Faith is like having sex

Faith is like having sex

You gotta feel it to do it

And you gotta do it to feel it

Anything less is just fakin'.

Do you believe in God?

Do you believe in God?  Great!

What if I told you that I believe in God too

Just not in the way you might

Would that be okay?

But what if my belief in God

Is too different

From your belief in God?

Would one of us need to give up rights to the term?

Are you an unbeliever?  Great!

What if I told you that I don’t believe in God either

At least not in the conventional sense

Would that be okay?

But what if my unbelief

Was more nuanced

Than your unbelief?  Or yours more than mine?

Would one of us have to concede a belief in God after all?

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Yet what if belief or unbelief is completely irrelevant

To the reality of God’s existence or nonexistence?

What if faith still works like faith

Regardless if we believe in a God or not?

What if right is still right, wrong is still wrong

Grey is still grey, and “beats me!” is still “beats me!”?

What if hope is still hope, love is still love, and trying is still trying

No matter how we use our faith?  –as long as we use it

What if faith is as universal

As our limits and shortcomings

And learning to love was the only real choice we ever had in the first place?

Would that give us an all-inclusive meaning to the struggles of life?

Would that pretty much describe God in a nut shell?

Or humanity?

Or grace?

Or all of the above?

In the end words DO have meaning

And ‘God’ is no small word

Question is, is there a Word

Bigger than how we might think about ‘God’?

If there is, do any of us really have the right to define it?

To color it?  To wrap it up in a box?

Postmark it for Jews and gentiles

But not for heathens or heretics?

Given what “God” means simply by us saying it

Isn’t it still the holy grail of human language?

An utterance for every knee and tongue

Too sublime to bow or confess a thing

Other than what faith would give us

In the very moment of its sudden and glottal stop!

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So what if faith took living

Rather than believing?

And God took faith

Rather than confessing?

Perhaps that would give us all

Only one thing left to do:

Live by loving others

Die in the throes of struggle

And hope to God that that was more important

Than what we believed.

Immovable Text

Scripture is not authority

Its inspiration

Otherwise

Why keep quoting it and not just do it once and for all?

I know the love of Jesus

Not because the Bible tells me so

But because I feel it in my heart

No book can do that

It just so happens

That what I read resonates

With what’s already in me

In deed, Divine Love transcends

Not only scripture

But the Christian story itself

So to be truly inspired

Holy Word must be borne in every trough

It must bear the deepest and darkest plot of love

Not just for some stories, but for all

And when this Love has done its work

We nonetheless insist that it must die

On ink and paper, buried inside immovable text!

And yet the Gospel truth

Is that between the blowing and crinkling pages of life

This Word rises to live again and again

Each day in our hearts.

Faith is a Two-way Street

To be clear

We atheists don’t reject

All the truly amazing and wonderful things about God

We just feel

That all these amazing and wonderful things

Are freely available without a God

Now

If you want to accuse us atheists

Of still believing in SOME kind of God

On account of this

I suppose then we DO have the right

To say critical things about God after all

All in all, faith is a two-way street

What you praise

I might scoff

And I’m sorry if that rubs a sore spot

But the rules say we all got to drive here

So let’s at least mind the center line shall we

By the way, what if ‘God’ is the road itself?

“G” “o” “d”

https://www.rutherford.org/product/god-is-a-four-letter-word

God is a word

That names the object of our faith

So

Believe

Or

Don’t believe

Just

Be good to your faith

God will thank you for it

And the rest of us will too.

Peace.

Religious Journey

http://greatmiddleway.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/two-kinds-of-doubt/

Religion itself is a good thing

But the kind of unquestioning literalistic certainty

Is what turns our religious ideas of God

From a loving creator

Into a bigoted tyrant

And us into his unwitting accomplices.

So make doubt part of your religion.

Doubt everything that doesn’t sit right with you

And especially those things that sit TOO well

And then hold on

Your idea of God is going to start doing cartwheels

But don’t worry

Religious faith is made for this kind of journey.

"no one puts new wine into old wineskins"   -Mark 2:22

"we should not think that the nature of the divine is like gold or silver or stone, an image which can be formed by the art and thought of humans"   -Acts 17:29

when heaven comes down to earth

http://createvisualculture.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/1911-heaven-comes-down-to-earth-and-why-that-matters/

In today’s world

Why should religion still be defined by superstition?

Why should spirituality still require a belief in the supernatural?

Today

We know we have an inner world, and an outer world

Our conscious minds, and our cosmos

At long last, that’s all we have data for; thoughts and things

And so our inner data has given us the insights of psychology

And our outer data has shown us the laws of physics

And yet science itself has shown us

That these are not two worlds, but one

One coin, with two sides

So why should we still imagine an extra third world

To make sense of the amazing two-sided one we’re clearly limited to?

Why should we keep imagining some extra heavenly realm that we have no data for?

Isn’t it about time we found religion without superstition?

Isn’t it about time we found spirituality without the supernatural?

Isn’t it about time we found God right here, right now, gleaming with reality?

Can’t God just be the great unity of the reality inside us with the reality outside us?

Can’t God just be the way the majesty of the universe relates to the wonder of our hearts?

And vice versa?

Can’t we just be still and know that God is simply the reality of reality?

And that reality itself will always hold and reveal the truth and goodness we seek

Even though we may lose track of it sometimes –inside or out

Thus, in today’s world

Shouldn’t religion simply be the outer practice of the inner good we find and cherish?

And spirituality, the collective science of how we can do this together on one planet?

Perhaps today

Can finally be the day

When heaven comes down to earth

But then again, this has been preached for two-thousand years

So maybe, could this, just maybe, be the return of Christ for our age?

Last time:  freedom from the legalistic trappings of Law and sin

This time:  freedom from the literalizing of Lore and superstition!
And yet at all times the same Kingdom, always at hand.

“Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”     -Matt. 28:20

Backwoods Redneck Un-believin’ Gospel

http://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2010/09/penn-jillette-this-i-believe-there-is.html

Ain’t nothin wrong with your soul

Only thing corruptible is the mind

Nothing but a brain’s belief

In a tricksy curse-love God that wrecks a soul's sedan

Ain’t no stain on your heart neither

For the most part, sin’s just a occupational hazard of learnin is all

And what we learn is, well –we gotta lot of growin to do

Tell you a little secret, sin’s but a prerequisite to love

Ain’t no hell either, nope

Hell’s just a place made up by grudgeful folks

Tryin not to feel that way

Shucks, hell ain’t nothin more than just a bad way to be

And there ain’t no God, sorry to say

Well… none ‘cept the one you believe in I 'spose

Just so happens we all gotta believe in somethin

So, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.  Deal?

And I do hate to tell you, there ain’t no pearly gates neither

Heaven’s just a kind blissful band-aid on account of our petrified fear of death

Nobody wanna die.  That’s the God's-honest truth

But ain’t nobody ever come back I know of, to holler out an "all-clear!"

Sheeit!  They say there was this one guy

Somethin bout a holy death wish on account your wretched soul

Say he’s un-dead as Elvis too

Just if’n you believe

Problem is, ain’t no belief sly enough to really fool the heart

But you feel free to confess it so; go on up to heaven when you die, go on now

Me, I’ll take my heav’n right here, with all its bumps and bruises if’n you don’t mind

Heaven's just a matter of being right with the world as it is, yup, right down to your bones.

Well, I suppose there ain’t no point in belaboring all this

I ‘spect you’ll get along alright, spite this little ol’ talk from me

Cain’t help it my friend

I likes to ruffle feathers a bit is all, I find it keeps a soul honest

Heck!  For what its worth, I’ll say this too

God bless you my friend, God bless.

No one has ever seen God

I.      To say who or what God is

Is like saying you know what’s beyond the edge of the universe

Or what’s smaller than a subatomic particle

Its like saying you know what’s straighter than a line, or rounder than a circle

II.      The term ‘God’ can be used literally

Only to refer to the great necessity of existence

As for who or what God is beyond existence

No person, or book, or thing can truly say

III.      All we can say is what God is like

Thus ‘God’ is the greatest metaphor of all existence

To affirm the reality

Of both our private and shared divine experiences

IV.      For to deny divine experience as genuine

Is to make God but a caricature of goodness

But to say what ultimately makes divinity itself

Is to make God an idol of our minds

V.      The mistake is that we end up worshiping a mere idea of God

Rather than wondering at existence

Basking in our blessings

And living a life thankful for all we touch and feel

VI.      This is why I follow the Way of Jesus

For Jesus was the great iconoclast of all our idols of God

He saved us from the follies of any law-bound or likewise captive God

And for this he became our liberating Messiah, our living Christ

VII.      Thus our sacrifice of faith

Is that we bury our best ideas of God with Christ

And when in two or three days time we find that life divine still rises in our midst

We finally believe

VIII.      That nothing on earth nor in any heaven can separate us from the love of God

Nothing

And certainly no idea of God, wrathful or holy alike

Can banish grace or shackle our souls

IX.      For the Spirit of Christ is not only the resurrection of life itself

It is the perennial re-birth of goodness in all that exists, that is –in God

And for this we worship, in spite of What we do not know

And work to build a just and peaceful Kingdom of these limited yet living stones!

“No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”   - I John 4:12

Altars, not Idols – a Repurposing of ‘God’

http://petzk.deviantart.com/art/Pre-Ice-Stone-Altar-320354072

For me, atheism is not about intolerance toward other people’s belief in a God.  Nor is it about rejecting all theology out of hand.  In fact, I consider myself a Christian-atheist.  And as an atheist, it is my desire to see the term ‘God’ repurposed upon the very faith we find in Christ.

How can ‘God’ be repurposed?

For me, atheism is simply a protest against all mental idols of God.  It is a rejection that any belief in a God can be held as holding God itself.  Atheism denies a ‘God up there’ by affirming only what is right here.  If anything divine can be found right here, so be it.  But it cannot be held as God.  Nor can we synthesize a God from what we find, for this is the definition of what an idol is.

So what are we to do with the divine experiences we do know?  In lieu of mental idols, I suggest instead we as humans make mental altars.

What is a mental altar?  Whereas a mental idol claims knowledge of a God beyond our natural human limits.  A mental altar simply acknowledges and affirms divine experience and mystery as at hand.  Upon a mental altar we may affirm our most heart-felt and holy experiences, both for ourselves and for each other.  And yet we may or may not use the notion of ‘God’ to reference such phenomena.  Either way, ‘God’ must not become an idol to us, nor a counter-idol against human faith.  For no human altar is absolute.

Moreover, a mental altar accepts the distinct limits of the dualistic nature of our human condition.  The studies of epistemology and metaphysics show this duality clearly.  In short, this duality is that we may experience the divine both inside and outside ourselves.  Yet neither our world outside nor our hearts inside are ever sufficient to encompass what divinity might be in and of itself.

The repurposing:  And yet it seems there must be an ultimate unity to this duality we are limited to.  Otherwise this duality should not appear so consistent upon what we know, what exists, and how we find ourselves diced up in it all.  Alas such ultimate unity is only a guess.  But if we can accept our duality, then perhaps ‘God’ can be this unity to us.  That only by denying God upon our own negating duality do we transcend the limits of our altars.  In this way our soul-fledging altars become our sacred space for all spiritual seeking and sacrament.

Thus faith in God is admitting that we know our altar only, and not God per se.  And yet the amazing grace is that this altar is our very point of contact to whatever the divine might be.  This altar becomes the faith-point from which to live life more fully and pursue the good in spite of what ails us.  After all, isn’t this what the New Covenant is all about?  Grace, by faith.

If we as humans can train ourselves and our religions to accept these limits and work within these tensions, then I believe God can become a very real way for us to share and live-out our spiritual journeys in love and in harmony with one another.

So let us each place our struggled notions of God squarely upon the altars of our lives.  Let us stand courageously in the cleft as our certainties are sacrificed in pure and open faith.  Let us rise with scented smoke as our shackles are accepted by the flame and consumed.  For we ourselves become this living sacrifice.  And as the embers of grace glow gently in our hearts, let us at last be free of our idols of God.