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I welcome the attention that serious atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are offering the world at this moment through their books. They are bringing what I regard as a deserved criticism and a necessary correction to what Christianity has become in our generation.
It is impossible to answer the question “What is Prayer” until you can discuss the meaning of God.
It is impossible to answer the question “What is Prayer” until you can discuss the meaning of God.
This is not really the proper question. Since sex is at the heart of life and its meaning, it is inconceivable that religion--primarily an interpreter of life--would not have strong convictions and opinions on this primary human activity. The proper question is whether religion has dealt with sexuality in a competent or incompetent manner.
Why would I form my belief about gay unions and gay clergy from my faith?
No!! Religion per se should not be a mandated program of study for anyone at any time.
If they cannot there is something wrong with their understanding of their own faith system. God is not a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim!
Yes, completely. If I had my life to live over again, I would choose the same career path, marry the same wife, have the same children and serve the same congregations and the same diocese.
I loved every phase of my professional life. I loved being a priest and pastor. I loved being a bishop and an author. I love being retired now with a still developing writing career.
Do I have worries and concerns. Of course!
This question assumes that faith is related to external events and that believing means things will work out properly in the life of the believer. As such this question is a parody on both faith and life.
Life is not fair. It is full of cruelty and pain. Good people die young. Scoundrels live to ripe old age. Despots thrive, idealists perish.
Faith is not a good luck charm. Believing does not provide life insurance or assurance.
Faith means that we live in trust that God is life calling us to live, God is love calling us to love, and that God is the ground of Being giving us the courage to be all that we were meant to be. Faith means we do not engage in pious self-deception. It means that we walk boldly into the unknown. It means we transform the present with a vision of the reign of God.
Only worshipers of an idol of their own wish fulfillment could ask this particular question in the way it is posed. Only one who uses faith as a drug against reality could answer it in this form.
There is a vast difference between the experience of God and the explanation of that experience. God cannot be captured in human words, but human concepts of God can be.
Those concepts are, however, always time warped and time bound as all things are when reduced to words. If one does not question, doubt and challenge his or her own faith assertions and creedal affirmations, then one becomes an idolater. God becomes little more than our own creation.
The Bible is a human explanation of the God experience, first of the Jews, then of the Christians. The Bible is, therefore, not the “Word of God” in any literal sense. It is a human creation. So are the creeds, doctrines, dogmas and traditions of the Christian Church. The idea that anyone would suggest that it is inappropriate to question these human concepts lies somewhere between the ridiculous and the absurd.
Only people and institutions fearful of the adequacy of their version of truth would suggest otherwise.
My newest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, just released in paperback, is written for those people who are committed to the Jesus experience, but because they are citizens of the 21st Century cannot twist their minds into First Century pretzels in order to say “I believe” to the traditional explanations offered by the biblical writers. Rather I seek the reality of the Jesus experience that made these explanations seem appropriate.
I do not believe, for example, that Jesus was born of a virgin in any biological sense, but I do believe that people found in Jesus a God presence that caused them to assert that human life could never have produced what they believed they met in him.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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