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Come On Down
A sci-fi fantasy I'm fond of- The Saga of the Exiles- predicates an alien intervention at the beginning of the 21st century (in fact, any time now.) The aliens- who are nice chaps- allow us the join their Federation, but on certain conditions. One of the conditions is that we abandon all but one of our religions.
And we do. Just like that.
How I wish. How I wish....
For some reason the religion we choose to retain is Roman Catholicism.
A certain leeway is allowed. People are permitted to flavour their Catholicism with Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever they used to adhere to. But I don't remember there being any Muslim-flavoured Catholics or Southern Baptist-flavoured Catholics.
It's a silly book.
I wonder how long it's actually going to take us to get beyond our religious differences.
How many thousands of years.
And we do. Just like that.
How I wish. How I wish....
For some reason the religion we choose to retain is Roman Catholicism.
A certain leeway is allowed. People are permitted to flavour their Catholicism with Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever they used to adhere to. But I don't remember there being any Muslim-flavoured Catholics or Southern Baptist-flavoured Catholics.
It's a silly book.
I wonder how long it's actually going to take us to get beyond our religious differences.
How many thousands of years.
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you're an optimist...
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Little ray of sunshine, me, this morning. Bah, work.
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This was a political, not a doctrinal act. Henry remained a good catholic at heart- he just didn't want the Pope bossing him about.
The Anglican church doesn't have any distinctive teachings. It boasts of being both catholic AND protestant. Some Anglican go to confession, others are born-again Biblical fundamentalists. This is a wobbly compromise that holds just so long as no-one starts stomping around and asking awkward questions.
Currently the Church is divided over the issue of gay priests and may very well be about to tear itself apart.
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Sure--like we're going to get it together down here and get to Titan in about twenty years.
With Bush in charge, these writers ought to start shoving their timeframes out about 200 years, at least. That should get us back out of the New Dark Ages.
As for aliens landing, I wish.
Why do we always assume that anything unlike us is a predator?
That's us!
Maybe aliens are benevolent teachers. Maybe they'll show us how to use warp drive and how to be kind to each other.
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I don't think we'd recognize it if they did.
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Sad to say.
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The newspapers came out to take pictures.
Soon afterward, a stupid hulk with a rifle shot the swan.
If he hadn't, another stupid hulk with a rifle would have.
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You think?
How would they look like us? Surgical procedures via a Beverly Crusher sort of doctor?
I wish one of them would talk with Bush pretty soon.
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Or maybe they look like us already- and all they need to do is make minor adjusments- like Spock does in the movie, covering his pointy ears with a sweat band.
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So how would they start helping us out?
I don't think they'd want to give us warp speeds just yet. Just thinking about that makes me smile. Can you imagine us nervous conflicted predators hurtling out into space to seek out other civilizations?
I wish I could imagine how they'd help us. It's beyond me. Sometimes I think only evolution itself will help us out.
We'll get our warp drive, but we'll be benign cockroaches in the year 40,000.
With opposable thumbs.
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Something like that.
I think the aliens are merely observing us. Perhaps they give things a surrepticious nudge every once in a while. Oh- and when they get too bored with hanging about being frostily benign they fly down to New Mexico and mutilate a cow.
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My brother thinks we need a Christ figure to forgive us our sins.
One of my sisters thinks we shouldn't need to be forgiven for being human--she says, "Do we get mad at a dog because he barks?"
She also thinks we're more like bees in a hive, and that our religion was constructed to keep us in the hive. If we get outside the hive, she says, we get unhappy until we're back in.
I have tried and failed to understand the concept of having an intermediary for our sins. If God is a personality, as we seem to think "He" is, then why would another personality be involved?
I realize I am being simplistic...
I don't think God has a personality. I mean, God's not human. With a beard.
Or a being, either...How can we possibly understand what created us? Or what created whatever created us?
The first creator. How can we?
I wonder often, Karen, about Jesus. IF he did the things that were said about him, how could he be a human being? Was he an alien?
IF he did those things.
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IF he did those things.
I think he did some version of those things.
I don't think he was more alien to us than we are to each other.
I'm sorry your family fights about religion.
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Our WORST fights are about politics!
By fighting, I mean only that we get very incensed, pull out our best arguments, yell, get hacked.
But it's fun! And I always learn something.
I tend to agree with everyone--as soon an argument is put forward, I see the sense of it.
My mother refuses to listen to any of it.
I can't stay away. But I can only speak for myself. I don't do very well in arguments. I lose debates routinely, because I am easily convinced, a dangerous thing.
I would probably be easily brainwashed, because I want to believe.
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I remember well a conversation I had with an older woman in our congregation whose son was dying.
I wanted to talk about Spong, that old reprobate who so stirred up the Church in the 90s with his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.
(He now has a new book out, A New Christianity for a New World, in which he explains why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, the Church, and their rules and dogmas are wrong and dangerous. He spells out his contemporary vision of God, Jesus, prayer, worship, evil, the afterlife, and the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth.)
Anyway, the woman stopped me. She actually held up her hand like a policeman. She said, "I don't want to have my faith shaken right now, not with my son so ill. I don't want to think about this."
I felt terrible and apologized. But it occurred to me later that if her "faith" was so fragile, it was probably already too late.
We seem to have the idea of "faith" and "being saved" all rolled up together.
I'd forgotten all about Spong. He had a really bad name for awhile, people gasped at his blasphemies, and then he was forgotten.
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I raised his name in conversation with the jolly old bishop of Middleton and he said, "I don't read radical theology. I'm afraid it would shake my faith."
I understand his concern. Reading Cupitt shook my faith to the extent that I had to leave the church. But is faith worth hanging onto if it such a fragile thing?
Surely what we're all trying to do- in church and out of it- is get at the Truth.
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How sad, to smother oneself in "faith" like a child's blankie, when there is so much to explore and wonder about!
I have never heard of Cupitt, but I found Spong fascinating. And there was no one to talk with about it. He was considered "evil."
The single most influential writer for me was Stephen Mitchell, a Buddhist. I happened to see his book, "The Gospel According to Jesus," in a bookstore, and I usually don't buy stuff in that section, but I kept thinking about it and kept thinking about it, and finally drove back to the store and bought it. It led me to Rumi, to Eckhart, and to thinking for myself.
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He was the inspiration for a (slightly hush-hush) organization for "unbelieving" clergymen. I spoke once (about Krishnamurti- then an enthusiasm of mine) at one of their "Sea of Faith" conferences.
These days Cupitt, like Spong, no longer makes the news. The theological debate (so far as I can see) has regressed and is all about whether God likes gays or not.
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Ah, the elegance of it. The peacefulness of it.
The very idea of killing another person would be repulsive to us. We would naturally want to help each other grow and prosper.
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A primary tenet of my faith is that the Divine reaches out to all of us, within us, and that we respond to that Divine, name it, and create ritual to celebrate it, based on our culture and personality. That being the case, we will never have a single religion.
I would like to hope that one day we will all recognize and respect the Divine and the Holy within each other's faiths, but I'm afraid that there will always be the arrogant, the fearful, and the absolutist, who can not bear the idea that Mystery and Paradox are inevitable when the Human interacts with the Divine.
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God has a million different names. A million million. And all of them are fitting and true.
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::Puts on Rodney Dangerfield voice:: We don't get no respect!
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But so much of the Christmas stuff is purely secular/pagan. The Christians didn't invent Christmas; they took over a pre-existing feast (which was too popular to suppress) and gave it a bit of a tweak.
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It's because the church has swallowed a lot of other elements of religion and through history has shown a degree of flexibility unknwon to most other major religions while still exerting a lot of control on the general population.
Plus our places of worship are prettiest.
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