R0bert,

Thanks for your post.

The Bible gives us hundreds of stories written over about 1,000 years that tell of a people’s evolving and deepening relationship with God. They use myth, metaphor and story to explain these things, and their understanding was shaped and expressed by their cultures and ideas. Some may have literally believed that God parted the Red Sea and plagued the Egyptians to bring Israel out of slavery, but it was the sense of God as instrumental in Israel’s history, and his purposes of freedom and redemption, that has lived with Israel for 3,000 years - not the the particulars of how that was executed. We do not have to believe in a literal garden of Eden to believe in the power and truth of Genesis to describe human nature, our alienation and fear of death, our tendency to voilence and division, our peculiar place in creation as self aware and morally aware, the yearning nostalgia that recurs in the human psyche, a feeling that things should be better, and once were. Or read 1 Genesis as a poem on the orderly wonder and majesty of life the universe, rather than a scientific theory in competition with Darwin and the big bang.

To me the message of Matthew 25 is that anyone who fails to see Jesus in the people around them, and especially in society’s invisible - the hungry, the thirsty, the ill-clothed and the oppressed – doesn’t really see Him at all. It is not that charitable behaviour earns admission to the kingdom of God, but rather that acted love for the neighbour is the behaviour characteristic of someone who is already a citizen.

Christianity needs to grow out of its literalised symbols and risk itself in the quest for Christ.

Alan Watts put it this way:

"The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it."

Heaven: a self-stimulatory emotional state of mind here on earth; a dream in which the end of life is not oblivion but a gateway to a realm of perfect peace and love.

All of the world’s trouble and strife gone; “the wolf lies down with the lamb”, no more war, no more bills or taxes and, for some, access to willing maidens. Endless loving contemplation.

This private dream can be left in private except when it is used as a reward for young people to strap explosives to their bodies and launch themselves and others to that promised land. At that point the whole of society has to pay attention to what the stay-on-earth leaders are peddling.

Rhian and R0bert

I would like to thank you both for the most interesting and thought provoking posts on this thread.

Well done, R0bert for eliciting thoughtful and polite responses from Sells.

As for the subject matter - as I am not religious and have no belief in any afterlife I have followed this thread more out of intellectual curiosity than from any particular POV on the topic.

Perhaps, R0bert, the usual holy rollers haven't responded to Sells claims about heaven, because they do not generally criticise other christians or maybe, they do not want their illusions about an afterlife challenged in any way.

John Warren : such a bl**dy obvious narky response; to the point of being tedious.

Rhian re your: "Christianity needs to grow out of its literalised symbols and risk itself in the quest for Christ."

I do not think Christ is a quest. Isn't it that He finds you, and it is in your response, which can only be a losing of self, that the desire for him takes hold and the path to a fuller humanity begins? And that there is no barrier to this? It is not intellectual or emotional - simply human assent of the informed will.

Symbols are associated with ritual which as a practice meets a human need. Every sphere of human activity has ritual so it need not be excised from religious worship. Indeed ritual is found its fullest expression in the religious sphere; from human sacrifice to sharing bread and wine.

Much of the literalising by believers is of the written word; be it the Bible or Koran. It is too easy to grab hold of something as unimaginative as text and avoid its underlying purpose and call.

I choose to worship God through the Catholic Mass. Its balance of communal prayer, the reading of the Word with the responses, and the ritual in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and importantly the short periods of quietness for reflection, satisfies my deeper yearnings to engage in communal worship fairly regularly. The sermon can invoke an inspired response or just a deadening.

I have no right to make judgement on those around me as to where why they are there. People at any point in time are at different part of the journey. It is just better that we are there, than not.

It just may spark that deep internal desire St Augustine speaks of
"Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord"

Boxgum,

Your last post is well written and presents I sense an honest conviction. I respect this over your earlier one-by-one shots at other contributors, who are entitled to their opinions.

Just the same:

Cannot ritual be over the top? Surely, nine absolutions is obsessive or even manic? Or, self-flagellation or Russian peasants lining-up to work their way around the Church kissing the icons. Often blue churches dedicated to Mary (Isis).

Moreover, Catholicism, unlike Protestant faith, requires surrendering to that Church's interpretations/symbols, rather than taking a less intercessionist route to interpretation. In this regard, Catholicism deprives individuals of their individualism. In this frame, I have read (Armstrong) that the Pharisees, after the fall of the Second Temple, were not particular phased: The "stone" Temple was not required, so they took their ritual home... Highly, individualistic.

Jesus, was removed from overt symbolism, chiding ritualistic public observences.

An individual relationship with God, without a stone church? A belief in the Body. God without a Church? Why do we need a clergy? Why not just professors of thesism? This state would prove more forensic.

Churches and clergy have their roots in the administration of land (on behlf of God) in the Sumer (Quigley) as garden cultures became city-states, hundreds of years before Abraham and thousands of years before Christ. It was land grab, via a God grab. That is, control, money and power, not devotion. If God exists, the Chuches seem to have usurped His thunder

Boxgum, you make some good points.

Individually, I’d agree Christ finds us, although we’re also working our way towards Him, as your journey imagery suggests. My criticism was targeted not so much at individual Christians (you’re right, we’re at different stages of our journeys) but at some church leaders. These fail to nurture progress on those journeys when they shy away from addressing complex or confronting theological issues, and are content to present shallow or literalistic theology from the pulpit. Deepening faith requires that we test, criticise and sometimes abandon some of our beliefs (writers such as Fowler, Kohlberg and Dykstra make this point, although their models of faith development are too hierarchical for my taste – see for example http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1982/v39-1-tabletalk1.htm). I think theology as it is taught in many churches actually inhibits spiritual development because it seldom makes its congregations aware of even the basic ideas being taught in modern theology and bible studies.

If I seemed to be attacking symbolism I apologise, this was not my intention. Symbols are powerful and moving and an indispensable part of faith, able to communicate things that words alone cannot. The problem is when we fail to treat these as symbols – things that point beyond themselves to something deeper – and treat them as the objects of faith and not windows on the subject of faith. So the bread and wine are not actually flesh and blood, Jesus was not remarkable because he walked on water and his mother was a virgin, we are not all biological descendents of Adam and Eve. The truths these images point to are far deeper than their literalistic use as miraculous proofs of supernatural activity. But in a culture that defines truth in terms of historical fact and scientific evidence, believers and non-believers alike struggle to recognise the real sense in which these things are ‘true’.

There is a spiritual yearning in our society that the church is not satisfying, and I worry that this is partly because of our unwillingness to rephrase our story in adult terms that make sense to the 21st century