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Friday 25 September 2015

Of COURSE He Would Be a Professor at Marquette

Seriously, where would one expect to find a writer who took an interest in "Christianity Without God"?
Christianity without an omnipotent god, without a divine savior, without an afterlife? In this bold and hopeful book, theologian Daniel C. Maguire writes that traditional, supernatural aspects of Christianity can be comforting, but are increasingly questionable. A century of scholarly research has not been supportive of the dogmatic triad of personal god, incarnate savior, and life after death. Demonstrating that these beliefs have questionable roots in historical traditions, Maguire argues for a return to that brilliant and revolutionary moral epic of the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Rescued from god, Christianity can offer a realistic global ethic to heal a planet sinking under the effects of our ungrateful mismanagement.
For the Christian who's "spiritual but not religious"?

Are these not the very definition of the people Andrew Greeley once said stuck around "for the stories"?
Okay, like Sebastian Flyte, we may find the manger and the animals and all that "lovely", but why, if it isn't The Book Of God would anyone want to encumber themselves with the Bible?
And it's not just the paradoxes and seeming contradictions and picture of an Almighty who's pretty mean, and can seem petty when we can't comprehend that our ways are not His ways; its the hard sayings of the New Testament that replace the hard God of the Old - why would a non-believer want to bother to even make an attempt at reconciling all that with mere atheist ethics?

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