Hi George, I find nothing in your last post to disagree with. I offer merely my own deconstructed interpretation of the Gospels. To me, the Bible is a mix of allegory/metaphor and interpretations of some probable factual events. The use of metaphor, as always, is to expand our understanding of such events - the dynamics of human nature - the deeper, psychological causes of conflict.

The Bible, to me, is predominantly an allegory for the transition from the unconscious to the conscious mind.

I do not consider myself to be a christian btw, though raised within the Roman Catholic tradition here in England.

My point is simple - the Earth IS the most beautiful thing known to exist in the universe and we take if for granted - to the point of self-destruction - when, quite obviously, the opposite potential is (for the moment at least) equally possible.

Remco,
If I may, can I tell you the closest thing I have experienced to a miracle this year?

I live in the country. My next door neighbours, who are Christian believers, don’t believe in banks. In April, armed thieves came to my neighbour’s house at 1am. They stole his life’s savings and put a bullet through his wife. After a month in hospital, she was okay. People described her survival as a miracle, but technically it was not a medical miracle. The bullet just happened to pass through parts of her body that weren’t vital.

Fortunately, she survived, but if you want me to believe in “the innate goodness of all people”, you’re probably caught me at the wrong time. Even babies, from fairly early, predictably show tendencies to improper behaviour. There was only ever one totally good person, and we nailed him to a tree.

Apart from ‘original sin’, I think you show some other misunderstandings of the Christian faith, and why people enter into it. Most Christians (like most other Australians) I know are very practical. If their faith was not real and useful to them here and now, I don’t think they would keep turning up on Sundays. Forgiveness from sin, yes, but pie in the sky when you die, no. That’s not front and centre of their mind.

Though I have enjoyed our exchange of ideas, I do find some of your ideas a little hard to understand. On one hand you say, “there is not one skerrick of proof of an object god.” and in the next sentence you say, “there is only god.”

If by objective god, you mean one that I just didn’t dream up in my head, or create from my own wishful thinking, but he who has revealed himself in the pages of history, then that is one way to describe the God of the Bible.

What is ‘god’? God to me is omniscient so as the Jews also acknowledge, using the name of “God” makes god an object. So one can say, “kill God” – kill the object.

Christians make supplicant pleas to an object god –a parent figure so one risks the “wrath of god” a potentially angry figure “out there”.

Despite the supplicant pleas and influence the Christian god has on behaviour, Christians struggle to affirm their god and so the Roman Catholic church scours the earth for ”miracles”. Yet Christians do not live longer, are no healthier, no less criminal etc than other beliefs. That is my “no skerrick of proof”. It is only the unexplained “miracle” that points to a greater being never mind other “miracles”.

The religious hold on to mythologies, dogmas by that disempower themselves – shutting out the omniscient, blinkered to the oneness, creating divisions of “saved” and “unsaved” and above all, to the beauty of this most beautiful earth. We on the other hand are open to question but if the book of Christians is questioned, it becomes an issue of heresy. A “my book is better than yours” is implicitly used to stand up to Islam. A book standing in the way of true love.

We don’t need a book to practice love. There is not a skerrick of proof that Christian nations are any different to non Christian nations, one need only look at the United States.

Little wonder the Gospel of Judas and the other Gnostics were denigrated by the church. They saw the light that Jesus saw. It is right here. Right now. All around. Just love.

The bible has the essence of spirituality. I suggest it has been selectively interpreted so the profound wisdom of Jesus, a son of man, has in part been lost, and where not lost, interpreted to the banal. So then words like “sin” and “meek” have been narrowed down to the vernacular. The light is obscured. The heaven lost, their power given away to the church.

K£vin, “though raised within the Roman Catholic tradition… the Earth IS the most beautiful thing known to exist in the universe and we take if for granted - to the point of self-destruction” Perhaps you will find interesting the article by John L. Allen, built around the statement that “ Catholicism ... stands at a crossroads today on the environmental question. While there may be growing ecological concern, it's not clear whether the church will be a follower or a leader, and to what extent it can, or will, mobilize its resources to make a difference.” (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1213). Indeed, on some issues the Church is a passive follower for too long, before she realises that the issue is of such nature that her very mission would require her to take up a leading position.

Remco, there are many reasons you could criticise the official position of any Church, in particular the Catholic, but you have to keep to what she stands for in the 21st century. Yes, simple minded Catholics are probably more into “miracles” and naive interpretations of their faith than those belonging to other Churches, but this is a left-over from the Middle Ages, when there were no “other Churches”. Today, the RC church certainly does not “scour the earth for miracles”. On the contrary, she has problems with the proliferation of “Marian apparitions” (which are simply reflections of the spiritual thirst of some simple minded people whom she does not want to alienate), and with how to respond to the advance of evangelicals in the Third World, including traditionally Catholic South America, where this advancement is at her expense and uses methods based on a little rational but overly emotional way of spreading the Christian faith, methods that the RC Church abandoned many years ago.

Going back to my fairy tale about the three pigs, to keep and enjoy the beauty of the flowers you need to accepts not only the (historical and transcendental) roots of the plant but also the stem (organised Church), which over centuries, Catholics believe, has been nourishing the flower from the roots.

My fellow men, you were not born in sin - that's a lie. When you were born, you were beautiful and innocent and pure. Then you learned the words. You learned to be in fear and vulnerable. Deep inside you knew there was more and into your sense of confusion then, came a "book". Ah you said, that is what my longing was about. You became trapped in words. Religions are words manifested.

Religions were born a long time ago. Today we can look at whole nations and so, we can see that religion makes NO difference to people's life expectancy, health, criminality or whatever. What do you pray for then? Special dispensation?

You are, in this moment, right now, in the "kingdom of god".

Leave the miracles to the scavengers of the establishment church. Nationally there is NO evidence of any benefits of religion - only loss of the joy, to love being in the perfect place right now.

You are there. Throw away your tired words.

Remember where you were a long time ago?? When you were innocent and beautiful and ready to love everything around you.

Can you remember that time? Before words? Before fear? Before judgment? When you only had love? No religious dogma and mythologies then.

“Can you remember that time? Before words? Before fear? Before judgment? When you only had love? No religious dogma and mythologies then”, no philosophy, no logical arguments, no law, no organized states or institutionalized churches, no social security, no science, no 21st century medicine, no technology, no trains, no cars, no aeroplanes, no computers and no internet to tell people who would listen how good it was without all these things, before people learned to write and read books, including a few of them considered “sacred”.