As this lazy approach continues, the church's audience will continue to dwindle. John Shelby Spong states: ‘Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits’.
No wonder we had to invent the term ‘blind faith’! Using scare tactics to ‘save souls’ is just plane underhanded and gaining heaven or nirvana or whatever you choose to call it, doesn’t have anything to do with reward or punishment, if this were our motivation, humanity then has yet to escape its self-centeredness and has a long way still to evolve!Now this hard line approach was necessary in the pre-modern word to be sure, but we no longer inhabit that world. We now live in a post-modern age and simply can no longer blindly accept crude black and white answers to complex questions.
In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. - J.H. Newman
