Theology by Intuition

(c) 2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com

#FirstCuppaJoe for Mon Sep 19 (thread)

Truth be told, I have a mere college freshman’s knowledge of the great #philosophers, attenuated by 60 years of living a mundane, working-life. But—I do have more than a nodding familiarity with the King James version of the Bible, thanks to 25 years in a Christian cult. But, that exposure did not convince me that the Bible was the inerrant, directly-quoted word of God, no matter how hard the cult leaders tried to beat it into my head. It just doesn’t “read” that way. I consider my views on God untainted by both the old philosophers and the Bible.
Rather than being based on what someone else told me, I’m trying to keep my developing theology limited to the yield which results from an admixture of science, experience, emotion, and logic — all four of which are, ultimately, gifts from the dynamic, living God.

I can’t claim that the Bible hasn’t influenced my developing concept of a God. Its authors, like I, were fallible humans, just trying to put a back-story to an amazing world, and our own amazing race of little creatures. Were those authors’ ideas, at least obliquely, inspired by a supreme, universal intelligence? It sorta “reads” that way— as do the Quran, the Da De Qing, the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon. That “Jesus” fellow came along at a time when the Jewish religion was in great need of some disruption. For his adherents, it meant emancipation from an ossified system of legalistic “doings and keepings” and paid indulgences, in the form of temple sacrifices. For me, my developing theology yields emancipation from a system using “guilt trips” to force political conformity. Rather than being based upon “What would Jesus DO?” It is based on “What is healthy, for myself and for God’s other seven Billion children on Earth, today?”