#Universalism

[brothernick]

#meditation #philosophy #spirituality #enlightenment #mindfulmeditation #mantra #advaita #illumination #mysticism #jesus christ #god #yahweh #father #gnostic christianity #orthodox christianity #christianity #catholic #prayer #unitarian #universalism

[luminousfire]

“We overleap the boundaries of church membership and find Lutherans and Roman Catholics, Jews and Christians, within the Fellowship. We re-read the poets and saints, and the Fellowship is enlarged. With urgent hunger we read the Scriptures, with no thought of pious exercise, but in order to find more friends of the soul.” - Thomas R. Kelly; a Testament of Devotion

#progressive christianity #christian #quaker #quakerism #progressive christian #universalism #radical christian #christian universalism #religious pluralism

[friendinstrument]

The wonderful thing about pluralism is that it allows you to see the truth that has been disputed, hidden, hated, and fought for so much of the history of Christianity.

Just as God loves and has a mighty use for all of his children, he similarly loves and has mighty uses for all of his Christians.

I was raised in the evangelical Baptist tradition, and there is truth in a church of equals where the gospel is discussed plainly. There is also beauty in Catholic and Orthodox art, and God can be a mighty muse. Every tradition of Christianity has its wonderful beauty.

Every faith has its divine-inspired beauty. I adore the sound of the Shofar and the Azzan, the serenity and peace of Buddhist temples, and the wonderful cornucopia of ways that people worship God in their own way, in whichever of God's faces they praise.

#quaker #christianity #universalism #pluralism

[chronostachyon]

As someone who's not a professional therapist but has had to develop a deep understanding of psychology in order to figure out my own issues, I kind of wish I could sit down with J. R. R. Tolkien about how much of himself he poured into Eä, and how guilty he felt about having the hubris to write down his own little imitation of what he imagined the Christian God's forging of reality must have been like. To put words in Eru Ilúvatar's mouth, when Eru Ilúvatar is very much a likeness of Tolkien's own God.

On the surface you can easily see that he identifies quite a bit with Gandalf, Aragorn, and especially and most openly Beren. But if you read between the lines -- of the story of the Ainulindalë, with Melkor's arrogant dissonance, and of the forging of the dwarves by Aulë, whose actions clearly meant to be compared and contrasted with Melkor's -- I think the beings that Tolkien identified with deep down were Melkor and the Maiar of Aulë who defected to him (especially Sauron and Saruman). He saw himself as harboring a piece of Satan within himself, and could not forgive himself for it, and therefore could not see a path of redemption and forgiveness for them.

I don't think it's a shock to say that I see Tolkien as (a) being autistic, in that noticeable way that makes one feel like a social outcast for liking weird things and being upset that so many ordinary things "don't make sense", and (b) that he suffered from severe PTSD, which may well have preceded his time in the WWI trenches based on the depth of his self-loathing.

Aulë was Tolkien's idea of a "good autist": creative, excited about the possibilities of complex things built from simple ones, but humble and subservient to his own Creator. Melkor was a "bad autist": creative, but wants to be in control so everything can meet his personal definition of order, jealous of God for having abilities that he does not but lacking the humility to admit it and therefore refusing subservience to the inherently superior being, as the "natural order" dictates.

I think, if you plopped me down in Hobbiton a few weeks before Bilbo's 111th birthday, I could actually talk Sauron into redemption and the War of the Ring could be entirely avoided. Part of that is my own PTSD fawning response at work, I'm sure, as I'm always on the lookout for how to "fix" fictional bullies, but I see something in how Saruman looks at Sauron, and how Sauron looks at Melkor, and how Melkor looks at Eru, that I could call out and make explicit and force Sauron to confront about himself. I think I understand Sauron's will well enough that I could sit down with the Ring and have a conversation with it, maybe to one day reunite it with Sauron so he could be made whole again.

I see this in Sauron because I see it in Tolkien because I see it in myself: the thing I find hateful about Eä is that I hate all imbalances of power. They are inherently unfair. Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman each sought to wrest power from a tyrant, but thought only of having that power for themselves, rather than seeing the symmetry of the situation and realizing that power over others is inherently evil.

Tolkien could never openly admit this, perhaps not even to himself, because it's pretty explicitly blasphemous. It implies that the standard Catholic theodicy of Free Will is hollow; that God was evil all along and that the serpent in Eden spoke the truth, and that God was never anything more than a petty tyrant undeserving of worship.

But there's also something Tolkien's faith kind of got a little bit right: redemption. The sin of Saruman and Sauron and Melkor and Eru is the sin of the Christian God, but sin is not a permanent taint so much as it's the harm we do to others, and if we stop hurting others and start considering their well-being in our actions -- especially their autonomy and self-determination -- then that sin will fade from the world with time and patience.

In the end, Tolkien wasn't wrong about preferring Aulë over Melkor for his humility, but he was wrong about the purpose of humility and why it's a virtue. Humility isn't servility or obedience; it's acknowledgement that one does not and can not understand everything that is. Humility is a virtue because each and every living being is the only expert in the world about that particular being's actual lived experiences, no matter how much broader your experiences may be than theirs. The real fantasy of Christianity is the fantasy that God knows more about your life and how you feel about it than you do, which is a lot less lonely and scary than the truth: you are the only person in the world who can make your choices for you.

#tolkien #lord of the rings #the silmarillion #atheist criticism of christianity #universalism

[thischristianguy]

@benito-cereno @apocrypals This happened before Benito jumped Elon's X-Change

#cs lewis #narnia #universalism #theology #christianity #aslan

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Matt Johnson

Published: Jan 27, 2023

“Christopher Hitchens: From socialist to neocon.” It was an irresistible headline because it’s a story that has been told over and over again. The novelist Julian Barnes called this phenomenon the “ritual shuffle to the right.” Richard Seymour, who wrote a book-length attack on Hitchens, says his subject belongs to a “recognisable type: a left-wing defector with a soft spot for empire.” By presenting Hitchens as a tedious archetype, hobbling away from radicalism and toward some inevitable reactionary terminus, his opponents didn’t have to contend with his arguments or confront the potentially destabilizing fact that some of his principles called their own into question.

Hitchens, who died in 2011, didn’t make it easy on the apostate hunters. To many, he was a “coarser version of [conservative commentator] Norman Podhoretz” when he talked about Iraq, and a radical humanist truth-teller when he went on Fox News to lambaste the Christian right: “If you gave Falwell an enema,” he told Sean Hannity the day after Jerry Falwell’s death, “he could be buried in a matchbox.” Then he gave Islam the same treatment, and he was suddenly a drooling neocon again. He defied easy categorization: a socialist who spurned ideology, an internationalist who became a patriot, a man of the left who was reviled by the left.

The left isn’t a single amorphous entity—it’s a vast constellation of (often conflicting) ideas and principles. Hitchens’s style of left-wing radicalism is now out of fashion, but it has a long and venerable history: George Orwell’s unwavering opposition to totalitarianism and censorship, Bayard Rustin’s advocacy for universal civil rights without appealing to tribalism and identity politics, the post-communist anti-totalitarianism that emerged on the European left in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hitchens described himself as a “First Amendment absolutist,” an echo of historic left-wing struggles for free expression—from Eugene V. Debs’s assertion of his right to dissent during World War I to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Hitchens argued that unfettered free speech and inquiry would always make civil society stronger. When he wrote the introduction to his collection of essays For the Sake of Argument in 1993, he had a specific left-wing tradition in mind: the left of Orwell and Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, which simultaneously opposed Stalinism, fascism, and imperialism in the twentieth century, and which stood for “individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism.”

Hitchens’ most fundamental political and moral conviction was universalism. He loathed nationalism and argued that the international system should be built around a “common standard for justice and ethics”—a standard that should apply to Henry Kissinger just as it should apply to Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein. He believed in the concept of global citizenship, which is why he firmly supported international institutions like the European Union. He didn’t just despise religion because he regarded it as a form of totalitarianism—he also recognized that it’s an infinitely replenishable wellspring of tribal hatred.

He also opposed identity politics, because he didn’t think our social and civic lives should be reduced to rigid categories based on melanin, X chromosomes, and sexuality. He recognized that the Enlightenment values of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience, humanism, pluralism, and democracy are universal—they provide the most stable, just, and rational foundation for any civil society, whether they’re observed in America or Europe or Iraq.

And yes, he argued that these values are for export. Hitchens believed in universal human rights. This is why, at a time when his comrades were still manning the barricades against the “imperial” West after the Cold War, he argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should intervene to stop a genocidal assault on Bosnia. It’s why he argued that American power could be used to defend human rights and promote democracy. As many on the Western left built their politics around incessant condemnations of their own societies as racist, exploitative, oligarchic, and imperialistic, Hitchens recognized the difference between self-criticism and self-flagellation.

-

One of the reasons Orwell accumulated many left-wing enemies in his time was the fact that his criticisms of his own “side” were grounded in authentic left-wing principles. When he argued that many socialists had no connection to or understanding of the actual working class in Britain, the observation stung because it was true. Orwell’s arguments continue to sting today. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” he criticized the left-wing intellectuals who enjoy “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.” Among some of these intellectuals, Orwell wrote: “One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries.”

Hitchens observed that many on today’s left are motivated by the same principle: “Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government.” This is a predictable manifestation of what the American political theorist Michael Walzer calls the “default position” of the left: a purportedly “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist” position inclined toward the view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.”

Indeed, the tendency to ignore and rationalize even the most egregious violence and authoritarianism abroad in favor of an obsessive emphasis on the crimes and blunders of Western governments has become a reflex. Much of the left has been captured by a strange mix of sectarian and authoritarian impulses: a myopic emphasis on identitarianism and group rights over the individual; an orientation toward subjectivity and tribalism over objectivity and universalism; and demands for political orthodoxy enforced by repressive tactics like the suppression of speech.

These left-wing pathologies are particularly corrosive today because they give right-wing nationalists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic—whose rise over the past several years has been characterized by hostility to democratic norms and institutions, rampant xenophobia, and other forms of illiberalism—an opportunity to claim that those who oppose them are the true authoritarians. Hitchens was prescient about the ascendance of right-wing populism in the West, from the emergence of demagogues who exploit cultural grievances and racial resentments to the bitter parochialism of “America First” nationalism. He understood that the left could only defeat these noxious political forces by rediscovering its best traditions: support for free expression, pluralism, and universalism—the values of the Enlightenment.

Hitchens closes his book Why Orwell Matters with the following observation: “What he [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.” Despite the pervasive idea that Hitchens exchanged one set of convictions for another by the end of his life, his commitment to his core principles never wavered. They are principles that today’s left must rediscover.

Matt Johnson is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment, from which this piece is excerpted.

#Matt Johnson #How Hitchens Can Save the Left #liberalism #liberal ethics #universalism #pluralism #freedom of speech #freedom of expression #free speech #first amendment #identity politics #identarianism #woke authoritarianism #authoritarianism #tribalism #religion is a mental illness

[thewordinblackandred]

#leftist #leftistchristianity #thewordinblackandred #henry kissinger #kissinger is dead #universalism #imperialism

[godlovesuu]

Spoiler alert for the Bible:

God will be All in All, one day every tongue will confess, God doesn't cast anyone off for forever, the gates of heaven are left open with the spirit inviting those outside to come in,Jesus redeems all not just some, and Jesus went into hell to preach to the dead.

Universalism isn't a heresy, it's a primary founding belief of the Christian faith.

So tell me again why you believe a loving God chooses eternal consciousness torment over their own divine will?

#christian universalism #christianity #universalism #unitarian universalism

[wisdomfish]

Christianity: Divine Rescue

Christianity is a religion, not of self-help, but of divine rescue. Thus, to understand “atonement,” a person must first understand both humanity’s sinful condition and God’s just wrath against sin. For without sin, there is no divine wrath, and without divine wrath, there is no need for salvation. This important context makes the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross all the more comprehensible.

WHAT IS SIN?

At its core, sin is an assertion of spiritual autonomy (a declared independence, even of God); generally described as missing the mark set by God, going astray from God, actively rebelling against God, and taking the form of violating God’s expressed commands. Sin might rightly be defined as anything (including actions, attitudes, and nature) contrary to the moral character and commands of God. Sin is also defined as unrighteousness, godlessness, and lawlessness.

“Wash me thoroughly from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my wrongdoings, and my sin is constantly before me. Against You, You only, I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You are justified when You speak and blameless when You judge… because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so… Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.” ~ Psalm 51:2-4; Romans 8:7; 1 John 3:4

ORIGIN OF SIN

Sin originates in the will of the creature. Adam, in his relationship to God, was not just a private individual. He was not only the first man, he was also representative man. God chose to treat Adam’s actions (either obedience or disobedience) as representative of all humanity’s actions. When Adam disobeyed God, it wasn’t just Adam who broke favor with God, but all his descendants as well. Sin and guilt transferred from the fall of Adam to all of Adam’s progeny. Consequently, humans are not sinners simply because they happen to sin, they sin because they are sinners by nature.

“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned… So then, as through one offense the result was condemnation to all mankind, so also through one act of righteousness the result was justification of life to all mankind. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous… If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” ~ Romans 5:12; 18-19; 1 John 1:8

TOTAL DEPRAVITY

Sin is universal and resides at the very core (inner being) of every individual [except Jesus], affecting the entire person - including the human mind, will, affections, and body. Human beings are thus ‘totally depraved.’

Total depravity doesn’t mean that people are completely or utterly evil, but it means that people are pervasively sinful (sin has affected their total being), making it impossible for human beings to merit the favor of God [except Jesus].

Fallen human beings are capable of doing certain morally good acts, but their sinful nature renders them incapable of living in a way completely pleasing to God.

“Indeed, there is not a righteous person on earth who always does good and does not ever sin… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Ecclesiastes 7:20; Romans 3:23

Given man’s sinful condition and God’s holy and righteous character, man unavoidably faces the just wrath of God. Yet, in the midst of man’s desperate state (divine judgment), God intervened and provided a way of escape [Christ Jesus].

~ Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions

#christianity #universalism #core #inner being #self-help

[brothernick]

Life is a dream.

God is the dreamer.

God is dreaming about us, what it is like to be us and what we do.

Our ego/personality is just a character god is dreaming.

When our lives end, our true self, God, merely wakes up and returns to being Himself.

So we never really die, we Iive on with, through and in God.

#meditation #buddha #philosophy #spirituality #enlightenment #mindfulmeditation #mantra #advaita #illumination #mysticism #jesus christ #catholic #gnostic #gnostic christianity #nonduality #nondualism #gospel #christianity #unitarian #universalism #jesus #life after death #kingdom of heaven #god #yahweh

[fierysword]

God is Eternal

God is Love

Love is Eternal

#universalism #God is Love #thoughts #t

[luminousfire]

“In every church there are many very honourable men, who worship God with justice and loving kindness,’ he reminded Burgh, ‘for we know many men of this kind among the Lutherans, the Reformed, the Mennonites, and the Enthusiasts. So you ought to concede that holiness of life is not peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, but is common to all.” - Spinoza in Spinoza’s Religion, by Clare Carlisle

#progressive christianity #christian #quaker #quakerism #progressive christian #spinoza #pluralism #religious pluralism #universalism

[renegade-hierophant]

There’s no such thing as “universal values”, only those who think their values are the best and an empire spreading them across the world.

#ethics #universalism #imperialism

[crow-collective15]

I swear I nearly cry whenever someone from our church says something kind, or welcomes us to the community because our church is so sweet and I’m so very excited about it and I love humans

#uu #unitarian universalism #Unitarian universalist #unitarian #universalism #uu church

[onancientpaths]

"But here I can at least point out that scripture seems to support my view [against the idea that eternal hell is God respecting human freedom]. ''And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:32): for freedom and truth are one, and not to know the truth is to be enslaved. "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23: 34): not seeing the Good, says God to God, they did not freely choose evil, and must be pardoned. "Everyone committing sin is a slave to sin" (John 8:34): and a slave, needless to say, is not free. Moreover, it is simply obvious that, under normal conditions, we recognize any self-destructive impulse in any person as a form of madness. It makes no more sense, then, to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or out of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy. And, as absurd as is the idea of someone "in a right mind" choosing eternal loneliness and torment rather than eternal love and bliss, the argument becomes all the more insufferably ludicrous when one considers the personal conditions - ignorance, mortality, defectibility of intellect and will - under which each soul enters the world, and the circumstances - the suffering of all creatures, even the most innocent and delightful of them - with which that world confronts the soul." - DBH

#david bentley hart #philokalia #theology #christianity #universalism #hell

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"A lot of people think that what is unique about science is its empiricism: it relies on experience to confirm or throw out statements about reality. Of course, it does do that. But empiricism in that sense is hardly unique to science. All human beings make up their minds by referring to experience.

The question which matters is not “Do you rely on experience to make up your mind about objective statements?” It is “Whose experience do you rely on?” This is where the empirical rule produces its unique answer: only the experience of no one in particular."

-- Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"

#Jonathan Rauch #Kindly Inquisitors #empiricism #universality #universalism #objective reality #empirical rule #science #what science is #liberal science #knowledge #liberal ethics #religion is a mental illness