Boo hoo, Fox News is reporting a new wave of disastrous economic news: the churches are going bankrupt and closing up shop. Future headlines I’m also looking forward to: “Meth lab economy collapses!” “Pedophile rings go out of business!” “Homeopathy peddlers file chapter 11, citing high cost of raw materials!”
It’s shocking. How dare they. The Australian writes about our puritanical television viewers and how British television has to be stripped of religious criticism before it’s aired here, or our citizens get all Muslim-cartoon-rioter over it.
It’s not as if those real Americans are pretending to be thin-skinned. This is not faux outrage. They are genuinely shocked that outsiders do not take Christianity as seriously as they do.
Oh, yeah? We’re thin-skinned zealots from the land where “God can’t take a joke”? We’ll teach you what’s funny. The cruise missiles and predator drones are standing by on our aircraft carriers.
(Hmm. That would be funnier if it weren’t a little bit true.)
Don’t send the kiddies to Sunday School, just have them watch this video and they’ll master the whole of the Bible (Old and New Testaments!) in 2½ minutes.
(via SMBC, of course)
A few Christians are indignant over this video mocking Pollyannaish theology.
Unfortunately for them, and to our increased mirth, their excuses are just as ridiculous as Suzie.
Dr. Normal L. Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, said the video contains a lot of misconceptions.
“You look at all of that [and] you sympathize with Susie because you think they (disasters, illnesses, etc.) are evil,” he said. “But if it’s evil, then there must be a standard for good. If there is a crooked line in this world then there must be a straight line. If there is a straight line then there must be God.”
Actually, I don’t sympathize with Suzie at all. The whole point of this video is that she’s silly and clueless.
I do have a standard for good: does it cause me or others harm? If not, it’s good. If it does, it’s bad. I don’t need a god to define this for me; humans are the yardstick. The existence of straight and crooked lines do not imply the existence of intent, but only that there are lines.
The video also gives a very limited picture of God’s presence in Suzie’s life, said Geisler, who is a Christian apologist and philosopher. When it comes to Suzie’s recovery from sickness, for example, the video fails to acknowledge that God is the one who designed her body with properties to heal naturally, said Geisler.
BECAUSE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT A GOD DESIGNED HER BODY. Jebus, he’s a philosopher…you’d think he’d be competent to recognize a circular argument when he saw one. There are alternative explanations with evidence in their support for the presence of self-repair mechanisms in evolved organisms, you know, so just point to the fact that someone can heal is not automatic evidence for the existence of a magic man in the sky.
The title of this article at the Christian Post is “Atheist Depicts Christians as Delusional”. Yeah? Depiction confirmed.
Stand in awe of the loving grace and harmony that church brings to the community! Here’s a letter one evangelical church sent to a congregant because she’d committed a sin.
They are handing her over to Satan! Worst collection agency ever.
Oh, and her sin was…getting divorced. How dare she break the sacred bond to her lord and master, a man?
Robert Bentley must have been feeling some political heat. After openly announcing his sectarian bias in a MLK Day speech, Bentley has offered a not-pology.
If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.
Jebus, but I hate that poor excuse for an apology. It happens all the time; someone says something stupid and wrong, and instead of saying, “I was wrong, I’m sorry and will try to change,” they say, “I’m sorry you were offended by my remarks” — suddenly, the problem lies not in the error of the speaker but in the sensitivity of the listener.
That’s not an apology. It’s a transparent attempt to twist the blame to fall on everyone else but the person who made the mistake.
Even that’s too generous: this wasn’t a mistake. Bentley was honestly and intentionally expressing his views, as he has said, “speaking as an evangelical Christian to fellow Baptists.” The man sincerely believes that his fellow superstitious louts are his special brothers and sisters who he has been elected to serve, and the riff-raff who don’t go to his church are of lesser consideration.
That’s what he needed to apologize for, and correct. He doesn’t need to apologize for people finding offense in his stupidity and bias.
He especially doesn’t need to apologize for that because pandering to a smug majority is what got him elected in the first place.
I don’t really need to comment on this story, do I?
A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church soon after his beatification this year.
It’s as if they aren’t even trying to avoid the connection to voodoo, vampirism, and blood magic.
An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.
Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”
Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.
Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.
“The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican’s intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere,” said Colm O’Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
Yeah, I have serious reservations of a moral character about the Catholic church, that’s for sure.
I am bemused by the threat that if a church dared to invoke civil authorities to protect the children in their charge from rapacious priests, their actions would be overturned by the Vatican. Is that basically saying that if locals do anything other than work with the Vatican to quarantine child-rapers, the Vatican will do whatever they can to put the rapist right back into his position? Sweet. They really don’t care at all about their congregations, do they?
The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.
But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.
Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.
Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.
Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?
Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.
The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:
A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.
That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.
I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.
God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!
God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.
The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.
The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.
But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.
And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.
I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.
Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.
Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.
I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.
