Gretta Vosper is a minister at West hill United Chruch. She’s a fantastic speaker (like, nice to listen to) and a really nice person. But her talk in general - less than impressed.
In my personal opinion there are a few things you need in order to call yourself a christian. i don’t claim to be any sort of religion expert - but I’ve grown up with it, lived with it and studied it. And from what I’ve seen in my short couple decades on earth is that generally, you need God and/or Christ to call yourself a christian.
Gretta preposes that neither of these really exists. She talks about not taking the bible literally or even really using it for anything useful.
Gretta is invovled with what the United Church is calling “progressive christianity“. Ever since the book Why Christianity Must Change or Die came out ministers who deem themselve “progressive” have been trying to save their church. What are they really doing? Taking steps to becoming secular.
- no god
- no christ
- not taking anything out of the bible literally
- admitting that the bible is basically…entirely fictional
- saying that “community” is what is important…
It’s secularism, only she’s covered it with fluffy bullshit about “love”…we all need to love, believe in love, follow love, let love guide the way… blah blah blah. She’s coping out by not just saying “I’m agnostic, and this isn’t progressive christianity, it is the realization that we’ve been obeying outdated and detrimental rules and thoughts”. I’d like for once for a minister to just say that. She did, however read some songs that her husband had written, it was nice to hear something like that being done in CFI - I didn’t particularly like it, because it just felt like church, but I know other people appreciated a more “artsy” approach to things for once.
My step dad tries to get around it by calling god everyone’s “something”, as if this is some sort of appropriate definition. Whatever you want to call god, you get to call god. Whatever you want to call faith, spirituality or belief is valid, because it’s your “religion” so no one can deny it. That’s where this is going. I can’t deny my step-dads god because apparently I don’t “understand” it, and I can’t take away his definition of “his lord”. I’m sorry, but to me, when you’re allowed to arbitrarily define things that are so important it tends to not only lose meaning, but credibility.
Two things specifically that Gretta said that made me nearly puke:
- “I’m not an atheist. Just because I don’t understand - I don’t believe”
- “The soul is your DNA altering your aura around you”
I’ll allow you to see the stupidity of #2 all on your own - but #1… it made me boil inside. I hate it when people tell me I’m an atheist because I don’t understand religion. I don’t get what it feels like to feel ‘christ’ and to be ‘loved’ by ‘god’. I do know what it’s like to think those things. I was religious for many years. So I do know what it’s like to feel the “love” and all the fluffy emotions that come with something that can offer so much support in life. I just refuse to not look past it all.
Anyway - good for CFI to put on an event with a minister, I didn’t like it, but it definitely brought in a different crowd and it was good to hear a different opinion and view point, no matter how much I didn’t like it. It made for good bar fights later, too.
