Page 47 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
Dodging mental lobotomies
I find liberal conceptions of God to often be flexible and dependent entirely on the person doing the conceiving. Bishop John Spong’s idea of “honest believers” who successfully avoid “mental lobotomies” while engaged in an uncompromising search for reality, is an accurate description of the mind of
many liberal Christians.38 Thus the dialogue between Christian and atheist liberals, and between the theistic and atheistic parts of each particular mind, should proceed relatively smoothly.
In general, what liberals have experienced is
a movement from external or traditional sources
of meaning — such as priests receiving meaning from God and handing it to their flocks — to an inner source of meaning in which each person may determine themselves what their lives mean. Not that the external sources should no longer be attended
to — just that they be considered as one possible source, not the only source. In addition, we need to stretch our flexibility to insure that what we think
is not actually one of Nietzsche’s shadows of God. Philosophy helps.
Existentialism is one philosophical alternative
to Christianity’s claims. Existentialists such as Sartre and Camus deem mere existence to be meaningless using the phrase: “existence precedes essence.” I think that means that we’re born with no innate meaning,
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