Mean Girls and Mean Theology

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Two Men and You

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Islam, Christianity and Secularism

Interesting things on TV these days.

If you missed it, which I certainly did, in this YouTube clip from last Friday’s show, Bill Maher — surprisingly, for such a notorious secularist — connects the actions of Boko Haram (the Nigerian schoolgirl abductors, for anyone not watching the news) to Islam “at large”, stating plainly that “It’s not just a few bad apples”, much to the consternation of fellow leftist Ariana Huffington, who begs to differ.

Matt Welch, Editor-in-Chief of Reason Magazine agrees with Maher (with a considerable number of qualifications): “Islam is providing a disproportionate share of radical nutbags killing people right now.”

Baratunde Thurston, CEO of Cultivated Wit and author of How To Be Black, dislikes Maher’s assessment and disagrees with Welch’s about the “disproportionate share”: “I don’t think Islam has any monopoly on darkness and nutbags and crazy rhetoric and violence.”

Maher replies: “It’s not a monopoly, but it’s the Titanic hitting the iceberg compared to Whitney Houston dying in her bathtub.”

Ouch.

Hooray for the Hypocrites

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Do Christians Hate Jews?

Many Jews today feel that, because of historical atrocities committed against their people by the so-called “Christian” church, all Christians are Jew-haters. Unfortunately, not only many nominal Christians but even some real believers harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, and this only confirms the suspicion in Jewish minds.

But does the New Testament allow Christians to be prejudiced in this way?

Definitely not.

Feeding the Dogs [Part 2]

Do you ever feel like God isn’t listening? That’s what this woman had to deal with:

“Jesus … withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:21-24)

In my previous post, I wondered how the Lord’s delay in responding to the woman’s need — or even acknowledging her — was consistent with his character, and how it served the purposes of God.

I wondered: If the Lord responds to the woman immediately and grants her request, what’s the difference? What exactly is lost?

So I tried to point out yesterday that we lose an important lesson about the priority of the Father’s will.

But we lose a couple of other things, I think.

Feeding the Dogs [Part 1]

Picture yourself in a situation of dire need. Say you’re in a private clinic with a sick child, a child that has been ailing badly for weeks and months. In this scenario, there is no Obamacare, no National Health, no social insurance program, and you are without resources, which is why you’ve waited so long to come to a doctor. You can’t pay, and you know it. Hospitals are for the rich.

So you cared for your child yourself as best you could. You tried home remedies. You bought what drugs you could afford. You called on any of your neighbours who knew a little bit about medicine, but nothing could be done. You have exhausted every possibility you could think of. Nothing worked.

So even though you know you can’t pay, you go to the clinic. You sit in the waiting room and watch as other parents leave with healthy children and smiles on their faces. You know that whatever this doctor is doing, it works. You see him down the hallway, treating other patients, but no matter how you beg the receptionist, she keeps looking past you and calling out “Next!” to the rich people behind you in line.

Finally, you step out of line and right up to the kind-looking doctor. Against all your natural instincts, with no dignity left in the world, you begin to beg.

He looks at you with concern and compassion in his eyes and says … nothing. Nothing at all. Not a syllable.

How would you feel? What do you do next?

Debunking Heavenly Mythology VIII: Captain Kirk Was Wrong

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

I know, I know, it’s Satan’s famous line from Milton, but the first time I heard it, it was delivered by William Shatner’s Captain Kirk in the original 1967 Star Trek episode Space Seed. In my frequently-inaccurate childhood memory the line belongs to Ricardo Montalban’s villainous character Khan, but thanks to YouTube, I stand corrected: Montalban doesn’t ever actually get to say it. Rather, with unusual subtlety for the genre, Khan, offered the choice between a comfy prison or the challenge of taming a wild planet, asks Kirk, “Have you ever read Milton?” Kirk, being a renaissance man, replies “I understand”.

Thankfully for my fascinated pre-teen self (and most of the audience, I’d suspect), Kirk later explains the significance of the reference to his engineer Scotty (who, despite spectacular feats of speed-engineering, is apparently not a renaissance man).

And really, it’s Shatner, so who better to deliver the line?

But that line stuck in my head. I thought it was really cool, and defiant, and independent, and all those things the TV screenwriters thought it was supposed to evoke (hey, I was probably twelve, okay?). Anyway, it worked.

But whether you choose to attribute the line to Kirk, Khan, Milton or Satan himself, it’s still wrong: Nobody reigns in hell.

Stumbling Blocks and Scandals

Two quotes today.

First, for those who have never heard of him (which is probably most people), Justin Currie is a grumpy, unusually perceptive Scottish writer of pop songs. The first quote is a lyric that has been stuck in my head for a month, largely because of its sadness — and because in it he correctly assumes that we bear responsibility for the impact we have on one another’s lives, something that is increasingly uncommon in our individualistic society.

Conversion vs. Coercion

A little while back I watched a TV mother’s horror at the dawning realization that her Christian daughter regularly prayed for her. It was an interesting moment and I thought it seemed like a pretty authentic reaction; something I’d seen once or twice myself.

I mean, what reaction should we really expect from people to the fact that we are praying for their salvation, hoping for their conversion and actively working toward that transformation when the opportunity arises … or vice versa?

Sometimes the fact that we take the issue that seriously can come as a bit of a shock.

Selwyn Duke at American Thinker has a good piece on the subject:

“I’m a man who takes his faith very seriously; I believe it is the Truth and that God should be at the center of one’s life. I also know a man who is Jewish and believes just the same. He is orthodox, praying at the appointed times every day — regardless of the situation — and abiding by every one of the 613 Judaic laws that pertain to his life. He is a very saintly, gentle man. And he also has expressed that his faith — not mine, needless to say — is the true one. Now, if I found out that he had prayed for my conversion to what he considers a superior faith, should I be offended? 
       In fact, neither his perspective nor such a desire would bother me a whit. While this may strike a Richard Dawkins type as strange, understand my position vis-à-vis his attitude: I’d expect nothing less.”

To me, this sort of response seems entirely rational.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology VII: I Won’t Enjoy Heaven If So-and-So Isn’t There

There is a something about the generosity of spirit in this frequently-heard and more-frequently-unheard trope that I would hate to disparage.

After all, no less a friend of God than Moses once voiced something similar when God expressed a desire to wipe out Israel in the desert and “make a great nation” from the descendants of Moses. Some people might have been flattered at the compliment. Moses didn’t see it that way. He said to the Lord:

“Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin — but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.” (Exodus 32:31-32)

He said, in effect, “If they’re going to be subject to your judgment, God, let me be subject to it with them”.

Generous, absolutely. Smart, maybe not so much. Not, perhaps, entire clear on what he was potentially letting himself in for. But we understand the sentiment, surely. I’ve felt like that about some people. Maybe you have too.

Fortunately for Moses, the Lord did not take him up on his offer.

Milking It

I'm a bit conflicted about re-using material at all (you know, the manna that "bred worms and stank"), but it seems to me that there are one or two posts from a time before we had a significant regular readership that might be worth drawing attention to (if and when our regular contributors run out of gas, which is bound to happen from time to time).

I'm going to stick the "Recycling" label in front of anything I re-post from our first couple of months so that anybody who was around to read them the first time knows to take a pass.

Your Father Who Is In Secret

It takes courage to stand up and pray in public if you’re shy by nature, but only a little more than must be mustered to spill your guts on Facebook or Twitter. And judging by the number of people doing that, it must feel pretty good. If you’re the type of person who by nature loves to be the centre of attention, it doesn’t take any courage at all to pray in public. It’s like swimming to a duck.

It certainly doesn’t require faith.

It doesn’t take faith to attend church meetings or to put money in an offering box. These things may be done for right reasons or wrong reasons. Church, or even giving, can be a habit, a social event, a way of feeling good about oneself, a duty or an obligation imposed by family. Such acts are done visibly and because of that, there are other possible benefits than rewards of a spiritual kind.

They don’t require faith

Finally! An Elected Official We Can Believe In

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What Sort of Heart?

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Miracles and Compassion

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Chesterton on Freedom

Immanuel Can recently posted on the subject of the meaning of freedom, which puts me in mind of a passage from Chesterton that I happened to read today:

     “It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called ‘The Loves of the Triangles’; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the THING he is doing.”

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Originally published in 1908. Entirely relevant.

That’s the funny thing about truth ...

Freedom: The False and the True

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Universalism = InterpretationFail

It is awfully useful to observe how and where people go wrong in interpreting scripture.

If, say, a Universalist misappropriates a particular text to serve his cause, you can bet Calvinists, Amillennialists, Prosperity Gospel folks or whoever will use a similar bag of tricks to get where they want to go too.

In perusing Universalist websites for a previous post, I noticed many of them have this is common: they are fond of pointing to the word “all”, as though its employment in any context decisively proves their point. I suppose this preoccupation is easily understood, given the nature of their particular doctrinal aberration.

How can we go about making Scripture say whatever we’d like it to?

Christians and the Media: Field Day

People who have not spent a great deal of time around serious Christians are often surprised, on the rare occasions when they finally do, to find that we are not always exactly the way we are frequently portrayed in popular culture.

Some Christians, notably Cory Copeland, a writer for Relevant, think any disconnect between the way we are portrayed in the media and the way we actually behave is … kind of our fault, actually.

“The truth is that there are some so-called Christians who quite closely mirror the Christian characters we watch on television and film. They’re loud and proud and angry in God. They stare down their “opponents” with judgmental eyes and damning language. They protest funerals and vomit epithets at people they’ve deemed sinners.                                                                        
And on some level, most of us are guilty of some of this type of behavior. Maybe not to those extremes, but we too judge, condemn and feel “better than,” while refusing to admit our own faults. For the more dogmatic Christians and for us, it doesn’t matter that how we behave, how we treat people, how void we are of love and grace is a direct and vicious contradiction of everything the Bible teaches us of God and His ways.”

Okay, so … Fred Phelps. Bit of a straw man, Cory.