God is not an Almighty Being watching over life on earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness.
Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality _ saying something like: __t is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us._ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
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Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality _ saying something like: __t is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us._ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.
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The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals.
Evil_doesn__ mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to __he Christian majority___ private liking.
Perhaps it is true that, by some definitions, Satan is more religious than God. Many of the particularly proud sinners are deceived into thinking that Satan is anti-religious, that he likes seeing people do immoral things simply because he likes immoral things. Doubtful; Satan likes for people to do immoral things so that he can blame them for doing immoral things. The Father of Lies laughs not with his teammates, but at them.
The intellectual climate of the 1970s, for which the 1950s had already paved the way, contributed to this. A theory was even finally developed at that time that pedophilia should be viewed as something positive. Above all, however, the thesis was advocated-and this even infiltrated Catholic moral theology-that there was no such thing as something that is bad in itself. There were only things that were "relatively" bad. What was good or bad depended on the consequences. In such a context, where everything is relative and nothing intrinsically evil exists, but only relative good and relative evil, people who have an inclination to such behavior are left without no solid footing. Of course pedophilia is first rather a sickness of individuals, but the fact that it could become so active and so widespread was linked also to an intellectual climate through which the foundations of moral theology, good and evil, became open to question in the Church. Good and evil became interchangeable; they were no longer absolutely clear opposites.
Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.