Christianity’s Challenge
by Rebecca Bynum (October 2013)
First and foremost, modern religion must not be an affront to reason and secondly, its morality must be of the highest order, unconfused by the superstition and paganism of the past. The ancient anthropomorphic God who was jealous, vengeful and unjust, who demanded sacrifice and suffering and found pleasure in the same, must finally be left behind, acknowledged as a stage of religious development, but no more.
The idea that the blood of the Lamb washes away our sins portrays too much paganism, reflects too much magic and barters too much superstition to uphold the mighty religion of Jesus anymore. The great lesson of the cross must be that God will not interfere in the free decisions of human beings, not that God required the suffering of his innocent son to appease his anger over the state of sinful humanity. God allowed the decisions of all those who sought the death of the Son of Man to be made freely. God does not force man to turn to him, to love him or even to recognize him. God allows man his sin because he allows man his freedom.
when he said, “Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists — they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”
Finding living faith means embracing radical freedom. Is Christianity ready for that?
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Allah is Dead, Why Islam is Not a Religion.
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