Nice quote

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. 
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I'm a panentheist

Paul Tillich said that we should retire the word “God,” because it had become virtually meaningless. Meaningless because there is no consensus about what the word means. Wars have been fought, people have been slaughtered of the "right" and "wrong" definition of God. (It always makes me laugh when people say God is so transcendent that we can't know his mind, but then they DO know his mind about what he wants, what he expects, where he will send me when I die ...)

Tillich used expressions such as “Ultimate Concern,” “Ground of Being,” which pointed toward a concept of God as not a supernatural person somewhere “out there,” but as the ultimately unknowable direction in which all things point.

As Marcus Borg has articulated better than I could hope to, the God I reject is the god of supernatural theism, a “supernatural being somewhere out there.” The God that has become a selfish transaction for the unknowable afterlife. Christianity is not simply believing the right things so you can avoid eternal Hell Fire, it's about knowing and loving God, loving your fellow man, and as Jesus said in John's gospel that we "might have life, and have it more abundantly" (John 10:10).  Borg's book, "Speaking Christian" has challenged me to rethink my opinion of God and of Christianity.

Unlike pantheism, which says the universe is God, God is the universe and that is all, I realized I'm a panentheist. Panentheist means all in God and God transcends everything. God is "the ground in which I live and move and have my being" (Acts 17:28). An imperfect analogy is of fish in a river. Fish (that would be us) live in a river, rely on the river for breathing, moving ... and yet the river is more than just the fish and flora and fauna, it flows into the Ocean, it nourishes life.

Life itself is a sacrament - simply by living our lives as genuine and authentic human beings we can meet God, not just know God, but meet him and know him completely.

This is also becoming the foundation of Progressive Christianity and the Emergent Church. I would be happily involved with these denominations because they allow for the intellectual honesty of searching, discovery, questioning and rejecting. And yet they acknowledge the traditions of Christianity and the beauty of the Bible - as a human creation. They acknowledge the beauty in and borrow ideas from other religions. They follow the truth, and still have an encounter with God.

I won't claim the title of Christian. The traditional, cultural understanding of that word means someone who believes things which for the sole purpose of going to heaven, of avoiding hell. I'm not that person, I don't just believe anything.

Watch this video from my favorite church (unfortunately it's in Springfield, IL or I would go every week) for a fuller understanding of my faith journey, which will continue until the day I die.

Pascal's Wager

Several people have said to me "I'd rather believe and be wrong then not believe and be wrong, because if you're wrong you're going to hell." What you may not realize is that this is actually called Pascal's Wager, created by the seventeenth-century philosopher, Blaise Pascal. In a nutshell, Pascal's Wager says that since we can never really know if God exists, there is so much more to gain by simply believing God does exist. Essentially if you wager that God exists you gain everything (eternal life) and if you lose (and God doesn't exist) you've lost nothing.

It seems like a compelling proposition, right? Just believe the right things and you'll go to heaven! But what are the right things to believe? Why should anyone wager the Christian God is the right God to gamble your eternal soul on? He is not the only option. Maybe the Hindu God is the right one. Maybe Zeus is the right one.

Secondly, I've given up my previously held beliefs because of reason and thinking. I simply can't force myself to un-know all the things I've learned during the last five years. Surely God would know I was faking it. Believe me, there are plenty of times I think to myself "why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?" but I can't take the blue pill and forget everything.

And finally, is faith really just a matter of mentally assenting to a checklist of established beliefs? That seems so hollow, so pointless. I think any God (who every religion says is utterly transcendent and ineffable) wouldn't endow us with an intellect and ability to reason and then require we throw those abilities out the window and just blindly believe what we're told. I genuinely believe any God would much prefer those who honestly seek the truth, wherever that may lead.

So please stop lobbing this argument at me. Like everything else, I've given it a good deal of thought before rejecting it, but I find it lacking and frankly disrespectful of God.

This I love and believe with my whole heart.

I've mentioned before my fondness for authors like Bishop John Shelby Spong and Karen Armstrong. I did not realize until recently that there is a church that also loves these authors. THIS is a church I would love to attend. THIS is a faith I whole heartedly embrace. Here is a church that loves the Bible as I do, the wants to follow the teachings of Jesus, as I do, and is not afraid to call a spade a spade; to recognize myths, metaphors and the historical setting. Here is a church that believes Jesus taught us how to LIVE our lives, not just a list of things we need to mentally ascent to!

This is a spiritual approach I wholeheartedly embrace. It focuses on how to live our lives, how we can make the lives of others better without concern for some magical after life we can't possibly know anything about.

Orthodoxy or Orthopraxy?

Orthodoxy: Adherence to accepted norms; specifically creeds. In other words "right beliefs."
Orthopraxy: Emphasis on action/activity. In other words "right doing."

Of course beliefs and practices should go hand-in-hand but we're all human and struggle to live the best possible life according to our beliefs. So I'm interested in starting a conversation with you, my readers. What do you think is more important; right beliefs or right actions? Why?

Earlier in my life I interpreted the entire Christian faith and Bible through the lens of Ephesians 2:8 "For by grace you have been saved, through faith; and that not of yourself. It is a gift of God." But I no longer just accept what I was taught in church, I've studied and learned how to think, not just what to think.

Ephesians is credited to the apostle Paul; probably the second most influential person in Christianity (after Jesus, of course). But I no longer interpret the Bible through this lens for two main reasons:
1) Paul never met Jesus, he only learned about Jesus from the teachings of his disciples. Jesus' own teaching (up next) contradicts this idea.
2) Most Biblical scholars don't even think Paul wrote Ephesians, that it was written by someone claiming to be Paul. (This is fairly common and immensely interesting. If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.)

So what did Jesus teach? After all the Christian faith is about following Jesus and being Christ-like.

When asked what the most important commandment is, Jesus didn't name any of the 10 commandments, he said "Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind." Followed immediately by "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 23:37-39)

Jesus taught a radical message of love. You can't love anyone by just quietly believing it in your heart and never expressing that love! If your spouse says they love you but they never hold your hand or kiss you good night, you wouldn't feel very loved.

Today, I understand the Bible and more specifically the person of Jesus through the lens of Matthew 25:35-45 "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him 'Lord, when did we see you  hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and cloth you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go visit you?' The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'" (repeat for those who did NOT do these things)

The best part of this description is the people who did the good deeds were surprised to learn this pleased the lord! They didn't care for their fellow man because they expected eternal reward or public recognition, they just did these things because they were the right things to do.

If you profess to love Jesus with all your heart and yet you proclaim the poor deserve their lot and refuse to help them, that is not Christ-like. If you believe Jesus died for your sins but you spend your weekends in strip clubs, that is not following his teachings.

Remember "If you love me, keep my commandments." John 14:15

So there you go, that's my opinion. What's yours?

What I do believe ...

I laid out in my previous post what I don't believe, which basically boils down to everything I was taught in various churches through my life. Many people have wrongly assumed this means I believe nothing, that I've made up my mind and declared there is no God. That's not true.

Yes, I attended the Minnesota Atheist Convention and in many ways my views are aligned with atheism. But there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what atheist means and how it is perceived - atheism like it's counterpart theism is a statement of belief, while agnosticism is a statement of knowledge. I don't believe  in the God taught by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. I think any attempt to anthropomorphize God are simply human attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible.

There is a Buddhist proverb I think explains how I understand God:

 Several blind men were gathered around an elephant and each of them ran their

 hands over different parts of the elephant. The man who felt the leg declared "an

 elephant is like a tree!" The man who felt the torso declared "an elephant is like a wall!" 

The man who felt a tusk declared "an elephant is like a spear!" The man who felt the trunk

 declared "an elephant is like a snake!"

Each of the world's religions offer truth and beauty and meaning. It's impossible to study other world religions and maintain that yours is the one true religion. I think each religion is humanity's attempt to describe their experience with something numinous. 

I believe the divine can be found within rather than without. I believe the divine can be encountered in the beauty of nature, in the moments of love between people.  I believe any religion that leads you to treat other people with love and compassion is a wonderful religion. I believe any religion that leads you to demean and abuse other people is a bad religion. 

I don't fully know what I believe. I am still searching and I don't think I will ever have a definitive answer, but that's OK with me because I enjoy the search.

What I don't believe

It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I thought I was due for a check-in.

First, my apologies to anyone who has been offended by what I've written. I never meant to persecute anyone and if you've interpreted anything I've said as persecution, I am very sorry.

That said, I will admit I was carrying around some anger for a while and poking fun at certain aspects of Christianity was very cathartic to me, after laboring under a repressive version of Christianity for years. I was angry at my church leaders who perpetuated hate, I was angry at the people who were so quick to condemn me to hell, and I was angry at myself for believing without question for so many years. What was I so angry about?

I was angry about these church teachings:
That black people are black because they are the decedents of Canaan, who committed an atrocious sin so God changed the color of his skin, and all his decedents skin so everyone else would know what horrible sinners they ALL are. That everyone who was not only NOT-Christian, but not our particular brand of Pentecostal Christianity was going to hell, a place of eternal, conscious torment. That as a woman, the thing I could do that would be most pleasing to God would be to marry a man would be my spiritual leader and submit in all things to his will. I was angry that I was taught the Bible was the infallible word of God, free of mistakes and easily understandable to all who read it. Because it turns out, none of that is true.  And not just because I don't like these things, but because these things aren't actually true according to the Bible itself. Shame on the system that perpetuates these lies because they're comforting to the masses, and shame on the masses who blindly believe these things and use them to justify their own personal prejudices and hates.

(I learned most of these at Emmanuel Christian Center. If you think I'm exaggerating, just visit the link they spell out everything they believe.)

I think because of some of that anger, I've misrepresented myself. I am not an atheist (well, I sort of am, many of you will think I am) and I don't bear any ill will toward most Christians (except those who so confidently proclaim that we can never know the mind of God, except that we know God hates gays, Hindus, people who work on Sunday, Democrats, etc.) And despite my aposty, I'm still very drawn to the Bible and Christian views. I am a philosophy nerd, I love studying world religions, and Christianity and the Bible are what I know the best. Christianity is like an amazing ex-boyfriend, the yard stick I compare all others to, but just can't be with anymore.

So with that long preamble, on to what I don't believe, and a little bit about why.

1) I do not believe in God. Yep, there it is, throw the label Atheist at me, it is sort of fitting. But look again, that is God with the capital G. The "God" I grew up with. The God who created a three tiered universe, who answers prayers, intervenes in human affairs and desires a personal relationship with us lowly humans. There is just no good reason to believe in this God. Prayer doesn't work - study after study shows that people in the hospital who are prayed for recover at the same rate as people who aren't prayed for. Maybe you feel like God has intervened in your life. I've felt that way too when I was a believer. I'm not asking you to answer the Problem of Evil because people smarter than you and I have contemplated that idea for thousands of years without coming to a satisfactory answer, but I do want you to consider the possibility that you misunderstood what happened or just made up a nice comforting story. Did God really align things just right so you could meet your spouse? That was nice of him. Why didn't he answer the prayers of a mother who pleaded for her child to survive cancer? Why didn't he answer the prayers of ten thousand starving people? Yeah, I know ... we can never know the mind of God and why He doesn't answer every prayer, we just have to be thankful when he answers our prayers. But if God is just, why would he give you beautiful weather for your family picnic, but not send some manna to a family starving to death? That is not just. So either God CAN do these things and just chooses not to, in which case he is NOT all loving. Or he CAN'T do these things, in which case he is NOT all powerful. As I've already mentioned - I'm a philosophy nerd so I've heard the explanations apologists come up with for this problem, but they just don't satisfy me at all. If this problem at all bothers you (and I will go so far as to say if the Problem of Evil doesn't bother you, then you are blind and deaf to suffering) at least be humble enough to stop publicly praising God for every little thing that happens to you that can much easier be explained by chance (did God really help you find that $20 bill on the ground? did God really remind you to run home to discover you'd left the stove on?) Neither of us have any good answer to why more than 20,000 people had to die as a result of the 2004 Christmas Tsunami and Earthquake, and neither of us have any good answer why it was not a rainy day when I got married - that's just the way things happened.

2) I do not believe in an eternal paradise or eternal torture after death. Have you ever really sat down and thought about what heaven would be like? I mean more than just how big the waterfall in the backyard would be and how you and your favorite people would ride around on unicorns (ok ... that's a holdover from MY view of what heaven would be!). If there is no sin, no sadness, no death ... is there free will still? If there is no free will, are we just happy robots? And if we have an eternity to lounge poolside, won't we get bored?  No, as wonderful as the idea of an eternal paradise where no one annoys me is ... I think this life is all there is. I can't speak further on this issue because I have no idea, I have no experience with this to go on, and science has no data on anything outside of biological death, but since I have no experience/memory of being alive before this life I can't expect to be alive after this life. I do know that the atoms that make up my body were at one time parts of stars, and will some day be parts of stars and trees and planets ... that's pretty awesome to me. In this way, I will go on forever. In the meantime, I will enjoy THIS life as fully as I can, because it's probably the only one I will have. I won't have eternity to figure out how ride a horse or paint a masterpiece, I just have this life so I plan to fully live it!  (And before you respond to this claim by referring me to books like Life After Life or Heaven is Real ... you know as well as I do that anecdotal experiences are not evidence.)

3) I do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. Moreover, I don't believe the earliest gospel writers literally believed this either. The earliest versions of Mark (the oldest gospel) ends with an empty tomb, it's a cliff hanger to be sure, but it's not a resurrection. At a later date, I plan to write about the process of midrash. In the meantime Google it. For now, it's enough for me to say that dead people don't just come back to life. But it does make for a great, symbolic way to tell a story that death has been conquered, that access to God is available to all. I think the earliest gospel writers were creating a myth. As Karen Armstrong describes it a myth is something that is true once for all time, not a lie. I think the gospel writers never intended for us to literally believe Jesus came back from the dead, that there are enough clues in the gospels to indicate this, in much the way that today's writers indicate a story is fantasy by saying "once upon a time." I promise to return to this at a later time because it's pretty critical to everything.

That's enough for now. I will return to address what I DO believe another day, and I think you'll be surprised. I've been greatly influenced in what I do and do not believe by Dr. Robert Price, Karen Armstrong, and Bishop John Shelby Spong, Each of these began their faith careers as fundamentalists and have since revised their views to varying degrees. I encourage you to read their works and diligently seek truth. We ALL spend far too much time confirming what we already believe; we could benefit from exposing ourselves to and understanding things we don't believe.