Fri, April 13, 2012
A Resurrected Christianity?
By
Diana Butler Bass
In his Newsweek cover story, "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus," Andrew Sullivan dissects the crisis of American Christianity--it has become hypocritical and irrelevant to millions. Organized religion is collapsing; atheism is rising. The wounded, lapsed, and doubting seek shelter in spirituality, away from the buildings and traditions that once housed faith.
None of this particularly surprised me, as I wrote several weeks ago about the end of church, here on Huffington Post. My gloomy assessment of American religious life was drawn from my new book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, the first third of which covers the same ground as Sullivan. We come to the same conclusion: Christianity is flailing and failing. It needs to change--and fast.
See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.
...yet another writer trying to help religionists to make sense of the fact that their churches no longer attract and hold them. Her take on a new way to look at basic questions is good, but...
195:9.8
The world needs more firsthand religion.
Even Christianity—the
best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a
religion about
Jesus, but it is so largely one which men experience secondhand. They
take their religion wholly as handed down by their accepted religious
teachers. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only
see Jesus as he really lived on earth
and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings! Descriptive words of
things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight thereof, neither can
creedal words inspire men’s souls
like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But expectant faith
will ever keep the hope-door of man’s soul open for the
entrance of the eternal spiritual realities of the divine values of the
worlds beyond.
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Fri, March 09, 2012
Is religion dying --or reinventing?
By
Diana Butler Bass
For decades, Americans have been turning toward spirituality as a
protest vote against conventional religion. In the last dozen years,
American religious institutions have undergone a myriad of crises--abuse
scandals, conflicts, schism, and partisan political entanglement, to
name a few--resulting in a great religious recession. Poll after poll
reveals that organized religions --mainline Protestant, evangelical,
Roman Catholic, and Jewish --are in varying states of disarray and
decline. Sadness, even doom, has gripped many congregations, as the
formerly faithful disaffiliate, and those who remain struggle to pay
clergy and fix leaky roofs.
...What the world needs is better religion, new forms of old faiths,
religion reborn on the basis of deep spiritual connection--these things
need to be explored instead of ditching religion completely. We need
religion imbued with the spirit of shared humanity and hope, not
religions that divide and further fracture the future.
See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.
Here are some pertinent thoughts from the teachings of
The Urantia Book:
The truth, beauty, and goodness of man's world are unified by the
increasing spirituality of the experience of mortals ascending toward Paradise realities. The unity of truth, beauty, and goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of the
God-knowing personality. ~ The Urantia Book, (196:3.24)
34:6.6 The dead theory of even the
highest religious doctrines is powerless to transform human character or
to control mortal behavior. What the world of today needs is the truth
which your teacher of old declared: “Not in word only but also in power
and in the
Holy Spirit.”
The seed of theoretical truth is dead, the highest moral concepts
without effect, unless and until the divine Spirit breathes upon the
forms of truth and quickens the formulas of righteousness.
The progressive program of an expanding civilization embraces:
- Preservation of individual liberties.
- Protection of the home.
- Promotion of economic security.
- Prevention of disease.
- Compulsory education.
- Compulsory employment.
- Profitable utilization of leisure.
- Care of the unfortunate.
- Race improvement.
- Promotion of science and art.
- Promotion of philosophy—wisdom.
- Augmentation of cosmic insight—spirituality. ~ The Urantia Book,
(71:4.2)
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Fri, February 24, 2012
The End of Church
By
Diana Butler Bass
Something startling is happening in American religion: We are
witnessing the end of church or, at the very least, the end of
conventional church. The United States is fast-becoming a society where
Christianity is being reorganized after religion.
The end of conventional church isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Christianity after religion, a faith renewed by the experience of God's
spirit, is closer to what Jesus hoped for his followers than the
scandalous division, politics, and enmity we have now. Will there still
be Christianity after the end of institutional religion? Yes, there will
be. But it is going to be different than what Americans have known, a
faith responsive to the longings of those who are expecting more
spiritual depth and greater ethical integrity rather than more
conventional church. Indeed, I suspect that the end of church is only
the beginning of a new Great Awakening.
See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.
This phenomenon is something that most Urantia Book reader/students have seen coming for years. So many of us came to The Urantia Book as a result of our own dissatisfaction with the religions of authority of our upbringings...and in The Urantia Book, we find out some of the reasons that the institutionalized churches are standing at such a crossroad. Consider the following quote from "Weakness of Institutional Religion"
99:2.1
Institutional religion cannot afford inspiration and provide leadership
in this impending world-wide social reconstruction and economic
reorganization because it has unfortunately become more or less of an
organic part of the social order and the economic system which is
destined to undergo reconstruction. Only the real religion of personal
spiritual experience can function helpfully and creatively in the
present crisis of civilization.
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