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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8618906758 #yiv8618906758templateBody .yiv8618906758mcnTextContent, #yiv8618906758 #yiv8618906758templateBody .yiv8618906758mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8618906758 #yiv8618906758templateFooter .yiv8618906758mcnTextContent, #yiv8618906758 #yiv8618906758templateFooter .yiv8618906758mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Can we strip Jesus of his supernatural powers and still achieve salvation through Christ?  | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Jesus: A Mutation of Consciousness (Part 1) Essay by Joran Slane Oppelt August 15, 2019 | | | | | |   WHAT DO WE KNOW?   We’ve always known well enough. We know enough about politics to know when an idea’s time has come. We know enough about the principles that move and motivate people. They are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. They are those universal principles found in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: fear, safety, community, belonging, status, esteem and actualization (another word for “becoming” or, possibly, “salvation”).   Ideas are played out by the people who live them. Empires are built around ideas. People resist, rise up and rebel against ideas that don’t fit their worldview. New ways of governance (or idea-generation) are born. We have been transcending ideas for as long as we’ve had the ability to communicate. These ideas, social forces and methods of leadership either work or they don’t work. It’s that simple. It’s people who birth and bear these ideas out and have to live together inside them.   We call this politics, but we’ve known how to move and stir people since the dawn of storytelling and the first human migration.   We know enough about archaeology to understand that what the Bible says about Noah’s fantastic ark and the great flood is not empirically “true.” While a localized flood may have taken place, the story about the ark (and the fable woven around it) is a myth we’ve been given in order to find a deeper, more personal, meaning. It’s a story about creatures in relationship to Creation – their importance to the planet and to one another. Perhaps most importantly, for the writers or re-tellers of that myth, the story is about our relationship to those creatures and about our sense of dominion or responsibility for creation. From the Inuit tribe (North America) to the Shatapatha Brahmana (India, 700–300 BCE), the warning of floodwaters sent by a god (or gods) to cleanse or punish – and the human command to gather plants and animals in a boat, elevating our species as preserver and protector of life – is quite common.   It is the first baptism, a world submerged and reborn. The appearance of this myth around the world doesn’t mean it was a historic event that happened on a global scale. It means the archetype of submersion (death) and rebirth (resurrection) – and the duality of human powerlessness in the face of the Creator and power over all of creation – is a global idea.   We know enough about earth science and cosmology to know that if things are happening on the surface of the world today, they most likely happened the same way 3,000 years ago. The earth's basic components (elements and minerals) do not respond differently today to radiation or pressure. The tectonic plates shift as they have always shifted. Volcanoes don’t sleep or awaken differently now than they did 2,000 years ago. Ice doesn’t melt differently than it did 5,000 years ago. Stars are born (and die) the same as they did a billion years ago. In fact, some of that light, or what we perceive as a star, is just now reaching us billions of years later. There’s a consistency to the way the planet, and our world, works. That’s why we call them “laws” of nature.   We know enough about human psychology to know that when Jesus was casting out demons and cleansing people of evil spirits, he was dealing with sick or highly traumatized and potentially psychotic people. Healing them – and the families that surrounded and supported them – through touch, faith or the power of positive thinking is no less miraculous today. But metaphysics doesn’t require the supernatural. It doesn’t require any outside influence, it simply requires that all things are fundamentally connected. This kind of healing requires that we reconcile the inner with the outer and the individual with the community.   We know enough about matter and time and the nature of the Cosmos to know that it hasn’t changed since the origin of the Universe (or what we call the Big Bang). Molecules, quarks and electrons didn’t recently learn how to behave. We have just recently learned how to observe them – and learned the limitations of our own observation.   Though we might be hurtling toward the singularity, “Omega Point” (de Chardin) or the “achronon” (Jean Gebser) where time ceases to be linear, our perception (understanding) of time remains infinitely different than the nature of time, or the way it has always worked.   Which brings us to the idea that in the first century – a mere 2,000 years ago in the vast 13 billion year timeline since the Big Bang (or the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on Earth) – something happened in which the finite and infinite were mashed together and one person on earth (for roughly 30 years) channeled the God-like powers of the Universe to give life and resurrect the dead, to heal the sick and psychotic with a word or touch, to give sight to the blind, to cure conditions like schizophrenia and diseases like leprosy. This idea – that one person’s birth and death meant salvation (or actualization) for the entire human species, or that there was a single generation (at least in one ZIP Code) responsible for killing this person – is unimaginable. Think of the power and responsibility. Think of the generational guilt. Think of the drama.   The idea that the moral and existential stakes were somehow higher for all beings 2,000 years ago than they are today is unthinkable. With the advent of nuclear fission and widespread environmental destruction and continued war and violence, the stakes are just as high (if not higher) today.   We know enough now to say this idea is far-fetched. Or, rather, it’s unbelievable.  THE JESUS MUTATION If matter, time, mind and soul function the same way now as they did 2,000 years ago — and if Jesus was what some would have us believe (God-made-flesh, the first alien superhero) — then we would have seen an accelerated rate of mutation after Jesus’s appearance on Earth.   Before 1954, something as simple as running a mile in less than four minutes was thought to be an “unattainable goal.” Yet, on the morning of Thursday, May 6, 1954 (after working a shift at the local hospital and catching a train to Oxford University) Roger Bannister ran a mile in just 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Just 46 days later, someone broke Bannister’s record. Today there are high-school students who can do it.   Inevitably, the Jesus “mutation” would lead to other “mutations.” Today, YouTube would be full of people healing themselves and each other in the streets. We would see people walking on water. People would be coming back from the dead. People would be multiplying food stores in order to solve the problem of world hunger. Miracles would be all around us. And while we do see “miraculous“ things happening every day — “superhuman” feats of strength and agility, the healing of bodies, the large-scale manufacturing of food, restoration of sight (both literally and figuratively) — they are largely explainable by science. We simply do not see unexplainable “miracles” (or inexplicable magic) happening today.   Occam’s Razor states that “all things being equal, the simplest explanation must be true.” If this is so, the stories we tell and have been told about Jesus are a vital part of our mythology that don’t always need to be grounded in science or fact.   He was no doubt a prophet, healer, metaphysician and rabbi — a man who led an uprising and a rebellion.   Was he able to perform magic? Did he have supernatural, God-like powers? Probably not. It was a mutation on another fundamentally interior dimension – a mutation of consciousness. Or, better yet, Jesus’s teaching was not a mutation at all, but a virus of the mind. We know enough about sociology to know that one charismatic leader can influence the masses and potentially shift the hearts and minds of an entire nation. One person with the power of presence, patience, empathy, vision and the ability to tell stories can change the world.   One Gandhi. One Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Mutations are a leap forward. If we’re not seeing mutants running through the streets – if we’re not seeing “real” magic – then what was the evolutionary leap that happened at year zero, the threshold “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini?”   First, it was something that was aching to spring from the collective unconscious of the first century – a leap in theology from a monotheism that implied Caesar (like emperors before him) was Zeus, and that he, as Lord, held the world in his hands. This is clearly depicted in the statue of Caesar (“Augustus as Jupiter”) and its similarities to the statue at Olympia. With the birth of Christ, this avatar-based monotheism was being rejected. You didn’t need a ruler or Caesar or priest to connect with God. The Divine was in us all. You could have a relationship with Abba (the father) or Creator right here and now with no need for a rabbi. In Arabic, the word is a’bwoon (meaning father/mother, divine parent, birther of the Cosmos). That was the radical evolutionary leap in theology that Christ represents.   As John Dominic Crossan points out, the titles “Lord,” “Savior of the World,” “Redeemer from Sin,” “Divine,” “Son of God,” were all names given to “Caesar the Augustus” and transferred by his followers to “Jesus the Christ” in his time. This is what was at the heart of the political conflict of Jesus‘s day and what is so important to the vision represented by his resurrection. It was a conflict between two versions of the world.   “On one hand,” Crossan says, “religion leads us to war, then to victory and finally to peace. On the other hand, religion leads us to non-violence, then to justice, then peace. Peace through victory or peace through justice.”   This is the real battle for the vision and fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. A world where the crown rests on the head of a man sitting on a throne who claims to be God or a world where we give the celestial crown to the creator of the cosmos – a Holy Spirit that moves in us all.   Another leap that the masses were ready for was the breaking of chains – a transcendence of the political power systems of the enslaved and oppressed. Jesus encouraged all of us to make that radical leap and “see” ourselves as freed.   As Bob Marley sang the words of Marcus Garvey, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”   It’s this journey from slavery to freedom that we continue to celebrate during Passover.   Yet a third “superhuman” shift in paradigm brought by Jesus is that you can heal yourself with the power of the mind, human touch and connection. You can reconnect directly with God (Source) through prayer and meditation. You can heal your mind (and sometimes your body) simply by affirming that in your DNA, at your core, you are an inseparable part of this beautiful Creation – the greenest shoot at the tip of the spiral fractal that is unfolding through space and time. Music and cosmology and biology, light and sound, history and mythology – they are all connected through sound and vibration, harmony and refraction, movement and process.   This evolutionary leap was theological, political and metaphysical. There are no superheroes running around the streets of New York City, though we continue to tell stories and write books about them. There are no God-man mutations post-Jesus (unless we consider prophets such as Muhammad and Baha’u’llah), but his work – his movement, his attempt to liberate – lives on. ~ Joran Slane Oppelt Read online here About the Author Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner and founder of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay. Joran is the author of Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities, Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox) and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He currently serves on the board of Creation Spirituality Communities and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer   Q: By Brian As a Buddhist (40 years), I would practice an oral meditation every morning and evening. It was, as one writer mentioned, a kind of physical workout – using the voice while sitting bolt upright facing a mandala. Although I’m now trying to be a Christian, I would like to be able to do something to bring myself closer to our Lord, other than sitting still while trying to keep invasive thoughts from disturbing my prayer session. What could you suggest? I’m a case requiring a lot of work (a long story) – if you understand what I mean. I just want to have God’s mercy and feel him with me in my struggle to express that mercy in all what I do. A: By Lauren Van Ham Dear Brian, Your question touches me for many reasons.  In just the short summary you have shared about your dedicated practice and your desire to feel close to God, I recognize the part in all of us that is looking for “home.”  First, I want to commend you for giving yourself fully, in your lifetime, to the richness of study and practice in multiple religions.  A 40 year Buddhist meditation practice demonstrates great devotion and commitment.  Now you feel called to the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus and the Buddha taught from a source of similar knowing; and while the practices may be expressed differently, the intended outcome for living a joyful, just and good life, is the same.  It is in this spirit, that I encourage you to hold the wisdom of what you are learning from both these traditions, with a willingness for them to co-exist, to inform one another, and to be at peace within you as your spiritual path continues to unfold, expand and nourish you. Second, you describe yourself as, “a case requiring work.”  What does Jesus or the Buddha say about this?  To say, “I am not perfect and am committed to grow and learn in this lifetime,” is to be a follower of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religious paths, as well.  One way to deepen your practice is to see your story reflected in the stories around you.  Keep reading Progressing Spirit and other resources like this one.  They are filled with the discoveries and teachings of others who, just like you, are wanting to be in a felt and meaningful relationship with God, Source, Spirit, that which holds us in this moment, and that which is larger and more ancient than our minds can comprehend. Third - and maybe this is the most adventuresome - how about giving some of the time that you have been meditating, to a cause you care about?  Jesus taught the importance of daily prayer; he also embodied again and again, the importance of praying with one’s hands and feet. In other words, just like the Buddha taught mindfulness in every action, Jesus invites us to be Christian in the lifestyle choices we make, the conversations we have with the people we meet, and the ways we spend our time.  Maybe there is a charitable organization rooted in Christianity where you would like to serve.  Or maybe there is another need showing up in your town that has been causing you heart-break, or guilt, or a longing for change and healing.  How might your experience of God’s mercy flow in you and through you by giving the gift of your time, your heart and your presence every week or month? Acts of service often help us gain understanding about what’s actually happening, what form of support truly helps.  This experience of being vulnerable and being ready to serve, is a spiritual practice that can’t happen on the prayer cushion.  The prayer cushion is essential, don’t get me wrong.  But the cushion needs action and action needs the cushion.  I wish you very, VERY well, Brian.  May you feel God’s mercy in you and all around you in the life you are living and sharing with the world. ~ Lauren Van Ham Read and share online here About the Author Lauren Van Ham was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute.  Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Her passion and training in the fine arts, spirituality and Earth's teachings has supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism.  Lauren's work with Green Sangha (a Bay Area-based non-profit) is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of environmental activism taking place in religious America.  Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women.  Lauren tends a private spiritual direction practice and serves as Dean for The Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley, CA. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Origins of the Bible, Part II: Biblical Contradictions, Discredited Attitudes and Horror Stories Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong March 19, 2008 The aura of holiness, the defense shield that endows the Bible with an unchallengeable authority, can exist only so long as people do not bother to read its content very closely. That is, of course, what has happened during most of Christian history. Few people in medieval history other than the clergy could read and even if they could the Bible was available only in the Latin language that most did not understand. Prior to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, books were scarce because they were prohibitively expensive. Books had to be hand copied, which meant that they tended to be community property not individual possessions. This meant that it was only at Sunday worship services that the words of scriptures were actually heard by the people, and even there the leaders of the church were quite judicious in their selectivity, so that none of the Bible’s contradictions, discredited ideas or horror stories were ever read on public occasions in worship services. Lectionaries can be quite effective in controlling access to content. Biblical contradictions begin, however, in the creation stories found on page one. In the opening verses of Genesis (1:1-2:4a), God first creates the fish of the sea, then the birds of the air and then the beasts of the field. Finally, in the crowning achievement of divine creativity, God makes the man and the woman. They are created together and instantaneously, this narrative suggests, and both in God’s image. In the second creation story beginning in chapter two (2:4b-24), God creates first the man, who alone is in God’s image, and God places him into a garden uninhabited by any other living creatures. The loneliness of that garden, however, becomes quite unbearable for Adam. Then the Bible tells us that God decided that “it is not good for man to dwell alone,” so God fashioned all the animals of the world in an attempt to make an appropriate companion for Adam. When none of these creatures satisfied the man, God “took a rib from Adam’s side and made Miss Eve to be his bride.” The woman, therefore, was not assumed to have been made in God’s image. She was rather fashioned out of the male for the primary purpose of being the male’s “helpmeet.” Her second class status was both signified and guaranteed when Adam named her, as he had named all the animals, as a sign of his authority over all living things. The two stories are immediately contradictory. We need to inquire as to which version should be called “The Word of God.” There are also the contradictions found in the three versions of the Ten Commandments contained in the Bible (Exodus 34:1-28, Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:1-21). How can all three versions be true if they are not the same? The oldest version (Exodus 34) is from the pen of the “J” or Jahwist writer and is not one of which many have ever heard. The final commandment in this earliest version reads “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Why, we are led to wonder, was this original set of Ten Commandments rejected or replaced? The second version (Exodus 20) was from the pen of the “E” or Elohist writer, but was greatly expanded about four centuries later by a group of people called the “P” or priestly writers. Did these writers, who added so much to the entire body of the Jewish Scriptures, do so because they judged the original version to be so woefully inadequate that it required major additions and editing? Does one alter or tamper with what one believes to be “The Word of God?” The third version (Deuteronomy 5) was from the pen of the “D” or Deuteronomic writers composed somewhere between the original writing of Exodus 20 and the expansion done on that same text some 400 or so years later. For example, the version in Deuteronomy did not offer as the reason the Sabbath must be observed the fact that God rested on the Sabbath, for the version of that seven day creation story had not yet been written. So this author states that the Sabbath is to be observed because the people of Israel must remember that they were once slaves in Egypt and even slaves must have a day of rest. Which of these versions of the Ten Commandments, we might ask, can qualify as “The Word of God?” There are also many pre-modern and outdated concepts in the pages of this supposedly divinely inspired book. Divine inspiration does not appear to overcome God’s apparent lack of knowledge. “The Word of God” assumed that the earth was the center of a three-tiered universe and that God lived above the sky. According to the Book of Genesis (Chapter 11) that is why people wanted to build a tower so tall that it could reach beyond the sky into heaven where they could commune on a one-to-one basis with God. That is why Moses met God on a mountain top, since the top of a mountain was as close to heaven as a human being could climb. That is why the story of Jesus” ascension into heaven (Acts 1) proclaimed that Jesus simply rose into the sky and traveled beyond the roof of the earth to the abode of God above the sky. The authors of the Bible also knew nothing about weather fronts, low pressure systems or why rain and wind, hurricanes and tsunamis happen, so they treated weather patterns as acts of divine manipulation designed by God, the judge, to reward good people or to punish evil people. Knowing nothing about germs or viruses, tumors or coronary occlusions, these writers also assumed that sickness was divinely sent punishment for sin and therefore the way to treat it was with prayers and sacrifices. It is hard to regard these narratives as “The Word of God” since the presuppositions on which these stories rest are believed by no one today. Why, we must wonder, was God so badly informed when the Bible was written, if this book is “The Word of God?” The most difficult revelation, however, that challenges the traditional belief comes in those passages, which in the light of modern sensitivities, are brutal, wrong, insensitive and even immoral. The Bible, for example, calls for capital punishment for a willfully disobedient child who talks back to his or her parents, for worshipping a false god, for being homosexual, for committing adultery and even for having sex with one’s mother-in- law! Would anyone today salute these laws as moral norms? Then there is that strange story about the concubine in the book of Judges who is first gang raped and then thrown on the porch of her master’s house, barely breathing, but presumably still alive. Her master then proceeds to cut her into twelve portions, sending one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel as a call to war (Judges 19). If that is not sufficiently grotesque, there is the story of Jepthah murdering his daughter to keep a vow to God (Judges 11). No one can read these stories in church and say, “This is the Word of the Lord.” The Bible contains stories that reek with vengeance, like the account in the book of Psalms (139:9), where the psalmist fantasizes about the desire to dash the heads of Babylonian children against the rocks, or the story in which the prophet Elisha is portrayed in the Book of Kings (II Kings 2) as greeting the taunts of some little boys making fun of his bald head by calling some she bears out of the woods to tear these boys apart and to eat them. Can anyone claim that these narratives are “The Word of the Lord?” In chapter one of Romans, Paul argues that homosexuality is God’s punishment on those who do not worship God properly. When talking about women, Paul and/or his surrogates condemn allowing any woman to have authority over a man. This means, if taken literally, that no woman could ever walk the path that leads to economic, political or ecclesiastical power. I have four daughters. One is the managing director of a major southern financial institution, one is a lawyer working in the office of the Virginia attorney general, one has a PhD in Physics and is the Chief Information Officer of a west coast high-tech startup company, and one is a veteran of a nine year tour of duty in the United States Marine Corps, with 21 months of active duty in the second Iraqi war to her credit. Will these women or countless others like them ever be able or willing to call the Bible the inerrant “Word of God” so long as these grossly discriminating verses are in that book? Both the Old and the New Testaments endorse slavery as a morally acceptable institution. The Torah prohibits slavery, but only among fellow Jews. “You are to take your slaves from neighboring countries,” is its exhortation. I suppose that if citizens of the United States were to call these verses “The Word of God,” it would put Canadians and Mexicans at risk. In Paul’s epistles to Philemon and Colossians (if he actually wrote Colossians), this apostle seems to think that slavery is quite legitimate, but that Christians have a duty to make slavery “kinder and gentler.” There is no doubt that a kinder and gentler slavery is better than a cruel and hostile slavery, but does anyone today really argue that slavery in any form is not demeaning, life destroying and evil? Yet of a book that contains these directives, there are many who still say, “This is the Word of the Lord!” Once people could read the Bible for themselves, the claims that the church has made for these scriptures over the centuries became tempered by reality. Many things in the Bible are clearly not “The Word of God.” They are immoral, unjust, uninspired and evil. No religious institution or individual believer can today deny these facts. No one should want to and the convoluted reasoning employed by trapped and exposed fundamentalists is no longer a sufficient cover for profound ignorance. A literally understood Bible is fated to be abandoned by all educated, thinking people. Does that mean there is no value that can still be attached to this ancient text? No, but it does mean that literalism must be exposed and expelled. What then? We continue next week. ~  John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Parenting Forward: An Online Conference for the Intersection of Parenting and Progressive Faith ** Early Bird Special Pricing of $20 through August 31st** It used to be that faith, a certain set of propositions and practices were passed down generation to generation, new parents following the lead of their predecessors without questioning the tenets of those doctrines. Today, we find ourselves at a time when church attendance is falling, the number of nones and dones are rising, and an increasing population of people becoming new parents who are at a loss for how to nurture their children’s spirituality and well-being when the foundations of their own faith are shaky.  This conference will be of interest to those who are: • Post Evangelical or Exvangelical • Progressive people of all faiths • Parents • Children’s Ministers (Sunday School teachers/Youth Group leaders) • Educators • Activists for intersectional justice with particular concern for child advocacy   Read On ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |