Christianity Critiqued – Page 2

The Crucial Context of Christian Conceptions

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

It is interesting how a small population from a limited area during a narrow period of history shaped the essential religious and social concepts of our entire western civilization. In an area smaller than our western Oregon, the Jews, Romans, Greeks, and others mixed in a cauldron of clashes, generating ideas that would shape our basic view of history and set into us assumptions so familiar we don’t often notice them. We also don’t notice is the context in which these ideas were adopted while…

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

Was it happenstance or deliberate that the date of the attack would be our code for emergencies? Who would that emergency call be to? What synchronistic meaning should we see? Out of the clear blue sky, our own airplanes allegedly commandeered by Islamic militant terrorists, smashed into the twin trade towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and into a field in Pennsylvania. While Americans may have had a somewhat disdainful attitude towards those two boxy towers above the Manhattan skyline, both for their…

January 24, 2012
Byron Carrier

Faith in the Larger Liberty: American Deism Picture this: Our president in the White House takes scissors to Bible, cutting out of the New Testament all that makes Jesus more God than human. Out goes the virgin birth story, the miracles, even the resurrection. When preachers object, he calls them “soothsayers and necromancers.” To top it off, he is having an extended affair with his half-black servant, fathering children with her. Such a scandal would leave Fox News sputtering, unsure how to begin the spin…

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The dream of an Earthly Religion…

Earthly: our precious natural earth which allows us our bodies, lives, cultures and future.

Religion: from the old root words religare and religio, meaning “to bind back to the root and be whole again.” This does not assume we need to believe in God or the Bible. Rather, we should be well-related with our own bodies, each other, natural life, and natural existence as it actually is. If there is connection with divinity or God, it is in and through our bodies and beings that we relate primarily, not via scriptures, traditions, rituals, or supposed religious authorities. In short, by religion we mean “relating well with reality.”

The emphasis here is on the earthly. It is not an afterlife or an instead-of-life that interests us. Living well here on earth together does.

While we take our religious perspective and work seriously, we don’t want it to be stuffy. Too often, religions can be alien to the human condition rather than affirming of it. They can be demeaning and demoralizing, dull and bossy, ponderously pretentious. We lean more towards the fun and sexy, natural and lively, human and humane, thoughtful and pertinent.

Reality: the obvious and inescapable stuff of physical existence. We intend to enjoy and tend our lives in these bodies, for our time, in our cultures, for our singular and interrelated ecosystem. There may be more, but there is AT LEAST THIS of which we are born, in which we live, and into which we will die.

God or no-God is not the point; Earth is. Both believers and non-believers are welcome here, for we all share a common source, opportunity, and responsibility: life as it is and could be. This ranges from simply improving one’s own life to your helping save and restore Eden’s, not just to “sustain” it, but veering it to thrive as never before. If you value your life, each other’s, and Earth’s – welcome!

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