Plonka's Blog

ALAN WATTS' QUOTES

Posted by Mark T

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of
holding on.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever
it might turn out to be.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings
to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person
who has no faith at all.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the
whole of it.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems
completely different from the style of the natural universe.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't
grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead
you relax, and float.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

6:30 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

John Shelby Spong on the Terrible Texts of the Bible

Posted by Mark T
Adapted from: The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to
Discover the God of Love

RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY:
"No one comes to the Father but by me" (John 14:6)
This text has helped to create a world where adherents of one religion feel
compelled to kill adherents of another. A veritable renaissance of religious
terror now confronts us and is making against us the claims we have long
made against religious traditions different from our own.

ANTI-SEMITISM:
And the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children'" (Matt.
27:25)
 No other verse of Holy Scripture has been responsible for so much violence
and so much bloodshed. People convinced that these words conferred
legitimacy and even holiness on their hostility have killed millions of
Jewish people over history. Far more than Christians today seem to
understand, to call the Bible "Word of God" in any sense is to legitimize
this hatred reflected in its pages.

SEXISM:
For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created
for woman, but woman for man." (1Cor. 8-9)
The message of the Christian church was once that women are evil to their
core and it was built on the story of Eve. She was taken out of man and was
not his equal, but his helpmeet. Evil entered human history through the
weakness of the woman. She was made to bear the blame and the guilt. She was
the source of death.

HOMOPHOBIA:
"...the men of Sodom...to the last man, surrounded the house; and they
called to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to
us, that we may know them.'" (Lev. 18:22)
This story that portrays all of the men of Sodom as eager to gang-rape two
heavenly visitors has been used to condemn faithful and loving homosexual
relationships. A story in which a father, in order to protect the Middle
Eastern code of hospitality, can offer his virgin daughters to be
gang-raped, and still be regarded by both God and the author of this story
as righteous, has been turned by the prejudices of later interpreters into
an anti-homosexual text that feeds the basest side of our humanity. How is
that possible unless prejudice overwhelms rationality and moral judgment?

The church has sought to portray Jesus as sharing an anti-female bias that
includes a commitment to celibacy. But there is a repressed tradition that
counters this teaching, in the story of Mary, the sister of Martha,
anointing Jesus' feet (John 12:1-8). The only thing that would have made
such an act acceptable in that day is the knowledge she was his wife.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT:
"Do not withhold discipline from a child....If you beat him with a rod, you
will save his life from Sheol" (Prov. 23:13, 14)
It validates our own violence, since when we abuse others we are only acting
after the example which God has set for us. God even required the
crucifixion of the Son. The punishing God is thus replicated in the
punishing parent, the punishing authority figure and the punishing nation.
Violence is redemptive. War is justified. Bloodshed is the way of salvation.
It all fits together so tightly, so neatly, and it justifies the most
destructive and demeaning of human emotions.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGREDATION:
"Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth" (Gen. 1:28)
We human beings are not some alien visitors who happen to be on the planet
earth. Our human life is part of this planet. Heaven is not our home. The
earth is. Once this supposed divine command was seen as necessary to enable
the human race to survive. Now it must be seen as nothing less than a
prescription for human genocide. If followed literally, this "Word of God"
all but guarantees our annihilation.

from http://www.johnshelbyspong.com/bishopspongon_theTerribleTexts.aspx

6:29 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Jesus for the Non-Religious

Posted by Mark T

The essay below was published on Februrary 15, 2006 as part of series on
this topic. Bishop Spong also wrote a book on the same issues under the same
name.

~~~

Most Christians seem to assume that the details of their faith system
dropped out of heaven in a fully developed form. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The creeds began as baptismal formulas in the 3rd century
and did not receive the shape we now recognize until the 4th century.
Doctrines like the Trinity and Incarnation were still being formed in the
5th century.

Moving closer to the life of Jesus, scholars now suggest that miracles were
added to the Jesus story only in the 7th and 8th decades of the Christian
era. The Virgin birth and the suggestion that resurrection meant physical
resuscitation are products of the 9th decade, and the account of Jesus'
ascension enters the tradition only in the 10th decade. Perhaps the biggest
gap in our knowledge of Jesus, however, occurs in those years between 30
C.E. when Jesus' earthly life came to an end and 70 C.E. when gospels began
to achieve written form. Today, by lining up the gospels in chronological
order with Mark first (ca. 70 C.E.), then Matthew (ca. 80 C.E.), Luke (ca 90
C.E.) and finally John (ca 100 C.E.), we can see how the miraculous was
heightened; the details become more graphic and supernatural activity more
pronounced. If the story could grow as dramatically as it did from 70-100
C.E., is it not reasonable to assume that it also grew from 30-70 C.E.? Yet
with no written sources, entering that time of oral transmission is a
problem. For the past year that forty-year oral phase of Christian history
has been the primary focus of my study. In a series of columns not
necessarily on successive weeks, but as a theme to which I will return often
during the next six months, I want to begin to share this study with my
audience under the general topic of "Jesus for the Non-Religious."

How can we gain access to an oral period of history when by definition no
written records exist? Is that not a dead end for research? These are valid
questions, yet studies of the gospels yield numerous clues that lead us into
these primitive moments in our faith story.

The obvious fact is that the story of Jesus was passed on or we would not
have it today. So the questions are by whom, how and in what context. Was it
simply personal? Did parents convey the Jesus story to their children? Did
it pass from person to person in the marketplace? The context of the gospel
narratives appears far too complex and patterned to have been handed on in
that personal and individual way. We need to search for a better
explanation.

The gospels make it clear that before the story of Jesus was written a heavy
dependency on the Hebrew Scriptures was already evident. That could not have
happened accidentally. Mark, for example, opens his gospel with two
quotations from the Hebrew prophets, one from Malachi and the other from II
Isaiah. He then builds into his narrative of Jesus image after image from
the Jewish scriptures. Matthew seems to imply in his gospel that everything
Jesus does is in fulfillment of the words of the prophets. He retells a
story of the birth of Moses as if it actually happened to Jesus (see Exodus
1:15-22, Matthew 2:16-18). He patterns the Sermon on the Mount (Matt.5-7) on
Psalm 119 portraying Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew and Luke both provide
us with genealogies of Jesus that relate him to both Abraham and King David.
They both quote Jesus as using texts from the Hebrew Scriptures to ward off
the attacks by Satan in the story of the temptation. Luke models the life of
Jesus frequently on the life of the prophet Elijah. On two occasions Luke
says the role of the resurrected Jesus was to open their minds to understand
the scriptures as the way to make sense out of his death. The Fourth Gospel
opens with a hymn of praise to the "Logos" or the "Word" that John believes
he has discovered in Jesus. This hymn was patterned on a hymn to wisdom from
the book of Proverbs. John constantly has Jesus invoke the name of God, "I
am," given to Moses at the burning bush as part of his own divine claim. One
cannot read the gospels without confronting the Hebrew Scriptures on every
page. These facts point powerfully to the source of the oral tradition.

The only setting in which this interweaving of the Jesus story with the
Hebrew scriptures could have occurred was in the synagogue, since that was
the only place where people heard the scriptures read and interpreted. In
the first century no one owned books since few people could either read or
write. There was no Gideon Society to place the sacred scriptures in hotel
rooms. The books of the Jewish Bible had to be copied by hand on great
scrolls. They were enormously expensive. They were the treasured possessions
of the whole community, kept in the Tabernacle of the Synagogue and brought
forth with great solemnity to be read aloud in public worship on the
Sabbath. They were always read in order. One does not skip around with
scrolls. The handles of the scrolls were laboriously turned as they were
read and the male reader began the next Sabbath where he had stopped the
previous Sabbath.

The next problem in this interpretive process is that most people today have
no idea what the liturgy of the Synagogue was like in the first century, so
they have no way of imagining this setting. Fortunately, a brief description
of synagogue worship included in the Book of Acts (13:13-16), gives us our
next clue in this probe of the oral period of Christian history.

Synagogue worship consisted of long readings from the three major sections
of the Hebrew Bible. The first was a reading "from Moses," that is from the
Torah, that included the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and
Deuteronomy. It was a requirement of first century Judaism that the entire
Torah, as the most sacred part of the Hebrew Scriptures, be read in public
worship in the synagogue over the Sabbaths of a single year. This would mean
that just the first lesson "from Moses" would last at least thirty minutes
each Sabbath.

The second reading came from what the Jews called "The Early Prophets,"
which included the books from Joshua to II Kings. There was no compulsion to
complete the reading of this material in any specific time frame; hence this
lesson was much shorter. The early prophets were simply read in order until
completed and then the process would begin again.

The third reading came from what they called "the Latter Prophets," which
were four in number: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and what was called the Book
of the Twelve. Today Christians refer to this Book of the Twelve as "the
minor prophets," and list them separately as the books from Hosea to
Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament. In the Jewish world, however,
these twelve books were all on a single scroll and treated as a single work.
Thus the four scrolls of the "Latter Prophets" tended to be read over a
four-year cycle at the rate of approximately a chapter a Sabbath. One year
would therefore be the Isaiah year, one the Jeremiah year, one the Ezekiel
year and one the year of the twelve. In the liturgy of the Synagogue these
three major readings, interspersed with prayers and Psalms would constitute
the core of the worship experience. After the final reading, the leader of
the Synagogue would normally inquire, as happens in Acts 13, whether anyone
had a message to bring that would illumine the morning's readings. This
became the setting in which his followers told stories about Jesus, recalled
the sayings and parables of Jesus and remembered and shared the developing
Jesus tradition. In this fashion, over the years, the Hebrew Scriptures were
wrapped around Jesus and through them Jesus was interpreted. The content of
the memory of Jesus was thus organized by the liturgy of the Synagogue. To
recognize this connection becomes a major breakthrough into the oral period
of Christian history.

By the time the gospels were written the memory of Jesus had been so deeply
shaped by the Synagogue context that it is impossible now to separate
history from scriptural interpretation. That is what makes the perpetual
quest to find the Jesus of history so difficult. The conclusion of the
scholars of the Jesus Seminar, for example, was that only 16% of the sayings
attributed to Jesus in the gospels are actually authentic, accurate
portrayals of what Jesus really said. The other 84% are words read into the
Jesus of history by an interpreting community during the oral period. Much
of what the gospels call the acts of Jesus fall into a similar statistical
spread.

For example, was Jesus really born in Bethlehem or was the Bethlehem birth
story an attempt on the part of people during the oral period to claim for
him the messianic status of being heir to the throne of David? Did Jesus
really feed 5000 people in the wilderness or was that an attempt to portray
him as a new Moses who also fed a multitude in the wilderness with bread
called manna? Did Jesus really march triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey
or was that an attempt to identify him with the figure of the Shepherd King
in the Book of Zechariah, who also came to Jerusalem, humbly riding on a
donkey (9:9-11)? Did Jesus really drive out the moneychangers from the
Temple and reclaim that place as "a house of prayer for all people" or was
this an early Christian attempt to show that what the prophet Zechariah said
about the Messiah had been acted out by Jesus? That prophet had written that
when the Day of the Lord comes, there would no longer be a trader in the
House of the Lord (14:21). Did Jesus really pray for the soldiers who
crucified him, as only Luke records, or was this story developed to identify
Jesus with the Servant of II Isaiah (53:12), who made "intercessions for the
transgressors?" On and on we could go, posing this same question in
literally hundreds of different ways about hundreds of familiar stories.

At the very least, this study begins to give us a glimpse of who Jesus was
before gospels were written, creeds formed or doctrines developed. If we are
willing to journey to this place with openness, I think we can be assured
that Jesus will look very different. As this series develops I hope to show
you this Jesus. Perhaps in the words of my friend Marcus Borg, we might "see
Jesus again for the first time."

from http://www.johnshelbyspong.com/bishopspongon_jesus.aspx

6:28 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Book review: The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong

Posted by Mark T
This book by John Shelby Spong, the retired Bishop of Newark. raises many
questions about the meaning of religion and its place in society. Some of
the things that Spong appears to believe would seem to indicate that if he
is a Christian then all other Christians are wrong about what being a member
of that faith means and entails. I would have thought that at least belief
in the Resurrection and the divinity of Jesus would be minimal requirements
for anyone claiming to be a Christian, but I am not a theologian. Spong's
thesis is that Christianity (however defined) has to detach itself from the
absurdities, contradictions and outright bad things in the Bible and
reinvent itself based on the good parts. Even atheists like me can agree
with him on that. But would it then be Christianity?

Spong has been telling people for a long time that the time for believing in
miracles is over, and in this book he goes further and looks at the stories,
rules and commandments which he feels are no longer appropriate for a modern
society. Restrictions on homosexuality and same-sex marriages, resistance in
the churches to the ordination of women, the seeming approval of the
destruction of the world's ecosystems which can be found in the Bible, the
idiocy of literal, young earth creationism, and many others. Spong is not
the first person to point out the absurdities in the commandments given in
Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and no thinking person could disagree with his
view that giving any credence at all to this nonsense can only bring
religion into ridicule. This is the twenty-first century, and nobody should
do anything except laugh at suggestions that the death penalty should be
applied for things like wearing mixed-fibre clothes or talking back to
parents.

(It is interesting to note that during a debate with creationists in 2005 I
asked them why they believed some parts of the Bible to be the literal word
of God but ignored other parts. I was more than a little surprised to be
told that some parts of the Bible couldn't be trusted because they were
incorrect translations, but I was stunned to be told that the mad
commandments in Deuteronomy did not apply today as the book was no longer
part of the official Bible but was just included because of tradition and
nostalgia. Remember - these people say that the Bible is inerrant.)

I get a similar feeling about Bishop Spong as I the one I had about the late
Pope John Paul II. There is an enormous intellect in there which causes
dissonance between faith and reality. Reconciling these without giving up
either is a very difficult task to achieve, maybe impossible, but the
intelligence compels its owner to try. The Pope made a valiant attempt in
his 1998 Encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), but the restrictions
of his job would never allow him the freedom that Spong has to favour one
side over the other. What Spong is calling for is a revolution in Christian
thinking which would have caused Martin Luther to back away slowly while
looking for the exit.

The following passage shows something of the flavour of the book. Spong is
talking about the responsibility that a Christian has towards nature and the
environment, but his comments about theism are a long way from orthodox
Christian thinking. I could not have put the last paragraph better if I had
written it myself

  In the Noah story saving the animals was part of the plan of salvation
(Gen. 6:20). In Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth, the Preacher, reminds his readers
that "the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. . . .
They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts". In
contemplating death this writer asks, "Who knows whether the spirit of man
goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?" (Eccles.
3:19,21). This is not the portrait of a supreme being living beyond the sky,
separate from the earth; this is the portrait of a divine presence that
permeates all of life, that binds all creatures into the mutuality of
interdependency These images are beyond theism, but they are not beyond God.
Surely we can now see that we have created the theistic God in our image,
even as we asserted that it was the other way around. We then used this God
to justify the dreadful things we were and are doing to our world. Theism is
a false notion, a human idol that must die, and when it does, God - seen as
the sacred dimension in all of life - must replace it. The minority voices
in our religious past must become the majority voices of our religious
future.

  So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human
competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God,
doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I
experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to
respect life in every form as embodying the holy. I experience God as the
source of love calling me to love wastefully all that God has made including
the earth with its plants and animals. I experience God, in the words of
Paul Tilhch, as the "Ground of Being" calling me to be all that I can be and
to affirm the sacred being of all that is. The worship of such a God could
never result in the destruction of the planet that has produced us.

  We have looked upward for a God above the sky for centuries, but we now
know that this infinite universe is empty of supernatural invasive deities.
We need to shift our vision to look within - at life, at love, at being.

This book is a useful and good read for both believers and non-believers.
For believers, it highlights the sorts of things that they are expected to
believe not only without evidence but without good reason, and provides
cogent arguments for abandoning the bad and useless ideas of their faith.
For non-believers, it shows that even a committed Christian can see that
things need to change. Whether such change is possible and whether it would
still leave anything of Christianity behind are questions which still await
an answer.

from http://www.skeptics.com.au/books/reviews/jss_sinsofscripture.htm

6:26 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Who Is Christ for Us?

Posted by Mark T
.......

By Retired Bishop JOHN SHELBY SPONG - Taken from Rescuing the Bible From
Fundamentalism

.......

 Who is Christ in our day? This question was first framed for me by
Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell in Flossenburg, Germany, in 1945.
This seminal Lutheran thinker had turned that cell into a worldwide pulpit
as he awaited his execution at the hands of the Nazis. His question was not,
Who is Christ? but rather, Who is Christ for us, in our day? Bonhoeffer
recognized, as so many religious people fail to do, that anything we say
about Christ is subjective. We do not capture Christ. Our minds do not
embrace Christ. Our words point to Christ. Our images interact with Christ.
But our words and our images are products of our world, our cultural
realities. They are not objective They will not endure forever.

...

 It was the first century that gave the verbal form to the Christian
experience. Into the words of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John the Christ event
was placed. By these words the universality of that experience was instantly
compromised. The words of the first century became the normative and
defining words for Christianity itself. So powerful was the experience of
Christ that to the words that told of the experience itself, the treasure of
the experience was confused with the earthen vessel that articulated the
experience. The essence of Christ was confused with the form in which that
essence was communicated.

      The experience of Christ was proclaimed by men and women who bore
their witness and shared their faith. First there were leaders like Peter
and Paul, who in the light of their meeting with Christ addressed the issues
that concerned the first Christians in the form of letters to the churches.
In this way the Epistles were born. Later the memory of Jesus, his sayings,
his parables, and stories about him achieved the status of treasured,
remembered, repeated words. Finally they were gathered by authors and
editors and placed into written form. In this way the Gospel narratives
entered history. In turn these books that slowly but surely obtained the
status of Scripture began to define the only legitimate ways to talk about
the Christ event, and as such they helped to create the words and phrases of
the Christian creeds.

      Despite assumptions that were made and efforts that were exerted,
these creeds did nonetheless change the biblical images dramatically. The
question is never, Who is Christ? as if there were some pure objective human
capacity to capture truth for all time. The question is, Who is Christ for
us? How do we as subjects carried along in the stream of history, whether we
are conscious of it or not, apprehend the reality of Jesus and appropriate
that reality for out time?

      The framers of the creeds, like us, were removed from the original
Jewish context that marked most of the biblical narrative. They were
answering the question. Who is Christ for us? In their own way as Hebrew
roots faded and Greek philosophical thinking became dominant. They admitted,
for example, a dualism that would never have been natural to the Hebrew mind
with its understanding of creation. they dealt with words that the original
Jewish Christians could not have fathomed. Far more than the church fathers
recognized, they were moving the Christ experience far beyond its original
vocabulary.

      Contrary to the unhistorical view of creedal fundamentalists and
biblical literalists, there never was a moment when the Christ experience
was captured to be normative for all time. So many of our classical
theological understandings are distinctly nonbiblical. But we have fused
them so deeply into Christian tradition that we do not separate creedal
concept from biblical formed Greek and Western eyes. Yet Mark would never
have understood a word like incarnation. Paul quite obviously was not a
Trinitarian. Each generation spoke of the way they saw Christ in their day.
Mark saw a cosmic struggle in the supernatural realm between demonic forces
and that intervening God. Matthew saw a new and greater Moses fulfilling the
expectations of the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke saw a new and greater Elijah
reaching toward a universalism that would embrace gentiles as well as Jews.
John saw Christ in terms of the preexistent deity who was Being itself, the
great I Am. Each of these images participated in the truth of Christ. None
of the them bound Christ forever inside their images.

      This process has continued for two thousand years. Each generation
stands in the midst of its concepts and values and uses a vocabulary tainted
by the tribal experience of those people who developed that particular
language. The knowledge available to Christians in any age was and is
nothing more or less than the common knowledge of that era.

...
      Ecclesiastical claims to possess infallibility in any formulated
version of Scripture and creed or in the articulations of any council,
synod, or hierarchical figure are to me manifestations of idolatry. Such
claims do not serve the truth. They serve only the power and control needs
of the ecclesiastical institution. The church must embrace the subjective
and relative character of everything it says and does. If the church
provides security, it cannot provide truth. This is the choice that faces
Christians today. I vote for insecurity and the pursuit of truth. The
alternative, I believe, is security and the creation of a doomed idolatry

...

      My quarrel with fundamentalist and conservative Christians is not
their right to believe as literally as they wish to believe. It is rather
with their attempt to define Christianity so narrowly that only
fundamentalists or conservatives can be included within the definition. It
is their need to impose their truth on all Christians as the only truth that
I resent. At this point biblical fundamentalism and the official position of
the Roman Catholic church with its defined orthodoxy and papal claims to
infallibility are remarkably similar, if not in form at least in intention.
Both are, in my opinion, remarkably wrong and remarkably destructive to
Christian truth and to a Christian future.

...

      It is scary to be a follower of Jesus. It even elicits great anger
form the religious establishment. It loosens the power of religious
institutions to control behavior. It opens one to the immensity of human
life, to new dimensions of consciousness and transcendence. To follow Jesus
is to be called to walk into the very being of God.

      Who is Christ for our day? I cannot answer this question for everyone.
No one can do that. I can only bear witness to what I believe the Christ
event is. Jesus is the point in the human enterprise where, for me, the
divine and the human flow together perfectly, revealing God as the Source of
love, the Source of life, and the Ground of Being. Jesus is human being
where the essence of the divine life breaks forth with a peculiar intensity.
Jesus reveals God in loving totally, living fully, and being all that he can
be. I worship the God I meet in Jesus by risking love, by daring to live,
and by having the courage to be myself-my best, deepest, and holiest self.
As I walk to the edges of life and bump into the meaning of transcendence, I
find God over, under, around, and through all that I know and all that I am.

      So the call of Christ to me is an eternal call to love, to live, and
to be. It is an invitation to work for those things that create life and to
oppose those people, those attitudes, and those systems that distort life.
It is to become aware of the freeing, exhilarating, consciousness raising
experience of the Holy God. That God calls me into every-new possibilities.
I have never met God by retreating form life. I seem to meet God only when I
enter deeply into life. That is the God that I confront when I look deeply
at Jesus of Nazareth. When I enter this experience, I turn to the words of
Scripture and to the phrases of the creeds and I no longer find the sterile
choice between literalism and nothing. I find rather an expression in dated
words and time warped symbols of the same reality that I am in touch with
today at the edges of my human limits and in the dawning moments of a
transcendent awareness. Then suddenly the ancient biblical story becomes my
story, and its ancient symbols interpret my life. I know then that I have
touched divinity, a divinity that is the same yesterday, today, and forever
I breathe that divinity in and I worship its source and I commit myself anew
to live "in Christ," as Paul would say, by living, loving, and being, as one
who has been transformed by the infinite and eternal presence of God.
Christianity becomes for me not an empty and outdated set of scriptural and
creedal concepts but a new adventure in living as I walk side by side with
the Christians of the ages who, with me, have journeyed into the meaning of
God.

...
      As the words of the Book of Joshua suggested long ago, there is set
before us today life and death. In the name of the living Christ, I choose
life.

from http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/spong3.html

6:26 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Matt McNulty: Christian fundamentalism and its fundamental flaws

Posted by Mark T
.... What I learned was a relatively new religious phenomenon -- 
fundamentalist Christianity -- was spreading throughout America and the
Third World like wildfire. And anyone who supports pluralism, religious
tolerance or science education should be concerned about this development.
Christian fundamentalism, like its Islamic counterpart, is the blatant
refusal to compromise with the modern world. Fundamentalists take a literal
interpretation of the Bible, and reject any scholarship or theory that does
not conform to the Bible, for they believe that scripture is the "inerrant"
word of God and should not be questioned. This explains their opposition to
the teaching of evolution in the school system. If they did not think the
creation account in Genesis literally happened, no objection would be raised
against evolution.
Fundamentalism differs from mainstream Christianity in other ways. In
Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, Bruce Bawer asserts
that fundamentalism -- which he terms "legalism" -- diverges from
"modernist" or mainline Protestantism in almost every aspect. Bawer argues
that legalism emphasizes adherence to doctrine over love of one's neighbor;
with modernism it is the opposite. While modernists regard Satan as a
metaphor for the potential for human evil, legalists believe Satan is a
supernatural being that exists out in the world, ready to deceive and tempt
people who are not "saved" by the "true" Christianity.

This is the reason many legalists believe that people who profess other
faiths can become instruments of Satan, and therefore deem other religions
"demonic." Televangelist Pat Robertson was quoted as saying that Islam is a
"Christian heresy" and that Hinduism "has as its origin, demonic power." The
Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, declared that
Islam is "a very evil and wicked religion."

Of course, if you decide beforehand that someone else's religion is "evil"
just because it is different from your faith, you will not be very inclined
to engage in a religious dialogue with adherents of other faiths. This is
the danger posed by a rigid, doctrinaire fundamentalism that stresses that
there is only one path to salvation.

Another pitfall of Christian fundamentalism is the disconcerting tendency to
regard the intellect as suspect, a potential tool for Satan. In Holy Terror,
Flo Conway and Jim Seigelman report that some people who join fundamentalist
Christian groups are told to get rid of every book in the house except the
Bible. Perhaps that is why fundamentalism has spread so rapidly in places
like Latin America and Africa, where education is substandard and
superstition runs rampant.

Hopefully, there will be more of a dialogue between the major religions in
the future and fundamentalism of every variety -- Muslim, Buddhist,
Christian, and Hindu -- will wither away under the lens of reason, and the
power of love.

from
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2003/05/22/Opinion/Matt-Mcnulty.Christian.Fundamentalism.And.Its.Fundamental.Flaws-2153616.shtml

6:24 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Fundamentalism vs George Orwell's 1984

Posted by Mark T
George Orwell's 1984 is an important book, and probably deserves all the
praise that has been lapped on it over the generations. But did organized
religion beat Orwell by a couple thousand years?

If you think about it, fundamentalist Christianity is a very Orwellian
religion.

Who needs Big Brother when you've got an omniscient God? Who needs the
Thought Police when there are slick televangelists and ministers condemning
anything that even looks like it might fall outside their narrow belief
system? (Or do televangelists embody the Two Minutes Hate more? I can't
decide - they go with both so well.) If you look at most Christian
fundamentalists, you'll find the same unthinking obedience and duplicity of
thought that characterizes the Party - and the same need to demonize
anything they can't control or understand.

Isn't it doublethink when you ignore scientific facts that contradict your
faith? Or when you claim to spread the love and "good news" of Christ even
as you encourage persecution and hate crimes against atheists, pagans,
Catholics, eastern religions, and homosexuals? What about when you believe
in God's faultlessness, even when the Bible itself shows him regretting
things and changing his mind? Or when you rant against the "hedonist
atheists" even as you yourself are guilty of fornication and fraud? How
about when you rant about the Second Coming even though the Bible describes
it as a ridiculous tale that any other mythology would have thrown right
out, not to mention something that could never happen across an infinite
universe? The Party portrays itself as infallible and Big Brother as
omnipotent - and so it is with Christian fundamentalists and God. Both
depend on you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.

Sin? Thoughtcrime. Satan? Goldstein. Both traitors used to be real high up
before they rebelled, almost on a level with God/Big Brother himself. We
should remember that fundamentalists literally believe Satan's influence is
pervasive, just like Party members are made to believe Goldstein's
Brotherhood is constantly working against them. Never mind that there is
never anything to prove that either Satan or the Brotherhood actually exist.

And while we're on the subject, hell sounds a lot like the Ministry of
Love - "The object of torture is torture." (The Party is more benevolent
than God, though - at least they will let you out once the pain and cruelty
have broken your mind.) Both are places where cowards have sent heroes.

Then there's Christ's death on the cross and the good news for mankind. Just
like the Party's Revolution, where Big Brother heroically defeated the
tyrant capitalists and established "freedom". Both revolutions were
betrayed - the Popes of the Dark Ages were content to make kings kiss their
feet, and even now the fundamentalists try to dominate every school board
and political office in sight. The Party went on to instigate horrors no
capitalist could ever dream of, and the Catholic Church dwarfed every
persecution the early Christians ever suffered. The fundamentalists today
want to keep those fires burning - sinners and those Satanic atheists and
faggots should never be tolerated in society...just like how the Party can't
stand a single deviant thought anywhere, no matter how secret or powerless
it may be.

And speaking of Catholicism, the fact that fundamentalists despise the
Catholic Church - the oldest form of Christianity - never looks good. Just
like how the Party eventually vaporized the Revolution's original leaders.

(I don't see what the conflict is about. The fundamentalists hold all the
worst attitudes the Catholic Church ever did. Oh, yeah - doublethink. I keep
forgetting.)

Hell, the comparison between Christian fundamentalism and the Party is so
close, you don't even have to change the Party's infamous slogans.

WAR IS PEACE? If you took away the delusion that humanity needs to be saved
from Satanic forces, I doubt most Christian fundamentalists would know what
to do with themselves. It seems they're never more at home than when they're
imagining yet another specter for their followers to be terrified or
outraged at. Andrew White beat me to saying it: "The main doctrine of a
fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God."

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY? Fundamentalists tell me over and over that while I might
feel free for not sharing their beliefs, it just makes me a slave of Satan.
The individual is always defeated, says the Party. Doing what we want or
enjoy (even our basic human rights) always leads to ruin and death, say the
Christian fundamentalists. As with the Party, the slogan's reverse is also
believed by the fundamentalists - slavery is freedom. Believing in the
absurd, repressive claptrap that they take from the Bible is supposed to
make us "free".

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH? One word: Creationism. A few more: who was told not
to eat from the "Tree of Knowledge"? It never fails - Christian
fundamentalists always argue the hardest against what they understand the
least. For example, why do many of them still think [fill in the blank] is
an occult (ooops, now it's "secular humanist") lure into murder and suicide,
despite having no evidence that will stand up with any secular organization
even remotely concerned with murder, suicide, and mental illness? Oh, wait,
almost forgot - that's because Satan's influence has got them fooled real
good. There just isn't any reasoning with fundamentalists. Which is exactly
the point - any good fundamentalist can tell you faith is far more important
than the world's logic or knowledge. The worst ones will even say that faith
is the only logic and knowledge. Kind of like how the only way to see
reality is through the eyes of the Party. How many fingers, Winston?

Many people saw 1984 as a warning against communism, but it's really a
warning against fascism. Politics aren't the only breeding ground for it -
the Christians have demonstrated this from pretty much the first moment they
gained any kind of power. I couldn't help but see how easily the Party could
have been a Christian theocracy - without changing a single facet of how it
operates.

I'm not saying the Party and the Christian right are an absolute, perfect
match. But the similarities are blatant.

And growing.

If this is their idea of "salvation", they can keep it.

from http://www.primaryerror.net/orwellianchristianity.html

6:23 PM - 17/12/2008 - comments {0} - post comment

SOLD - but not to us

Posted by The Gryphonn
I'd lined up a test drive for the Mitsubishi yesterday at lunch. She phoned at about ten to say she'd sold it to a woman that morning. Ah well, I found out todaythat she probably needed it more than us. She has five kids to cart around. BUT...she got it for $4000!!

I got held up going down to check out the Bedford today. Had the money and all, but couldn't get a lift. He sold it this afternoon.

Now we're looking at one in Buderim, one in Orange and one in Revesby...and maybe one in Mudgee NSW.
They're all long wheel base Mazdas of varying vintage from '84 to '95. All are between $4500 and $5000, registered with an average of nine months remaining and are in good nick.

But then, there may be something else come up too.

19:17 - Fri 12 December 2008 - comments {0} - post comment

Making Plans - Oh, Hello Everyone

Posted by The Gryphonn
Hi, long time no see. I just realised my last post was in April and I've barely communicated with anyone since then. So, without boring you with past details, here's a quick rundown on the past months...

April to May. House sitting.

May to July. Living with the Sister and Brother in law near Kingaroy.

July. Back to hometown for two weeks for school holidays and to sort out some custody problems with step daughter.

July to September. Stayed in shed at eldest step daughters place.

October to now. Moved in to emergency housing with Anglicare.

Next week...

We have looked at the following for the start to our mobile home that we'll take back to Ballogie (near Kingaroy) with us:

4WD Mitsubishi Delica 8 seater. Reg/RWC 5 months. $4500

Bedford converted to a camper with solar power, shower, toilet, water, gas hot water, big fridge, stove, mobile satellite. Sleeps 4.  202 Holden motor, automatic, LPG/petrol. BUT, I have no idea what it will need to pass a roadworthy. $5000, but we may be able to talk them down to $3500 or less I HOPE.

A 90 series Landcruiser wagon. $1800 but I haven't looked at it yet.

Once again I am cutting it fine because the emergency lease at this house runs out on either the 13th or the 15th.

The thing is, I have a budget of about $6000 at the outside. Now, the Delica is in good nick. It's had the gearbox rebuilt, the radiator replaced. The timing chain and I believe rings also have been done. There is a little wear on the back tyres (big sand tyres), but overall it's in good condition with minimal surface rust. It's an '85 model.

The Bedford has everything we'd want in a mobile home!!!! BUT BUT bloody BUT!!!! It has oil on the motor, tranmission and diff. Which is a sign of old age, leaky seals and probably some dollars extra to spend. But then, it would cost more than $3000 to kit a vehicle with LPG, 80W solar, battery, inverter, shower, stove, fridge hot water and satellite...OH, and it starts first pop (hadn't been started in a while) and runs quite smooth.

I've just sent off a txt to the seller to see what they think about 3 grand.

I'll keep you posted.

What are we gunna do in the future?

Head back to Ballogie. Sort out our new home there (long story). Get organised and take the youngest kids up to Far Nth QLD for a few weeks. After that we'll sort ourselves out again and get a mobile photo studio/printing thing happening and along with the website that I'm developing, start selling some photos.

Just got a txt back from the owner's son. $3500 is the lowest they'll go. All he knows is that the glass bowl on the fuel filter leaks, so it is being run on LPG at the moment. Rego ran out this month.

HELLLLP!!!!!
 

18:07 - Wed 10 December 2008 - comments {2} - post comment

OPEN LETTERS TO PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD AND HEALTH MINISTER NICOLA ROXON

Posted by josken1

OPEN LETTERS TO PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD AND HEALTH MINISTER NICOLA ROXON

28 November 2008


Name: Mr Mannie (Emanuel) De Saxe


Email Address: josken1_at_pacific_net_au


Postal Address: 2/12 Murphy Grove Preston Vic 3072 Australia


To Prime Minister Kevin Rudd


Subject: Roxon's health ambassadors


Comment: Health Minister Roxon appointed six men as health ambassadors, showing yet again her misjudgement in her portfolio. Two of the men are known notorious homophobes, one of whom has used an expression used by anti-semites who pretend to like Jews by saying "some of my best friends are Jews". He has said "some of my best friends are gays".

Homophobia is rampant in our communities leading to abuse, violence and murder of gays, lesbians,transgenders and people living with HIV/AIDS (GLTH communities).

Two of these six men belong to a group called the Fatherhood Foundation who published a paper entitled "21 Reasons Why Gender Matters."

While the ALP works on futile attempts at net censorship, this sort of hate preaching on the web will continue unabated.

The ALP is not known for its friendship with the GLTH communities and the support it showed for the Howard Marriage bill in 2004 is an indication of its approach. Discrimination against these communities is writ large and continues unabated.

Not only should Roxon be removed from the ministry, but  the second of the homophobes whom she has left as one of her ambassadors must be removed immediately.

Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

7 December 2008


To Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon


It seems that although you have got rid of one of the homophobic appointees as health ambassadors, the other, Barry Williams, is still there.


As far as members of the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS communities are concerned, this situation is very unsatisfactory, and we will pursue the matter until homophobia is rooted out of those of us who are affected by this ongoing campaign of hatred waged by so many in the community.


We have also contacted the Prime Minister about the issue, and we are still waiting for a response from him.


Barry Williams is a homophobe and if he says he didn't read the "Gender Matters" document when he signed it, he should have, or else he is just trying to hide his homophobia in order to retain this appointment. What did he think a document containing 21 hate clauses consisted of?


We trust we will be informed as soon as possible that Barry Williams is no longer a men's health ambassador.


Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an automatically generated response.


Thank you for your email to Nicola Roxon MP, Federal Member for Gellibrand and Minister for Health and Ageing.


Due to the large volume of emails received, we are unable to acknowledge each email personally.  However, we will reply to each email.  Response times depend on the complexity of the issues raised.


If you live in the electorate of Gellibrand and have not included your name, address and any other relevant contact details in your email, please provide them.


Your email is important to us and will be dealt with in due course. However if you require any further information, please contact us on (02) 6277 7220.  For electorate and local constituent matters, please telephone the Gellibrand electorate office on (03) 9687 7355.


If your email relates to an invitation or media enquiry for the Federal Member for Gellibrand and Minister for Health and Ageing it will be forwarded to the relevant staff member.


The Department of Health and Ageing have a number of National Information Lines for further information on a range of topics.  They are available here - http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/health-infoline.htm


Thank you again for taking the time to email Nicola Roxon MP, Federal Member for Gellibrand and Minister for Health and Ageing.

4:46 PM - 10.12.2008 - comments {0} - post comment

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