Persnickety

"Give up your good Christian life and follow Jesus." --Garrison Keillor                                                                 "The only container for truth is a lie."--JM Lloyd  My position is that the Holy Bible is not holy, nor inerrant, nor consistent, nor is it God’s purpose that we view it as if it were an idol, as if it were perfect. It is the greatest work of literature ever written down, but is similar to how the Greeks viewed Homer’s epics, how the Romans viewed the Aeneid, or the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh or the Hindu Vedas. It is how a people came to view their history and how they answered certain ontological and epistemological questions. To put it in that company does not degrade the Bible; it elevates it. It is how humans have recorded our search for meaning and truth, for God. The Bibl...

What Hans Christian Von Baeyer once said of science ( Discover , March 1996) should also be applied to the church and spirituality: "Science, in other words, thrives on anomaly, inconsistency, controversy, and doubt. Certainty kills it." Whereas certainty comes from the mind, doubt comes from the body: an experience leaves the question, What has happened? Who am I , now that this instance, this thing, has occurred? Certainty says, This is so because X is Y . It is an answer. And the answers which the old church is leaving us are proving unsatisfactory. Perhaps the New Church should be like a ship at sea, not at port. The existing church sits at dry dock, getting its repairs done and reviewing its rules and regs: No homosexuality. Belief in transubstantiation (or not). Belief in infant baptism (or adult). The rules for Christ's divinity--all the stuff that has been worked out in creeds and so forth. The ship is painted with the colors of burdensome connotations: j...