Liberal Christianity – Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia

Liberal Christianity  

From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.

For the religious among us who choose to believe lies, the so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Liberal Christianity.

The faith that worships some of Christianity’s better ideas, but without getting so much into the whole figurehead thing or the “saved by the great blood-spurting wounds of Jesus” fetish promoted by your standard Mel Gibson torture epic. It is tolerant of everyone except for people it deems “intolerant,” and has a particular emphasis on the rejection of most (though not quite all) of those orthodox Christian ideas that seem a bit too far-fetched for all but the most religiously rabid. Its doctrines and precepts can be vague to the point of near non-existance (rather like their god), though LC’s aren’t particularly bothered by this, since they are comfortable enough not to need a black and white and well-defined dogmatic world view. LC’s are sometimes mocked by orthodox Christians because the latter get a raging hardon over the fanciful idea of divine justice, whereas Liberal Christians, recognizing the lack of divine justice here in the real world, seldom bother even to muster up a semi over the concept, especially since they are far too busy organizing the next Springtime Pet Service. Liberal Christianity sometimes uses The Bible, but also uses whatever other books they deem useful, including Aesop’s Fables and Dr. Seuss, in order to teach themselves to get along with others instead of getting all excited and perky over the possibility that their god is about to go smiting some group or another.

The Afterlife

Liberal Christians, if they believe in a heaven, believe that at death everyone gets to go there. When liberal Christians get to heaven, they get very quiet while passing the rooms of conservative Christians, so as not to wreck the conservatives’ fantasy that they’re the only ones who got in, and the extra bonus fantasy that liberal Christians (and everyone else) are off writhing in the pain of hell’s eternal torture. By staying quiet the liberal Christians ensure the conservative Christians can keep their divine punishment hardons raging for all eternity.

Read more awesomeness at: Liberal Christianity – Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.

Motivational Posters for the Emerging Free-for All

http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/posters.htm

Nihilism 2 – Decline of Cosmological Values

12 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

Decline of Cosmological Values

( A )

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the “in vain,” insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure–being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.–This meaning could have been: the “fulfillment” of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal annihilation–any goal at least constitutes some meaning. What all these notions have in common is that something is to be achieved through the process–and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.– Thus, disappointment regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a specific aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about aims that concern the whole “evolution” are inadequate (man no longer the collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming).

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration (–if the soul be that of a logician, complete consistency and real dialectic are quite sufficient to reconcile it to everything). Some sort of unity, some form of “monism”: this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity.–“The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual”–but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i. e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.

SNIP

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not “true,” is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into the world–we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.

SNIP

Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.

Final conclusion: All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world–all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination–and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.

[Exerpt from Nietzshe’s Will to Power ]

Nihilism 1 – A definition

I. NIHILISM

2 (Spring-Fall 1887)

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.

SNIP

In sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism.

[Excerpt from  Nietzsche’s  Will to Power]

The Anglican Communion/Biblical Authority/Postmodernism – a conversation

“It may be that schism is inevitable, and indeed it may be beneficial, in so far as the progressive (emergent?) way (and I mean this to include all aspects of Christian belief and practice, not just sexual matters) needs to be able to grow while the traditionalist view dies out (as I think it eventually will, but sadly it will continue to hurt and confuse a lot of people along the way). Maybe the progressive way needs to focus on teaching a radical redefinition of biblical authority — I believe that the church cannot speak authentically to a postmodern world without this redefinition.”

L. SOF.  Posted 09 February, 2011

The Cambridge Companion to Jesus. Edited by Markus Bockmuehl. THE STORY OF ALL STORIES – excerpt from The Future of Jesus Christ. Richard Bauckham. (Pp 278-280)

Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’. This rejection of any kind of grand story about the whole of reality is mainly rooted in postmodernism’s critique of the idea of progress as an ideology of domination that has legitimated the exploitative exercise of power: the domination of the West over the Third World, the affluent over the poor, even men over women. Through science, technology and education the West has imposed its own particular rationality and ideals on others. Economic globalisation is a new form of the same process. To the charge that the Christian meta-narrative has also served as justification for terror and oppression, including Christian collusion with western imperialism and the arrogance of modernity, the Christian response must be repentance. But the horrors of Christian history are not the whole story, and one should go on to ask whether such abuses are inherent in the Christian meta-narrative or whether the meta-narrative itself might not expose them as abuses. The further dimension of postmodernist critique that regards any meta-narrative as per se oppressive depends on the radical relativity of truth for postmodernism. Truth is always somebody’s truth. A meta-narrative is the grandest way of imposing my truth on others by assigning them a place in my scheme of things. But for those for whom the venture of truth cannot be abandoned without self-contradiction and for whom the postmodernist assumption that the will to power is over-ridingly operative in all intellectual and other ventures is too cynical, the character of the specific meta-narrative in question also makes a difference in considering its potential for dominative abuse.

If Jesus and his story are decisive for the Christian meta-narrative, two aspect of his story should be recalled: the cross and his still future coming. Moreover, these two are connected in that the Christian story attributes to Jesus a consistent identity: he is ‘the same yesterday and today and forever’ (Heb 13.8) The coming of Christ is the same Christ who was crucified. In chapter 5 of the book of Revelation it is the slaughtered lamb. Christ crucified in his sacrificial love for the world, who shares the divine throne and receives the acclamation of his sovereignty from all creation. It is the one whom they pierced whom all the tribes of the earth will see when he comes (Rev 1.7). Jesus’ loving self-identification with all, which reached its furthest point in his death, is thus not left aside in his coming to rule, but remains permanently his identity, precisely in his exercise of God’s rule. It is as non-dominating love that he is decisive for the meaning of the whole story of the world. This ensures that, although as we have stressed already he also comes to make the truth of all people and all history finally and unavoidably clear, this truth is not the expression of his will to power. Each will recognise it, even if tragically, as the real truth of his or her own life.

This eschatological revelation of the truth of all things is still to come. The Christian meta-narrative, properly understood, is not a story that suppresses all other stories, but one that leaves open the future for the inclusion of all other stories in the only one capable of being their ending too. This is because it is not, like the myth of progress, a story of history’s own immanent potential alone, but a story that has already, in the resurrection of Jesus, broken the bounds of this world’s own reality and promises and end that comes as God’s transcendent gift to his creation, fulfilling but also surpassing its own potential. Unlike the myth of progress, it is not a story that will privilege the victors over the victims of history, for the end that comes with the parousia of Jesus will come to all history and as life for the dead. The countless victims of history, those whose lives have been torture and those who have scarcely lived at all, all those whom progress can only forget, are remembered by the Christ who identified with their fate and comes as their redeemer. The horrors of history, the tragedy and the loss, the negatives which defy any grand story of immanent meaning in history, forcing it to suppress them or to justify them, are fully acknowledged by the Christian meta-narrative, because it is a story of transcendent redemption. It does not offer the kind of purely theoretical theodicy that would silence the cries and the protests of the suffering, but finds in Jesus crucified God’s loving solidarity with all who suffer and resists all premature closure, maintaining the protest against evil, suffering and death until Jesus comes with the redemptive conclusion that only God can give.

Christian hope for the future of Jesus Christ promotes the same kind of compassionate and undaunted engagement with reality for the sake of its future in God that Jesus himself practised and pioneered as far as death, trusting that his way is the way to the kingdom of God. It is neither promethean, burdening history with an eschatological requirement of achievement it cannot bear, as the myth of progress did, nor quietist, leaving the world to its fate as every dualistic spirituality must do. It neither over reaches itself in attempting what can only come from God nor neglects what is humanly possible in God’s grace. Sustained by the hope of everything from God, it attempts what is possible within the limits of each present. It does not value what can be done only as a step in a cumulative process towards a goal. It does what can be done for its own sake, here and now, confident that every present will find itself, redeemed and fulfilled in the new creation. Most characteristically of all, it knows that only by expending life in the service of God and God’s world can life finally be found secure, hidden with the Christ who is yet to be revealed.