Greetings from Oz

[possibility]

I have been wandering around the Internet of late in search of a faith community.

I was raised Catholic: church every Sunday, private schools, 'the pope is infallible', and 'ours is the one true church' type of Catholic. Then I went to university and discovered the rest of the world as well as my own mind. I soon stopped attending church, married an agnostic and put aside any thoughts of spirituality.

I was never an atheist, but I lived almost entirely in the material world for the next two decades, before a series of life experiences led me to pick up the bible and read it, from the beginning, with an open mind and a quiet prayer seeking understanding.

What I began to realise was that the bible communicates something very different to what I had been taught - and that it actually makes more sense. If God is eternal and unchanging, then all the many instances of change in the nature and personality of God as described in the bible must have been written in by the authors themselves. Suddenly the bible was just a series of very human writings, documenting a particular cultural group's valiant attempts to share their experience of 'God' as it developed over many centuries, and in doing so, try to make this spirituality appear more concrete than it is.

These days I still consider myself to be 'Christian', in that I strive to follow the teachings and example of Jesus as a human being who connected so completely with this eternal and limitless source of life, wisdom, power and possibility. But I don't consider 'Jesus' to be the only way to this spiritual connection.

I cannot say the creed, and I cannot assert what are widely proclaimed as the main tenets of Christianity: the divinity of Jesus, the concept of the trinity and the physical resurrection, among other things. I firmly believe that we've somehow got confused - we got lost somewhere between the death of Jesus and the creation of the bible, and then we called a halt to what, up to that point, was an ongoing journey of spiritual discovery and understanding.

So I explored other faiths, as well as online forums and meeting points of Christians, atheists, ex-Christians, biblical hermeneutics, interfaith communities, etc. I found lots of argument and debate, lots of attempts to label my beliefs as agnostic atheist, Christian, New Thought, Jainist, etc.

Then I read Spong's Twelve Points for Reform, and I have never felt more fully understood. That's why I'm here.

[PaulS]

Welcome to the forum 'possibility'. 

Spong's 12 points are brilliant and clearly very much a challenge to 'traditional' Christianity.  They spoke to me also when I first read them.  I joined here 6 or 7 years ago and was stunned to find people who looked at Christianity a different way to how I had been raised and indoctrinated.  But I found the people here and the resources available immensely beneficial and even integral to me having some faith in Christianity again.  I think the world will be a better place to see the back of that old time Christianity.

Cheers

Paul

 

[possibility]

Thank Paul.

Nice to see a fellow West Aussie willing to talk about religion along these lines.

I look forward to many discussions with you here.