Pumpkins

This was found in the Bible of my wife's grandmother. There is no indication as to the source of the material.

"From one pumpkin to another."
"A woman was asked by a coworker, "What is it like to be a Christian?"
The coworker replied, "It is like being a pumpkin. God picks you from the patch, brings you in, and washes all the dirt off of you. Then He cuts off the top and scoops out all the yucky stuff. He removes the seeds of doubt, hate, and greed. Then He carves you a new smiling face and puts His light inside you for all the world to see."

"This was passed on to me by another pumpkin. Now it's your turn to pass it on to other pumpkins. I liked this enough to send it to all the pumpkins in my patch."

What They Think of Us: Creepy Images From An Abandoned Bible Theme Park

As the title of this web page says, this is creepy. A once busy place now sits abandoned and decaying.   I would add that it strikes me as very sad. Many of the sarcastic viewer comments are filled with obvious hate for Christianity. One says that this is "no more creepy than any church."

Parks such as these seem, especially to non-believers, to be gaudy, simplistic, and naïve.  Although well intended, it can be argued that they unnecessarily bring derision upon the faith.

Unforgiveness is Toxic

"We don't know what could be holding us down, but if someone needs to be forgiven that would be a start."  What an insight!  Forgiveness can have just as much an effect on the forgiver as on the forgiven.  Carrying hatred, or even just an attitude of unforgiveness, is toxic.

This is one of the points of October Baby, a film I recently reviewed.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation Advertisement

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) placed a $26.690 full-page advertisement in the 1 June 2012 edition of the USA Today newspaper.  The advertisement calls for Catholics to “join those of us who put humanity above dogma.”  The issue which has stirred up the FFRF is the Catholic Church’s opposition to being forced to pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortion coverage in its employee insurance plans.  The FFRF calls this “irrational opposition,” and “incense-fogged ritual.”

I believe that there is a hidden, hate-based agenda.  What the FFRF seems to be really calling for is for Catholics to abandon Christianity, not just the Catholic Church.  And their 18,000 members are willing to spend $26,000 to further their agenda.

Read about this here and here.   

This Is a Sermon?

For full disclosure: I am opposed to same sex marriage and will firmly state that I will never vote for any political candidate who is pro-abortion.  That said, I find the following video to be repulsive.  This "sermon" by Pastor Charles L. Worley seems to be based on hatred and has nothing to do with Christianity.  The pastor is actually calling for concentration camps.

(Some videos will not play properly when you click on the triangle.  Instead,  click on the title line in the picture and the video will begin .  When the video is completed, close the You Tube pop-up window to return to this blog.)

Rise Above Hate

Today I saw a young man wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo “Rise Above Hate,” a truly laudable sentiment. As with many things, though, in this modern world, there is more to the story, hidden below the surface.  The phrase, “Rise Above Hate”  has become a code phrase for the moral relativist movement.  This philosophy, which leads to the world view called postmodernism, has become the prevailing sentiment of the modern world's culture.  Pope Benedict clearly understands; he has called it the "dictatorship of relativism." 

Postmodernism is the newest and the most rapidly growing of the modern world views challenging the Christian ἐκκλησία, and potentially the most dangerous.  It has permeated modern Western culture, even making its way into the thinking of many professing Christians.  Postmodernism rejects human reason and logic as a source of truth because it declares that there is no absolute truth.  Since there is no absolute truth, ethics are relative, all religions are equally true, and personal experience is more important than any external authority.  There is no ultimate basis for proven knowledge of any kind.  Modern  Western culture is seen as repressive to the individual.  There is a deep anti-intellectual distrust of reason and logic; truth is subjective, pluralistic, and collectivist, and is not reachable by reason.  One of the favorite phrases of the postmodernists is "Your truth may not be my truth."

Two films on which I have commented clearly express this world view: Crash Test and Rubber .

Bible Printer's Errors: The Wife-hater Bible

The 1810 Wife-hater Bible says something entirely different with the mistaken substitution of one word.

What it says:

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own wife also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26

What it should have said:

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26

This verse is almost universally recognized to not be actually teaching literal hate for one's family.  It is hyperbolic language, the language of absoluteness, a conscious exaggeration for effect.  It's like saying "I hate liver!" (for other examples see Genesis 29:30-31 and Luke 16:13)

Book Comment: The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible

Ruth Hurmence Green (1915 - 1981) is apparently something of a "saint" (atheists please excuse me) to the Freedom From Religion Foundation who published her books, The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible (1979) and The Book of Ruth (1981). The 1999 cover of her book looks like a brown Bible; it even has "Holy Bible" centered, in large letters, on the front. The Foundation says she "debunked the Bible as no one has done since Thomas Paine."

Ruth read her BIble cover to cover, verse by verse, and she really hated Christianity. She picks out every seeming inconsistency, every hard passage, and every major Christian doctrine and tries to grind them up into sausage.

The only thing about which I almost agree with her is one statement she makes about the Trinity. She believed that the doctrine of the Trinity was cooked up to maintain Christianity's monotheism. I don't believe that it was "cooked up." It was a hard fought controversy for many years as Christians tried to come to a consensus on what they actually thought about the three divine Persons they knew and the monotheistic God of their Jewish heritage. I believe that the doctrine of the Trinity is the only explanation which can account for all the statements made about God and by God in the BIble.

I am presently collecting materials for a book I intend to write about some of the more profound, and even shocking, implications of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine resolves many seeming contradictions and problems in the Bible.