It doesn't belong in the YEC thread, or the Dawkins thread, though it spins off from the latter.

This morning Rabbi Blue on the Today programme on BBC R4 Rabbi Blue spoke about a Cabbalist interpretation our creation, as being (I need to listen again and it isn't up yet) in order to bring that part of God which He spent in the creation back to Him.

I've recently come across a ninth century scholar, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who held that Augustine's doctrine of God predestining everyone to either Heaven or Hell was wrong, God being of one nature, good, and therefore only capable of predestining souls to rejoin with Himself. The Irishman is not in totally good odour with the church, though he had been engaged to counteract Pelagius.

Both of these teachings (and I want to discover if the Irishman had been in contact with Cabbala - seems a bit early - in his continental travels) seem, by contrast with so much religion, to be inclusive, rather than drawing walls around which put those we don't like outside, beyond the Pale.

And then, this morning Start the Week, again BBC R4,
Faith and Doubt goes into the same territory, with ex-bishop Richard Holloway telling his own account of a journey to Christian agnosticism, away from the dependence on rules. (He appears with Karen Armstrong - confusion between faith and belief, Jonathan Safran Foer - writing a new Haggadah, and Helen Edmundson - author of a play about a nun, sister Juana, who had problems with a Catholic archbishop in colonial South America.) This will also repay relistening, and broadcast that there are more open forms of living belief in the spiritual.

Thjere are lots of us out there, and we need to make more noise. This from a Quaker. (We used to have a small meeting in a room next to a Fellowship who had a loud worship band, and a lot of glossolalia. It is hard to make silence heard.)

Penny