Floating Life

Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Paul Tillich Paul Tillich sought to express Christian truth in an existentialist way. Our primary problem is alienation from the ground of our being, so that our life is meaningless. Great for psychotherapy, but no longer very influential. Paul Tillich 87% John Calvin 60% Jürgen Moltmann 60% Friedrich Schleiermacher 53% Charles Finney 40% Anselm 40% Karl Barth 33% Jonathan Edwards 27% Martin Luther 27% Augustine 13%

Thanks to Bruce for this.

You can’t expect something deep and meaningful every day, can you? In fact, you probably only get deep and/or meaningful in flashes on this, or most, blogs. I don’t have such a high opinion of my genius, nor am I setting out to be original, other than in the sense that my views, while no doubt not unique in any profound way, are as far as I know my own — or at least have passed through my brain, for good or ill, before you see them here.

So today my ventures focus on Ninglun on Blogspot: Good thoughts from strange places. This may particularly interest my more atheist readers.

Kevin is back too. No, not Kevin Rudd, but my old sparring partner Kevin from the USA. He has emailed me in a friendly way, and left a comment on Old Lines from a Floating Life. A search for Islam in Ninglun on Blogspot, which has appeared since Kevin was last here lamenting the descent of Australia into radical socialism under Kevin Rudd, should give Kevin something to get his teeth into.

And finally: the fake mail delivery failure seems to be very popular in the phishing and scamming world lately. Have you noticed this? I get several passing through to my mailbox every day; they seem to evade the net at Unwired (my mail provider) before delivery, which is, I suppose, the point of the technique.

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When it comes to the politics of the hardest left I am a dead loss, being an actual believer in "reformist pap" as the best means to deliver a greater degree of humanity and compassion in our fraught world, hard left solutions in practice having generally delivered tragic outcomes. While the hard left is ineffectual it can however be useful, as some insights I have gleaned from an oh so typical "theological" dispute around the US Revolutionary Communist Party show. This (along with its kind of like-minded critics) is a Maoist outfit. One of the like-minded critics is Kasama, a blog on WordPress. There is, I note, a struggle going on about the correct attitude towards Islamist militancy, some favouring "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", while others are, in my view, a touch more realistic about militant Islamism (as distinct from Islam, the religion of around one quarter of the world’s population). For example, Kasama: "The essential question remains the same however. Should Maoists join and try to lead a pole of resistance to imperialism that may include reactionaries? Or should they strive to create a third pole that includes neither Islamic reactionaries nor the imperialists? Who is the main enemy of the ‘Third Pole’ in Iraq? Also, who would the main enemy of this third pole be in a situation like an aggression against Iran, the Islamic reactionary government or US attackers?"

In one of his Nine Letters to Our Comrades Kasama (Mike Ely) argues on tactical as well as experiential grounds that atheists such as himself need to think more carefully on the subject of religion, even (quite relevantly) citing Marx in support. Bob Avakian is the founding leader of this band of US Maoists, with whom Mike has issues.

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