@ Oldskeptic, I'm well aware of the line between Mesopotamia and modern civilization. Every point in history had it's precursors which went on to a new culture and society. So I was wrong and Christianity adapted to the Western thought model but for you to think that I was unaware of the "path" though history is off.

logical bob wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:I would direct you to Acts 9 and 1st Corinthians 15, and ask If not divine then what was going on in acts? Jesus spoke to Saul/Paul as a blinding light in the sky. If not divine then what did Paul think this voice claiming to be Jesus was?

And what is all the talk about resurrection in 1st Corinthians 15 if Paul didn't believe in resurrection? Paul may or may not have believed in a physical resurrection, it's hard to tell, but that is beside the point. He believed in the resurrection of Jesus.

Acts is a story about Paul written when he'd been dead for a while. It doesn't necessarily represent his thoughts or what really happened to him. The Road to Damascus isn't in his own surviving writings.

Acts while not written by Paul himself does tell his story, one written probably before his death. But this doesn't really matter either because there are plenty of references by Paul in his epistles to Jesus lord and savior.

I agree that Paul believed in the resurrection (obviously). 1 Corinthians 15 is precisely the passage that suggests it might not have involved the corpse getting up and walking.

Doesn't matter how resurrection occurred. What matters is that it happened and there is the claim/promise that all dead will be resurrected.

Spong is an example of what I'm talking about. He wants to ditch pretty much every tenet of Christianity yet retain the name. I don't think that it works that way. Spong is calling for a new reformation of Christianity that does away with Christianity.

That's you putting words in his mouth. I don't believe Spong would ever say he wanted to do away with Christianity.

Whether he would say it is not the point. The point is that his twelve theses do it.

1. God of the Bible - gone.
2. Jesus as an incarnation of God - gone.
3. God as creator and original sin - gone.
4. Virgin birth as evidence for Jesus' divinity - gone.
5. Miracles of the New Testament - gone.
6. The sacrifice of Jesus for sins - gone.
7. Jesus was not raised from the dead in any manner - gone.
8. Jesus' ascension to heaven - gone.
9. God given morality - gone.
10. Prayer - gone.
11. Getting into heaven based on any type of behavior - gone.
12. We bear the image of God but that image cannot be used to judge a person.

Can you really say that stripping Christianity of all these things leaves it still Christianity?

Tell me what is Christianity without a Christ?

Obviously Christians who are committed to the beliefs Spong rejects will say he's non-Christian since for them that's a pejorative term. I presume that for you non-Christian has no negative connotations, so you're just saying that his religion is not Christianity as you define it. That's fine, but nobody else is required to pay attention to your definition.

I didn't define Christianity, Christians did. It is Spong that wants to create a new definition not me.

I'm baffled by people that want to retain the label Christian after they admit their disbelief in Christianity as defined by me.

It's less baffling when you complete the sentence.

Don't be editing my posts. It has nothing to do with my definition, so my sentence was complete without you altering it.

And I am not an outsider.

You're someone with rather less riding on the question than Christians have.

What does it matter how much I have riding on this question?

In a way you could say that the early forms of Christianity were consumed and transformed by western civilization into a more compatible form that fit better with western civilization.

Here I think you're dead right. You could also argue that Christianity is as much a product of western thought as it is of Judaism.

I think that Judaism has much less to do with Christianity than western culture or thought.

Oldskeptic wrote:Can you really say that stripping Christianity of all these things leaves it still Christianity?

Tell me what is Christianity without a Christ?

Spong can speak for himself.

The way I see Christ is not as the incarnation of a theistic deity, but as so completely human that he becomes a channel through which the way I define God can live completely and perfectly. So I still have here Christ as “fully divine” and “fully human”, but I get at it in a very different way because I define God as the Source of Life, the Source of Love, the Ground of Being – all my Tillichian stuff comes out here. When I look at Jesus I see a human being that is so fully alive that the Source of Life is visible in him, so loving that the Source of Love is visible in him, so whole, so capable of being himself that the Ground of Being is visible in him. And then I watch him live out a new kind of humanity.

When I look at the cross I don’t see a sacrifice where a victim pays the price of sin. I see a life that is so whole that he can give himself away completely. It’s a tough battle, but I think we’ve got to get people out of tribal religion and get them into a redemptive process that enhances our humanity instead of rescues us and makes us grateful.

What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism. I believe that God is very real. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. I call this God by different words. I describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground of being. I engage God when I live fully and love wastefully and have the courage to be who I am. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, and that's the God I want to live out of so that all of the people of this world have a better opportunity to live fully and love wastefully and to be who they are in the infinite variety of humanity.

Now my question is: I am a Christian and I want to be able to sing the Lord's song in the 21st century but I can't sing it in the accents of the 1st century or with the words of the 1st century, so how can we reshape the very words of our tradition so that this old song can be sung in a new way so that I and my children and my grandchildren can still acknowledge Jesus as their Lord? That's what I think the Reformation is about.

Sources here and here.

Now I'm not endorsing this stuff, I think it's very deeply flawed. But to misquote his theses as you do above and then announce arbitrarily that what he's saying is not Christian doesn't work. This is certainly not Christianity without Christ.

We'll have to agree to differ on this as we'll continue to insist on different definitions. chairman bill has already put the points about people being able to identify themselves as they choose better than I could hope to.

logical bob wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Which is why this sort of attempt at explanation always ends in people fighting about what's wrong with what the other person said. And I'm just not in the mood to fight anymore, not with people i like anyway (Actually I don't want to fight with the ones that irritate me either).

Well, I don't know which of those categories I fit into but I don't want to pick a fight with you either. Without going point by point, I'm suggesting that you sometimes view history through the lens of your own hostility to Christianity and that this makes you a little cavalier about the facts. Don't be too keen to portray Judaism/Christianity as bad and the alternatives as better in all cases.

I take your point. But generally until Nero thought it was a good idea to pick on them, they were pretty much tolerated, and even afterwards, would probably have been left alone had they not gone on and on and on, which they still do today.

I'm not exactly hostile to Christianity itself, I'm not really hostile to any religion. I don't care if people want to believe in mythology or that drinking drops of St John's wort in a bottle of water will cure their depression, as long as they leave me alone to not believe in the nonsense. I come across as hostile because no matter what I discuss IRL, someone always manages to accuse me of being a crazy activist because I don't agree with their particular pet belief. As an example, in the 1980s we used to have huge rows around our Sunday afternoon barbecues with the extended family because someone who say "all K......s are too stupid to be allowed to vote." I would respond with some example of a really intelligent person I worked with, and who because of their skin colour wasn't allowed to be more than a tea lady, and I'd get "you're such a k.......r boetie!" (An SA expression for someone who defended anti-racism). (Actually they were perfectly correct I was an extreme anti-racist, but that wasn't the point, it was merely pointing out that generalizations are wrong. In the same way if someone in a discussion nowadays says "shall we say grace" before a meal and I don't do the whole pretence of participating, even just by sitting quietly while they talk to the ceiling, I'm accused of "hating God." I can't win. I don't care if people want to talk to the ceiling kitteh, or worship a flying teapot or spend a pile of money going to visit a big black rock in the middle of the desert, just leave me out of the stupidity. I don't think that's hostility.

(And BTW you don't irritate me, I like your logical analysis of what people write. And it's fine to tell me when I'm off track, I tend to waffle on).

To pick just two examples there's little point arguing that the Romans were particularly tolerant of Judaism given events in Jerusalem in AD 70, and it's stretching things somewhat to say that Byzantine Christianity was different to Roman Christianity in antiquity because Rome had Inquisitions 700 years after the fall of Rome.

True, the Jews with their silliness must have really driven the Romans mad. Let's be honest, as much as we like to be politically correct today and not make comments about the silly things people do, the whole business of a man living in NYC walking around in the middle of summer dressed in a black coat with ringlets hanging down his cheeks is a little weird. Imagine what the Romans with their enjoyment of a hedonistic lifestyle thought of it.

To be honest, personally, I find the Eastern Orthodox religion to be more bearable than the insanity of Western Christianity, just a personal opinion, not based on anything. I don't know why, it just seems to me that their Patriarchs aren't "in your face" like the leaders of western Christianity are. Maybe they are just as narrow, or even more so than the Texas Baptists, but I don't see posts on FB from people in the eastern church wanting to burn atheists or shoot them like these crazies.

That's me now. No more fighting. Honest.