Tag Archives: Evangelicals

More Daft Things Christians Say

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Image from a video by Intimacy With God, available here. I don’t recommend it.

In this season: a new favourite of evangelicals.

Though it is biblical (2 Timothy 4:2), what the hell does it mean in the mouths of today’s Christians? Here it is used to excess in the FreshPerspective blog: 

…God is shifting his faithful sons and daughters into new seasons. But before I divulge into the signs, understand that everyone is called to different seasons. Some are being released into a season of exposure (platforms, opportunities etc), some into a season of preparation (preparing for a new season), and some into a wilderness season (a time of God pruning you, deliverance from past sins and behaviors before you enter a new season). So don’t be discouraged when it seems like you’re not where everyone else is. Seek God, pray and receive his wisdom and knowledge for what season you’re in.

It’s meant to sound profound, but there’s nothing profound about it. It’s pretentious, meaningless twaddle. Bob Dylan said it far better when he sang, ‘the times they are a-changing’. Things change; they continually evolve. Likewise our personal circumstances. God isn’t blessing, releasing, pruning or preparing you. Nor has he any great plans for you or the church. (Why? Because he’s not real.)  

Thoughts and Prayers/I’ll pray for you

Thoughts and prayers are always proffered when disaster strikes. The ‘thoughts’ I understand; when a long-distance friend lost her daughter to suicide a couple of years ago, I wanted her to know I was thinking of her and was ready to listen if she wanted to talk. She told me later that it was comforting to know that friends were thinking of her and were around if she needed them. I don’t think she said this just to make us, the friends, feel better. Such painful circumstances pare away insincerity.

There’s often not much more we can do beyond thinking about others when they are suffering like this. There are circumstances of course when we can offer more practical help, but adding ‘prayers’ to any expression of concern is lazy and glib. Prayers are of no use to anyone in distress or despair because prayers are, in any context, of no use, period. There’s no God out there, up there or inside us listening to our inner pleading. Even if there were, he is, according to his personality profile in the bible, so capricious and unheeding that he would do nothing to alleviate suffering. Neither would he step in supernaturally to remedy the terrible situations humans find themselves in. If he was even remotely concerned, he wouldn’t allow these to happen in the first place. Little point then in asking him to help with any mess he’s helped created, either intentionally or through disinterest.

But as I say, there’s no God so we need not trouble ourselves trying to work out what he’s playing at. Nor do we ever need the sanctimonious promise of prayers that will probably never be said. It doesn’t matter whether they are or not, so please, True Believers, can we dispense with  the cant?

This Must Be Heaven

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In the last week or so my Facebook feed has been bombarded with posts and memes of a religious nature. Every other one is of this sort. Most are Evangelical though some are evidently Roman Catholic, what with Jesus and his mom with their hearts pinned to their blouses. All of them inform me in the schmaltziest of terms how wonderful Jesus/God/Heaven is. Just about every one is followed by comments consisting single word: Amen! Some have a ‘Praise Jesus’ and occasionally there’s profound philosophical insight (kidding).

Last time my FB was invaded, about six months ago, I had to go into each post separately to blocked them. For a while FB complied. Now that my period of grace (pun intended) is over, they’re back with a righteous vengeance. Before I block them all over again, I’d like to share one with you. Its picture is at the top of this post. Some bright-spark has given it the title First Moments in Heaven, which is patently not what it’s called; not even the nuttiest fantasist would include gravestones in heaven. None of the undiscerning commenters seemed to have spotted their inclusion. Having had this pile of old cobblers dumped on my FB page, I felt obliged to point out the problem. As if a single drooling commenter cared. Here’s a sample of what they went on to say:

I despair that this saccharine banality is the best many Christians have to offer. It really can’t be argued with; people who enthuse over such slush are immune to reflection, reason and critical thinking. A staggering 13,000 of them reposted the damn thing.

The picture evidently depicts the general resurrection here on Earth and, as I thought when I first saw it, is a Jehovah’s Witness creation, originating in a Watchtower magazine. Not a single one of the thousands of born-again geniuses who orgasmed over the picture noticed it was the product of a sect they detest. Again, I felt compelled to alert them to the fact.

Now to block the lot of them. Amen! Praise Jesus!

 

Jesus Is Cool With It

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I was handed a sticker the other day that read ‘Jesus is cool with it’. Just what the hip Jesus of the sticker was cool with was explained by an accompanying leaflet, and the fact I was at a Pride event at the time.

I worked out from the leaflet and his rainbow flag, that what Jesus is cool with is homosexuality and all that goes with it. He might also be cool with transgenderism and other variations in human sexuality, but who knows; the leaflet didn’t say so directly. It did, however, have a list of websites that support those who are religiously afflicted and gay, transgendered or of unorthodox sexuality. It suggested that through these sites it might be possible to find a gay affirming church in the local area.

I was at first pleased to see that Jesus had had a change of heart. That he had in fact made a complete u-turn from his previous position, which evangelicals have long assured me, is that homosexuality is a heinous sin and a ‘violation of God’s design for human sexual behaviour’.

Eagerly, I logged into my favourite – I use the word loosely – Christian sites to see how they were celebrating this new revelation from the Lord. Unfortunately, they had yet to be updated and so weren’t conveying the news that Jesus was now ‘cool’ with gayness and the like.

That was over a week ago. I’ve just checked again only to find that they’re still not proclaiming this particular piece of good news. In fact, some have published even more rants well considered pieces about the evils of homosexuality, drag acts, people who are changing sex and the rest. They are so uncool about it that they’re still quoting the Bible: the Old Testament verses where it says that for a man to lie with another man is an abomination, and Paul, who, channelling Jesus (or so he’d have us believe) insists that homosexuals won’t make it into God’s Magic Kingdom. Some sites also mention Jesus’ pronouncement in Matthew 19:14 (yawn) that God made only male and female and the only time they’re allowed to get jiggy with each other is when they’re married.

I’m left wondering who is right. The ‘Jesus is Cool’ brigade or the great preponderance of evangelical churches that say he isn’t cool, not one jot or tittle, with same-sex doings.

The thing I’ve learnt through this, is that Jesus can be whatever you want him to be: a really cool guy who gives the thumbs up to whatever consensual sex you enjoy or a grouch who didn’t die just so you could continue in your old sinful ways. Take your pick. He’s both, depending on which bits of the Bible you prefer.

I wouldn’t care one way or another if it weren’t for the damage done by those who think they speak for the grouch.

The Jesus Story v. Reality

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Recycled picture, new post

Whenever the Jesus story comes face to face with reality, it fails. The nativity stories, which only Matthew and Luke think to invent include, are a case in point.

  • Luke tells us the Emperor Augustus decreed there should be a census in what we now know as 4BC. He didn’t. The closest Roman census was in AD6, ten years later and it didn’t entail hordes of people trailing back to their ancestral village.
  • Matthew claims that Herod was so enraged about the birth of the ‘royal’ baby that he killed all little boys under two years old. Except he didn’t. This never happened.
  • According to the same story, a host of supernatural beings appeared announcing that a young woman who’d never had sex with a man had given birth, while a wandering star shone directly over her house.

Where in reality do these kinds of things happen? That’s right: in myths and stories. They are typical literary tropes found in fantasy fiction. The ‘miraculous’ events of the nativity are of this genre.

  • Christians who delude themselves into thinking theirs is an intellectual faith concede the nativity is mythical, its events symbolic. They’re not usually so hot on what they’re symbolic of but say the story conveys truth. Still, they insist, the rest of the Jesus story is true. Evangelicals go even further and say it’s literally true. So, Jesus walking on water really happened (or if your faith is, oxymoronically, intellectual faith, it didn’t.) After all, the illusionist Dynamo walked across the Thames a few years ago (see it here), and if he could walk on water then how much more capable of doing that was the Son of God. Except the modern illusionist‘s feat was – yes, you guessed it – an illusion. So even if Jesus did the same thing, his trick was also an illusion. Those who say the story is included in Mark and Matthew because it’s actually only a parable about faith (or something) are conceding, again, that it didn’t actually happen.
  • Likewise when Jesus turns water into wine, calms the storm, raises the dead, chats with apparitions of long dead Jewish folk-heroes and does every other ‘miracle’ he’s credited with. If they’re only symbolic then, by definition, they didn’t happen. Nor did they happen, if, as Evangelicals believe, they’re being passed off as real events. ‘Miracles’ do not happen in reality. Never have, never will. They happen only in stories.

Well, okay, more enlightened Christians might say, but nonetheless Jesus conveyed to the world what God wanted us to know. He was wise and compassionate and told us how our sins could be forgiven. Except his wisdom comes directly from Jewish scriptures; he had nothing new to say. He was no more compassionate than anyone else and could in fact be an absolute s**t. He was inconsistent across the gospels about how sins were forgiven and much of his teaching in the original Gospel (Mark’s) is lifted from Paul or reflects the beliefs of the early Christ cult. Jesus the holy man is a construct – or rather a series of constructs, a literary device, not a real man.

So, okay; the nativity didn’t happen as depicted. The astounding feats attributed to Jesus didn’t happen and Jesus is whoever the various gospel writers and Paul want to make him. Nothing we’ve seen so far is factually, historically or really (as in reality) true.

But, the crucifixion and resurrection are! Oh yes. The rest is made up, but these two events most certainly are not.

  • Even though Jesus’ trial is historically inaccurate and is, as a consequence, highly implausible.
  • Even though there was no-one to record Jesus’s snappy repartee (or silence depending on which gospel you read) with Pilate or Herod.
  • Even though there was no such Roman custom as releasing a prisoner on the Passover.
  • Even though the synoptics have Jesus crucified on Friday while John says it was a Thursday.
  • Even though characters like Barabbas, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdelene and the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ are evidently and entirely fictional.
  • Even though there was no eclipse of the sun that lasted for hours.
  • Even though there was no earthquake that shook zombies loose from their graves before Jesus had a chance to rise and shine himself.

Such things are not historical. They’re not even feasible. They did not happen in reality. Well, if not the crucifixion per se, Christians say, then definitely the resurrection: that most unlikely of all unlikely events. That really happened.

  • Even though the reports of it are completely at odds with one another.
  • Even though angels are involved once again.
  • Even though Jesus behaves entirely like a ghost, walking through closed doors, altering his appearance and vanishing at will.
  • Even though he levitates into the clouds.
  • Even though some of the disciples find it impossible to believe he’s back.
  • Even though dead people rise only in stories, myths, legends and fantasies.
  • Even though, in reality, dead people do not come back to life after three days, which is why Jesus didn’t either.

Still, I’m sure I’ll be told when I go to a carol service with my friends in a few days, that the story of Jesus’ birth, emotionally powerful as it is, is true from start to finish. Why? Because people’s capacity for believing fantasy stories knows no bounds.

Stories

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  • Many Christians believe that God himself impregnated Mary and that her son, Jesus, was God Incarnate. Yet they don’t accept that numerous others, including Perseus, Buddha and Vishnu, who were all fathered by gods, are in any way divine. Why not?
  • Evangelicals and other Christians believe that Jesus performed many miracles. However, they dismiss other miracle workers as frauds or mythical beings. As John Oakes puts it on the Evidence for Christianity website, ‘religious figures (such) as Osiris, Empedocles or Krishna almost certainly were not real people, making stories of supposed miracles they worked irrelevant’. Why?
  • Christians believe Jesus fed 5,000 people with 5 fish and 2 loaves. They don’t believe the Qur’an’s story that Muhammed did much the same thing. Why not?
  • Christians believe Jesus was visited by the long dead Moses and Elijah. They believe Paul saw Jesus after he died. Yet they dismiss the Mormon claim that Joseph Smith saw Jesus and God himself. Why?
  • Christians believe Jesus came back to life a day and a half after he was killed. However, they regard the resurrection stories of Dionysus, Osiris and Attis as counterfeit. Why?
  • Christians believe Jesus rose into the sky to take up his place in heaven. Yet they think it preposterous that Muhammed went there on a flying horse. Why?

When it comes to their own stories Christians are adamant that they are reliable accounts of events that really happened. Jesus really was God’s son. He really did do magic; really did feed 5,000 people with a few scraps; really did rise from the dead and really did beam up to heaven. Paul really met him on the road to Damascus.

Even liberal Christians like Joel Anderson, while acknowledging there is much that is suspect in the Jesus story, argue with all the cognitive dissonance they can muster, that the gospels are nevertheless ‘historically reliable’. This really won’t do. Evidentially, the gospels are as ‘historically reliable’ as the tall tales involving Osiris, Buddha, Vishnu, Muhammed and Joseph Smith. Gods only make visits to the Earth in stories, individuals only rise from the dead in stories, magic and miracles only occur in stories. The Christian examples of these tropes are as imaginary as all the others. The heroes of such stories – be it Empedocles, Perseus, Mithras, Buddha, Krishna or Jesus – are fabrications too.

If it’s constructed like a story, has all the components of a story and reads like a story then that’s exactly what it is. 

The Mask of the Beast

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Know which fights to pick. Making an issue out of wearing a face mask isn’t one of them.

I don’t want to wear a mask. They’re an incovenience; stuffy and uncomfortable. They hide the face, making communication difficult. An internet meme I saw recently said requiring a face mask four months into a pandemic is like requiring a condom at a baby shower.

Nevertheless, I will be wearing one when they become mandatory in UK shops next week. Wearing a mask isn’t about the wearer. It’s about protecting others from your respiratory effusions that may harbour the virus. That seems a good enough reason to put one on in shops. That and the threatened £100 fine for not doing so (unenforceable in practice, I’d have thought.)

So why are so many Christians opposed to protecting the neighbours they’re supposed to love? Wonder no longer. Here is DeAnna Lorraine to explain:

Biblically, God does not want us wearing masks. Masks are a symbol of hiding yourself, of doing bad deeds, inappropriate deeds, or malicious things that you need to hide from. And it is also a symbol of stripping us of our unique identity because [when] we’re wearing a mask, we’re not unique anymore, we’re all the same. And God doesn’t see us that way.

He also sees us as being good, and anyone who is doing good deeds should not be living and hiding in the shadows behind a mask. A mask is a symbol of fear. You’re living in fear. If you have a mask on, it means you actually don’t trust God. You don’t have faith. You’re living in fear instead of faith. And of course, the Marxist globalist Satanists that are pushing all this, they are trying to invert reality and pervert God and Christians, and they want to isolate us from God, isolate us from other humans, and deprive us of that faith so that we rely on the government, the media, telling us what to do and telling us whether to be fearful or not instead of God.

It’s simple, you see: ‘Biblically’, God doesn’t want us to wear masks. It’s right there in Revelation: God just doesn’t recognise his Chosen Ones if they’ve got a mask on. Just as you or I wouldn’t recognise Hal Jordan or a ninja turtle once they donned their masks, so God is totally flummoxed when we ‘strip ourselves of our identities’ by the simple expedient of covering our mouths and noses.

Instead, according to the insecure, self-obsessed Lorraine, we should trust this enfeebled deity to keep us, and our neighbours – towards whom we evidently have no obligation – safe.

Like this has worked in churches that have flouted lockdown and social distancing rules! The God who doesn’t recognise us in a mask has proven himself incapable of protecting a single one of his followers from Covid-19; not entirely unexpectedly, admittedly, when he’s no more than a figment of their imagination. (This is the same God, incapable even of protecting them from the common cold, whom they think is going to rescue them from death.)

So no, resisting the wearing of masks and other covid precautions is not the fight Christians should be taking on. Nor is raving about the erosion of ‘religious liberty’ (read, ‘Christian privilege’) and the supposed decline in morality. I mentioned last time a number of causes with which they might consider engaging. We might add campaigning to end poverty and the deaths of 15,000 children a day through hunger. ‘Biblically’, God would want them to do that (Matthew 25.31-40).

Failing this, they might put their neighbour above themselves, wear a face mask and shut the f**k up.

Why it’s never a good idea to throw stones from inside your glass house

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I added the comment below to Bruce Gerencser’s blog yesterday. Bruce had been writing about one reason people don’t like Evangelical Christians, that being their attitude towards LGBT folk. It’s a good post and well worth your time (though not, of course, till you’ve finished here.) This is what I wrote:

It never ceases to amaze me that people who claim to possess the key to salvation, know the secret of eternal life, have a relationship with the creator of the universe and think their sins are all forgiven, have nothing better to do than spend their time slagging off LGBT folk.

A quick, admittedly non-scientific, survey of Christian blog and web-sites suggests that at least a third are attacks on those fortunate enough to be gay.

Maybe all that other stuff just isn’t as marvellous as they like to think it is.

Genuinely, I cannot understand how, when they think they’re tapped into the First Cause/the Power of the Universe/God, the Father Almighty, that the best evangelicals can do is to make repeated snipes at gay people. I had a look this morning at the Christian Research Network site to find three articles had recently been posted doing precisely that: one called ‘Which should be illegal: Christianity or Sodomy?’, about how religious rights are soon to be negated by gay rights (they won’t be, specially not in America); one criticising popular preacher Beth Moore for supporting a small number of gay-affirming pastors and another attacking clergy who might be gay but who remain celibate.  Obviously these matters are of great concern to the Lord of Hosts, the Judge of Mankind, who is, nonetheless, demonstrably impotent when it comes to doing anything about them. Or maybe, given his non-existence, they matter only to his small-minded sycophants here on Earth.

Bruce writes in another post that he doesn’t comment on Christian web-sites because ultimately it makes no difference; evangelicals don’t listen and don’t want to know what others think. They regard even the mildest criticism as the persecution the Bible promises they will face, particularly in these ‘last days’ (that we’ve been enjoying now for two millennia.) Bruce is right, of course. All the same, when I’ve time, I can’t help but comment on their anti-gay rhetoric, their judgement and condemnation of a relatively powerless minority. They can take it how they like; their casting of the first stone just can’t go unopposed.

I think it’s always pertinent to ask Christians why they’re not living according to Jesus’ commands – by not judging others, giving to all who ask, loving their enemies, and the rest, because as sure as eggs is eggs, the majority don’t. As if this matters to today’s evangelicals. Being a Christian is really about being part of a glee club that first and foremost benefits its members, no one else. Sometimes the party bubble needs a little puncturing. Of course, believers don’t like it; they tell you Jesus was only speaking ‘metaphorically’, which he always is when he says things they don’t like. They become aggressive and unpleasant because, presumably, that’s what he would want. Nonetheless, they sometimes need to see that when they condemn others, they can expect to be judged in return. That’s just how it works. Jesus says so.

Oh, and Dolly Parton too:

If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones,
Don’t shatter my image till you look at your own,
Look at your reflection in your house of glass,
Don’t open my closet if your own’s full of trash,
Stay out of my closet if your own’s full of trash.

Amen to that, Dolly.

 

Thou shalt worship False Idols

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Blog335Trump

Franklin Graham was in England over the weekend, to preach at Blackpool’s presumptuous ‘Festival of Hope’. There was considerable opposition to his presence from, amongst others, the town council and local churches. One objection in particular stood out: Nina Parker, a minister at Blackpool’s Liberty church said –

(Graham) seems committed to condemnation, discrimination, walls and prejudice in a way that Jesus never was.

‘In a way that Jesus never was?’ Has Nina read the gospels? I feel sure she must have done – and yet, she, along with many others, still sees a Jesus as a beautiful soul, full of love, kindness and forgiveness. Many Christians, like Nina, don’t let the evidence (such as it is) interfere with their own inaccurate construct(s) of him. Their reading is coloured by their preconceptions to such an extent they can’t see that, while he may occasionally pay lip-service to being nice, Jesus is, as we saw last time, actually a bit of a shit.

Should you doubt it, there’s his

advocacy of cruelty and self-harm –

If anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. (Mattthew 18.6)

enthusiasm for destruction –

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! (Luke 12.49)

disrespect for life and propensity for violence –

If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. (John 15.6)

disdain for non-Jews –

(Jesus said) “I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” (Matt 15.24-26)

exclusion of those who would follow him –

And He told them, “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is expressed in parables so that, “‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'” (Mark 4.11-12)

contempt for those who don’t subscribe to his ‘good news’ –

it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town (that isn’t interested in his message.) (Matthew 10.15)

contempt for those who do –

So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants (slaves); we have only done our duty.'” (Luke 17.10)

delusions of grandeur –

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (Matthew 19.28)

Is this the Jesus Nina Parker speaks of, the one with no time for ‘condemnation, discrimination, walls and prejudice’?

Hardly.

Nor do Christians reserve such cherry-picking for their saviour. Many of them make the same allowances for Donald Trump, proclaiming him to be God’s choice for president because he’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and makes the right noises about Christians’ religious liberty (and no-one else’s). Trump’s corruption, dishonesty, pettiness, serial adulteries, misogyny and self-obsession, together with the absence of any behaviour that might reasonably be considered ‘Christian’, are ignored, excused and dismissed; he couldn’t be a Man of God with characteristics like these – and a Man of God of God he most definitely is: Franklin Graham says so.

Turning a blind eye to the many obvious faults of their heroes is something Christians have always been good at, making false idols of Trump and Jesus alike.