...The real deception, then, was allowing him to believe that his situation vis-a-vis spiders was somehow improved -- a deception on which the entire exchange was predicated and that did not change when I dispatched the "real" spider. My assigned role was not really that of spider-killer but reality-buffer. I was allowed (called, really) to step in and protect my son from the crushing reality that our house is, most likely, crawling with spiders. As an adult, I recognize this but don't think about it overmuch, not to mention I happen to find the spiders a welcome alternative to whatever insect population the spiders are keeping at bay. As an 8-year-old, he just needed know that the damn thing was gone so he could sleep.

As parents, we act as buffers all the time. "Life is not fair; get used to it" is a frequent refrain at our house, but even so we're not prepared to catalog all of the precise ways in which life fails to be fair. We absorb what we think they're not ready for and dole it out in manageable chunks. This only goes so far: I am leery of the insipid Veggie Tales ethics in which doing the right thing always works and always feels good. We couldn't quite bring ourselves to convince our children that a real man in a real sleigh was really delivering presents on Christmas Eve (which does not stop us from enjoying this cultural mythology in other ways, or from furtively putting presents out that night ourselves).

But buffers we are. If you're a parent, there's a line somewhere that marks the boundary of your willingness to essentially lie to your children, to offer them a picture that is rosier on some level than you perceive it to be. You do this because you love them and don't think they're ready for what you know, or what you've seen. Your line may be different than mine but I'd bet real money it exists.... Read on at Unorthodxology >>>>

On a Sunday where our theme is to look at our place as people in The Big Picture of all that is, we will begin worship with the singing of Be Thou My Vision… using the words as in Together in Song 547

This prayer will follow. It is designed to speak to the traditional faith, but with encouragement to look beyond, and with encouragement for those who struggle with the traditional language of church... Read on >>>>

This is the kind of insight of which the Sarah Palins of the world are sublimely unaware. From the perspective of Paul Griffiths perhaps she is a "hobbyist-cheerleader" before being a Christian.

ABC Religion and Ethics website: IMPOTENT RELIGIONS AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE By Paul Griffiths

...with the birth of the modern nation-state ... [there was]... the  determination that religious convictions and passions should in one way or another be both distinguished from and subordinated to political convictions and passions. This was attempted in a number of different ways....

First, there was the idea that a particular state, a particular geographically-bounded and law-governed entity, should permit full citizenship to only some religious convictions.

This was the solution adopted eventually by the English and the Swiss. John Calvin's Geneva forms something like an ideal example of this solution, yielding the convenient slogan, cuius regio eius religio, which is to say, your place determines your religion. If you live in Geneva, you're a Calvinist - if you live in London, you're an Anglican.

A second mode of distinction and subordination was the American solution, according to which the polity's laws are supposed to provide a palatable home for those of many different religious convictions - just so long, of course, as they each recognize their subordination to the laws of the state...

This solution tolerates all religions except the intolerable ones that won't submit to the required distinction and subordination. Against those, the army is sent in or the coercive power of the courts and the police used.

There is a third solution as well, it may be called the French solution. I'd prefer to call it the American solution with the gloves off. According to this solution, there is no need to identify one religion as the preferred one (as the English did), neither is there any need to discriminate tolerable from intolerable religions in order to provide a safe haven for the latter (as America did).

No, the best thing to do is declare them all intolerable, and to the extent possible eradicate their presence and their trace from the life of the body politic, whether by violence or expulsion.

All three solutions share two basic assumptions. The first is that loyalty to the state must be primary and loyalty to your religion, if any, always secondary. The second is that your religion can be separated from your politics. Religion is thereby made into a lifestyle choice - subordinate to and under the control of the state... Read on >>>>

We should love each other. It's the ultimate “motherhood” statement of the church. Families should especially love each other. That does not need biblical support, chapter and verse, because it is a given, a with-mother's-milk learning that we simply assume.

If we are listening when we read this week's text, we find our deepest motherhood assumptions are under attack.

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

There is an instant need to spiritualise, allegorise, or as Loader says, domesticate this statement. Love one another has become such a mantra, that unless we are careful and deliberate, our domestication of today's text will be almost unconscious.... Read on >>>>

"I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. … I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights." ...

The context in which I read this is one of disappointment and alarm. In the recent federal election in Australia, members of both major parties propagated essentially racist, anti refugee rhetoric... Read on >>>>

ABC Religion and Ethics: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE By William Cavanaugh

The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about secular violence. A sound approach to the study of violence would be resolutely empirical, investigating the conditions under which any kinds of ideologies and institutions produce violence - not just jihad and the sacrificial atonement of Christ, but also the "invisible hand" of the market and the belief that liberalism and secularism are the destiny of the whole world....

What counts as religion and what does not depends on how power is configured in any given society, including our own. The idea that "religion" is susceptible to violence, in ways that "secular" ideologies are not, authorizes certain kinds of power....

The myth of religious violence is a way of saying, "Their violence is essentially irrational and fanatical. Our violence is essentially rational and necessary."... Read on >>>>

On the nature of "religious" vs "secular" see the following from the same web site

"Religion," in its modern sense, is a modern invention. It came into being sometime in the seventeenth century, roughly around the time of the Peace of Westphalia in the 1640s and 50s.

Its birth was therefore contemporary with the birth of the modern nation-state - something which, like religion, was a new thing in the world. And this connection is not accidental....

The circumstances in question were the violent divisions that had ravaged Europe for the century or so preceding the Peace of Westphalia, divisions that had severely damaged the infrastructure and the political peace of the European continent.

This violence used to go under the name "the wars of religion," but it would be better called the birth-pangs of the nation - not those of any particular nation, but those of the very idea of the nation.

Certainly this violence included the killing of men by other men in the name of God. But more profound than that was the violence involved in the effort to figure out what it would mean to found and order a state in which citizens with vastly different convictions about what human beings are and how they flourish could live together under a single system of law without killing one another or becoming convinced of the necessity of revolution.

And so there was the decision that some sets of convictions about human nature and human flourishing would be called "religious" and others "political," though without any very clear idea, then or now, of what differentiated the one set from the other.... Read on with Paul Griffiths >>>>

I remember going to visit my 94 year old Grandma.  When we got to the old folks home, Grandma was nowhere to be seen.  It turns out that after breakfast and getting dressed, she used to go off down the corridor and help the old folks.

People like my grandma seem to me to have made a discovery. The have found a contentment which is independent of their status or possessions. Grandma was old, frail, poor as a church mouse.... and happy. She was possessed of a generosity and a freedom of worry about herself.  I don't mean that she had no worries or concerns or struggles, but that she was content.

This is not a thing to be taken lightly. It is not about being old and on a pension and in a good aged care facility. It is not guaranteed.  I have met old folk who were far better off than Grandma, and who were bitter and miserable.

I want to end up something like my Grandma.

What I don't want to do is get to the point... Read on >>>>

Around July 26, which is surprisingly early, I had my first magpie strike of the season. A magpie slammed into my helmet several times out near Mawson Lakes. So out came the cable ties.

Cable ties sticking up out of the helmet prevent the birds from hitting the rider on the head.  They don’t like flying into the little forest of twigs. It’s very effective, although it makes the rider look somewhat strange. A lady once asked me at the traffic lights why I had all this stuff on my head.  I said it was to keep the aliens away, and she took a step back! I then said it was for magpies, but she was not convinced, and looked the other way.... Read on >>>>

A useful reminder, at the least, of the dangers of ethnocentricity.

The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are. Read on >>>>

The original paper is here

Joke #1: I'm a Christian because God won't let me be an atheist....
Joke #2: I'd become a Buddhist but I don't want to learn a bunch of new words....
Joke #3: I'm a Christian because I refuse to surrender the use of perfectly good metaphors to idiots and assholes... Read on >>>>

I would add only one comment to this piece by Ben Myers: theologians are not academics in universities. They are people who think and rethink, and struggle with ideas about God.

Thomas Mann once said that a writer is simply someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

I wonder if this insight could also be extended into theology. Theologians are people for whom the Christian faith is especially difficult, incomprehensible, infuriating. As a rule they are not especially talented or spiritually adept individuals. They are people whose minds have been hurt by God, and they are restlessly searching for – what? Healing perhaps, or catharsis? To expect so much from the study of theology would be futile or even dangerous. At any rate there is no lack of opportunities for theological catharsis: often our worship services seem calculated to remove the difficulty of believing, to make God easy and accessible, more a cure than a wasting sickness.

Perhaps then we should define theologians like this: They are people for whom even the Christian worship service does not provide adequate catharsis of the hurtfulness of God... Read on >>>>

Quotes from a 4,000+ word essay by Rev Michael Dowd. Michael also has this article in pdf format for download.

Biblical Christianity is bankrupt. I use ‘bankrupt’ in the exact sense of the term. A business that goes bankrupt still has value and is capable of producing useful goods or services. It still has an inventory and trained professionals in its employ. Until the day insolvency is declared, it also usually has a façade—a bright and upbeat demeanor by which its clients and the community at large assume it to be relatively healthy. The only thing wrong is that a bankrupt business is no longer able to accomplish its purpose: to be successful. It is precisely in this sense that I suggest Bible-centered faith is bankrupt....

The Church is not bankrupt because it has run out of things to say or do. Rather, it is bankrupt because the otherworldly product it has sold for centuries now lacks wide appeal. Christianity now lags behind our most advanced secular methods and tools for providing salvation in this life...

The root ‘religare’ means to link together. Evolutionarily robust religions over the tens of thousands of years of human existence have been those that, as philosopher of religion Loyal Rue observes, nurture “personal wholeness” at the individual level and “social coherence” at the community level. To do so, they must operate with as accurate a map as possible of what’s real (how things are) and what’s important (which things matter).

Biblical Christianity that does not integrate our best evidential understanding of the universe and human nature is doomed precisely because it is wedded to unchanging scripture....

How was the world made? Why do earthquakes, tornados, and other bad things happen? Why must we die? And why do different peoples answer these questions in different ways? The big questions that children have always asked and will continue to ask cannot be answered by the powers of human perception alone. Ancient cultures gave so-called supernatural answers to these questions, but those answers were not truly supernatural—they were pre-natural. Prior to advances in technology and scientific ways of testing truth claims, factual answers were simply unavailable. It was not just difficult to understand infection before microscopes brought bacteria into focus; it was impossible. Without an evolutionary worldview, it is similarly impossible to understand ourselves, our world, and what is required for humanity to survive. For religious leaders today to rely on pre-natural answers puts them at odds not only with science but with one another—dangerously so. Their resistance, however, does make sense. Until scientific discoveries are fleshed into the life-giving forms of beauty and goodness (as well as truth and utility), scriptural literalism will command power and influence....

Darwin didn’t kill God. To the contrary, he and Alfred Russel Wallace offered the first glimpse of the real Creator behind and beyond the world’s myriad mythic portrayals of the divine.

As Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and other 20th century scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion and religious differences if we ignore the human propensity to relationalize—that is, personify—anything important or mysterious. Evidence from a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology to cross-cultural study of the world’s myths and religions, all support the claim that God is a personification not a person, and that we instinctually forget this. More, there is no counter-evidence! This fact alone makes sense of the thousands of competing stories around the world as to what God supposedly said or did. "God" is a mythic name for Reality in all its sublime fullness. Any so-called God that is imagined as less than this is unworthy of our devotion and deserves to be mocked, as the New Atheists so readily do....

In the words of Philip K. Dick, “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn’t go away.” Anyone can develop a habit of mindufully and heartfully communing with this Ultimacy, of quieting our minds, jettisoning judgments, surrendering to Life As It Really Is, seeking deep and intuitive guidance, opening to the way of the heart, engaging in contemplative prayer, and many other names and activities that put us in a state of radical openness and receptivity to wider and deeper wisdom. In so doing, our experience of life will improve enormously—even if the outward conditions of our existence change not a whit.... Read on >>>>

More from Jason Derr

Echoing the work of John Caputo, my last post for The Huffington Post articulated a vision of God beyond theism, a concept of God that sees the word "God" as a word used to describe love. Other words sometimes used are mercy, justice, passion, joy, goodness. This suggested that we have a conception of religion that is less about religious beliefs and more about a passion for the religious life -- an awe of life, living and the growing world and universe that can only be called religious. You hear this sort of religious awe in, say, Richard Dawkins when he speaks on the beauty of evolution. This model suggests that there is no line between theism on the one hand and atheism on the other.

A way of being alive rooted in a religious awe of life would view God as a verb -- an action and activity we make real in the world, not a creature or being that sits outside of time and space. In this way God is not a strong force -- God does not cause earthquakes, hurricanes or 9/11 -- but is instead the call toward awe and the flourishing of life in its multiplicity and plurality.

Here we come to a space that is a line between faith and belief. Belief can be described as assenting to certain doctrines -- infallible scripture, resurrection, virgin birth etc. Faith, on the other hand, would be about placing our trust in the work of Love -- and our ability to be agents of the work of love -- in order to make change in the world... Read on >>>>

A Huffington Post article by Jason Derr.

It has come up for me a few times recently, the gap between Christianity and my own personal spiritual journey. On my best days I can put myself into the "Emerging" or 'Progressive" camp, but at other times -- when I am bombarded by blogs, TV news commentators and comments from friends -- I have to admit that I am not in a space most Christians would find safe.
It even got so bad that my wife's priest, a lovely Anglican clergy member who married us just under a year ago, declared I was "not truly an Anglican."

.... Like many people I understand myself to be in the progressive Christian tradition, a tradition that is at the heart of the Christian theological project to speak truthfully and faithfully in the contest of life in which we find ourselves. If people cannot question faith and push back against certain assumptions or positions in light of medical, scientific and philosophical insights, then we have exchanged faith for belief....

Caputo says -- and I want to affirm -- that the line between "atheist'" and "theist" (or "panenthesist" as well) is a false one. What he means is that God is not an all powerful/all-knowing being outside of history but is instead life itself. "God," Caputo says in On Religion, "is a name we put on Love." Other names we put on love include justice, mercy, joy and goodness....

God, then, is not a force who acts on the world through coercion, violence or the suspension of physics and free will. Instead, God is something that we participate in. God is a verb, an action we bring to the world to make love, justice, mercy, joy and goodness known....

If God is a verb, then so is worship. The future of the church will not turn on our new theologies but on how we pray and whether our prayer is rooted in an action and activity. Can we honestly say "body broken for you" over the bread if we don't address how the world and church contributes to the breaking of bodies?... Read on >>>>