Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable...
The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story....
God is not a being to whom beings can relate; God is rather "being itself." God is not a noun that needs to be defined. God is a verb that needs to be lived. from Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today
God is not a being separate from the human. If you do not and cannot see God in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, then you cannot see God at all. God is not an external being; God is present in the faces of the least of...
All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.
My mission as a Christian is not "to convert the heathen" as we once asserted; it is rather to assist in the task of helping all people "to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that they are capable of being."
The tragedy of Christian history has been that we have so often assumed that ecstatic language is literally true and that the experience of God can be bound by human words.
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.