Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Index

Quotes & Sayings

We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Index - Process Science & Cosmology

Index to Process Science & Cosmology

Here, I have mixed in a little bit of everything over the past two years (2020 - Feb 2022) related to quantum cosmologies as I have covered them in some aspect of the subject itself - along with any topics especially relating to cosmology and metaphysics, process philosophy and theology, or the evolutionary origins of the universe from a processual basis.

The reader may pick-and-choose the topics to connect together one-with-the-other with the thought that hopefully, I've been able to address a few other topics which may help "expand and extend" the cosmic metaphors, philosophies, and ontological possibilities humanity has been searching; topics which may help make sense of the cold, hard scientific facts the metamodern sciences are discovering one-after-the-other. If you will then, this index here is a constructive cosmological process-based metaframework of the living organism we live within panrelationally, panexperientially, and panpsychically.

As you'll see, my bias will run towards Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism ( sic, Process Philosophy) as it has been responding to the quantum sciences of the 20th and 21st Centuries. As an integral philosophy of everything, process thought has been responding quite helpfully in providing the (processual) sciences of cosmology and evolution with a metaphysical and ontological perspective (this latter, re ontology, comes courtesy of process theology).

You'll also notice from the CD cover below, that science itself has been attempting to provide it's own philosophical perspectives through "look-backs" in history. For the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he started with the German Idealist Hegel whose cosmological outlook began - but became overwhelmed - within the trappings of his enlightenment era when fellow philosophers over the next several hundred years got caught up in the idea of a mechanistic, matter v mind cosmology and did not extend his work.

As a Scientist and Royal Academy Fellow, Whitehead noticed the need for a relevant cosmology after completing his Principia Mathematic with Bertrand Russel and immediately set out to complete his life's last project by re-orienting science towards a relationally processual essence of being. Translated, this meant to see the world as "an organic essence full of relationality, open-endedness, and prehensive concreasences of actualities and possibilities."

And so I don't think the reader will be disappointed when reading through these postings. For myself, Process Philosophy has meaningfully circumscribed itself around all previous Western and Continental philosophies, and has helpfully integrated some of the more salient points of Middle-Eastern and Oriental philosophy as well. This is why Process Philosophy portends towards becoming, for the time being, an overarching integral theory of cosmology, metaphysics, and ontology.

See what you think. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater

February 8, 2022

EVERYTHING FROM 2021-2022

RELATING TO PROCESS COSMOLOGY

(in chronological order)

You will find that there will be some overlap of the same articles appearing in several categories. As explanation, I felt these posts aptly fit each categorical reference which it subtended under. Hence, the topic at hand was broad enough to be applied widely so that if a researcher wished to study a topical category of choice this form of categorization may help the best in attaining to their effort. Thus the overlaps. (PS. Similarly, you'll find a dizzying amount of article replications in the "Index - Bible topics" as well; again, because of the breadth of topic being handled by that one specific post.) With deepest apologies.

- R.E. Slater

Process Cosmology

Science & Cosmology

Science & the Universe

Please note: All articles are listed chronologically by date, each building upon the last. Though the reader may pick and chose their subject as they please, do realize that for myself I wrote some of these in a "date-ordered series" attempting to connect my separate thoughts to the last as I understood them. Hence, what wasn't covered in one article was most probably covered by several other past articles or future articles which I had laid aside to attend to the present matter. Thus, such topics were skipped over. As example, I've spoken many times of divine immanence but have never separated out the present-ness of divine immanence. It was always assumed by myself that a present context was implied by the topic. In hindsight I will need to develop several future articles connecting these two ideas to the larger idea of process panentheism to help "round out" the subtending ideas within panentheism.