All Comments (16)

Bishop Rodriguez... preach at our house tonight... and i wanted to give my testimony...
he preached on abraham and isaac, i believe it was isaac climbing the mountain... anyways he said what it is that u are going for, if u can see it (figuratively) you can have it... well
...well i was born with an underbite and since i can remember i always wanted it corrected, i always thought how nice it would be to smile and actually be happy not self conscieous(mispelled haha)and i went through so much to get here but i could still imagine myself... insurances wouldnt cover, doctors wouldnt take the surgery, then i found a doctor i spent $1000 getting ready and he back out, i cried as it looked impossible... but i kept going... and tomorrow i will have the surgery with a well experienced doctor and insurance is going to cover it.... I AM SOOOOO BLESSED... that was the short version.. Thanks Bishop... may the sun always be upon your face, and may the wind always be upon your back!

Bishop Rodriguez... preach at our house tonight... and i wanted to give my testimony...
he preached on abraham and isaac, i believe it was isaac climbing the mountain... anyways he said what it is that u are going for, if u can see it (figuratively) you can have it... well
...well i was born with an underbite and since i can remember i always wanted it corrected, i always thought how nice it would be to smile and actually be happy not self conscieous(mispelled haha)and i went through so much to get here but i could still imagine myself... insurances wouldnt cover, doctors wouldnt take the surgery, then i found a doctor i spent $1000 getting ready and he back out, i cried as it looked impossible... but i kept going... and tomorrow i will have the surgery with a well experienced doctor and insurance is going to cover it.... I AM SOOOOO BLESSED... that was the short version.. Thanks Bishop... may the sun always be upon your face, and may the wind always be upon your back!

Bishop Rodriguez... preach at our house tonight... and i wanted to give my testimony...
he preached on abraham and isaac, i believe it was isaac climbing the mountain... anyways he said what it is that u are going for, if u can see it (figuratively) you can have it... well
...well i was born with an underbite and since i can remember i always wanted it corrected, i always thought how nice it would be to smile and actually be happy not self conscieous(mispelled haha)and i went through so much to get here but i could still imagine myself... insurances wouldnt cover, doctors wouldnt take the surgery, then i found a doctor i spent $1000 getting ready and he back out, i cried as it looked impossible... but i kept going... and tomorrow i will have the surgery with a well experienced doctor and insurance is going to cover it.... I AM SOOOOO BLESSED... that was the short version.. Thanks Bishop... may the sun always be upon your face, and may the wind always be upon your back!

wtf!!!!!!!!

And as with every other human behavior the behavior is a prerequisite for proving the existence of the condition.

What you are attempting anonymous is what we in the logic biz call a false dichotomy.

Garyd: sez, "Homosexuality is a behavior."

Homosexuality is a condition not a behavior. Performing homosexual acts is a behavior. Dumb!

Homosexuality is a behavior. This country has never bothered to protect people against others finding the behaviors in which they engage reprehensible nor for my money should we start now.

Mr Mark.

Glad you read the article.

The way I see it, it's a start. It's an odd start I would agree. Cut out the supernatural and what's left? If the church can't 'guarantee' everlasting life, and goes light on the God thing, you lose your congregation, I would think.

But still, there's something going on when a church is trying to play down the supernatural. It seems to me a kind of admission of how silly some religious folk are beginning to feel, trying to sell snake oil in the 21st century. They know they're lying to us, and they know that we know they're lying to us. So the lady seems to want to stop lying and to try being more honest.

But what else can they sell if they quit the snake oil business? Some kind of New Age Christian zen maybe, who knows?

Dear Andrew -

Thanks for the article.

I can't help wondering why Rev. Vosper doesn't take the final step, chuck religion altogether and join the enlightened ranks of the atheists? After all, if her contention is that the Bible is a purely man-made construct (and in this, I wholly agree), then she surely knows that we've come up with a helluva a lot of improved human constructs in the past 2,000 years, constructs that expose religion for the barbaric ideas it expounds (and none more barbaric than the death cult that calls itself Christianity).

Perhaps it is simply a matter of Rev Vosper not wishing to face the unemployment lines?

Let us look at the problem in parts.

Part 1,

1. Sexism in the Catholic Church.

a) the refusal to allow women, single or married, to be priests using "fuzzy" references in scripture to make the case.

b) Paul the Prude as per Professor Bruce Chilton
An excerpt from his book, Rabbi Paul":

"He (Paul) feared the turn-on of women's voices as much as the sight of their hair and skin..... At one point he even suggests that the sight of female hair might distract any "pretty wingie talking fictional thingies" in church attendance (1 Cor. 11:10). Simply add Paul's thinking about women to the list of flaws in the foundations of Christianity and a major factor in the Church's treatment of women.

Professor Chilton btw is a Professor of Religion at Bard College and a priest at the Free Church of St. John in Barrytown, NY.

c. And it is very probable that the Islamic scribes in the plagiarizing from the NT used Paul's ideas about women and added them to the sexist koran.

From The Globe and Mail, Canada.

Taking Christ out of Christianity

Avant garde pastor teaches a new Christianity where the way you live is more important than beliefs.

MICHAEL VALPY

March 22, 2008

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today - Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words "Jesus Christ" will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with "Glorious hope."

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected - an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit - but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers ("Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor"). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week - With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe - in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.

She is considered one of the bright, if unconventional, minds within the United Church, Canada's largest Protestant Christian denomination. She holds a master of divinity degree from Queen's University and was ordained in 1992. She founded and chairs the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.

Other Christian clergy and theologians have talked about the need to dramatically reform the doctrines of a faith that, with the exception of its vibrancy in the United States, has lost huge numbers of adherents throughout the Western world it once dominated as Christendom. In Canada, where 75 per cent of the population self-identifies as Christian, only about 16 per cent attend weekly services.

Addressing those statistics, what Ms. Vosper proposes is not so much reform as a scorched-earth approach.

A number of leading theologians in Britain - where the decline in adherents is more dramatic than in Canada - are on the same path, people like Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh and primate of the Scottish Episcopal (Anglican) Church, who has likened the Christian church to a self-service cafeteria stacked with messy trays of leftover food urgently in need of being thrown out.

Like Bishop Holloway, Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus - her words - of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.

She says there's been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation - or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time - but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.

And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won't acknowledge that it is a human project, that it's wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it's no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.

She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. "I just don't think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn't keep people away."

She wants salvation redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world. She wants the church to define resurrection as "starting over," "new chances." She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-powerful authority who must be appeased to avoid divine wrath; rather she would have congregations work together as communities to define God - or god - according to their own worked-out definitions of what is holy and sacred. She wants the eucharist - the symbolic eating and drinking of Jesus's body and blood to make the congregation part of Jesus's body - to be instead a symbolic experience of community love.

Theologians asked to comment on her book said they wouldn't until they've read it.

But one of her colleagues who knows her well, Rev. Rob Oliphant, the progressive pastor of Toronto's Eglinton St. George's United Church, said, "While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of it all - getting rid of the nonsense and keeping the core faith - I think that there is something lacking in it all. Gone is metaphor, poetry, symbol, image, beauty, paradox."

Ms. Vosper said she and her congregation have tried hard not to lose those elements in their search for the sacred and the transcendent in life.

She met with members of her congregation last Sunday to discuss what the impact might be of her book.

End of article.

Whow. At last some religious leaders see clearly how nonsensical traditional religion is in the 21st century. They have to dump the supernatural in order to get respect. And about time too. They must have noted that people have had enough of the supernatural hocus pocus and stay away from institutions that are seem more and more unreal in these enlightened times.

This is a teeny weeny beginning in the slow unraveling of religious orthodoxy, which is simply incompatible with the modern world, and must go the way of astrology, sorcery and witchcraft.

Samuel, you seem to be a little confused about your isms. There is no race or sex isms in America as mandated by law. Now all we need do is mandate that everybody love everybody and we're all done making law -the law to end all law.

Women voted for Clinton because they liked his hair. There are people who will not vote for Obama because his ears stick out. And, yes indeed, there are people who will vote for Obama because he's somewhat black. There are people who will vote for Clinton because she is she and not he. People vote on a lot of non issues and in both directions, for and against for the same non issue reasons.

There is no way to control human emotion concerning the way we look and conclusion people draw about us based upon our looks.

It's been that way ever since there's been people. There is no way to change it. It's like gravity, a natural thing that can't be controlled. Discrimination is the mechanism through which we choose many things, where we live and those with whom we will associate to name a couple. And having the right to choose where we live and with whom we will buddy up is a good thing not a bad one.

Discrimination causes real estate to go up in some places while in other places it goes down. Who wants to live in an area where theres drive-by shootings or one cannot take a walk without getting mugged? Wouldn't you pay more to live in Westwood than South Central? Why do people prefer Westwood? Because there are black people in South Central or because they have drive-by shootings in South Central?

The law does not allow racial or sexual discrimination. There is an exception yet to be addressed by law, gay people who are still discriminated against in areas that government can control, taxes, the public square and the work place. So you almost got one correct, America reeks with an ism that's sorta of gender based, and has from the beginning too.

You'll need a new source of absolute truth before the gay gender issue ism can be addressed with an open mind. Your old source is also the source of discrimination against gay folk. It's also the source of the greatest terror known to man, the threat of being thrown into a pit of fire for failing to discriminate against gays.

I can see why you're confused. Discrimination is alright as long as you're the discriminator and not the discriminatee. You're all emotionally knotted up, confused in your mind about race and sex ism that can't exist by law.

Very good Mr. Gold lets by all means start protecting behaviors which are not provably genetic as well as race and sex which are.

my comment is being held for approval by the blog owner?

"Sexism and racism are as American as apple pie" as if Americans have a corner on it.

Come to Mexico, land of your "paisanos" where there is blatant, open racism against people of darker skin and the indigenous. Ask your "paisonos" about their heritage of wife-beating and domestic violence. Maybe as Mexican as "pay manzana".

Faith communities do need to stand guard at the gates. It's important not to repeat the same indignities of the past. Today, the same "type" of people who were/are racists and sexists now use their same justifications to dehumanize and marginalize gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans. Let's tear down their walls.