You get no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no classism…no negative stuff at all from Progressive Christians. You get positive people doing positive things.
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A lot of flawed people are modeling lots of flawed behavior for us every day. We don’t have to become so indignant or angry or even violent after we feel frustrated or offended. We can choose something else.”
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The bodhisattva has one pair of hands at rest. One pair of hands is praying. 500 pairs of hands are acting in coordination with 500 pairs of eyes. This is a lacquered wood statue of the …
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When, if ever, is anger appropriate? If we want to be good actors in the world, and become the peace we’d like to see in the world, can we allow anger to exist? How do we know when anger is ok and how much anger is ok?
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Bishop John Shelby Spong did an invaluable service to the advancement of a progressive Christian movement by demonstrating, in numerous popular books, that a literal interpretation of the Bible is not tenable.
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Jesus was, however, not the first person to challenge the lex talionis (law of retaliation) – the belief that if you are harmed it is OK to follow your gut and harm the person who harmed you.
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If one chooses to interpret the story of Jesus fasting in the desert symbolically, the story becomes an allegory of transformation.
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A couple of hurdles to deriving the greatest possible meaning from the Bible are orthodox literalism (everything in the Bible must have happened just because it is in the Bible) and secular denial (since hardly anything in the Bible really happened, the book is of no value).
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Retribution as a form of deterrence is like a fixed action pattern in humanity… We do not worship the Christian God when we do this.
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Secular Consumerists (aka Secular Humanists) have made a cottage industry of bashing the belief system of totally innocuous and even quite benevolent people and they enjoy gleefully pointing to things like the Crusades, the Inquisition or the 30 Years War to, basically, say that Christianity sucks. They feel the Christian religion is impugned by such atrocities.
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The story of Job shows us that our wishful thinking is not the case and that if we are to engage “evil” effectively as progressive Christians, or even live meaningfully in the world, we must first imagine what a just God’s expectations of, and trust in, us would involve and what expectations we should have about God.
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At the end of a short story by Heinrich von Kleist there is the line: “I would not have found you to be such a devil if you had not presented yourself as being so angelic.”
I realized that this can apply to our conceptions of God. We have been told many bizarre things about God that have led to unrealistic expectations. So I start with the famous quote from Bonhoeffer “God is weak and powerless in the world…” and explore a proper relationship given this fact.
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The story of Jesus fasting in the desert presents an allegory of transformation. By adding the temptations to the basic story, we even get allegories within an allegory. In fact, the symbolic components of the story of the 40 day fast and temptations present a description of how the flawed activity of the human will can be superseded by a humble receptivity toward humane inner change
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