Religiosanity

Recognition of the deep human history and prehistory can have a profound influence on our spirituality and religion.

Humans like us (with same capacities of thinking and feeling have been on our planet for roughly 200,000 years. History starts with writing in Summer and Egypt just about 6,000 years ago. Christianity is only 2,000 years old and Judaism in its biblical format perhaps half a millennium older.

Some of this meditation (and more to come) was inspired by a book "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and

David Wengrow

Pastor Andrew returns again to the topic of the state of Louisiana making it a law to have the 10 Commandments on display in all schools. He posits "Tell me which 10 Commandments you read and I'll tell you who you are." By censoring the very first commandment, they are showing exactly what kind of Christians they are, namely ones interesting in enslavement rather than setting their people free.

A moment in France's olympic opening ceremony was deemed blasphemous and mocking of Jesus and the Christian religion. The outcry was so loud and vast that the Olympic officials had to give press conferences about it, and eventually removed the clip from view online. The fervor has finally died down. Now we need Pastor Andrew to weigh in on this most potent form of "Religio-insanity." He says, "we are being shackled back into slavery under the pretension of “blasphemy.” That itself is blasphemous…using God to promote your inferior motives—political, religious—using religion not to liberate, but to control and to enslave. Jesus would be horrified.

Birds in the New Testament - and some less known mythical antecedents of well known Jesus' logia (sayings and parables)

Public displays of the 10 Commandments are back!!!!!! And Pastor Andrew is more angry about it than ever. On this episode, he discusses how this phenomenon is offensive on many different levels, not just with fundamentalists pushing their religion on others, but also theologically frustrating being that there isn't just one set of 10 Commandments, not even in the Hebrew bible itself!

An offhanded remark about the salvation of birds prompts Pastor Andrew to come to this episode with some examples, from the Bible and ancient texts, of the wisdom, cunning, and dare we say, faith of our winged friends, which leads to a larger discussion of what has led humans to feel a superiority to animals, and the Christian implication in this.

Biblical scholarship is slowly replacing the discipline of Biblical theology. More and more biblical scholars find themselves outside of the straitjacket of church dogmas and practice. Their lack of dogma yields a richer and robust understanding of the deep roots of religious history and thought.

Pastor Andrew is back LIVE with host Peter Rinaldi for the 2nd edition of ASK THE PASTOR ANYTHING (about the Bible of Ancient Times). Favorite theologians, Do pets go to heaven, Christianity in the days of Slavery, miracles as myth, and much much more!

This event was recording live at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on Tuesday March 5th.

On this episode, Pastor Andrew describes, and begins to process, a spiritual crisis, or a personal spiritual realignment, that has to do with the Old Testament.

A headline reading “Breakthrough in Biblical Archeology: Israeli researchers developed a groundbreaking method using the earths magnetic field to verify events in the old testament” prompts Pastor Andrew to do a deep dive into the oxymoron of Biblical Archeology, highlighting two figures, Yigael Yadin and William Foxwell Albright, who played key roles in this phenomenon, and why it has always been about much more than just “proving” the Bible.