Bill Ferguson points out that his Ekklesia site is still online, though inactive. BUT...
"Quango.net is about to be completely revamped with an Ambassador Report WIKI, a web board with RSS feeds and chat site. "
Good news. Check out what's available right now at www.quango.net. The pseudonym Qua Ngo shouldn't put you off! Among the site's drawcards are the writings of Bob Brinsmead, an ex-Adventist who put the proverbial cat among the Sabbatarian pigeons twenty five years ago. Try accessing the 1981 essay Sabbatarianism Re-examined. If you find that stimulating, Jesus and the Sabbath will be helpful too. I've yet to meet any Sabbath observer who can adequately deal to Brinsmead's arguments.
From Brinsmead to Don Cupitt, the British radical theologian who wrote the passage in the last post: one further quote.
"[There is] a distinction between 'Microsoft theology' and 'Linux theology'. In Microsoft theology the operating system - the set of beliefs and practices - that you live by and work with is 'proprietary': that is, it is tied to a particular institution and its power structure. Somebody owns the rights, and demands his or her cut from you. But the newer Linux theology is 'open source' ... Nobody has been granted the franchise for it."
It's an interesting metaphor.
16 comments:
Unfortunately, Ekklesia has far too many missing links.
Nothing says "I don't care" as much as a website that isn't kept up to snuff.
DennisD
"In Microsoft theology the operating system...is 'proprietary'... it is tied to a particular institution and its power structure. Somebody owns the rights, and demands his or her cut from you. But the newer Linux theology is 'open source' ... Nobody has been granted the franchise for it."
That says it all...
Religion, methinks, was designed to cut off the flow of free thinking and being an authentic spiritual person vs being an obedient religious one. It makes piously convicted but marginally informed types by the millions.
The Gnostics, who never saw Jesus as a real person, and they may have known he never was, drove the literalists of the Church nuts. Even though literalism won to form what we see today, many gnostic types, who didn't need all the trappings and personnel of the Church, came across with much more integrity and a deeply held , from the inside out, spirituality.
Even in the NT, during the life of Paul which was very early in the game, and before the Gospels were written to flesh out Paul's cosmic Christ, some felt no Jesus ever really came in the flesh. Such a huge controversey, similar to us arguing over whether Elvis ever really existed, is amazing and telling.
It is much MUCH easier to be be a Microsoftian. Linuxians, who draw from open sources and open thinking, have a more difficult time, are much less in number and viewed as abbarations...but they are more whole, authentic and free.
Oh...and I doubt God is mad at them either for being so.
Without liberals there is no forward motion and no progress. It is the "Church" that has held back the progress of free thought and today brings us most of our wars, death and destruction on the planet.
LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy (July 1,07) For the second time in a week, Pope Benedict XVI has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, reasserting the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church and saying other Christian communities were either defective or not true churches."
I rest my case. Microsoftianity speaks to the masses.
Mr Benedict has a certain dictatorial look and perspective about him. I wonder if he ever had a personality test or mental health screening? No wait...he's the Pope. Men with illusions and delusions don't rise to such spiritual positions in our Religions.
Tuffy McFurts here:
Welcome to the 1400's!
Yea, UNIX started at the legalized monopoly of AT&T's Bell Labs. BSD started at the public subsidized University of Berkley.
Obviously, neither organizations main activity required it making a profit from the sale of a computer operation system.
My experience goes back to the heyday of SCO Xenix, and from what I've seen, it's not cost effective, for many organziations, to run their IT Operations based on open source products.
The cadre of open source gurus it takes to effectively run these systems are usually a cult among themselves, and guard the tricks of the craft as well as anybody.
All things considered, if the engineers at Microsoft could make a bigger buck by working on open source products, they would leave in a flash.
So, are we suggesting publicly subsidized, publicly mandated religous studies?
I'll have to check some of the sites to see which cultdoms are running amok with the POpe's comments.
Douglas Becker said...
Unfortunately, Ekklesia has far too many missing links.
Nothing says "I don't care" as much as a website that isn't kept up to snuff.
Thu Jul 12, 01:11:00 AM NZST
Perhaps an apt criticism. I haven't touched it in years, but there's new stuff "in the can" ready to go.
After my brief "evangelical stage" which Joe Tkach Jr quickly extinguished in January 1997. I was left with out answers to the questions I had.
Pauline theology can lead one down the Tkach road. Orthodoxy, orthopraxy, certification by the NAE, I can still see these words coming from the bearded mouth with the big eyes of Joseph Tkach.
Accreditations can't wipe clean the stink of the cult. But it can make one feel all smug with contempt for those who have a different belief. "Look at how many people we lost because of our belief!" No doubt Pope Gregory IX said similar things during the 13th century.
Heretics can be so bothersome to the Church order.
I was struggling reconciling Paul of Tarsus with Jesus of Nazareth. Even an idiot like me could see the two are not the same theology.
I decided to follow Brinsmead's example and not publish my thoughts until I had something more concrete to provide. The Internet fight against the Herbal Kingdom has been taken to heights unimagined by myself in 1994. Gavin included. Good on them!
As to my perceived laziness, mea culpa.
Sometimes we have to walk in faith for a while until we have answers for our questions.
But lest I discourage others on similar journeys, the answers really are out there. Bart Ehrman, Karen Armstrong, Joseph Campbell, Michael Morwood are all good places to start.
Gavin provides a wonderful glimpse into many of these authors.
As to my perceived laziness, mea culpa.
No, no. There are often valid reasons for not caring.
When things get so absolutely weirdly crazy dysfunctional from overload, one of the most sane things may be to go into the blind point of view mode and ignore the issues. The WCG / xCG venue is richly verdant with contradictions which cannot be resolved. Each of us in turn has gotten thoroughly burned out trying to make a contribution to the venue, oft without compensary recompense. It's like that Far Side cartoon with the one guy on one of the sinking ships yelling, "We win!".
By this time, one would think that all those who have something to see would have seen it. There are only so many who can be saved at the shallow end of the gene pool. The ones at the deeper end have all been dragged to safety -- at least one would think. For most of us, the excesses and abuses of the past have been exposed and we would have moved on, for at least as far as our limited selves can move on. For the most part there is little more to share, although there are new things popping up all the time.
There are things like exposing the psychopath running a subcult in the xCGs pretending to be a part of it all, but holding a Bible in one hand, holding the Koran in the other and a mighty sword of destruction to kill off Australians and Americans in the third hand. There are new things like the war which has broken out amongst the xCGs evidenced by "The Sabbath Test" and "The Calendar Controversy". For those who think there is nothing new and that James Tabor and Robert Brimsmead have an explanation for anything, think again. Unless you understand the Church Corporate and psychopaths, you understand nothing about the group dynamics of the WCG and the xCGs today.
And that's the problem: The dearth of effective tools. The ones that are used are the wrong ones and not up to the job at hand. It's like trying to open a can of tuna with jeweler's screwdrivers: It can be done... badly... and you will end up with blood on the can -- your own.
The problem is not theology, it is business and some rather bad sociology. Unless or until people actually understand that, they will fail to make an impact.
Now as it turns out, Gavin does have one key: Attempting to get some accountability amongst the church of gods. Accountability is the real issue and has been all along. In fact, the eschatology hardly matters: It is how people treat each other in the psychodynamics of a dysfunctional environment. Except for the scope, we might as well be talking about the Mormons, Scientology, Radical Islam or Exxon. In this realm of religion, religion hardly matters.
So it is that at this point it may be appropriate not to care any more. The coxcult team has finished up and moved on. Other projects related to the church of gods are slowly winding down.
And for websites that were prospering prior to 2000 but haven't been touched since, you've made your mark, but the opportunity to remain relevant has slipped away: Maybe it is just as well to leave well enough alone and walk away.
The Ekklesia mailing list was shut down briefly, its not a large list, but solid core wanted to continue their friendships and share information with each other, so by popular demand I restarted it.
Its going to a webboard format soon, just because the issue of maintaining email lists that doesn't get flagged at AOL as spam is getting harder and harder. Maybe we should all just ban AOL?
For some in retirement, Ekklesia gives a sense of continuity with the past.
As to the web pages relevancy, that is always market driven and I have brought nothing new to the market in quite a while. Nobody likes to read the same old things over and over again. I freely admit that.
Abusive Christian religion seems to rest on 3 legs:
1) The writings of Paul interpreted as god-breathed law, rather than one man's opinion.
2) The presumption that Justice as used in the Old Testament is the same concept used in the New Testament.
The New Testament writers are heavily influenced by Greco-Roman "payback" (societal retribution, penal systems, etc). From this concept of justice all concepts of Hell are derived as are Paul's interpretations of the meaning of the crucifixion. But that's what happens when you read one culture's scripture, with another culture's worldview.
Old Testament Justice was defined in terms of how one operated financially and legally with those with little or no political power, such as the widows, orphans, homeless, the foreigner in the gates. To be just meant to take care of the unfortunate. Criminals were either killed outright (stoned), or in the case of accidental manslaughter, were given cities of safe haven to retreat to. Debts were released every 7 years, and every 50 years the lands reverted back to the families that owned them if they lost them in hard financial times.
3) The delusion of separateness of individuals. Buddhism is the best reference on this subject. The mistaken idea that you can abuse another individual and not have it have consequences in your own life.
The corollary to this is dualism of the profane and holy. The God in the sky and fallen man on earth. There was no paradise from which man fell. Death has always been a part of physical life. Its just natures way of renewal.
God is immanent in his creation. There is no separation from us and God, there never has been. That's what Jesus on about in his "Abba father" allegories of God. The God that always forgives, that is always there. You can't fit Paul's explanation of Jesus death into that mental framework. And once you can deal with that, the issue of Jesus divinity, virgin birth and all that become moot.
But none of us learn at the same rate, and I am slower than many. So if I can provide a bread crumb to the trail of understanding, its worth doing.
Leaving the cult is not the end, its just the beginning.
Bill wrote: Leaving the cult is not the end, its just the beginning.
Ain't THAT the truth!!!!
Nice caste system, Bill.
Glad to know we all got what was coming to us by being the WWCG.
Care to speculate on the past lives of the WCG ministry?
Start with Dennis, please.
XCGMouse said...
Nice caste system, Bill.
Glad to know we all got what was coming to us by being the WWCG.
Care to speculate on the past lives of the WCG ministry?
Start with Dennis, please.
....
There are times when I am left completely speechless.
Non-sequitur's have that effect on me.
The best I can hope for is you mistook me for someone else.
Sorry Bill, your right. I pretty much flamed you and Dennis.
I should of stuck to my first thought: For the Greeks justice was socially embodied,
an individual got his just deserts, good or bad, in accordance with his social role.
Action in accordance with virtue were rewarded, actions in accordance with vice were punished. In fact, justice itself was a virtue; the lack therof would threaten the viability of the community. Actions, what one should do, were logically/rationally premised on the goods needed for a good society.
I think this concept lines pretty much with some concepts of justice in the old testament; whereas someones actions could defile the whole community.
I just thought you were limiting some aspects of justice to the individual or to the cosmos - defined apart from the social community, here and now - and calling the rest "payback".
xcgmouse wrote:
Sorry Bill, your right. I pretty much flamed you and Dennis.
I should of stuck to my first thought: For the Greeks justice was socially embodied, an individual got his just deserts, good or bad, in accordance with his social role.
Action in accordance with virtue were rewarded, actions in accordance with vice were punished. In fact, justice itself was a virtue; the lack thereof would threaten the viability of the community. Actions, what one should do, were logically/rationally premised on the goods needed for a good society.
I think this concept lines pretty much with some concepts of justice in the old testament; whereas someones actions could defile the whole community.
I just thought you were limiting some aspects of justice to the individual or to the cosmos - defined apart from the social community, here and now - and calling the rest "payback".
Before I was married I would have written off a good flaming of yours truly as being just the a-holyness of the flamer.
But age has taught me it can be estrogen/testosterone levels, what the kid did during the day, or that road raging idiot on the freeway or a thousand things that have absolutely nothing to do with me.
Sounds like mistaken identity.
We inherit our Western legal system from Roman and Greek thought, via the British. Europe also has Napoleanic law, the big difference is the British graciously gave us the concept of innocent until proven guilty, not found in France and Mexico.
Ancient Judaic law pretty much revolves around social justice and property rights. Adultery is forbidden in the OT not because morality but because a woman is a man's property along with his goat and she-ass (and what an ass that lass has - there's a limerick begging to be born in there somewhere).
Roman law introduces the concepts of penal systems, dreadful forms of executions for various offenses and the like. In short, the retribution of the Tyrant/State upon the individual, rule through fear.
The problem comes in when in scripture God's kindness towards sinful people is referred to as Justice, (we rather tend to think of it as mercy - but not Justice).
Justice is God being true to what God is.
Its not retribution to an ungrateful humanity. Nor is it something requiring an intermediary to broker redemption or reconciliation. Its not even a get out of jail free card, or a Scooter Libby commutation of punishment.
It may seem like a trivial study, but its key to recognizing the fallacy Paul of Tarsus gets into with his explanation of the meaning of the crucifixion. He looks at the event through the eyes of a Hellenistic (Greek schooled) Jew, schooled in the law of Moses and Greek thought. The Law had to be satisified for "societal reasons" as you put it, and since it was God's law, only the death of a God could pay the penalty. From this derive all the
incarnation theology that Bart Erhman so clearly illustrates. Some from Paul, and some of which was added latter to round out the logic of the argument.
It may be that the Apostle Paul's barnacled encrustation of the simple message of Jesus was necessary to preserve that message through the abuses of the Roman era. But it does not sail well in modern era. Once we scrape those Roman barnacles off the fishing boat of Jesus, we find real spiritual sustenance.
In short God forgives, because that is what God does.
More on the intricacy of the meaning of justice in OT time at http://www.quango.net/verdict/scandalgodsjusticepart1.htm
Ok, the light just went on in my head.
Brimseade(?) is using the historical critical method to end run early church history; like Armstrong used his method to end run early church history.
You guys are just placing the errors farther back - back in the new testament text themselves. Armstrong put the errors in the interpretation.
So, I guess everything come down to how to make fact vs. value distinctions.
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