I'm a Theoligical Liberal. Ask me anything!

OK, so I borrowed a Lounge meme. :-)

Ask me anything you want about my theology and why I think the way I do.

Some precepts to save you some time:

Yes, I believe in God. I use He/She interchangably when talking about Him or Her.

Yes, I have personal experiences with God. I find it beautiful and rewarding, and yes, loving, more so than what I experience with other humans.

Yes, I believe we have Free Will. God loves us so unconditionally S/He allows us that.

No, I don't believe in the fundie version of Hellfire and damnation, so don't ask me to defend it.

No, I'm not a biblical literalist or inerrantist. I mostly take it as allegory. So don't ask me to defend literalist interpretations of passages.

Yes, I belive Science and Religion can coexist in the same mind. I meld the two all the time. I enjoy both astronomy and ancient history, especially.

Yes it's true that I am a liberal partly due to my love for God.

Ok, go for it! :-)

What god ? ...

Where ? ... show me ...

:-)

God is everywhere, through all and in all.

I sometimes see Her in something a person says, a specific way they relate to someone else. No, they aren't always religious, either.

Sometimes, He's a painfully beautiful sunset.

Sometimes, He's the sheer infinity of the night sky.

Sometimes, She's in a child's laughter.

Sometimes, She's dying on a battlefield or from terminal illness.

Sometimes, He's a butterfly sucking nectar out of a buttercup.

Get the idea?

Then I thought: what ISNT god ? ...

And if there is nothing that isnt god, then such a god cannot be distinguishable from any other object or subject .....

Such gods aren't of much use ....

That 'idea' was one I discarded long ago as baseless and without foundation .... If there is a god, then god is god, not such a god's products or effects .... I will gladly accept any such god that can be shown to exist through direct observation .....

if you believed? What are your expectations? I'm just curious.

I have what sounds like very similar beliefs and trying to find one that doesnt praise George W. Bush in the same sentence as Jesus Christ.

Presbyterian Church USA. There are other Presbyterians, but they are more fundamentalist.

"Presbyterian" is really more about a style of Church government than doctrine.

list and checking it twice.

But hey, if you need that to get you up in the morning, you keep believing in whatever the hell it is you believe in.

anyway, that isn't a question.

Francis Bacon warned about the idols of the marketplace. Karl Marx remarked about commodity fetishism.

The destructive false gods before which people bow down are, more often than not, something other than standard deities: power and control, comfort and entertainment, pride and ego -- and so on and so on.

Since everyone actually bows down and effectively commits his/her life to something or other, perhaps it is just as well to choose one's religion mindfully and deliberately, rather than simply following something by carelessness, laziness, indifference, accident, or lack of awareness.

"everyone actually bows down and effectively commits his/her life to something or other"

On what grounds do you base this? And do you really think that atheists worship something just as much as you worship your god?

Bigot:

A prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own

One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

You're stretching a bit aren't you? I'm not seeing a lot of intolerence from your target, they're just expressing what they believe to be true. By this definition I could call many of the comments you've made in our discussions bigoted. I don't because they aren't. Not every theist is intolerant of atheists, even if they don't agree with your philosophy or take a different view of your philosophy.

And you can call me whatever you want, including bigoted, if you want to.

Another definition of bigoted:
blindly and obstinately attached to some creed or opinion

Hmm, let's see:

"Everybody worships something, consciously or mindlessly."
"everyone actually bows down and effectively commits his/her life to something or other"

Am I blindly and obstinately attached to atheism? Apparently in your view, I am. Of course that must mean asking for evidence before believing something is "blind and obstinate" in your book, too.

Wait a second here, I do in fact believe that you are blindly and obstinately attached to atheism. Here's the twist though, I don't think that YOU think you are blindly and obstinately attached to atheism. I know that you think I'm blindly and obstinately attached to Christianity, but of course I don't feel that way myself. If this is the threshold of bigotry we're in big trouble. I thought the whole concept of bigotry centered around hate and intolerance.

In relation to the topic at hand I believe that everyone does in fact exhibit the desire to be labled as "something". As humans we like to form social groups and constructs. Religions and philosophies fall into this department. I firmly believe that everyone commits their life to something, be it science, God, money, sex, athletics, power, fame, etc. If believing that makes me a Bigot, then I guess we'll just have to have a disagreement as to our definition of that title.

I would like to see the person I responded to, address my objection.

If you feel I'm an atheistic bigot, like I said, that's fine, I don't really care. I've been called worse simply for not subscribing to religious belief. Like I said, apparently you think that by asking for evidence before I believe in something, I'm a bigot.

I challenged the original poster's bigotry in assuming everyone HAD to worship something, implying that as an atheist I must worship money, drugs, sex, I don't know what. To say that I "worship" something like that is indeed hateful, intolerant, and is also showing blindness towards how others think.

Sorry to ruffle your feathers, I never ever called you a bigot. In fact, that was the point of my posts, I thought that your definition of a bigot was a bit harsh and way too inclusive. I don't think you're a bigot and I don't think the person you were responding to made a bigoted statement. They were just expressing their opinion. I believe the intolerance was incorrectly inferred. By asking for evidence before you believe in something, you are a rationalist, not a bigot. I'm not trying to piss you off, I just happen to disagree with your definition of a bigot. I'll drop it at that, sorry to interfere.

... evidence of bigotry.

It IS my view that everyone inevitably worships something, whether they admit to it or not, and that essentially everyone actually spends considerable time worshipping idols. It is also my view that the objects of people's worship often cannot be reliably discerned by the lipservice they pay to religion: some self-described atheists might more devotely and ardently worship the true G-d than other self-described believers

I made no assertion about what you, or any other so-called "atheist," worships, and in particular I certainly did not accuse atheists of being more likely than other folk to worship idols such as money, drugs, or sex.

So don't put words in my mouth.

is just as bigoted as saying that every black person MUST be lazy, or every Asian person MUST be smart.

There are SOME lazy people in every race. There are SOME smart people in every race. And there are SOME people who worship things.

I don't worship anything. I am a living counterexample of your thinking.

... result from my further effort to explain my views to you.

As the matter now stands, you busy telling me I'm a bigot, and I'm thinking you don't really have a clue what I said. I guess we'll have to leave it there.

BTW, give my regards to van Heijenoort.

"everyone actually bows down and effectively commits his/her life to something or other"

I am disputing that statement of yours. I'm sorry if you think there's some sort of "semantic quibble" involved here, but that quote is entirely wrong (and disrespectful) no matter how you parse it.

So much for a dialog.

:)

How ya doing? :D

:D

{Joey voice} How you doin'? {/Joey voice}

the concepts forwarded by eastern mystical philosophy have interesting parallels in the context of Quantum Theory. The Cartesian model is inadequate to describe what happens at sub-atomic level because it relies on cause and effect. There's something important there but it's late o'clock over here and I don't know enough about the concepts to make any sense...but then Quantum Theory turns logic upside down anyway.

on me! :D

I'd be interested to here what "easter mystical pholisophy you're talking about.

Nighty night, McKenzie. :hi:

you mean in the day to day? For me, not really. That's what Free Will is about. Although we are certainly free to ask for God's help and counsel, and it is freely given.

I buy into the Enlightement concept of God The Eternal Watchmaker: set everything in motion, but leave it to run of its own accord.

I was testing you, actually. I've heard people admit both to believing that there exists such a thing as free will, but that God is the cause of everything - a duality my mind wants to deny - so I was wondering if you were one of those people that thought both things could be true.

Since you're not, carry on then :)

So for you, God caused everything in the sense that She entered all the inputs, and knows, perhaps, how it will all turn out in the end, but the paths we take are more or less our own.

I buy that.

I think some religious people are comforted by the notion that God controls everything down to the minutae. I couldn't do that.

For one, my life has been very difficult at times and if I believed that paradigm, then I'd have to believe God wanted to "punish" me somehow for all that I've lived through. Ugh. Not a chance. It just doesn't square with a loving Creator for me.

So for you, God caused everything in the sense that She entered all the inputs, and knows, perhaps, how it will all turn out in the end, but the paths we take are more or less our own.

I buy that.


Wow. You said it better than I did.

edit: There is a theory in theological circles, and I don't know where it comes from, that eventhough God is omnicient and omnipotent, S/He chooses not to be in order to be in relationship with us. Think about it. Could you bear being in relationship with your child if you knew everthing that was going to happen to him or her, good and bad in this life?

took from my earliest "teachings"....God gave us Free Will so that we could CHOOSE to love him/her , otherwise what is the value in "forced" love.

So - view on Old Testament/New Testament - do you view them differently in terms of worth/validity?

as you put is, is not the point of this life.

Old Testament - It is the original convenant that God made with Abraham and will be kept for those that follow it, i.e. the Jews. I have no reason to believe God wouldn't keep His promise to the Jews and also the Muslims. Hagar began the line that eventually became the Muslims. As a xtian, I enjoy the Old Testament for the history of his people, however imperfect.

I read The Book of J by Harold Bloom not too long ago. He posits that huge chunks of Genesis are actually part of a larger epic work, not unlike Gilgamesh, which it resembles in content. Flood, anyone? Fascinating stuff.

New Testament - A collection of writings that tell the story of Jesus. I think whether you say he was a real person, or an amalgam of several traveling itinerant preachers of the time, the teachings are worth noting and living by.

To answer your question, I view them equally. They serve different purposes for different reasons.

Good discussion guys! I was always fascinated by the free will question in relation to omniscience and...gasp...predestination. I recommend "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis, it paints the perfect picture of this complex relationship. The last chapter will blow you away. The crucial factor in all of these areas of discussion is time. As humans, we all strive to look at something in terms of a timeline. Calvinists thought that God ordained our fate before our existence. The free will crowd loudly shouted them down. Still others say that we have to wait until the end of all things. Amazingly, when you remove God from time all of these things, every shred of our free will still distills to a decision. Before all things, our life and spiritual journey, judgement at the end, it is all without time to God. I can't do the concept justice, go and pick up "The Great Divorce", it's a short read and it's pretty cheap too.

:-)

:hug:

I especially appreciate your stress on free will. All that God has done and still does comes out of love for humanity and creation, and because of love we are created with free will to choose our life-paths.

Remember the old saying, "if you love something set it free, if it returns it is yours, if not it never was?" God loves us, set us free, and for each of us is waiting to see whether or not we return.

It's really about unconditional love. If you love someone unconditionally, you don't DEMAND that they love you or swear fealty to you like some King on a throne.

And I worship Johnny Depp too! ;)

Seriously, I have very similar beliefs to yours. I don't identify myself as Christian or any denom simply because I think it's limiting and creates division where there could be inclusion. I have never joined any church either. I feel religion/spirituality are very personal and don't need to be advertised, esp. in the current climate.

between being "religious" and being "spiritual". Thank you, NC_Nurse.

Religious means, more or less that a person probably adheres to a specific doctrine with a specific set of rituals.

Spiritual, for me means, experiencing the metaphysical side of life, whether or not a person is religious.

Nice to see yet another spiritual liberal, NC_Nurse! :hi:

As for the current climate, I was very private for a long time about my relgion but the neocons have all but made it impossible for any of us to keep our privacy. If they want to have that fight, fine. I'll debate them anytime.

(the kind that oppress the poor, for example) reconciled to "judge not, lest ye be judged?"

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," when the mob wanted to stone Mary (the adulteress, prostitute, not Magdalene) to death.

He did however, tell the moneychangers to get the hell out of the temple. That was a common, accepted practice at the time.

I would say that the point is challenging what are common, accepted practices which are clearly askew is good, while challenging individuals about behavior you don't understand or have any knowledge of is not good.

and individual mistakes or behavior I don't understand is one that had previously eluded me. Thanks for clearing that up!

if anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know it too. :-)

And the two statements closely follow each other. They represent the tension between two poles. One one hand it is not our place to confront people making personal private decisions for their own lives. In addition I think that can very easily be an exhortation interpreted to be a prounouncement against racism, classism, sexism, and all kinds of prejudice and discrimination.

I think we become a little literalistically absurd if we think somehow we are to see a rape in progress and say, "well like looks wrong to me, but hell I shouldn't judge!" Coupled with the exhortation not to "judge" is also the ongoing and frequent exhortations to live in a relationally responsible way with hearts governed by love and compassion. Love and compassion towards others necessarily demands that we work for the needs of others - that includes standing up for those who can stand up for themselves. And even Jesus himself elludeds for this when he proclaims:

"the spirit of the lord is upon me The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord."

I agree with the other poster that there is a difference between the individually relational and the collectively institutional. A person could take "do not judge" or anything else from any source - religious or otherwise - and push the concept to the point of absurdity. But in this case, doing so would require only taking one text without interpreting it through the lens of Jesus's entire life and all his words.

And don't forget that even Jesus had very harsh words of criticism for the Pharasees - in fact he takes about an entire chapter to just let them have it on their hypocrisy. But what he addresses with them is the ways their actions have oppressed the people not what they look like, or what their social status is, or who they associate with or how they live their private lives. His criticisms are moralistic bits of legalism, they come from a relational and compassionate concern.

If so, why (general hints from the Bible, personal revelation, etc.)?

Do you think it consists only of entities who were once human? Would we interact between ourselves in the same way we do now, or would it be just interactions between each of us and God?

No, I really don't know, like everyone else, what that consists of.

I like to think that we recognize each other as ourselves, but that we are able to see the "whole" of existance, letting go of old hurts and guilts because we can see life from multiple perspectives and dimensions.

We in a sense return from whence we came. Physically we are made of the same stuff as the stars, so we return to that.

An interesting challenge.

"Do you believe that the observable evidence is inconsistent with there not being an omnibenevolent supreme being"?

"Why do you refer to god as S/he rather than as it"?

Honestly, it seems like a rhetorical knot to me. :shrug: I'm not really sure what you are trying to get at. I think the observable evidence supports the existance of an omibenevolent being.

Why do you refer to god as S/he rather than as it"

Because, my belief informs me that this presence, as best as I can describe it, is indeed a being, a living entity with awareness and personality, a person, so deserves to be called "He" or "She," as we all are.

In English, we use "it" to refer to two things:
1) inanimate objects: chair, table, car, boat, TV
2) forms of life we consider less than us: animals, plants, microbes,

To refer to God as "It" would imply that I think of Him in the same category as those things, which isn't true.

I say "He" or "She" only because those are the pronouns that are available to us. It's a limitation of language, not a comment on the gender of God. I actually believe Her true nature to be something beyond what we call "Male" and "Female."

Do other characters in other stories have belly buttons?

Is he the son of God, at least more so than anyone else? Did he die for our sins? Did he rise from the dead? Is belief that he's the son of God necessary for salvation? (I know you don't believ in "hell" but feel free to elaborate there.) I'm on a spiritual journey, so I'm interested in your thoughts. :-)

a wonderful teacher who tried to show us the way to live a fully present life in this life. I think he is the son of God; but so are we all. So, yes I believe he was a real person who was persecuted for preaching, basically, unconditional love.

I don't really buy into the idea that Jesus didn't exist. Recorded human history at that time just wasn't about work-a-day folks. Most of recorded history is about Ruler->war->monument, not some obscure carpenter-turned-hippie radical.

I'm agnostic on whether or not "Jesus saves" in the traditional sense, or what the miracle stories might mean. I often wish I could have been there to see. I guess you could say I believe there is a degree of myth-making that grew up around him. It may or may not have had anything at all to do with him.

I try to concentrate on his teachings.

As for the resurrection, I've fallen from the idea of substitute atonement, which is the traditional "Jesus died for our sins". He died, so we don't have to. Instead, I'm more in the mold of God loved us so much that he martyred himself, through Jesus, for us. It's a toally, unconditionally selfless act. Perhaps in our lifetime, only our parents perform this role. We don't do anything to deserve it. It just is.

As for the Gospels, I think these stories were in circulation for a time in the oral tradition until someone got the idea that they should be written down. I think people tried, the best way they knew how, to describe what they believed was an encounter with God.

Whether or not Jesus was actually here, I believe he was very much needed. The time the Gospels were written down was after his death and after the fall of the Temple. People were in dispair. Their world really had come to and end. For followers of The Way, I think it brought comfort to them to believe that Jesus did go on.

This is my basic thinking and still sounds somewhat disjointed.

What about paganism. Why do we "have" to have a single, male God?

though, this particular forum has become something of a theist (read: xtian)/athiest debate society. ;-)

Personally, although I'm xtian, I find lot to admire in other religions of all types.

As for "a single, male God?" That's just the tradition I grew up in, so that's what I understand. For me, we all worship the same entity, which I believe is something quite beyond what we understand as Male and Female. But that's the language we are stuck with at the moment. We just use different rituals and call Her different names. It's like we're all looking at a diamond with thosands of facets. No one person can possibly see them all. Some people see one or several faces; some others see many facets and call them "Gods."

Left Doesn't Get It_? Are you familiar at all with Mr. Wallis? I saw him on the Daily Show the other day and he seemed rather levelheaded. One thing that he brought up that I thought would make for a spectacular talking point when criticizing the right's distortion of the bible for their cause was (and I'm paraphrasing here):

"that there are some 3,000 verses in the bible devoted to encouraging people to help the poor"

or somesuch.

Since I wasn't raised in any religion and haven't gone out of my way to study Christianity, I was wondering if anyone has figures about how often homoSINuality and other of the christian right's pet peeves are denounced in the bible. From what little I've heard on the issue, I'd think that it's mentioned a hell of a lot less than 3k times. That would make for excellent ammunition against people who think that their judeochristian god really really doesn't like gay people.

Much better than providing historical reasons for why pre-modern societies needed to emphasize heterosexual coupling for breeding purposes in order to replace a population that was far more subject to early deaths than the society we find ourselves in today. Such as why English monarchs would get all pissy with their noblemen who didn't breed enough and suchlike. Most of the wackjob christian rightie's eyes glaze over quick-like when one starts talking like that. They do seem to be able to latch onto the bible though, and that would be a good start.

:D It sounds like a fascinating read. The only other thing I know about Mr. Wallis is that he's the editor/publisher ? of Sojourner's Magazine, which I have come to admire.

He's a little more theolgically conserivative than I am, but he's making the right arguments to the left. And we should pay attention.

http://www.sojo.net.

edit: correct URL