Ernie: " It is a great challenge for orthodox Christianity to articulate how and why we differ from that consensus in positive ways, not just negative ones."
AND , although I am anything but orthodox, also a challenge for me, especially since years ago I was a member of the Baha'i Faith. A good number of things from those years I regard highly and still value, but this is not among them. Billy ====================================== 4/18/2012 12:24:16 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: Hi Billy, On Apr 18, 2012, at 11:02 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: It does seem that the view, "all religions are different paths to the same God," has triumphed in America -for now, anyway. This view has a corollary, that the scriptures of all the world's religions teach essentially the same thing. Baha'i religion, Theosophy, and Uni-Universalism make this teaching central to their worldviews. Which is where --precisely-- this idea entered our culture, starting in the late 19th century / first decade of the 20th century. One writer I know calls it "moral therapeutic deism." _Moralistic therapeutic deism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism) He describes it as a disease of the church (what our friend Ross Douthat would call a 'heresy' :-). However, I think it is actually America's de-facto civil religion. Even the New Atheists are among its most fervent subscribers. Just about everybody in our culture implicitly assumes: - universal right and wrong ("moral") - personal happiness as the definitive metric, if not the highest value ("therapeutic") - an orderly universe susceptible to rational inquiry (*'deism") It is a great challenge for orthodox Christianity to articulate how and why we differ from that consensus in positive ways, not just negative ones. -- Ernie P. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: _http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism_ (http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism) Radical Centrism website and blog: _http://RadicalCentrism.org_ (http://radicalcentrism.org/) -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
