tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post6513443443245536392..comments2024-03-15T17:06:31.642-05:00Comments on The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Ariel Sightings and Atheist FaithEric Reitanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-22008051476423418452008-09-16T13:00:00.000-05:002008-09-16T13:00:00.000-05:00Oh Eric,Your analogy of loving Christianity despit...Oh Eric,<BR/>Your analogy of loving Christianity despite layers of crud the same way you have loved prison inmates despite their crimes, brought tears to my eyes. When I visited my brother and his fellow inmates in prison, I too, found myself opening to these folks whose inner goodness I could clearly see when I turned on the inner light to get past the shadows and gloom. ---ElizabethMary Elizabeth Bullock-Resthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13867099451147318235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-50652771448633735792008-09-16T09:52:00.000-05:002008-09-16T09:52:00.000-05:00Elizabeth--I can relate to your experience. One re...Elizabeth--<BR/><BR/>I can relate to your experience. One reason I wrote my book (and one reason I wrote the "Angry Atheists" blog post) was to attempt to express the sense of "theistic religion" and "Christianity" that I identify with, and to distinguish it from those senses which inspire so much (justified) outrage. <BR/><BR/>There is, in my view, something precious that shouldn't be cast out along with all the accumulated crud. In many ways, my defensiveness with respect to religion and Christianity is similar in kind to my defensiveness towards many of those inmates I have met doing AVP workshops in prison, whose essential humanity became vivid to me in the course of the weekend, whom I came to love and identify with, but who were viewed by the wider world as nothing but scum and filth. <BR/><BR/>While I cannot deny the evil that many of these people have done, and the bad habits which have characterized so much of their lives, I balk at efforts to say that these dark things constitute their real ESSENCE. <BR/><BR/>On the contrary, I believe that at their core, beneath the layers of crud, there is that which is precious. I've seen it and experienced it myself--both with violent murderers locked away in prison, and with Christianity and other religions.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-11594381196715653032008-09-16T08:57:00.000-05:002008-09-16T08:57:00.000-05:00Sometimes people get alarmed, angry, or upset when...Sometimes people get alarmed, angry, or upset when I use the words "God" or "Christ." It hurts and puzzles me when they assume I am referring to a Cosmic Tyrant when in fact I am referring to the most precious and transformative power in my life: The Essence and Experience of Love Itself.<BR/><BR/>The other thing that saddens me is when others assume my identity with Christianity is the same as condoning institutional problems found in the history of Christianity and in current practices of some who call themselves Christian. e.g., sexism, racism, militarism,and intolerance of non-Christians.<BR/><BR/>When these misunderstandings happen, I feel like a bowl of chopped liver with styrofoam in it...not a very yummy mix. <BR/><BR/>----ElizabethMary Elizabeth Bullock-Resthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13867099451147318235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-75659562184966072662008-09-16T07:19:00.000-05:002008-09-16T07:19:00.000-05:00My two year old grandson's radar is set for backho...My two year old grandson's radar is set for backhoes. As I was driving him to our house, he in the back seat, I would make conversation like "do you see the trees? the birds? What do you see?" Long silence....then "backhoe". Fortunately, we passed a lot full of backhoes on the way to the house.<BR/><BR/>We had our own message from the birds in Santa Fe. A hummingbird wrote a message in some kind of substance on the studio window. Michael watched as it wrote it out. I saw the message. It was about an inch and a half long and looked something like Arabic and something like a crocodile. I thought it could mean an Arabic crocodile would be coming up through the park from the dry Santa Fe riverbed to our studio, but it never happened. It was probably meant for the other birds and not for us. Maybe it meant "don't fly into this window."<BR/><BR/>Can't remember what you said Hick said, but it sounded right when I read it. It's all sacred, and I think we all together are creating the world as it is, or the worlds as they are, not knowing how many dimensions we all encompass, or encompass us...<BR/>The hummingbird somehow bridged one of its dimensions to one of ours...we didn't know what it said, but we knew who wrote it, which was just as good. I can't think of anything more valuable than trying to find a way to communicate that forms a bridge and finds commonground, Maybe that's what the hummingbird was saying.<BR/><BR/>ShelleyMary Elizabeth Bullock-Resthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13867099451147318235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-37234171675371487422008-09-15T16:19:00.000-05:002008-09-15T16:19:00.000-05:00I'm imagining a tossed-deity salad with croutons a...I'm imagining a tossed-deity salad with croutons and a raspberry vinagrette. It's putting me in a prayerful mood. Or is that hunger?<BR/><BR/>On a more serious note, I think it may be helpful to draw a distinction between (a) the images, metaphors, and myths we invoke to put us into contact with the divine, and (b) the attempts to describe for others the nature of the divine (perhaps an attempt to gesture towards that which we experience coming into contact with in our most prayerful moments). <BR/><BR/>The measure of adequacy in relation to the former is essentially subjective: how useful is this image for helping the individual come into alignment with the divine? But without some kind of sense of the nature of the divine as a starting point, we won't have a clear sense of what exactly we are striving to connect WITH in our moments of meditative prayer--and so we won't have a very good idea of which images and metaphors will be of greatest use in bringing us closer to an experience of the divine. <BR/><BR/>Meditating on images of torture and abuse may generate a sense of alignment with some diabolical energy; but we don't call these images useful for connecting us with the divine precisely because we already have some sense, however vague, of what "the divine" means, a sense that excludes anything diabolical from being divine). <BR/><BR/>Consider the prophet Zoroaster. The reason why he was so angry at the worshipers of the war god Indra was because the image of a superbeing who takes sides in human conflicts and delights in violence was fundamentally at odds with his EXPERIENCE of the divine.<BR/><BR/>And this is the key, I think: our initial conception of the divine has to be born out of some kind of special experience--what might be called religious experience, or mystical experience, or revelatory experience. Our attempt to describe that experience will inevitably be metaphorical, since the divine by its nature transcends our concepts. But some metaphors will be better than others precisely to the extent that they help others to have religious experiences of the same sort as those that originally gave birth to the metaphors.<BR/><BR/>When I encounter contemporary portraits of God in which God is portrayed as a cosmic tyrant who demands obedience and lashes out violently at those who don't comply, I might say something like the following: "I have had intimations of something extraordinary at work behind the empirical skin of the world, something that is both tender and awesome, something that at once exposes my inadequacies and washes them away as irrelevant, something that inspires me to love more fully and broadly than I would ever imagine doing on my own. This something is what I mean by 'God.' Not only do I find it hard to see how your picture can be an alternative picture of the same reality that I have encountered, but I cannot imagine how meditating on that picture could help bring anyone closer to an experience of the divine in the sense that I understand it."<BR/><BR/>So, there may be many different images that are just as valid (or just a salad), but I would add that there are also images that are not. Some things do not a salad make--at least if, by "salad," you mean anything like what I mean. There are a great diversity of great salads, but chopped liver mixed with styrofoam just ISN'T one of them.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-42323409975665399192008-09-15T12:36:00.000-05:002008-09-15T12:36:00.000-05:00Yesterday evening I was having a conversation with...Yesterday evening I was having a conversation with my Spiritual Friends, talking about our various inner versions of the visual images we have for the object of our prayers. How do we picture whatever it is we pray to? I was saying something to the effect that I see no problem with visualizing a more human-like entity to help provide a focal point, and at the same time having a broader, more universal concept of the Divine being all that is. These types images are our own internal constructs, (as are the rest of our experiences we often claim to be reality) and each is just as valid. When I said 'just as valid' my friend thought I'd said the various types of images of a divine nature are all 'just a salad.' Well, perhaps that too, if it is a meaningful image for you.<BR/><BR/>SusanSusan Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10886113835779012615noreply@blogger.com