Showing posts with label Unitarian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unitarian. Show all posts

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.
Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.
Because seeking and not knowing is the path.
Because all paths are as one path.
Because of the partiality of any understanding.
Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.
Because of the life-light that burns through all people.
Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.
Because of the peace that passes all understanding.
Because of the temporarily of the self.
Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan


 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

Friday 27 May 2011

More about Penal Substitution

The doctrinal emphasis on the idea of penal substitution that so typifies Western Christianity may date from about 1100 – 1200 CE, that is following the Great Schism of 1054 CE. That schism allowed Western Christianity to develop along different theological lines to the Eastern traditions. The idea of penal substitution does occur before, but is is not doctrinally central. In the Eastern traditions it has never gained much adherence. The schism provided extra impetus for an overhaul of the Western traditions, an impetus that may have started with the Cluniac reforms. Church beliefs and practices were de-Paganised (the period 500 – 1000 CE can be thought as one of Paganistic-Christianity in Western Europe), Marianism was fostered and a much more penitential, lapsarian doctrine espoused.

The Reformation developed the emphasis on penal substitution further, especially in the light of 'original sin' and its lapsarian consequences. This is particularly clear in the works of John Calvin. Modern fundamentalist beliefs seem to be more in tune with Calvin's developments than with the beliefs of the early church or of the traditions of Eastern Christianity.

Traditionally Unitarian thinking (both post-Reformation and Early Christian) denied the divinity of Jesus, seeing him as fully human. The resurrection often being seen as metaphorical and spiritual, not physical. The story of Jesus being seen as a metaphor for all human suffering and its spiritual transcendence, something only fully possible if Jesus was purely human. For Unitarians it was Jesus's humanity, not his substitution, that gave the Passion its special relevance.

Is Unitarianism a somewhat Islamic view of Jesus? Why not? It would not alter one word of the Gospels, simply the way in which you see them. Perhaps it is no accident that modern Unitarianism arose first in Transylvania, an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire and subject to considerable Islamic influence and thought.

Tuesday 12 April 2011

Creating monsters

Listening to the truth within,
Observing the wonder without.
Unbinding from the shackles of words:
Name it God and you create a monster,
Name it not and you close your heart.

Thursday 31 March 2011

Sort of tantric

Thubten Yeshe:
..each one of us is a union of all universal energy. Everything that we need in order to be complete is within us right at this very moment. It is simply a matter of being able to recognize it. This is the tantric approach
David Gordon White:
... the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the Godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways.
Only take away the intentionality of "the Godhead", or its existence as something other than the energy that flows through time, that was and is everything. Our wonder to be open to it, to be the witnesses of this dance of the divine, to feel its spark, its heat flowing through us. To know that we are no more than the dust given shape and form by it. For a while to be its eyes and ears, to be its body and senses, to dance its joys and to shed its tears.