My lexicon

One of the questions being asked in my circles these days is whether or not there is the possibility of something good and useful arising from the wreckage of religion and Christianity in particular.  Increasingly, I have trended toward thinking that they may be, although certainly not having a lot to do with the toxic version created some hundreds of years ago by people who were not Jesus that the institutional church seems to be having such a hard time unmooring itself from.   In any event, for me that process has largely boiled down to re-defining a lot of terms and phrases that I grew up with but which mean very different things to me at this point.  To that end, I've been thinking a lot about attempting to create my own theological lexicon, a dictionary of terms and concepts the way I currently consider them.   Below is a list of those, with a comment about what I don't think they are.  What replaces that will hopefully be the subject of a series of posts over the coming months. 

-Salvation 
Not: an individual transaction to get you to heaven

-Faith
Not: belief in a dogma

-Reconciliation 
Not: God was mad at you, but now he’s OK with you

-Heaven
Not: the happy place you go when you die

-Hell
Probably this is one that should be deleted from the lexicon altogether, but for now:
Not: a place of eternal conscious torment for “non-believers” 

-sin
Absolutely a candidate for being deleted from the lexicon, but for now: 
Not: bad things you do that makes God not want to hang with you

-wrath of God
Not: God is angry with me because I’m a bad person

-forgiveness of sins
Not: God looking the other way at your "sin" (see previous definition)

-righteousness
Not: correct behavior according to your institution’s particular moral code
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-original sin 
Not even going there on this one.  I'll just explain why it absolutely needs to be deleted from the lexicon

-Jesus Christ
Again, delete from the lexicon.  Replace with Jesus the Christ
not: God's chosen blood sacrifice so he could "forgive our sins" (see previous)

-God
Not: a being outside of creation who occasionally messes with it