Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
It was to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and those in prison. If we did those things, we did God, even if we did not believe in God.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
We join it not by reciting a creed, but by doing something. By reconciling with those we have hurt and forgiving those who have hurt us. By challenging cruelty in all its forms, religious as well as political.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Focusing these two principles (in addition to tohers) is what Jesus wanted to preach in the first place. The Catholic Church gas become so wrapped up in indoctrinating its young and polarizing the views that they forget to root in these 2 very ideals their greatest prophet preached.
‘When will the kingdom come?’ Jesus said: ‘It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, “Here it is” or “There it is”. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Regardless of my atheism, this preachy bit of text here is a powerful and an enlightning message. The fact that we should always hold our headup expecting some almighty deliverance. The heavenwe seek is the heaven we make. Noone comes on a chariot with wings and takes our hand. We are all thats left to fix what we can and enjoy it.
That meant ignoring the barriers and divisions established by the world’s religious and political power systems. It identified Jesus not just as someone who waited for God to overturn the system, but as someone who worked to undermine it here and now.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Golda . . . they take the cross and turn it around, they turn it around my God.19 No, the Church never really tried to live the Jesus-life. What it did was to keep his story alive.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
The Christians say they love Christ, but I think they hate him without knowing it; so they take the cross by the other end and make a sword out of it and strike us with it! You understand
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
The individual is pure and stripped of blame in an oppressive system. Under despotic rule, the crimes of the system squeeze out the blame of the individual. I believe this is the message here. We are poor but we will be rich in the Kingdom of Heaven, etc.
The people Crossan described as the expendables, those at the bottom of the bottom of the world’s pyramids of power.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Did Jesus really think that bums and beggars were actually blessed by God, as if all the destitute were nice people and all the aristocrats correspondingly evil? Is this some sort of romantic delusion about the charms of destitution?