Huffington Post: Religion

[Alex]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/religion

[Alex]

Religious People Must Rally to Restore Sanity
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/religious-people-must-ral_b_750682.html

...So what is sane religion? The word "sane" comes from the Latin sanus, which means "health" or "healing." Sane religion, then, is religion that, regardless of differences in understandings of the Divine or metaphysical beliefs, promotes a healthy personal life and creates positive relationships among the people of the world. Sane religion is productive and allows for clear thinking and a mind free from rage, suspicion and hatred.

A 20th-century roll call of sane religious leaders would include the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mahatma Gandhi, and Pope John XXIII, all of whom found sustenance from within their respective traditions to increase liberty, peace, and justice at a personal, communal, national and international level. Sane religious people include the billions of regular people of all faith traditions who are good citizens, welcome the neighbor who is different from them, volunteer for community service and offer comfort to those in need. Religions and religious people can be a vital source for good and a productive element within civil society, but only when approached sanely with our minds tethered to compassion and our passions moderated by intellect.

Of course we have far too many examples of "unsane" religion: Pat Robertson blaming the Haiti earthquake on a "pact to the devil," Glenn Beck equating social-justice-minded Christians with Nazis, Christine O'Donnell running for the Senate on an anti-masturbation platform, and William Boykin telling a church congregation, "I knew my God was bigger than his," referring to a Muslim. I don't mean to say that Robertson, Beck, O'Donnell and Boykin are mentally unbalanced; I don't think they are. And I don't think that they mean to do harm. They are making these pronouncements out of their own worldview, which they have every right to do. However, I do not think that the religion they are promoting is sane in the sense of being healthy and productive. The comments of these Americans are at best trivial and at worst dangerous for a peaceful future.  ...

[Alex]

A New Way of Being Religious
Philip Goldberg  |  26/6/2012  |  Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/a-new-way-of-being-religious_b_1614170.html

"Ralph Waldo Emerson -- who deserves, if anyone does, to be called the Steve Jobs of American religion"

"the advent of globalized communication has now made it possible for massive numbers of people to access authentic alternatives...SBNRs [Spiritual But Not Religious] are...probing for teachings that make sense to them and produce tangible results in practice. If they don't commit to one religious label it's because they haven't found one that satisfies all their spiritual needs and they don't want to be bound to a lifetime contract when they might reap greater rewards through free agency.

"Weiner's lament may really be about the Nones' lack of community and institutional structure, which, as a direct consequence, deprives them of a voice in the national conversation. I suspect this will change as new ways for independent seekers to come together take shape. The new forms of community will no doubt be less authoritarian, less dogmatic, less centralized and less hierarchical than traditional institutions, and they will evolve more from the ground up than the top down. The leadership is multiheaded and diverse -- more Mom and Pop entrepreneurship than Walmart-style dominance.

"Our new way of being religious may seem chaotic, as most new things do, but it coheres around certain elements: individual choice over institutional decree; inner experience over creed; reason and evidence over faith and dogma; unity and pluralism over separation and tribalism. These trends reverse centuries of religious history, and they bode well for an authentically democratic spirituality -- if we continue to develop it with care, discernment and responsibility."



Alex's comment:  That is Unitarian Universalism.

[Alex]

The Deciding LGBT Issue That Christians Cannot Ignore
John Shore, 08/24/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shore/the-deciding-lgbt-issue-that-christians-cannot-ignore_b_1825167.html

"And what do we know to be the indispensable tool for judging the morality of any given action?"

"Context."

"Context. Sometimes lying, stealing, or killing is a sin. Sometimes any action at all -- or taking no action at all -- can be a sin. And when we look to context, what do we look for?"

"Harmful intent and harmful action," said Arthur. "At the motives behind the action and the harm that resulted from it. Or, as you put it in one of your lectures, 'To find the sin, look within.'"