FireDragon76
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Posts posted by FireDragon76
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I recently found this video. There's some interesting food for thought:
It's good that some people are thinking about these issues. I know I have. What's frustrating is when you are in a congregation where the pastor simply doesn't care about the relevance of the religion. That is offensive to somebody like me who values their own time. Coddling octagenarians is all fine and dandy but misunderstanding and refusing to listen to younger people who come to church is simply unacceptable, it's organizational suicide.
Plus, I'm not sure that the trend towards individualism can be halted, or that it even should be. People have just lost faith in the Christian narrative of the world. There are some real alternatives to the loneliness Pr. Baumann talks about, such as practicing mindfulness, that doesn't require a community. Perhaps that is the spirituality of the third millenium. We have to find new practices and new stories that center our lives and that cannot be swindled away by con-men.
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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.
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14 hours ago, thormas said:
Never seen that channel but PC is well spelled out in the points and #1 & 2 go to Jesus - with both mentioning the 'teachings' of Jesus and #2 correctly stating that the Way is many (yet one). Any detailed connection would seem to be up to the individual or his community. To me, this is a statement of philosophy, correct?
What does "the Way is many and yet one" mean? This sort of thing is very vague, and also not demonstrated very well by real life experience.
Jesus believed in the Hebrew God. How exactly does atheism fit in with that? I am not saying the Christian Church shouldn't welcome everybody, but Christians have a right to identify their own religion as theistic, and it's arguably intellectually dishonest to think otherwise. Prayer and communion with a personal God has been a consistent aspect of Christian practice since the beginning.
A radical reinterpretation of Christian faith along New Age or Eastern religious lines begs the question of why be Christian at all? As Thich Nhat Hanh has demonstrated, one can be committed to a religion like Buddhism and still appreciate Jesus' teachings without committing oneself to a Christian identity.
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3 hours ago, thormas said:
I'm not familiar with Unitarianism but, still, the 8 points definitely are Christian, albeit enlightened, progressive Christian.
I'm familiar with the notion of "Progressive Christianity" from following the Progressive Christian channel on Patheos. The ethos of the 8 points seems more like new age sentiments, in comparison. There's insufficient explanation of the connection to Jesus of Nazareth or what he taught.
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5 hours ago, PaulS said:
And I would agree - that is why this forum falls under the banner of Progressive Christianity and not mainline Protestantism, but I don't quite see how you've connected mainline Protestant church to PC and this forum, and then jumped from there to say most people on this PC forum would be more comfortable in a UU congregation.
I think most people here (I'm sticking to most although I see you're now saying 'many') align themselves to the 8 Points of Progressive Christianity. Maybe that's not 'Christian' enough for some - is that what you are trying to get at by suggesting they'd be more comfortable in a UU congregation rather than a Progressive Christianity forum? Or do you just have issues in general with people calling themselves Progressive Christians? This is what I deducing from your comments above, but maybe I'm off the mark? Check out the link below for some familiarization with the 8 Points of PC:
https://progressivechristianity.org/the-8-points/
Frankly, the eight points sound more like Unitarianism than Christianity.
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9 minutes ago, PaulS said:
So why would Progressive Christians here feel more comfortable in a UU congregation if such a congregation regarded them as bible thumpers?
I'm suggesting many people here don't necessarily express the types of sentiments that would find a home in an actual mainline Protestant churches. Most mainline denominations in the US are still committed to theism, and even Trinitarianism, as part of their identity; it's in their liturgy and in their hymns, and even in some cases as part of their code of canon law.
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On 5/13/2019 at 9:26 AM, Burl said:
The official PC is a publishing house for mainstream liberal churches, but compared to the Unitarian Universalist denomination PC's are bible thumpers.
That's more or less been my experience as well.
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You can be a Unitarian Universalist without giving a whit about Jesus, but it would be difficult to conceive of a "Christianity" without Jesus.
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2 hours ago, PaulS said:
Agreed, but still not sure how you come to the conclusion that most people here would actually be happier in a UU congregation. I think they both have things to offer. Each to their own I guess.
Well, when people are talking about "the universe" instead of God, that's generally how UU's talk.
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48 minutes ago, PaulS said:
I'm not sure if you are implying that people here are 'pretending' to be Christian, but I was asking you why you thought " ....most people here would probably be much happier in a Unitarian Universalist church". If it is because they could enjoy more individualism there, rather than here, I am not sure I agree. I'd like to think that Progressive Christianity is inclusive enough to allow people as much individualism as they desire. Indeed, the PC 8-Points welcome's people of all walks ranging from 'Conventional Christians through to questioning skeptics and agnostics, and all sorts in between. I don't think one has to 'pretend' to be a 'Christian' to walk in line with Progressive Christianity.
Progressive Christianity still defines itself as Christian in some way, UU generally does not.
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On 7/19/2019 at 3:08 AM, PaulS said:
Where do you think Burl was saying people would be much happier to be away from, if you think he meant they would be 'much happier' in a UU Church? I could be mistaken, but I got the sense he wasn't saying they should be 'there' instead of 'here', but rather was saying they would be comfortable in a UU Church because it has some similar values to Progressive Christianity and 'here'.
UU's and progressive Christians seem subtly different. UU spirituality is much more individualistic... and doesn't pretend to be Christian.
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On 7/21/2019 at 3:26 PM, JosephM said:
I also believe ( from reading the gospels) that imagery was never meant to be understood literally in the first place. I think it is evident in the frequent use of parables and also Jesus's claim that his words were not his own and that his words were spirit and truth. That which is flesh is flesh and that which is spirit is spirit and as Paul later attests to in his 1st letter to the Corinthians when he says in effect .... that the natural man cannot understand because the words must be spiritually discerned.
Watch the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "Darmok" some time, and you get a clue into this.
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The creation-Creator distinction is a kind of dualism.
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On 7/21/2019 at 9:39 PM, thormas said:
God in himself (so to speak) or what is called the Godhead cannot be visualized: agreed. However, it seems important and necessary (and possible) to visualize the human experience of God as John did in his Gospel. And I wonder if one can/must say that the human experience of God must, in some real way, reflect the reality that is God in himself.
Muslims and Jews get along just fine without doing so, so I don't see why it is necessary.
I don't see the author of the Gospel of John anthropomorphosizing God- that would be a distortion of the doctrine of the incarnation. The notion of connecting ones religious teacher to the transcendent, what the doctrine of Incarnation is really about, is a common intuition across religions. And that's all that's occurring in the Gospel according to John.
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It seems to me, on doing more reading, that the simplest explanation for Jesus resurrection is that it is in fact an after death communication. An ADC is neither an hallucination nor a fabrication, since they occur in psychologically healthy, normal people.
The best evidence for this seems to be the apostle Paul himself, the earliest New Testament Christian witness we have. Paul seems disinterested in what modern day evangelicals think of as a "bodily resurrection". 1 Cornithians 14:45 is evidence enough for this, but there are other passages where Paul makes it clear that Jesus' and believers' existence after this life is qualitatively different from this life. (1 Corinthians 15:50). The only way evangelicals can explain Paul's words and reconcile them with their own perspective is to twist them beyond the usual meaning (even N.T. Wright engages in this sort of thing).
I know from my own research, these sorts of stories aren't unique to Christianity, either. In Tibetan Buddhism, stories of gurus or monks bodies disappearing are known and even said to occur into the present day, and this phenomenon has been studied by the Jesuit priest and Tibetan scholar, Fr. Francis Tiso.
Now that I have reached this currect perspective, I am trying to think about the implications for my own spiritual life. I am quite alienated from my conservative ELCA parish with its evangelical message- I don't think the message of relentless human brokenness and unworthiness particularly wholesome. I went to therapy for years to try to heal from emotional pain and to recognize in myself a capacity for self-love, and to have that message eroded seems problematic.
I've noted some improvements in my life as I distance myself from this kind of spirituality and I resume practicing meditation and adopting a perspective that is more open to humanistic Buddhists and mindfulness teachers (like Thich Nhat Hanh or Tara Brach). So, I am not sure exactly where I go from here. I still think believing in God can be helpful for many people, but I'm no longer in agreement with the evangelical emphasis on sin and unworthiness, and the inner passivity and guilt that seems to result from it.
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4 hours ago, thormas said:
I take it you don't mean the western religions like Judaism and Islam, correct?
As for the Eastern 'religions,' the Way of Taoism has always struck me as having to do with what I call God or the Sacred, even though the word might not be used. So too Buddhism but it has been a while since I studied Buddhism.
Not sure what you mean by protected: one either uses and is comfortable with God language, perhaps having reimagined it for their times, or not, correct?
Bodhidharma, the monk who was said to have brought the Zen tradition to China from India, was once asked what was the highest holy truth he had learned from years of meditation. "Vast emptiness and nothing sacred". The notion of "the Sacred" is frequently a descriptor in a dualistic worldview, typically of a certain notion of transcendence. The point of Mahayana Buddhism is that Dharmakaya (the eternal body of all the Buddha's wisdom) is immanent in the world, not separated from it.
Dao doesn't correspond to western concepts of God. People don't pray to Dao, nor is Dao itself loving. Dao is just the all-pervading principle behind the world of the "Ten Thousand Things" (phenomenal world) and the source of wisdom and virtue.
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3 hours ago, thormas said:
Again, I liked Borg but felt he had a view of Jesus (specifically, as you say to encourage social action) then looked for that Jesus in the NT - rather than let the NT speaks for itself.
Which book by Wright, I'm interested in checking it out?
This is an article by Tom Wright on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet and what that imagery actually meant in the first century:
http://ntwrightpage.com/2016/04/04/apocalypse-now/
Schweitzer understood the image of "the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven" literally, and concluded that Jesus was a mistaken apocalyptic prophet, as the space-time universe did not end. Wright argues that imagery was never meant to be understood literally in the first place by first century Jews.
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On 10/19/2016 at 9:23 AM, Burl said:
Reincarnation and karma do not make sense unless there is a durable 'self' which maintains its integrity after death.
My personal view is that these are folk beliefs which persist because they do a good job of explaining why life is not fair.
Buddhists implicitly believe in a person (pudgala) surviving physical death, without ascribing complete permanence to that person. There was a somewhat unorthodox (and now extinct) school called the Pudgalavadans that stated this implicitly, but most Buddhists considered that too much like the Hindu explanation to accept the implicit reality, and preferred to simply remain silent on the topic.
In some ways, the Buddhist view of the person is similar to Whitehead's Process metaphysics. We can acknowledge persons as real without ascribing to them a particular unchanging essence.
It does seem that the actual historical Buddha, based on the reasonable conclusions of scholarship, accepted beliefs like reincarnation, at least provisionally, because they were so widespread, and he saw some benefit in believing that our actions have consequences for the future. But in terms of dogmatic belief... that was foreign to his ethos of self-inquiry.
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On 10/17/2016 at 12:13 PM, BillM said:
Some religions, especially those of the East, tend to focus on diminishing self or attaining some state where self no longer matters. How would this concept, which I think has some benefit, mesh with Jesus' teachings about loving one's self? Are these notions at odds or do they overlap?
Jesus didn't preach about loving yourself, really. It was implicit in the life-affirming stance of his culture and religion. His time is not necessarily our time. We've had 1,000 years of deconstruction of traditional cultural belonging, religious quarrels and the resulting cynicism, and as a result, many people experience alienation... ever from themselves.
Anatman in Buddhism, at least what I'm familiar with, doesn't mean "I" perish at death. It's more like there never really was an "I" to begin with. This is something difficult and obscure to understand, though. It's why there's koans like "What was your face before your mother and father were born?"
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On 1/13/2017 at 3:29 PM, romansh said:
This requires omniscience on your part Burl. For all you (or I) know I might have a perfectly accurate visualization of god. Note I don't believe it ... but I can't assert it like you do.
God's essential being cannot be visualized- that's the most basic teaching in most Abrahamic religions. Islam and Judaism in particular are explict that God is more dissimilar to a human being than similar. When body parts are described for God, it is understood analogically.
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On 6/1/2017 at 9:44 AM, thormas said:
However Jen, there are those who remain 'rooted' and for them (and others), love is more than a vague ideal. So too, they realize that each generation must take its turn to nurture and care for what has been given to them and they see that for many of their fellows, what springs from the root, no longer provides shade, nor do they eat its fruit. So, they attempt to cut away what has withered, to prune where necessary and, hopefully, allow the tree of life to once again nourish the lives of those in the present generation. Gabriel Moran once wrote that revelation must have one food firmly planted in the Bible (the NT), which is the root as the other foot steps into the future. The back food supports and guides but the other foot, stepping into 'now,' allows the word to be hear by each new generation (in their words, within their world view) so there is always a 'Present Revelation.' Revelation is not facts or information handed down by the ancients in sacred books; revelation is always self-revelation, God's giving of himSelf so each generation might respond and live in relationship with the Sacred / with Love. The NT is the story of those who went before, who experienced the self-giving Love in the man Jesus; it is our beginning, our roots, but it means nothing unless, guided by it, we have our own present story of living in relation to the Sacred.
I see this thread as one venue to do that and the words God, Jesus and Christianity still speak to me and, with some watering and careful pruning, open dialogue with a new generation so the vine does not wither. Plus, I like what Chesterton wrote that the Christian is sure (in faith) of the ground on which he walks, so how can one fear a dialogue with God's children?
As somebody with a Buddhist past and who has returned to meditating daily as my refuge... I find the idea that a non-Christian cannot relate to God as a useful concept, and that we must instead be "protected" from it through language, rather paternalistic (even the concept of sacredness, for instance, isn't very helpful, since it is not necessarily found in some religious worldviews/philosophies).
Look at somebody like Thich Nhat Hanh, for instance. He is definitely a Buddhist but is capable of understanding the concept of God and its significance for Christians. He doesn't see the need, when talking to Christians, to mince words and pretend Christians believe in something they don't.
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Sorry about the double post.
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On 5/31/2017 at 7:48 PM, SteveS55 said:
The quote is contained in Sermon #87, Burl, although it may be a different number in some texts. Rather than take it completely out of context, I'm including a few more paragraphs from that Sermon below:
"While I yet stood in my first cause, I had no God and was my own cause: then I wanted nothing and desired nothing, for I was bare being and the knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth. Then I wanted myself and wanted no other thing: what I wanted I was and what I was I wanted, and thus I was free of God and all things.
But when I left my free will behind and received my created being, then I had a God. For before there were creatures, God was not 'God': He was That which He was. But when creatures came into existence and received their created being, then God was not 'God' in Himself - He was 'God' in creatures.
Now we say that God, inasmuch as He is 'God', is not the supreme goal of creatures, for the same lofty status is possessed by the least of creatures in God. And if it were the case that a fly had reason and could intellectually plumb the eternal abysm of God's being out of which it came, we would have to say that God with all that makes Him 'God' would be unable to fulfill and satisfy that fly!
Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God that we may gain the truth and enjoy it eternally, there where the highest angel, the fly and the soul are equal, there where I stood and wanted what I was, and was what I wanted."
Steve
I think this kind of mysticism can be easily misunderstood . It is not atheism in the usual sense. Just like how a Zen master might give a sharp rebuke to a student who merely parrots an answer to a koan without genuine understanding, we need to be cautious about misapplication of a mystical realization such as what Eckhart is expressing.
On 9/30/2018 at 1:41 AM, Jack of Spades said:Having read some of these Christian mystics, incl. Eckhart myself, I think it's a huge leap to assume that they mean "abandoning God" in sense of becoming an atheist. When you put together everything Eckhart has said, and interpret this particular sentence in the light of everything else he says (as opposed to, being biased to see atheism in it) it's quite unlikely that this sentence speaks of desire to reject theism.
The most likely interpretation, in my opinion, is that it's a rhetorical device for trying to point to a distinction between the kind of worship that is born of the holy spirit, and the kind of worship that is a product of unholy human mind. This is a common theme in all Christian traditions and it's not limited to medieval mysticism. In modern days protestantism, the same idea is put in statements such as "reject your religion and start following Jesus" or "I lay down all my religion and follow God" etc. I think we all know that the people who utter phrases like that, are not talking about becoming an atheist and very likely, the same applies to the likes of Eckhart.
Yes, that's closer to the truth. He's speaking of mysticism. He's not countenancing modern atheist cynicism. He's saying you have to go beyond even your concept of God. But that still necessitates having a concept in the first place and taking it seriously more than simply saying "This God stuff is merely wishful thinking".
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, primarily. Lately I've been trying to study more of Langdon Gilckey's thought.
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I'm done with church
in General Discussion
Posted
Messianics in my experience are generally preaching a fundamentalist evangelicalism, not appreciably different from the sort of thing I've already come to reject, just packaged with Judaica.