Thanks Peter, for one of your more thought-provoking pieces.

If we can’t offer miracles, "intelligent design", life after death, or the eco-worship that passes so often for modern spirituality - and I agree we can’t – then what is our mission?

I agree with some of your analysis of modernity, but I think it would be helpful if you spent less time describing what we need to ditch as Christians, and more on what can replace it. A return to orthodoxy is all very well, but I suspect what you call orthodoxy is far removed from how the average pew dweller perceives it: as accepting the authority of the church, the historical accuracy of the bible, and a single unquestioned Christian position on issues like homosexuality and the status of women.

And the trinity is a hard doctrine to take in, except at the literal (and absurd) level. We can’t stand on street corners proclaiming “perichoresis”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis

It seems to me the church hasn’t yet come to a coherent view, so it can’t properly articulate one. Thinkers like you are important in prodding us on that journey.

Those of us in churches following the lectionary are hearing a lot of John’s gospel at the moment. This Sunday’s text will be the man born blind. It’s a relevant story and quite an encouraging one, I think, for our current situation. The gospel remains, indeed!

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%209

Dear Peter,

At one time many people accepted and believed in the various pantheons of the Romans, the Greeks, the Norse, the ancient Egyptians etc. At one time Manichaeism extended from Spain to China. Manicheism lasted for 15 centuries. At one time the religions of the Aztecs and the Incas thrived. All of these religions were invented, came and went. They were all human inventions and all were eventually discarded.

The Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism and all other religions that exist today are also human inventions. They too will be discarded in time. They will be replaced by other superstitions.

However, be of good cheer. Eventually our universe will end. Science and philosophy along with all the humanities will also disappear as humanity and all other life disappears in the heat death which ends all we know. Your particular superstition will have disappeared long before that. Meanwhile let us enjoy life.

Thank you for another great article, Peter.

Proverbs 26:27 says:
"Whoever digs a pit will fall into it; if someone rolls a stone, it will roll back on them"

The church knew all along that there is no meaning in nature, but so long as it was profitable, the church, like Aaron, went along with the worship of the golden-calf of material science for some centuries of early modernity, so long as it brought the church power and wealth. It even cooperated with the materialistic state so long as it was filling the churches and their coffers. But then the calf kicked back, proving there is no material God and leaving the church empty and embarrassed. Ultimately, Moses descends from the mountain and... doesn't like what he sees...

The future of the church is in quality rather than quantity. Instead of evangelising with false-promises of material success, the church should simply be there to nourish those weary of the world and its false lights, as the prophet Isaiah declared (chapter 55):

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labour on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.
...
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
...
You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the Lord’s renown,
for an everlasting sign, that will endure forever.

Amen.

Some good points but essentially just a confession of Peter's own muddle-headedness or his usual dim-witted Christian nonsense. Even more so because Christian-ISM as a power-and-control-seeking ideology is well and truly past its useful use by date.
It just aint true and never was.
http://www.aboutadidam.org/articles/secret_identity/beyond_hidden.html
It is interesting that David Bentley-Hart recently published a well received book with the title Being Consciousness and Bliss. This is interesting because hardly any (even none) of the usual dreadfully sane Christian apologists, including Sells, use the words Consciousness with a capital C, and they certainly do not use the word Bliss or Ananda. Nor for that matter do they really talk or write about Indestructible Being with a capital B.
You certainly wont find any being Consciousness and Bliss at First Things - just right-wing "catholic" clerical fascism.

What then of Consciousness and Light which is the Energy of Consciousness - Love-Bliss-Radiance
http://www.consciousnessitself.org
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/Aletheon/there_is_a_way_EDIT.html
http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htm

Christians are of course by self-definition sinners.
To be a sinner is to actively dissociate from Being, Consciousness and Bliss.
It is to be thoroughly convicted of the mortal meat-body condition, just like atheists and secular humanists.
It is to be thoroughly Godless!
This reference describes the origins of the materialist "culture" of death that now patterns the entire world.
http://www.aboutadidam.org/newsletters/toc-february2004.html

This essay including the footnotes describes the origins and all-the-way-down-the-line cultural consequences of the profound shift in human consciousness that began with the European Renaissance. A period in history which also produced Protestant Christianity, a religion that is entirely exoteric, and which reduces human beings to the fear saturated mortal meat body scale ONLY - thus producing the "culture" of death as described in the above essay.
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Art_and_Photography/rebirth_of_sacred_art.html

Where does the Teaching and Culture of Truth come from?
It certainly does not come from theologians or religious philosophers.

http://global.adidam.org/books/gift-of-truth-itself
http://www.dabase.org/up-4-1.htm

david f,

I counted four mumbojumbos in your post, referring apparently to certain models of reality, however only in their naive (fundamentalist) forms that you, and most of us, cannot accept. I failed to see it as a justified reaction to Peter’s article. After all, as Pericles seems to suggest, one can share Peter’s (Nietzschean?) pessimistic outlook without believing in the desirability or even workability of his solution.

>>However, be of good cheer. Eventually our universe will end. Science and philosophy along with all the humanities will also disappear as humanity and all other life disappears in the heat death which ends all we know … Meanwhile let us enjoy life. <<

Perhaps this is to be understood as something to be offered as an alternative to the existential hope offered by religions, some more some less naive. It somehow reminds me of “(Life) is a tale told by an idiot, … signifying nothing." (Mackbeth)

It really is all about you, isn't it, Peter? Never mind that 'modernity' has educated, clothed, fed and lifted out of poverty billions of people. Never mind that it's revealing new and exciting ways to achieve goals that we could never have dreamed of. Never mind that it's spared an increasing number of us the need to earn our bread through hard physical labour. No, it's all about 'nihilism', and denying God, and everything else is immaterial. Why don't you grow up and stop trying to make out the details of the world through your God-coloured glasses? Surely you can't sustain this toppling tower of nonsense much longer?

And I had to chuckle when you recommended studying the Trinity as a cure for doubts about the meaningfulness of God. That's like recommending Dostoievski for people who are struggling with Chekhov. Three in one! One in three! Which thimble is the pea under this time?