Not always friendly to each other and historically at times hostile, Protestants and Catholics are once again being reminded of the different approaches they have taken ever since Henry VIII split the Church of England from the Church of Rome almost six centuries ago—an event detailed in the current television series The Tudors, also available through sources such as iTunes and Netflix.
Controversy has dogged the first-ever official state visit of a pope to the United Kingdom ever since the visit was announced, with the vast majority of Brits apathetic to the visit and no small number deeply opposed.
As Pope Benedict XVI begins his tour today, the controversy has been heightened by a comment by papal aide Cardinal Kasper that landing at Heathrow airport was like landing in a Third World country. The cardinal has been dropped from the pope's entourage and is under pressure to apologize.
Cardinal Kasper's comment baffled even the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who said that he found Kasper's statement "quite inexplicable."
To what was Cardinal Kasper referring in his comment?
One possible answer lies in his statement that, "Particularly in England, an aggressive neo-atheism is widespread."
It's true that the United Kingdom is no longer what one would call a religious country, in the sense that the United States for instance is a nation in which faith plays a major role. But is this such a bad thing?
Stephen Hawking was interviewed from Cambridge, England, on Larry King Live last Friday evening about his new book The Grand Design. Hawking claims that physics doesn't require a God to have created the universe—that the universe would spontaneously arise from nothing because of the law of gravity.
Needless to say Hawking has touched off a debate. On the Larry King Live show one of the panelists, Deepak Chopra, commented that Hawking's book was a major contribution to our understanding—that indeed there isn't someone "out there" who made the world.
Rather than create the universe, in the traditional way people understand an external God creating matter as something separate from the divine, Chopra explained that God became the world.
So perhaps it's a good thing that England is increasingly moving away from traditional ideas of God, becoming neo-atheistic. It's just possible this will open the door for a genuine experience of the divine to arise in people's own consciousness.
Is it perhaps time the Holy See, in line with the thinking of some of the best Catholic theologians, also recognized that the kind of "God" Christendom has long promoted has never in fact existed?
As Meister Eckhart—from whom Eckhart Tolle, takes his first name—pointed out many centuries ago, along with many other mystics in the Western tradition, let alone the Eastern tradition, God is the essence of our existence,not a separate entity from us.
St. Paul said nearly two thousand years ago that "in God we live, and move, and have our being."
Science cannot tell us the meaning of the universe, let alone of our personal life. That is the domain of spirituality.
But if spirituality is going to truly assist us, it needs to be informed by science—and many in traditional religion are still a long way from realizing there is no separate God "out there somewhere," but that we all live, and move, and have our being as an expression of the divine.
Perhaps the Scots and English can have an evolutionary effect upon the Pope's understanding of the divine during his visit.
Then an enlightened Holy See could join with science and with Eastern spiritual traditions in helping us all enter into a deeper realization of the nature of our being.
*Editor's Note: If you'd like to read more about the kind of God pointed to in this blog, which doesn't clash with science but is better understood through the discoveries of people like Stephen Hawking, you will especially enjoy the second chapter of the Namaste Publishing book Your Forgotten Self.
Controversy has dogged the first-ever official state visit of a pope to the United Kingdom ever since the visit was announced, with the vast majority of Brits apathetic to the visit and no small number deeply opposed.
As Pope Benedict XVI begins his tour today, the controversy has been heightened by a comment by papal aide Cardinal Kasper that landing at Heathrow airport was like landing in a Third World country. The cardinal has been dropped from the pope's entourage and is under pressure to apologize.
Cardinal Kasper's comment baffled even the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who said that he found Kasper's statement "quite inexplicable."
To what was Cardinal Kasper referring in his comment?
One possible answer lies in his statement that, "Particularly in England, an aggressive neo-atheism is widespread."
It's true that the United Kingdom is no longer what one would call a religious country, in the sense that the United States for instance is a nation in which faith plays a major role. But is this such a bad thing?
Stephen Hawking was interviewed from Cambridge, England, on Larry King Live last Friday evening about his new book The Grand Design. Hawking claims that physics doesn't require a God to have created the universe—that the universe would spontaneously arise from nothing because of the law of gravity.
Needless to say Hawking has touched off a debate. On the Larry King Live show one of the panelists, Deepak Chopra, commented that Hawking's book was a major contribution to our understanding—that indeed there isn't someone "out there" who made the world.
Rather than create the universe, in the traditional way people understand an external God creating matter as something separate from the divine, Chopra explained that God became the world.
So perhaps it's a good thing that England is increasingly moving away from traditional ideas of God, becoming neo-atheistic. It's just possible this will open the door for a genuine experience of the divine to arise in people's own consciousness.
Is it perhaps time the Holy See, in line with the thinking of some of the best Catholic theologians, also recognized that the kind of "God" Christendom has long promoted has never in fact existed?
As Meister Eckhart—from whom Eckhart Tolle, takes his first name—pointed out many centuries ago, along with many other mystics in the Western tradition, let alone the Eastern tradition, God is the essence of our existence,not a separate entity from us.
St. Paul said nearly two thousand years ago that "in God we live, and move, and have our being."
Science cannot tell us the meaning of the universe, let alone of our personal life. That is the domain of spirituality.
But if spirituality is going to truly assist us, it needs to be informed by science—and many in traditional religion are still a long way from realizing there is no separate God "out there somewhere," but that we all live, and move, and have our being as an expression of the divine.
Perhaps the Scots and English can have an evolutionary effect upon the Pope's understanding of the divine during his visit.
Then an enlightened Holy See could join with science and with Eastern spiritual traditions in helping us all enter into a deeper realization of the nature of our being.
*Editor's Note: If you'd like to read more about the kind of God pointed to in this blog, which doesn't clash with science but is better understood through the discoveries of people like Stephen Hawking, you will especially enjoy the second chapter of the Namaste Publishing book Your Forgotten Self.
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