Take a Quick Trip on The Sea of Faith in Aotearoa

What's In a Name?

• I hear a lot of talk about "Axial Periods" of religious faith. What are these?
• Why "Sea of Faith"?
• What's the connection with Ephesus?

The Big Questions

• We have to create meaning for ourselves
• Or search for it?
• Thinking of sending a wreath to God's Funeral? You might like to read this first.
• Don Cupitt suggests here that "Life" is replacing "God" and here that there is no supernatural glue that hold things together.
• Might it be possible to better understand were war fits in?
• "Evil" — is it real? imaginary? read what earlier Christian theologians thought about it.

Expressions of Faith

• Fundamentalism often expresses itself violently, but it springs from deep fear. Karen Armstrong talks about it in her book The Battle for God: read a review here.
• Lloyd Geering did a lecture series on the danger that fundamentalism poses to the secular world.
• There's heaps of ways of expressing religious faith.

The Practice of Faith

• Similarly, doubt can help us to grow.
• "All that is ever accessible to us is the relative god, my god. As I see this, metaphysics dies and I am left knowing only my god, my guiding religious ideal. And this is the non-realist philosophy of religion in a nutshell" wrote Don Cupitt in Is Nothing Sacred?

The Earth

• The Earth: a Sacred Place to Dwell
• The land in New Zealand has been fought over ever since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. The Waitangi Tribunal, which makes reparation recommendations wrote in a Report that "the war has never ended in [the province of ] Taranaki."
• Just another book about the millennium? No, its Lloyd Geering's The World To Come
• He followed up that in 2005 with a book about "The Ecological Imperative". Its called The Greening of Christianity.
• But enviromentalism can be a path of faith.

Christianity: for, against and post-

• Christianity is more of a trinitarian religion than a theistic one, writes Lloyd Geering in his paper: Christianity Minus Theism. He later went on to amplify this in his book Christianity Without God reviewed here, here and here.
• Some background notes to aid understanding of the material presented at the 2009 Conference by Noel Cheer
• Rivals to religious faith include Atheism, Skepticism and Humanism. Here's a Dictionary about them.
• Theology can be either "church" or "Kingdom" based. That's how Don Cupitt sees it.
• The Bible: the "good book"? John Spong doesn't entirely agree.
• Can it survive? Why Christianity Must Change or Die
• But in can be re-shaped by we whom it shaped in the first place.
• Another lurid revision of history: The Pagan Christ.
• Another look at the Gospel of Mark
• Other mythologies inspire us too.

Other Paths of Faith

• Buddhism: without Beliefs
• Buddhism and good and evil

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