Friday, August 4, 2023
I have tons of photos, and I don’t post enough of them. Here’s one more: I’m not sure if this is a dragonfly or a damselfly. At any rate, it landed on my ring while I was riding down Scottsville Road, and I tried to take a quick picture with my phone camera. I figured it would fly away if I tried to pull out my little Canon, and I was right—it took off in the process of taking this, probably because I was careening all over the shoulder.
Friday, August 4, 2023
August 4, 2023 This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.
Sunday, July 30, 2023
I am anticipating seeing the Barbie movie with a mixture of excitement and dread. It’s a Greta Gerwig film, which means it will be a sharp and funny satire of Barbie, Mattel, and our ridiculously consumerist culture. On the other hand, my name is Ken, and this is a movie about . . . Barbie. My nemesis. The name which, unwisely wielded, can move me to violence. My cross to bear.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
This is about my State of Faith project but not actually part of it—kind of a meta-post. I’m not entirely done with the deconstruction part, but I’ve documented the snot out of why I’m no longer even Evangelical adjacent and maybe not even Christian. I want to start writing about something positive—what I’m constructing now. I hesitate to call it reconstruction because I don’t want to simply replace one rickety system with another.
This is a funky tree I saw growing along Irondequoit Creek on a bike ride through Ellison Park
Thursday, July 13, 2023
July 13, 2023 I’ve been working on this for ages, and I need to publish something, so here it is. I’ll likely come back to this post and refine it—it certainly isn’t in a final form, but it is a good start. Atonement I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my view of atonement, actually, just learning there were alternative views of atonement, was the first domino that fell and knocked down a whole series of beliefs.
Saturday, June 3, 2023
August 4, 2023 Experiential Problems with Faith This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.
Sunday, May 28, 2023
May 28, 2023 This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What if favoring one person harms another? Be careful of what you wish for, the folks tales tell us—unintended consequences lurk behind our wishes, and they can be far worse than our original plight.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
May 24, 2023 This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian): ** Sṓma** (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse. ** Psyché**: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death and goes to the underworld. ** Pneúma**: spirit, literally breath. This is very similar to soul but also implies that which can commune with the divine.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Updated June 3, 2023 Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in creation? Theodicies comprise an entire branch of theology devoted to answering how a good God and evil can coexist. The subject is far too complex and deep for me to cover here, and it may be the single knottiest problem in all of theology; however, I can’t simply ignore it.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
May 23, 2023 Evangelicals (especially Calvinists) like to define the attributes of God, most of which can also be called perfections: Omnipotence—God is all powerful. God can do anything except that which is logically inconsistent (e.g., making a rock so heavy that they1 cannot lift it2) or inconsistent with God’s perfect nature (e.g., lying). Omniscience—God knows all that occurs in creation, including all of our thoughts. God knows all truth. Eternality—God has always existed.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
May 23, 2023 I’m taking a little different tack here and jumping around in my posts to topics or sections I’ve been able to get into a publishable form. Philosophy, in particular, has been difficult for me, because I have very little training in the subject. I’m trying to be as accurate and fair as possible, but don’t be surprised if I get some details wrong. Oh, I’m also bringing in some Greek words, and I’m bound to screw that up.
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
May 16, 2023 If myth is one end of the narrative spectrum, then metaphor is the other. Myths are grand, transcendent stories which help to explain why the world is as it is. Metaphors are nuggets of meaning, comparisons which carry associations and contextual significance rather than storylines. Metaphors are true without being isolated ideas or propositions. They imply stories without being limited by them. The transcendent is, by definition, beyond our experience and, being beyond our experience, beyond our words.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
May 10, 2020 I’ve been reading Inspired by Rachel Held Evans, partly because it was available on my Bible study app and partly because I no longer know how to read scripture or what “inspired” even means. I enjoy her humor and frank honesty about her own struggles and misbehavior—it feels like she has invited me into her secret society of misfits and screwballs. That’s a crowd that makes me feel right at home, even if I, like Rachel, look pretty normal at first glance.
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
April 11, 2023 In our next exciting installment, we’ll explore the authority of scripture and how has collapsed for me. Sort of. I still find scripture compelling, and I’m trying to understand how to read it appropriately. Scripture In Reformed Christianity, Scripture is the single most important revelation of the nature and work of God, and if one takes sola scriptura seriously, it is the only true revelation of God.
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
Memo to everyone who has been behaving badly on my feed: I recently was told that people were shouting at each other on my feed. I spend very little time on social media, particularly Facebook, because it has become a cesspool, and I was oblivious until someone apologized for blowing up my notifications. I have deleted the Facebook app from all my devices, so I actually don’t get any notifications. The only reason this post exists is that I created it on a quieter platform and absent-mindedly cross-posted to Facebook.
Friday, March 31, 2023
##March 31, 2023 Now that I’ve deconstructed or unravelled my faith, where do I go? I don’t want to float around in an unanchored agnosticism, but I also don’t want to latch onto the next shiny certainty I see. I’m jumping forward a bit here to start discussing reconstruction of a new way to believe. Reconstruction Having deconstructed my faith or experienced its collapse of its own accord, what will fill the void?
Saturday, March 25, 2023
March 25, 2023 What can we know about God? As the first cause and creator of the material universe, God is, by definition, transcendent, and as such, not observable as an object in our experience. Transcendence means the idea of God is necessarily an abstract concept and hard to get our heads around—if we could understand God as something in our experience, God wouldn’t be transcendent. There are parts of God that are necessarily outside our experience and any experience we ever could have and can only be understood, partially, by metaphors, using objects within our experience.
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
May 28, 2023 I’ve been all over the place, revising older posts and wrestling new ones into publishable form. Don’t ever let anyone tell you writing isn’t work. Introduction I’ve been in a near constant state of gradual spiritual evolution over the last 40 years (since college), a process which reached a turning point around 2016. Even though I was more comfortable calling myself “Evangelical adjacent” than Evangelical, Evangelicals were still my people.
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Finished reading: What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey 📚 I actually read this when it came out, in 1998. I remember standing in the bookstore, tears running down my face, unable to put the book down. So I didn’t. I don’t think this started my deconstruction, but it was a profound relief to learn that I wasn’t the only one thinking that my people were marching down a wide and easy road to destruction, not the narrow way to God.