"... it should not be surprising that in a culture which inscribes its money with "In God We Trust," atheists might be led to think it is interesting - and perhaps even useful - to deny god exists. It does not seem to occur to atheists, however, that the vague god which some seem to confuse with trust in our money cannot be the same God who raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt."
Jeff Keuss skiver bra om Zizek, kristen tro och om mod att möta tillvaron bortom distanserande abstraktioner:
"In short, people talk a lot, blog endlessly, fill our ears and eyes with media and after the tidal wave of information overload most people still lack a belief in anything that substantially effects their day-to-day lives other than the desire to shop."
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"Where to I go with Žižek on all this? Well, probably to places he would find a bit too ‘touchy feely’ but still in line with large parts of his attempt to revive lost aspects of the Christian narrative. What the perverse core of Christianity as he describes it offers is a grand counter measure to these tendencies to abstraction and is a call to true belief that seeks after the particular to know the universal – that is to say, to have courage to live in relation to marginalized, the disenfranchised, the person who is our neighbor which purpose and resolve in a deeply real way. It means getting involved with each other, knowing our names, and drawing dangerously close in ways that can break our hearts and shatter our precious beliefs from time to time. In keeping the world abstracted and objective, we keep God at bay as well."
via @sebasti_an
"Last week saw a pitiful demonstration of the power of the Internet, coupled with the way global media corporations love to promote religious extremists. Why did the media seize on the words of an obscure, sectarian pastor of an unknown Florida church with less than 50 members and broadcast it to the whole world, knowing that it would inflame Muslim passions? The same media are largely silent when scores of churches are burned down and hundreds of Christians killed in places like India, Nigeria or Indonesia. There is an obvious bias to the media’s religious reporting. Who holds CNN or the BBC morally responsibility for fomenting violence? If one gives whiskey to an alcoholic, knowing he is an alcoholic, isn’t one morally culpable if he gets drunk and kills someone?"Vinoth Ramachandra bloggar om The Media, Violence and Partnership.
"Valrörelser är fyllda av förenklingar. Sverigedemokraternas (SD) sätt att bunta samman alla muslimer till ett hot mot svensk välfärd har avslöjats, senast i en satir på Youtube. Men även en grupp som Humanisterna visar prov på farlig förenkling. Vem synar denna organisation och deras sätt att sammanföra alla religiösa till ett hot mot ett modernt samhälle och dess offentlighet?"Christer Sturmark gav svar på tal, och bjöd in till ganska intressant debatt.
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"Den engelska teologen Tina Beattie hävdar i polemik mot nyateismen att den vetenskapliga rationalismen inte alls befriat oss från allt det onda som våld, krig och hat representerar. Inte heller har religionen vittrat bort utan uppstått i nya former som parasiterar på moderniteten. Religiös och ateistisk extremism hör enligt Beattie samman med en ohistorisk och bokstavlig förståelse av sanning som liknar den hållning vetenskapen periodvis intagit. Den uppvisar samma motstånd mot det mångtydiga, mot tvivel och komplexitet i sökandet efter mening."
"I think Tomáš Halík has produced one of the best and most beautiful responses to the new atheism, in his recent book Patience with God (Doubleday 2009). His argument is that the real difference between faith and atheism is patience. Atheists are not wrong, only impatient. They want to resolve doubt instead of enduring it. Their insistence that the natural world doesn't point to God (or to any necessary meaning) is correct. Their experience of God's absence is a truthful experience, shared also by believers. Faith is not a denial of all this: it is a patient endurance of the ambiguity of the world and the experience of God's absence. Faith is patience with God. Or as Adel Bestavros puts it (in the book's epigraph): patience with others is love, patience with self is hope, patience with God is faith."En tålamodets teologi ...
Om "The Frugal Collegians":
"With one foot in their old Baptist youth group and the other on the unsteady terrain of viewing missions through the lens of post-colonialism, these kids are horizon-broadened, foundation-shaken and mind-blown on a daily basis, as they encounter such things as genocide, non-western plumbing, or Camus for the first time in their lives."
Om "The Bookish Intellectual":Missa inte heller att peka på de olika föremålen på bilderna på orginalsidan.
"... impressively well-read (or at least impressively well aware of all the right books), this is the type of hipster who thrives anytime serious thought is given to just about anything. Is there a theology of corned beef and cabbage? Probably not, but the idea excites the Bookish Intellectual."
Om "The Monied Yuppies":
"More than likely they’ve thrown a Mad Men 60s-themed party or been involved in a discussion group for a book by Donald Miller, G.K. Chesterton or N.T. Wright."
"As a populist movement, and (rightly) allergic to elitism, evangelicalism has either eschewed cultural production altogether or has instead engaged in merely subcultural production—generating the mimicking kitsch that fills Christian “gift” stores across the country. Such subcultural production (that is, the production of an evangelical subculture) actually betrays that “large swaths [of evangelicalism] have been captured by the spirit of the age”. No matter how many Jesus action figures or Hipster Study Bibles™ we might sell, the battle’s already been lost as soon as such phenomena exist. All we’ve done is carve out a new market sector that extends dominant cultural forces. This is a long way from “changing the world,” despite our rhetoric to the contrary. The world has changed us."
"What this overlooked … is that homo sapiens is not only, or even primarily, a maximising animal, choosing rationally between options. We are uniquely a meaning-asking animal. Our most fundamental questions are Who am I? and To which narrative do I belong? The great hope of the liberal imagination, that politics could be superseded with economics, replacing public good with private choice, was bound to fail because economics as such offers no answer to the big questions of “Who?” and “Why?”. Religion does, and that is its power in the contemporary world. The politics of ideology may have died, but it has been replaced not by “the end of history” but by the politics of identity."
Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 40-41
