Christianity in the Age of Nuclear Weapons - Brian Zahnd

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Saturday we will mourn Nagasaki. As we remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the quarter of a million casualties suffered, I would like to share a few words from A Farewell To Mars.

It’s easy to imagine that the world doesn’t really change — that it simply marches around the maypole of violence, trampling the victims into the mud same as it ever has. But as true as that may be, something has changed. We are post-something. If nothing else, we are post-1945 when the enlightenment dream of attainable utopia went up in smoke — literal smoke! — from the chimneys of Auschwitz and a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

After 1945 we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed: the capacity for complete annihilation. In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”?

When Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, he recalled the words of Vishnu from the Bhagavad Gita…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

When the monstrous mushroom cloud rose over the New Mexico desert, did the human race indeed become Death, the destroyer of worlds? It’s more than a legitimate question. We’ve now lived for over a generation with the most haunting post-Holocaust/Hiroshima uncertainty: Can humanity possess the capacity for self-destruction and not resort to it? The jury is still out. But this much is certain:If we think the ideas of Jesus about peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear weapons, we have invented an utterly irrelevant Christianity!
BZ

(The artwork is Mushroom Cloud by Luciano Civettini.)

The post Christianity In the Age of Nuclear Weapons appeared first on Brian Zahnd.

The Importance of Being Creative During Deconstruction - David Hayward

Alone But Not Lonely - by Nakedpastor David Hayward

Making art was an important part of my healing and reconstruction process.

I didn’t know this at the beginning of my deconstruction. It didn’t know this consciously after I’d left the ministry and the church. In fact, it wasn’t until I published my new book, The Liberation of Sophia, that I realized making art helped save me.

It was the week after I left the church when I drew my first Sophia drawing. The one with the bear. The inspiration to draw her was unstoppable.

It was four years later when I drew my last one. The inspiration to draw her stopped.

It was when it stopped that I realized it was probably important that I did it. Drawing Sophia every week and writing about her journey was, I concluded, a crucial part of my healing.

It’s strange, but when I stopped drawing Sophia, I also stopped painting. I haven’t done a new piece in quite a while.

I draw my cartoons every day. I enjoy it. It’s creative. But it’s my work.

Being creative just for creativity’s sake! I need to get disciplined in that again. And I’m going to advise people when they are going through deconstruction to be creative and discipline themselves to be creative every day.

Why?

To read David's answer, CLICK HERE

Hallelujah in Hell - Peter Hiett

Faithful Questioning: Does questioning the Bible mean questioning God or ourselves? - by Derek Flood

When we question the Bible, does it mean we are questioning God or that we are questioning ourselves? Many Christians assume that questioning the Bible entails questioning God, and thus is an expression of rebellion and sin.  Consequently most apologetics focuses on "defending" the Bible from the "attack" of those on the outside critiquing it. The assumption is that those who question the Bible are attacking the Christian faith itself, and are thus outside of it. In other words the assumption is that Christians cannot question the Bible.

I'd like to propose that the opposite is in fact that case: that questioning the Bible is a necessary part of a healthy and faithful expression of our faith. The reason is that the focus of questioning the Bible is ultimately to question our interpretation and application and thus to question ourselves. The goal is to be faithful. We question so that we can follow better. We question so that we can avoid wrong and hurtful interpretations. 

When I question the Bible I am personally not interested in questioning God. That's not our job. However it is our responsibility to question what we humans do in God's name, especially when we can see that we are justifying deeply hurtful things in the name of our religion. Part of that involves questioning our (at times messed up) image of God. Questioning therefore involves humility rather than arrogance because it means recognizing that our understanding of God and of what is good and right is always limited, always "through a glass darkly" as Paul says (and it says a lot that the guy who said that about his own knowledge of God was the same guy who wrote most of the New Testament!).

CLICK HERE for the rest of Derek's blog

Writing a Song (the Guitar Series, part 3) - Caleb Miller

I've gotten a new guitar, and it has been restrung. It is now time to write the song. When I sit to write a song, I don't usually have any agenda on writing, it's more of a private (meaning, just me) session of playing and working through melodic lines in my head. Usually, I'll try to do this when everyone is gone from the house for a couple reasons. First, I get a little nervous singing something I haven't written yet with an audience. Second, I get distracted easily by my kids, and wind up playing with them instead!  Once I have the house to myself though, I sit to play. Some people like to craft their lyrics first, and then put music to them, but I like to hear my guitar sing. Often, I will hear a word or phrase come out of the guitar, and that becomes my starting point. Sometimes, I'll just sing that single line over and over, until it becomes locked in my head.  Then, I'll put the guitar away. Why? I don't want to force it. I want the guitar to have the time to teach me the song, and all too often, I try to simply create a lyric that matches. I'll usually go grab some coffee and keep humming that line over and over in my head.

When I return to my guitar, I'll change the key or even the tuning of the guitar, but keep playing that phrase. It is now that the song usually begins to pour out - both from my guitar and my soul, singing in unison.  Often I won't write the song down until this point, and I usually don't write the chords over the words yet even when I have written the words down.  I still want the guitar to be able to sing its song too.  As a songwriter, I look at lyrics as a product of the soul, and the music as a product of the instrument's resonance. Once I have what I consider to be the basic song, I'll put everything away and give it a few days of rest.  I will keep meditating on the lyrics and melody, but I don't want to get the melody so locked that it can't grow and change.  When I revisit the song, it gets rewritten and grows into the finished product over the course of many days and often weeks. I even have a couple songs that took more than a year to get the finished version ready.

For the Common Good: A Draft Statement on Christian, Muslim, Jewish Friendship - by Brian Zahnd

A few years ago I drafted a statement to explain the friendship and cooperation I have with Ahmed El-Sherif, an Arab Muslim scientist, and Samuel Nachum, an Israeli Jewish artist, as we work together for peace in Israel and Palestine. This seems like a good time to share it again.

For the Common Good

We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.

And we are friends.

We seek to follow our respective religions faithfully.

We do not believe all religions are the same.

We recognize the reality of our religious differences.

But we are friends.

We are devout in our faith and respectful of our friendship.

Our faith and friendship need not be mutually exclusive.

We recognize that we share common space — the common space of a shared planet.

For the sake of the common good we seek common ground.

We do not share a common faith, but we share a common humanity.

In our different religions we do not practice the same rituals or pray the same prayers.

But in our shared humanity we hold to a common dream: Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

We hold to the dream that our children may play in peace without fear of violence.

And so…

We pledge not to hate.

We pledge not to dehumanize others.

We pledge to do no harm in the name of God.

As individuals we do not compromise the truth claims of our respective religions—

But we will not use truth claims to fuel hate or justify violence.

We will practice our respective faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

But we believe our faith can be practiced in the way of peace—

We believe our faith truly practiced need never be at odds with humanitarian ideals.

Our religions share a complex and intertwined history—

A history of interaction that has too often been tumultuous and bloody.

We believe there must be a better way and we seek that better way.

The way of peace.

We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.

And we are friends.

We seek common ground for the common good.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

Ahmed El-Sherif

Samuel Nachum

Brian Zahnd

P.S. I’ve been asked, Are you implying a concession to not evangelize in exchange for coexistence?

FOR BRIAN'S REPLY, CLICK HERE

Sinead O'Connor: "Take me to church, but not the ones that hurt ..." by Brad Jersak

"Take me to church
but not the ones that hurt
'Cause that ain't the truth"
Sinead O'Connor

Just because someone has been hurt badly or offended greatly in the context of a 'church' (whatever that means) and has stormed away in anger and wailed and railed about ... does not mean they have renounced love or forgiveness or the need for a safe place to belong. It does not mean they've shut out their own conscience or have no regrets about harm they've done. It does not mean they've let go of their own beautiful song ... songs of love and joy and lament and healing.  

Within Sinead O'Connor's beautiful repertoire, you'll hear it all -- from prophetic protest to blasphemous barrage, often in critique of the church she can't quite stop obsessing about and pining for. So when she sings, 'Take me to church,' we know she's got no interest in 'the one that hurts' ... and of course, she means, 'hurts children' and 'hurts women' and hurts 'the poor' and so on. That kind of 'church' (no matter how it dresses up or down) isn't the truth, doesn't represent the truth, doesn't know the Truth. But it also strikes me that if she could find a safe place to belong that echoes her own experience and let's her tell the story without judgment, you can bet that place would be 'the one that hurts' ... that is, such a 'church' would be a harbor for the hurting and give them space to continue processing their hurts without faking it.