The Divine Universe

 
 
Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief accountant $100,000.
After [...]

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
 
Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief [...]

 Where do Christian moral standards come from? We have the Ten Commandments and something that Jesus said was a more fundamental and all-embracing law: to love your neighbour as yourself. I don’t think anyone would quibble about the Ten Commandments. But the rest of the Jewish law books, the first five books of the Bible, [...]

There’s a story in Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) that raises the question. Jesus and some disciples were hiking through the region of Tyre and Sidon. It was a cosmopolitan region – people from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. On their way a Canaanite woman accosted Jesus, pleading with him to heal her mentally disturbed daughter. The [...]

I have been re-reading a book that caused a sensation in the Anglican Church some forty-five years ago. That was a time when Anglicans were more concerned about evangelism than sexual orientation. Bishop John Robinson believed that the Church had a deep-seated problem in presenting God to the contemporary secular society. He described the problem [...]

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is often over-mystificated, but religious people should be mystified. A sense of mystery is an important element of religious experience. God is the ultimate mystery. Jews do not even attempt to speak his name. The ninety-nine names proclaimed by Moslems are abstract attributes; physical images are forbidden. Christianity, Michael [...]

Forever and ever - endless time. But what is time? We all know what time feels like, but we can’t really define it. Poets have described it as flowing like a river, but many philosophers and scientists believe that this is an illusion: it’s just the way our brain works. Our mental apparatus and our [...]

The reason I have called this blog The Divine Universe is that I believe that matter, the physical world, is sacred. This is clearly implied in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, invented in the 3rd century by Tertullian and adopted as a universal dogma by the Council of Nicea in 325. Tertullian referred to [...]

Whether people think theologically or scientifically, they believe the universe emerged from nothing. Catholics use the Latin word nihilo; scientists use the word vacuum. For centuries scientists and philosophers have been pondering about the vacuum, a region in which there is no matter. In recent years they have gone further and explored a theoretical [...]

Neurologists, molecular biologists and others in the field can tell us a lot about the electrical, molecular and chemical processes that take place when we think or feel with our senses, but such information seems remote from our subjective experience of consciousness. There is a huge gap between objective, scientific knowledge and our experience. Feeling [...]