Peter

“How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe — if he/she/it has any interest of being known or listened to — be such a massively poor”
― David Madison, GUESSING ABOUT GOD

“People must be able to reconstruct their own pattern of meaning, regardless of what it looks like or how long it takes—it simply must be all their own. Experiencing depression or numbness is normal during this phase of recovery (Winell 23). I have had clients who have even gone so far as to describe it by saying, “I don’t feel alive.” Losing a former faith story means losing the meaning-making method by which a person made sense of their life and the world around them.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the “writings” [poetic and wisdom texts] as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [postexilic period]. This suggests that by their intention, these materials are . . . an intentional and coherent response to a particular circumstance of crisis. . . . Whatever older materials may have been utilized (and the use of old materials can hardly be doubted), the exilic and/ or postexilic location of the final form of the text suggests that the Old Testament materials, understood normatively, are to be taken [understood] precisely in an acute crisis of displacement, when old certitudes—sociopolitical as well as theological—had failed.[”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“Since, for most centuries since Jesus died, the majority of the population couldn’t read or had limited access to books, why would an all-knowing God think self-revelation through a book was a good idea? For 1,500 years or so after the death of Jesus, God’s holy book remained inaccessible to most everybody except Christian priests who did the reading and interpretation of the book. Does this sound like a plan designed by the “God of the Universe”?”
― David Madison, GUESSING ABOUT GOD