News-Record.com

When you wipe the slate clean and feel that you have no rules to work from in starting the process of filling it back up... you get some very strange results. Sort of like religion as abstract art.

For some Modernists, abstract art WAS a religion, in many ways. But more for the wiping the slate clean, rather than the filling it up part....sort of Zen.

This woman's work doesn't sound very earth-shattering, though. And besides, the premise of the question requires that one's thinking about one's religion, as you were taught it, was a direct transcription from the minds and texts sermonized. We all re-interpret everything we hear and learn; that's part of learning itself. I am not sure how one could basically take one's own religion and be "wrong" about that interpretation.

"Wrong" according to what standard? This woman claims to know now exactly why and how Jesus preached and suffered and died. That realization, as she would perhaps call it, suddenly upends all she ever thought before. But for another person, they might have a precisely opposite realization, coming from a more New Age-y idea of Jesus for example to one that includes a notion of Last Judgment, etc.

Can anyone's understanding of their own religion be "wrong"??

"This woman's work doesn't sound very earth-shattering, though." FN

I couldn"t agree more! From the excerpt I read, its just another low-grade spinoff from the contemporary feeding frenzie of of anti-christian secularists, atheists and get-a-life nay-sayers.

And so we get the cliched humanist jargon:

"The truth is long overdue, and all I ask of you is to trust — trust yourself." (from Martha's Voice)

This is just make-a-buck humanism at its worst. Trusting in "one's self" has led more than one hapless, deceived victim down the primrose path to desperation, depression and self-destruction.

I can resonate a bit, however, with her frustration with religionism, especially the Romanist sort. But that was eloquently dealt with in the early 16th century, beginning at Wittenburg, and later Geneva; albeit imperfectly and in seminal form.

The only place to go with this trust-yourself default position is down into the sin-infested pit of the lost and depraved human psyche, where Freud rummaged around and Timothy Leary freaked out in. For:

"This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:
Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
But ye have not so learned Christ;
If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus:
That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;
And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;
And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." Eph. 4:17 ff.

Thanks be to God!!!