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, March 14, 2023

What Is Process? - Jay McDaniel




From Jay McDaniel's Process Site comes "Four Hopes of the Process Movement". Let's sit back and enjoy the depth of Jay's insights over a lifetime of process study!

R.E. Slater
March 14, 2023



What Is Process?

by Jay McDaniel
July 7, 2021


The Process movement is a network of people around the world who want to make a constructive difference in the world. They include farmers, artists, business persons, government officials, philosophers, sociologists, educators, grandmothers, social workers, musicians, and poets. Some are religious and some are not; but all are hopeful.

Those who are religious include Bahais, Buddhists, Christians, Daoists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and Unitarian Universalists. These traditions are very important to them, and they weave a process outlook on life onto, and with help from, their spiritual lineages.

Nevertheless some people in the process network are spiritually interested but not religiously affiliated. Indeed, for many, including those who enjoy a sense of religious belonging, the topic of "religion" is not as important to them as are many other topics facing humanity, other animals, local communities, and the Earth today.

So what do they have in common? They share four hopes that animate their actions in local communities and the broader world.

Whole Persons. They work to help individuals around the world grow in personal wholeness and spiritual vitality (e.g. creativity, beauty, love, forgiveness, faith, playfulness, gratitude, listening, and a sense of wonder)

Compassionate Communities: They help build compassionate communities that are creative, caring, participatory, diverse, inclusive, good for animals and good for the Earth: with no one left behind.

A Flourishing Planet: They work to help the planet as a whole flourish with its many forms of life. Toward this end they encourage "world loyalty" as well as "local loyalty," encouraging people to think of the Earth as a whole as an Earth Community deserving respect and care. This hope lies behind their commitment to "ecological civilizations."
Holistic Thinking. They encourage holistic ways of thinking - drawing from science, art, philosophy, and spirituality - that help people live with respect and care for the Earth community, enjoy meaningful bonds in local settings, and find personal happiness.
For process thinkers there are many obstacles to these hopes. Examples include:

(1) the excessive individualism of western modernity and consumer culture,

(2) a mechanistic understanding of the world that reduces all things to inert objects in space,

(3) the failure of higher education to address serious problems of the world, and

(4) the failure of education as a whole to help people become whole persons in whole communities.

Some process thinkers believe that the world is headed toward catastrophe: global climate change, chronic economic inequities, animosities between nations, and political dysfunction, The four hopes are not just icing on a cake. They are necessary for survival.

Many process thinkers take the philosophy of the late mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, as an alternative to hyper-individualism and mechanism and believe that his "philosophy of organism" is the kind of holistic thinking sorely needed.

Below I offer an example of a Whiteheadian version of holistic thinking.

click to enlarge


​Those of us in the Process movement recognize and celebrate that there are other, non-Whiteheadian forms of holistic thinking that are also conducive to living with respect and care for the community of life on Earth. The Process network can well include Islamic, Jewish, East Asian, African, and Indigenous forms of wisdom that are Whiteheadian, but that are extremely important if the four hopes are to be realized. It is the four hopes that matter the most. They are what animate the Process movement.


Saturday, March 11, 2023

Index - Evolution of Man and Religion




The road to humanity was a long one, and we are still exploring its byways. It began in Africa some 7 million years ago when our lineage split from that of our closest living relatives the chimpanzees. Our ancestors still resembled apes nearly 4 millions years later. This includes Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia, from a group called the australopiths. In some ways Lucy was very ape-like: she had a chimp-sized brain and long arms that suggest she spent a lot of time in trees. But she also walked on two legs, like modern humans.

Hominins living at this time probably made simple stone tools, but our ancestors didn’t really begin to look and behave like us until about 1.9 million years ago with the appearance of the genus Homo. Homo erectus fossils have been found in Europe and Asia, marking it out as the first hominin to make its way out of Africa. It produced far more sophisticated tools than its predecessors, and was probably also the first hominin to control fire. Some researchers believe it invented cooking, providing them with more energy to allow bigger brains to evolve.

However, the anatomy of Homo erectus suggests it was incapable of speech. That talent most likely came with Homo heidelbergensis, which evolved from Homo erectus in Africa about 600,000 years ago. Populations of Homo heidelbergensis living in Eurasia are thought to have given rise to the Neanderthals in the west and an enigmatic group called the Denisovans in the east. And was it was considered to be our direct ancestor too. However, new evidence is completely rewriting this part of the human story.

Until recently, the out-of-Africa paradigm had Homo sapiens evolving in East Africa around 150,000 years ago, becoming capable of modern behaviours around 60,000 years ago, and then migrating en masse to colonise the entire world. But new analyses of fossils, tools and DNA tell a different story. It looks like our species is far older – at least 300,000 years old – and was behaviourally sophisticated from the start. We did evolve in Africa but, rather than originating in one region, we emerged from populations across the continent in a process called “African multiregionalism”. Everything, from the identity of our last ancestor, when our species left Africa and what happened next, is up for revision. These are interesting times to be exploring the human story – no doubt, there will be more plot twists to come.



EVOLUTION OF MAN and RELIGION
In The Days Before Genesis

chronologically listed from new to old
building upon the article before it

Ancient Civilizations: The Younger Dryas Era

































SCIENCE - PROCESSUAL EVOLUTION



























SCIENCE and HUMAN ORIGINS










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