"I’m a Presbyterian Minister Who Doesn’t Believe in God"

[Mustafa]

 

[Thalassa]

Don't confuse me for having any allegiance to your world view.

I don't even know what happened. Have a blessed day.

 

[Bush]

][...]a Presbyterian 'Pretty Much Any Liberal Church, Especially UU'-ist Minister, Who Doesn’t Believe in God

There. More plausible. This suggests that it's not that outlandish.

So some separate the insights and wisdom contained within the doctrine from the original source. Many wouldn't call those folks true Christians. It's an issue for some, for sure, from the outside, it's mostly worthless semantics.

It's not from a God and it should all be tossed in the garbage? Please. Lots of folks would be missing out on insight if that's the criterion.

 

[Forever]

Christianity is actually not a difficult religion to follow if you throw out the sexual aspects of it in my opinion.

Yeah any atheist benefits from serving others, being honest and responsible and keeping personal stuff within group only.

Forgiveness isn't all spiritual, lack of negative feelings sounds great to me.

Maybe I'm too liberal haha

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Yeah, I actually wondered myself why he wouldn't avoid the trouble and simply identify as UU instead. But- as I said- I know very little about the different branches/sects of Christianity (my understanding pretty much stops at Catholic vs. Protestant, and even that doesn't begin to be complete). And seeing as how this guy has made it his life's work (and so, knows far more than I do)- I assume he knows a lot about the differences that I do, and for whatever reason the UU option didn't appeal.

He doesn't mention UU in the article I linked, but he does mention it in his blog. I've scanned through the blog entry titles and haven't found anything that might answer why he's intentionally not pastoring to a more UU crowd.

 

[Luke O]

I think it should be, I think you're failing to see the bigger picture, I'm not denying that change happens but change for the sake of change and following every fashion and vogue is a VERY bad idea, if you consider the fashions such as nazism, communism, human sacrifice etc. you'll know that, I suspect that you're coming from a very fundamentalist liberal position which is going to naturally distrust what doesnt change, what shouldnt change and what is worth conserving unchanged as an inheritance from one generation to the next.

Perennials dont shed their leaves annually and completely renew, holly stays all year round, there are perennial social institutions too and it ought to be a job of work to discover them and protect them from changing them up as and when you choose for the sake of the present moment, imagine its a house and you plan to hand it on to your kids and they to theirs you dont want to add a lot ugly fashionable extentions or sun rooms or fixtures and fittings which will undermine the structural integrity and pull the whole structure down and ruin it, creating work for the future generations in building it up again, if they can, in the time and with the resources and resourcefulness they possession, or maybe the skills necessary to do so will become lost to history and generations are then simply doomed to eons of avoidable suffering.

You're describing change as positive, without any downside what so ever really, I dont see it that way and there's plenty of reforms I would like to see in the world. The kinds of constant reinvention, change is good, change is always good sort of thinking sees it always as an improvement, I doubt that, entropy and decay and deterioration ARE changes too, undesirable ones. You mention tithes as an example of negative conventions or practices from the past, I'm sure I could mention the hospitaleers and the emergence of care facilities but I'll not engage in that sort of horse trading the record is there.

Tradition and social institutions are meant to embody ancestoral memory, intergenerational learning, perhaps I'm talking about it at its best, I'm definitely not talking about it at its worst and I'll acknowledge that but I dont think that the constant start from scratch and individual and collective amnesia involved in beginning over and anew all the time would be a good idea. Everyone only has one life to live and to give over so much of that to learn things from scratch again is an impediment on progress surely.

The thing is you see, as I said in my last post, some things are better left alone. The only reason why I talked about change was merely a counterpoint to yours about keeping things the same. Change for the sake of change, without anything to back it up is as illogical as tradition for the sake of tradition. The thing about change is that it is happening all the time. The world is changing, the universe is changing, even your body is changing. Those grey hairs, those hairs where there shouldn't be hairs, losing hair where you once had hair. You can't fully control it but you can embrace it.

The thing about traditions are people will keep to them if they want to. I live in a country with many of them. You can roll a big cheese down a hill, have a bunch of people chase after it and call it entertainment. I don't have a problem. People can create new traditions as well if they want, after all, that's how the entirety of them start in the first place. I even hold to a tradition since 2011 to have breakfast for dinner on 21st December every year so I can call it Yule Brinner. Tradition is part of change, not the opposite of!

 

[Z Buck McFate]

I even hold to a tradition since 2011 to have breakfast for dinner on 21st December every year so I can call it Yule Brinner.

LOL!

 

[free electron]

Can someone be Christian and not believe?

I don't think so. It is as if you asked if someone could be a vegetarian and eat meat everyday : it is an oxymoron.

In other words, maybe- is Christianity to you more about the faith in God than it is about the teachings?

There is a name for that, it's called deism (which is not christianism).

 

[Lark]

LOL!

Keep getting fooled that people want to discuss things...

 

[Luke O]

If all it took to be Christian was just to be a decent person in your every day life, speak out against injustices and be good to your fellow man, I'd be Christian too and so would many of you. If there's a requirement to believe in God, then I'm out.

 

[Mustafa]

God is nobody, nobody is God. (Which is somebody)