Your Take: Does the Bible condemn homosexuality?

Posted by: The Editors - CNN Belief Blog
http://tinyurl.com/6jhwob7

There were thousands of comments on Thursday's Belief Blog post arguing that the Bible condemns homosexuality, a response to another guest post arguing that the Bible is much more ambiguous on homosexuality than previously thought.

Most of the comments appear to doubt the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality - or challenge the wisdom looking to the Bible for guidance on such matters. And, as usual, we're struck by all the atheist comments. They seem to far outnumber believers' comments. [...]

[Full Article]

Finding the Shared Basis of Spirituality

By Dhruv Chatterjee
Dhruv Chatterjee is a College sophomore from Kolkata, India.

 

There is an old joke that claims that God blessed us all of us with spirituality until the Devil decided to organize it and call it religion.

While this joke is obviously rather cynical, it does bring to light an important distinction that exists between organized religion and spirituality itself. Religion may be the starting point from which we begin our journey to connect with God, but ultimately, only spirituality is what will get us there. Religion is the starting point of interest, and spirituality is the medium.

~ ~ ~

So what, then is spirituality? Spirituality is the religion above all religions and atheism. Spirituality is belief strong enough to transcend knowledge, differences in humanity and imperfections.

Spirituality is God, free of human perceptions and attributes. It is unity consciousness. It is the understanding that when Christ said to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” he meant that harming others is effectively harming oneself.

 [Full Article]

Manchester Orchestra - Simple Math

When Truth is the Enemy of Truth

by Donald Miller
http://tinyurl.com/4ozd6h2

When theologians throw out anomalies that threaten their paradigms, they respect their interpretation of truth more than truth, or worse, believe their interpretation of truth is actually truth. They use terms like Biblical and heretic to convince themselves and others that their interpretation is the real truth and others are a threat to “the gospel” or to God Himself. This sort of language isn’t helpful or respectful of anomalies, not to mention it’s behavior indicates a genuine intellectual threat that should be taken seriously, not dismissed as heresy.

~ ~ ~

1. Is the Bible supposed to be used like a constitution? And if so, why isn’t it structured as such?

2. How do we reconcile propositional truth with the language of Christ who claims to actually be truth?

3. If to know Christ is to know truth, how do we give up the metrics we commonly use to decide whether or not somebody is a Christian? Do we create relational metrics, or simply give control over to God and just introduce people to the person of Christ?

4. Why do certain sects within evangelical Christianity claim their interpretation of truth as absolute, when their interpretation is fit with unanswered anomalies? (I suppose thats the point of this post.)

Mideast: They're doing it without us

By Andrew J. Bacevich

 Los Angeles Times

Rendering a decade of U.S. policy irrelevant, the people of the Middle East are transforming the region themselves.

The ongoing upheaval in the Arab world (and in Iran) has rendered a definitive judgment on U.S. policy over the last decade. Relying on their own resources and employing means of their own devising, the people of the Middle East intent on transforming that region have effectively consigned the entire "war on terror" to the category of strategic irrelevance.

When first conceived in the wake of 9/11, two convictions underpinned that war. According to the first, precluding further attacks on the United States meant that the Islamic world needed to change. According to the second, because Muslims were manifestly unable to change on their own, the United States needed to engineer the process, with American military might serving as catalyst. Freedom (or at least submission) would issue from the barrel of a GI's assault rifle.

~ ~ ~

In Afghanistan, then Iraq and now, of course, AfPak, U.S. efforts to promote change have achieved — at best — mixed results. Meanwhile, the costs incurred have proved painfully high. In terms of treasure expended, lives lost and moral authority squandered, Americans have paid a lot and gotten precious little in return.

 [Full Article]