Exploring the concept of religion from an objective, sociological standpoint, “The Comforting Illusion: Lifting the Veil on Organized Religion” aims to somehow reconcile our modern worldviews with ancient spiritual perspectives.
Tag Archives: creation
Faith Demystified – The Root of Religious Discord
Faith Demystified – The Root of Religious Discord Religious discord comes from bumping into belief systems that do not match our own, however illusory our own systems of belief may be. When I was a pastor, there was a young woman who had been baptized and raised Presbyterian. She was marrying a Baptist and joining […]
Faith Demystified – Richard Dawkins and Atheism
Faith Demystified – Richard Dawkins and Atheism Richard Dawkins is a world class evolutionary biologist. Lately he has been seen as one of atheism’s greatest proponents. In his 2006 book The God Delusion he contends that there is no god and that religious faith is a delusion. In the same year he founded the Richard […]
Faith Demystified – Our Place in the Universe
Demystifying Faith – Our Place in the Universe We are born of the cosmos, and this is not some religious illusion. The iron in our blood and the calcium in our teeth were created in ancient stars that exploded as supernovae, spreading their chemical wealth across the galaxy. We are stardust, and to stardust we […]
Faith Demystified – Prologue
FAITH DEMYSTIFIED Prologue The quest for faith is one of the strongest of all human urges. The oldest archeological sites contain evidence of religious awareness. The Neanderthals buried their dead, suggesting that they were aware of their own mortality. The quest for faith includes of the following categories and more: What happens when we die? […]
A String Theory Vision: Chapter 2
The Spirituality of String Theory String Theory or its close cousin M-theory, with their ten or eleven dimensions, is a universe beyond our comprehension. Cosmologists are still struggling with its workings and what it means for our existence. The origin of String Theory was in trying to describe what happened before the Big Bang. […]
The Progressive Church Dilemma
Progressive churches are in a dilemma, caught between fundamentalism on the one side and secularization on the other side. While progressives have dismissed any interpretation of the Bible that is based upon fundamentalism, it can be very hard to decipher what that post-fundamentalist message actually is. THE MESSAGE Recently I attended a United Methodist Church […]
Divine Paradoxes
Paradoxes are common in both cosmology and in theology. Indeed, this shared quality demonstrates how these two seemingly diverse endeavors are really quite similar, if not two sides of the same coin. A photon can act like either a wave or a particle depending on what is being tested, or what question is being asked. […]
Cosmic Creation and Calamity
I once had a question about volcanoes that launched a spiritual inquiry. Why are their volcanos? They cause so much death and destruction. What purpose do they serve? And, why are they allowed to exist at all? It seems hard to fathom the destructive forces of nature. We expect to be safe and comfortable in […]
The Cosmos and the Logos of God
United Church of Cloverdale Sunday, June 27, 2010 The Work of God’s Fingers Psalm 8:1-9 Greg Bentall When I was a small boy I loved to sleep out under the stars. I could spend hours just watching the night sky. There were stars and planets, satellites and meteors, nebulae and galaxies. But the sky was […]
