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not just saying “I’m agnostic, and this isn’t progressive christianity, it is the realization that we’ve been obeying outdated and detrimental rules and thoughts”.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.
Hi Katie,
I have struck up a correspondence with exminister Brian Worley the creator of http://www.exminister.org. He writes about “philosophical Christianity”. He is an ex-baptist so you can assume he was soaked in literalism.
What is encouraging is to find clerics who sense the game is up, realize the real hazards iron age thought poses for the modern world and are willing to undergo such radical change in their thinking. Of course there is one expriest who flatly states he is petrified at the thought of losing the only job he ever knew. So, he goes through the motions, although his heart is no longer in it and he knows deep down that he is a fraud.
It is sad is it not. Most clerics are not evil people, just horribly misguided and frightened. It takes courage to face your own mortality and stare into the existential abyss.
I think the likes of John Shelby Spong are doing good… Many atheists wonder why such people keep calling themselves Christian. It’s one of those crazy things: if you want to try to contribute to the tribe, you need to still bear the tribe’s name.
The essence/value of religion is its community building aspects. (Refer also: anthropological theories on the origins of religion.) With this take on Christianity, it is about the shared mythos, the shared collection of stories that defines the culture.
The Greeks had their mythological stories, I’d love to argue that they didn’t take them as seriously as today’s literalist fundamentalists. But I can’t really back that up… Within these stories, you find lots of material with which to discuss life issues. Sure, we could use movies or books, or even soapies and the like, but for that kind of pervasive impact we’d need to define which are Canonical to our culture.
More organic tribes form around shared interests. Maybe that’s better, anyway. But still, there is this huge tribe with one particular Canon. And that’s where these people help out. It lets the tribe discover or evolve secularism without having to discard their cherished stories and ways of speaking…
One pastor/preacher saying just that, is one pastor/preacher that officially “deconverts” and is then no longer of use to helping the tribe. OK, they can then also help in other ways, but I’m sure we’d agree that having multiple angles of “attack” is beneficial, to reaching the maximum number of people?
Yea, philosophical differences. Abrupt deconversion versus gradual shift. Abrupt deconversion just isn’t an option for everyone, and can be particularly traumatic.
OK, let me stop babbling.
I have to say, despite your prior anti-Dawkins comments, this post could have come right out of God Delusion. And don’t take that the wrong way, it was a good post.
It’s strange when a complete and public rejection of the central tenants of a person’s faith, coupled with that person’s decision to remain in that faith, becomes a “good thing.”
I majored in psychology and was quite gung-ho about it until the 4th year, when they let you in on a little secret: all the mumbo-jumbo that distinguishes the disciplines is really only effective because it puts you in a position of authority over the patient, and patients who go to counsellors thrive best when the counsellor is the authoritative, confident keeper of almost-mystical knowledge.
The other real important part of it all was the social connection between two people. We were just learning to spout that mumbo-jumbo so we could sound like we really believed it.
Yes, I was majoring in “faith-healing” without ever realizing it.*
The thing is, faith-healing in this context is often really effective. So my decision was: do I pretend to believe the mumbo-jumbo and use it to help people? I couldn’t do it. It was like discovering that rubbing a potato on a wart doesn’t have any medical effect whatsoever, but still being asked to do it; the cure wasn’t real; I couldn’t administer a placebo.
So even though I couldn’t take it further, I can perfectly understand a minister who sees the “community” aspect of religion so helpful that she continues to promote it even after re-evaluating the mumbo-jumbo. But what I can’t understand is how such a minister could publically ADMIT the mumbo-jumbo is false…that’s like giving placebos to patients and saying “oh, by the way, it’s only a sugar pill.”
* This is a generalization; there ARE some disciplinary distinctions that are useful to particular types of patients and problems.
Errr, tenants = tenets.
I like the sentence formed with tenants. Does “Central tenants of the faith” refer to the most high-profile believers, like Tom Cruise and John Travolta for Scientology?
Hi Katie,
Just to save you from continuing to puke, I didn’t quite say “I’m not an atheist, just because I don’t understand – I don’t believe.” I’m absolutely an atheist when it comes to the biblical descriptions of God and I’m pretty sure I said that. But I’m not going to be as dogmatic as some of the fashionable atheists who deny anything they can’t understand. I said if I don’t know, I’ll say I don’t know. And I did. I also said that if there is something going on that we don’t understand, I expect it will be discovered to be a natural phenomenon, not something supernatural.
Also, as for the DNA point, I was not proposing that to be what the soul is and I never used the word aura. It’s on tape–check it out. I spoke about the provocative work that Simon Berkovitch and Pim Van Lommel, M.D. –http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/29/life_goes_on/ — did based on near death experiences through which they proposed that our DNA coding links us to an electromagnetic field around the body might be where memory resides. The magazine editors referred to it as soul. It’s just one of many scientific explorations to figure stuff out. And it will be scientist who figure that stuff out. Not theologians.
Hope you’re feeling better.
gretta
To KT and to Gretta:
Contends is the key word here.
Here’s a more detailed explanation of Dr. Van Lommel’s study. While his study points to a separation of mind and body — it’s far from well-accepted fact and very far from both: “DNA coding links us to an electromagnetic field around the body might be where memory resides” and “The soul is your DNA altering your aura around you”.
This kind of research cherry-picking is what makes new-age religions so scummy (See: What the Bleep Do We Know, and The Secret) — studies done with quantum entanglement and studies done with/on consciousness are particularly vulnerable to such cherry-picking. While I appreciate The United Church’s revitalization campaign, I have to say, it is not the job of my preacher/minister to keep me up to date on the latest scientific studies … especially studies done in fields that they have no background in what so ever.
Alon, you’re right, I was really referring to John Travolta, but I was afraid he’d punch me out so I changed it.
I too, share your view of Greta Vosper, though as a practicing progressive Christian from the radical tradition.
While I’m fine with Vosper’s philosophy of love and believe in the inclusion of all people within the Christian church regardless of belief (though I must admit it would be mighty difficult for them), I can’t really wrap my head around why she would consider herself a Christian anymore, nor why she would suggest that the church should drop all things Christian.
Someone on this string said something about a common mythos–I absolutely agree. While I do believe in God (though a non-theistic, spiritual essence of things) and the centrality of Jesus Christ in the Christian story, I do not believe in the supernatural. Vosper does not really subscribe to either the idea of God or a spiritual centre of justice, nor does she subscribe to the importance of Jesus within the matrix of the Christian story. Jesus may not have been the only “prophet” in history, but he is our archetype and the matrix through which we view our philosophy, spirituality, ethics and traditions. Hate to say it, you can’t have “Christian” without “Christ.” While I believe the church needs to rejuvenate Christ and the surrounding language to give it fresh meaning, I figure you might as well start going to a “Spiritualist” or a Unitarian church, or start a club of some sort, rather than attending a Christian church.
Even Spong calls God the “essence of being” while Vosper simply calls God an agreement of common community values. Spong also affirms the centrality of Jesus within the Christian tradition. Vosper does neither, and really, while I do not believe I have the right to say whether someone is a Christian or not–she doesn’t really fit the definition.
Perhaps Jesus has little meaning for her, but that doesn’t mean Jesus has no meaning for the rest of the Church, nor that if we go secular we will suddenly rejuvenate. If Christianity dies, I’d rather have it do so than lose it’s uniqueness to some form of homogenized secularism.