Hi ESeville: the Golden Rule. If we could only focus on making that one thing the goal of each and every human life - then the last 2000 years wouldn't be the complete waste of time that it is proving to be right now. end of quote

Hear! Hear!

I'm so glad you're finding a home in Gretta's book. Its nice to identify with somebody and to feel you belong. I haven't read it but I've been enjoying the discussions here on the WC and reading along.
paradox3 has posted threads on all of the chapters and they are open for discussion. You might like to read them or respond. Some are in the archives pages 2 or 3. They are titled as above: "Readers Group" chapter whatever.
A few people have read the book while some of us are responding and giving opinions without having read it.
There is lots of Gretta on the WC including videos in which she is speaking. You may have to hunt to find them in the archives. Some are here in Faith and Religion. Others are in the Social Section.
I'm not able to comment at the moment because I'm not sure I understand some of what she is saying. I have ideas.

Congrats on your marriage. That's terrific!

I haven't read Gretta's book yet, but I will, as soon as it comes to our church library.

Whether we go through life with or without "God" is just a matter of semantics. If one--as I do--regards the self-creative universe as God, then one can quit calling it "God," and IT will still be the same. IT doesn't care what we call IT.

The patriarchal Zeus-type sky God, the cosmic creator/dictator who throws his misbegotten creations, who already suffer more than their fair share while alive, into eternal hellfire after they are dead, is a concept that needs to be discarded.

I have just got to this book and will soon have it finished.

Most of what she writes about has been around for the 35 years i've been involved with Christian faith. It is the kind of stuff that got me interested, especially the wonderful questions that arose out of alienation, and especially from the feminist and liberation theologians.

But one of the things those questions really opened up for for me was a re-visitation of the undercurrents that have always run through Christianity: the twists and conflicts, the horrendous distortions and errors, the crimes and persecutions: but also the deep insight, love and selfless actions of individuals, the complexities of seeing truth and our human capacities for great good and great evil. All of this rich, writhing, intertwining describes the history of Christianity but also, I think, the inner struggles of each and every person who commits to a faith. The story of Christianity reveals the essential fragility of our faith, its vulnerability to corruption. It allows us to see how hard we have to work to really BECOME faithful people rather than simply pinning on a name tag.

I get the idea of getting rid of the seriously messed up concept of "God": it'll win some friends over and get the ball rolling again, maybe. I am not sure about the cost, though. I am not one who finds God a familiarly benign comfortable old gent. God talk drove me to atheism for much of my younger life. That "God" still lurks around churches and alienates me but I can see that "God" as the distorted creation of a whole lot of the very human failings, vanities, delusions, depravities even, that MUST remain a part of our heritage. Without owning those errors and crimes we will, i am sure, fall into them again. "Nice" isn't enough. "God" has to change, not placed out of sight to fester.

The human journey through life is full of consequence, and not only for oneself. More important than cleaning up the historical park with the excision of a single word (this reminds me, unfairly I am sure, of the public relations strategies I learned to loathe and detest during my long years in newsrooms), is trying to raise an overly-entertained, cynically misled, self-obsessed society that the consequences of one's own, private individual life and the decisions made there matter to us all: that we are profoundly accountable and this battered and abused concept of God that the churches have created will tell us, if we heed it, how precious life is, how beautiful even humanity is capable of being "” whilst indicting us for the shallowness and self-centredness of our vision, the cruelty and vindictiveness that lurk in the very "niceness" of our values system, and the unthinking mistakeness we can so easily live by.

The call should be to overturn the idol and find the truth. That's an old call "” but, unattainable as it may be, it's no less essential than ever it has been.