We’d be better off ignoring Jones

There’s a big difference between killing human beings (which radical Muslims and Christian Scott Roeder have done) and burning a book (which Terry Jones did). We should all condemn those who commit violence in the name of their beliefs. When Muslims do it, we hope Muslim leaders speak out. When Christians do it, we hope Christian leaders will speak out.

But Jones didn’t commit or condone violence. He burned a book.

So should he be condemned by the Christian community (or any of us, for that matter)?

Let’s be honest here: No one Christian represents Christianity.

Please click over to the full post and leave your comments there.

Gandalf rose from the dead to save you

Category: Religion • Weirdness
Posted on: April 7, 2011 8:13 AM, by PZ Myers

There is a church in Romsey, Australia which is getting lots of attention because they offer a "Sci-Fi and Fantasy Friendly Church Service," where people dress up as fantasy characters and wave light-sabers around while quoting Buffy and Bilbo. It's a weird story, because every church service offered everywhere is fantasy friendly, so what's the big deal? Obi-Wan and Gandalf are both Jesus-figures, anyway.

Predictably, though, some stuffed shirts are outraged, which just fills me with more appreciation of irony. Says the Baptist minister who hears voices in his head and promises escape to an imaginary paradise after death,

"I don't have a problem with people enjoying sci-fi, but church isn't the place to encourage escapism and fancy dress," Mentone Baptist minister Murray Campbell said.

"It is the time where real people with real lives need to hear the real God speak his word, the Bible.

Another of the men wearing a dress speaks up:

Catholic priest Gerald O'Collins said: "There should be no need to dress it up.

"There is a magical story there already - We just have to start selling ourselves properly."

At least he's honest—yes, religion is all about selling magic. The Romsey church is embarrassingly blatant about it, which is nothing new — but their real crime is making the silliness obvious by inviting comparison with openly fictional stories.

The ONLY way that faith is about "magic" is with the denial of the historical events recorded in Scripture. It is very amusing to me that there are so many athiests who are so emboldened in denying that the Bible contains historical records even when the eye-witness record many instances when, faced with the evidence, people still did not believe.

No, PZ, Gandalf did not rise from the dead to save us. He is a fictional character who we know was created by a human author. Even atheistic biblical scholars such as Bart Ehrman acknowledge that the Bible is a historical account.

The honest, aggressive, loud [jerks] like Mark Driscoll who probably push more people away from Christianity than they bring in…

Or the hipstery, sweet, Jesus-loves-everybody folks like Rob Bell who don’t “correctly” follow Christian theology, who are apolitical, and who are not anti-gay/anti-abortion… but may draw more people into the faith in the process.

Unlike the similar schism in our own movement between the “angry atheists” and the “accommodationists,” I don’t think you can say “We need both kinds” in this case.

The two types of Christians here have very different objectives — Driscoll wants to save souls for the afterlife and he thinks he knows how to do it because the Bible gives him the directions. Bell leads the charge to “be more like Jesus” because that makes for a better world for all of us; saving people almost seems incidental after that.

You can’t have it both ways. These are two different interpretations of how to live according to the Bible. They’re not both right, and only one (if any) will win out. There will be a schism in the Protestant world before those sides come together.

Once again the atheist insight is facinating. This quote from Friendly Athiest makes solid points that have been lurking in conversations about the Christian church for years.

He is right that Bell's attempt is to make the message of the Bible more palatible, and not only that, but to turn its teaching to focus on us instead of God. Bell wants to make this world a better place, and if people learn to love God in the pricess it "almost seems incidental."

What is the church for? Are we not sharing the message of salvation?

Will Driscoll "push more people away from Christianity"? Doesn't look that way from the thousands that attend Mars Hill each week. But if he does push people away, they are the people who care more about this world than they do about their need for a savior.

After we collect enough of these to buy cabinets with, we plan to use even more to cover the floor in our kitchen!

Nouwen struggled with his sexuality.^[2] "Although his homosexuality was known by those close to him, he never publicly claimed a homosexual identity."^[3] Although he never directly addressed the matter of his sexuality in the writings he published during his lifetime, he acknowledged the struggle both in his private journals and in discussions with friends,^[4] both of which were extensively referenced by Michael Ford in the biography Wounded Prophet, which was published after Nouwen's death. Ford suggests that Nouwen only became fully comfortable with his sexual orientation in the last few years of his life, and that Nouwen's depression was caused in part by the conflict between his priestly vows of celibacy and the sense of loneliness and longing for intimacy that he experienced. Ford conjectured, "This took an enormous emotional, spiritual and physical toll on his life and may have contributed to his early death."^[2] There is no evidence that Nouwen ever broke his vow of celibacy.^[2][3]