Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

No wonder Alma is extra spicy on the climate change thread.

Southern Baptists say denomination faces DOJ investigation

 

Good on the nature and matter of "American Christianity."

Only God Could Join Us to God | Commonweal Magazine

Which is to say, if you were a Martian, and you came down to the United States and you wanted to deduce from the statements and behavior of its adherents, without access to the scriptures, what Christianity was, what the gospels taught, I think you would have to conclude that Jesus spent most of his time denouncing homosexuality, insisting on the inviolability of gender, counseling the acquisition of wealth, and railing against immigrants.

DBH: You’ve left out guns. It’s a curious thing, of course. Let’s start there, then, rather than with the more metaphysically abstruse issues. So, every age of Christendom has been something of a jarring contradiction to the language of Christianity, as preserved in Scripture and liturgy; but I honestly believe that America uniquely is the land where Christianity went to die, and that the proof that it died here is that it could be so easily supplanted by a completely different religion called “Christianity,” and yet no one noticed the absurdity of it.

 

So the very uniqueness of Christ becomes also the universal truth, the universal destiny of human beings. Well, if you start from that as your understanding of Christology, and you accept an analogical ontology—one that doesn’t involve this catastrophist notion that in order to affirm the uniqueness of Christ you have to say that in Christ absolute contraries are united in some way, which somehow the dynamism of personality has the power to confect, and that this also determines who God is, and God becomes who he is, and his determination towards the man Jesus, and all this other rubbish from twentieth-century Lutheran thought and other sources—and instead you realize that what’s really splendid and magnificent about this more original understanding of deification is that God’s incarnation in Christ is also going on in everyone, everywhere, at all times, then that seems naturally to lead to a sort of universalization of the claims you can make for the faith.

The beliefs of all the traditions as imperfect but nonetheless real participations in this union of creatures and God.

 

Only if you were one of the especially stupid Martians.

 

You should read the whole thing, there's a lot there.

 

159-word sentence. Jesus Fucking Christ himself doesn't want to read a 159-word sentence.

 

Judas actually betrayed Him for 30 semicolons that could be sold on the open market.

 

In the form of fentanyl that looks like candy.

 

Jesus set Judas up. It was part of the plan all along. He was entrapped. God knew when he turned himself into Jesus that he would be crucified and he/they let Judas take the fall and be associated with that undeserved guilt for eternity.

 

Oh shut up.