Religion has got to be accountable to the secular

I had a Quaker parent and an atheist parent. They did not argue about religion much, but they are both (or versions of them) at work in my head and heart. There is no question of my trying to do without religion, but the religion has always to be responsible to something outside itself.

For example, I think that religion must not try to justify itself in terms of what happens in an afterlife. There may be an afterlife; it seems to me unlikely but not out of the question. But the responsibility of the religious to the rational means that religion must show the good it does in terms of this life.

My own heritage is Christian and I feed on a low church version of that very often, but I cannot imagine Jesus sanctioning the exclusion from Paradise <whatever that is>of people who came to God by another route than his. So other religions must in general have equal status.

This in turn means that any claims Jesus made to uniqueness have to be explained away. --That is very hard work, because I don't want to rubbish the evidence of Mark, among others. Mark reports Jesus as claiming a special status for himself, right from the start. We know Jesus was wrong about at least one thing, the imminence of the Last Days, but I have not the least desire to make him wrong about more things than I have to. I think he was in general level headed and not deluded, though I don't think he escaped all the intellectual hazards of his time. So if he knew he was closer to God than almost all, he was right. And if he knew God wanted him to get crucified, he was right about that too. The issue is, what he was supposed to save sinners from and how.

This is a picture of the Transfiguration; but my version is a bit different. Hide Moses and Elijah. Substitute Zoroaster and Muhammad, and give them fancier haloes. Interpret the middle witness as female. Remember that Mary Magdalen is unlikely to have been a prostitute and may well have been a church funder.

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Responsible Religion

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