yes, i think he does. it's sleight of hand, with one hand and no sleight.

The failure of Christianity is failure to acknowledge that the bible is intended as a guide to belief and morality, and not a factual record.

The cleaving of the church to the literal values of the bible has resulted in its ridicule as science undercuts this position.

Faith need not be in conflict with reason. If it is then reasoned people will reject it.

Must say that the Excerpts above have given one much food for thought, and thus could well be kept and compiled.

Further, as one who has only become a historian and political scientist owing to his wife reminding him in retirement that staying too long in the golf club was not fulfilling a wish to make up for the earlier lack of schooling - only helped by specialist courses in the military.

However, must admit that the most appealing apart from the hard grind of study was the story of the Young Jesus.

His Sermon on the Mount very much included.

And if the Story never does prove true because it is somewhat like other similar stories, such as of Buddha and Such, because they contain early simple themes like sharing the blame and loving our neighbours, surely they should be good for a child to grow up with.

Regards, BB, Buntine, WA.

Bushbasher.
The bible is testimony. That is it consists of human witnesses who write that which they believe to be true. So it has a similar status as a friend or spouse or child that you trust telling you something that they believe to be true. So the content of the bible has a different status from that which we can see, hear and smell or that we can figure from cause and effect. These may be certain to a degree, they are empirical, experienced. For some there is no guarantee of certainty only a probability and in that case what is asserted lies in the realm of opinion.

Belief in knowledge based on witness is called faith. I have faith that what my wife tells me about her day is true. There are no universal guarantees of certitude, she may be lying to me. But because I trust her I give assent to what she says. Likewise there is no universal certitude about the truth of biblical story, but as we learn to think in the language of the bible we begin to see the truth of it, that tug of the heart and mind that Augustine talks about.

Christians come to trust the words of the bible to tell them the truth, however it depends on what we understand what truth means. If we mean that the sea of reeds did really stand in heaps so that Israel could cross on dry land then we must say that the event was more symbolic than an actual historical event because it contravenes what we know of how the world works. If on the other hand we look at the crucifixion then we can say with some certainty that Jesus did suffer such a death at the hands of Pontius Pilate. That makes me not a fundamentalist. I hope this helps.

Peter Sellick

Peter Sellick wrote:

"If Christianity is not a truthful story that reveals who we are then it can be rightly said that God does not exist."

The above implies that the only way of seeing God is through Christianity. That is utter nonsense and a put down of the many people who believe in God and are not Christian . Non-Christians see God as a single entity rather than split into three parts. I'm not sure there is a God. However, if there is one I think the Christian story has almost nothing to do with God.

Consider the Christian story. The psycopathic God who condemned his son to torment is not a God to believe in. The son born of a virgin like the pagan Gods, Mithra and Osiris, is not a God to believe in. The Holy Ghost who impregnates human females like Zeus did in the form of a swan is not a creation to be believed in. Rather than responsibility for one's sins our sins can be displaced on a sacrificial entity in the form of Jesus. This is a pagan concept which Judaism had once accepted but abandoned when they ceased the practice of putting sins on a scapegoat.

Christianity added elements of paganism to Judaism. This mix was accepted by the Roman Empire, and Christianity became the official religion. However, In my opinion the Christian story has little or nothing to do with belief in God.

"Love thy neighbour as thyself" along with other injunctions in the New Testament is taken from the Jewish Bible. One can say of the new Testament: What is new is not good, and what is good is not new. To this mix of Jewish morality and paganism was added magical tales of changing water to wine and bringing the dead back to life.

The Christian story should be avoided if one seriously seeks God.

Quite so Bushbred, the Gospel stories have a genuine appeal – they are the first theological writings with a narrative about the life and teachings of Jesus, with John (a mystic) being the most perceptive.

Sells,
For the Western Church Fathers like Augustine, sex and sin became inextricably entwined for reasons that were personal and peculiar to the time and place. Therefore it becomes problematic if the doctrine of Original Sin becomes a starting point for religion (Christianity in particular). Original Sin is anthropocentric – more a human design. This is not to deny any existence of ‘evil’ or ‘sin’ or that the human psyche suffers flaws. Scholarly criticism (given, e.g. by, Archbishop Hunthousen, Hans Kung and Leonardo Boff etc.) leveled at the Catholic hierarchy becomes justified against the doctrinal thesis on sin along with the continued and archaic idea of Papal infallibility and the Vatican’s obsession with sex, where it actually became scandalous and dare it be said, reflects some psychic imbalance within the Church. Ireland referred to this as the “pelvic morality” of the Catholic Church. With theology aside, Thomas Aquinas for instance believed that deviation from the 'missionary position' was worse than intercourse with one's own mother. If the Church is to maintain any credibility to ‘outsiders’ it must listen firstly to its internal critics, rather than to merely silence or muffle them – i.e. get its own house in order before attempting to ‘fix’ an ‘outsiders house’ or another’s ‘deviant’ nature.

Perhaps the Catholic Church will ‘bottom out’, as any institution might, but as Jung writes, “Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticise the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria…[which] leads to an abolition of liberty and terrorisation” (Psychological Reflections).” I would suggest this to mean, the Church will continue to attend to a deep human need – even if at times it is severely inadequate, where people will inevitably turn to ‘other things’. Karl Rahner is perhaps a little more on the money when he says, ‘The future Christian will be a mystic, or he or she will not be at all.’