concretized into dogma for many people. There is a broad general concensus that there is some definitive version/interpretation that should be adhered to.

So hats off to progressive Christians who enrich the Bible (or more accurately their lives) by encorporating other traditions and our most accurate understanding of the way the universe ticks to evolve Christianity further. That some would express this as watering down of Christianity to me seems strange.

My two cents.