BenL
04-30-2007, 10:26 AM
I am beginning to understand how traumatic some people's religious experience has been under fundamentalist upbringings. With all due respect for that experience -- and I DO respect it, believe me -- I am at a point in my life at age 63 that I refuse to allow such narrow-minded thinking to frame my understanding of my own spiritual life and my own faith in God.
My faith is biblically based but not enslaved by the Bilbe or more accurately by someone else's understanding of it. The 39 Articles of Religion that played such an important part in the English Reformation state that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. The reverse, to me, is not necessarily true, namely, that all things in the Bible are necessary for salvation.
The central message of the Bible for me is the abiding, unconditional love that God has for God's own creation. The violence of the old dispensation ended at the cross and has been thrown over by divine love.
This started out as a need to express my weariness with Dobson et al. and the amount of energy they consume from glbt Christians. That's why I wrote it in the General Chat forum. I think it could also live in Faith/Nonviolence, but so be it. I mean no disrespect to others' journeys or others' struggles, but I can't help but think that the reformers would be aghast to see American religous figures annointing themselves as infallible popes.
Pardon my digression, but I needed to vent.
My faith is biblically based but not enslaved by the Bilbe or more accurately by someone else's understanding of it. The 39 Articles of Religion that played such an important part in the English Reformation state that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. The reverse, to me, is not necessarily true, namely, that all things in the Bible are necessary for salvation.
The central message of the Bible for me is the abiding, unconditional love that God has for God's own creation. The violence of the old dispensation ended at the cross and has been thrown over by divine love.
This started out as a need to express my weariness with Dobson et al. and the amount of energy they consume from glbt Christians. That's why I wrote it in the General Chat forum. I think it could also live in Faith/Nonviolence, but so be it. I mean no disrespect to others' journeys or others' struggles, but I can't help but think that the reformers would be aghast to see American religous figures annointing themselves as infallible popes.
Pardon my digression, but I needed to vent.