As an atheist, I’m not sure why I even think about this but here goes. I have heard and read some Christians opinions (Mother Theresa for one) that suffering in the world somehow atones for sin in the world in a global sense. It would seem to me that this type of christian could believe that earnest prayer for someone’s grandpa could just be contributing to the general “good” energy of the world. The higher that good energy, the less suffering required to balance the “bad” energy. Or something like that.
I think this could still be squeezed into Spong’s theses.
Personally, I like to know people are thinking about me, and I can count on some of my Christian friends to pray for me on a regular basis, it makes me feel loved (even if they’re not praying, just because I THINK they are praying).
Furt…Nope, that “Efficacy of Prayer” thing was all my views. I was responding to somebody (Gaudere?)'s comment on prayer as “God switching the cup with the pea under it because somebody asked him to” so to speak – the idea that answered prayer breaks the rules. I do see it as fitting well into Spong’s universe, but I doubt he would; his theology is too abstractly intellectual. (Christian existentialism gives me the willies.)
This is very “yin-yang”; reminds me of Buddhism. I do not doubt in the least that some Christians believe this, however, I would find it very amusing to see the look on their face when they are told the origins of this!
But of course, not all Christians pray exactly like that. (Yes, I know, you say “real” Christians would only pray like that, but we’re talking about the way Christianity is practiced by most people who self-identify as Christian) Some do pray about to ask God to save dying grandpas and suchlike. If you object to this, perhaps you are in agreement with Spong.
jmullaney, you and I never seem to understand each other. I don’t expect God to disagree with me. I don’t believe God exists. And I don’t view abortions as a cause of suffering but, instead, a prevention of suffering in most cases. Death and suffering are not the same.
When the Christian morality and motivation coincides with mine, this is a good thing. It does happen quite a lot. Some groups of Christians do act in ways I disapprove of and I will continue to speak out against them.
The only thing I hold against you, jmullaney, is that you can’t seem to maintain a consistent, coherent argument. Or maybe our points of view are just so different that we can’t even communicate them to each other.
There is a difficult question that many people must find themselves asking at some point, “What makes my morality correct?” or “How do I know I’m right about my morality?” For some, they can say, “God says so, I believe it.” Others probe a bit deeper and say, “The bible, and therefore God, says so according to the interpretaion taught to me by people I respect.” Some want to know why God wants us to act in a certain way but can find no satisfactory answer. For some atheists, we find our morality in ourselves and our experiences and we no longer have to ask why this morality is right. Some Christians do this also and, for them, the times when Christianity coincides with their morality is further evidence that God is Good. Spong seems to have been one of the people that started as a “God says so, I believe it.” type but has progressed over time and now seems to be saying “I have found out what I believe is right. Christianity mostly agrees with me but gives arguable, possibly rediculous, reasons for it. Let’s keep the morality but scrap the myth (but lets still call it Christianity).” He still clings to belief in a Christian God, but his grip there is tenuous and that is where some of his theses break down. You can’t scrap the whole myth without coming up with a whole new concept of God (or lack thereof).
Does this makes sense to the rest of you? Poly? I think that Christians should look at it as one more attempt to modernize religion, especially to make it fit in with modern science. Science has been, generally, very consistent. Consistency builds trust. People now trust science. When religion and science disagree the trust will often determine which way a person will jump. Spong wants to reduce the conflicts between science and religion.
Interesting how many Chritian religions quote the Bible as to the part of ‘how Christ taught us to pray’ and then jump into the Lord’s Prayer, repetitive words in a group, said aloud, the exact opposite of what the entire text teaches. The words, that have been repeated to the point of meaning nothing to most people who recite them. I find it intriguing when Christianity so boldly and blatantly violates the Bible upon which it bases itself.
So is it Christianity or Satan’s influence? Look at the Catholic Church’s unilateral decision to make Sunday, rather than Saturday, the Sabbath day, followed by most other Christian religions. I think Spong is atheist, bent on destroying Christianity, certainly not on saving it. But there is a great deal of inaccuracy between religion and the Bible.
JustAnotherGuy - Good to hear from you bud, even if it’s only on a MB. I think what you meant to say in your last post was good. Unfortunately, between typos and miswording it’s a bit confusing. To help, let me start by saying I think you meant “inconsistencies” rather than “inaccuracies” (which would imply that religion and the bible combine to create lots of errors).
I don’t think Spong is an atheist yet. I think he is headed in that direction, but is still emotionally attached to the Christian God. Intellectually, he is having a hard time justifying his belief, but the belief stands. Or, at least, that’s the impression I get from his theses.
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.**
So God is no longer this Old Guy with a long white beard, wearing a night shirt, sitting on a sugar cloud hurling ligthning bolts at the request of His followers? Sounds very practical to me. With this version, God would follow His own rules for the Universe. Certainly He has powers and abilities beyond mortal kin, He can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in His bare hands… whoops, wrong God While He can do, what appears to humans to be miracles, he can’t violate the basic rules of physics, like conservation of mass/energy or exceeding the speed of light.
The idea that God, in whatever version you’d like to see Him, intervening in human affairs, especially political ones, always struck me as silly and used by those who have run out of other supporting arguements for their cause.
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.
Hrm… get back to me on this. If God is no longer an old, theistic God, then what was Jesus? An inspired prophet? More? Less? Not enough data.
**The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible. **
In other words, treat mythology like mythology. Sounds good to me.
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.
Then what were the miracles that inspired Jesus’s followers? Was he a con man or simply a good speaker? What convinced these people that what Jesus said was so good?
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.
I’ve always thought that the John 3:16 passage, while nicely worded was such a guilt trip. This would wipe out the whole arguement about the sinful nature of humanity and the necessity of its redemption. Then what’s left of the Christian msg? Just be good to each other and treat others as you would like to be treated?
Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
So the physical Ressurection didn’t happen? Again, what inspired the people to believe Jesus’s msg. after his death? Were the Apostles and Paul really good, charismatic speakers?
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.
This echoes my comment about mythology. I’ll let it stand as is.
There is no external, objective revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
Times change and the people with them. I agree whole heartedly with this. The cultural principles as written down 3000 years ago in th OT and nearly 2000 years ago in the NT cannot accurately deal with the soceity we have become. And in another 1000 years or even less, who knows what we’ll need then.
Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
Not sure about this one. Then why do we pray? For re-assurance? Is that the only reason?
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.
Agreed, whole-heartedly. Instead of making people fear God and His Wrathful Judgement (copyright, Fundie, Inc), inspire people to do good with inspirational love. Any good management seminar will tell you this.
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.
I translate this as: no matter what body you inhabit now, the Divine Spark in each of us comes from the same source and must be treated equally with respect.
I understand that VileOrb. But, you just called the idea that the Christian God wants to put to death those who cause suffering a “bad idea”, even though you yourself want to put to death those who cause suffering. I’m sure you have myriad reasons for not believing this God exists, I am only curious as to how you can consider this one of them. Is this really a bad idea, in your opinion, or not?
Actually, he seems to want to throw out the morality as well, as one of his theses seems to suggest that the Bible doesn’t contain a viable ethical code.
VileOrb, I’d say you have it pretty close to on target. (Hey, Jodi and pld are agreeing in the Pit, VileOrb and I are agreeing on a religion thread – has anyone noticed any pigs flying by lately? ;)) The caveat that I would draw to what is pretty closely a summary of how I understand his approach is that he uses a Christian existentialism drawn largely from Tillich and John A.T. Robinson (and acknowledges them as his sources), and appears to reject any theophanic event (conversion experience, etc.), though he does subscribe to Jesus as in some way god made manifest in humanity and to the resurrection as some sort of mystical acceptance of Jesus into divinity. As I’ve noted elsewhere, he was brought up in a quasi-fundamentalist Episcopal church in Charlotte, NC. Psychologically oriented people take note: his father was a good provider but an alcoholic and emotionally abusive, and died young; one of the major crises in JSS’s life was trying to bargain with God for his father’s life, and feeling he had fallen short of God’s expectations when his father died (on a night he had fallen asleep without keeping up his prayer vigil for his father’s life). His mother was a strictly pious type. He himself quite freely admits he is in conscious rebellion against fundamentalism, which he (like I) sees as destructive of the actual basic doctrine which Christ taught.
In contrast to this, I would posit a spectrum of belief, all devoutly held by those at each point on it, ranging from a strongly Biblically-based faith such as Navigator espouses to my Christian humanism, all being strongly theistic and seeing God at work in the world. One might go beyond this to the deist and near-agnostic beliefs of many people, who suspect there is a God but that he is not having a great deal if anything to do with his creation.
JAG, it’s extremely easy to label someone with whom you disagree by whatever name seems negative and fitting to you. Spong is trying to be honest about what he believes, which includes a sort of god and a role of sorts for Christ in the bringing of god and man together. That does not constitute atheism, however much it doesn’t fit what you or I consider good Christianity. (I’m somewhat more gentle with him than you are.) And I don’t think he’s out to destroy anything, except prejudice and ignorance, and the demand that someone accept dogmatic utterances that make no sense to them “because it’s what God said” (usually, it’s what some theologian trying to pigeonhole God said). I’d urge you to read, with as little hostility as possible, a couple of his more recent books, particularly Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. I guarantee you will disagree with him. But I think you’ll learn from the process what motivates liberal Christians, and may find the compassion to deal more kindly with them. As Vile Orb notes, trying to maintain a contrary-to-fact cosmology from a literalist reading of a Book that includes both accounts of God’s saving grace and a collection of Hebrew folktales is not going to do a whole lot to bring a person who is the product of a secular and science-oriented culture into a vibrant relationship with the God who really is there and behind all this stuff. In short, one needs to face facts, and let the God of Truth show His Truth through them.
God: "Hello! How are you?
Sartre: “The question is pointless. I am a series of moments held together by memory.”
God: “I see.”
Sartre: “Ha! See? See what? Shades of phenomenon. Essence of being is not a being of essence.”
God: “Look, forget it.”
jmullaney - I did not say that the idea of a Christian God wants to put to death those who cause suffering. I said, “It was my impression that Gaud was saying that theoretically God was using the reward of eternal life to manipulate people. It’s not the priests, it’s God himself. Because this is, in my opinion, a bad idea, unworthy of an omniscient being, it is further eveidence that God does not exist.” This was to say that telling people that their actions in this life would determine whether they had an afterlife in heaven or hell is not a good way to make people more moral. They may act more moral, but it is because of the carrot and the stick rather than through real understanding. This was my way of agreeing with what Gaudere had been saying in the previous few posts."
I would say that the bible does not contain a complete ethical code. I do not think that Spong wants to throw out what’s there, he just wants to restate it and complete it. I don’t actually agree with Spong about that much, I do think I understand, and sympathize with, his motives. I think he need to throw out more and start fresh himself before he starts asking everyone to do it with him.
Poly - We do seem to agree about Spong, and have understood each other fairly well even when disagreeing. Do you think that if things go on as they have been that the number of publicly atheist, but loving and moral, intellectuals will grow and perhaps organize? Would you view this as a good thing or a bad one? Obviously you would rather have them be Christian Humanists, but would you prefer moral atheists to, say, militant fundamentalists? And, do you think that a movement to restate a major religion’s beliefs into a more modern format and interpretation could occur successfully and not be viewed as a cop out? Could this result in gaining members in the long run?
Poly, here’s what I think is the fun question - If you had the chance to throw out traditional beliefs, what would you throw out and what would you build in their place? I think that your OP invited this from us all but not many took you up on it. The thread that jmullaney quoted me from, asks something similar from the non-theists, except that we’ve already thrown out the traditional beliefs. I’d like to see what the progressive theists say. Obviously the fundies don’t want to throw anything out.
Ah, so I see the difference. You want to kill anyone who causes suffering without giving them a grace period in order to change their ways, since you are ultimately concerned with the suffering being caused per se, where as God is, in your opinion, worse since he gives people the chance to change there ways although they may of course continue to cause suffering in the meanwhile. Each solution has its merits.
The problem, of course, is that the deity they were looking for was no longer operating under that name; due to the events of the First Century AD, he was now doing business as God (N.T.).
::: ducks rotten tomatoes thrown by devout Jews and Christians, persons who enjoy existentialist literature, and those offended by truly horrible puns of any description :::
jmullaney - NO, again you misunderstand. - I want to raise children to be good people and do everything I can to help misguided adults see the error of their ways, helping all to form a coherent and positive morality. If I see little chance of fetus getting raised in a loving and healthy environment, then I say the mother should have the option of choosing to have an abortion. If I see no hope of helping a violent adult who is causing much suffering and preventing much joy, then I am not going to argue against execution. If another action would do more for preventing suffering and promoting joy, then that would be preferable. I am a bit self centered and sometimes I will weigh my own joy and that of my friends more heavily than I would that of a stranger, but only slightly heavier.
The idea of God seems to say, “Do what I say and go to heaven, the rest will go to hell.” IMHO, this does not encourage honest morality but instead enforces moral actions.
I could as a (hypothetical) parent tell all my (hypothetical) children, if you will go through your life until the age of 25 brushing your teeth regularly I will give you a million dollars at that time. Anyone who fails to comply will be disowned at that age and I will arrange to have them beat up whenever I can. If you fail once or twice to brush your teeth and confess to your crime and are genuinely sorry then we can work out a way for you to atone, perhaps by additional flossing and forgoing of sweets. This policy would likely result in children who mostly brushed their teeth, especially when they knew someone was watching. I would rather teach my children all about good dental hygiene and the reasons for it and hope that they chose to brush their teeth because it was a good idea. Perhaps they would even study about new toothbrush alternatives and water picks etc. and make informed decisions to keep themselves healthy.
Now you’re going to try to extend my story to include my abortion position. Please don’t try. Or go ahead and criticize my ideas and opinions. I don’t expect you to like them. Just try to understand my problem with the carrot and stick thing. Read Gaudere’s posts about the same thing. We’re not saying we have perfect solutions, however many people DO say God is perfect. Carrot and stick is not, IMHO, a perfect way to teach morality. If God is doing this, and God is perfect, then this must be the perfect thing to do. I don’t think it’s perfect. There could certainly be someone who thinks that God is not perfect, or God is not doing this, or that this is the perfect way to teach morality, or all three. I am saying that if you believe the first two the the third follows. Also, I am saying that I believe the third is false. This argument is only vaguely related to my position about abortion and I don’t know why you insist on comparing them.
Vile Orb asked me the following (tough) questions:
There have always been a strong admixture of very decent people who have been unable with integrity to accept the idea of a transfinite God mucking about with the world. I have immense respect for them. Yourself, Spiritus Mundi, David B., and Gaudere are prime examples of the species. I’d note that UU churches are not necessarily theistic, and include agnostics and soft atheists among their membership, drawn by the intellectual ferment and debate and the opportunity to work together for secular good. Something called the Ethical Culture Movement, about which I know little except that it is a non-religious “religious corporation” (legalese for church in the denomination sense), has been around for over 50 years. And Della Reese’s church is not so much theologically as humanistically oriented. I’d hope that the good atheists of the world would organize and bring their decency into a unified force for the betterment of man, not so much proclaiming their gospel ("Hear, O Israel, there is no god… ;)) as challenging the tacit assumptions Christians (and other theists) are loath to look at.
I like moral atheists. What is a militant fundamentalist? My answer would depend on the definition. A militant fundamentalist such as Navigator, who stands foresquare for the Jesus who died for love of mankind and everything about Him, and who is utterly commited to Him, is a good thing. A militant fundamentalist of the Fred Phelps or Rushdoony stripe, preaching hatred and domination in the name of Christ, is substantially more repulsive to me than he would be to you. That’s my beloved Lord that he’s using to rationalize his evil!
Absolutely. I’ve been saying for years that the truth is what counts, not the formulae in which we clothe it. Suppose for a moment I were able to convince you that YHWH actually does exist, that the Jews “colored” their account of their encounters with him with their own tribal and personal prejudices, that He is sincerely interested in you and your welfare and in fact loves you, just as you are, enough that He manifested Himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and died the excruciatingly painful death of crucifixion for love of you, and that He is quite willing to mind-meld with you in the form of His Holy Spirit, if you will welcome Him to do so, and that these three distinct modes are all ways in which one single God reveals Himself to man, being three “persons” at once (tough trick for you or me, but after all, He’s God) – okay, I’ve just given you all the necessaries of Christianity, and I think that having experienced Him through the indwelling of the Spirit, you’ll come to love Him as I do and commit yourself to Him as I did. Now, if you say that the whole hoohah about “three persons in one substance” and “two natures in one Christ,” the idea of “transubstantiation,” the idea of Mary as Mother of God, and so on, are less than palatable to your understanding of how the world is put together. Well, fine! Nobody asked you to believe in Thomas Aquinas or Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Theology is an attempt to understand God, not a set of prescriptive categories you are required to give unwitting intellectual assent to. And if they get rewritten, oh well – I’d be all the happier, because I’m not nuts about the traditional formulations as particularly accurate ways of defining Him. In particular, one of the key points of the early Church was that Jesus was “truly man and truly god” – and most “casual Christians” would be highly offended by you speaking of him as man. He’s our Brother; everything you and I have gone through, He went through. “Been there; done that.” Well, yes, he has.
I’m not interested in throwing them out. I think they’re timeless. But I do think the packaging has gotten a little frayed over 2000 years of intellectual growth, and they could use a new coat of paint and some air in the tires.
My core doctrines:
[list=1][li]The universe is unary, purposeful, integral.[/li][li]It was created by an eternal spirit who is involved intimately with it, and with us as self-aware inhabitants of it in particular (no idea how he relates to whales, putative aliens on other planets, etc., just flagging his interest in us humans – we’re called to tend to our own knitting, not worry about that other stuff).[/li][li]This God loves us, and wants us to be connected to Him. (See Holy Spirit item above.) He is, however, doing this on a timetable of when He knows it’s the right time (kairos) to interact with each of us. This accounts for the “mysterious ways” and “Glitch effect.”[/li][li]Need proof? He loves us enough that he took one of us, Yeshua bar Miriam, and entered into the world as a human being. If you want to distinguish true Christianity from every other faith in one quick swoop, it would be in this statement: “A few days after the First Christmas, God pooped His diaper.” To a Jew, Moslem, etc., that idea is positively scandalous. A being that can cause supernovas by just thinking about them becomes a human baby, unable to care for itself.[/li][li]As if this weren’t enough, this Yeshua grew up to teach the love of god and of one’s fellow man, a strict ethic based on that, and then fell afoul of political/religious machinations, as reformers nearly always do, and was killed. And was willing, according to his biographers, to die, for our sakes.[/li][li]But he didn’t stay dead. Something happened two days after his death that convinced those near and dear to him that he was alive again. Exactly what that something was and in what way he “came back to life” is purposely left unclear. But three things are obvious from the (conflicting) accounts: (a) He wasn’t Jesus the Friendly Ghost (Caspar was one of the Wise Men, anyway :)) – he had all the capabilities of a living human body, and then some. (b) Whatever happened had the capacity to conquer doubt in people who had hung out with him day and night for over a year prior to his death, and further, gave them a moral commitment they had never had before, to insist on what he’d done even if it meant their deaths. (David B. has a wonderfully arcane explanation of this in non-theist terms, which makes you wonder how well one can convince oneself of the myth one has started. I think it’s obvious I disagree with his thesis.) (c) This Jesus hung out for a period, coming and going somewhat mysteriously, then vanished as a flesh-and-blood human, but has been making regular appearances to people in more or less mystical ways ever since. (Sorry about the preaching; but I need to define this in some detail.)[/li][li]Add the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer as a way of strengthening him, guiding him, and equipping him with the confidence of God’s real presence. This is of course subjective, but it’s been the common testimony of people from Paul to, well, me. I’d submit that if a wide range of people, most of whom appear otherwise to have both oars in the water, allege that they’ve seen a unicorn, then quite possibly there is a somewhat elusive unicorn, rather than that they’re all crazy, hallucinating, misinterpreting a horse playing a clarinet, or some other “rational” explanation.[/li][li]The obligation that this God puts on the people he has managed to convince of his existence is to love and trust him, to love their fellow man, to respect the dignity of others, to help them in time of need, to humble themselves because he, not they, is in charge of the universe, to speak to others about him because that’s the way he wants his good news delivered, and to avoid from sitting in judgment over others, so far as is possible. Oh, and to participate in two symbol-fraught ceremonies, one marking one’s transition from self-made man to child of God in which the “old man” is drowned and the “new man” raised from the water in token of rebirth, and the other in which we share in the fruits of the earth and the vine in remembrance of Jesus’s death and giving of himself for us and in token of the communion we have with each other and Him.[/li][/list=1]
Actually, though, I suspect that this won’t be needed. In this I differ from nearly everyone else alive, but let me tell you a short story:
In the First Century B.C., all the Faithful Remnant, the conservatively religious Jews, knew that the Messiah was coming as a great warrior/priest who would restore the true worship of God, not the mockery those Sadducees were making of it at the Temple, and throw out the Romans and restore the Kingdom to Israel. The more worldly Jews saw the prophecies of the Messiah as symbolic of Israel’s call to be the witness Chosen People who would teach the nations how to live righteously before God, and the Day of the Lord as the point when even Rome and Persia would acknowledge YHWH Elohim (Allah in Arabic) as Lord.
Nobody expected the Messiah to show up in history as a wandering teacher and then die a shameful death.
Today, the Left Behinders are convinced that He is coming again in glory, on the clouds of heaven, to gather in the true believers and judge the nations, cleansing the world of the evil that men have turned to, and so forth. And everybody else understands the doctrine of the Second Coming as symbolic, something outside history as Spong would say.
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the student.
I guess what I meant about moral atheists organizing was more toward the point of asking what might happen if they grew and organized to the point of having the kind of world influence that the Catholic Church has. I think that this kind of thing is inevitable barring a literal second coming, WWIII, or a complete collapse of first world educational systems.
I’m logging off for the night talk to yall tomorrow.
