Liberal Christianity made me a better Wiccan

I am not a Christian, but I highly value the liberal Christian strand in Unitarianism, as its alternative interpretations of the new testament in particular have helped to liberate me from the oppressive and painful interpretations I received from my fundamentalist and evangelical upbringing. People who do not have that particular painful experience perhaps can't know the fear - and actual physical pain - that it induces. I am very grateful to liberal Christianity for liberating me from that fear. Despite being a Pagan since the age of 17, I still had that fear (of hell, basically) lurking at the bottom of my psyche, encased in a volcano of anger. Once the anger had gone, the fear was still there, and it is liberal Christian interpretations of the Bible that have liberated me from that fear.

On a more positive note, I also value the fact that I can find a lot of common ground with liberal Christians, on values, shared appreciation of the beauty of Nature, and frequently shared understandings of the nature of the Divine as immanent and loving and including both genders as well as transcending gender.

If we have travelled by very different paths and still arrived at a similar understanding, that suggests we might be onto something. I met an ex-Franciscan who has a remarkably similar apophatic understanding of the Divine. I have met Unitarian Christians with a deep appreciation of the Divine immanence in Nature.

As a dear liberal Christian friend remarked approvingly, "Ah, so liberal Christianity made you a better Wiccan?" To which I replied, "Yes."

Liberal Christianity liberated me from my fear so that I could concentrate on my spiritual path of joyous communion with the Divine in Nature, with spirits of place, and with the land.

Missing the point (again)

PZ Myers and most of his commenters appear to have completely missed the point of Religion for Atheists.

They also completely exaggerate the importance of belief in religions. Alain de Botton is right that whether or not God exists is a boring question. It's been pretty well settled that God does not exist. Some theologians have got round this problem by saying that this is because God is existence, or the Ground of All Being, but then that leaves the question of what that might mean.

I'm glad that the New Atheism has raised the stakes in the theological game, and brought non-realist and apophatic theology to the fore again, but I dislike the way some New Atheists dismiss all religion as harmful rubbish.

Most religions are centred around practice rather than belief. In Hinduism, Paganism, Buddhism, Taoism, Unitarianism, Quakerism and Judaism, belief is not central to whether you count as a member of the religion or not. What counts is either values or practices. The question for Jews is not "Do you believe?" but "Are you observant?" For Pagans, what counts is your attitude to nature, the earth, and/or the land. There are many different schools of thought in Hinduism, Taoism, Paganism, Buddhism, Taoism, Unitarianism, and Quakerism, ranging from theists to non-theists. For Buddhists, deities may well exist, but they are irrelevant. Many Pagans and Unitarians would agree with the Buddhists on this. Many Unitarians are atheists and humanists.

So if it is not about providing an explanation of how the world works or how it came into being, what is religion for? It is about providing a system of shared meaning, and a set of spiritual practices (meditation and ritual), and a community to share ideas, joys and sorrows.

In liberal religions, you don't need to sign up to a set of axioms or propositions which may offend against your reason in order to be part of the community and make use of a collection of stories, mythology, symbols and practices.

Religious community also inspires people to band together to create social justice (although non-religious groups do this too). By consistently encouraging members to treat others with compassion, religious community can be a powerful tool for creating change. Think of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and others who were inspired to change the world.

A syllogism

God doesn't exist. (Many theologians have pointed this out, including John Scotus Eriugena, Paul Tillich, Karen Armstrong, and various thinkers from Judaism and Islam. This is because "God" is Being itself, or the Ground of All Being, or Nothing, or a process.)

God is love (according to various Christian commentators).

Love does not exist. (There's no thing you can point to and say it is love.)

Love is an experience shared between people.

God is an experience shared between people.

Odd's bodikins!

Dear Almighty God,

Please read Karen Armstrong’s history of you — I think you would find it most interesting. Did you know that you have several separate identities – the God of the philosophers, the God of Western Christianity, the God of Eastern Christianity, the God of the mystics, the Neoplatonic Divine Source, the Ain Sof (the God beyond God), and so on? And there’s also a chapter about your death, but don’t let it get you down, cos you’re obviously alive and well since you’re writing your own blog, right? Just like Dr Watson from Sherlock Holmes… he has his own blog too.

Also, who doesn’t like to read about themselves? I mean, we know you do, because your official biography is so long that most of your followers never get beyond Leviticus, even though there’s all those x-rated bits.

Mind you, I'm amazed you let some of the really dodgy bits into the book, like that mean trick you played on Abraham, and the time you told Saul to slaughter all those babies. You really should get a better publicist.

Oh wait, you did get some better publicists, but they keep getting killed in pogroms and burnt at the stake, or shot at.

I'm a non-theist

... or, why I don't call myself an atheist even though I am one.

• Atheists are pretty strident about how much they dislike religion. And they have a pretty narrow definition of what religion is (usually, "belief in the supernatural"). I find religion fascinating and frequently inspiring (that is the liberal and mystical varieties of religion)
• I consider myself a spiritual person - in other words, I get feelings of peace and joy from feeling connected to nature and other people, and I get those feelings in places where people have practised religion (possibly because of the beautiful architecture)
• I like doing spiritual practices in the company of other people with similar values. That's what I call religion
• There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, atheists
• I am open-minded as well as sceptical
• I am not a reductionist, and certainly not a logical positivist
• I like Paul Tillich's definition of God as the Ground of All Being
• I pray (into the Void, the Silence, the darkness, the Tao) and meditate, and find this to be a helpful spiritual practice
• I love stories and symbolism and mythology and Jungian archetypes
• I think fundamentalist atheists are just as bad as religious fundamentalists
• The main difference between me and a liberal theist is that they think God is a person and I don't. Otherwise our conclusions about the world are pretty similar.