RevCyn

There has been a lot of talk about God's role in the Newtown, Connecticut shootings.  I have no more (but no less) a direct line to God than anybody else, but these things I know about God.  Others have been saying these things before me, but they bear repeating. This tragedy in Newtown was not "all part of God's plan," and it didn't happen because "God wanted another little angel."   We as human beings have free will.  The shooter made his decisions to kill children and adults, not God.  We also have free will in how we respond.  Go listen to the early interview with the father of Emilie Parker : "The person that chose to act this way was acting with a God-given right to use his free agency and God can’t take that away ... that’s what he chose to do with it. I’m not mad [at God, I'm assuming]. I have my own agency to use this event to do whatever I can to make sure my wife and daughters are taken care of."  Robert Parker has it abs...

A couple of sites are reporting that feminist theologian Mary Daly died this week, although Google News shows no articles yet on the subject.  For those not familiar with Mary Daly... where to begin? Mary Daly is the author of several books, many of which can be found through Beacon Press , which acquired the right to publish them when they would have gone out of print, I believe, including Beyond God the Father , The Church and the Second Sex , and Gyn/Ecology .  Many people heard of Mary Daly because of a controversy while she was a professor at Boston College in the 1990s.  She refused to have men in her classes, offering them separate opportunities to learn from her.  Some students brought this forth as a legal case, and Daly was required by the school to include men in her classes, whereupon she refused to teach.  Mary Daly was the very definition of a "radical feminist."  Clearly many people think she went too far, and would point to her as an exa...

My uncle asks, "If God is love, how does that work?" To elaborate, he means does God still act in people's lives the way God does in the Old Testament? How is a God who is love different from a God who loves ? Does it mean God is all kinds of love--eros, agape, etc.--or just some? Paul Rasor writes in Unitarian Universalist views of God , "Others may use the term God to convey very different ideas, such as the creative power of evolution in the universe, or the power that makes transformation possible in our lives, or the ongoing power of love , or simply the ultimate mystery within which we all must live" (emphasis mine). God, in Rasor's description, is not the God of the Old Testament who acts directly in people's lives, who is a larger-than-human but human-like personality who speaks and makes demands and rewards and punishes. This God who is love is more like a power, as he uses the word in the two preceding phrases about God. God is the power ...

First, some general definitions. Atheist: Someone who does not believe in God. There are many distinctions you can make among atheist--strong, weak, implicit, explicit, practical, theological--but the two major ones are strong atheism vs. weak atheism. A strong Atheist believes that it is certain and clear that there is no God. A weak Atheist does not believe in God, but doesn't assert the lack of God--it could be said to include all forms of non-theists. Non-theist: Someone who does not assert a belief in God. I would include Agnostics, Atheists, most Buddhists, and many others in this group. Some would argue any non-theist is an atheist. I generally reserve the term "Atheist" for the group that is really strong Atheists, and use "non-theists" as the catch-all term. Agnostic: Someone who does not know whether or not God exists. Again, can be divided into many categories, the main ones being strong or weak. A weak Agnostic does not know if there is a G...