The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He makes me lie down in green pastures He leads me beside quiet waters He restores my soul
Blondesense posted: The Picture is the Same but the religion looks different. People fight wars in the name of religion. People kill one another in the name of religion. People judge one another's value in the name of religion. There are some evil deeds committed in the name of religion. When I was little and attended Sunday school, my Sunday school teacher gave me a little picture. The picture depicted a kind and gentle looking Jesus holding a little baby lamb. I loved that picture because it was so sweet and it made me feel safe and good. That's how I used to view religion too, I saw it as being as kind and gentle as the way Jesus was holding that little baby lamb. Today the little picture looks the same but religion sure does look different to me.
I attended Catholic school all through my educational life. I had the picture of Jesus holding the lamb too, and remember the words of the nuns and priests telling us that WE are the lamb. We represent all that is good and humble and innocent and that Jesus loves and protects us.
For me, believing in Jesus means believing in what he SAID, in how he lived. Here was a man of peace who preached about love, acceptance, forgiveness and mercy. He is the Jesus who held no malice toward his detractors or persecutors. He remained faithful to his own beliefs till the day he died. Yet, he was also human. He lost his temper that day in the temple. He almost lost his faith, and certainly showed his fear that day in the Garden of Gethsemane. Yet he did what he had to do, and not ONCE raised his voice against his "enemies", not once did he ever DAMN them as evil or misguided or wrong, as so many who supposedly preach that they are "doing God's work" do today.
The beauty of Jesus is that you don't have to BE a Catholic, or even accept him as the Son of God to see the truth and beauty in his message. His message is a message to live by, and his message is so similar to the message of other religions which have also been perverted and co-opted by extremists...such as Islam. That message is so universal that it should be binding us together. Instead, it is totally overlooked and we spend all our time focused on the things that divide us. The Jesus I know isn't waving his fist at the world. The Jesus I know is watching and shedding a tear for all of us, not because we're destroying ourselves, but because he must feel that he failed.
When you speak about Jesus shedding a tear, you need to realize that for the evangelical fundamentalists Christian Right there is no crying Jesus in their religion. Rambo Jesus doesn't weep, Jesus kicks ass. Their spiritual entrepreneurs are never more dogmatic than when they are ignoring, if not contradicting, the essence of Jesus Christ's teachings. The basic con is to insist upon the historical and scientific accuracy of every syllable in the Bible - then to analyze its symbolism, unveil hidden meanings and decode secret messages known only to initiates. The Book of Genesis is reduced to a biology text, and Daniel becomes a crystal ball. Thus are delivered the comforts of certitude and the enhancements of sorcery in a single beguiling package.
There was a time in the not too distant past when most reasonable people would have pooh-poo'd Eric Rudolph the American Christian terrorist. Eric Robert Rudolph set off bombs in public to hurt and kill innocent people in order to make a political point: to "confound, anger and embarrass" the United States government for its legal sanction of abortion. He killed two people, injured at least 120 more and effectively terrorized everyone in three states. This "dangerous tactic," also known as murder, is expressly forbidden by the commandment handed down to Moses on Sinai, a document and a tradition Mr. Rudolph professes to revere.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay casts himself as maximum theocrat and chief scold, a cross between Cotton Mather and the Church Lady from "Saturday Night Live." I can't decide whether his bombast against Federal Judges in the Terri Schiavo affair was to deflect attention from his own ethical troubles or take decidely un-Christian advantage of what a GOP aide called "a great political issue" for Republicans. In the Schiavo case, the public overwhelmingly disapproved of DeLay's sanctimonious intrusion into a family's private dilemma.
All the usual suspects, including Senator Bill Frist, Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary are taking part in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees. The telecast, organized by the Family Research Council is scheduled the evening of April 24, calls the day "Justice Sunday" and depicts a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The Rude Pundit calls it Christ Weary About Filibusters: and a bad use of photoshop.
This religion is an embattled faith, which requires an ever evolving list of enemies to keep it's focus. It includes Satan worshippers one year, "secular humanists" the next. Panic over backward masking on phonograph records yields to fears that supermarket bar codes harbor the Mark of the Beast. Some years back, Procter & Gamble was forced to deny widespread rumors that a moon-and-stars logo on boxes of soapsuds symbolized corporate diabolism. More recently, purging school libraries of Harry Patter's witchcraft has emerged as a cause. Also today, George W. Bush is seen as God,, and liberals and democrats are doing the bidding of the Devil. As if the real world weren't scary enough, foolish mystery conspiracy theories must be invented. When will mainstream Christians, like the Church of Christ, speak out against these political hacks and "Elmer Gentry-style" televangelists willing to misuse Christian tradition for their own political agenda....
Anybody familiar with the Bible would have directed the faithful to Matthew 24:36, in which Christ warned his disciples on the Mount of Olives not to distract themselves searching for signs of the Second Coming because "no one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." If you don't know much about "Rapture and the Left Behind series" don't feel alone. No Christian believed in this term for the first 1800 years of Christianity, and no orthodox faith, Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant Churches believes in this popular myth now.
The hugh commercial success of the Left Behind series of eschatological thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a twelve-novel extravaganza combining a blandly paranoid worldview with crackpot theology to produce a form of biblical infotainment seemingly irresistible to a reported 42 million readers.
Forget all that sentimental gibberish about blessed peacemakers, turning the other cheek, and loving your enemies. If there are references to the Sermon on the Mount among Left Behind’s roughly 1 million words, I failed to find them. Depicting the "End Times" as an action/adventure melodrama similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator films, the books portray midwestern suburbanites and born-again Israeli converts as Warrior Jesus' allies in an apocalyptic struggle against a U.N.-anointed "World Potentate," who looks "not unlike a younger Robert Redford" and speaks the language of science and liberal internationalism.
Yet the media’s response to all of this nonsense has been remarkably polite. In America, of course, with commercial success comes a degree of cultural respectability. If millions of consumers succumb to a childish revenge fantasy that takes the Christ out of Christianity and treats the Bible as a cosmic Daily Racing Form, we dare not scoff at the merchandise.
How seriously the rest of us need to take a primitive revenge fantasy like the Left Behind novels is hard to say. While daydreaming about Armageddon, most readers, I'm guessing, are also signing off on thirty-year mortgage notes and keeping their life insurance up to date. But maybe the nutball evangelical born-agains have it right: Maybe it's best to just stop fighting it and wait for the end so we can watch as Armageddon rains down and only those who've given tens of thousands of dollars to secretly gay televangelists will rise up and be saved and the rest of us will merely fall into the fiery pits of gay-marriage-friendly hell.
Ah, but according to the cute Rapture Index, that adorable little Web site o' righteousness that charts the various global "signs" leading up to the impending Second Coming, the Rapture should be happening, like, right now. Or maybe last week.
Woody Allen said, If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he wouldn't be able to stop throwing up. In fact, the index now stands at 152, well above the "Oh sweet Jesus take me now" threshold. Which means, of course, that the Second Coming might have already come and gone, and Jesus may have swooped down and taken one look at what we've done to the place and said, you've got to be freakin' kidding me, and said, sorry but no one here deserves much of anything illuminative or enlightened right now. Can't you just hear all those gay-hatin' born-again Christians saying, what the hell?
When you speak about Jesus shedding a tear, you need to realize that for the evangelical fundamentalists Christian Right there is no crying Jesus in their religion. Rambo Jesus doesn't weep, Jesus kicks ass. Their spiritual entrepreneurs are never more dogmatic than when they are ignoring, if not contradicting, the essence of Jesus Christ's teachings. The basic con is to insist upon the historical and scientific accuracy of every syllable in the Bible - then to analyze its symbolism, unveil hidden meanings and decode secret messages known only to initiates. The Book of Genesis is reduced to a biology text, and Daniel becomes a crystal ball. Thus are delivered the comforts of certitude and the enhancements of sorcery in a single beguiling package.
