Tree of Life Universalist Church

10/18/2025

Belief in an afterlife is rational if viewed from an idealist perspective instead of a strict materialist perspective. Although, instead of ‘afterlife,’ a better word would be simply ‘life’: whether now or then, above or below. All is united in Christ. It is not a ‘now’ versus ‘then.’ It is realizing/admitting that there is more to now than just what we see with the physical eyes. Don’t ignore what’s right in front of you, but work hard to truly see it all in eternal light. We live in heaven now, and therefore death is not a barrier—it is just a transition.

The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why

10/12/2025

The hardest spiritual battle is not waged in the heavens but in the mind.

10/08/2025

Theology is composed of lots of data points, but the way you arrange these points is determined by your denomination, tradition, worldview, or favored scholarship. Someone said once that everyone wears colored glasses. 👓 Even viewing Christ in the traditional Christian manner involves a lot of assumptions about history, canon, and authority. None of it is easy by any means. Someone who is overly proud of their theological tradition is either deliberately ignorant, too trusting of what others tell them, or dishonest. All this to say we can totally know Jesus through the Spirit, but establishing exact details with empirical certitude is not possible. The real spiritual authority comes from an inner witness that is immediate and available for every person. We do not require an intercessor. As Hebrews says, the priesthood is done away with in Christ.

10/06/2025

The good news is not about worshipping God out of guilt but about reconciling with your divine nature. Another way of saying this is that it’s not about hiding in the darkness but about coming to the light.

10/04/2025

The form of Christian Universalism represented by this page is the sort that recognizes your eternal fate was never in question to start with. Salvation is about knowledge that brings deliverance in the here and now.

10/04/2025

The Gospels were written not only to tell us truths about Jesus but also to tell us truth about ourselves. What’s true of the Son of Man is also true of you. As important as it is to know history about Jesus, knowing and recognizing Christ in others and in yourself is so much more essential to your life.

10/04/2025

True scholarship is all important and so valuable, when it’s carried out in humility and with a desire to discover truth. However, when scholarship stagnates, and so much of it is stagnant in religious studies, it becomes an obstacle to truth, stuck in tradition, and full of people with overinflated egos. People are people, whether they occupy the preacher’s pulpit or the professor’s podium.

10/03/2025

Jesus said, Love your brother as your soul; guard him like the pupil of your eye.
-Gospel of Thomas

10/03/2025

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
-Max Planck

09/26/2025

By the way, scaring someone with threats of hell is the same thing as coercing them. It’s like asking someone to make a free choice at gun point. You’re free to choose, but if you make the wrong decision…

09/26/2025

Theology is necessarily shaped by the assumptions you read into the text: these may come from your own church tradition, scholarship on relevant history, your life experiences, your intuition, etc. No one reads scripture in a void. And, therefore, no matter what, you can’t escape the fact that the conclusions you draw will be determined, at least in part, by the parameters with which you begin your study. It is by necessity an inductive, not a deductive, process. And therefore biblical studies is always and only in the domain of probability—not of certainty. This doesn’t mean that you can’t conclude anything from scripture, but that the conclusions you draw should be carried with a degree of humility. You may be wrong. And so certainty in spiritual matters must come from another source than scripture.