A shorter update this week...
Dear Friends,
 I've had some bug for most of the week that has had me operating well below par and not up to preparing lead commentaries yesterday or today. I'm well on the road to recovery now and hopefully we should be back to our normal schedule tomorrow. I've been filling in much of my time reading Karen Armstrong's engrossing book "The Battle for God — Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam". There is so much on recent history, particularly about what has been going on in the Middle East and with the rise of Islamic terrorism, that I have to confess I was ignorant about. But fundamentalism is not just confined to Islam. Some of our own advocates are only a couple of clicks away from being as bad as anything that Islam can demonstrate. As I've argued in the past the only difference is that the Islamic fundamentalists reached the ammunition lockers first. While fundamentalism might be on the rise across all the religions I don't live with a fear that it is ultimately going to prevail. What I find funny is that heaven must be an awfully crowded place with all these dudes, many of whom I have little doubt were extremely sincere and certainly did believe they had the 'final authorative answer'. I'd love to be a fly on the wall when they were all finally assembled in the one room and God expressed his opinion on their certitudes. What I find surprising is that a goodly proportion of them seem to die quite young. Also surprising is the way in which some of them ended up shaping the destiny of entire nations in various ways.
Not unrelated to all of that, and perhaps as a replacement for a lead commentary today, could I draw your attention to a lengthy article Vince Exley has drawn our attention to on the forum. It's a series of notes taken down by Richard Holloway, former Anglican Primus of Scotland, on a series of lectures given by Hans Kung on religious paradigms. Kung proposes five religious paradigms and Holloway proposes a sixth to explain the present period of history we seem to have entered. It sits well with the suggestion I have been making that the hope for reform is now dead in the water. The hope for the future has to rest in what emerges from the present destruction underway in the religious institutions. I doubt the fundamentalists will be reading anything of what Richard Holloway or Hans Kung have to say but as an informed seeker you might like to be abreast of some of the best in contemporary thinking.
<Link to Vince Exley's post introducing the Richard Holloway article>
<www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=32573> |
