The most beautiful emotion

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger ... is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

- Albert Einstein

What sort of god do you affirm or deny?

Everyone carries around with them an idea in their mind which they call ‘God’/’god’, and which they choose to either affirm or deny the existence of. What is immediately striking is that everyone has their own personal ideas about their deity concept. This is true even limiting ourselves to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which Christadelphians should know since they deny the doctrine of the Trinity which most other Christians affirm, but it runs much much deeper than this with many different historic and contemporary ideas about God that go far beyond what most of us have ever heard of.

The fact that everyone carries around a different idea of God in their mind should make us more open-minded towards others in that just because we superficially disagree with someone about God that doesn’t mean we are talking about the same God concept, and may actually find we have more in common with them than we think.

Talking Faith and Deconversion with Andy Stanley

Andy Stanley is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church a megachurch in Atlanta, GA. In this episode of 'Life after God' Andy talks to the shows host, Ryan Bell, who was an ordained minister with the Seventh Day Adventists before becoming an atheist.

I think this is a model conversation, in terms of attitude, between two people with different views, especially between a Christian and an Atheist who have different worldviews.

The show opens with this quote from Andy,