Author: Ralph Rickenbach

What if God loves an open-ended adventure and has not planned out our lives? We love to say that God has a plan for our life. There is even a verse for this. ‘For I know what plans I have in mind for you,’ says ADONAI,’plans for well-being, not for bad things; so that you…

Do you know what it means to become self-aware? Can you remember the moment you first experienced yourself as the I and others as You? I doubt that you can. And frankly, even the people who took care of you back then cannot remember the moment this was the case. It was some time into…

What is missing from an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God? Boundaries. What does an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God lack if he limits himself? The possibility of not taking responsibility. These two statements cry out for explanation. But they also form the basis for a thought experiment that attempts to explain the world. Let’s just start. In…

It is striking where the word for friend comes from in many languages. Let’s take Latin: amicus is a form of the word Amor, amare. In Greek, philia means both friendship and love. And in German, the word comes from Old Saxon friohon, Old English frēogan, Old Norse frjā, Gothic frijōn, which means to love…

Most of you will know that I interpret “The Fall”, what led up to it, and what resulted from it quite differently from traditional Christianity. I do not buy the story of perfect paradise, followed by a moral and ethical assessment we failed, resulting, therefore, in a struggle back to the previous state, trying to…

I have written about communities before. Let me remind you: they can develop through four stages. In a pseudo-community, everybody agrees to believe the same. But many things are just not talked about. We assume that we all think the same, mostly because people do not dare to share their doubts, ask for clarification, or…