Dear Jane

Dear Jane,

One of the “features” of churches is they tend to present one version of many interpretations as if it was the one and only truth, and Revelations is a good example. The “Left Behind” series served to scare the shit out of everyone and help convince us that Jesus is about to return any day now. What the churches do not tell us is that Futurism is only one of three ways of dealing with Revelation, and that there is also the Literary theory and the Praeterist Theory.

Praeterism (for example) says that Revelation was all (or almost all) fulfulled within the generation that lived with Jesus. The disciples asked “when will these things happen” and Jesus answered “some of you will not taste death … this generation will not pass away before ..” What did he mean? I could argue very effectively that the return of Jesus happenned in AD70 when “Jeruslaem was surrounded by armies.” Of course the modern church does not teach this because they do not want to upset the masses or be shown that they could have been so grossly wrong (and risk losing a big chunk of their tithe-giving clientele).

Chuck Missler is just one more fear-monger dressed up in sheeps pseudo-intellectual clothes but is really doing nothing more than building his own Christian book-selling speaking-engagement business. His biggest crime – and he really does know better – is only presenting a “modern church friendly” version of “the truth” and conveniently missing out a big lot of other stuff that is nowhere near as cut and dried black and white as he makes it appear (just like YWAM!)

It upsets me to see beautiful people like you sucked into the shallow modern day christian theology when there is so much more richness of thought out there.

Jon

Intelligent Design Question

I’ve been thinking about this idea advanced by some Christians of “Intelligent Design”, where the basic thought is that because we appear to be designed we must be the product of a designer. Seems like a sensible enough idea, and supports the Christian idea of a Creator and a Creation.

As I reflect on this idea, my question is “Who designed the Designer?”

If Christians reply to this question with “No-one, God is outside of time and space and simply IS”, then I could just as easily say this reasoning could apply to everything, including the known universe.

If I remove the duality and simply view everything as being part of All That Is, then “the Designer” and “the Designed” become one and the same and the question dissolves into nothing (or everything!).

Works for me.

Jessica’s question

My 14 year old daughter asked me “If you are gay or lesbian or bisexual, can you still be a christian?”

My response was to ask her what she meant by gay, and what she meant by christian. Although she seemed reasonably clear that gay meant “you were born liking other guys” she was fuzzy to say the least about this troublesome christian word, giving up after something like “someone who believes is God and tries to live the way the bible says you should.”

I then asked her to pretend she was a christian, and answer the question herself. She proceeded to ask me straight back what the bible said about homosexuality. From this, I asked her if that meant that her basis (as a christian) for determining whether something is right or wrong was “what the bible says”, which got met with a mumbling sort of yes. As for me telling her what the bible says about homosexuality, I pointed out that it isn’t all that clear, as christians from both sides of the fence argue their viewpoint by each quoting different verses at each other (as they do for many other issues). So then I suggested we just pretend that the bible was crystal clear that being gay was wrong – what would she think then? This was greeted with more grumbling as she clearly did not want to agree with this, but also did not want to disagree with the bible.

Finally I asked her how people of other cultures and religions would resolve the same question. So this left her with the questions of not only how do you determine the “correct” message of the bible, but also even if you do, what difference does that make as there are lots of other “bibles” out there. How can she know whether or not the bible can be trusted as divinely authoritative, or whether it is just another religious book devised by man.

After all this which was way more thinking than she was expecting, she decided to leave it at that.

What would you say to her?

the truth … a truth

A few days ago I was wandering through our local shopping mall and I bumped into a member of my former church. He knew I had “fallen away” and so used the opportunity to enthusiastically tell me (again) of how he had been miraculously healed by Jesus a few years back.

In his mind, this was a clear proof that what he believes is the truth.

In my mind, this was clear proof that what he believes is a truth.

WWANAD?

During my christian days, one method of resolving moral/ethical conundrums was to apply the WWJD method. (For the dim and slow-witted amongst my readership, this stands for What Would Jesus Do). Or even better (but I digress), the classic variant “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”. Anyway, this leads me to wondering what answers we would come up with to similar questions with WWANAD. (What Would A New Ager Do?)

Thus here some questions I propose for our next discussion group (which will be Wednesday 27th at my house, 7:30pm)

“Is abortion OK? If not, why not?”

“Is watching porn OK?’ (you would simply not believe how many search hits this blog gets each day with poor christians tying themselves up in knots over porn and masturbation)

“Should marriage be abolished?” (Stats show that marriages are busting up faster than ever, and that many that are married are just going through the motions. Is there a better way of doing this?)

For these, and whatever similar questions arise out of the discussion, the underlying question of course is “on what basis do you make your answer?” For christians, the appeal is to the bible of course. But New Agers don’t have a bible, so who says which answer is right? How do we decide? How do we know? Hmmm.

So what does matter then?

What would it matter if my doctrine of God, Man and everything was absolutely correct in every way?

What would it matter?

What matters is not that I know or that I believe, but that I do and that I live my life.

What matters is how we express love each day.

That’s what matters.

The problem with …

The problem with evangelical fundumentalists is they’re too narrow-minded

The problem with liberals is they’re too broad minded

The problem with a limited-atonement gospel is it is too exclusive

The problem with a full-atonement gospel is it is too inclusive

The problem with a literal bible interpretation is it is too objective

The problem with a symbolic bible interpretation is it is too subjective

The man who says there is no god is a …

Watch and weep.

My imaginary friend

Hi. I’d like to tell you about my imaginary friend. He’s very nice, very caring and very loving. When I feel lonely or scared I talk to him and I can feel him warming my insides and hugging me. When I feel small and weak he gives me strength. Sometimes I do things he doesn’t really like, but when I’m sorry he just says it’s all better and not to worry. What a lovely friend I have. He especially likes it when I sing songs to him. My imaginary friend is so nice that I just want everyone else to know him the way I do.

I learnt all about my imaginary friend from this very old book I read. Some of the bits in this book are not very nice and don’t sound like my friend at all, so I just skip over those bits. But the nice bits really are very, very nice. All that love! Love here, love there, love everywhere! Lovely!

Some people get angry because they don’t know my imaginary friend the way I do. Some of them even say he’s just a “transference of my ideal” whatever that silly term might mean. Of course the real reason is their hearts are hard and unbelieving. But never mind, I’ll ask my imaginary friend to help them so that one day they will be happy and loving like me.

Some people say that the very old book I read says that my imaginary friend will do some very nasty things to people that don’t love him like I do, but my imaginary friend is just too big for my little mind to understand, so I’m sure he will sort it all out. When I talk to others about my imaginary friend, I don’t really mention the nasty side of my friend too much – no point in scaring people needlessly I say.

Amazingly, I know other people who have an imaginary friend very similar to mine, so we meet together and “collectively reinforce our model”. Not sure what that means, but I’m sure it’s good. When we meet, we all make sure that we have the same ideas about our imaginary friend. It just upsets everyone if someone starts talking about something different so we really discourage that sort of thing. Cloneliness is next to godliness.

Oh how I love my imaginary friend. He’s everything I could ever wish or dream for!

One way

A diode is a small electronic device that exhibits the rather remarkable property of allowing electrical current to pass through it in one direction, but not in the other. Amazing!

Rites of initiation into the church club range from a conversion experience to baptism to public declarations to speaking in tongues to simply becoming a member. There’s a variety of ways one can enter into the kingdom of church.

But it strikes me that while churches offer a variety of ways to get in, there are no ways of getting out (not gracefully at least). While the church community has many ways to rejoice when someone “becomes a christian”, it has no mechanism for dealing with someone who decides to “un-become a christian” and move on to another stage of their journey where other models and metaphors are more helpful.

Now why is that I wonder?