However, I stand by my statements about Christianity. Of course they don’t really help the dialogue about open-source Christianity. I don’t have much of an opinion about that. Personally, I feel that whatever Christians want to do with their religion is up to them, as long as their decisions don’t affect me and my life.

“If an individual can be spiritually mature enough to respond to the Word of God and take Jesus into their heart, what prohibits them from being mature enough to study and make other spiritual decisions on their own?”

I think that making the “respond to the Word of God and take Jesus into their heart” decision is one that makes a lot of other decisions for you or will at least influence future decisions. In the same way that wearing pink glasses might influnce your favorite color (as others perceive it), wearing a religion can influence many different kinds of decisions, as many as the religion decides to help it’s host with.

Spiritually mature? My mind goes blank.

“If it’s only a lack of training, then let’s train them. But this means that we’re going to have to be open and trusting and allow people to make decisions on their own, and possibly even some mistakes. For some people, this is all a necessary part of the learning process.”

You imply that we are not being open and trusting and that we are not allowing people to make decisions on their own, welcome to the human race Please excuse the sarcasm but this behaviour does not seem to me emergent upon contact with religion or even much exacerbated by it.

We will be seen by some to try to control things “in our environment”, like every other organism and there is no euclidian dividing line between in-me and out-of-me, or between me and you that is not a model, so my environment is everything from what goes on in my mind/spirit/body/being to what I experience with my senses. From my perspective it’s ALL me!

You can’t escape the silliness in preaching to preachers about not preaching what they preach because it’s ruining what you preach but then to silly is human.

On a more cynical note, I think if you are going to stop doing your religion find another way to deal with your loneliness first. Getting rid of your friends will definately stop them from dragging you down but you’ll be alone. Imagine you are in a religion (in the sense of the word gang) and you decide that it isn’t what god wants. Do you try to get the gang to convert you again? Do you throw away your gang? Do you start another one and get them to come with you? Or do you weigh up the pros and cons as they affect you and **** what you reckon, or the book says, god wants? I think most people go for that last option and personally I’m glad

Further:

For me, the truth of Christ and His gospel in the Scriptures is strong enough to stand under the greatest criticisms without my silly antics.

If that’s the case, then why criticize people who are authentically trying to understand that truth? I also don’t understand what you mean when you suggest that we should tolerate your narrow-mindedness, but you’re free to write others off at will for seemingly small doctrinal differences.

I regret if you’ve received any harsh treatment from other commenters on my site. Their statements do not reflect my original intentions.

Yes, I’m narrow-minded and that really seems to put a lot of people out. But that’s okay, right? If tolerance is a value we hold dearly, can you tolerate me? You’ll find no “stamping of feet, talking louder and louder,” with me, that’s a promise. It may feel like I come across like that sometimes, but just know that’s not my ‘pastoral’ style. For me, the truth of Christ and His gospel in the Scriptures is strong enough to stand under the greatest criticisms without my silly antics. THanks for the interchange.

“different spiritual planes” = “you’re going to hell”

I can’t imagine any place worse than some corners of this reality. So perhaps Christians believe in reincarnation after all!

In fact, I’m willing to work with Christians on issues of common interest, i.e. the right of the individual to control the space inside his own skull. (I also believe in the right of the individual to control the rest of his body, but I don’t think I’ll get general buy-in from Christians on that one.) Of course, some Christians believe that the right to freedom-of-thought extends only to Christians and not to non-Christians, so the value of any such alliance would be somewhat questionable.

However, I don’t know that I have a lot to say to Wilkerson. I started out in life as a Roman Catholic, moved onto the Episcopal Church for awhile before giving up on Christianity entirely. I have no problem with Jesus’ message, or Jesus himself for that matter. What I have a problem with is His followers.

If Christianity were truly superior to other available religions, then I would expect that on average Christian states and civilizations would behave “better” than those spawned by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. After 2000 years of Christianity in the West, it is clear that Christians are no better than non-Christians, and there may be some indication that (historically) Christians have behaved much worse than non-Christians. I realize that we live in an imperfect world, so we cannot expect perfection, even from the One True Faith. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that, averaged over the long-term, Christians would behave perceptively more ethically than their non-Christian counterparts. Not true historically, and certainly not true today. (One might quibble about Muslim fundamentalists, and I’m willing to concede that one).

My little personal rant about Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with the open-source question. But there is a larger issue that touches on the issue being discussed. Any spiritual or religious principle, or collection of principles (including an entire religion) should have to withstand scrutiny over general moral or ethical principles. There should be empirical tests, administered by the community of “open-source theologians”, upon any religious or theological idea. Obviously this gets complex because different people(s) have different values, but there should at least be some internal consistency. In my view, conventional (non-Gnostic) Christianity fails to live up even to its own ideals.

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