Apparently Christian mega-church pastor, Mark Driscoll put out an interesting Tweet yesterday and liberal and progressive Christians are going nuts.…
Tag God
Christians often tell me that one of the things that makes Christianity different from other religions is that Jesus conquered death. They claim no other religious founder did that and that this is definitive proof that Christianity is the real deal. So if Jesus conquered death, where is he now?
My doorbell just rang a few minutes ago and to my delight it was Jehovah’s Witnesses. I bet I am the only one who is delighted to see them and yet they always seem to want to end our conversations.
I grew up in a pretty sheltered environment and I think that has a lot to do with why I am so outspoken about my lack of belief in deities and my support for skepticism and science. I had never met anyone who valued religion over science until I went to college.
I know that there were a lot of people worried that something was going to happen because the Mayan calendar had run out. Some people even thought the world was going to end. When December 21st passed, people said that the Mayans were wrong. But they weren’t.
I find it odd that the religions that claim to be “religions of peace” often tend to have the most violent believers. Sure we can point our fingers at Islam and all the beheadings that Muslim extremists are so quick to execute, but Christians aren’t much different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that all Christians are violent gun nuts, but I am saying that if you know a violent gun nut, he or she is probably a Christians.
It really does seem like every time something bad happens, some fundamentalist religious leader is going to say something stupid. It doesn’t even matter what the bad thing is. It could be a hurricane, an earthquake, a school shooting, or planes crashing into buildings. Whatever it is, right wing religious leaders will blame it on all the predictably irrational causes.
Last night, President Obama delivered a speech at a memorial service for those killed in the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. His speech was extremely religious in tone. But for me the really offensive part came toward the end of the speech when the President said about the victims that “God has called them all home.”
By now everyone knows that the author of the Twilight books is a Mormon and that the books contain a distinctly fundamentalist view of gender roles. I confess that I have not read the books so I am taking that view in large part from commentaries I have read about the books and from my other confession… I have actually watched the movies and the last movie reminded me about some ideas I had about God and predestination.
There has been a wave of atheists shunning and defriending other atheists because of differences or even perceived difference of opinions. This is what the atheist community has become. Who are we? The Amish?