Don Cupitt tagged posts

The Difference Between Faith and Belief

I can pretty much trace my initial religious awakening to the fact that my (Catholic) dad married my (Lutheran) mom in defiance of Catholic precepts at the time that forthrightly declared only Catholics could enter heaven. (This view was actually restated by the recent Pope Benedict as late as 2007, though his successor has been sounding a far softer tone.)

When I was in third or fourth grade listening to the priest’s lecture on this matter in a religious education class, I thought of my kindly mom at home, denied entrance to heaven with us because she was reared in a different faith tradition.

This was such self-evident poppycock that I remember being not so much offended or outraged as I was dismissive.

The thought did not escape me that if the padre and his faith could be so blindingly wrong on such a simple and obvious matter…

Believing in a heaven where my mother was denied entrance required suspe...

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Are You More Buddhist or Christian?

In the spirit of the arbitrary and fallacious-but-fun lead-in, “There are two types of people in the world…” let’s see whether you might be more inclined toward being a Buddhist or Christian “type” of person. By this I do not mean whether you believe in or practice either of those two traditions. It is only to ask: What is your orientation, your emotional style, the temperament that fires your imagination and sense of personhood and relationship to the world?

I owe the impetus of this post to the former Anglican priest and “post-Christian” philosopher and theologian Don Cupitt, whose voluminous works on what I would describe at least partially as the “evolution of religion” offer an endlessly intriguing and finely distilled romp through multiple fields of intellectual history...

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