Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

The scoffing is sincere to the bone marrow.

 

Oh, sometimes it is. Generally, folks like that don’t bother with the conversation.

 

The conversation can never truly be had but the engagement is still fun.

 

Sorry you went through that.

Reminds me of a story. (Doesn't everything?) A few years ago, there was a thing where Victoria Jackson was laying out how she was coming to Middle Tennessee to save all of us. A friend who also happens to be an Episcopal priest was there with his wife. At one point she looked at him and her eyes widened.

"Are you Catholic?" she squeaked.

"No," he said, and offered no explanation about the dog collar.

His wife said, none too quietly, "I wish you'd throw holy water on her so we can watch her melt."

"What did you say?" Because y'all know Victoria Jackson is a big ole THREAT.

So Mrs. Reverend repeated it loud enough for her to hear everything clearly. She dropped it and moved on.

It is arrogant and it needs to stop. The flip side was Penn Jillette's reasoning that Christians who didn't prosyletize didn't truly love people because they obviously didn't care if non-Christians went to Hell. As far as I'm concerned, the jury is out on the whole Heaven/Hell binary afterlife idea.

It is a part of my identity, but I try to keep it to topics where it is appropriate to talk about. Having said that, I find that sometimes I have to qualify certain stances with my position on other topics because it will inevitably come up. For example, can I be anti-capital punishment and pro-choice? It's complicated.

I think it comes down to the individual person. The Abrahamic God works for me. Not sure I want to push that on someone who just doesn't feel it. (I have my own ideas about belief and people and brain chemistry and all that.)

Jesus gets all the cool toys. Then again, would dinosaur ownership be all that great?

 

I know you know this, but I wanted to follow up and amplify yours ...

There's more than one way to try to live up to the Great Commission. Some people feel called to make a scene on street-corners. Others make sandwiches for night shelters or erect and staff emergency hospitals in Central Park. When they go for walks around the city they make it a point to have bottles of water and non-perishable snacks at the ready for the panhandlers. These are as powerful acts of evangelism as knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. "You shall know them by their fruits" indeed.

 

People do street preaching all the time. They’re called TED talks. They just happen to occur in auditoriums. They’re acceptable because they’re polished and designed as products of controllable human intelligence.

The most offensive thing about Christianity to a postmodern American audience is its exclusivity. Now, as ever, you cannot save yourself. You cannot live a good enough life. You cannot read enough of the right books, think enough of the right things, protest enough against the worst laws, or give enough to the right charities to overcome the deficit you have to God. You have to admit and accept only Jesus could or did, and in that spirit, love like he did, chalking it up to him.

This is hard, of course, on all the things postmodernity has told us to play up about ourselves, namely our individualism and our own “truth,” which is a phony euphemism for feelings.


That’s why the poor in spirit are blessed, and the rich young ruler is not. The former has no illusions about where their choices got them. The latter does, and can’t bear to give up what he thinks his choices produced: Markers of his virtue.

 

I know some who think it's heretical, but I've long believed that Buddhist who lives a good life and adheres to The Golden Rule will find a place in Heaven. Same for a good Hindu or Muslim or indigenous person who worships the sun and has never heard of the Son.

 

What?

 

I don't think it's heretical to believe it. It's wishful and almost certainly wrong - I'm not God, so - but not heretical.

If that's what a person preaches to Buddhists and Muslim, and the Christian God is who the Bible says he is, well, a person can explain that preaching to God. Jesus affirms to the Ten Commandments in his answer about the greatest commandment.

 

Kinda reminds me of the old joke ... Guy dies and goes to Heaven and is getting a tour. They pass by this room, which is stone silent, and the guide tells him that's where the Quakers are. They pass by another room, which sounds like Mardis Gras on steroids, and the guide tells him that's where the Catholics are. They make a turn and the guide tells him, "Shhhhhh ... we gotta be quiet here. The XXXXXXs are in there, and they think they're the only ones here in Heaven."

 

Pretty much. I lived 18 years as a born-again evangelical and I’ve lived 11 years now as an agnostic. Neither one of my identities could reason with the other in any way if I was able to put both of them in a room.