Last post - because none of you have the ability to thoughtfully engage…

… or you would have by now. Only Jesse, at first, didn’t have anxiety or worthlessness traditional to radical protestants. But then, he couldn’t face up to the serious errors embedded in his theology. That old angry God problem. Couldn’t face it. So he fled never to reappear.

I always seek engagement. Your problem is that I seek engagement at higher standards of rigorous thinking AND believing AND spiritual devotion.

None offered to me, I leave you with this guy. Maybe I should leave you with St Catherine of Siena, St Teresa of Avila, or St Ignatius. But this guy confronts with profound faith your lazy, 18th century agrarian fetishes more directly. A spiritual life should be more the focus of what you need. Like that of St Catherine, etc. But the oath to humility is shorter by pointing out your vain pride in your empty doctrinal Bible idolatry.

I pray that God confronts you with holy prophets. You so need to be broken in spirit.

___

“The greatest epiphany for me came when I was translating the New Testament. I’ve been reading Greek most of my life. I’d read the New Testament in Greek many times, but I was still hearing it through the doctrinal inheritance to some degree, even when I thought I wasn’t. But having to grapple with the text and realizing just how strange, just how uncannily different this is, not only from anything else going on in the Late Antique world, but from received institutional understandings of Christianity, or just our commonplace man-and-woman-in-the-pews understanding of Christianity, became much more intense for me.

I became much aware of this and especially the absolute centrality of the social. When we talk about Christ threatening damnation, this is the indignation of someone who loves the most despised and ignored people of all. And that more and more becomes the center of my faith. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst. For me, that’s maybe 80 percent of my faith now, just this burning sense of obligation to those whom this man loved. And in calling him God or calling him the revelation of God, I realized that that love is absolutely incumbent on me.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/opinion/jesus-christianity-atheism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share