Colinset I agree with much of your post

I am concerned when the author of the article write “Boyd’s painting and the story to which it refers expresses this brokenness at the centre of our lives.”

There is a presumption by the author that we share a common “brokenness”,

Why do I not share that sense of “brokenness”?

Could it be that only by instilling a sense of emptiness or brokenness or incompleteness in me can the Church offer to market to me the means of fulfilment, repaired-ness (?), completeness?
Such a strategy would develop the co-dependence which the religiously manipulative need to make them important in the lives of ordinary folk.
This co-dependence is recognised by psychiatrists.

Type “co-dependence” into Google and read what you see. Words like “mental disease”, “addiction”. One link even ascribes a cause as child abuse. Organised religion has been known to pursue that course in the past.

I guess, in this secular age, the Church of any denomination has moved from its original set of values to a set which sees perpetuation of its own institutional existence as the goal.

Little-agreeable-buddy seems to believe he has seen the “light” and is preaching to Colinset on the wonders of his discovery, like someone who has just discovered snake-oil.

Alan grey “To take the text of genesis 1-11 seriously”

You would need access to the original text, not something which has been translated, edited, construed and re-construed to suit the particular goals and objectives of the Clergy over time.

PK “…How will I fare on judgement day? “

good point PK.

I personally believe we all are judged as individuals and on how we live our life. Not on which deity we ascribe fealty to.

For me, I believe there is a God. I do not believe any religious order has the monopoly on intercession with him.

I do not believe any religious order, or its self–appointed officials are sufficiently meritorious to qualify to represent God.

We will only find him within each of us and not in a pulpit

Interesting Fide Mae and a good point from a scientific perspective: I will not jibber, so you can read about it here: and remember these events occurred near 12 billion years ago, and we are witnessing them today.
Ancient Quasars: http://majorityrights.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/42/
There is no paradox between Science and Religion. For all intensive purposes for the argument, they are as one. Faith is the key issue and learn from it.

Sells no one said it was 'just' a resucitation. Use the word 'and'. The Gospels are clear about Christ's bodily resurrection. Our understanding of this event increases as we reflect more on it. But the event is still the event.

Do you deny the bodily resurrection of Our Lord. Just want to be clear where you are at theologically.

I'm not saying this is you but
It is common for those who have reached certain heights in life to disdain the climbing completely while talking about the view. To get any Christian reflections on society, humanity etc requires Jesus' body resurrected. (fairy tales ppl say, but in the next breath demand God perform a miracle then they'll believe - poor God can't win)

So the higher stands on the lower. The whole thing falls if you forget how you are able to see what you see.

Martin..
The resurrection was an event but what sort of an event? My hunch is that people who insist on the resuscitation model want to use that as a proof of God as supernatural agent. This is a modern view that relies on the method of natural science and is quite alien to the biblical view. There are two things here. The first is the triumph of scientific materialism that has removed the possibility of the existence of the supernatural. The second is that the biblical accounts are themselves contradictory. The appearance of the risen Christ in the upper room in John both confirms that the risen one is the crucified one but then he vanishes from them, confirming that the risen one is not a physical presence. The problem with using the miraculous as proof of the supernatural is fraught with many problems. The main one being that such a proof makes God a subject in nature, again an unbiblical notion when we consider the creation accounts. When God is a subject or agent in nature his existence can be easily disproved, as the scientists say to us. We end up with superstition, Unitarianism, and an unnatural nature. We also have to deal with the problem of the further death of this resuscitated man.

Notwithstanding that I am, according to many of the uncharitable types who haunt Peter's contributions, an emotional/intellectual/mental and/or physical cripple requiring a crutch, , I feel emboldened to take up St Paul's marvellous statement along the lines that anything offered without love is empty, foolish (lacks wisdom) and self serving.

The paucity of argument on the actual content of Peter Sellick's work is worrying, from both the narky non believers and the comfortable, self-assured believers.

I propose that the unfolding and pressing question of Western societies is whether we are "of God", or not.

An answer in the negative will see us "progress" into further social deterioration, into the "kingdom of nothingness" talked of by the late Manning Clark. Any dialogue with the emerging global forces will be as empty as a clash of symbols. We will have nothing to say other than baseless "imagineerings" that every truth that has underpinned the work of human development can be imagined away to create peace ( as in safety). Or worse still there is the armory attached to the self righteous twaddle of the perverse Texan christians and fundamentalist cohorts that exist in every suburb.

The affirmative will enliven debate on our social advancement. With an aware social consciousness of our Judeo/Christian cultural foundation, without the social compulsion to "believe", there can be a freedom to know our Western societies' story in God's revelation across (or as) history, with an ability to focus on a goal of human existence that is expressed in our story's eschatology that sees us at the fork of oblivion or completedness. It will promote the presence of an understanding of "Imago Dei" ( man as the image of God) , a priori, again in the mind of the ordinary person, for true humanism to further flourish.

Just as Peter expressed the act of judgement breaks the intimacy that is at the centre of all love, love itself, expressed as acceptance and availability to the other, works towards the mitigation of this unloving judgement.

Of course this is the healing love of the bloke from Nazareth, Jesus.

646 Christ's Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter: Jairus' daughter, the young man of Naim, Lazarus. These actions were miraculous events, but the persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus' power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment they would die again. Christ's Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space. At Jesus' Resurrection his body is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit: he shares the divine life in his glorious state, so that St. Paul can say that Christ is "the man of heaven".

648 Christ's Resurrection is an object of faith in that it is a transcendent intervention of God himself in creation and history. In it the three divine persons act together as one, and manifest their own proper characteristics. The Father's power "raised up" Christ his Son and by doing so perfectly introduced his Son's humanity, including his body, into the Trinity. Jesus is conclusively revealed as "Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his Resurrection from the dead". St. Paul insists on the manifestation of God's power through the working of the Spirit who gave life to Jesus' dead humanity and called it to the glorious state of Lordship.

650 The Fathers contemplate the Resurrection from the perspective of the divine person of Christ who remained united to his soul and body, even when these were separated from each other by death: "By the unity of the divine nature, which remains present in each of the two components of man, these are reunited. For as death is produced by the separation of the human components, so Resurrection is achieved by the union of the two."

Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Union of the two are the key words I think.

Do we agree or disagree?