Thank you for detailed reply. I see that Cox was mostly talking about liberal Protestant movements in the global south. I find it pitiful that sometimes these movements remain the only Christianity people know. I know a person from the South-Eastern Asia, and she was sure that Christianity was necessarily associated with uncontrollable ecstatic crying in the “church”. She didn’t like it (actually, she was afraid of it) until she moved to Italy, to discover that there is other Christianity. What’s troubling me more in such “Age of Spirit” movements, is that they expand their operation worldwide, even where traditional faith exists, and use their financial advantage to expand. Ultimately, they bring segmentation of the faith, and it is not a good thing.

What about me, I don’t have much trust for the creedless faith. It lacks protection against transformations. Well, it’s like a dynamically typed language, you can never be sure what happens next. But I feel liberal in the Chesterton’s sense, with much trust to tradition: “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history”.

There is a reason why they call it be a ‘disciple’. It’s a disciplining of the mind, body, and spirit. Takes work and dedication.

A ‘religion’ tends more to be a human construct.. most ‘religion’ tends to be pretty worthless and can actually be quite misleading. Fundamentalism usually is about dogma and human rules and such.. and is usually something that you should ignore.

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As far as the Bible goes… I figure a person can take it a hell of a lot more literally then most christians beleive they can… I don’t see any sort of incompatibility with science or anything else.

In fact if your a christian your beleif shoudl dictate that science is freaking terrific. It’s a glimpse into the workings of the hand of God in this universe and can be a serious aid in the understanding and quality of the relationship between you and God.

The thing is that you have to read it yourself and gain your own personal understanding and DO NOT believe what other people tell you is in in there.

For example… Adam and Eve did NOT eat a Apple. The book of Genesis does NOT say that Adam and Eve were the first humans that ever existed. Hell; Even taking a completely literal reading of the book would make zero sense if you tried to inject those two ‘facts’ into a reading of it.

You will never find any of that anywere in the Bible. Yet these two ‘facts’ are so ingrained into popular culture that I expect that most self-described serious theologians would have no idea what I am talking about.

There is misconceptions like that all over the place and it stems from a lack of understanding and study of what the Bible is, what the purpose of it is, and what it is trying to tell you.

Even really basic probing questions about the Bible most Christians would be at a loss to answer.

A example I see all the time is stuff like this:

Student/Doubter (healthy state of mind, btw) asks: ‘The old testiment has all sorts of requirements for sacrificing animals and ‘thou shalt not suffer’ various types of people and so on and so forth… why do Christians not practice that to this day if the Bible is the core of your religion?”

A typical answer I may see is something like: ‘Oh those are just stories, don’t take them literally. They are ment to be lessons and good stories to help you be a better person’. A more accurate answer would be: ‘Jesus died for our sins on the cross. The blood sacrifice of the human embodiment of God on earth is all we ever need for the atonement of our sins. In fact, carrying out sacrifices like described in the old testiment would be blasphemous since it would be effectively saying that Jesus is not good enough for our sins. Remember that when you ask for forgiveness that Jesus made the sacrifice for us and our salvation.”

Something like that. It’s all about a personal relationship between the individual and God. Everybody is given their own way, their own path, and their own unique understanding. However the Bible, being the letter of god to us, is intended to be a guide through this reality, through this universe.

it’s up to us individually to figure this out.

I think you’re just describing how religion seems to work over here (N. Europe). We rarely have any big debates over evolution, over geological time, or the existence of a global flooding event – Christians and non-christians alike seem to accept the scientific beliefs, without having it interfere with their faith. I think this is a logical conclusion of scientific discoveries disproving belief after belief about the physical world rooted in the bible or related dogma.

I’ve occasionally tried to challenge people’s beliefs – but in general, they don’t seem to have them. I.e. they will have no clear opinion on whether there actually was a global flood, whether God literally appeared as a column of smoke, or what part of our cognitive self actually goes to heaven, and when. Most people tend to only have some vague and rather non-biblical notion of going to heaven when we die, and generally don’t seem to think a lot about these issues. Which to me is strange, since by faith this is substantially more important than anything else.

-ketil (via planet Haskell :-)