I commend the articles below for your consideration. As stated in previous posts we need to consider the bible, not as a rulebook nor user manual, but as a valuable source/resource for thinking about and developing the principles/concepts/ideas that its authors articulate. We should see them a a jumping off point: not the final, literal, unalterable divine word. Our thinking should not be boxed in or constrained within the envelopes of biblical interpretation and church doctrine. As the saying has it: think outside the box.
'What I respect most about Jesus and the Buddha is not simply what they taught, but the fact that they refused to live secondhand lives. Neither man inherited truth passively. Neither surrendered his authority to the systems around him. They arrived at their understanding through direct confrontation with existence itself. Their insight was not borrowed. It was earned.
Jesus emerged from within a deeply religious culture with established laws, traditions, authorities, and expectations that could have easily defined his life for him. Instead, he trusted something deeper than conformity. He spoke and acted from an authority that did not come from religious institutions, which is precisely why those institutions experienced him as dangerous.
The Buddha undertook a different but equally radical journey. He subjected himself to disciplines, teachers, renunciations, and extreme practices in search of an answer to human suffering, only to discover that none of them reached deeply enough. What stands out is not perfection, but resolve. Both men were willing to continue searching long after inherited answers failed them.
What they discovered placed them in direct tension with the dominant assumptions of their time. They trusted lived reality over social agreement. They trusted direct insight over inherited certainty. Neither softened what they saw in order to remain acceptable. They were misunderstood, resisted, dismissed, and threatened because genuine truth has a way of destabilizing systems built upon illusion, fear, hierarchy, or dependency. Yet neither retreated. They embodied what they discovered so fully that their lives themselves became inseparable from their teaching.
This is why reducing them to religious mascots completely misses the point. The Buddha was not interested in creating Buddhists. Jesus was not interested in creating Christians. Neither man was asking for worship. They were pointing toward transformation. They were demonstrating what a human being becomes when illusion falls away, when fear loosens its grip, when one comes into direct relationship with reality itself. Their significance lies not only in the truths they articulated, but in the courage, honesty, and existential seriousness through which they arrived at them.
Somewhere along the way, people replaced the challenge of embodiment with the safety of devotion. It became easier to worship Jesus than to live as he lived. Easier to admire the Buddha than to undergo the kind of inner confrontation his path required. Religion turned living revelations into systems of belief, and in doing so often protected people from the very transformation these figures represented.
The deeper invitation was never imitation in the shallow sense, nor obedience to a religious structure built around their memory. It was awakening. To become “a Jesus” or “a Buddha” is not to become supernatural. It is to become radically awake to reality, deeply responsible for one’s life, grounded in compassion, liberated from illusion, and unwilling to betray what one sees to be true. It is to stop living mechanically inside inherited frameworks and begin living consciously, courageously, and honestly.
That path cannot be walked for you. No religion can hand it to you fully formed. At some point, every person has to decide whether they will continue living from borrowed truth or risk discovering what is real for themselves.'
Jim Palmer
'There’s a strange kind of ache that comes when you realize you spent years loving a book you were never fully allowed to understand. For me, the Bible was that book. I was handed it like a contract — sign here, agree here, don’t ask too many questions. But over the decades, something in me kept tugging toward a wider, deeper truth. Foster and Willard taught me to listen beneath the noise. Rohr taught me to trust the widening. Giles taught me to question the frame itself. And somewhere along the way, Scripture stopped feeling like a rulebook and started feeling like a living conversation.
Every translation I picked up became another doorway. The NIV helped me breathe. The Rainbow Bible helped me see. And The Inclusive Bible helped me hear, really hear, the voices that had always been there but were muted by the limits of older language. Suddenly Sarah stood beside Abraham, Wisdom spoke in her own voice, and God was no longer trapped inside the narrow pronouns I inherited.
In this translation, God is never reduced to “He,” but named with titles like the Most High, the Holy One, or Adonai. Christ is spoken of without gender when referring to the universal, cosmic presence, while Jesus is honored in his historical maleness. And the Spirit moves freely without pronouns at all — Breath, Advocate, Presence — letting the Trinity breathe in its full, unbounded life.
And of course, in honor of and respect for the many who hold this view: some people insist the Spirit is female because the Hebrew word ruach is grammatically feminine, and because the Spirit’s movements — comforting, birthing, hovering, indwelling — echo traditionally feminine imagery. Others point out that Greek uses a neuter word for Spirit, and Latin uses a masculine one. The languages of Scripture never agree on a single gender for the Spirit. And maybe that’s the point: the Spirit has always slipped past our categories.
Which is why the best translation isn’t the one we defend — it’s the one that transforms us, the one that opens something in us we didn’t know was closed. And in this season of Eastertide — when resurrection keeps unfolding in quieter, deeper ways — it feels right that the words themselves are rising into new life too.
The text didn’t shrink; it expanded. And so do we. Perhaps a little less certain now, and ever more drawn toward an egalitarian way of seeing our God, God’s creation, our neighbor, and even ourselves.
Maybe that’s the quiet miracle: when we let Scripture speak without the old filters, we don’t lose God — we find the One who was never confined by them.
What if the real revelation isn’t what the Bible says, but what we finally become able to hear.'
Royce 
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