I’ve never heard of these folks before: Universists. I don’t have time to explore the site now, but if I stick it here, maybe I’ll remember to do it later. Maybe.
Universists are individuals who allow our personal philosophy to continue evolving. We are uplifted by a continuous search for meaning in a complex universe that deserves our unbounded vision and appreciation. Universism posits that religious philosophy should not be conceived in terms of one’s views toward God, but rather the method and attitude with which one approaches religious questions. Universists embrace the creative force of uncertainty, which is fundamental to human progress. We determine our meaning and purpose individually; our understanding comes through personal reason and experience. Our universe is a beautiful constellation of ideas whose light is threatened only by the black hole of faith.
The Good Book
The problem with the Bible is that it is very rare for people to have read it. They read extracts or theological commentaries, but rarely the text itself. I decided that if I was going to come to terms with this book, I wasn’t going to read about it—I was going to read the book itself.
So, what is it all about? Well, the Bible is 66 separate books written by 40 authors, over a period of around 1500 years. There are 1400 pages and, so far as I could discover, not a single joke. The Bible was written between about 700 BC and 500 AD and inspired, among other things, the great cathedral building of the Middle Ages, the art of the Renaissance, the music of Mozart and the spirit of socialism.
There’s no doubting the Bible’s historical significance. But the text itself is a mass of moral contradictions, strange stories and arbitrary laws, such as the one against wearing clothes woven of two types of material (Leviticus, 20:6). God appears alternately as a brutal tyrant and a compassionate father. To make any sense of it, I had to read it twice: first in the 1965 New International translation, and then the King James Authorised Version of 1611, the poetry of which has so enriched the English language. I have quoted here principally from the Old Testament, which makes up four-fifths of the Bible and much of which I find baffling. So many of its stories either contain no moral message, or a highly ambiguous one. This is the Bible on which Christian theology is largely silent—the X-rated version.
