tagged w/ belief
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Celtic Christianity Today Homily “The Goodness of Creation” on April 26, 2009 at Union Community Church, Valparaiso, IN by Rev. Dr. George Cairns of Chesterton, IN.
Rev. Dr. George Cairns delivers Celtic Christianity Today homilies:
The homilies on Celtic Christianity take a look at several topics including the European roots of the Celts (primarily Scotland and Ireland) and how Earth-based cultures can impact the future of civilization including actively protecting the environment, respecting fellow humans, different cultures and nature.
Cairns is working closely with Rev. Gregory Jones on several social fronts.
Rev. Jones is the pastor of the Union Community Church and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University.
Founded in 2007, The non-profit Turtle Island Project is known for its ongoing work with Native American issues - and the other wing involves other Earth-based religions like the Celts. Dr. Cairns is the co-founder of the nonprofit Turtle Island Project.
Rev. Cairns continues to work closely with the foremost Celtic group in the world, the Iona Community in Scotland that is a dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and social justice, rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship.
Cairns is a research professor of Practical Theology and Spirituality at Chicago Theological Seminary, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and lives in Chesterton, Indiana.
Cairns recently completed a six-part "contemplative reading and discussion" of Philip Newell's book "Christ of the Celts" at the Union Community Church. Cairns and his wife, Nancy, recently hosted a conference on Celtic Spirituality, Ecology, and Participative Consciousness.
Dr. Cairns says:
Celtic Christianity is a strand of the Christian tradition which developed during the
middle of the first millennium. Its full flowering in Ireland and Scotland continued for several hundred years before it was incorporated into the dominant church as many of its traditions were lost or suppressed.
There are two major reasons for this recovery and reconstruction of Celtic Christian practical theology for the church today: Church Renewal & Engaging and transforming the genocide and ecocide taking place today.
We are concerned that our current individual and systemic western consciousness is disembodied and ill. We believe that this process started several thousand years ago in the late Paleolithic. We are not trying to turn back the clock to the Stone Age. But we do know that a change in consciousness must begin if our planet and we are to survive.
What we have lost is participative consciousness, which understands that our lives are profoundly related to the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of all of creation. Another way of putting this is that we are completely relational beings. Reconnection with all of creation as sacred and responsive
and alive is our great task in the early 21st century.
We have living guides to help us such as Celtic Spirituality, Native American Spirituality and post-modern science. I believe we need to integrate the profound gifts of these resources and open ourselves to deepen our relationships with all of creation.”
Related websites:
Celtic Christianity Today
http://www.celticchristianitytoday.org
Rev. George Cairns on Spirit Cafe blog, United Church of Christ
http://i.ucc.org/FeedYourSpirit/SpiritCafe/CafeBlog/tabid/83/Default.aspx
Iona Community, Scotland
http://www.iona.org.uk
Iona Community New World Foundation: Iona associates, friends in U.S.
http://www.iona-nwf.org/links.htm
Turtle Island Project
http://www.TurtleIslandProject.org
Union Community Church, Valparaiso, IN
http://unioncommunitychurchucc.blogspot.com
Rev. Gregory Jones, Theology Department at Valparaiso University
http://www.valpo.edu/theology/faculty/gregoryjones.phpCeltic Christianity Today Homily “The Goodness of Creation” on April 26,... more
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In a bizarre macabre account of divine intervention, Erik Larson amazingly encounters the All Mighty through a death proof hearse. Empowered to guide the lost, the Minister of Death mobs down the streets in his bequeathed vehicle of demise to enlighten the impressionable, the drug addicts, and the criminal element of the mortality that challenges them. Being scared straight may be the answer toward a future of sobriety.In a bizarre macabre account of divine intervention, Erik Larson amazingly encounters... more
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DonQ
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3 years ago
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A 'moai', one of the giant head-shaped statues on Easter Island, is to travel to Paris in 2010 to "challenge the materialistic conscience of the world". According to the island government, the statue had "made its wish for travel known to them and wants to be placed in the Tuileries gardens, between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde." Once there, it is going to "spread spiritual energy which will change the conscience of humanity" and "transform the materialistic conscience of the world into something more humane." Incidentally, the travel costs will be paid by French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.
I guess even the ancients are not immune.A 'moai', one of the giant head-shaped statues on Easter Island, is to... more
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As much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, and as much as the evidence seems to point otherwise, the key difference between atheists and theists is not intelligence, open-mindedness, or rationality (though these traits certainly help, I think, one adopt an atheist worldview) but whether or not the person’s concept of a living world requires a god.
[And yes, I totally stole Veirotchka's avatar.]As much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, and as much as the evidence seems to... more
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Cells hold the key to understanding the mechanism, as well as the meaning of life. An individual can be seen as a group of 50 trillion single-celled citizens working together, sharing one “amoebic consciousness”. Cell communities are role models for groups of individuals.Cells hold the key to understanding the mechanism, as well as the meaning of life. An... more
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"A leading anthropologist has questioned the popular idea that religion developed and spread because it encouraged social bonding, by arguing that faith and belief is nothing but a figment of human imagination.
Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics argues that humans are the only species to practice religion because they're the sole creatures to have evolved imagination. According to Bloch"s theory, initially humans had to develop the essential brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't subsist physically, and the likelihood that people somehow survive on after their death.
Once this was done, they had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Exclusively, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unite with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead.
He explained that the transcendental social also permits humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct linked with religion. "What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," New Scientist magazine quoted him, as saying.
"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it. Moreover, the composition of such groups, whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead," he added.
He argues that no animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the routine and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life. The reason for this, he says, is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans can.
Bloch believes our ancestors evolved the essential neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age. "The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," he said.
"Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental," he added. But Bloch argues that religion is only one expression of this exceptional ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.
"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society," he said.
"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he added. Bloch has detailed his findings in the journal of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.""A leading anthropologist has questioned the popular idea that religion developed... more
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"When it comes to saving lives, God trumps doctors for many Americans.
An eye-opening survey reveals widespread belief that divine intervention can revive dying patients. And, researchers said, doctors "need to be prepared to deal with families who are waiting for a miracle."
More than half of randomly surveyed adults -- 57 percent -- said God's intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared that treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand that treatment continue.
When asked to imagine their own relatives being gravely ill or injured, nearly 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a hopeless outcome.
"Sensitivity to this belief will promote development of a trusting relationship" with patients and their families, according to researchers. That trust, they said, is needed to help doctors explain objective, overwhelming scientific evidence showing that continued treatment would be worthless.
Pat Loder, a Milford, Michigan, woman whose two young children were killed in a 1991 car crash, said she clung to a belief that God would intervene when things looked hopeless.
"When you're a parent and you're standing over the body of your child who you think is dying ... you have to have that" belief, Loder said.
Although doctors should be prepared to deal with those beliefs, they also shouldn't "sugarcoat" the truth about a patient's condition, Loder said."
(More at link)
Do you "have to have" that belief? Sounds kind of like "there are no atheists in foxholes"- which I think is very untrue.
Do you believe in divine intervention?
"When it comes to saving lives, God trumps doctors for many Americans.
An... more
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"No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not Great.""No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not... more
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samply
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4 years ago
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35 people spent almost six months living in a primitive underground cave, waiting for the world to end next month. Attempts to persuade them to come out - you had to shout down a chimney - didn't work.
Now 17 members of a Russian doomsday cult emerged from their remote underground hiding place. They had apparently concluded that the recent collapse of part of their roof meant God now wanted them to return to the surface.35 people spent almost six months living in a primitive underground cave, waiting for... more
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"Religious, but not Spiritual? Good News and Bad News from the World's Largest Religion
It takes a moment to reconcile oneself to the fact that the religious tradition of St. Francis and Mother Theresa is also the tradition of the Crusades and the Inquisition. Fr. Thomas Keating, considered one of the great contemplatives of our time, has spent a lifetime in the practice of Christianity, seeking and sharing its depths. The goal of the tradition, suggests Fr. Thomas in this week's video, is transformationâbut transformation into what? ""Religious, but not Spiritual? Good News and Bad News from the World's... more
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The Virgin Mary appears on a Florida family's cell phone after it gets microwaved by a two-year-old girl.The Virgin Mary appears on a Florida family's cell phone after it gets microwaved... more
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