Faith-killing questions from the trenches, and answers
“Top 10 Reasons To [Not] Be A Christian”
Lie #1: ‘If you live a moral life, deny yourself pleasure, follow the prescribed rituals and give us enough money, you’ll have a decent shot at being accepted by God.’
Remember that scene near the end of the Wizard of Oz,
when Toto is pulling back the curtain? The sound system
is bellowing, ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain. THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ HAS SPOKEN!’
And There’s a little man behind the controls, talking into
a microphone. more »
Tribute on September Eleven
On September 11, 1993, I received word that my 14
year old cousin, Chris Marshall, lost his life in
an accident.
Every year on the anniversary of that day his mom
and dad, my uncle Tim and his wife Dottie have relived
those sad events. When the World Trade Center was
decimated on September 11 2001, the sorrow became
greater still.
Today I want to share a message Tim wrote to his
son, on the 5th anniversary of what most of us now know
as “9/11.”
Perry Marshall more »
Mel Gibson’s Controversial Passion Movie
Most of the buzz about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”
has subsided.
I heard a lot and read a lot about this movie before going to
see it. You’d think I knew what I was in for, but I really didn’t. more »
Lie #7: ‘If God was really powerful and good, he wouldn’t allow so much evil and suffering to go on.’
This is raised by just about everyone: Priests and ministers, college students and housewives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
It’s one of the hardest questions anybody ever asks. more »
Lie #6: ‘The Bible is out of date, inaccurate and over-rated. People in the 21st century are way too smart for that.’
At first blush this doesn’t seem like an ‘Organized Religion’
thing. The reason I include it here is that many large religious
organizations do teach it today.
Let me ask you something: Don’t you think it’s a lot easier for a
leader to sneak in his own agenda when there’s no outside authority to
compare it to? more »
Lie #5: ‘There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find a truth that works for them.’
This one’s a real hot potato. And it’s not something you hear
so much from ancient religious institutions… rather, it’s simply
the ‘politically correct’ way to talk about spirituality these days.
It tends to be expressed something like this: ‘You’ve got your
truth, and I’ve got my truth. You find a faith that works for
you, and I’ll find a faith that works for me.’
Well here’s my question:
How many conflicting versions of the truth can actually be true? more »
Lie #4: ‘Women are spiritually inferior and must bow to the authority of men.’
In the religious bureaucracy of the ancient world, women
were basically property. If she burned his toast, he could
divorce her and send her away destitute. If she saw a crime
in progress and reported it to the police, her testimony in
court would be thrown out–simply because she was female.
Women weren’t considered smart enough to recount what really
happened.
Isn’t that special? more »
Lie #3: ‘You are not smart enough or good enough to think for yourself. We will do your thinking for you.’
Do you know what the most important invention in the
history of the world was?
It wasn’t the computer. And it sure wasn’t the light bulb
or the telephone. (Or even the electronic voting machine.)
It was the printing press. more »
Lie #2: ‘God is huge and unapproachable, and He wants you to labor, struggle and live in guilt.’
2000 years ago, they wouldn’t even dare say the word
‘God.’ God was distant, remote, terrible.
But Jesus had his own words for God, and he used them freely.
They were controversial, even scandalous. more »
Passages from “The Naked Now”
The Naked Now is Richard Rohr’s exploration of the mystical side of Christianity. Below are some brilliant quotes. Thanks to my friends John Fancher for compiling these:
Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we realize it is also obsessive and repetitive
……………………….
Yes, the mind can serve the world, but in fact it largely serves itself.
………………………….
…we still think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become spiritual, when the Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human.
………………………………
(on insisting on one interpretation of scripture): This, even after Jesus so often … taught that the Ultimate Reality…is always LIKE something – clearly a simile or metaphor, inviting further experience and journey, not an idea with definitions that could be checked true or false on a student exam.
……………………………………
…we forget that every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God’s own rules…Once you’ve known Grace, your tit-for-tat universe is forever undone: God is everywhere and always and scandalously found even in the failure of sin
………………………………
The Gospels never recorded Jesus having a single pre-requisite for any of his healings…except desire itself
………..
God’s love is so ingenious and victorious that I find God is willing to turn the whole world around to get me facing in the right direction
………………
If certitude, predictability and perfect order were so important, Jesus would have come in a time of digital recorders and cameras and he would have at least written his ideas down somewhere – and more clearly! He would have described his task as the establishing of archives instead of a sprawling banquet of rich food and wine…
……………….
If you fight dualistic thinkers directly, you are forced to become dualistic yourself. This is why, classically, Jesus sidesteps the two alternatives by telling a story, keeping silent, or sometimes presenting a third alternative that utterly reframes the false dilemma.
………………………………..
On the kingdom being NOW: How different this is from our later notion of salvation, which pushed the entire issue into the future and largely became a reward and punishment system.
……………………………….
We judgmentally look for the sin, error, or mistake in ourselves or others, not to consider its message for us, but to catch it, hate it, eliminate it, and often to project it elsewhere.
…………………………………………….
Scripture calls this subtle seeing (Wisdom) “she”, which in patriarchal culture is a way of saying “alternative”. Alan Watts says that the loss of paradoxical thinking is the great blindness of our civilization, which is what many of us believe happened when we repressed the feminine side of our lives as the inferior side. It was a loss of all subtlety, discrimination, and capacity for complementarity.
…………………………
Jesus, as the icon of Christ Consciousness, is the very template of total paradox: human yet devine, physical yet spiritual, possessing a male body yet a female soul, killed yet alive…failure yet redeemer, marginalized yet central, singular yet everyone
……………………………………
Unfortunately, faith became a matter of believing impossible or strange things (which was supposed to please God somehow), instead of an entrance way into a very different way of knowing altogether.
A Tale of Two Dads
I heard that one of my colleagues had recently lost his father. I asked him about it, and he shared this story.
_____________
My “step” father who raised me since age of 9 and who served REALLY as my Father/Dad… died on Saturday 10 days ago.
I spent more than 2 months in a California hotel, visiting him this past summer, when he was still happy and walking and living life… tending his vegetable garden, and not taking any chemo.
His cancer was two separate types of terminal lung cancer, one in each lung… so he chose to not do chemo.
My blood father, whom I hadn’t spoken to, by choice – for more than 32 years, died two days later.
I had no idea that he was dying or had cancer also, until about 4 days before.
Strangely, I had been praying for each of them, on alternate days, all day long for about 4 weeks before they died.
So, I was able to reduce my resentment toward my blood father for all the mental cruelty he had put me thru for the 1st half of my life, until age 28, when I mentally “divorced” him.
The praying for him, gave me a sense of compassion and peace, and love for that part of myself represented by him.
I had no idea he needed prayers.
It’s almost as if I “manifested” him coming back into my life, when my uncle made his daughter (my cousin) write to my wife to tell me to call him. My whole family knew I never wanted to speak to him again.
It turns out, he never woke up during those final 4 days, after I called my uncle, but I was able to tell my uncle I forgave his brother, my blood father.
When my step-Dad died Saturday, it was very sad.
When my blood Dad died on Monday, I felt nothing, unless it was relief… but I was glad to have released him and to feel absolutely no resentment.
It’s just weird they would die almost on the same day.
All my life since age 9, I never called my “step”-Dad my Step-Dad. I called him Dad. He Really WAS My Dad, and I loved him dearly.
My real (blood) father, on the other hand, severely crippled my self image for the first 28 years of my life by telling me I was no good, and making it clear that I could NEVER please him, no matter what.
If I had actually gotten the opportunity to tell him I forgave him, he would have said: “What! Forgive me for WHAT?!!”
He was a sad case. An alcoholic all his life.
I’m glad I was able to break the mold on that one, and to transcend him.
I’ve had many father-figures in my life, from Socrates & Jesus, to Shakespeare & Ben Franklin. From Napoleon Hill to my “Step” Dad. From my career role models, to my entrepreneur role models.
I feel really happy that I did that, so when the time came, I actually felt for a day or two…
That I would be able to talk with him, if he ever woke up and could get on the phone.
However, by the time my “step” Dad died, I decided not to give him one last chance to crush me
or lash out at me, and instead, I asked my Uncle to tell him I loved him, and that I said Goodbye.
In the end, I was so proud of myself for not giving him that opportunity, but also for not feeling any resentment toward him, only compassion and kindness.
This was only possible due to the 4 weeks of praying. During that 4 weeks, I healed that part of myself,
that was “him” inside me.
On the other hand… My “step”-dad, who always always there for me, to the extent he could be working in manufacturing as the sole provider, raised me as the oldest of 7 kids, 5 of which WERE his blood.
What I neglected to say about him at the end, was that I was so gratified to have just pulled up the stakes, and to have spent more than 2 months with him this past summer, when he was happy and healthy, and times were good.
We went to baseball games, county fair, out to lunch & dinner, had family BBQs.
In the end he went very fast, and the way he wanted, surrounded by love, with some of us near, and some of us far, but he KNEW he was loved.
I feel very blessed to have prayed for both of them, at odd moments all thru the days – on alternate days, thru those final 4 weeks.
It’s just strange that both were dying of the same disease, and I didn’t even know it until the very end.
One last thing.
I continue to pray for both of them all day long, whenever I can think of it – from midnight to midnight… in rotation with 2 others.
It goes this way… Pray for –>
1) Blood Father
2) Mother (who died of cancer in 1994)
3) Step Dad
4) My Wife
I switch at midnight, and rotate through again.
These are the four biggest influence on who I am, who I’ve been, and who I’m becoming.
_____________
Share your dad story below….
Amway Pink Koolaid = Christian Pink Koolaid?
For years I was a revved up, starry-eyed, enthusiastic Amway distributor. Drivin’ all over the place, doing meetings, building my “organization” and gunning for Diamond.
Eventually (it took about 5-6 long torturous years; I can be both stupid and stubborn) the rose-colored sunglasses started to shatter. Due in part to scrutiny that the Internet provided, which had formerly been impossible.
I decided to use the web as an anvil to see if the Multi-Level Marketing machine could stand up to scrutiny. To make a long story short, I put up a website asking qualified people to explain some things that appeared to be fairly unethical and no good explanations were forthcoming.
Was there a good reason for the tool systems being the way they were, etc, other than the powerful exploiting the gullible?
In a word, no. I saw very quickly that it crumbled under the weight of hard analysis. (To put it mildly.)
A few years later I found myself putting together this here Coffeehouse Theology website with an eerily similar thing in mind. Point/counterpoint, thesis/antithesis. Let’s get all this out on the table and start hammering on it.
I’d been raised Christian, my dad was a minister, and I thought there was a very real possibility that Christianity might crumble the same way Amway did. (Amway imploded in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – huge fallout. It would take a major recession with millions of desperate people seeking opportunities, before that trend began to reverse.)
Not only that, atheist websites like Infidels were attracting hundreds of thousands of followers. The arguments were very strong.
I was open to the possibility that the whole Christianity thing might be a sham. And if so, I might as well find out sooner rather than later. Maybe churches would someday be filled with only those people left who couldn’t be bothered to get on the Internet.
By the way I had a deep dark fear of feeling the same way about having been a Christian as I’d felt about being a “naive enthusiastic Ambot.” ie they saw me coming a mile away. I was a gullible idiot. What a horrible fear.
Meanwhile I decided to try my best to defend Christianity based on what I did know. I decided to take all comers. Sort of like I am doing here on this blog, but back then it was via email. All the email autoresponder replies came back to me.
So the convos were private, which helped. It made them deeper and less snarky than what you typically find on blogs. I decided that I was willing to “fight to the death” – someone was going to win. Maybe it was going to be me, maybe it was going to be the atheist that I was talking to.
Sooner or later we would find out. If Christianity was a sham I would give it up.
What happened to me was, I became more and more sure of fewer and fewer things.
There are a lot of things that I would never be interested in trying to defend. There are other things that I think really do stand up to logical, historical, philosophical and scientific scrutiny.
One of those things is Christian God –> resurrected Jesus spiritual belief system. The Judeo-Christian account of the origins of the universe; the case for the resurrection of Jesus; for the remarkable reliability (not utter perfection!) of the gospel texts; for various prophesies coming true, for Christian ideas of equality giving birth to our modern notions of human rights. For developing the philosophical roots for modern science; healings from disease; the case for all these things is much stronger than most people would ever suspect.
In fact I’ll go so far as to say that Judaism and Christianity together laid the foundations for modern colleges and universities and a great deal of the Western intellectual tradition.
By the way I just ran across a fascinating article. David Stove was a brilliant, incisive atheist philosopher from Australia. Wrote “Darwinian Fairytales” and “Rationality of Induction.” I bought both of those books several years ago. I wasn’t aware he had a son.
His son RJ Stove writes this riveting account of converting from atheism to Catholicism.
I think RJ’s story is a shining example of what happens when you put atheism on the anvil and start pounding on it, the same way I pounded on Christianity. I found out it shatters like brittle iron. I doubt many people know the real story of David Stove, I sure didn’t. David Stove’s books are outstanding by the way, and very witty.
I don’t expect you to accept any of this just because I say so. But I think if you page through the various articles, the Q&A in the blog comments, the presentations and MP3′s both here and on my sister website – you will find a reasonable, logical articulation of Christianity as a rational belief system.
The Biblical Case for Cessation of Miracles
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Blah blah blah.
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Blah blah blah.
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Blah blah blah.
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Blah blah blah.
Anne Rice Quits Church
In another post, bestselling author Anne Rice told you her story – how, through historical research, she became convinced the facts support a real Jesus who rose from the dead. She explains how and why she left atheism to embrace hope.
Then, in 2010, she left the church. She said:
“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. more »
The Burning
The Burning
by Joshua Russell
From the black void a voice arose: I will go to hell and back for you, dear child.
Then God created the heavens and the earth, full well knowing the heartache it would cause him to have such beautiful little children (he could gobble them up!) and watch them cower before his gaze, think horrible thoughts, despise him, despise themselves, despise the very sky he painted for them.
And what’s worse, they would feel such incredible more »
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never Told You – Transcript Part 3
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never
Told You About Church History
(Written Transcript Part 3)
There’s kind of a Catholic view of scripture, which is we have this Bible, but you don’t just pick it up and interpret it in a vacuum. Just like there are genealogies of scriptural documents that radiate outward from the center, there is also a tradition of interpretation that also radiates outward from the center.
Just like you can go back here as early as you can go and find out, “All right, the Septuagint says this, but this other version or other scroll says more »
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never Told You – Transcript Part 2
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never
Told You About Church History
(Written Transcript Part 2)
The Destruction of Jerusalem
It’s mentioned 78 times in the gospels. Here are some instances of that. more »
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never Told You – Transcript Part 1
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never
Told You About Church History
(Written Transcript Part 1)
I’m really glad that you’re here, and it’s been brewing for a very long time. There’s a little story behind this whole talk that I want to tell you about; how this whole project was born.
About seven years ago, I put up a website called CoffeeHouseTheology.com. There were a number of motivations for me doing this, but one of them was I needed a punching bag. more »
7 Things Yo’ Momma Never Told You About Church History
Power Point Presentation in PDF
In this talk Perry Marshall selects 7 huge “anchor points” – 7 monumental ideas and events that changed civilization. You’ll see with new clarity how the world has been transformed in a positive way: more »
Lie #8: “Miracles ceased with the disciples.”
7 Great Lies of Organized Religion – Lie #8
Where I grew up, they said: “Miracles don’t happen anymore. They ceased with the disciples.” I believed what they told me.
Dozens of personal experiences and medically documented cases have caused me to do a 180 on this. Miracles are REAL. The idea that miracles are fake is literally the 8th lie of Organized Religion. (Fake miracles masquerading as real ones are the other side of that coin, by the way… and there are many fake miracles.)
Miracles are far more common than many would have you believe. Today, I share several of my own personal experiences. And several thoroughly documented events. more »
The Dance of Equality, Technology and Spirituality
10 years ago someone said to me, “These days you may not even know your next door neighbor, but you exchange emails with your buddy in South Africa twice a week.” I looked out the window at the house next to mine – barely knew the neighbors – and yes I was sitting there sending emails to someone in some far-off country. more »
