Responsible Religion

1- natural destructiveness, eg the Boxing Day tsunami. I feel that Nature is hugely valuable on the whole but distinct from God-the-largely-powerless-carer. I can imagine God grieving over the Boxing Day tsunami, and over every child who dies of an illness we can't solve yet; and rejoicing over every advance in medicine. 2- thinking in terms of a force of evil-- I feel  that's a massive buck-passing exercise, though I remember being impressed by Scott Peck's People of the Lie ; must give it another go. 3- sin. To think of sin as infractions of rules seems to me seriously wrong. I think human failure usually comes in the form of callousness, of refusal to feel empathy when we should clearly do so. And what God can very properly charge us with is not giving him/her/it the opportunity to both enlighten us and give us a bit more strength to do The Generous Imaginative Thing. He/she/it will help fast enough if given the chance. And I do buy the Zoroaster vision of the contin...

I could link this to a biblical verse, indeed, I think, my all-time favourite one. The Micah one which everyone knows as "What doth the LORD require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God". In my version it is  ".... but to shun bias and to prize kindness and to never forget how little you know". The bit that matters this time is bolded. The synonym I want is not there: disinterestedness. Impartiality would do nearly as well. We favour ourselves most of the time without even thinking about it. We favour our kindred and close friends and may even take that for altruism. (Sometimes it really is-- when for the sake of a child we set aside our own comfort.) But the action of the truly public spirited, indifferent even to their own reputation, is, I submit, so rare it could count as holy.  I'm not talking about spectacular sacrifices, necessarily-- just the act of trying hard to figure out what the public good requires and ...

There was recently a Radio 4 In Our Time on Purgatory-- or maybe I only found it recently. It told me a lot I did not previously know, for example that virtually everyone went to Purgatory and  got out of it to Heaven eventually, but that the being there was appallingly painful, that was why it was worth taking steps to try to get people out earlier. --My own hunch, such as it is, is that we do get a thorough cleaning-up after death, and I know what some of that might be like. With the mother of two of my son's children I was on one occasion absolutely required to be supportive though it was the last thing I felt like doing. That process of being coerced by circumstances into doing a generous act which does not come at all naturally could easily be part of a cleaning-up. But Purgatory has to be about turning one into the best imaginable version of one's given self. Some of that must be unwelcome and uncomfortable, but some of it could be comforting. Suppose one's grudgin...

Quakers have recently published a little book called God, Words and Us . This is because someone anticipates difficulty in producing the next version of Quaker Faith and Practice arising out of the fact that some Quakers think a personal God is out of the question, and others think a personal God is de rigueur. Actually Live and Let Live is normally the adequate Quaker watchword; but one thing follows from the lack of unanimity about God-- which is that some other notion has to be in the foundation of our faith. I'd say it's Reverence that is basic: the experience of something Much Much Bigger. Provided the Much Much Bigger thing does not cause one to behave badly in its pursuit, we can uphold one another as regards what it is.

I still have not read all of Paradise Lost, let alone Paradise Regained, but at this point the feature that impresses me is that Satan was jealous, and was jealous because God preferred another creature to him. In PL it's Jesus whom Gd prefers; in the Muslim version it's Adam-- the latter makes slightly better sense of Satan's wish to trash humankind.  But either way we are required to assume in that God is right and Satan is wrong in his self-estimation. --See Will McCormick, who killed the teacher who punished him for not submitting homework.  A story that impresses me is Laura Ingalls Wilder's narrative of her father's response when she got into trouble at school resulting from a feud with a snobbish rival, Nellie Olesen. Laura's Dad asks Laura what she had said and what her rival had said. What Laura's rival had said was not true, but it was not baseless. Laura's Dad asked Laura what basis Nellie had for believing what she said. This Middle Way...

No, I know that's an overstatement, but it's not that much of an overstatement. I start flipping through the Bible at the beginning of Meeting for Worship looking for a passage I can unite with. Pentateuch? No, it has God telling the Israelites to kill all of those they have invaded. God never did any such thing. Psalms? No, they keep saying that if David (or whoever) is obedient his enemies will be trashed. And the same objection applies to most of the Old Testament,  although  I love Isaiah 58, not least because I learned it first as the Lent hymn "Now quit your care". I go on to a gospel, and it has Jesus saying "There will not be left a stone of the Temple on another stone". That may have been written back in after Jesus' death and after the Rebellion, but in any case even that is not true. I have to go all the way to the end of Romans, where Paul and Tertius are greeting the Christians in Rome by their names, before I find something I have no prob...