Hello again, Misty,
I also appreciate the opportunity to communicate with
you! You probably don’t remember this at
all, but Uncle Dana and I visited CA way back when you were about 4 years old! That
was in 1992 or 93, I think. My favorite memory
of you, is that you fell asleep on Dana’s lap after lunch!
Regarding you questions:
My family and I attend the United Church of Christ. This is a liberal mainstream protestant
religion with roots in the Germanic Evangelical and Reformed tradition. I was never taught that the Bible was the
inerrant work of God, but rather a book of theology written by man using
metaphor and traditional lore to explain God to people in ways they could
understand. I was never taught that
there was a list of rules to follow, but rather, that I was to use free will
and thought to understand my place in the hand of God and how to live according
to the best interest of all mankind.
About God being energy; I do not believe God is an
energy. I believe God is The
Energy. The energy that animates life
and creates and inhabits everything. Everything
is energy and that energy is God. Because
God Energy makes up everything, there is no way for us to be separate from God
or each other. When Jesus said that if
you do something to my brother, you do it to me, he was not speaking
metaphorically! He meant, what you do to
one, you do to all since we are all connected through God.
This is my understanding based on all the teaching from all
the wonderful theologians in my world, but also based on my own knowledge of
the world and science. Science and
religion are not mutually exclusive. The
same God that created minister, also created scientists! Our job as thinking humans with freewill, is
to find God in all things, make sense of the knowledge provided, and then use
that knowledge to better the lives of ourselves and others.
The main teaching of Jesus to me is to love your neighbor as
yourself. To care for everyone and to
love the vilified and disenfranchised as much as anyone else. It is easy to love people who look like you
and think like you. It is much harder to
love people who are unfamiliar and who think and do things which are outside of
what you consider normal or moral. Needing
to turn the other cheek to those who want to hurt you, is the hardest part of
being aware of God in everyone.
My understanding of God helps me to love and have compassion
for everyone. I have to always be aware
of God in everyone in order to try to take a path to acceptance.
I believe I have probably over explained things! I hope tis gves you a little more insight
into me thoughts, and I hope you do well on your class project.
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