[Magdalen] Religion Without God?

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

The principle thrust of the Unitarian path is that they simply do not have
a doctrine of the trinity. As a smarty pants priest once put it,
"Unitarians believe in no more than one god." Never could see what all the
fuss was about. The father and the spirit are essentially the same. Whether
Jesus is even a part of god at all is a question that people keep asking
all the time. Ofttimes You hear sermons in which God and Jesus are
repeatedly spoken of as two individuals.  Take a look at the comments on
God and Jesus in scripture and one has to say that the Arians had a very
good case. It would seem that Nicaea and Chalcedon decided as they did, not
due to the evidence, but due to the fact that they could not imagine their
theology of sacrifice working if Jesus were not God.  I can sympathize with
their position, but that's not a reason to justify anathematizing one side
of a discussion.  And they could also have decided not to decide.  I mean,
when you really don't KNOW the answer, it seems quite acceptable to me to
say so.  One might go so far as to call it honest, as opposed to what one
might call idle speculation cloaked as dogmatic certainty.

I would have more charitable a view of our refusing to give up the trinity
if the powers that be would simply say it's a means of meditating on God,
isn't for everybody, certainly need not be for everybody, and let it go at
that.  But, OHH NOOO.  We simply can't give up the idea that we can know
these things.  Well, I am sorry, but we really don't know anything about it.

The Unitarians have a solid position.  One could as easily look at all the
speculation about the spirit and scratch one's head: "Where on earth did
they dig all of that up?"

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better
for people coming behind you, and you don’t do it, you're wasting your time
on this Earth.”  -- *Roberto Clemente

On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 6:03 PM, Roger Stokes <roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com
> wrote:

> On 27/12/2014 22:25, Jay Weigel wrote:
>
>> I'm not a big fan of UUs, although I've warmed to them somewhat in recent
>> years. My father's brother was a UU minister and from my teens onward I
>> could never really see the point of UU as a religion. It always seemed to
>> me like a place for people who felt like they ought to be somewhere on
>> Sunday morning but didn't want to have the struggle of belief. *shrug*
>> YMMV. However, Sunday Assembly seems to have *really* managed this. Ugh. I
>> find that silly and pretentious.
>>
>
> My big question for the Sunday Assembly people and for Universal
> Unitarians is to ask what they believe in.  From what little I understand
> of Unitarianism is that their faith is based on what I can best describe as
> shifting sands - basically no real foundation at all apart from being good
> to each other.
>
> Atheists proclaim their faith in a negative which can never be proved.  As
> James O-C has implied, what God do they not believe in because I probably
> don't believe in a God like that either.  Surely we have moved on from a
> God of the gaps to a God who is beyond our power to comprehend, whose
> existence cannot be proved by scientific means because they are necessarily
> limited in their scope to that which is outside of the divine that created
> the universe and all that is in it. It is only by opening ourselves to the
> divine through faith that we can experience its reality.
>
>  Asfor the comment comparing UUs to Reform Jews, I'd take exception to that
>> too, and so would my friends who are RJs. They would argue that they at
>> least have tradition and, in most cases, belief. Non-observant (cultural
>> only) Jews would be another matter entirely.
>>
>
> I totally agree.  A quick check of Wikipedia suggests I need to be careful
> here because what is known in the US as Reform Judaism is close to what is
> called Liberal Judaism where as British Reform Judaism is closer to the
> American Conservative Judaism.  We also have Progressive Judaism which
> seems to be intended to cover everything that is not Orthodox Judaism or
> even more conservative than that.
>
> Be that as it may for a time for a time I visited, under the auspices of a
> diocesan scheme for self-appraisal of my ministry, the Rabbi of a
> Progressive Jewish synagogue.  The discussions we had have left me in no
> doubt as to his faith in the Covenant revealed to Moses and its ongoing
> relevance today.
>
> Roger
>