| 1. The Bible is not true: it and other
sacred texts are a series of attempts to imagine a God. 2. The Bible is true: it and other sacred texts are a series of honourable but inevitably deficient attempts to understand God. 3. If God exists, he/she is wholly separate and other, and his/her ways are an incomprehensible challenge to human reason and human values. 4. If God exists, he/she is unbearably present including as the still small voice we cannot completely shut out and which represents our most authentic self. 5. If God exists, he/she is of questionable morality having created a world hard-wired to permit violence and suffering on an epic scale. 6. If God exists, he/she is the yearning for morality and transformation we feel in a world hard-wired to permit violence and suffering on an epic scale. 7. The Church is a human establishment which stops us seeing God as he/she really is - as a radical challenge to all human establishments and to the laws of the jungle and the market on which they are inevitably based. 8. The Church is a human establishment bravely committed - however many times it fails - to the search for God and a life-enhancing alternative to the laws of the jungle and the market. 9. Prayer is an attempt to shape the world in a way which responds to our deep but deluded desire for fairness and moral order. 10. Prayer is a liberating way to accept, and even transform the meaning of, the totally arbitrary nature of events and individual destiny. 11. Belief in God creates the illusion of meaning and significance for the individual and the community, as well as the conditions for discrimination and cruelty against those living under different illusions. 12. Non-belief in God is as illusory as belief and is normally accompanied by belief in something worse which creates the conditions for discrimination and cruelty against those living under different illusions. 13. There is no such thing as salvation. 14. Salvation is all around - and inside - you. |