Ξ February 24th, 2010 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Life |
You know sometimes I write things and have no idea "from whence" they come. Doesn’t happen often, but it did today. Who am I kidding? I know it comes from Source. But I guess I’m STILL always surprised when it happens. My friend Ernie, at LRC Houston, wrote a post about thankfulness. My response to it "just flowed". I love it when it "just flows", it rarely does! So, I wanted to share it with you for what it’s worth.
"For some time now (as my website proclaims) I have been praying prayers of thanksgiving ONLY each morning as I drive to work. Thankfulness leaves me in a better frame of mind (the mind beyond OUR mind). It has accomplished for me what years and years and years of begging, pleading, beseeching never did. Thank God, our Source for what is already done or is “in the process on manifesting itself”. Focused intention of one mind with Source, co-creates our reality. Thankfulness yields a contented spirit."
Be a thankful spirit!
Ξ February 23rd, 2010 | → 6 Comments | ∇ Life |
Every once in a while, I stop and take a look at where I stand in this journey I am on. At present, my head is spinning when I see how far I have come in the last year. I make the assessment of my journey by reading posts from the past. So what have I noticed about the last year’s posts?
First, I find that the deeper I go into research and study of traditional Christianity, the greater variety of belief I find throughout. It has been, truly, an education in the history of Christian beliefs and a truer picture of what it meant to be Christian at the genesis.
Second, I have been shocked by the in-depth introduction to the God of the Old Testament; the God of wrath. I can truly see how the Gnostics, especially Marcion, came to see the God of the OT as a completely different God as compared with the God of the NT. It is easy to see why those outside Christianity see it as polytheistic.
Third, my studies have revealed to me the historical sequence of the creation of the OT. This helps to explain in much greater detail where the books of the OT came from, their actual correct chronological order, and the effect the chronological order has on the picture that most traditional Christians have of God and his purpose. In connection with that idea, I have come to see how the gospels were created and the purpose each author (or authors) had in mind for the projected audience of each, and how each gospel reflects back to the OT.
Next, my own vision of the man called Jesus has changed in the past year. I think I have a more realistic picture of his actual purpose, his ministry if you will, while on earth. It is not the purpose that Christianity puts in our minds. He never intended to create a new religion. In fact, he spok against that very thing. He was all about relationship. He was such a unique individual. Jesus, for me embodies the kind of relationship with the unnameable which I seek. None other with which I am familiar, has ever approached closeness, clarity of what I call the Christos. His life, his relationship, his understanding of what it is to be human is what I seek. I like this new vision of Jesus much better. I see him as one of us, part of us. We may not have a true record of all he spoke or taught, but the things that are recorded in the NT as his words carry the overall picture of LOVE, compassion, and concern for those around him. The quote about love speaks volumes for me. "Love God, and love your fellow human beings". This truly IS the greatest commandment and covers it all.
As I continue to look back, I find a disturbing picture of Christianity emerging from what I have learned. It is something I strongly suspected and tried without success to put from my mind. Christianity is so very EXCLUSIVE, not INCLUSIVE. How can we bring peace to the earth, to humanity if we are exclusive. We must not exclude anyone. To believe that our way is the only way and if it’s not your way, too bad for you…is an unloving approach to life. Dogmatic Christianity is not LOVE. It is not what Jesus taught in any way.
Overall, my journey continues now with a renewed vigor and determination to further explore my connection with Source and to seek a realistic picture of the man called Jesus and his mission here. I will go where I am led, not afraid of what I will find; not afraid I will go "too far". I believe we are curious creatures who seek the unknown, who want to know, and desire a connection with something greater than ourselves.
Ξ February 15th, 2010 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Life |
The gospels of the New Testament are attempts by their authors to explain the powerful God experience that the faith communities, for which they wrote, had had with the man called Jesus. The problem is, one cannot WRITE an EXPERIENCE. One can only try to attempt to explain an experience. As a result, we have four quite different accounts of what it meant to meet God in the life of the man Jesus, depending on for whom or to whom each gospel author was writing. The gospel stories, centered as they were on the life of Jesus, have become, for some, a part of the Jewish epic story. That the gospels are a part of the Jewish epic story is not easy for the readers and interpreters throughout Christian history to see. That is primarily because the gospels are seen as either biography or as literal history instead of being part of a Jewish epic story. I think it is easier to see the Old Testament as the epic story of the Jews than to see the NT as a part of that epic. The addition of the Jesus story makes, for some, the Jewish epic a human story, with the potential of making it a universal story. Many readers and interpreters of the gospels came to assume that the gospels had to be true biography or accurate history. But, as we know, no epic is ever that.
Let’s look at the gospels for a minute.
Mark, writing in the early 70’s CE, faced the question of how God could be experienced in the life of Jesus. His explanation came in the story of the baptism of Jesus. God declared Jesus to be the Son of God by the action of the Spirit, which incidentally was in agreement with Paul (written some 20 years earlier). The difference was timing and graphic illustration. Mark told the story that Jesus was made "Son of God" at his baptism, not at the time of the resurrection, as Paul suggested.
Matthew, writing in the early to mid 80’s CE, tells a different story to answer the same question which Mark asked, changing the timing and description of the experience. For Matthew’s story, an unnamed angel of God revealed Jesus as the "Son of God" to Joseph in a dream. The action was still that of the Spirit, which was said to have caused Mary to conceive. This is where the story of the "Virgin Birth" was born.
Luke, writing in the late 80’s or perhaps early 90’s CE, repeated the miraculous birth story, but made it more specific and changed the details. The unnamed angel becomes Gabriel who communicates not with Joseph, but with Mary herself, in a vision.
The gospel of John, written in the late 90’s or perhaps into the next century, decides on something completely different. The author (or authors) decide that there was never a time when God was not in Christ. He told the story of Jesus, as the enfleshment of the eternal Word that had been spoken into existence at the beginning of creation. This became the place where the preexistence of Jesus, so essential to later doctrines of incarnation, the atonement, and the complex idea of the Trinity, first entered the Christian story.
Perhaps we need here to mention Paul, who suggested that God entered Jesus in the resurrection when God raised him into God’s life. When compared to John’s suggestion that Jesus was the enfleshed Word of God and part of who God is since creation, I think anyone can see that the range of time and descriptions used here cover quite a range of human explanations. Many parts of the various accounts seem to contradict each other.
Paul and John and the others in the NT were attempting , each in his own way, to make sense out of an experience that proclaimed , in ecstatic language, "We have met God in this life of Jesus". They then, in the rest of each gospel, proceed to expand the life of Jesus to epic proportions with the heroic deeds and miracles attributed to him.
It is impossible to WRITE an EXPERIENCE. The best these gospel writers could do was attempt to explain that experience. Their explanations along with that of Paul are pretty much the sum total of our NT idea of who Jesus was and how his life was in God.
*information taken from the works of John S. Spong
Ξ February 10th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |
“Birth after birth I walk the Earth
always my goal is the same.
Yearning for learning, looking, unhooking,
attempting to master the game.
Walking and talking, at times even stalking,
the Truth that I know is here.
Then struggling to dance, ever flirting with chance,
knowing much on life’s path is a dare.
Again I come to the ridge that has no bridge,
to the place God’s calling me to be.
Yet my body still falters at Nature’s altar,
though indeed the Christ set us free.
Yes, I’ve been here before on this very shore,
trying to manifest the freedom espied,
But NOW there is peace, soul powers released,
so I don’t take that last step…. I FLY!”
~A poem by John Jay Harper
Don’t wait for December 21, 2012. We are already experiencing an exponential, transformational change in consciousness. Can you feel it?
Ξ February 9th, 2010 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Life |
America is a country familiar with and accepting of transient lifestyles. It isn’t at all uncommon for our children to grow up and ‘move away.’ Many of us have moved so often in our careers that it’s almost expected that our kids will do the same. However, for a Palestinian family living in Israel, this is rarely the case. Not only do the children remain at home, often after marriage they build their house on top of their parent’s home. When you’re ‘land-locked’ , and Israel forbids you from moving, you build up, not beside or across town.
Here’s an interesting statistic: 50% of all suicide bombers in the lands held or occupied by Israel are victims of having had their home destroyed! What is it that caused their homes to be destroyed? A program instituted by Israel.
And this is why the home demolition program carried out by the Israelis is so devastating. It is not just the loss of property that Palestinians experience, but the loss of identity. In a document from Amnesty International we are told that “The largest single wave of destruction carried out by the Israeli army was in Jenin refugee camp in April 2002” when more than 800 families – equaling over 4,000 people – were driven from their homes.
The practice of ‘communal’ punishment, something prohibited by international law, is when a person involved in civil disobedience not only is punished by the destruction of their home, but also the homes of those related to this individual are destroyed as well. Imagine having your home destroyed merely because one of your children (or even a distant relative) was ‘accused’ of having committed a crime – not convicted, mind you, just accused. Not only that, but in addition to your home, several homes of other family members were destroyed. Do you think that would compel you to action, to retribution, to an act of terrorism?
Imagine a bulldozer arriving at your home, unannounced, and begins leveling it. The time it takes to bring a home to rubble can be as few as five minutes. For an apartment complex of five homes, it takes only a few hours to bring it to the ground.
As well, the net result of such demolitions is that more and more the Palestinians are ‘herded’ onto smaller islands of communal living if not driven out of the country altogether. It is clear that by taking the land, Israel not only displaces the people on it but also forever ends their right to self-determination.
Once a home is destroyed, a permit to rebuild must be applied for. The cost for such a permit is prohibitive, let alone the fact that denial is assured. In an instant and without proof of any wrongdoing, an Israeli bulldozer can arrive at your home and in minutes you can witness your entire world crumbling down.
The net result is that Israel gains effective control over the country by confining the 3.6 million Palestinians of the Occupied Territories to small enclaves comprising just 8% of the country; enclaves that are often encircled by a massive concrete wall.
In the name of peace, we ask all Jewish citizens to petition the Israeli government to cease their systematic home demolition program. And we ask all American citizens reading this blog to petition their U.S. congressmen and Senators to address the illegal and immoral problem so that peace might be one step closer to arriving for all the citizens of Palestine/Israel.
~from a post written by Tim King after returning from a visit to Israel. Read all his posts on the subject at: postchristianblog.com/
Ξ February 7th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |
~Borrowed this from : http://www.nakedpastor.com/
Pretty self-explanatory!
*You may have to use your "ZOOM" feature in the lower right of your screen. Sorry, had to make it fit my template!
Ξ February 3rd, 2010 | → 7 Comments | ∇ Life |
Warning! Bold statement to follow. Use caution when reading.
Jesus did not die for your sins and mine. That proclamation is theological nonsense. That Jesus was punished and died for our sins to procure some kind of Divine Justice leaves us with a heavy sense of guilt that is all but unendurable. It is also a timeless process, because our sins kill him anew every day. God rescues us from sin by paying the price of our sin through Jesus (by murdering him). When the piety of the story is scraped clean, its horror can fully be viewed. It is grotesque. It is barbaric. It creates a distorted, even a sick, humanity. It paints the portrait of a sadistic God (who murders his son) served by masochistic children (you and I). How can that be Good News? It’s bad theology because it’s bad psychology. Perhaps that is why religious people have become more and more unloving, more and more judgmental and more and more eager to "force" (through evangelizing) others to stand where they stand. After all misery loves company. That is the traditional way in which Christianity has prescribed the cure for human sin.
The primary way in which the Jesus story has traditionally and historically been told portrays the holy God involved in a cruel act of divine child abuse that was said to have taken place on a hill outside Jerusalem. We are told that there, instead of punishing us for our sins (because of the fall of Adam), God required the suffering and death of his divine Son. Thereby, righteousness was restored when the Son was punished as a substitute for us. Does that not at all sound a little strange. Jesus’ blood is precious and has the power to wash us clean because it is really God’s blood. The blood becomes a fetish, a grotesque image that rivets our attention on the trauma of the cross. We are taught that the suffering of Jesus was our fault.
~from a Passion Hymn
Who was the guilty?
Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
T’was I, Lord Jesus,
I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.
The interpretation of Jesus as the sacrificed victim is a human creation, not a divine revelation. It was shaped in the first century world by the disciples of Jesus, who drew on their Jewish liturgical symbols as a way of making the crucifixion make sense. They borrowed this understanding directly from the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, with all its symbols and story: the innocent lamb slaughtered (his death on the cross), the sprinkling of the blood, the innocent goat (the scapegoat) who became "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world". Jesus was interpreted by his earlier disciples inside these Jewish liturgical images. They are all based, however, on an understanding of human life that is quite simply wrong.
We are not fallen, sinful people who deserve to be punished. We are frightened, insecure people who have achieved the enormous breakthrough into self-consciousness that marks no other creature that has emerged from the evolutionary cycle. Our sense of separation and aloneness is not a mark of our sin. It is a symbol of our glory. Our struggle to survive, which manifests itself in radical self-centeredness, is not the result of original sin. It is a sign of emerging self-consciousness. It should not be a source of guilt. It is a source of blessing. We do not need to be punished. We need to be called and empowered to be more deeply and fully human and to develop the godlike gift of being able to give ourselves away freely in the quest for an even deeper sense of what it means to live. Jesus did not die for our sins. He died because he challenged the worldly powers of his day. Jesus demonstrated in an ultimate way that it is by giving that we receive and by loving that we enhance life.
Guilt, judgment, righteousness, orthodoxy, creedal purity; these are the products of a religion of control in which we hide in fear. They are attempts to build security. None of these are life-giving. All are methods of seeking righteousness when what we really seek and yearn for is love. The traditional way we as Christians have told the Jesus story must die along with the God-image that feeds it. When it does, this faith story may yet have a chance to be born again.
~source: John Shelby Spong’s, "The Sins of Scripture"
Ξ February 2nd, 2010 | → 7 Comments | ∇ Life |
This question has periodically resurfaced in my thinking. Christians today claim to be monotheists; "There is only one God whom we worship". See John 17:3 and many others. Once again the concept of the Trinity rears its head here. But that’s another post altogether http://donrogers.org/?p=218. What I am speaking of in this instance is Christianity’s mother, Judaism, and its concept of monotheism, which of course led to the Christian concept of monotheism. Pre-exilic Israel exhibited a firm (?)stance on monotheism, one God, Yahweh is the true God (I think even this stance is up for debate).
But all that changes when Israel is carried off to Babylon in 586 BCE. Actually, this was not a one-time event, but took place over several years. For my purposes here, 586 BCE works.
The exile to Babylon was a traumatic event in Jewish history, as the destruction of the political independence of the kingdom coincided with the destruction of the monarchy and of the first temple. After the overthrow of Babylonia by the Persian Empire, Persan ruler Cyrus the Great gave the Hebrews permission to return to their homeland in 538 BCE. More than 40,000 are said to have returned, as noted in the Biblical accounts of Jehoiakim, and Nehemiah.
But were the beliefs of the ones who returned to the homeland the same as those who left? Scholars of Judaism say, NO. Theologians have for years speculated that belief in, Satan, a basically theodic innovation, seems to have intensified in concept in the Jews post-exilic period. Let me define theodic. Better yet, Theodicy. Theodicy is an attempted answer to the problem of evil. Now, moving on.
What was the source of this intensification of the Satan concept? It appears, according to Jack Miles, writer of "Christ, Crisis in the life of God", to be the Jews exposure to Persian Zoroastrianism, with its dualistic deities of good and evil (Ahura Mazda-good, Angra Mainyu-evil). Prior to the exile, Jewish concepts of God attributed both good and evil to Yahweh, supporting a strong monotheism, although creating tension in the minds of Jews who often asked why God did "evil" things (see Isaiah 45:6-7).
It seems that in post-exilic Israel there were dual agents for a change in Jewish monotheism; one was hellenistic influences, the other, and perhaps a stronger one, was the lasting effects of exposure to Zoroastrianism and its competing deities. The process of how this affected the Jews is impossible to construct, but it is undeniable that the post-exilic Jew saw a dramatic growth in the importance of Satan in religious life. Along with the importance of Satan, there is seen a growth and importance of angels in Judaism, with a growth and importance of demons on Satan’s side. This is best seen in the extra-canonical literature of the pre-Christian centuries.
Some believe that an "enlarged" Satan" helped ease somewhat the theodicy dilemma which many Jews faced daily. In the years of growth of the importance of Satan, his power waxed and waned according to the writers of the time. At times, Satan approached an equal status with God, although never quite equal as the Gnostic lower divinity of the material, fallen world, the Demiurge. Satan, therefore, seems to have become the answer to the theodicy dilemma experienced by Jews of the day.
The theodicy dilemma in monotheism again rears its head when Christianity is in its infancy, and later. We see the rise of Gnosticism (1st & 2nd century), with its concept of the Demiurge. Marcionism (1st & 2nd century), which saw the Hebrew God of the Old Testament as a inferior deity to the God of the New Testament. Manichaeanism, which was a dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles, or regarding matter as intrinsically evil and mind as intrinsically good. The last evidence of the Theodicy dilemma, Catharism (13th century France), was a dualistic idea which basically supported a God of good and a God of evil.
Satan then, in the minds of "modern" Christians, functions to create an Orthodox dualism.
We find in today’s Christians, a variety of beliefs about Satan.The first is a "soft" or attenuated Satan concept. One may abstractly believe in Satan, but they don’t see Satan active in their lives. Whether they really say it or not, they tend to attribute both good and bad things to God. They praise him for the good and blame him, however circuitously it may be, for the bad.
Another belief about Satan which manifests itself today is the "dualistic" idea. These Christians have a robust notion of Satan and see him as a constant interference in their lives. God is praised for the good. It is Satan who receives blame for the evil. No matter that Christianity constantly states a "full" belief in monotheism, this last idea smacks of the dualism that Christians condemn readily.
As you can see, the problem of theodicy has not gone away. It has merely shifted focus and changed its appearance. Today’s Christianity and the variety of belief about theodicy begs the question: Are Christians true Monotheists? The problem of good and evil is ongoing in the lives of Christians as well as other religious people today.
I think of Biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman. Bart is quoted as saying that the reason he is today an agnostic, after beginning his scholarly career as a fundamentalist, is that he could not resolve the issue of why God allows suffering (evil). What do you think? Are Christians true Monotheists?
~An article from Dr. Richard Beck in 2008 got me to thinking about this subject.
Update: If you’re interested in pursuing this subject in a little more depth, follow this link to a good article
Ξ February 1st, 2010 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Life |
The actual beneficiary of the practice of compassion and caring for others is ONESELF.
~His holiness, The Dalai Lama
Stumble it!
