jenk

...of the WWII-era Waltons episode "The Fire Storm" where the reverend arranges a burning of German books. John-Boy spots a book on the to-be-burned pile and asks if anyone can read German. One woman bravely steps forward, and reads:

Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde. Und die Erde war wüst und leer, und es war finster auf der Tiefe; und der Geist Gottes ...

Then in English:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God spoke, Let there be light ...

....and the preacher seems not all that interested in book burning anymore.

It might be a good thing I'm not near any churches planning to burn Korans; I might *BUY* an Arabic Bible just to add it to their stack. فِي الْبَدْءِ خَلَقَ اللهُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالأَرْضَ،

[Found it on YouTube; the quotes start about 4 minutes in, and were longer than I remembered. Oh, and John Ritter played the preacher. *tilt*]

Current Mood: annoyed

I saw this over on Slacktivist, and I'm only quoting a portion here:

[Wednesday, Glenn] Beck told his radio listeners to "look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. ... If you find [them], run as fast as you can. ... They are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

As Joe Carter noted at First Things, taking Beck's advice would require all Roman Catholics to leave that church, since "Social Justice" is -- for Catholics as for almost every longstanding Christian denomination -- an integral aspect of the church's teaching. ("Social Justice" is, in fact, the title of Section One, Chapter Two, Article 3 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.)

Glenn Beck continued his attack on "social justice" [Thursday], arguing that it entails "a perversion of the gospel" and is "not what Jesus would say" (MediaMatters has the audio).

This is an astonishing claim to anyone who's ever had a Bible and their eyes open at the same time. Justice is an inescapable, relentless, pervasive, nearly omnipresent theme of that entire volume. It is impossible to read the law and the prophets, the Gospels and epistles, the histories, wisdom literature and apocalypse without being confronted incessantly with the theme of justice, justice, justice, justice, justice, justice, justice.

Searching for "justice" in online versions of the Bible: NIV, NASB, The Message - just the word, not the theme. Some of the results:

Exodus 23:6
"When there is a dispute concerning your poor, don't tamper with the justice due them.
Leviticus 19:15
"Don't pervert justice. Don't show favoritism to either the poor or the great. Judge on the basis of what is right.
Proverbs 31:8
"Speak up for the people who have no voice, for the rights of all the down-and-outers. Speak out for justice! Stand up for the poor and destitute!"
Luke 11:42
" But woe to you Pharisees! For you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.

Yes, I know (and have attended) churches that talk about social justice and seek to practice it through education, voter registration, sponsoring immigrants, welcoming gays and lesbians, hosting homeless shelters, Amnesty International, AA, providing tax help, and so forth. But the biggie is building a culture where fairness and justice actually prevail. Is it too much to hope that Beck is going to get people thinking about this stuff again?

Current Mood: awake

LaHaye & Jenkins' notion of spiritual warfare is difficult to distinguish from sorcery. The Antichrist can cast a spell that we are powerless to resist. That would mean we're all doomed except that we can invoke the magic words spell, which God is powerless to resist, and thereby compel God to cast his counter-spell against the Antichrist.*

It's kind of like a cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors. Antichrist beats human beats God beats Antichrist.

— Still Unsaved

Antichrist is devil horns, God is thumbs-up (a la Buddy Christ) but what's human?

*Yes, this is NOT the generally accepted Christian view, but it is the view that slacktivist is seeing in Left Behind (Your career rides on meeting the man I think is the Antichrist and you're not a Christian? Get saved! So the Antichrist can't hurt you!) and criticizing.

Current Mood: amused

[I]n searching for "something not just to die for but to live for" [they] settle on "a group, a team, a force" and not a cause, a purpose, a mission. Bruce attempts to imagine a cause or a mission that this "force" would be fighting for, but the best he can manage is to imagine what it would be fighting against:

"When it becomes obvious who the Antichrist is, the false prophet, the evil, counterfeit religion, we'll have to oppose them, speak out against them."

So again they aren't for Christ, they're anti-Antichrist, which again is far from the same thing.
— Martyr Envy

Oh, and the "force" they're creating? It's the title of the sequel. Ca-ching!

Current Mood: amused

From the slacktivist's critique of Left Behind (which has spawned a website of fan fiction based on the idea of an after-Rapture world where people act like actual human beings):

An aside for my evangelical brothers and sisters: "The scripture saith, thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his reward" (I Timothy 5:18). So tip 20 percent. At least. Divide by five and round up. If you also plan to: A) say grace aloud before the meal; B) ask your server if he/she is "saved;" and/or C) leave a gospel tract on the table when you leave, then make that 40 percent.

Also:

The spiritual warfare gurus love to cite the story of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness as though it were an introductory course in Defense Against the Dark Arts. The salient point of the story, for them, is not its profound contrast of love and power, but rather its demonstration of mystical defensive techniques. A magic trick. When tempted by Satan, Jesus quoted scripture. Thus, they believe, when confronted by the forces of darkness, Christians should follow suit by raising their wands and chanting "Expecto patronum!" ... er, I mean, by citing chapter and verse from the Bible to invoke divine protection.

Current Mood: amused

Not having HBO, I figured someone would link to it. From what I'm seeing online, it sounds like HBO didn't broadcast it - to which I say, ouch. It's rare for something this solemn to make me both tear up and laugh, but this did. The laugh was at:

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

( Full text behind the cut )

Current Mood: amused

I wonder if the persons who broke down the doors at a Wal-Mart and trampled employees - including a 34-year-old man who died of his injuries - consider themselves murderers?

The NY Times quotes Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, as saying: “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not,” he said. “Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”

I think that's well said.

There are times when I think the Puritans weren't completely wrong in banning Christmas celebrations as unChristian.

Current Mood: angry

In the "Did evangelicals go for Obama or did it not matter that they went for McCain?" discussion comes this nugget...

Overall, the religious vote for Obama did not reflect a massive shift in ideology and priorities among evangelicals but rather muscle-flexing by a coalition of others of faith--including and especially African-American churchgoers and Latinos who tend to be both more religious and more socially conservative than the population at large. The pro-Obama faithful represent a wild diversity of the American religious experience, including mainline Protestants, church-shoppers, the curious, the spiritual but not religious, the heterodox (those who subscribe to several traditions), the intermarried, the community-minded, the intellectually provoked but skeptical, and the traditionalists. Indeed, it includes almost every committed person of faith except those whose church culture insists on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
— Lisa Miller: A Post-Evangelical America?

Yes, for the non-evangelicals out there, that latter is one of the differences between evangelicals and other Christians. (And unlike what I was taught as a child, no, it's not that other Christians don't pray. ;)

On a related note, Washington's voter turnout is expected to be almost 85%.

Current Mood: amused

No, not even the Pill.

Yes, it prevents pregnancy. Yes, this can direct the path of your life in ways that do not involve children.* And you know what? I think that if you are not prepared to raise a child, then using birth control is the RESPONSIBLE thing.

Yes, I've never been pregnant. It is not an accident that I've never been pregnant. Never being pregnant does not mean I am not "entitled" to speak in this matter.

If YOU want to be open to having children, that is YOUR choice. Others are entitled to make THEIR choices.

God, save me from the people who claim to be talkin' to you.

*It can also clear up acne, keep endometriosis under control, reduce PMS, and other good and useful and LAWFUL things....

Current Mood: pissed off

Interesting article on plant confusions and not-so-commonly-known toxicities. Example: did you know the vines of a potato plant are poisonous, and so are sweet peas? Heck, the edible (red) part of the rhubarb isn't without the toxins of the leafy greens, it just has much less. One gets the impression that food variety doesn't just mean you get larger a variety of nutrients, it also means you get less-toxic doses of potentially problematic poisons. ("The dose makes the poison.")

Of course, reading Murder with Peacocks tends to make me curious about the edibility / toxicity of our garden ;)

Fun with planting false memories.

Building a treadmill into a bed. Gee, add a laptop and

dustin_00 could use it when he's tired of biking.

Prayer is many things, but a business plan??

“We felt if we prayed and obeyed God’s word and did what He asked, that He would help us be successful,” the bank’s founder, Steve Skow, told the Journal-Constitution in 2005.

Meanwhile the FDIC and state regulators shut down the bank on Friday, and are investigating the bank for making improper loans. These people need to read Dorothy L. Sayers' exhortation that good works matter little if they are not also good work. "No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth....The only Christian work is good work, well done."

Current Mood: geeky

Quoting from "Strength to Love," a collection of sermons by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state," King wrote. "It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority."

This is quoted in a discussion of Rick Warren hosting Obama & McCain at his megachurch.

In reality, there is not one church, there are many, just as there are many faiths. But I do think it good for churches to stand apart from the state, and not just to enforce freedom of religion. Dr King was able to use his place in the pulpit to act against the state because his church was separate from the state. If his church had been a part of the state, it would have lessened his effectiveness.

It also takes buy-in from those not of a church for a church to really sway the state. This is also a good thing. Some "guidance" is pure snake oil. The state eventually had to follow Dr King. I doubt the polititians who supported Jim Jones pre-1978 still do.

(I'm not sure there's a problem with a church being just a social club, though. ;)

Current Mood: thinking out loud

13:35 SQL ... you don't forget how to use it, you just get sloppy on grammar.
18:25 Cricket is a game with impenetrable rules and played solely for the purpose of confirming that Brits are superior to the rest of the world.
18:26 Or so writes Bishop Robinson, in tinyurl.com/62eq64
18:27 He also quotes Richard Harries, retired Bishop of Oxford: "Diversity is God's gift to us; division is what we've made of it."

Automatically copied from http://www.twitter.com/jenk3 via LoudTwitter cause it's easy :)

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- An unemployed man accused of opening fire with a shotgun and killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church apparently targeted the congregation out of hatred for its support of liberal social policies, police said Monday.

Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen IV said a signed, four-page letter written by Jim D. Adkisson, 58, was found in his small SUV in the church parking lot. [...]

"It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that and his stated hatred of the liberal movement," Owen said at a news conference. [...] Owen said the letter indicated Adkisson, who neighbors said had previously worked as a truck driver, did not expect to leave the church alive. He added the man reported having no family or next-of-kin.

"He certainly intended to take a lot of casualties," Owen said. "He had 76 rounds with him."
— Seattle P-I

He started shooting while children were performing a play, but no children were harmed. According to the New York Times: "Witnesses said that the gunman, carrying a guitar case, had first tried to enter the area where the children were preparing for the play, saying he was there to play music. But he was told to use the public entrance to the sanctuary instead."

There are no words.

Current Mood: cranky

22:05 They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse. - Emily Dickinson #
10:40 Psychology Today on caffeine - besides increasing heart rate it blocks the "sleepy" neurotransmitter adenosine. tinyurl.com/3zskn4 #
12:42 "Don’t be rude to the wait staff" & other useful things to know tinyurl.com/69ha2k #

Automatically copied from http://www.twitter.com/jenk3 via LoudTwitter cause it's easy :)

According to The Sun, "Officials at the Church of England have written a saucy good sex guide for their parishioners."

The Church website takes just a bit of a different slant on the book and related pre-marital course, saying that "Growing Together identifies key areas which couples need to consider to make sure their marriage stands the test of time. They include children, money, commitment, sex, conflict, faith and families."

;)

Current Mood: awake

Peggy over at A Silly Poor Gospel has re-interpreted the Christ story as ... the tale of the field service tech. She calls it Geek Squad Jesus.

No, really. As she put it:

I think something broken got fixed. I see Jesus the redeemer, as Jesus the repairman, tech support if you will. See, there was this system called ‘time and space’ and running on this system was a program called ‘humanity.’ And it got all buggy. And the code called ‘the law’ just wasn’t working. So the system designer had to crack it all open. Get inside, wipe some stuff, patch other stuff, write some whole new stuff. ( Read more... )

I'm not a Quaker myself, but I definitely respect the tradition.

Current Mood: amused

( in case you've already read them )

“You know kids, nobody can ‘make you’ feel anything. – You do know that right?” (they look confused)

“No, seriously,” I say, “ You can be, if you choose, in control of your feelings. Nobody can make you angry, nobody can make you sad, unless you want to be.”

They scoff, and without fail, one of them says, “My parents make me angry” – or even better - “I can make people angry”.

And there follows an experiment, where the teenager tries to make Peggy (the Quaker preacher in the story) angry. And at the end, she reports:

“I am feeling slightly amused, and proud of you, young man, you showed courage, you gave it a good try. You didn’t flinch. I respect that. I like you. – I am not, however, in the least bit angry.”

Then I ask the class if they can figure out why he failed. They are smart. They [...] come around to “You didn’t want to be angry. You made up your mind that you weren’t going to get angry.”

And that is the "bingo" moment. A human can choose a particular reaction. We can get better at picking what we're going to feel or do.

Just because people are offensive does not mean that I have to be offended. What a time-saver....

Read the rest, it's worth it.

Current Mood: amused

So the senior pastor at Antioch Bible Church, Ken Hutcherson, has been asking the folks on his prayer list to support him in meeting with Microsoft executives about Microsoft's gay-positive policies at the Microsoft shareholders' meeting. In a followup, he reported that the meeting "went well".

Reports elsewhere (P-I, Slog) note that Hutcherson's "meeting" occurred during the public Q&A. As one person put it,

[Hutcherson spoke first.] As Hutcherson spoke, only one person clapped out of the 500-600 people present.

I can't help but wonder what was going through Hutcherson's mind at that point. Was he surprised at the lack of enthusiasm for his ideas? Did he assume people weren't responding to him because they're afraid of the "pro-gay" cabal? Did he think the quiet meant they were taking him seriously? Did he decide silence meant they were afraid of the "black man with a righteous cause, with a host of powerful white people behind me," and would therefore do what he wants?

Another stockholder asked what they could do to counter the hateful ideas and actions of people like Hutcherson. There was a more enthusiastic wave of applause in the meeting.

Was Hutcherson still in the room at that point? Did it reinforce how out of step he is? Did he question himself at all? His post-meeting mailing to the prayer list ended,

Pray God will take this to their hearts and minds and that they will respond to me.

Dude. Were you still in the room when the general legal counsel replied to the followup question?

As a company, we've had a clear policy with respect to the way we treat our people, and we believe in that policy. It's a policy that's founded on non-discrimination, it's a policy that we believe has served our employees well, it's served our shareholders well, ( ... )

- Seattle P-I

I think that's your response.

Current Mood: curious

Gay men came to embrace [Tammy Faye] Messner as a camp figure, making her the subject of gender-bending look-alike contests. She embraced them as well. She began attending gay pride events, and in 1996, she became the co-host of a syndicated television talk show with Jim J. Bullock, an openly gay actor.

“I refuse to label people,” Ms. Messner said in a 2000 documentary, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” when asked about her attitudes toward gay rights. “We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn’t make any junk.”

- NY Times Obituary

I was not a Tammy Faye fan even when my aunt was sending the PTL Club $100/month, but this is still a nice thing to include in the obit. Mel White wrote in Stranger at the Gate that he found Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to be uncommon among the televangelists he ghostwrote for in their support of gay rights. Of course, I'm sure Pat Robertson sees this as just another example of Messner's poor judgement...

Current Mood: sore

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Entries tagged with god

Why am I reminded...

justice and the Bible

rock-paper-scissors

more mst3k of Left Behind

cackles loudly

Bishop Robinson's prayer that opened today's concert...

Black Friday indeed...

America has religions other than Evangelical Christian

Rant: Birth control is NOT murder.

(no subject)

Church shouldn't be master or servant of the state

tweets

Can't find job? Commit murder.

stir-fried semi-random

Anglican Guide to Sex?

hee