David Lose in The Huffington Post asks Is the Bible True?
James McGrath writes for Religion at the Margins about The Veil That Prevents Fundamentalists from Understanding the Bible.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times that The Bible is not like moral sayings.
Here’s an early Easter message from the USA: The Presiding Bishop’s Easter message.
Harriet Baber writes in The Guardian that Religion is not really about ethics. “As a compendium of moral doctrine the Bible doesn’t come off well. Its relevance lies in its teaching of the nature of God.”
Her article is one of several answers to this week’s The Question: What would you add to the Bible?
So we have the usual split – moral teaching vs ‘saving souls’ and miracles. It ain’t like that. What we have, as a base line, in the life of Jesus and in his parables and teaching is, at the very least, a gauntlet thrown down to his society and to ours. ‘This is how it should be. No reward for being nicey nicey. Living with radical cost towards others. Facing a God who demands we forgive and give. The old order upset. The new order based on our giving everything. No more respect for elders and betters.’ It is a… Read more »
Reading David Lose’s article brings to my mind the greatly different impressions one gets from reading (and listening to) Bart Ehrman vs. Marcus Borg. Ehrman went from a strong fundamentalism in his youth to his present lack of faith. While he claims that his loss of faith was brought about by the problem of theodicy, not by his discovery that the Bible is not literally true, Ehrman’s writing has the sense of someone who nurses resentment that he was made to believe a lie. Borg, on the other hand, as a scholar and a man of faith, can quite readily… Read more »
False dichotomy! ‘Saving souls’ and miracles isn’t the only alternative to moral teaching. There’s also metaphysics, mysticism and ceremony–the fun, juicy stuff. Admittedly not to everyone’s taste but there is a large minority of people yearning for religious experience–most of whom would never dream of looking for this ‘spirituality’ in Christianity because churches have expunged every bit of the numinous in order to engage in endless moralizing. So they poke around with New Age bs looking for religious experience–because Christian churches have failed them. It isn’t hard to see why churches are losing members. When religious participation is de facto… Read more »
I enjoyed Monday’s addition to the Good Book and the ensuing discussion, I must say.
Absolutely on the money Harriet Baber…while churches have trashed ceremony dear to our forebearers, they have indulged in non-stop moralizing. No wonder younger people are turned off in droves.
I live in a wonderfully diverse ethnic city. Once, a very dear friend of Polish descent kidded me about getting a gig in an Episcopal parish that still reeked of it’s ‘Englishness’ complete with a men & boys choir. “Oh, you go to “Ethnic Church” now!” And the place is packed on Sundays.
Half the people polled in the United States don’t accept the evidence for human-caused climate change. Only 39% accept evolution as the explanation for how life has developed on Earth. 27% think that the President wasn’t born in the USA. Yes, let’s celebrate the joys of believing without evidence or even, with St. Paul and the Birthers, against the evidence. And what’s with Brad Ehrman’s resentment at discovering the murky origins of Christianity? It’s not as if he were a gay kid who had half his life distorted by religious authorities in confident possession of Truth who counseled him to… Read more »