Leaving Your Religion

So in a previous post, I explored the concept of a Christian Humanist particularly ideas regarding non-realism and other associated concepts such as eternity etc. Well I recently discovered that Bart Campolo has become a secular humanist and given up on his Christian faith. See www.bartcampolo.org
One of the podcasts features on the site involved a discussion between Bart and a man called James Mulholland. James runs a website called www.LeavingYourReligion.com and published a book with the same title. I was fascinated by the discussion between Bart and James who both shared a Christian past but who now both inhabit very different places. Following is some commentary on the book.
The book has very helpful questionnaires to complete which help further reflection. It opens with one titled 'should you leave your religion?' Your score is then used to indicate whether you should read the book, or what parts would be most beneficial. Another helpful tool on page 21 is a 'religious loss inventory'. Interesting here you discern between nostalgia and genuine loss. The list of things you deny on page 30 was also very good. I ticked most! Strikingly, the final denial read, 'you confess to believing in God even though you've rejected nearly every common definition or description of God'. On page 39 it stated 'anger often masks sadness'. In the context of faith, I do find myself getting angry. Interesting. James suggests there is a process of Refining, then expanding and then redefining. Theses all resonate with my experience. He provides a list on page 88 which details some of the redefining. In losing your faith, the book encourages you to live in the new non-religious identity, discarding all artefacts related to the previous religious way of life such as books and embracing new ways to live as a non-religious person. James talks about walking away from the shadow of the mountain.
I resonated with so much of this book and it tugged on my heart strings, but just as I could not fully accept the Christian Humanist position (a rejection of eternal life), I could not fully embrace a denial of the existence of something divine and yet again, eternal life.
My next quest is therefore to read a book about spiritual experiences (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1539007324/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1AIZ7Q12HCYEM&coliid=I3REZJ2THOW5RH) and seek to reconcile my spiritual experiences with an ever increasing non-realist/humanist stance.

A short exploration and review of Christian humanism

Sources:

Adams, R.J., 1989. So you think you’re not religious.

Freeman, A., 2001. God in us.

Windross, T., 2004. The thoughtful guide to faith.

Ritchie, A. & Spencer, W., 2014. The case for Christian Humanism

Quotes and reflection:

1. The primary business of Christianity is making sense of the world, “not meaning that we can show that it makes sense, but with the more literal and radical meaning of making into sense what, till it is transformed, is largely non-sense” (William Temple, 1943 cited in Adams, p.8). I think it was Tertullian that said theology is faith seeking understanding. In other words, I use my faith framework to try and make meaning of the world as I experience it recognising that it may be my framework that needs changing.
2. Simon Weil suggested that the great blasphemy is not in doubting that God exists but in making believe that the hunger is not real (Adams, p.11). I strongly identify with this quote. I struggled to accept the views of Freeman of non-deity as I cannot quench the hunger I have deep within that there is something/one beyond that which I completely understand. In some ways it echoes the title of a book, ‘he placed eternity in their hearts’ by Don Richardson.
3. Latin word credo is translated ‘believe’ but literally means ‘to set the heart’ (p.17). Kardia (heart) is never about logic or analysis (p.20). Verb pisteuo usually translated ‘believe’ while noun pistis is translated as faithful, reliable, faith (p.23). The opposite of amen is not doubt but denial. To doubt is to ask questions, to weigh evidence (p.27). Can apply an age of reason upon what were oral traditions (p.45). They studied the Bible to find analogies (p.49). All of these explanations encourage a faith that grows and develops (changes) not holding to orthodoxy as rules or doctrine.  
4. I believe God is real…a reality that is neither the subject nor the object of a theological discourse…I experience this God; I do not explain this God. I offer no prayers that are designed to manipulate this God so that this God becomes my servant. I do not spend my hours in worship praising this God as if my liturgical flattery will serve me well by winning me some divine favour. I do not find this God even inside the Trinitarian formulae of the creeds that I recite. These traditional words do not capture God, they only point me towards this God. I take seriously the warning of the Second Commandment that human beings are to build no graven images of this God that they will then confuse with God. It is now obvious to me that graven images can be constructed with human words. Such things as the Bible, the creeds, the doctrines and dogma’s are not divine revelations, they are graven images made with words. They are human constructions which we have frequently confused with the God to whom they can only point…to enter the human experience of God, which drives language to breaking point (forward by Spong in Freeman, p.xiii). Although Spong (as I do) share the contents shared by Freeman, we do not share the same conclusion (there is no God and no eternity, p.45). As Cupitt put it, “I am a verb, not a noun” (2010, p.4).
5. Do you believe in God? Tell me what sort of God you have in mind and I will tell you whether I believe in him (p.11). Freeman uses the categories of liberal, conservative and radical. If you are a non-theist (theist where God is supernatural and non-theist where God is ‘the ground of our being’ or ‘sum of our values’ or the creative and healing power of love), then prayer will be more like an exploration into the mystery at the heart of human life (Windross, p.30). Windross is in favour of a post-theistic model rejecting the theistic idea of God – personal, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, creator and sustainer, a being with no cause, beginning and end (p.177). Instead being – symbol; transcendence – immanence; love experienced in community (p.179).
6. Resurrection is not a matter of speculation, but an explosion of meaning (Windross, p.69).  
7. Amsterdam declaration, Christian humanism is rational, affirms human dignity and is ethical (p11). Humanitas (Latin) means human nature, virtues of an educated and cultivated existence (p.15). Associated with Unitarianism and positivism (pp.17-18). Based on this document, I suspect I resonate more with radical Christianity/progressive Christianity than I do with Christian humanism which for me shares to many of the modernist characteristics.  

 

An explosion of meaning (6) is the hunger that drives me (2). I have a hunger to make sense, to be engaged in meaning making (1) and what consequences that has upon me and my actions as I share this planet with others. I can say ‘amen’ to Spong’s creed (4) affirming that my heart (3) resonates with what I read. I can no longer naively support a supernatural understanding of God with trappings of sin, atonement theories and exclusive truth claims. If these trapping define theism then I reject theism but rather than then simply embracing non-theism (with its trapping of no eternity or personal God) I will explore post-theism.  Christian humanism for me is a return to modernistic epistemology.   

A homage: Loss and Pain

My wife and I are expecting our first child on 7 April 2015. My wife is an only child and since her twenties, her parents have hinted they want a grandchild. We got married on 12/12/12 and were delighted to announce in 2014 that we were expecting. Thursday 19 March 2015, at our last scan, it was conclusively confirmed that our baby would be a girl. My wife's parents always wanted a girl. My father-in-law, only 10 years older than me, is like a father and older brother to me. He accepted my daughter from another marriage like his own and was a caring, generous and good man. Sunday 22 March 2015 he died of a heart attack while shopping online for an outfit for his new grand daughter. My wife being so pregnant cannot fly home to support her mother, cannot grieve out of concern for the baby and feels helpless as the only child in how to help. I cannot imagine how her mother feels losing her husband, I cannot imagine how my wife feels losing her father. I cannot imagine how they both feel knowing a grand child is on the way!




Life is cruel.




My homage: Vladimir, you were a kind, generous man who always put family first. I remember how you threw a snow ball at my daughter the first time you met her; I remember how you taught me how to drink vodka, how you always bought us beers to try together; how you would always organise a braai for me when we were visiting; how you helped us paint our house, fix things and buy us things.




Who will help me board the loft, put legs onto the boxes to make them tables, leave pounds for Skye, take Kaia out for walks and throw snowballs at her too?


I miss you.


Who said it is better to love and lose than never to love at all,
I have loved and lost
I was loved and lost
Will my heart ever recover


Every time I look at her
I will remember your absence
Three women at loss
A wife, a daughter, a grand daughter


I don't understand
I struggle to accept
Why the good die young
While evil men live to decapitate another innocent life


If your god loves
And yet allows this to happen
Then either he has no control of life
Or if he does, I don't want to believe in him


Life is what it is
Life
And then we die
Love and loss


Vladimir Filiptsik, husband, father, grand father, 'father and brother' (1963-2015)

The Fountain

Nietzsche has said that every notable philosophical system is a compressed spiritual autobiography. Every philosopher is a heretic. He is a restless, questioning, critical person whose need to satisfy himself turns out stronger than his desire to continue to a respected, conforming member of his own people...the philosopher who cannot help but pursue his own quest for personal intellectual satisfaction at any cost I the most religious person of all. I was always a philosophical theologian.
The Fountain by Don Cupitt (2010)
Don gives me signposts along the way that I am travelling on, as I work out my understanding of life, the Other and what really matters. Even though I know my bible, systematic theology, trained and taught these and still do, I have never been comfortable with the term theologian. But I like the label (if indeed I need one) of philosophical theologian. I like the fact that I am not alone in seeking a faith expression that has integrity. How does education fit into this and my commitment to human flourishing?

A religion of one's own

Moore states, "I was choosing against formal religious life and leaving open the possibility for a religion of my own. Years later I would read about Emerson coming to a similar point of decision, rejecting the formal tradition, and for him, too, it was a matter of becoming more religious, not less" (A religion of one's own, 2014, p.207).
What Moore and others such as Moore demonstrate is a faith that seeks to go beyond a human formed and controlled expression and experience of faith. In a training session for Church of England clergy discussing 'policy/rules' regarding allowing children participation in the Eucharist, all were reminded that baptism is the entrance into the church. Asked whether a Baptist's believers baptism was considered the same as an Anglican baptism, it was stated emphatically 'no'. Of course, Baptists and others similar are not allowed to preside at Catholic, Anglican or Methodist (to name bit a few) Eucharist's! Catholics may receive (participate) in Anglican Eucharist's but not the other way around and so this religious craziness continues. I can understand and sympathise with Moore and Emerson. Perhaps this is why others take it a step further such as Cupitt when he writes in 'The Fountain', "Since we now have no further world to expect beyond this one, and even this one is passing away rapidly, we should spend ourselves completely and be content in due course to pass away and be forgotten along with everything else. Life's a package deal: it cannot be re-negotiated, and there is no alternative. So we should buy into it, and make the very most of it".
How do I, if I want to leave behind silly formal religious ways and views of an out-there, above-beyond God, to 'create' an authentic faith that values my experience and yet draws on my Christian heritage and understanding? How do I create an authentic faith be it progressive or Christian humanism or whatever else it can be labelled as?

i-revtrev

Exert from new book:
I like to think that one day out side time and space (I know, that is a paradox!) there existed (another paradox because to exist assumes time) this ‘being’ called Love. This Love was not some ungraspable phenomenon like the wind but had a personality and other personable qualities and in its nature being love, seeking to love, Love decided to create a life that would be able to share in this life force of love but also be objects of love, experiencing and being loved by Love. However, understanding the complexities of this mystery love (and truly who today still understands love), Love gave Love a name…God and so we have: God is Love.