Another thing about the homosexual/Christian “issue” is that it seems to me that we Christians should be clear on the fact that asserting homosexuals should stop acting homosexual necessarily means asserting that they should spend their lives never knowing the loving intimacy with another that straight people enjoy and know to be the best and richest experience in life.
If I were gay, and I lived and behaved in the way most Christians (understandably!) defend as biblical, I would live alone. I wouldn’t wake up every morning next to my wife. I’d never hold hands with my wife. I’d never kiss my wife. I’d never cuddle with my wife. I’d not know the profound pleasure of every day growing older with my wife. Remaining as sinless as possible would, for me, mean never knowing love of the sort that all straight people, Christian or not, understand as pretty much the best thing life has to offer.
Again: I’m not saying that it’s manifestly absurd and even cruel to suggest that everyone within a broad swath of our population spend their lives in emotional and physical isolation. I believe in the tenets of Christianity as ferociously as any Christian in the world. All I’m saying is that, as far as I can tell, we Christians (insofar as we ever speak with one voice) are saying that it is morally incumbent upon homosexuals to spend their lives in emotional and physical isolation. I hear a lot of Christians asserting that gays and lesbians should stop acting like gays and lesbians. But I never hear anyone saying the unavoidable follow-up to that — saying what that really means — which is that gay and lesbian men and women should spend their lives never experiencing what people most commonly mean when they use the word “love.”
This is what I’ve been waiting to see…someone who believes the bible categorically forbids same sex relationships admit what that really means to gay people. Not babble that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Not witlessly deny that there is ever any fulfilling, romantic, body and soul and spirit component to same sex relationships. But honestly and seriously look at what denying intimate romantic love to gay people does to their lives, to their inner lives, to their heart and soul. To our spirit.
Someone who is at least willing to both see human beings when they look at us, and honestly acknowledge the hell we are being put through for the sake of these biblical passages, can be talked with.
Thank you Mr. Shore. I’ve been waiting for literally decades to see a Christian writer make this connection. Usually it’s just quickly glossed over. I think the reason why is pretty obvious.
When my mom passed away a few years ago, I inherited her diaries. We never discussed my sexual orientation…it was a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell household. I was, like her, raised a Baptist, and the time of my coming of age coincided, not coincidentally, with the period of my leaving the faith. What I expected to read in her diaries from that time was grief over my slow but steady walk away from our church. But no. Grief there was, but it was almost exclusively over how the bright and cheerful son she once had turned into a moody, sullen, angry young man. It makes me cry to read those entries.
When you take the possibility of love away from someone…what do they have left? Think about that, the next time you see an angry homosexual.
Bruce: Perfectly said. Just … perfect. And what a touching, heart-wrenching story.
Liberal Christians like Fred Clark have never had any trouble acknowledging the spiritual potential of same sex love. But they’re not generally biblical literalists. Hopefully I’ll see more of this from those in the coming years. The people who don’t care and just don’t want to know have had the stage for far too long.
An evangelical chaplain who leads Bible studies for California lawmakers says God is disgusted with a rival fellowship group that includes people of all faiths.
"Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior," Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.
The comments drew immediate fire from others in the capital, including the Republican lawmaker who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group.
Drollinger said "progressive religious tolerance" is an offense against God and causes harm to its practitioners.
He said the other Bible study group was perpetrating a "deadly lie" by presenting Jesus as "a good moral teacher who loves everyone without distinction."
Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group, said the differing approach between the two groups should not be a cause of conflict between them.
Capitol Ministries aims to "reach every elected official in every nation of the world at every level of government with the uncompromised, saving message of Jesus Christ," according to its website. So far, the California-based group has, again according to its website, "singularly focused on establishing biblical ministries in State Capitols throughout our nation … in order to make disciples of Jesus Christ within the political arena, at every level."
…
The growing roster of states is worth noting because of Capitol Ministries’ extremism.
The group’s leader, Ralph Drollinger, is so extreme that the Los Angeles Daily News reported this month without qualification that he "has a long record of bashing Catholics, gays and mothers of young children who serve in the state Legislature."
…
In his keynote address to the May 8th Harrisburg "Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast," Drollinger said it was important to challenge legislators to make decisions to "submit to Christ as Lord," according to Rabbi Paula Reimers of Congregation Beth Israel in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who attended.
She also noted Drollinger’s remark that it isn’t necessary "to coerce one who has come to Christ as to how to vote."
…
In 2004 he [Drollinger] offended many in the California legislature when he called Catholicism "the world’s largest false religion."
According to a 2005 report in the Sacramento News & Review, the previous year Drollinger "had to move the Bible study from the governor’s suites after he labeled Catholicism, the religion of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a ‘false religion.’" Thanks to the sponsorship of three Republican legislators, Drollinger moved the study to a legislative suite, according to the paper, where its attendance was around a dozen Republican lawmakers. There is a separate study group for staffers.
In 2004 Drollinger wrote a Bible study stating that women legislators were sinning by leaving their children to go to Sacramento. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," he wrote. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."
Drollinger amplified with a patriarchal assertion about the roles of men and women. "Man’s is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women’s is to be at home nurturing their children," according to contemporaneous news reports.
Some members of the state Senate responded by wearing aprons to a legislative session.
In the interview with the Sacramento News & Review, Drollinger differentiated his operation from religious right organizations. They, he said, lobby on bills, whereas Capitol Ministries works to win souls (the same distinction he made at the Harrisburg breakfast)..
He also insisted that he supports the separation of church and state, because the two insititutions are biblically ordained to serve different purposes, according to the SNR.
The group’s own descriptions of its activities suggests quite the opposite. A 2002 "Bible study lesson series" aimed at Tennessee government workers was titled "Decision-Making and God’s Will," according to the Nashville Business Journal.
…
In 2005, in a retort to the speaker of the California Assembly’s statement that all are "children of God," Capitol Ministries’ national "expansion" director, Sean Wallentine, said: "While it is nice to believe that God is everyone’s Father, it is not true." Only those who are "born again" become God’s "adopted children," Wallentine said in a written statement quoted by the California Observer blog.
The Daily News report on the prayer breakfast in Santa Clarita quoted Wallentine disparaging an alternative Interfaith event. "I would just say they’re allowed to have their meeting," he said, "but we wouldn’t be supportive of a meeting that taught that there are many ways to heaven. There are not."
Freedom of religion? You’re very much mistaken citizen…sin has no rights that men of god are bound to respect…
If you were wondering why the Archbishop of Canterbury has a sudden fondness for Muslim sharia law, maybe this can help explain it to you…
I have no problem with the argument that liberal, secular law should not be seen as universal. However, Williams is saying something else. He does not want the "conscientious disagreement" that a faith community has with state law to be "overruled by a monopolistic understanding of jurisdiction". What this means is that faith communities should be allowed to opt out of laws that go against their teachings. This, I would suggest, is a recipe for compromising notions of equality and equal treatment before state law.
A telling example shows where all this is leading. Roman Catholic adoption agencies, the archbishop suggests, should have the right to reject gay men and lesbians as adoptive parents. The corollary is that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches should have the right to stop gays from taking senior positions in church ranks. Ditto for women. The archbishop’s attempt to redefine the relationship between religious conscience and law turns out to be about Christian churches and their position on such issues as gay rights and abortion. The sharia is a distraction.
I am all for enlarging the religious space in a secular state. However, it seems to me that on the issue of equality it is not just the sharia that needs reform, but all monotheistic faiths.
I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of new found respect for sharia law being declared from ersatz Christian pulpits in the coming years…
Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities.
The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria’s wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.
Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by ‘deliverances’ – exorcisms – for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it’s a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.
But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children – naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.
Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance – sometimes as much as three or four months’ salary for the average working man – although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.
This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.
Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical ‘prophets’ are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.
‘The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me "you are supporting witches". This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place,’ he says. ‘For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.
This is the country that’s posturing to the world about being more godly and righteous then those liberal American Episcopalians who are rewriting the bible to excuse sexual deviancy. This is what the "conservative" American Episcopalian churches that are aligning themselves with Akinola are buying into so they don’t have to treat their homosexual neighbors as anything other then human garbage. Without a doubt it’s what the billionaire Ahmanson wants the Anglican Church he’s paying for to look like. Ahmanson you may recall, is the billionaire "former" Christian Reconstuctionist who once said that stoning homosexuals to death was all part of God’s plan.
When you start inciting mob religious passions against your neighbors you are walking down a path that leads right into the Pit and what you need to understand about that is that the fall has no speed limit, and there is no bottom to stop you. It just gets worse and worse and worse until every last shred of human nobility and decency is gone and all that is left is the jungle and screams in the night.
Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.
‘My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn’t know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.’ She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for ‘a deliverance’.
A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous ‘asiri’ berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary’s throat. If that didn’t kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush. Mary was seven. She says she still doesn’t feel safe. She says: ‘My mother doesn’t love me.’ And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face
The righteous men of god in Nigeria are killing children now as witches. If you thought all that would stop with the sinful wicked devil possessed homosexuals you have never opened a book of human history. There’s a reason why Jesus said the most important thing after loving God, is loving your neighbor.
Delegates at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted Saturday in Fresno to withdraw from the U.S. Episcopal Church. With the decision, the diocese is the first to leave the U.S. Episcopal Church, which has 110 dioceses and 2.4 million members.
Delegates said they voted to break away from the church because it allows the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of gay bishops and the ordination of women.
Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! That’s San Joaquin as in San Joaquin Valley…the sullen and resentful red heartland of California. If the California coast and its coniferous mountain north are laid back, progressive wonderlands, the San Joaquin valley is Rush Limbaughville. Agrarian, xenophobic, insular, it’s the Antebellum South, only with lots and lots of irrigation and Hispanics playing the part of the darkies picking in the fields. The only surprising thing about this is they didn’t bolt back when women got the robe. Oh…and they’re aligning with the South American church instead of the murderous Bishop Akinola. But he was probably a shade too dark for them.
After Mitt’s wee tirade on religion the other day I found myself presented with a torrent of LDS history crossing my screen, some of which I’d never heard of before. A hat? I’m sorry…a hat? And this man is bellyaching about secularism being an invented religion???
Anyway…reading the LDS story of Elohim and his spirit children who live on a planet circling the star Kolob, it crossed my mind that you can tell which religions were founded after the invention of the telescope because they always read like bad science-fiction novels (praise Xenu), whereas the ones founded before the telescope read like planet earth is at the center of the universe, with a somewhat ambiguous heaven floating above it.
I think at the moment that Huckabee has it cinched in the heartland, and if he doesn’t get the nomination the base is going to be very, very upset.
A 14-year-old Jehovah’s Witness sick with leukemia has the right to refuse a blood transfusion, even though doing so might kill him, a judge ruled today.
Skagit County Superior Court Judge John Meyer denied a motion by the state to force Dennis Lindberg, of Mount Vernon, to have a blood transfusion. The judge said the eighth-grader knows "he’s basically giving himself a death sentence."
Doctors diagnosed the boy with leukemia on Nov. 6 and began treating him with chemotherapy at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, but stopped a week ago because his blood count was too low, the Skagit Valley Herald reported. The boy refused the transfusion on religious grounds.
However, his birth parents, who do not have custody and flew from Idaho to be at the hearing, believe their son should have the transfusion and suggested he has been unduly influenced by his legal guardian, his aunt, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness.
Several friends of Lindberg and of his parents attended today’s hearing, and some ran out crying when the judge announced his decision.
"Dennis does present himself as a very mature man. But he really is just a child trying to please the adults around him," said Jan Curry, whose daughter, Morgan, is his friend.
On Tuesday, Lindberg’s doctor told the judge that the boy’s blood was hypoxic, or deficient in oxygen, and that he would not be surprised if the boy died overnight.
Well hold the surprise then, because that’s exactly what happened. The boy is dead.
So…let me get this straight… According to the religious right, a 14 year old can’t consent to sex…but they can consent to suicide. As long as they’re doing it for God. Well praise the Lord.
Note that some of the statistics about emerging adulthood today are not historically unique. For example, young Americans in the 19th and very early 20th century, when society was more rural and agricultural, also married later in life than they did in the 1950s. Nevertheless, changes in the larger culture and social order in late 20th-century America make the experience of emerging adulthood today very different from the young adulthood of a century ago.
What then are some of the specific issues that this new life phase might raise for church and culture? First, we might consider the content and texture of the religious faith of emerging adults. Having grown up in whatever religious traditions, congregations, and families of faith they have, and having participated in whatever youth groups and Sunday School and catechism classes they have, what then becomes of the religious faith of youth ages 18 to 30? At a recent University of Southern California conference organized by scholars Don Miller and James Heft, in which I participated and which served as the basis of the edited volume Passing on the Faith, discussed below, the central image animating discussion was of young adulthood as a mysterious "black hole" in the life of the American church. Quite a dramatic idea. Does research bear it out? Two authors in the other books noted here address this question in some depth. Their answers, while not definitive, will not be particularly reassuring for Christian churches, educators, and parents.
Jeffrey Arnett explored the religious beliefs and practices of the more than one hundred emerging adults he interviewed in various locations around the country. Here is what he concluded:
The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood … . In statistical analyses [of interview subjects’ answers], there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults … . This is a different pattern than is found in adolescence [which reflects greater continuity] … . Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.
Although the transmission of religious faith is not a central concern of Arnett’s, he still finds this observation startling. He writes, "How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the kinds of religious beliefs and practices people have by the time they reach emerging adulthood? It doesn’t seem to make sense … . It all comes to naught in emerging adulthood? Yet that seems to be the truth of it, surprising as that may be." Need I say that these findings raise serious questions? To be sure, Arnett is not working with nationally representative data, and so his findings must be viewed with some skepticism. Even so, the very possibility should make Christians sit up and notice.
(Emphasis mine) How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the religious beliefs and practices of young adults? Let me hazard a guess. Because when you demand that people believe the bible over clearly observable facts that even a concrete block can grasp then religion starts looking less and less like a spiritual relationship with your creator and more and more like a self inflected lobotomy. What happens between adolescence and adulthood is you leave the nest, go out into the world and then you encounter reality. And reality never looses. You can’t walk away from it. You can only take your mind, your heart, your conscience, and ultimately your soul, around behind the barn and shoot them. Like this poor lost soul did…
It’s impossible to feel sorry for the hacks who promote intelligent design, especially after you hear the evidence presented at the famous Dover trial (if you haven’t watched it yet, NOVA has its complete Judgment Day episode up online—I recommend Chapter 11, in which the roots of ID are located in a Supreme Court decision rejecting the teaching of creationism in schools).
IDers clearly know they’re misleading the public, if not with regard to their beliefs, then at least with how those beliefs are described and marketed. It’s infuriating.
But I am not so cruel that I can’t see the tragedy in today’s New York Times Magazine article about young-earth creationists who have also earned legit PhDs. Their cognitive dissonance is heartbreaking:
Given the difficulty of their intellectual enterprise, the creationist geologists often have a story about the time they nearly gave it up. For [Kurt] Wise the crisis hit when he was a sophomore in high school. He was already an avid fossil collector who dreamed “an unattainable dream” of going to Harvard to study paleontology and then to teach at a big university. But as he told a friend, he couldn’t reconcile the geologic ages with what he read in his Bible. So he set about figuring this out: every night, for months, he cut out every verse of the Bible he’d have to reject to believe in evolution. “I dreaded the impending end,” he writes in a collection of essays called “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.” “All that I loved to do was involved with some aspect of science.”
When he was done, he tried to pick up what was left. But he found it impossible to do that without the Bible being “rent in two,” he writes. “Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.” In the end, he kept his Bible and achieved his unattainable dream. But it left him in a strange, vulnerable place. “If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.”
[…]
If Wise still has doubts, or unhappiness, he has learned to put them aside. When consulting for the Creation Museum, he considered his most important duty to be presenting a “coherent story line about the earth’s history,” he said. “Even if it’s wrong, it’s a starting point. We use coherence as a criteria. It ought to fit together not as a set of random processes but something coherent orchestrated by God.”
From searching for truth to fumbling after coherence. It’s so sad.
But if God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then it is not those of us who are willing to let nature speak for itself who have turned away from God. The bible may be the testament of Moses, of Mark, Paul, and all the other authors who made the cut over the ages. The universe is the testament of God. It is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.
If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.
No. The universe is the word of God. The rock that cradles the fossil is God’s handwriting. And if beholding that little two-hundred and fifty million year old trilobite cradled in Paleozoic stone makes you feel very very tiny in a universe that is immense and strange and sublime so far beyond your ken that just trying to grasp it all makes you feel ridiculous, there’s probably a reason for that. And if you’d rather flee from that universe into the embrace of an idol made of paper and ink because that idol cuts the universe down to a size small enough that you can imagine you’re the center of it and God made it all Just For You…there’s probably a reason for that too. For all the fundamentalist posturing that they’re simply bowing down to the will of God, fundamentalism is a very, very arrogant religion. And increasingly in an age where knowledge is literally at everyone’s fingertips, the cost of worshiping that idol is more then many want to bear. Young adults, raised in the age of computer technology and the Internet, just don’t see throwing their ability to reason away, and along with it their conscience, their self respect, their dignity, and their very soul, as being a normal part of having a spiritual life. If anything it is completely destructive to having a spiritual life. An empty vessel waiting patiently for some authority figure to give it meaning contains no spirit…it is just a blackboard waiting helplessly for someone to scribble something on it. But that’s exactly what the religious right wants us all to be.
And there’s Christian Smith’s black hole. It isn’t age. It isn’t that parents are more indulgent. It isn’t that society is more permissive. It’s that fundamentalism has put itself on a path diverging ever more and more away from reality, and if an adult knows anything that a child does not it’s that reality always wins in the end. Someone who really believed in standing humble before the will of God might actually appreciate how that works.
There is a signpost next to that black hole. It reads: When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
A traveling collection of liturgical stoles will grow by one during its stop in the Toledo area this weekend.
Each of the 1,100 stoles represents a person in one of 26 Christian denominations who was either banned from ministry for their sexual orientation or who feels too threatened to publicly acknowledge that they are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
The exhibit, called the Shower of Stoles Project, started in 1995 as a "witness of faith" by the Rev. Martha Juillerat, a Presbyterian minister in rural Missouri whose career ended after openly acknowledging she was a lesbian.
The local addition to the stole project is from the Rev. Michelle Stecker, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the only cleric in the local presbytery, or regional body, to openly acknowledge she is a lesbian. A second minister was to donate a stole but changed her mind at the last minute.
Although Ms. Stecker remains ordained and in good standing with the denomination, she said she cannot get an assignment because churches are wary of defying the denomination’s ban on gay clerics.
"Since coming out in the media in 2004, there’s no way that a Presbyterian church would call me right now," Ms. Stecker said from Chicago, where she is working for a nonprofit organization. "I know God called me to be a minister, but when I finally realized I had to speak out on social justice issues, I knew it was the end.
"It’s been very sad for me," she said. "I’ve lost my livelihood. I mourn that loss and continue to mourn that loss. I’ve had to retrain for a new profession and I’m starting all over again."
The Shower of Stoles Project will be on display from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. today [This article ran on Saturday November 3rd in the Toledo Blade. -Bruce] in the Wintergarden of the Main Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, with members of the local clergy on hand to answer any questions.
"We wanted to have it in a public place where people might just stumble across it, not just those who were planning to see it," said the Rev. Cheri Holdridge, pastor of Central United Methodist Church.
After the library display, the collection will be divided up and stoles will be displayed in 16 churches in northwest Ohio, including those belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist, Unity, Episcopal, and Presbyterian Church (USA) denominations.
Ms. Holdridge said the number of churches participating this year is encouraging to people who support the ordination of gays and lesbians. The last time the exhibit came to town, in 2001, only three churches were willing to display the stoles.
"At least we’re making progress," she said. "Central [United Methodist] is on the far edge of being totally accepting. A gay couple can walk in and breathe a sigh of relief and know they can be themselves, but there are more churches at least trying to be welcoming."
Trying. Trying. Trying. Amazing isn’t it, how the simplest most innocuous of words can have such a bitter aftertaste in the mouth…
He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you’ve never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He came to Jesus in high school, under the guidance of a football coach. His recent memoir, "Finding Home," has barely made a dent on the best-seller lists. Nevertheless, in 2005, Daly got the job of president and CEO of Focus on the Family, and although he denies this, it’s clear that he was picked to be the yin to James Dobson’s yang. While Dobson continues to threaten in the press, Daly chats amiably with a reporter about the fall weather. He sticks to the hard line on policy issues—gay marriage is bad for families, he says—but his presentation is all soft edges. "I’m sure there are wonderful gay parents out there; there’s a poster child for everything." If one of his boys turned out to be gay, he says, "I’d love him."
Sure he would. He’d love him right into an ex-gay camp. It’s telling of the relentless animus the religious right has toward gay people, that Miller considers a Pew study showing opposition to gay marriage has crept down a tad among white evangelicals under 30, to 76 percent, as a sign of growing tolerance. Yes. And mount Everest is still growing too but I wouldn’t try watching it.
But there’s this little tidbit also…
According to a new study by the Barna Research Group, 80 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 16 and 29 believe that the term "anti-homosexual" describes Christianity, and they complain that they don’t get enough guidance from their pastors in how to apply Christ’s message of love to their gay friends.
I’ve seen this statistic cited elsewhere recently. Well I just can’t imaging why young people would describe Christianity as "anti-homosexual"…
One of the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights gatherings was held on October 8 in Greenville, South Carolina, and Faith in America has passed on photos and coverage of what transpired there, as those at the vigil faced protesters from a local church.
When the voices of straight allies unite with those of their gay and lesbain friends, family and co-workers, the shrill voices of religion-based bigotry can’t stand up against reason and heart-felt conviction. That’s what happened last Monday in downtown Greenville, S.C.
It was a beautiful night for Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. on Oct. 8. But when a van full of anti-gay protesters from a Greenville community church showed up, the special event’s celebratory mood was maligned by the anti-gay group’s attitudes of intimidation and confrontation.
The good men and women of faith arrived at the protest bearing signs that read God Abhors You. There’s a video over at Pam’s House Blend.
Strolling back and forth yelling out that gay and lesbian people were doomed to hell, one of the leaders of anti-gay protesters continued his booming tirade of hate toward gay and lesbian citizens.
After the initial intimidation – which is what the protesters were all about – several of the people gathered for the Seven Straight Nights event approached the protesters and began questioning the message and their tactics.
Jon and Dawn Kennedy were two of those people at the celebration. Their brother, Sean Kennedy, died May 16, 2007 in Greenville, S.C., after being struck by a man who reportedly called Sean a faggot before striking Sean with such force that it crushed the bones in his face. Sean died from the one fatal blow.
Sean’s mother was present at Seven Straight Nights and was one of the event’s several speakers, including Faith In America Executive Director Jimmy Creech.
When Sean’s brother and sister politely told the leader of the anti-gay protesters that their brother was killed and that their hateful speech promotes violence toward gay and lesbian people, the protester flatly and unemotionally told Jon and Dawn Kennedy that their brother "was burning in hell right now."
I realize that these people are not representative of the whole of Christianity. But the silence in the pews toward this kind of thing is telling.
If you have friends who seem to think that violence against gay and lesbian citizens isn’t pervasive in our society, you need to introduce them to Erin Davies and her Fagbug.
Erin Davies, a student at Sage College in New York, was targeted by anti-gay vandals when her VW Beetle was sprayed with the words "U R gay" and fag" in mid-April, most likely because the vehicle has a rainbow sticker affixed to its bumper. The incident occurred on the national "Day of Silence" in which students across the country use silence as a means to bringing awareness to intolerance and homophobia.
Instead of having the car cleaned up, Davies says she plans to use it to spread a message of tolerance and take it on a cross-country trip this summer with the hateful messages still emblazoned across its windows.
Erin attended the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. last week and it was there that she reported the awful news that she had been the victim of another painful – and potentially serious attack – in her hometown of Tampa, Fla.
On Oct. 4, just a week before arriving in Greenville, S.C., someone threw a brick through the window of her home in Tampa and the back window of her car parked there.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not tolerance for the homosexual, but tolerance for bigotry. You cannot arouse religious passions against couples in love, without giving license to hate. This isn’t murder we’re talking about here. It isn’t violence. It isn’t theft. To denounce acts of violence, crimes of greed, the hurtful, harmful, things people to To their neighbors, is to condemn hatefulness. To denounce couples in love is to condemn love itself and that gives hate free reign to do what it will, because only love can stand against hate. Once you have destroyed love, you have unchained hate and hate obeys no one. It throws the brick through Erin Davies automobile. It laughs in Jon and Dawn Kennedy’s faces, and tells them their brother is burning in hell. It ties a 112 pound college student tied to a fence, tortures him, then leave him to die alone on the cold Wyoming plains. That is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not absolution, but blood. On your hands.
I’m terribly sorry if all this puts you in a theological bind. But the bible says… Yes. And it says we shouldn’t suffer witches to live either. And then it turns around and says Love Thy Neighbor. Over here is God flooding the earth, killing everyone and everything on it, including by the way, all its little children. Over there is Jesus, warning people not to harm a hair on a little child’s head or face the wrath of God. The bible can have its cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, you can’t. Those people vitriolically condemning homosexuals and their families and friends, Are the face of Christianity in America, until you give it a better, more loving one. And you can’t. Not until you start loving your gay neighbor. And as long as you hold to the belief that the love between same sex couples is a sin, you don’t. All you can do is watch impotently, while they are eaten by wolves you cannot speak out wholeheartedly against. Or you can wash, wash your hands of it all, and look the other way.
The original intent of the forum, according to Coalition of Conscience director Dr. Michael Brown, was to have an open and honest dialogue between the Coalition of Conscience and members of the Charlotte-area gay & gay-friendly clergy.
Brown said he had invited members of the clergy from thirteen area churches – including the New Life Metropolitan Community Church, MCC of Charlotte, Myers Park Baptist Church, St. Martin’ & St. Peter’s Episcopal Churches, Holy Covenant UCC and Jay Bakker’s Revolution Church. Brown also said up to 500 personal invitations to the event were handed out at the Pride Charlotte festival at the end of August. He also noted that this was his third or fourth attempt at organizing a public discussion on issues of sexuality & Christianity with members of the Charlotte-area LGBT community.
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“We want to open a door of grace to the gay & lesbian community. We are convinced from the Scriptures that Jesus is against homosexual practice. We are equally convinced that Jesus died for homosexual and heterosexual alike,” Brown said, “We know there is a lot of misunderstanding. We know that a lot of gays and lesbians have been driven out of churches as if homosexuality was the worst of all sins…. Just by saying, ‘Let’s talk about it,’ hopefully we can break a wall down there.”
Oh how…neighborly…
Uhm…well…sort of….
At the beginning of the forum, however, Brown made his point very clear: One cannot be gay & Christian, or rather, one cannot be a self-affirming gay person and Christian:
“If you mean, can I be a devoted follower of Jesus while struggling with unwanted sexual desires, while saying I know these are wrong, I resist them, I don’t give into them, I do not practice homosexuality, I’m celibate and I’m abstaining from these things and my goal is to be pure in front of the Lord, but I’m still struggling with these things… Can you be gay and follow Jesus? In that sense, yes. And that’s the same as a heterosexual struggling with lust, desire, temptation outside of wedlock. However, if you mean can I practice homosexuality? Can I engage in romantic and same-sex relationships and does God endorse those things and can I be a follower of Jesus at the same time? The answer is absolutely, categorically no. The Scripture leaves no room to question that.”
(Emphasis mine…) Oh. Well there’s nothing to talk about after all then is there?
Strange How Emotionally…Empty…The Fundamentalist Reality Is…
Fred Clark has, for I think the past year or so if not longer, been doing a running, chapter by chapter review of the first book in the apocalyptic fundamentalist hit book series, Left Behind. If you haven’t checked in on it yet you should, because while it may seem that taking a serious, critical look at Left Behind is like shooting fish in a barrel, Fred not only brings to it his editorial knowledge (he works for a local newspaper where he lives), he also brings to bear his own sincere and deeply held Baptist faith (he’s a Baptist in the sense that I once, in a world long ago and far, far away, thought of the word…), and with it a humanity utterly absent from the scribblings of LaHaye and Jenkins. It must be a painful chore, but after so long his readers can tell Fred’s committed to it, because it’s important to him that people see what the likes of LaHaye and Jenkins have done to his faith, and are doing, still, to their followers.
I bring it up, because this week’s episode finds Fred, once again, pounding on the one, overreaching flaw in the series, the thing that taints every word of it from the get-go. And you see that flaw in how strangely indifferent the characters of the novels are, to the sudden disappearance of millions of people…
Buck Williams and Steve Plank have been watching the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 on CNN. They don’t wear sackcloth and they don’t shoot fire out of their mouths, but two guys who tried to kill them tripped, fell over and died, then one of them claimed to be the Messiah before they both settled back into chanting that Jesus was the Messiah. CNN’s Dan Bennett, bored already with the chanting, signs off, promising to record anything else that happens and to report on it after the fact.
Marge and a few others on the staff had drifted into Steve’s office during the telecast. "If that doesn’t beat all," one said. "What a couple of kooks."
If you ever met someone, in real life, who talked like the characters in Left Behind, it would become a story you told for the rest of your life. "No, for real," you would say to your friends, who had heard this story a dozen times, but still enjoyed it while half-doubting that it really could have happened. "It was six years ago, at the airport, and the guy actually said, ‘If that doesn’t beat all, what a couple of kooks,’ just like that. And then he said something about ‘coming on like gangbusters.’ …"
But it’s not that they don’t talk like real people talk…it’s that they’re missing something that real people, mostly, have…
Buck decides to stick up for the kooks:
"… What a couple of kooks."
"Which two?" Buck said. "You can’t say the preachers, whoever they are, didn’t warn ’em."
Actually, you can say they didn’t "warn ’em" because they didn’t warn ’em. Instead, they started out with a lethal little object lesson — kill the first two and the others will get the idea. It was only after killing those two that they informed the rest of the crowd that this is what would happen to anyone who tried to harm them. That’s a rather vivid warning, but it came a little late for those first two dead guys.
The authors have gotten confused here. They have read Revelation 11:5, which says of the witnesses that "anyone who wants to harm them must die." That warning seems to be what they have in mind when they have Buck weirdly assert that the preachers "warned" their attackers that they would be devoured by flame and/or trip and die. But the authors seem to forget that Buck and Dan Bennett and, most importantly, the two trip-and-die guys, have not read Revelation 11:5 and thus were not privy to this warning.
The central conceit of the Left Behind books, is that it’s a future history according to the Dispensational Millenialism theology of it’s authors. Events in the book of Revelations, taken at literal face value by crackpot fundamentalists, begin happening throughout the world, and are witnessed by the central characters in the book…a group of sinners who were "left behind" after the rapture.
There’s a problem here…and it runs throughout the book.
"What’s going on over there," someone else asked.
"All I know," Buck said, "is that things happen there that no one can explain."
Two weeks ago, Buck’s co-workers would have been impressed by that comment. A year before, you’ll recall, Buck had been "over there," in Israel, when the Ruso-Ethiopian Air Force launched a full-scale, doomsday nuclear assault, concentrating its entire arsenal on that tiny country. And no one was killed. No one was even hurt. And Buck was right in the middle of it, watching this According to Hoyle miracle unfold before his eyes. Buck had seen something happen "that no one can explain." Two weeks ago, that made him special.
But that was two weeks ago. He’s not special anymore.
Last Monday, a third of the planet vanished faster than you can blink, without a trace, without an explanation. The entire world has seen something "that no one can explain." There are no more children anymore and no one knows how or why or what happened. Compared to The Event, even Buck’s bona fide nuclear miracle seems a little less impressive. Compared to the confounding, incomprehensible, world-altering Event, a couple of guys tripping and dying scarcely registers on anyone’s personal list of unexplainable happenings.
Look at this. Really look at it. LaHaye and Jenkins are writing about events that have happened after what must be the greatest calamity that the human race has ever faced. Not only have millions of adults suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, but so has every single child. There are no children anymore! To everyone left alive after such a cataclysmic event, it would have to seem as if the world had suddenly ended. There is no future left for humanity. This is it. Finito. Done. End of story.
And yet the characters drawn by LaHaye and Jenkins seem utterly indifferent to that. They just go on about their lives.
There’s a reason for that…
"If that doesn’t beat all …" No, you moron, it doesn’t. Every child on the face of the earth simultaneously vanishing and no one knowing why beats all. With prejudice. All has been beaten, decisively, and all won’t be coming back for Round 2.
The next thing Buck says is, "I’ve got to get to JFK." In the context, I at first took this to mean that he had decided to fly to Israel to check out these preachers for himself. (Buck likes to fly all over the world investigating stories. Someday weeks from now, if he finds time, he may even write something about one of them.) But what he meant was that he had to get to JFK to meet a flight attendant he spoke with once, briefly, for a few minutes, so that he can take her to meet the president of Romania in his hotel.
As he leaves for the airport, Buck doesn’t give a second thought to any of the things that no one can explain. He’s not thinking about the witnesses and the trip-and-die guys. He’s not thinking about The Event, or about the international criminal conspiracy whose secrets he has promised not to reveal, or about his betrayal of his slain friend Dirk, or his likely complicity in the suspicious death of rival reporter Eric Miller, or about how he’s well on his way to missing his second consecutive weekly deadline. He is thinking, instead, of the promotion he has just been offered:
Buck knew Steve was right. He was going to have to accept the promotion just to protect himself from other pretenders. He didn’t want to be obsessed with it all day. Buck was glad for the diversion of seeing Hattie Durham. His only question now was whether he would recognize her. They had met under most traumatic circumstances.
In his article for Vanity Fair, American Rapture, Craig Unger tells of walking with a group of the faithful, led by their prophet LaHaye, to the very place where the longed for battle of Armageddon will occur…
On a scorching afternoon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient fortress city of Megiddo, Israel. LaHaye is not a household name in the secular world, but in the parallel universe of evangelical Christians he is the ultimate cultural icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influential American evangelical leader of the past 25 years by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. With more than 63 million copies of his "Left Behind" novels sold, he is one of the best-selling authors in all of American history. Here, a group of about 90 evangelical Christians who embrace the astonishing theology he espouses have joined him in the Holy Land for the "Walking Where Jesus Walked" tour.
Megiddo, the site of about 20 different civilizations over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops on our pilgrimage, and, given that LaHaye’s specialty is the apocalypse, it is also one of the most important. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles here. But if Megiddo is to go down in history as the greatest battlefield on earth, its real test is yet to come. According to the book of Revelation, the hill of Megiddo – better known as Armageddon – will be the site of a cataclysmic battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
To get a good look at the battlefields of the apocalypse, we take shelter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wearing a floppy hat to protect him from the blazing Israeli sun, LaHaye yields to his colleague Gary Frazier, the tour organizer and founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., to explain what will happen during the Final Days.
Like they’ve seen it in their dreams, a thousand times…
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"- billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God – are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… Read that again. "We’ve done the math." What kind of person goes to the trouble to calculate to the corpse, exactly how many human beings have to be crushed like grapes at the hand of the man who once said that to love God, and your neighbor as yourself, was the greatest commandment. I recall reading after the last book in the series was published, that someone asked LaHaye how hard it would be for God’s Chosen to go on living after having witnessed almost four fifths or more of the human race cast into hell for eternity…many of whom must have been family and dear friends…
Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again
-Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing
…and LaHaye averred that God would probably, in kindness, erase the memory of it from everyone’s mind. But why would God have to, if the faithful are all as empty inside as LaHaye. Without a doubt LaHaye could go on living just fine after having watched all the heathens, all the intellectuals, all his betters, everyone he’s despised all his life for being more gloriously human then he could ever hope to become, cast into fire for eternity by a loving God. He’s the kind who, if he was a good Party Member in the Germany of the 1930s and 40s, he’d have shoveled Jews into the ovens and gone home to kiss his wife, tuck his children into bed, and listen to a little Bach before turning in for the night. All of them could. That’s why they’re fundamentalists. They have no inner compass for managing human relationships. No instinctive sense of sympathy and decency. They need rules. But even more, they need someone to blame for that inner void that keeps nagging at them, keeps reminding them of everything fine and noble and decent a human being can be, that they are not. They need scapegoats. They need someone to hate, so they don’t have to hate themselves.
This is why the characters in LaHaye and Jenkins novel can walk around in a world where all the children have suddenly vanished and worry about their job promotions. They act like they’re oblivious, because their creators are oblivious. But they know down to the corpse how many bodies it takes to fill the valley of Armageddon with blood up to a horse’s bridle.
Uhm…I Don’t Think That Was God Telling You To Do That
Imagine a world where the major religions didn’t teach everyone that sex itself was innately wicked and sinful…that sin was only in hurting and taking advantage of others. Imagine a world where preachers didn’t teach people that their bodies are evidence of their fallen status, objects of shame, and not beautiful in their own right, to be taken care of and treated with respect.
SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
The 30-year-old was recovering in the Hospital Clinico Universitario in Salamanca in western Spain.
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The local newspaper La Gaceta reported when relatives called emergency services, he told ambulance workers he did it “so would not sin any more”.
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He was bleeding heavily.
The newspaper said it was not known if the man’s penis could be sewn back.
There was also a suggestion he may be suffering from psychological problems.
I read crap like this and I just find myself shaking my head and wondering how the hell it ever came to this. What other creature on this good earth, besides us humans, punish themselves for feeling desire? I can’t believe that just having rational thought capable minds does this to us, because behavior like this just isn’t rational. If you could, in some imaginary laboratory, start the history of the human race over from day one, and run it as a simulation, would you still end up with the major faiths of the world teaching us to fear and loath our sexual nature, to the point where some people even mutilate themselves?
Christian denominations outside Roman Catholicism are either defective or are not full churches of Jesus Christ, the Vatican has reaffirmed.
A 16-page document released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Pope Benedict XVI once headed, described Orthodox churches as true churches, but said they are suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognise the primacy of the Pope.
The document, approved by Pope Benedict, went on to say the "wound is still more profound" in Protestant denominations.
Just so all you American fundamentalists who’ve been getting all gushy about yours, and Ratzinger’s, mutual hostility toward gay people know where you fit in. But hey…look at it this way…you both agree that everyone else but you isn’t a true Christian. Common Ground.
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