Easy to be Entreated

My wife and I really enjoyed our UU services today. We are coming up on our 1 year anniversary of attending the UU fellowship. I really like our minister; she is very honest with herself and encourages us to be as well through her sermons. I relate well with her as she is an atheist and spiritual, naturalistic humanist like myself. Today, she spoke about solidarity and gave me a lot of food for thought. I love having my mind stimulated that way and to be able to share that with a whole community. And I was moved to tears as we sang "Blue Boat Home" which goes to the tune of the LDS hymn "In Humility, Our Savior". You can hear a sample here . I copied the words below: " Though below me, I feel no motion Standing on these mountains and plains Far away from the rolling ocean Still my dry land heart can say I've been sailing all my life now Never harbor or port have I known The wide universe is the ocean I travel And the earth is my blue boat ...

Note: These are my doctrinal issues with Christianity. I am not preaching that they should be yours. There are a number of different ways to challenge the validity of Christianity from: - literature analyses that show when certain verses were written which erode claims that they were eyewitness accounts or contradict the notion that certain passages came directly from god to his prophets - to historical reviews that show how the books were selected to be included in the Bible and how Christian doctrines evolved from the Christian fathers to today - from comparative analyses between the different sects (Coptic, Armenian, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) who all seem to be able to justify their differing beliefs - from archaeological evidence that shows the development of Jewish and Christian myths over time by borrowing from neighboring myths - to everything from DNA evidence to fossil records to cosmic radiation, etc, that shows things such as the creation of the world, the Fa...

A thread on Nom on " Best Practices for Achieving and Maintaining a Happy Marriage " prompted me to write the following and I wanted to get your answers to my question at the bottom of this post: We are focusing a lot on what disbelief by one partner does to the relationship. Clearly, it can have different outcomes on the relationship for we know of some couples that end up disbelieving together, some that divorce, some that feel prolonged tension but work out some way to continue, some who never talk about it, some who respect each other's right to believe as they wish, etc. I think one of the major factors that affect which route a couple will take when one becomes a disbeliever is the quality of the relationship before the paradigm shift. (Disclaimer: I am not saying it is the only factor, there are many, but I feel this is a very important one). Did each partner admire qualities in the other spouse, or did they think their partner was inferior to them? Was there equa...

Otterson recently created a thread called " Opposition in All Things ". Below are his remarks and my response. (Begin Otterson's remarks) "I am not complaining,” my father wrote to my mother from war-ravaged Europe during the closing days of World War 2, when he finally reached the safety of American lines after three years as a POW. “I would not appreciate comfort if there were no hardship. We cannot appreciate joy without sorrow, health if we have never felt pain, or peace until after a war. All things must have their opposites, and we can learn from both." My father was well-versed with Christian teaching, but as far as I know never read extensively of Buddhist thought, or classical Chinese or Greek philosophy, all of w...