You raise a really interesting point about faith, which is a concept I've never been able to wrap my head around. People of faith claim that faith is some sort of a sense that helps them evaluate truth statements, to know true things about the universe.

I think it almost goes without saying that those people are wrong. If faith worked, if it did what they said it does, then we wouldn't have several apostolic churches like the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Chaldean, and Anglican churches. We wouldn't have literally tens of thousands of Protestant denominations with mutually exclusionary belief systems. We wouldn't have mutually exclusive religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

If somebody's faith out there in that real is actually real and says something real about the universe, then it's impossible to objectively know that. Because if certain Christians are right about their faith, then Islam is false. If certain Muslims are right about their faith, then Christianity is false.

That's how I know (not believe, know from an objective point of view) that faith is a false concept. It's hard for me to understand how people can claim otherwise when the empirical evidence is so overwhelming.

And, you know, people have fought wars to "prove" faith works. It's just mystifying to me. I've struggled all my life to wrap my head around it, and I have never even begun to approach understanding.

Likewise, I don't know what spiritual and spirituality are supposed to mean as words. The way that they're used in almost all cases is to explain supernatural phenomena.

People who believe in the healing powers of crystals describe themselves as spiritual. People who believe in the obviously, empirically false principles behind astrology call themselves spiritual. (Yet empirical evidence shows us without any serious doubt that astrological predictions and claims about human character being shaped or influenced by stars are simply wrong.)

Christians who say that they can communicate with their god, that they can hear him in their hearts, call themselves spiritual. Yet, other people have told me quite emphatically that spirituality has nothing to do with the supernatural. This doesn't make sense to me based on the claims of most people who say they are spiritual. So, I struggle to understand what people are saying. Sometimes, I think they can't define what they mean, because they don't know, themselves. I mean, there's a principle that goes something like, "If you can't define something, you don't actually understand it." I got that idea from a mathematics PhD who was tutoring me in some fascinating concepts like quantum mechanics and the mathematics of infinities. He pushed me to keep studying until I could explain in my own words the concepts that I had been working on in problem sets.

A lack of ability to define terms is my experience with people who claim to be spiritual. Try as I might, I've never met a definition that passes the test of truthfulness, yet isn't contradicted by so many other people who claim to be spiritual.

When I was a little kid, Christianity terrified me. I went through a period of about 2 years when I was often unable to sleep, because of the teachings of my church about eternal conscious torment, God as an avenger, most people ever born screaming in hell for eternity, etc.

When I was 9 or 10, I was terrified of bedtime, because I was so afraid of the Christian god, a concept I utterly and completely believed in. I was afraid of demons haunting my bedroom, and I was afraid I was going to hell.

People in church claimed constantly that Christians who are spiritual enough and who are truly "saved" can hear God in their hearts. They taught quite explicitly that if you asked Jesus to save you from hell, you can hear him in your heart. (They called it a still, small voice. I tried so hard, and so desperately to hear that voice, but because I never heard it, I was scared to death.)

I'm afraid my parents, who were quite patient, also got pretty seriously annoyed with me that I would keep jumping into bed with them crying in fear. Well, terror, really.

One thing I never dared to tell them is that I was afraid of eternal conscious torment, because I never, no matter how hard I tried, been able to hear a voice in my heart.

Imagine my shock years later when a lot of Christians told me that that was simply a metaphor, and that nobody actually hears anything. They explained that there's just a mechanism called faith that lets them know that some sort of spiritual communication is happening.

But nobody can verify it!

Nobody actually hears anything, despite the teachings being so concrete about that.

Since I learned that those Christians didn't actually mean what they were clearly and repeatedly saying, I have doubted the claims of anyone saying that they experience communication from spirits, or whatever else spirituality is supposed to mean. (Which, as I say, there's simply no definition for it. It doesn't mean anything generally accepted, so the skeptic in me supposes that it means nothing at all.)

Anyway, sorry for the rabbit track. I just want to put my thoughts out there about how confusing and illogical the entire topic is. Actually, when I read writings by spiritual or religious people, I struggle (pretty much without exception, to date) to receive any meaning, because I can't understand the definitions of the words they're using.

In one sense though, I can get behind progressive or deconstructed Christianity. If people want to highlight certain teachings and practices of Jesus that are kind and loving, while rejecting some of his more destructive teachings, I think that's great. I think Episcopalians are by and large wonderful people. I think the same about members of ELCA. One of my best friends ever is a cisgender straight woman who is an active member of her ELCA congregation. Her social life pretty much revolved around her church.

And she was such a force for good in her community. To this day, she supports immigrants, she's never been homophobic or transphobic as far as I know, and she supports with all with her beliefs about what Jesus taught. She happens to be wrong about some of the things she believes Jesus taught, at least according to historical-critical history and textual scholars. But, I have no serious bones to pick with her about that.

She's fabulous. (Hi, Wendy!)

Part of me wonders though, and can't help but wonder, why we need an ancient example that has to be cherry picked for it to work.

I guess there's no answer to that question. And I'll probably never understand it. I'm in my 60s, and I've struggled for decades to understand it, so I'm not about to receive any epiphanies, I suppose.

Anyway, thanks again for your story and for highlighting Bishop Budde, who seems as loving and lovely as my ELCA friend Wendy. I can certainly get behind their actions, even if I often don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about.