Alan Watts Weighs In

By Wayne Brown
As an ordained minister of the Episcopalian church and a serious theologian, Watts gives a serious and sensitive picture of what is wrong with Christianity. Hw sums up the reasons why we need to move past Christianity as it exists (not what we wish or hope it could be)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIVrFV3S2c

The lecture is long but clear and brilliant. If you care about the issue, I strongly recommend that you give Alan Watts an hour of your time.

This is not the usual atheist attack on "Santa Claus for Grownups". It is a call for radical reform and a total re-think of what the message of Jesus really is, which, paradoxically, involves rejection of what most people think of as the central dogmas of the Church, such as those surrounding sin, forgiveness, the nature of God, the person of Jesus and so on.

If you accept his arguments, you must stop calling yourself a Christian (if you ever did). It is not enough to say you have a private interpretation of the "real" message of Jesus. If this private interpretation is 180 degrees away from what all "conventional" Christian denominations teach, then self-identifying as "Christian" is a cowardly lie -- just a way to fit in and cling to the last vestiges of the official dogma of the entire culture.

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