Here is the quotation from Eileen Barker I promised.

(Ken Smith) writes:

>”Rowland Croucher” <> writes:

>>A ‘Net friend wrote in message

.

>>> Rowland Croucher wrote:

>>>

>>> What a decidedly PC commentary. 🙂

>>>

>>> > A ‘Net friend wrote in message

>>> > .

>>> > > Sean McHugh wrote:

>><>

>>> > But more importantly, I think there’s a challenge for us wowsers, I

mean >>> > Jesus-followers, in the old saying ‘Those who are searching for God

have >>> > already been found by God’.

>>>

>>> Those three that you mention deny that they are searching however.

>>Most ‘searchers’ don’t fully understand what they’re searching for 🙂

>I’ve got a quotation somewhere by Eileen Barker about “searchers”.

>I’ll dig it out and post it, so I get it accurately, but it’s along

>the lines of there being genuine searchers, but that most people seem

>to acquire their beliefs simply by drifting and gathering an assortment

>of ideas, mostly unconsciously, from a variety of places.

In an article “Science as theology – the theological functioning of Western science”, pages 262-280 in A.R. Peacocke, “The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century”, Oriel Press, Stocksfield, Northumberland, 1981, Eileen Barker deals with the way both science and theology are generally perceived by members of society.

She writes (on pages 262, 263):

Today we live in an age in which societies are bound together both internally and externally through heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. Increasing specialisation through the division of labour in the production of goods, services and what passes for knowledge has created a world of fragmented experience that gives rise to assorted patterns of understanding, meaning and direction. No one theology is universally accepted. Modern man can seek out or drift into the supermarket of socially available religious options, trying each theology for size and seeing how well it stands up to his experience of reality. He can seek out a whole package – perhaps one of the New Religious Movements, a recent import from the East or a well tried Born-Again Christianity – or he can collect odd bits as he goes along, putting these together to produce his own personalised theology.

It should not be thought that this is necessarily either a very conscious or a very rational process. There are, of course, the seekers but there are also the drifters who collect their theologies through a sort of absent-minded accretion. Such theologies can lie dormant in the mind, often surfacing only at points of crisis or when a curious sociologist asks them to think about what they think. Furthermore both personalised and institutionalised theologies can encompass the most extraordinary ragbag of facts, opinions and beliefs which happily coexist, apparently quite oblivious of what to others are the most glaring inconsistencies. However in the more institutionalised theologies such contradictions may be recognised and indeed celebrated by the believers as the mysteries of God or (in more secular vein)

the paradoxes of truth.

How many of us on a.r.c have indulged in some sort of “absent-minded accretion” until someone asks us to think about what we think?

>>Shalom! Rowland Croucher

>>http://jmm.aaa.net.au

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `I think that if I believed in God I should now be a very frightened man. Luckily, however, I am rather old-fashioned, so I don’t, thank God.’ Alastair Bocker, in “The Kraken Wakes”