{"id":89,"date":"2005-12-21T08:36:12","date_gmt":"2005-12-21T15:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2005-12-21T09:25:34","modified_gmt":"2005-12-21T16:25:34","slug":"heaven-afterlife-and-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Heaven, Afterlife, and Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Its seems Barbara Walters has done the definitive work on faith and life after death<\/a> and the verdict is… she won’t give her own opinion. I got bit of a chuckle out of that yesterday when she appeared on Good Morning America and she was asked if she believed in heaven and her answer was, “A heaven with family and loved ones is a very comforting thought to many people.”<\/p>\n

Unfortunately I had a long evening meeting so I missed Heaven — Where Is It? How Do We Get There?<\/a>. I plan on ordering the DVD and checking out what she and her guests had to say. The little I was able to glean from her morning interview and the web site offers some real challenges for those of us who live and grapple with faith in the 21st Century because it seems like many of the people in who responded to the polls and who were interviewed still seem to be living in the Dark Ages.<\/p>\n

Faith is not a rational thing and the western world has tried to make it a very rational structure and glossed over inconsistancies, history, and current realities. I say this as I am reading one of the most challenging books I have read in years, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. Expect a podcast in the new year on it. The core of what he is arguing is that faith, particularly Western Christian liberalism and Orthodox Islam, have an inherent absurdity in many of their beliefs, especially regarding the afterlife, that faith now poses the greatest threat to the future of the human race. Consider the little bit that I know Barbara Walthers shared and other thingsthat I saw – 1 out 4 Americans believe heaven is for Christians only; strict Muslims believe the same except that it is designed for the needs of men and resembles the Playboy mansion; that intelligent design and evolution sounds more like a religious argument on both sides rather than rational science, etc…<\/p>\n

You might want to check out this out from Mark Allender. Its a lecture that goes in some of the same directions with those who are wrestling with the disconnects between faith and reason in the 21st Century.<\/p>\n

Mark Allender here. <\/p>\n

I am a subscriber to the WGBH Forum podcast out of Boston – and their last lecture – a scant 20 minute piece on Science and Religion – has so profoundly affected me that have been forwarding this to many friends and family. I also thought it might interest you.<\/p>\n

Here is the podcast link:
\nhttp:\/\/www.npr.org\/rss\/podcast.php?id=510007&uid=f14bc329c72603758146504eb2648461<\/a><\/p>\n

And here is where you can download it if you are interested:
\nhttp:\/\/cdn.npr-podcasts.speedera.net\/anon.npr-podcasts\/podcast\/396\/510007\/WGBH_4967152.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n

Again, no obligation but I suspect you might get a lot out of it. It is a very postmodern thing to experience religion through a lens of science. This piece correlates “ideas” to “viruses” that propagate themselves with little regard to their “hosts.” A fascinating way to think about ideas and religion…<\/p>\n

Thought i’d share.<\/p>\n

mark
\nzzz@uu.cx
\nhttp:\/\/zzz.uu.cx<\/p>\n

Watch for a podcast on all this after the first of the year. I think Jon Steward summed it all up best when he said this about the theory of intelligent design: “Its not teaching that there is a god, only that there is someone out there with a job description an awful lot like it.”<\/p>\n

http:\/\/cdn.npr-podcasts.speedera.net\/anon.npr-podcasts\/podcast\/396\/510007\/WGBH_4967152.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Its seems Barbara Walters has done the definitive work on faith and life after death and the verdict is… she won’t give her own opinion. I got bit of a chuckle out of that yesterday when she appeared on Good Morning America and she was asked if she believed in heaven and her answer was, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-culture","category-heaven-hell-and-afterlife-pasttimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredjesus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}