Timestamps
00:00:00 – 00:00:39 – Intro Video
00:00:39 – 00:02:17 – Show Introduction
00:02:17 – 00:05:32 – Tell us a bit about yourself
00:05:32 – 00:09:06 – Tell us where your passion point fits, your role, and how you ended up here?
00:09:06 – 00:11:02 – Comparing the states to Australia, do you find there isn’t even a point of contention here?
00:11:02 – 00:16:32 – What are the challenges facing young men today? and what is authentic masculinity?
00:16:32 – 00:22:22 – Given the circumstances, why are we so surprised to see the worst coming out?
00:22:22– 00:26:06 – What does reimagining masculinity look like?
00:26:06 – 00:28:54 – The question should always be, how do I live out the virtues in my life today?
00:28:54 – 00:30:38 – Do you find there’s an intiutive answer?
00:30:38 – 00:41:01 – Where do you see the role of community in this? How do men support each other? and how do parents and women support men in this space?
00:41:01 – 00:41:26 – Outro
We often hear people say ‘I’m spiritual not religious’
- Religion has been politicised
- Ideology – liberal vs conservative
- The neo-conservative or neo-liberal?
- Christ is not the mean of our political extremes.
- Rather than political wording say, ‘I’m Catholic’. Be careful when using politicised language in religion.
- Religion is deemed private
- Religion has a bad rap (Christianity) – ‘failed’ as a moral compass
- G. K. Chesterton – “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.”
- Spirituality makes it excessively self-focussed. Means it will not be separated from the political because we ourselves are political.
- But we are meant for more – we are built to worship God.
Why Be Spiritual rather than religious?
- Feels safer because mainstream society is much more accepting and receptive of spirituality particularly in Australia.
- Not sure spirituality will ever be rejected the way religion is because it means also rejecting aboriginal spirituality, which is taboo in Australia. Aboriginal spirituality can only be accepted, and only questioned to understand, but not to critique, or else you’re in social trouble.
- Soothes and confirms, does not challenge in any way
Spirituality without being associated with a particular religion allows:
- Individualistic search for a higher power and/or meaning to life (separate from a group or community)
- Cherry-picking the ‘best bits’ of different religions – e.g. Cafeteria Catholicism
- Self-determining
- What is and isn’t ‘divine’
- Come to your ‘own’ truth
- Own standards of practice
Religious – Christianity – Why Be Apart of It?
- Belong to a community
- A community helps you strive beyond what you can do individually
- Support each other
- Challenge each other
- A group of people who have Christ as their bedrock – that Christ is the entire meaning of their existence.
- We will always tend to the path of least resistance, religion removes that.
Religion from Latin religare – means to reconnect. A way to reconnect to God through His Church.
Spirituality tries to bring God down to us, rather than religion that raises up to Him.
Spirituality can be thought to be more primitive than religion.
- God did come down to our level – He became man. But that’s where spirituality stops, and then goes no further. It shows how we desire God to be with us.
- But Christianity means God became human in order to raise us up.
- Spirituality makes him a God on our terms, which makes Him no longer God.
Self-Determining
- The Christian God throughout the Bible tells us who God is, and who we are in relation to God. This is where we get our understanding of ‘divine’ from, instead of relying on an inner search of ourselves and hoping we’ve connected right.
- Rather than being self-determining – religion also makes demands of love from a person
Truth
- We have Scripture and history as to knowing who the ‘divine’ truly is. It’s not based on us and our ability.
- A good challenge to those who are spiritual – Jesus made a bold claim “I am God’. Find any other religious leader who said ‘I am God’. We must test the veracity of it, because he is either a liar, lunatic, legend or the Lord.
- Jesus, was never considered mentally ill. The Pharisees never said he was ‘insane’ – he was never charged with lunacy – even historically people were aware of mental illness.
- If we look back on historical evidence, seeing if Jesus existed, it is consistent that yes, this is true. It’s very hard to prove that the Gospels were fake.
- Challenge: make a choice of Jesus’ claim – wrestle with it’s legitimacy, and decide.
- If we take the best of someone, and if He was a liar or lunatic, would we want to model Him, because if He wasn’t Lord, we wouldn’t want to model that, being mentally ill.
- For a non-religious spiritual person – there is no ‘truth’. The truth is simply whatever the person deems to be ‘true’ at this time.
Standards of Practice
- Scripture gives us clear guidelines of what to expect to see in each other as fellow Christians.
- 10 commandments, beatitudes, love one another, what worship should look like, what marriage looks like – these are consistent.
- These are not present outside of religion except in the ever changing society which is inconsistent in its expectations
This kind of idea that truth as ever changing – This philosophy of ‘truth’ as merely enlightenment, euphoric, and always changing, – if that’s ‘truth’ then we can question whether that is true?
The only way of marking change is by the background of permanence!
TBG
Stina – Family group – wisdom to apologise so quickly, after deflecting embarrassment.
Padre – Answering the New Atheism by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker
If you enjoy our Show Notes, you can listen to our Living Fullness Podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, directly from our website or watch our guest interviews on YouTube! Also check out our social media pages Living Fullness Podcast on Instagram , the closed Facebook group for links and discussions, and Virtue Ministry on Facebook and Instagram.