You’re talking about the New Testament (Greek?), which I’m agreeing is much less patriarchal, especially the statement you mentioned came to my mind as well.

(Neither Jew nor Greek.)

(a) talk of a “new covenant” that effectively replaces the old,
(b) recognise the cultural context, and separate the truths you take very seriously from the cultural context that happened to reign at the time.

What do you think? Another option or two I didn’t think of? Am I misrepresenting something with this suggestion?

Do you really think that’s the case? (Growth in the male demographic.) I don’t have anything to measure that by. I don’t know who tends to traditionally be more church-going. I have heard fundie-leaning congregations suggest it’s very important for males to take a lead in religion in the home though. Maybe that’s “patriarchal mentality”?

On the question: “does a patriarchal mentality increase the likelihood of being a fundamentalist?” – how do you establish causality from correlation? Maybe fundamentalism encourages a patriarchal mentality… And females could also be patriarchal, many fundie-leaning females are all too happy to take “traditional gender roles” and seem to be happier for it?

I remember hearing a lecture about dialogue as evangelism years ago from a dear older gentleman who had been dean of arts at a large american university during the days before the fall of the Berlin wall. During this time, he was invited with a handful of ballet dancers for a cultural exchange program in the then Soviet Union. The dean and most of the dancers were confessing evangelicals but decided to respect the warnings from the government not to “evangelise”. However, they were continually saught out by communist dancers and choreographers for dialogue. Both parties learnt a lot about the other and there was real repentance (in the true sense of the word – a change of mind/heart) on both sides.

Evangelicals reading this (if there are any) need not worry about Ikon’s invitation (“please evangelise us”). This is not a watering down of faith. Dialogue with “the other” often leads to fuller understanding of the teachings of Christ. We all fall into religious dogmatism (even atheists do), so we could all do with the kind of humility (and it might be argued, the kind of faith) expressed in the invitation to true dialogue that Ikon is suggesting.

Ikon’s Evangelism Project.

I like! I’d like it if this blog could provide a similar space for that kind of evangelism. Thoughts?

Transformation has to be something that comes from the inside, both in the community and in our personal lives.
[...]
The loving thing would be to trust them to be moved from the inside, not by engaging in angry debates or resorting to political measures of restraint and sanction, but to dialogue in a loving way…

And “the heart of God” is talk about that which should ideally be at the core of our lives. From words I used in God as Meaning Assigner,

the source of meaning in your life, the source of your values, the source of your concept of what is right and what is wrong, especially including the reason that you stick to doing right and avoid doing wrong.

Getting that right is, to me, the “post-theistic language” version of not misrepresenting the heart of God.

(“Which God?” – well, that’s what we’re talking about, what theology is about, our idea of how it should be. And we don’t believe in an authoritarian black-and-white penal-code driven heart, we feel e.g. the heart-of-fundie-Islam is a misrepresentation of how things should be. We can nevertheless learn more about good representations and misrepresentations from other religions, each world/life-philosophy has its “theology” with more or less overlap.)

An attempt to explain/translate, don’t know if that was worth something to someone. My point is to agree with Michael.

Transformation viewed this way is something everyone can buy into (correct me if I’m wrong). We may not pray for or work for or hope for the same things, but we need to agree that neither manipulation nor ignoring evil in the world (whatever you believe that is) will help.

When it comes to “messing with people’s lives” versus positive transformation, I think it’s much to do with what drives it. The way I feel about it: messing with people’s lives is when some people try to convince other people to do something (transform) by various kinds of manipulation. That sounds like it can be bad. Positive transformation would be more likely, I feel, if it’s rather a choice by the transformed individual: that they do the seeking and they find the tradition under which they can be transformed.

Then there’s the transformation we talked about above: the kind of transformation experienced when we go and participate in a community far removed from our own, with much more “bare” needs. (Saneman, did you read the comments above?)

What I like about the moderation queue is that it slows down the publishing of comments that drive me up walls. I can relax about them, so that by the time I hit “accept” (or whatever the link is) I’m a bit more calm. Why saneman? Because he’s the best at driving me up the walls.

He feels, to my subjectivity, like the only fundamentalist. Others have come and gone. Which isn’t good, because I actually want them to stick around, if they’re not of the saneman variety.

What do I mean by fundamentalism? Something like this:

least with “community” you can still pretend you are doing good by spreading belief in myth and legend.

“You pretend you’re doing good”.

Implied: no Christianity or Christians ever do any good for the world. Ever. That’s a fundamentalist’s opinion, right there. A non-fundamentalist would be able to recognise the good that also comes from Christianity, even if it only happened in three-standard-deviations circumstances. I’m really not convinced saneman is able to do that.

Would growth in that case be a better term to use? Although I think growth only refers to living objects (self, community, etc), but I think this is the context it is being used in.

I recall you indicating understanding why you got dropped into the moderation queue, back when it happened. Do you think I should do the same to gerhard?

just a simple question, u can remove this comment with your moderation powers

“transformation” sounds like it is openly wanting to mess with and change peoples lives.

not to high jack this thread, just wanted to show you guys this article:

http://www.skeptic.co.za/content/view/215/1/