A new PBS documentary, “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist,” premiered this month. Paleontologist, theologian, and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin tried to be a faithful son of the Church and a faithful scientist as he brought both those together. Challenged during his life (and after), refused permission to publish, rehabilitated by recent popes.
"I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."
Hello everyone! I’m #NewHere and wanted to introduce myself. My name is Dalton B. and I am a Disciple of Jesus Christ! I am looking to make this my new home for socials and looking to migrate my friends and current following here!
'A team of academics from the Religions and Theology department at The University of Manchester have created ‘Going Beyond Belief’, a new learning resource for A Level students, with the support of the BBC Beyond Belief team.
The resource has been conceived to support students in schools and colleges to access a collection of innovative research produced by researchers at the University and the rich resource that is the Beyond Belief archive.'
@quakers I want to speak in a discussion group about the topic of "Hell". Do you have any ideas for the #Quaker perspective on the topic? #theology#quakerism
"I mean what is the deal with doctrinal theology? There are thousands of web sites and forums locked in endless pedantic debate, analyzing the arbitrary threads of theories far and wide. Like whether that wizard headmaster is gay, whether it’s kinda weird for hundred-year-old vampires to be dating school girls, and whether portrayals of counter-predatory sexual submissiveness are empowering or denigrating. Theology is the same. Just wanking over fan-fiction. "
New instance, new #introduction: Hello! I'm Abdi 👋🏾 Software engineer/data scientist in NYC. Former #refugee. Lover of greenery/gardens, board games, #movies, #cycling, autumn, Japanese food, and #tea. Fortunate to have done a lot of #travel
For those seeking to understand the uncritical pro-Israel, anti-Palestine bias of many US leaders, Steve Rabey points to Timothy P. Weber's On the Road to Armageddon, which tracks the religious beliefs among US Christians feeding this political stance. He writes,
Seems the local church has been infiltrated by some kind of heretics. The communion table is outside the chancel arch, in the nave?! Anabaptists, Cathars, Satanists, Thelemites?
(I am here to support my wife and ex who are both in the choir.)
A religious colleague of mine told me today that he had once emailed James Maffie, asking if his 500-page tome, "Aztec Philosophy" was meant to be a definitive work of historical scholarship or speculative conjecture - and Maffie admitted it was the latter.
I am without words, because he said nothing to this effect anywhere in the book... /
God the Father, God the Son, it could be said: God our Father, God our brother.
And the Holy Spirit? God our consolation? Our strength? Our support? Our help? Our impetus?
Thinking about this makes me feel that the way the Holy Spirit is usually talked about seems poor. Some churches talk too little, others focus on the least important.
The Holy Spirit IS Emmanuel.
Wrote a new blog post about some questions and musings about Gregory of Nyssa, Anthropocentrism, and Christocentrism. Trying to move beyond the "humanity is the telos of Creation" perspective, while still remaining connected to the teachings of the Fathers.
Also, I have moved my blog to a new platform. No platform perfectly matches what I want, but at least now my family and friends can easily subscribe to it.
Dogmatic religion is a bitch. It destroys the very core of people.
Humans are social creatures. So when our cherished others share with us that it is possible to know the love of a perfect being, to be enfolded in the bliss of union with it, if only we follow some rules, we naturally strive to seek this perfection. But the rules are the thing. When we submit to rules we want to know that they are justified. That they will be efficacious. But dogma, the insistence on unquestioning faith, does not give us such reassurance.
Any dogmatic set of rules is functionally unattainable in the long term because of the power of doubt. Dogmatism is not a natural part of what it is to be human. We thirst for understanding. And, while there is a great truth in not being a slave to the why of things, in sometimes accepting things as they are even though we cannot yet understand them, we will never cease completely to ask why.
Whenever there are rules they are broken. Always. If there is a rule, someone is breaking it. But with dogmatic religion it is always the rules held in the highest regard that are broken. Not just broken, smashed. The most proscribed precepts serving only to indicate the nature of the depravity of the oppressors. Our tender bliss seeking hearts recoil from this hypocrisy. And we instantly see the deception that these others have perpetrated upon us. And we hate them for it.
And if we are hurt enough, we defensively reject the entire possibility of the blissful union ever existing at all. We want our money back, because the thing they sold us does not exist. Or so we think. We think this because the hypocrites who taught us are hooked on the idea that there is only one way to characterize the perfect thing, and it is their characterization. All the other ones are evil. The god of Abraham boldly declares that all other gods are evil and untrue, false and deceiving, or even, the big lie, simply nonexistent. Like a spoiled toddler, his every utterance an insistent cry of There Can Be Only One.
This is often the first clue to us that the god of love they say they are recommending might not be quite as loving as they make him out to be. Even though we reject them once we see their hypocrisy rear its so, so ugly head, we have been so traumatically conditioned by the purveyors of the One True God™ that we can’t easily escape from the bounds of monotheism. Once we have found that particular god lacking we fall back on that conditioning and we believe that there must be no gods at all.
But the blissful union with the perfect thing is still there! If we continue to be prisoners of the conditioning foisted upon us by the damaged peddlers of the one single truth lie we shall be forever beholden to their conceptualizations. Forever locked in a trap of their design. Forever believing that it is their way or nothing.
I'm deeply grateful to announce that I wrote an article that was just published today in Christ and Pop Culture magazine. If you are interested, you are welcome to read it here.
Prosperity Gospel and Nationalism are two Christian heresies that have been rising continuously through my life, and really started rising in the 1960's. They both amount to the same theological fallacy: God wants his people to have social authority over others.
That message is about as far from Jesus as you can get.