Palm Sunday is a festival celebrated by Christians around the world. Jesus went to Jerusalem; that much is certain. The details are less clear.

Where is all this going? What can we ultimately hope for, for both the universe as a whole and our own individual life as part of that same whole?

As the years moved along, this answer seemed less and less adequate in the face of undeserved suffering in the world, the epitome of which is the baby born into the world, experiences extreme pain, and dies after one day.

Christmas presents us with an intersection of religious and secular stories that come from and come with a mixed bag of fact and fiction

Here are some recent news items to which I have added a few facts that seem related. Have fun putting it all together, creating your own narrative about what it all might mean, if anything. 

Fifty years ago, one prominent topic of conversation in the churches was the ecumenical movement, trying to determine what the various bodies had in common.

It is not so much my thinking that has changed over the last fifty years, as the attitude I bring to that thinking.

What a person does, the content of one’s act depends on how one analyzes the situation, that is, the method by which one decides.

If you ask this question, the most likely answer you will get, is that a Christian is a person who accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior, this being the most likely answer both fifty years ago and also today.

The Jan 6th committee has done everything possible to show that Trump attempted to overthrow the government. They almost beg the undecided to look anew at the evidence and realize how close we came to losing our democracy and that it is still possible for that to happen.

The terms messiah and messianism have, of late, been resurrected in the political sphere. For some, Trump is the second messiah, come to liberate us from the devilish democratic cabal who eat children and worship satan,  thereby creating the kingdom of god as envisioned by heartless, authoritarian Republicans.

The question Who is Jesus? is perhaps the most complex issue in Christian theology, embracing, as it does, three interrelated sub-questions: who was he in his person, what did he do, and how does that impact us today?

Answering this question is both easy and difficult. The easy part is differentiating sin against God from plain old immorality, as well as from crime against society.

Fifty years ago the Christian understanding of human nature fell into two camps. The fundamentalist approach placed humanity at the apex of an unchanging universe.

Creation and the health and activity of God go together.

Even fifty years ago, whatever creation means, it does not mean that in seven days God brought the universe into being out of nothing.

About 2022 years ago a man called Jesus was roaming the countryside of Galilee in Palestine. That’s the first we know about him. Before that, nothing.

Almost 50 years ago I wrote a book entitled What to Believe?, subtitled The Questions of Christian Faith. Fortress Press had been looking for such a book, and so published it in 1974. Fifty years later, I thought it might be interesting to see how my thinking today has changed. Hence the title.

In a recent article, Gretta Vosper, of the United Church of Canada, was asked, How can you be an atheist and still be a member of the UCC?. In answering that question, she described how that church has become liberal on social issues, but also remained very conservative theologically.

The faith of Christians,  all too often, is approached  on the basis of “Here it is, take it or leave it.” Frequently, it seems that the mind of the church has been eternally established,  that Chris­tians have all the answers and thus need face no more questions.

Speaking of God as a “he” is pretty much in your face, but there are other distinctions to be made between the past and the present when speaking of how God makes God known.

The word matrix can bring to mind science fiction images of living in a web of illusion, but my intent here is quite the opposite, not fiction, but reality.

The word matrix can bring to mind science fiction images of living in a web of illusion, but my intent here is quite the opposite, not fiction, but reality.

The entire existence of Jesus is therefore based on a Jewish legend developed by Jewish preachers. Am I missing something?

Key to my understanding today are some observations about human life. I’ll refer to these later in the discussion about human nature, but a quick summary is in order. Following the Reformers, and adding a touch of neuroscience, it seems to me that we all become egocentric.

The dominant view in the history of Christianity is that Jesus the Christ is the savior of the world, the one and only mediator between God and humanity.

Almost 50 years ago I wrote a book entitled “What to Believe?”, subtitled The Questions of Christian Faith. I thought it might be interesting to see how my thinking today relates both to those questions and to whatever theological inclinations I may have had at the time.

Why have we not found evidence of life across the universe? One solution to the question is that civilizations destroy themselves before they develop the technology to escape their planet.

I am sorry to say this, but it has been a long time since going to church on Sunday morning has uplifted my spirit. Interacting with people definitely is uplifting, but the service is mostly boring, preachers never give an indication that the scripture readings are not the literal word of God, and the theology of these same preachers is stuck somewhere way back when.

Accepting that the Gospel accounts of events in Jesus and the disciples’ lives are nonhistorical creations intended to reach Jews in a traditional Jewish liturgical framework,  what *did* Jesus do and say that made the God’s presence in human life so clear to his followers?

If people can be helped to understand that the god they profess is not the God of Jesus, that no man is the messiah, and that God blesses all people, not just America, then perhaps WCN can be overcome. The church has a job to do, and that quite simply is to speak truth to perversion.

Who ever thought we would say this, but it seems to be the case that society could be collapsing before our very eyes. The common bond that forges a basis for unity is disintegrating, indicated and exemplified by the litany of headlines that continue to bombard us.

It’s a scary thought, but true. To quote the Nazi, Joseph Goebbels, “If you tell a big lie often enough and keep repeating it, people will come to believe it.” A full 60% of Republicans today believe that Biden is not the President of the United States.

Woven into the fabric of the disturbing news that continually bombards us are those moments of humanity, mostly unreported, that tell us who we really are.

Everything changes, and often not for the better. Life on this planet will end eventually, possibly sooner rather than later, due to, for example, nuclear annihilation, still quite possible but no longer front page.

There is no inescapable reason why human beings need become divided and protective. There is another way, a way that is based on recognizing that the world we have created for ourself is limited in scope and accuracy. We must not hide in our cocoon and be threatened by all else.