Can I believe in God?

7
“what sort of God do I believe in?”
- Religions try to capture God to the boundaries that they define.
Is the author doing the same but in reverse?
8
“the word God is so contaminated that it is no longer usable”
(Is God iwhatever carries us beyond our mortality?)
(according to Bishop Spong,
humanity defined God to counter the insecurity and fear of self-awareness.
This definition is no longer viable and needs a realistic replacement
- or for humanity to grow beyond the need for such comfort.)
9 Blasphemy is imagining that one can imagine divinity.
11 “many have lost confidence that the voice of God in religion
has much that is useful to say.
God has become a tired old man to be ignored.”
The voice of God has never really been in religion.
Religion has merely invented what it wants its construction of God to say.
13 Jim was sent off happy, but was there really any truth in his contentment?
Was there really anything, or anyone, to accept and love
– as we might understand those emotions?

Chapter 2
14
The author considers the Sunday Assembly “godless”, but why?
Are they not just inventing God in a new image?
The author actually has a very bounded view of God!
and this comes over in the next few pages.
21 “God refers to a reality,
but we don't have the words to describe what that reality is”
This has always been a problem in the scriptures.
There is never an image of God, only of God's effect.
But why can't we just settle for Jn4:24 “God is Spirit”?
22 The idea of God was not dreamt up by ordinary people as the text says,
but by those eager to control others through a spiritual medium,
providing a way to calm their deepest fears,
27 We make God in our own image because we can not imagine any other.

What does God look like?

Chapter 3 33
God may be experienced, but is God only that experience?
Does God have any more concrete existence?
41
The nature of God has changed as humans changed their nature.
Or maybe as the needs of the humans for an outside authority or supporter changed.
It is only when we no longer need such a prop that we become fully human.
43
Jesus is the symbol of divine love in the New Testament.
He gave all as our example of what we could give.
46
The “retail God” exists in biblcal stories,
prayers and church liturgies as mother, father, lover, friend, deliverer.
However the unreality of these desciptions have become
insuperable barrriers to the faith of the majority,
yet can not be abandonned by the church.
These are the very things that are closing the churches.
Can Christianity (and Islam etc) not open itself to the reality of divinity?

This concept (the Retail God) is just what Bishop Spong's books are against.
The church needs to present truth
– not the febrile imaginings of ancient shamans.
47
Is God personal?
In other words - does God have personality?
Giving personality to God places human nature upon God
God becomes “love” or “power” which sound like making God in our image
– which sounds like blasphemy!
48
God is seen to be there to give us comfort
- invented for the purpose!?

Spiritual Intelligence

Chapter 4 54
“Spiritual Intelligence” sounds like where Spong is coming from.
Something more spiritually basic than, and independent of, religion;
yet which tries to reduce the spiritual to something controllable by man.
We need to ask what sort of person we want to be;
whose example we would be proud to follow;
how we would like to be remembered.

Spiritual intelligence is independent of religion,
and can run along with or counter to it.
Religions are often stuck with rules which SQ can ignore.

The word God has been captured by religion
and acts as a deterrent to those outside the box,
despite their spirituality.

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned,
being gripped by something of deep importance
but which may yet be intangible.
Perhaps religions help us to give it form.

Faith without Creeds

Chapter 5 71
Is Jean a woman of faith, even though not a Christian? No.
She may be more spiritually aware than many people of faith,
but that does not make her a woman of faith.
If we ask whether she should be a woman of faith,
I would also answer “No”,
though my primary question should perhaps be “what do you mean by faith?”
Surely having faith means trusting in something,
God, religion or whatever.
I don't think that Jean does.
She just gets on with what her Spirit causes her to do.
Introducing “faith” merely adds something completely alien.
As he goes into on the next page.

Eve as Heroine not Villain

Chapter 6 Watching Theism capture Christianity
98
Matthew's portrayal is of a Jesus who is not quite human
The Sermon on the Mount follows the outline of Psalm 119
Matthew/Mark set the Christian story in the frameork of the Jewish liturgical year.
The supernatural elements of the story are a later overlay.
Luke adds to ther developing tradition –
separating resurrection from ascension and adding new detail .
He writes the Pentecost story under Paul's influence.
John asserts the unity between Jesus and God
and adds God-like actions to the Jesus story.
He even claims the name “I am” taken by God at the burning bush.
When he left to be with his Father, the script says
that he left the apostles with the authority over the faith.
Thus theism and an external but visiting God became established.
He became the firewall against the flames of the hysteria and fear
of self-consciousness and potential non-being

Changing the Christian Myth

Chapter 7 . Changing the Basic Christian Myth
114
To change direction we may need to backtrack a long way
The supernatural overtones need to be removed,
including the explanations of the arrival and departure of Christ
- all of which were later developments.
Their later provenance is shown through inaccuracies
in the text exposed by modern analyis.
The message of basic sinfulness proclaimed by the church is flawed,
but creates a power-base.
The atonement doctrine merely mirrors medieval behaviour.
Evolution affirms a pattern of progress by putting ourselves first.
There was no good creation fallowed by a fall into sin,
only emerging, and ever improving, life.
Atonement doctrine is a cure for a problem that does not exist.
Today people seek for Spirituality in anywhere except the church.
To survive the church needs to reform the basic tenets of its existence.

An Untheistic Jesus

Chapter 8 An Untheistic Jesus 130
We can no longer view Jesus as an incarnation of a visiting deity.
Jesus pointed to a new way of living - “the Kingdom of God”
and dismantled the barriers between people and tribes.
The Gospels tell of Jesus breaking those barriers and Acts continues the story.
This is an invitation to a new form of living, a new humanity.
God can not be bound by the limits of our religious systems,
which merely build another wall when we should be destroying all walls
– realising that there are many paths to, and on, holy ground.
Jesus refused to obey the rules that debarred Love for others,
arising from our incompleteness and fear.
Such Love does not defend itself or justify itself.
It is content to be.
The stories told about Jesus may be inaccurate and untenable,
but the message that they carry is of the ways of divinity.
Jesus may not actually have been what they wrote,
but what they wrote is what he should have been.
The Gospels are parables not biographies.
Jesus was not a different form of person
but can be a standard by which we measure the God-presence of any other.

Original Sin is Out

Chapter 9 Original Sin is Out - the reality of Evil
147
We enter a torn ans sinful world as a new blessing upon it.
Is Jesus more than a good example?
No, he is an invitation to a fuller life.
But does that take account of the reality of evil?
(the old story is that God addressed evil throught the death of his son
However it now seems obvious that that did not work. Evil is still with us)
First abandon the idea that we are all born sinful.
Remember that the reality of God has been experienced through man.
Evil enters the human mind with a recognition of incompleteness
and a striving for fulfillment and survival
to winning usually at the expense of others.
Evil is first manifest by the cruelty of interpersonal competition,
which can exacerbate to tribal and national level.
It is the drive for power over others – to be top dog.
Militarism and slavery are both products of this;
as is oppression of women in a patriachal world (and vice versa?)
These concepts became buttressed by divine claims written into scripture.
Such evil thus derives from our basic survival instincts.
Evil can also emerge from the Spiral of Purity, or “mob spirit”,
when rationality disappears and dreadful deeds are done.
This is an exacerbation of the same struggle for power and survival
which has gone over a psychotic edge.
We are incomplete creatures, growing and developing,
but still exhibiting aspects of our past when such survival techniques were positive features.
The evil of addiction does not follow this pattern.
Others can become so warped by experiences of life
that their behaviour is permanently affected
(this can include a destructive childhood).
These tend to bar the doors to healing from inside.
The hang on to their sickness.
Some even infect others with their mania – in whatever form it takes.

In the absence of a personified evil, how can these experiences be explained?
Jung saw evil as a balance to goodness within God; a strange idea,
but somehow evil needs to be explained.
If we revert to the idea of emerging goodness
, we might realise the reality of remaining evil as a product of our past needs.
Thus our need for survival skills and other variants of rational behaviour become residual,
now unwanted or corrupted,, aspects of past necessities.
The concept of Original Sin becomes justified !!
What Jung calls “the shadow side” of my life is a shadow from the past.
I find the explanation in the text unworthy and incomplete.
The conjunction of good and evil is an escape mechanism, not a sound solution.

The taks of the community is to produce wholeness, not goodness.
Spong sees wholeness as embracing both good and evil and a recognition of both.
HMM!
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