amateur theology in recess
Posted on December 17, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Site Notices | 2 Comments
With all the excitement around at the moment - both in terms of the general Chrsitmassy type seasonal stuff as well as the personal, getting-married-in-19-days stuff means that I don’t have the sort of time I’d want to dedicate to doing AT properly, so we’re just going to let it take a break for a while. Because I am getting married, and will not be blogging during the honeymoon for remarkably obvious reasons, this means that Amateur Theology will resume in February, 2008.
But in the meantime, I would really love it if we could get some more perspectives from wider than just myself. So if you have anything to contribute, could you send it to submissions@amateurtheology.org. That way we can relaunch in February with hopefully a much more communal feel.
Thanks
Geoff Matheson, Amateur Theology Adminstrator/principal blogger/editor
your ponderance for today…
Posted on December 12, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Emerging Questions, Links | Leave a Comment
…comes from “The Ongoing Adventures Of ASBO Jesus“, who is posting some very controversial, but very thought-provoking stuff. You don’t need to agree with Jonathon to be benefited by seeing his cartoons. Anyway, feel free to leave your opinion on this one here, or over at the original post.
do you like stuff?
Posted on December 10, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Crazy Idealism, Culture | 3 Comments
The video that the below clip is from is perhaps the best description I’ve heard of for why there’s something deeply wrong with the consumption-centric system that our economy is based on. It puts out the big picture for what Brian McLaren describes in his new book “Everything Must Change” as “the suicide machine”. So please - set aside 20 minutes to watch the whole video here, and understand what’s wrong with the system that our world economy is centered around. The Story Of Stuff
dawkins’ deity, part ii - responding to transcendence
Posted on November 25, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | 3 Comments
In the first chapter of “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins describes the difficulty he has with reconciling that which scientists know and hypothesise about the natural world with traditional religious belief. He quotes Carl Sagan in “Pale Blue Dot”
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded ‘This is bigger than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our great prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, my God is a little god and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
In embracing the belief that all good things come from God, we have drawn boundaries around what God is, and then dismissed anything which does not fit into our traditional understanding of God. Our response to a world that is more complex, more beautiful and more vast than we have understood it to be has been to protect the ground we’ve always stood on, and to hold tight to the truth we know. It’s what the church did to Galileo, and when we put our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la I’m not listening” to increased scientific pontification around origins of life, etc we do the same thing.
So here’s the question: where are we as the church, still doing this? The challenge here has to be to recognise where we’ve limited God to our previous understanding of theology, and allow that theology to become flexible enough that we can see God in the Universe and even in scientific discovery, rather than seeing God opposed to these things. Where would your theology be too inflexible to accomodate for scientists discovering more about our world?
This could be a long series - two posts and I’m only 5 pages in.
dawkins’ deity, part i - preliminaries
Posted on November 22, 2007 by Geoff Matheson
Filed Under Books, Emerging Questions | Leave a Comment
This is the beginning of a series on Richard Dawkins’ book: “The God Delusion”. I’ll be writing the series “as I read it”, which given the way that life has been looking recently, could result in this series finishing around late 2020, but with a little bit of application, we should be able to get “something” out on this weekly (or so).
I believe that while the easiest, and most tempting response to the sort of criticisms that a fundamentalist atheist such as Dawkins presents is to dismiss him out of hand as a radical who doesn’t have any concept of what Christianity is really on about, I don’t believe that such a response is sensible, nor is it helpful. Whether we like it or not, voices like Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, etc. are being heard loud and clear. So this is an attempt to respond to “The God Delusion” and to sort the truths that the church needs to hear from the “other stuff”.
Because I’m attempting to find the “things we need to hear” and even some issues to wrestle with, this will (attempt to) be the last time I’ll address the style in which Dawkins’ has written his manifesto. I admit, I’ve seen Richard appear on television interviews before, so I was a little prepared for what I would be reading. He writes as he talks, with a steady, calm, English gentleman sensibility - all the while conveying sentiments which border on ridicule. His rhetoric includes regularly referring to religion as one would a virus, commonly using references to the bodies immune system as imagery for those who resist religious thought and ideas.
There is little doubt in reading the little I have already, that Dawkins writes with a deep personal conviction that he is hoping to help people out of a “broken” way of thinking. I don’t think he “hates” religious people, but I think that he has seen a great deal of hurt and “backward thinking” and has identified that he believes the root cause to be this thing we call religion, or even this idea of “God”. Richard Dawkins sets out his intentions early in the book:
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
and I’ve laid out mine. I realise this post might not have much to comment on it, but stay tuned because coming soon: chapter 1 - a deeply religious non-believer.
