(ctd)
<<• the belief that the Catholic Church is the one and only true Christian church founded by Jesus Christ;>>
The bone of contention (with non-Catholic Christians) is how to interpret Mat 16:18-19. I think the solution is neither to require that all Christians return to the flock of the Roman Church (as pre-Vatican II demanded) nor that Rome abandon its interpretation of Mat 16:18-19, and regard themselves as just one of the myriad of Churches and “churchlettes“ thus losing its identity rooted in history, if nothing else.

<<• the belief that the modern idea of religious liberty is to be condemned; >>
This is, if at all, a pre-Vatican II position. It might have been implicitly stated then, but Vatican II has for instance its “Declaration on religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae)“ (http://www.rc.net/rcchurch/vatican2/liberty.asc) respected by both the “traditionalists” and “progressives”.

<<• the belief that the books of the Bible are historically inerrant; >>
This is a literalist position that I do not know if the RC Church ever held. Certainly not after Vatican II, see for instance the document “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church“ presented to JPII by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/pbc/ibc.cfm).

<<To the simple man in the street this religion business must seem all a little messy and confusing and not worth the bother>>
I agree. Like relativity theory and quantum mechanics must sound “confusing and not worth the bother“ to the “simple man in the street” using his navigator and mobile that depend on these theories. However, this “simple man” is never asked how come he uses those gadgets without understanding the theories behind them, whereas some “liberated” Church activists tell him, he has to understand abstract theological positions as interpreted by a variety of theologians, (often contradicting not only the official version, but also each other), before deserving to be called a modern, enlightened, Christian.

Martin.
I really must protest at your interpretation of my stance as being an accommodation to modernity. My aim is to reach back beyond modernity and even medieval scholasticism to a post Nicene Christianity in which Trinitarian theology took center place. The God you accuse me of not believing in looks very much like the god of the early English Enlightenment, that is an altered Greek monotheism that has nothing to do with Christianity. The theology of Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke and William Whiston was essentially materialist in that God was part of the system of the universe even if he was “immaterial”. This was a theology that glibly talked about the material body and the immaterial soul, the only difference between Jesus and ordinary men was that his soul consisted of the divine logos. This makes a mockery of the doctrine of the Atonement because only the body of Jesus dies on the cross while the divine logos returned to the Father. Theology was weakened during this time because it had lost key insights from theologians such a Gregory of Nyssa of the immateriality of God. This is the real reason that Christianity has declined in the West, because it was no longer credible and no longer made the world and our lives intelligible. The alienation of theology in intellectual circles is virtually total for good reason, it does not make sense.

I have some hope that the future will be different particularly when reading living theologians and the present pope but it will take a long time for this rethinking to filter down to the public, especially since the media is so hostile, or better, ambivalent to challenging theological thought. By the way, I do believe in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and can say the creeds of the church without my fingers crossed behind my back, not that I get a chance to say them in the Anglican church.

George, I am not about warm and fuzzy feelings which I leave to people who need to worship a teddy father figure or some artificial role model or a misrepresentation of logic or obvious pseudo science or models of finite universal causality or a universe created as a fixed-in-place system. The problem here as i see it, rests with this worship mindset that should not be confused with love as you seem to demonstrate. My point is just how with this weak false behaviour can humanity collectively ensure a continued appreciation of the beauty of existence?

I dismiss the old “gravity-only” bigbang fantasy for many reasons. Gravity simply plays a relatively insignificant role because very clearly electrical forces are billions upon billions times more powerful and more far-reaching. There is this overbearing belief that electricity doesn't work in 'outer space' like it does right here on earth denying the fact that earth is in outer space. Another consideration is that the matter in the universe could not have formed from the energy of an explosion (in a vacuum?) because matter cannot be 'created' from energy.

Similarly, underlying the entire analysis of human-caused global warming there is this premise that nature has been designed as if it were a printed circuit board forcing electrons to follow a certain path, and the human influence is like unsoldering and replacing a component. It is a ridiculous notion and like the bigbang nonsense, just a new age wrapper for the revival of an insecure pre-Copernican mindset.

It is LOVE that leads to discovery but this "worship of the golden calf" is where people learn to be stupid becoming justification for the hidden agendas.

George,
I'm highly appreciative of your candid reply and the consideration you give in our discussion - it is something not commonly found on this forum amongst people of differing views.

Your reference to Matt 16:18-19 is interesting and is certainly a contentious point for Protestants, whose movement was based on sola fide (faith alone). And yet, to further peel another layer off the onion, we can also refer to Matt 28:19, which cuts to the heart of the Trinitarian issue as offered by Sells. Ratzinger (whilst still a Cardinal) admits the formulation of the RC faith '...took shape during the course of the second and third centuries in connection with the ceremony of baptism. So far as its place of origin is concerned, the text (Matthew 28:19) came from the city of Rome.' The text in other words has been transmitted in a form expanded by the [Catholic] church in an effort to reinforce Trinitarian doctrine. This I guess is no real big deal, if you accept all scripture is written by man (albeit via inspiration) anyway and therefore quite fallible.

I think Carl Jung lends great insight into the dilemma of the religious. What is natural to the soul, he insisted from his early writings, is not any particular set of religious doctrines, experiences, images, or rituals, but rather the drive to heal the wound that our nature has inflicted on us, to become a truer, fuller Self in symbols coincident with the religious symbolism encoded in language, culture, and art throughout human history.

Kieran leads us into another area - the subject of love and the golden calf. His comment is important because love will discover many new aspects and angles to a truth that without this color and shading it might well have a destructive impact - i.e. all this theology and dogma without love is but a waste of time (or a golden calf).

I am really flummoxed by those who are prepared to say professing Christians are not Christians after all, particularly since I see such an act as unchristian. Curiously I'm not even sure why it distresses me, but it does.

I am reminded of the words of Rabbi Kushner in his book 'To Life'.

"When we talk about what we as Jews believe about God, we must remind ourselves of Rule one; Some Jews believe certain things, other Jews believe differently, and there is no central authority to declare one group correct and the other in error. This is partly because of the relatively minor role that theology plays in Judaism: God is important; talking about God is not all that important. But mostly it is because statements about God are not so much about God as they are about us."

An old rabbinical text says "God is like a mirror. the mirror never changes, but everyone who looks at it sees a different face."

Martin and Boaz-David might like to think of themselves as a central authority on what constitutes a true christian, they certainly are not, perhaps now they might like to contemplate the mirror rather than just their own reflections.

In “The Biology of Ultimate Concern” Theodosius Dobzhansky noted that humans are unique in coming sooner or later to self-awareness [the ability to say “I AM”] followed by death-awareness. With dying, death and disintegration all around, we wonder about life after death! We ask, “Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?” At least in his younger years, it dawned on Charles Darwin “there is more in man than the breath of his body.” In 1919 Pierre Teilhard SJ asked, “What exactly is the human body?” He concluded what “I” call MY matter is not a PART of the universe which “I” possess TOTALLY. MATTER is the TOTALITY of the universe which “I” possess PARTIALLY – and temporarily. For the basic substance of the cosmos as a whole is streaming from Christ and to Christ in the wake of his ascension from the beginning [15 billion years ago?] to the end of time – albeit by way of the Cross and his pierced and broken Sacred Heart. Indeed scriptures attributed to Paul and John proposed that the basic stuff of all creation was made by God the Father for the incarnation of God the Son – through him, in him and for him (Col.1:16). And we – having been chosen in Christ before the world was made – are each given an everp-changing PART of the cosmic body of the TOTAL Christ for the duration of our own earthly lives. After that, we shall see God as God really is! As Blessed Franciscan John Duns Scotus saw it, Jesus the Christ did not come down from the heaved-up “heavens” 2000 years ago in response to what Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas called some “Felix Culpa” or “Original Sin” that “Eve” committed 100,000 years ago. On the contrary, Christ was in the world from the beginning. Scotus called that the PRIMACY of Christ. Likewise, in “Redemptor Hominis” Pope John Paul II said the Redeemer of Man – Jesus Christ – is the centre of the universe and of history, which extends from the beginning to the end of time.

Roch