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It's been a lot of years since I read this, but I believe it was theologian Paul Tllich who theorized that WWII had trivialized God, so that Americans in particular see God as in this country rather than this country as a part of God's world.
And Tillich has turned out to be absolutely correct. There is more flag waving in church around the Fourth of July, there is more singing of patriotic songs and a whole bunch of other baloney than any other time. Personally I believe any church that flies a U.S. flag rather than simply the Christian flag should have no tax exemption. It flat out disgusts me. And with all the people living here from other nations we'll soon have some group placing the Mexican flag in an American church.
Patriotism is important, but needs to be so far down on the flag pole in a church that it doesn't even show.
We have a people believing God is on our side, when we need Christians seeking to be on God's side in the war on poverty, the battle to obtain health care for all (which is what made Jesus different from a dozen other healing messiah's of His age ---He healed for free!!!), and the battle to open our church doors to all sinners, not just the sins we approve of.
Instead we have an ineffective religion because we have changed the God of the world into a tribal God---and nowhere is the emasculation of God greater than in the fundamentalist churches who have turned Him into their very own warrior God and set about trying to use Him to destroy people and institutions they deem unworthy.
We are enjoined after all, to love our neighbor, not a tribal god. The abrahamic religion is about a religion of the individual, not a group think tank that organizes god along political lines as opposed to personal lines. Our thoughts and concerns as Christians should be about how we can help individuals, not about how we can become a theocracy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pastor Al
Was this during his work as a German Army Chaplain in WWI or his work with the Voice of America in WWII or in his Systematic Theology?
Once a year too much? Twice a year honoring our lost on Memorial Day too much?
Unless you're willing to get out there and make it happen, it's just words. Our church and 2 others sent 127 pounds of clothing to a Catholic church in Arizona for Central Americans. Is that not "Christians seeking to be on God's side in the war on poverty," enough for you?
So ridiculous not even worth responding to.
Brother, it's not the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's or even Y2K anymore.
I was at one of several potlucks my wife and I visited today. I grabbed a Sam's Club Diet Cola out of someone's cooler. I pulled the tab, took a big swig, then spit it out. It was nothing but stale fizzy water. The flavor was gone. On the bottom of the can my wife read "Best used before XXX 2011." Times have and are changing rapidly, but unfortunately there are still those expired cans circulating out there waiting to be discarded.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wardendresden
I think Tillich wrote that sometime after 1933 when he was fired from his university professorship for lecturing and preaching against the Nazi regime.
Your responses would be less ridiculous if you would read Tillich's works, though I must warn you that his works require much deeper thought than "the Bible says."
And yes, once a year is too much flag waving for a church that wants to be dedicated to God. They should have no other love. The Nazis, you know, courted all the Christian denominations and got enough positive response to move their agenda along.
Flag wavers always proclaim war is about protecting our freedom, but we haven't been anything but a perpetrator since the Korean Conflict. I'm a Vietnam Marine Corps veteran, a volunteer at that, who was stationed on the DMZ in 1967, not far from the hellhole we called Con Thien, where hundreds of marines lost their lives. I arrived there to meet a former boot camp comrade who related to me how a few weeks before his unit had sent seven tanks into a village SUSPECTED of harboring Viet Cong. He personally observed the gunner in one of the other tanks machine gun down a pregnant woman running from a hut. Never heard that story did you--but that is what war and fear does to men. And other men sit at home and think it's all for God and country. Or how about this, the wounded Viet Cong brought into camp, foot mangled from a mortar round. One of our guys went into the mess tent and brought out a box of salt to help him remember where his weapon stash was. Can you hear his screams? I can. Then pray to your tribal god to keep our poor boys safe and able to put salt in the other guy's wounds.
Not every soldier or serviceman does those things, but I had only one other Christian friend with whom to get together about once a week. Most of our good ole' boys were using their free time to gamble or purchase the local poontang that flirted around our main base--that included many of the married men as well, for one of them told me he left his marriage license at the water's edge of California and would pick it up again when he got home. The "every soldier is a hero" crap today disgusts me as much as the "every soldier is a baby killer" crap did when I got home from Nam.
Tribal gods forgive our boys their piccadilos and "oops I murdered someones" while demonizing the other side.
You may not like it, but the fundamentalist churches have stood lock arm in supporting the government to launch wars that in the past 40 years have brought in huge profits for corporations like Haliburton that want war to continue lining their pockets--to the tune of eight corporations making more money on the current war than all other companies in all other wars combined. Fundamentalist churches have blessed the boys and held on to their marriage licenses until they came back home with limbs blown off or so addled that they commit suicide in atrocious numbers. And many of the more liberal churches have ignored them all together.
My father was a right wing politico fundamentalist Christian who felt Rush Limbaugh was a bit too leftist. But he was sitting in my living room when George W announced the beginning of hostilities with Iraq. Dad had served in Libya and Saudi Arabia during WWII, directing bomber flights in and out of an airfield. He said, "Son, I think the President has made a serious mistake starting this war. Those Arabs have known nothing but fighting for generations, and we will never bring peace to them." LOL, Dad died in 2005, but his prophecy lives on as Iraq has become like the man cleansed of an unclean spirit--having nothing to put in his heart, seven devils, worse than the one we executed, are about to come to power.
If you think war is a Christian endeavor Pastor Al, you must be smoking some of the junk that's raised here in Colorado. War is awful, awful, awful. Good men turn into murderous criminals and frequently no longer care about themselves or anyone else. So anytime you get up in the pulpit waving Old Glory, remember this marine who told you about the machine gunning of a pregnant woman, and the Viet Cong with the mangled foot getting salt poured on it. That was done in honor of Old Glory, too. Then praise your tribal god for us good ole' boys protecting your freedom 8000 miles away. After all it's the fundamentalist way!
As for me and my household we will pray to the God of all peoples and treat them as respectfully as anyone else. As a child of God, whether they know it or not. Because the important thing is--we know it, and we won't wave the flag of a tribal god while we treat them like we wish to be treated.
Somehow, 127 pounds of clothing and a Sam's club diet soda, just doesn't compare to the bloodshed within humanity, or the things you have to live with?
Thanks, Warden, for the reminder that things are not always as they appear; and some people are blind to it.
Somehow, 127 pounds of clothing and a Sam's club diet soda, just doesn't compare to the bloodshed within humanity, or the things you have to live with?.
Why would you downplay someone collecting 127 pounds of clothes for the poor?
It's been a lot of years since I read this, but I believe it was theologian Paul Tllich who theorized that WWII had tribalized God, so that Americans in particular see God as in this country rather than this country as a part of God's world.
And Tillich has turned out to be absolutely correct. There is more flag waving in church around the Fourth of July, there is more singing of patriotic songs and a whole bunch of other baloney than any other time. Personally I believe any church that flies a U.S. flag rather than simply the Christian flag should have no tax exemption. It flat out disgusts me. And with all the people living here from other nations we'll soon have some group placing the Mexican flag in an American church.
Patriotism is important, but needs to be so far down on the flag pole in a church that it doesn't even show.
We have a people believing God is on our side, when we need Christians seeking to be on God's side in the war on poverty, the battle to obtain health care for all (which is what made Jesus different from a dozen other healing messiah's of His age ---He healed for free!!!), and the battle to open our church doors to all sinners, not just the sins we approve of.
Instead we have an ineffective religion because we have changed the God of the world into a tribal God---and nowhere is the emasculation of God greater than in the fundamentalist churches who have turned Him into their very own warrior God and set about trying to use Him to destroy people and institutions they deem unworthy.
We are enjoined after all, to love our neighbor, not a tribal god. The abrahamic religion is about a religion of the individual, not a group think tank that organizes god along political lines as opposed to personal lines. Our thoughts and concerns as Christians should be about how we can help individuals, not about how we can become a theocracy.
Jesus's God is YHWH. A tribal God who ordered the genocides of many other peoples based solely on their religious beliefs and/or race.
Somehow, 127 pounds of clothing and a Sam's club diet soda, just doesn't compare to the bloodshed within humanity, or the things you have to live with? Thanks, Warden, for the reminder that things are not always as they appear; and some people are blind to it.
I take it before you drink another pop you'll make sure every poor and disadvantaged person in the world has one first?
Before you buy any more clothes for yourself or your family you'll make sure all of the poor in the world have new clothes?
I take it you have gone Over There and are right now busy bandaging up the wounded?
Do you think there is any correlation between the World Wars and the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the early 1900s?
Being of any Abrahamic religion makes it very difficult to fight for your civil rights against racial cleansing in any intellectual way. I believe the Jews's association with the Torah had their hands tied fighting against the Nazi movement. The Jews, like the Christians and Islam, worship a God that is all cool with racial cleansing and committing genocide based upon their religious beliefs. It's hard to make a case against any other movement, or God, who decides to do the same. A good example is the situation with Islam. Here you have Islam that teaches all kinds of hatred for all Jews, Christians, and all "non believers", and any Jew or Christian who decides to argue against it has their hands tied because they worship the same immoral God of genocide and terror. As a Jew, or Christian, you cannot argue that their doctrine is immoral and evil. Because that would make them hypocrites.
The Bible makes it OK to commit racial cleansing. It sanctions it. And anyone who decides to commit racial cleansing could argue that he worships the same God as the Christians, Jews, and Islam.
Somehow, 127 pounds of clothing and a Sam's club diet soda, just doesn't compare to the bloodshed within humanity, or the things you have to live with? Thanks, Warden, for the reminder that things are not always as they appear; and some people are blind to it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CAllenDoudna
I take it before you drink another pop you'll make sure every poor and disadvantaged person in the world has one first?
Before you buy any more clothes for yourself or your family you'll make sure all of the poor in the world have new clothes?
I take it you have gone Over There and are right now busy bandaging up the wounded?
Been there, done that - and still do, if you are talking to me?
I'm not asking if your churches pray generic and perfunctory prayers for world peace; or that "souls be saved", ie. that they come to believe the same doctrines that your church teaches.
I'm asking if you actually hold your "enemies" closely in your mind, to the best of your ability, actively desiring (and imagining) that they experience the same things in their lives that you desire in yours. And when you find yourself resistant to desiring good for them because you're angry or afraid or unforgiving or because they are different than you in some ways, do you acknowledge those feelings? Do you invite the love of God to wash over you and transform those feelings so that you can honestly want only the best for them?
Do you earnestly spend time desiring that the "enemy" troops be protected from harm and return safely to their loved ones the same as you desire it for the forces of your own country?
Do your churches actually teach and practice that type of prayer?
The main thrust of Tillich’s thought was to recreate a meaningful link between Christianity and contemporary society. Like Karl Barth, he intended to do so by reintroducing the absoluteness of God and the Christian message, as opposed to its attempted “enculturation” in the liberal Protestantism of that time. That attempt, Tillich and Barth felt, was doomed to fail, as it deprived Christianity of its very essence. Like Barth, Tillich also linked the Christian message to social justice and the socialist movement. Unlike Barth, however, Tillich did not believe that a mere insistence on the absoluteness of faith in God as the “wholly other” was a viable solution. He strongly felt that ways had to be sought to show how religion was a necessary dimension of any society and how the absolute God was at the same time present in all relative cultural life.
Tillich was a philosopher and thinker far above any of us on this thread. Most of us view God as a "higher being." To Tillich this was blasphemy and a reduction of God from what He really is to the "tribal god" worshipped by most--particularly fundamentalists. Tillich held that God is the Ground for Being, that even conceptualizing Him as just another, albeit, higher being means God becomes a super-being capable of all our worst traits.
He believed, as I have come to believe, that theological theism is bad theology.
Quote:
The God of the theological theism is a being besides others and as such a part of the whole reality. He is certainly considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole. He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality. But every statement subjects him to them. He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which relates to a thought, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and endless time. He is a being, not being-itself.
Tillich hit the nail on the head regarding fundamentalism of today (and that is the "why" of the kickback on this thread) when he wrote:
Quote:
In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware.
Tillich's writing and thought is literally salvation for organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, and he greatly influenced some of the methods they use in helping despairing individuals deal existentially--looking at today, not yesterday or tomorrow--with their addiction.
Quote:
While Tillich never discusses theological issues from the standpoint of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are a number of ideas in his complex thought that lend themselves to our analysis of the dynamics behind the success of A.A. and its allied movements, such as the Jacoby Club. ---
"We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection." So states the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And Tillich reminds his student that "the Christian life never reaches the state of perfection -- it always remains an up-and-down course." The text of the Big Book could be placed next to much of Tillich's writings on the subject of New Being and the overcoming of self.
When one views Tillich and his thought as conveyed in his wonderful writings, it is like standing before the Mona Lisa. Some people may criticize it, but in that meeting the Mona Lisa is not the work being weighed in the balances.
Last edited by Wardendresden; 07-06-2014 at 01:37 AM..
I'm not asking if your churches pray generic and perfunctory prayers for world peace; or that "souls be saved", ie. that they come to believe the same doctrines that your church teaches.
I'm asking if you actually hold your "enemies" closely in your mind, to the best of your ability, actively desiring (and imagining) that they experience the same things in their lives that you desire in yours.
Those are the same thing.
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Paul Tillich--the enemy of liberalism in his time
