1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. 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.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. 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.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. 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.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. 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.
12. 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.
Dr. Al-Saqa is a medical doctor currently studying to practice medicine in the United States at Wayne State University Medical School in Royal Oak, Michigan. According to the brochure:
Mazen was born in Mosul, Iraq (old Nineveh), where he served in the Presbyterian Church in Mosul as youth leader, assistant lay pastor, and doctor in the church clinic. Following the kidnapping and murder of his father, Mazen fled to Jordan and in 2009 he was granted refugee status and currently resides in Michigan where he is studying to practice medicine in the USA. He is interested in the meaning of being Christian and the effects of persecution on faith and church.
Here is an article about him,
This latest massacre of Christians, which left 58 dead, is one of the bloodiest on record since the war began in 2003. It also marks a shift in patterns of violence. It's nothing new for militants to destroy empty churches. But this bloodbath in a sanctuary full of worshippers is horribly new.
Upon hearing the news, Mazin was devastated, but not surprised. "This is what's happening to Christians in Iraq," he said by phone from his safe haven in the U.S. "What hurts most is that no one does anything to protect them."
And some others:
Iraqi refugees move to Michigan despite economy
He wrote about topics he would like to address (in his words):
He will bring his own laptop and has a powerpoint presentation.
This will be a rare opportunity to hear from a Christian in Iraq and the effect that the Iraq War has had on the people there including Christians. It will also be important to hear of his work in Iraq as a medical professional.
Here is his schedule:
If you have questions about any of these venues e-mail John Shuck.
The choice to write this particular book was deliberately made to force faith and knowledge to come together. I decided to see whether or not I really still believed in life after death. p. 199
“It’s hard to believe it’s finally happening,” Anderson said in a released statement on Friday.
“Abraham!...Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”You don’t think that story is real? You don’t think that God is real? He is as real as today’s newspaper. All over the world, fathers sacrifice their sons for some ideal such as flag or freedom or some religious superstition or even their own narcissism. What was your relationship with your father? For what did he attempt to sacrifice you? Did he succeed? And your son and your daughter? For what abstractions (honor, belief, success) will you sacrifice them? Mothers sacrifice their children too. We are all recipients of patriarchy’s bowl of pottage.
Cain said to his brother, Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then Adonai said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”Is that story real? Is Cain real? Is Adonai, the fickle lord who picks favorites, who prefers Abel’s offering to Cain’s and thus raises murderous resentment in Cain’s heart real? Listen to the news. You can hear variations on this theme from your television talking head every day. Read your heart. What is your relationship with your siblings? Any resentment you care to admit? Or maybe you were the favorite. Maybe your offering pleased daddy. How does that feel? How does that shape who you are today?
And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.Yes these are myths. They are the creations of our imaginations. But do we create them or do they create us? These stories are what it means to be human at least in part. In church, we still read them under the aura of holy writ. We expound upon them from pulpits. Our fundamentalist friends frame them with halos of inerrancy. We hip progressive types try to dismiss these silly tales with a nervous chuckle. Neither approach honors their terror and their claim upon us. If we wish to find out who we are and why we do the things we do, we might do well to enter these myths.
Adonai took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.Indulge me.
And Adonai commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for the day that you eat of it you shall die.”How do you feel about that?
This at last is bone of my bonesYou tell her about the garden, and the tilling, and the animals, and Adonai.
And flesh of my flesh;
This shall be called Woman,
For out of Man this one was
Taken.
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”Do you trust him?
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.Now open your eyes.
Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.Here is the blurb about the speech:
Join Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges for an profound new speech - Calling All Rebels. In it, he poignantly argues that American liberalism has been an abject failure in the face of the corporate takeover of the American government. He insists that unless we begin to stand fast around moral imperatives we will be complicit in our self-annihilation.During the Q & A he quoted H. Richard Niebuhr. The question was in regards to why religion seems to be a force for evil (think of the Christian right) and yet also a force for good. Hedges said, quoting Niebuhr,
"As the centers of American power were seized and hijacked by corporations, the media continued to pay deference to systems of power that could no longer be considered honest or democratic. The media treat criminals on Wall Street as responsible members of the ruling class. They treat the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon as statesmen."
"Religion is good for good people and bad for bad people."Yup.
The fact is that we need a great turnout for the rally just to get the attention of our elected representatives. Please join us in our struggle to take the power of government out of the hands of corporations and return it to the people. YOU can make a difference. YOU have the power.Check out the Facebook event.
The Green Interfaith Network will host Anthony Flaccavento as its monthly speaker Sept. 18 from 4-6 p.m. at Milligan College.Listen to Mr. Flaccavento from 4-6 p.m. Sunday, September 18th, at Derthick Hall on Milligan College Campus.
Flaccavento is a consultant, activist , organic farmer and author who has written, consulted and farmed his Flaccavento ideas and determination for a just and sustainable world.
Whether in the fields farming or as a much sought after speaker, Flaccavento is committed to steering the country and communities to be progressive and open minded. Flaccavento has stated that the nation needs to counteract current political and “lessons learned” practices and connect with reason and the morality that have come from faith-based traditions.
According to a release, Flaccavento said the emergence of local economies and the rapidly growing food movement will help bring communities together and will also help people engage across a broad political spectrum.
“We need to spend less time trying to change people’s hearts and minds with our words, instead create the opportunities for folks to act into a new way of thinking,” he said.
Flaccavento has 25 years of experience in sustainable community development. He has been a certified organic produce farmer for the past 15 years, during which time he also founded and directed Appalachian Sustainable Development. He is the author of “Healthy Food Systems: A Tool Kit for building Value Chains” and more than 100 published articles.
Flaccavento was the director of the Appalachian Office of Justice and Peace for the Catholic Diocese based in St Paul, Va., from 1985-95.
His presentation is open to the public. Light refreshments will be served and a question-and answer session will be held.
I don't know about you, but I have noticed a lot flags flapping this past week. That's nice that folks are patriotic and proud of their country. 
I broke up with God that night. I broke up with the priesthood. I broke up with the river and the sky opening and the dove calling me beloved. I broke up with chosenness and salvation and belonging. And I imagined God held me when I cried.She broke up with the Creator of Universe just when she was about to be ordained as a priest in The Episcopal Church. She had her M. Div. from Harvard and was working toward her doctorate in theology when she decided that she could no longer be in love with God. It is a love story. After she lets go of God she is able to love herself. She is able to leave the cage.
I can't do this anymore, I said. I'm not happy.
I know, I heard him say. I know. p. 170
Thanks to Gordon Kaufman--please know this book is a love letter to you, a thank you note.Through her story I heard echoes of my own. My guess is that many clergy will find their stories reflected in hers. I heard in her story the disconnect between a great Harvard education and the reality of a church that has no interest. It wasn't just the people as much as the language of the liturgy and the tradition itself that proved too small and too inadequate to converse with the faith she was deconstructing and developing.
God is gone--but not completely. When I close my eyes I still see a bearded white man. A decade of study can't wipe him out. I feel him there, hovering. But that version of God has become ethically untenable for me. Too many terrible things done in his name. Too much suffering in the world. Too much violence. Too many disasters. I let go of a personal God. I let go of all of it. p. 214
Ludwig Feurbach called his book The Essence of Christianity, but he wanted to call it Know Thyself. In that book he writes, you imagine the best version of yourself, but then you pretend it doesn't belong to you, and you name it God. Christianity alienated human beings from what is theirs. All that's good it gave away.Whether that is enough to retain the label "God" is an individual choice I suppose.
But what you think of as united, you unite. What you think of as distinct, you separate. What you think of as destroyed, you destroy. What you think of as loved, you love.
Can you see? You can save your life. You can save others' lives.
Imagine a screen. Project goodness. Project strength. Project holiness. Kindness. Mercy. Love. Watch the screen. Long for what it shows. Bow down. Worship.
Now imagine a mirror. See goodness. See strength. See holiness. Kindness. Mercy. Love. See they belong to us. pp. 221-2.
Dupre told us about Isaac Luria, a fifteenth-century Jewish mystic who believed when God created the world, he made an emptiness in himself. He made a place for otherness. He made himself vulnerable and weak. The creative act is an expression of a fundamental uncertainty. It changes God. It makes a hole in God.I am looking forward to the rest of her book and to reading more about Louis Dupre.
I need God for all I am, Dupre said. And God needs me for all God is. God needs me to be God. God is the life force of everything that is, he said. God is everywhere, the core of everything that is. Most Christians and Jews are too afraid of pantheism to admit this, he said. Mystics are not afraid of pantheism. They know if God is not in the movement of my fingers, then God does not exist.
I speak to you as an older person, Dupre said. Life is a series of failures, and at the end, you die, no matter how successful you are. This life is flawed and fragile, and we are vulnerable. Life is no more than that. But religion says that the meaning of life is not in your narrow way of looking. Religion tells us we have infinite capacity.
Religion is this: the one thing able to tell you that you have any significance at all. pp. 64-5
“The reason fundamentalist churches grow is that they offer security. “You can’t think but they offer security….The churches that claim to have all the answers don’t allow any questions.”He said that he had an unstable life growing up. He was only twelve when his father died. His father was an alcoholic. His mother was uneducated and raised him in the faith she knew. He said:
“My fundamentalist religion probably gave me the strength to endure that kind of childhood. But by the time I was fourteen, my fundamentalistic religion kept me from growing, either in terms of my understanding of God or my understanding of the world. So it began to shatter and fall apart. I didn’t go from fundamentalism into what I am now in one step. There were a number of intermediate steps. But I finally came to the conclusion that God is beyond my human capacity ever to know fully. I tell people that a horse could never explain what it means to be human. No matter what you did, no matter how a horse might be able to talk, a horse could never enter into the human experience and describe what it is like to be human. I wonder why human beings can describe what it is like to be God. And yet we have done that throughout history. We have said God is this and if you don’t agree with this I’ll burn you at the stake, I’ll go to war, I’ll persecute you. That’s nothing but human arrogance. God is a mystery into which we walk and the more deeply you walk the more that mystery just surrounds you. I consider myself today a God-intoxicated person, almost a mystic, but I have no idea of what human words I would use to try to articulate who God is or what God is. I can articulate what I believe my experience of God is.”That was John Shelby Spong in an interview about his latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. What I think is important here is that he recognized that the fundamentalist faith of his childhood had a purpose. It gave him security and strength to endure a difficult childhood. It isn’t that fundamentalism is bad. We have to be careful about judging because that security is often what people need to endure. But there comes a time that it no longer works. That happened for Bishop Spong, perhaps for many of you, and for me.
Security is a good image. Security can keep you safe, but it also keeps you confined.Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,I'd like to know his wife's opinion.
Had a wife but couldn't keep her.
So he put her in a shell
And there he kept her very well.
The Proclaimer was not only wise in himself,He is writing as an old man to a young man. He is offering his reflections. He is not sparing anything. He wants the young man to think. Qoheleth knows that there are plenty of places where the young man can go to get security and someone else’s answers. Those places are a dime a dozen. They exist today as they did in his time. In our language it sounds like this:
but what is more important, he imparted his knowledge to the people.
He searched and weighed and set forth a host of parables.
The Proclaimer sought to find just the right words,
and honestly write down what he found to be true.
The words of the wise are like goads.
They are like nails driven firmly home,
by members of a fraternity
and now delivered by one caring guide.
You are a miserable sinner. Here is how Jesus will fix you. Believe this and believe that and don’t doubt this and don’t doubt that.Qoheleth knows that business. He heard all of it and found it wanting. Qoheleth, like Spong, does not tell his spiritual story to give the final answer. He tells his story so that the young man will take his own adventure and live his own life. What Qoheleth tells the young man in the last chapter is what he has been saying throughout. He is telling him the one truth that he knows:
everything comes to an end.Nature bats last. She brings us all home, back to her womb. That is how she holds us accountable. Our life is impermanent.
Stand in awe of Nature and do what it requires of you,In other words, such is life.
for this is the whole duty of humankind.
Be happy, young man, while you are young,Be happy. Enjoy your youth. Don’t be anxious. Live life, knowing that Nature has the last word. Then he says:
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the impulses of your heart
and the desires of your eyes,
yet know that for everything you do
Nature will hold you accountable.
Therefore banish anxiety from your heart
and cast off the troubles of your body,
For youth and its early vigour are short-lived.
Therefore think of your grave in the days of your youth,Why think of the grave? Isn’t that depressing? No. It is the opposite. What do we spend our time doing? Much of the time we spend it waiting to be happy. I am going to be happy when I finish school, I get a job, I get a better job, I get a lover , I get another lover, I have kids, I boot the kids out, I get a house, I get older, I retire, whatever.
before the days of trouble come and those years arrive
when you say, “I no longer find any pleasure in life.”
“Why wait? Be happy now.”None of it lasts. Neither do you. There is no need to put off joy. Whether it is joy or sorrow, it is now. Notice it. Such is life.
Your teeth rot out andand on and on. In my first church, my elderly parishioners would tell me,
Your eyes grow dim and
Your mind wanders and
You can’t hear the birds and
Desire stops and
You get afraid of things
And you drag your old body around like a grasshopper
“Don’t get old.”What do you say to that? I’ll try? I knew what they were saying. They were seeking some sympathy and offering advice,
“Don’t let life pass without noticing it.”Good advice.
Stand in awe of Nature and do what it requires of you,The last words from Qoheleth are these:
for this is the whole duty of humankind.
For everything we do Nature will bring to judgment,For me, that sentence means that what I do now matters. What do I now, not five years from now or ten years from now, but what I do now matters. What I do will either add to the collective good, the ball of merit, as Joanna Macy calls it, or it will add to suffering.
even everything hidden, whether it be good or evil.
"Be kind."I will try.
