Jason Coleman

From the post Rachel Held Evans | The Great Disappointment

I confess that beneath my playful derision lies a hint of fear, not that I’ll be “left behind” but that I’m already caught up—in a delusion, in false hope, in a God of my own making…and perhaps, in a looming Great Disappointment.  

Like it or not, Harold Camping and his followers make us laugh because we see a small piece of our faith in theirs. They are exaggerated caricatures of ourselves. 

We too are guilty of projecting onto God our expectations and desires. 

We too can get overconfident in our interpretations of the Bible. 

We too expect God to judge the way we think he should judge, act when we think he should act, be who we think he should be. 

And, you gotta admit,  there’s a chance that we too might be absolutely, devastatingly, irrecoverably wrong.

From the post My Understanding of Christianity at Exploring Our Matrix comes a quote about trying to get both our Christian doctrine and practice right:

… I suspect that it may be more Christian to actually follow in practice a Jesus we do not completely understand, than to get as close as possible to understanding a Jesus we don’t really follow.

A post at Otagosh quotes from a book review by Thom Stark.

These apologists are perpetuating an insular Christian culture, giving well-meaning Christians permission to switch off their brains and their consciences and go about their business, pretending everything is all right. The apologists don’t care to convince those struggling on the margins of faith – they’re preaching only to the converted, only to those who are looking for easy answers to questions others are asking them, but which they aren’t asking themselves.

Thom Stark, Is God a Moral Compromiser?

James McGrath speaks about confronting proponents of Young-Earth creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

I think that one aspect [of expressing doubt to conspiracy theorists] is to learn to speak confidently about our uncertainty, so as to be able to not merely say “Perhaps” and “Possibly” but a direct and forthright “You have no way of knowing that” and “Your confidence is simply a feeling you have, but it isn’t justified by the evidence.”

Quote from Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Found at blog A Holy Experience

I slept and dreamt life was joy, I awoke and saw life was service, I acted and, behold, service was joy.

From James McGrath regarding the Japanese tsunami and whether or not God “did it for a reason.”

In my Sunday school class last week, the subject [of the Japanese earthquake] came up, and as we were up to Romans 1 in our study of that letter, we discussed what it means to think of God as in some sense plainly visible in the natural world. I emphasized that we cannot help but think differently than people did in bygone ages about these matters, and that theists should not simply have all the gods of polytheism, personifying forces of nature, rolled into one, but must find a way of acknowledging that things happen which simply ought not to be interpreted in terms of divine action or theological significance. If science offers anything helpful to religious thought, it is to free us from needing to interpret meaningless accidents and tragedies as though they are the acts of a malevolent deity who, although supposedly omnipotent, chooses to vent his frutrations using blunt, indiscriminate instruments of harm, fors [sic] of nature that seem perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Attributing them to supernatural agency is to make the tragic into something even worse.

Brian McLaren in a post about the Rob Bell universalist controversy.

… [T]he biblical story is bigger and better than a narrative about how souls get sorted out into two bins at the end of time.

Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, sums up how the universe is both incomprehensibly vast and quite personal.

In my time on Hubble we’d routinely see background galaxies that were well over a billion light years away. Routinely. Mind you, each of these background objects is itself an entire galaxy, containing tens or hundreds of billion of stars, perhaps as big, rich, and diverse as our own Milky Way.
…
Some people feel small, insignificant, when they look out into all that space, all that blackness. It’s easy to feel that way, but it’s not a fair assessment. It can be a struggle, and a mighty one, but it’s worth the effort to seek out the awe and the grandeur in it as well. In all that vastness, all that depth, it’s entirely possible there are trillions of planets like Earth, and maybe more. But none is this Earth. Nowhere else is there another you, another me.

In the end, when you make that effort, this is one of most important lessons you learn: we’re a part of all this. A unique part. And that’s a fine thing to know.

That’s all. Other people have different questions.

I heard that spoken by a man who was on an economics panel talking about why gathering a group of diverse scholars was beneficial. Because even though each was a giant in his own field, some of the others would phrase the questions differently than the giant would. When we know all the answers, it’s good to remember that other people have different questions.