John Hunt

I have two kids (well, adults now), they're good people, I love them very much. I'd do anything to stop them having to spend a minute in Hell/burning lake of fire. The idea that there is a loving God who would condemn the vast majority of the 100 billion or people who have lived on the earth to trillions of years/eternity of torture because they haven't accepted His son as their savior - I just think that of all the teachings,of all the world's religions, this is the absolute worst.

Point taken, I'll stick to the gardening.......

Wish I'd spent my life doing something useful like farming...

I used to be heavily involved as a teenager with an evangelical para-church organization called the Navigators. For a confused adolescent, it supplied context, comradeship, direction, much like being a member of a street gang, or the Hitler Youth. We were the shock troops of God’s Army. The military analogies were often made explicit. I remember a week-long Bible study and leadership conference where the climax at the end was an all-night prayer session, in the manner that a medieval squire underwent in church before taking his vows the next day and being knighted. Praying for a few minutes, or even an hour or so, was one thing. But all night? How much is there to say? And how do you actually know you’re hearing the voice of God rather than your own? It’s not like anyone else in the room could hear Her talking to you. I couldn’t make the cut. Later I came across one of the wonderful Sufi poets, Rumi, whose words back in the thirteenth century summed up my experience: So what do I have to do to get you to admit who is speaking? Admit it and change everything! This is your own voice echoing off the walls of God. I've kind of lost touch since.

Seems to me that that's the main commandment; Jesus sums up his teaching in Matthew 22: 35-40 (and elsewhere). Apart from loving God (and who knows who God is - I see Him/Her as in everything, it's existence itself) the commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself (and that's not just the person next door).

Totally agree with that. And everything else said here. A bit envious of the "speaking in tongues" bit. OK, I know in some respects it's a "New age" (or Old Age") aspect of Christianity that's come back to the forefront in the last century or two, in the charismatic communities, the ecstatic experience where you're at your happiest dancing in the aisles/whatever....but it never happened for me. Even when very senior members of the Full Gospel Business Mens' Fellowship laid their hands on me and prayed for the Spirit to enter me (that was a very long time ago). The notion of "sin", particularly "Original Sin" - I'm pretty sure the first century Christians would not have believed in it. It runs contrary to the teaching of Jesus, who goes out of his way to affirm people as good rather than bad. The people he condemns are the religious leaders who say the opposite. He says you have to be like a child to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:17). It runs contrary to our understanding of human development today. There is grounding for the idea of inherited traits, sure. Many psychologists say that around half the variation in personality and behavior is inherited, the outcome of our genetic makeup. But the idea that we are all condemned before we start, through an action that had nothing to do with us, goes against common sense. I remember arguing with my mother about it, as a youngster. Brought up in a Baptist family I hadn’t been christened or confirmed. Baptism was an adult choice (or rather teenage, in my case). I didn’t feel convinced enough. In fact, the closest I’ve some to any kind of religious initiation was being blessed by a tribal witchdoctor in Sudan (I still have the cow bracelets). Anyway, I pointed out that if I wasn’t baptized into the Elect I was going to hell. Did she really believe that? She replied that she’d go to hell with me. Love beats doctrine, or should do. That was probably the point where I started to think for myself. But nobody today really believes their child is born evil, unless they’re mentally disturbed. The idea is obscene. It’s also immoral.

The Aztecs thought of hell as a period of time rather than a place, a belief they adopted from the Mayans. Their survivors dated it from 1519 when the Christians arrived.

Agree with irreverance, and I liked that post, hadn't come across "stages of Faith" before. You can argue till the cows come home as to what the pros and cons have been historically. In my own lifetime though, the most Christian nations on earth today, those with the highest proportion of churchgoers, have had some of the worst records, being amongst the most racist (South Africa and apartheid), the most genocidal (Rwanda – the home of the great East African Revival in the early decades of the twentieth century), the most tribal and murderous (Northern Ireland), the most nationalistic (Serbia), etc. And now you have 4 out of 5 white evangelicals (the largest religious grouping in the USA), who voted, voting for Trump, in both the last elections. With most of them in thrall to conspiracy theories. So I think, in practice, Christianity has been and is taking us backwards. Mind you, I don't think it has any connection with the teaching of Jesus (in so far as we know what it probably was), quite the reverse.

Wouldn't argue with the gist of that, I think people are pretty much the same everywhere, agree they can be/are racist and insular. But I do think they're better at "taking care of their own." Their societies work better for the people in them.

There's a lot of terrible stuff out there, bigotry and so on...I've come across it. I think you have to see it, sigh, move on. Do what you can to reduce the amount of bigotry in the world, personally. But it doesn't help to focus on each individual example of it - there's too much, you go nuts.....

For another spin on the complexity of the issue - I have many relatives in Norway, consistently ranks high on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report They're virtually all atheist. Churchgoing in all the Nordic countries is very low. A couple of generations ago, they were all Christian. I do think, though, that as societies they've somehow managed to absorb the best of the Christian teaching, like creating decent social support structures, minimizing inequality, focusing on what's best for everyone, whilst rejecting the worst. Particularly the kind of fundamentalist stupidity and bigotry that has been increasing in some of the more Christian societies over the last couple of generations.

Agree with all this....what I find concerning is that in recent years this kind of homophobia and racism seems to have become more acceptable, in the USA at least - I think (perhaps overly-optimistically) that it's still largely declining in the UK and much of Western (not so much Eastern) Europe.

Interesting and helpful, thanks.

I do think there are different levels of experience. There’s a “state of flow”; which could be experiencing the unity of the crowd at a soccer match, or a rock concert, or enjoying an extreme sport. But then there are the peak experiences, described by Abraham Maslow as “the moments of highest happiness and fulfillment.” There’s the wonder of a discovery, there’s gratitude at being loved, and at the power of love to change ourselves and others. At times most of us feel the pull of something, of being connected to a whole that embraces our little selves, that is in some sense absolutely “good.” Maybe even a sense of awe, that pinnacle of consciousness, where we see ourselves in something else, or indeed lose all sense of distinction, when the boundaries dissolve. We might describe it as God, variously emphasizing the loving aspect, or the beautiful, or the true, or simply as a mystery that we can touch the edges of but can’t know. These experiences might even lead to a state of self-transcendence. Sometimes, maybe just once or twice in a lifetime, we might have a breakthrough moment so strange and wonderful that nothing is ever quite the same again. We might even redefine the priorities in our lives. After all, the world is over there, and it’s astonishing. We’re here, and we’re the only starting point we have. Surely we’re related. If there’s a meaning behind it we want to know, to be part of it. And in so far as we’re rational creatures we need a reason for living and a framework to live by. Rules are useful for that. And life is more than rules and logic. Hope would be a nice thing too. At it best, religion, or spirituality, is a way of enabling it to come at will, rather than just on occasion. Perhaps even leading to “plateau experience” – the province of saints and mystics who reportedly live in it all the time. Not that I've got far towards any of that.

Can you provide some examples please of which might be and which might not be; just to make sure we are on the same page Out of interest, how about elements of Buddhism (I realize a lot of the god/miracles stuff has grown up around it). Historically, it’s generally been the most peaceable and contemplative of the major religions. It seems the most intellectually rigorous, being based on reason rather than revelation, in some respects closer to philosophy. Or Jainism. No gods there. Its first principle is that the highest duty is not to harm anything living, including through thought and speech. Its second principle, “many-sidedness,” is that truth and reality are complex; reality can be experienced, but never fully expressed through language.

cInteresting that the study was on prayer. Can the mind change the course of events, or how far that’s just reading meanings into what happens, I don’t know. If everyone prayed intensely at the same time for a meteor to be moved off a collision course with the earth, would it have any effect? Could a pebble be moved an inch? I guess not. It’s never been done, anyway, not in a way that can be “proved,” photographed. But that's not to say it’s not worth praying together. In that kind of concentrated agreement, focused on a higher purpose, we could maybe achieve a few other things, like getting rid of world hunger, or terrorism, or nuclear weapons; providing everyone on the planet with a decent education, basic health care, clean water, toilets, decent roofs over their heads, access to the Internet – any one of which would be a good start, and affordable, and help everyone else as well, if the will to do it was there. When religion ignores science it’s on the way to irrelevance. When it contradicts it, it’s superstition. But then it doesn’t have to do either. It plays a different kind of role. It refreshes the parts science doesn’t reach. They both come from the same kinds of promptings, the same questionings. Science tells us how to get to the moon, but doesn’t tell us why we want to go there. Even the battiest religion can help us get through the day better than knowing everything there is to know about evolutionary theory. And good religion is informed by science, much as science has been informed by religion. Science without religion or morality is the fast road to hell. Religion without reason, likewise. That's how I think of it, anyway....

This is probably naive, but I see God as everything there is. And that we're a long from knowing what that's there. After all, each level of description is more than the sum of its parts. Matter is more than molecules. Life is more than matter. Brain is more than life. Mind seems to be more than brain (disputed). More keeps coming from less. The seemingly impossible keeps happening. Life did emerge from molten rock, humans from monkeys, cathedrals from quarries. Why shouldn’t there be a spirit that is more than mind? Perhaps we’re just on the borderline between the two, like a nematode worm between plant and animal, or a chimp on the shimmering edge of self-consciousness. Perhaps when there is sufficient mind it “emerges” into another level of complexity like all the other levels do? Why not look positively forward to the next step? If we don’t, it’s not going to be there. I also think we're on a path. Young rats that are regularly and gently stroked with a brush function better as adults. Being “loved” makes them more relaxed and comfortable. They can actually work out problems better. Their brains get more wired up. This works with mammals, not with reptiles. All furry animals are vastly more intelligent than scaly ones. It’s taken a lot of scientific experiments to prove what every pet-lover instinctively knows. We’re no different. Good relationships develop communication skills, which in turn lead to greater understanding and more complex responses to situations. At birth, our brains are relatively unwired, prioritized to keep the heart and lungs going. The next few years are a dialogue between brain and surroundings, with the child taking on the culture of parents and others. Children from loving, secure homes grow up with more confidence in their abilities than children from violent or broken ones. As these children acquire greater sensitivity to shades of meaning they find it easier to develop symbols that summarize and convey attitudes. The frontal part of the brain, where we reason and choose, is not fully wired up till the teens or even twenties. Which is why the Jesuits and all Churches, and schools, try to get indoctrination in early. And over millions of years and dead ends, wrong turnings, communication grows the brain, in a virtuous circle. A more complex brain enables deeper love, which in turn spurs the search for meaning. If life forms more developed than human beings exist they are likely to be more loving forms, or they would have destroyed each other (or so we hope). So, logically, if there is a highest life form we call God who created the universe He is likely to be creative and loving rather than destructive, or He would consume Himself. “In the Beginning arose love,” as the Rig Veda claims. This echoes the oral myths of indigenous societies around the world, still handed down today from the Inuit in Alaska to the Aborigines in Australia, about how we came to be self-aware through language. About how the universe is there in so far as we see it, and see it looking back at us. Consciousness brings life to the void. The world, the landscape, people, are all sung or spoken into existence. The origin of existence is the Word, the creative act, the ultimate definition. God speaks out of His eternal silence and the Word takes on the flesh of creation. It’s words that make us, and everything we see (without words, we can’t talk, we can’t create meaning). In the greatest and oldest religious texts we know of, the Vedas, which were probably begun in the fourth millennium BC with the canon being fixed after 1000 BC, half a millennium and more before the Old Testament started to be written down, the words are part of the fabric of the universe, existing before time itself. In the Prashna Upanishad they create the universe at the beginning of each cycle of existence. There’s a pale reflection of this in the first verse of the Gospel of John. Religion is not just art, it’s literature. Religion is not about taking these texts literally, it’s about understanding why they’re written as they are. There two meaning of "religio", "relationship" and "the "other", the "sacred". At one level religio is our gift to ourselves, the framework we create to live as if our lives mattered, to function without despairing, to give a name to our collective journey. And at the level of “sacred” we sometimes put God in charge because every bus needs a driver. Most religious believers in the world aren’t bothered whether it’s literally “true” or not, in the sense that that’s not a particularly meaningful question. “Life” is “true,” and life is what we make it. That’s the human path. If facts were what counted we’d have concentrated on claws and teeth rather than brains and imagination. We’d have got tougher rather than softer. We know what we are, the question is what we are going to do about it, what we are going to be. And a religious understanding of this is that life is not about survival of the fittest. It’s about taking care of each other, collectively. Growing together. Most scientists accept that the laws of physics that we have now will be superseded in years to come, much as relativity superseded gravity – or, rather, included it in a broader picture – that’s the way science works. Many think we will never understand the universe, even that the fundamental laws of physics could change through time and space. Gravitons and particles might replace leptons and quarks as the interesting units (but this is some way ahead – for instance theory might predict gravitons must be there, rather like the Higgs boson, but they’re impossibly too small to “find”). To speculate further, perhaps we’ll come to see the speed of light as a threshold rather than a limit. The world of matter that we experience might be one small part of our new equation. Maybe, on the side of our physical existence, we live in the world of particles, but on the cognitive side of our being, we live in the world of waves. Perhaps the world of consciousness, of choice and purpose will come to be seen as vastly larger, 99% of what there is rather than 1% or zero. And if anything can travel faster than the speed of light it’s likely to be thought. Religion describes it as the Word, the Logos, the principle of reason. God, the final answer, beyond which nothing can be known, nothing exists, talking to Himself, the ultimate conversational loop. Imagine an eye with a long stalk in the form of a loop, with the eyeball looking back at its own beginning. That, in the world of quantum physics, may be the most credible explanation of how the universe came to be. Perhaps consciousness is something created by its own workings that has already happened. Religion is simply our attempt to realize where we are before we get there, and it’s by doing so that we arrive. It is the practice and growth of consciousness, the universe’s way of thinking about itself. Religion is not anti-evolution (“Creationism” is a sad joke, a declaration of personal ignorance about science, the Bible, and life itself) – it is evolution. Darwin is the St. Paul of our time. God was not there at the beginning, but He is there at the end, and in the end is our beginning. What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot (twentieth century AD)

Terrifying stuff.

"For the first time ever, there has been no war or conflict in Western Europe in about three generations" In part, surely, because of the cost. If the "Great Powers" went to war today it would be the end of civilization. I'm less optimistic - it was a nice morning in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Whether the international organizations are going to be strong enough to cope with climate change - another question.

I|enjoyed that, thanks.

Maybe oppression is lessening in the world, maybe it isn't. I incline to the former, because after the horrors of the 2nd WW there was a massive, worldwide effort to set up international institutions to prevent that kind of thing happening again, to put boundaries around nationalism and give it less soil to flourish in. But the Trump presidency (along with Brexit) has shown how fragile those are. And I don't see them surviving for long. This is a bit of a diversion, admittedly, but the lead negotiator for the Paris climate agreement said in 2019 – What’s at stake over the next decade is nothing less than the future of the planet and of humanity on the planet. That’s no exaggeration, that is no hyperbole. That is actually scientific fact. The overwhelming consensus among scientists, the conclusion of all the climate models, is that without radical action – of the kind we’re not remotely close to putting into effect – we’re heading for a rise of three to four degrees C by the end of this century. That’s a global average – temperatures over land as opposed to over the oceans would be several times higher – and probably conservative. The last time the planet was this warm was 15 million years ago in the Miocene period, around the time when our ancestors diverged from the orangutans. Sea levels were over a hundred feet higher. In that scenario, we get into a vicious spiral of economic depression, political upheaval, social breakdown, war and civilizational collapse. The band around the Equator, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where half the global population live, would be uninhabitable, because of heat stress. All of the USA and most of Europe would be desert. You could live in Canada, or Scandinavia, or Siberia, or the tip of South America, if you could fight off the billions of other people desperate to get there, but there would be little food – it takes thousands of years for weathering to produce topsoil deep enough for agriculture. You can’t turn permafrost into farmland overnight. And in a couple of decades it will be too late to stop this happening. Which is why I'm not optimistic about things getting better!

I have no experiences (and very little knowledge) to offer. I've read around the subject quite a bit though, and find Sam Parnia in particular interesting - seems a serious medic, and his work on resuscitating patients hours after they've gone brain dead possibly raises questions- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Parnia

Realize that's very tricky.....a balance between being open, and having a place where reasonably intelligent and perhaps personal conversations could be had. Which are not going to happen if you have to wade through nutcase kind of stuff. My inclination would be to only have the forum open to people who accept the broad principles of liberal/progressive Christianity, so that decent conversations/threads can develop - there are plenty of others for fundamentalists and atheists. But what the hell do I now...I've only been on forums for the last couple of months. Though I think, from the little I've learnt, that there's not much around between the two poles,which provides space for genuine critical and personal reflection.

I'm sorry, but the post by John56 yesterday was just so much gibberish - there are plenty of Christian fundamentalist and conspiracy sites where this kind of stuff can be posted. I realize this is probably a hopeless dream, but I'm looking for a site where rational discussion can happen, about matters of life and death and spirituality. The big stuff. Which involves curation, as in every other enterprise - educational, business, etc. And I realize this involves some "censorship", but then the alternative is to be drowned out by noise and ignorance. And having been on some other forums where that's par for the course, I can't be bothered with this one if it's going to turn out the same.

I don't have that kind of pain. But, being 68 next month, and now retired, I'm at a bit at a loss to know what to do. So I create problems for myself. 40/50 years back, I did think about the ministry, but had just enough commonsense to know I'd be hopeless at it. And, anyway, got attracted to the idea of getting on in business. Nowadays - feel like I'm back to where I was 40 years ago - haven't much of a clue what to do with the life remaining, now that the business does better without me, kids have grown up, etc.. Find it hard to take life "as it is". Tried meditation, Buddhism etc, but never got far with it. Anyway, just for background....don't take anything I say seriously, let alone coming from a "sorted-out place".....