Religiosanity

Recognition of the deep human history and prehistory can have a profound influence on our spirituality and religion. Humans like us (with same capacities of thinking and feeling have been on our planet for roughly 200,000 years. History starts with writing in Summer and Egypt just about 6,000 years ago. Christianity is only 2,000 years old and Judaism in its biblical format perhaps half a millennium older. Some of this meditation (and more to come) was inspired by a book "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A moment in France's olympic opening ceremony was deemed blasphemous and mocking of Jesus and the Christian religion. The outcry was so loud and vast that the Olympic officials had to give press conferences about it, and eventually removed the clip from view online. The fervor has finally died down. Now we need Pastor Andrew to weigh in on this most potent form of "Religio-insanity." He says, "we are being shackled back into slavery under the pretension of “blasphemy.” That itself is blasphemous…using God to promote your inferior motives—political, religious—using religion not to liberate, but to control and to enslave. Jesus would be horrified.

Public displays of the 10 Commandments are back!!!!!! And Pastor Andrew is more angry about it than ever. On this episode, he discusses how this phenomenon is offensive on many different levels, not just with fundamentalists pushing their religion on others, but also theologically frustrating being that there isn't just one set of 10 Commandments, not even in the Hebrew bible itself!

Biblical scholarship is slowly replacing the discipline of Biblical theology. More and more biblical scholars find themselves outside of the straitjacket of church dogmas and practice. Their lack of dogma yields a richer and robust understanding of the deep roots of religious history and thought.

On this episode, Pastor Andrew describes, and begins to process, a spiritual crisis, or a personal spiritual realignment, that has to do with the Old Testament.

Deeply problematic, ugly, satanic texts about biblical jihad (passages from the Hebrew bible that no serious theologian would ever cite without significant, careful assessment of the context), are suddenly surfacing among the ranks of Israeli politics to seemingly justify what appears to be a war campaign hell bent on elimination. On this episode, Pastor Andrew reads his letter to his representatives alerting them to this danger, breaks down these (and other) passages, their origins, why they are problematic, and how their prima facie invocation is a perilous brand of Religio-INsanity.

As promised, Pastor Andrew breaks down the various geographic terms of the areas surrounding and including what we nowadays refer to as Israel and Palestine, explaining how these terms were formed, what is contested, and why it matters.

The worst conflict between Israel and Palestine in recent memory sparks a hypothetical question for Pastor Andrew: If there were a button that would erase all the organized religions from the planet, would you press it? His answer leads into a discussion about the broader reaches of fundamentalism, which certainly does not leave Christianity unimplicated.