Fick en mycket intressant artikel skriven av en ateist apropå Anglikanska kyrkans splittring. Som ger oväntat stöd till icke-fundamentalistiska kristna... :-)
Nedan några tänkvärda utdrag.
Läs gärna hela artikeln och kommentera!
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"If you really believe that salvation can only come by following Christ, then you think that the vast majority of all people who have ever lived are damned.
It's a tough teaching, but you might think that at least there is an integrity to it. For all the sweet words said about interfaith dialogue, isn't it just true that almost all religions think the other ones are plain wrong? If they didn't, why would anyone bother to believe one particular religion at all?
If that's true, then so much for traditional religion. The pluralism that the Foca bishops so lament reflects a truth that is more challenging to orthodoxy than even evolution. We just know that people believe wildly different things about what God is and what he wants, with equal conviction. Most people who believe latch onto a faith which is locally popular. So to believe that the religion you follow, partly through accidents of birth and geography, is the only true one, and all the other equally sincere believers around the world are just wrong, takes colossal chutzpah.
Fortunately for believers, however, that's not the only way to be devout. Although an atheist, I can see that in its more thoughtful corners, religion has worthwhile things to say, and even good ways to live.
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I saw a side of Christianity that I don't like. They all seemed obsessed by salvation and glorifying Jesus. You would not have guessed that the only prayer their messiah gave was directed at God, not himself, and that he repeatedly told people not to worship him, but the father. You would not have guessed that he spent much of this time telling people to be good neighbours, irrespective of what other people believed or who they slept with. The very human moral teacher of Matthew, Mark and Luke was eclipsed by the more ethereal Christ of John.
/.../
Yet which denominations are thriving today? Those that focus on the authority of the Bible and the message of salvation.
Why does this matter to non-believers or the 'vaguely spiritual', as a BBC survey identified most people? Because it shows that religion is much more diverse than crude attacks on it as a 'delusion' suggest. Belief is not going to go away, and if we want those churches that thrive to be inclusive and, yes, pluralist in their approaches, we have to give support to those resisting the fundamentalist urge and not simply lump them together with evangelicals. In one sense Foca is right: an unholy alliance of liberal religionists and secularists can threaten their version of bible-based Christianity, and that is precisely what it should do."
Läs hela artikeln här.Etiketter: anglikanska kyrkan, ateism, exklusiv, inklusivt språk, kristen tro pluralism |
