Obama..... not religious?

Frank, did you see "The Onion" headline a few years ago: Homosexual Admits To Being Governor of New Jersey?

They are worse than Lawyer or Polish jokes, Wandel.

You are right. I didn't think of that. What more can the church do the guy?

Maybe so, but I have to confess I liked another headline of theirs: "Black Man Asks Nation for Change". Guilty pleasure of mine ....

That's rather like saying: "I have one word in refutation of the theory of combustion: Phlogiston!"

I'm not exactly sure how Socinianism refutes anything, and you haven't really explained it. From the sources that you cited, I still can't figure out what the Socinians believed. Here's an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry: Frankly, I have no clue what it means for Christ to be a "deified man" but not to be divine. If you can make sense of that one, Setanta, I encourage you to share your explanation with the rest of us.

Now, if your point in all of this is to say that Socinians were Christians who didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, then I would raise the following points:

(1) Are you sure?

(2) Who says they were Christians? Certainly not the authors of the Catholic Encyclopedia, who labelled the Socinians as heretics. If you're saying that the Socinians were Christians because they called themselves Christians, then I will simply repeat what I noted previously: saying it doesn't make it so. Just because the Socinians might have thought they were Christians doesn't mean they were Christians. After all, they could have been mistaken. Unless, of course, you're suggesting that everyone gets to be what they claim they are. And finally:

(3) Are you sure?

I did not say "godhood" I said "divinity", and I later clarified this to "supernatural" because of this wordplay.

Jesus never said he was "god". He danced all around this because this would get him executed. But he did say things to indicate that he was supernatural.



Other than to make my wording clearer, I'd really rather not spend too much time arguing religion. Here is what I said as clearly as I can say it:

No significant Christian theology fails to consider Christ to be supernatural.

Now if you want to argue that Socinianism or even Christadelphians is a significant body of Christian theology then we'll just have to agree to disagree about what "significant" is. One of the problems with such definitions of authority is that the line does need to be drawn somewhere as to what constitutes theological authority and because I already agree that they can call themselves whatever they want it doesn't make too much sense to argue over where that line is drawn.

Arg, I head over to my RSS feeds to find something else to read about and I run across this:

Hehehe

Yeah, I needed to step away from the screen for a bit myself.

Frank, I saw your post and will respond manana.

I love that one.

Poor shewolfen. She started this thread and cant get a post in at all. On the other hand perhaps she like me is snowed under by all the bs. Religion or the lack thereof should be left up to the individual and thier god, or what ever they worship.

No prob - I overreacted, anyway.

I still, pages later, like the word 'pockets'. People push others into pockets, the better to metabolize them.

Wolf is not shy. If she had anything she wanted to post here...she would do it in a New York second. Nothing is preventing her from posting.



No one is forcing you to participate.



Really!

And you feel that way about the cult members who marry off 13 year old girls to old men also, right???

Not in mine. You are saying "this is what my church is teaching, but I don't believe all of it." I have no problem with that. To become a hypocrite in my eyes, you would have to say something different. Something like: "I don't like what my Church would seem to be teaching by the standards of ordinary reading and listening comprehension, so I interpret it to be teaching something else." Which is not what you're saying.

for someone who is usually thoughtful and informative you have turned out to be a bug on religion and the people who believe in it. And I post when and where I want, i dont need permission from you or anyone else. You seem to be Genoves like on this subject.

That sounds more self-delusional than hypocritical.

Please describe exactly what the self-delusion is.

Point taken.

But that's not what they're saying. I've tried to formulate this response a couple times and I find myself with the dilemma of trying to explain the views of liberal christianity without incorporating my own faith, which I do not claim to be christian. I think the best approach for me to respond to this is to make some general statements and supply some sources.

The liberal christian does not look at individual statements of the bible as true/false or valid/invalid so much as they look at biblical scripture as a whole. Taken as a whole, and viewed in the eye of a telling of a story in the mythical sense, the liberal christian sees a story of a tribal people who were given guidance by god (first with a heavy hand, then with more compassion). It's a story of hope given to an evolving society. Hope for a greater purpose, for a life of value and meaning. The story doesn't get stuck in chapter one, or five, or twelve. People get stuck there sometimes, but the story doesn't. Is it a false hope? I don't think so, but I have a different definition of god, heaven, and hell than the one of the bible. My concern with Christianity is that the church put a freeze on scripture and didn't let the story continue to unfold. Liberal christian denominations have done that on their own.

You may ask how I can say the story of the bible is a myth but represents anything real? The concept of true and fact come into play here. Religious journalist Ron Harper wrote, "The Bible is true and some of it happened" as a way to highlight the problem that christianity and other religions run into when they tries to equate "true" and "fact".



To give you a non-religious example of true vs fact, consider three representations of a tree. One rendition is a photograph, the second is a painting done in fine detail, and the third is an impressionist print. Which of these is true? The fundamentalist perspective is that the photograph is the only picture that is true. The conservative perspective is that the photograph and detailed painting are both true representations of the tree. The liberal perspective is that they are all true representations of the tree, even though you could barely discern which tree was depicted in the painting. Continuing with another example from the art world -- are Picasso's cubist paintings true? Do they factually represent the subject -- no, but are they true renditions of what he was trying to express -- yes.



This is where we are looking at the discussion from different perspectives -- the net value of religion for humankind. If you remove religion from humankind, you have lost more than half (guess) of the art world, the world of music, and most importantly, the social outreach provided by the religious community. Personal experience has confirmed what I felt was true -- the religious community from far and wide has been on the ground, in the trenches, volunteering to help their neighbor recover from personal, natural, and man-made disasters long after government-sponsored, or large volunteer based disaster relief agencies have turned their attentions to other matters. This goes back to my soup kitchen analogy earlier in this thread. It's the religious community who tend to run shelters, soup kitchens, hands-on volunteer efforts at a much greater level than the secular community. For some it may be to get in a good "work" deed with their god. For others it may be to serve a "penance", for others it's simply seeing a need.

I agree with you completely that much harm has been done in the world in the name of religion. I think third level fundamentalists* (theocrats) are the most dangerous people in the world. But, beyond that, I don't see that religion -- and most certainly a liberal religion -- is doing anyone any harm.

*To quickly define levels of fundamentalism (I don't know the origins of these levels, but they aren't mine):

An example of first level fundamentalists is an enclave -- an insular group of people (the Amish, for instance) who minimally live within greater society other than what's necessary for the sake of the enclave. Second level fundamentalists can be thought of as a community where "almost" everyone follows the same path and are afraid of anyone outside the group coming in -- my jewish neighbor who moved to North Carolina to teach kindergarten and ran into extreme bigotry by parents who didn't want their publicly educated children taught by a jew is an example. And, finally, third level fundamentalists -- those who think that they, and only they, have found Truth and that the law of the land -- first their land, then the lands of others, should reflect that truth.



I don't think you're a monster of any kind. I think, like most people, you've been influenced by what you've seen in the world and are reacting accordingly. You've seen the downside of fanaticism and the harm it can do. I've seen the upside of faith and the good it can do. Peace.

I think that if religion has been removed, the arts and music and altruism would still have happened by virtue of the emotions that drive humanity. The human desire to express would have been the same, only the channel and form of the expression would be changed.