The "Jefferson Bible"

We hear examples of people who pick and choose scriptures they like and scriptures they don't like. We then hear how that's bad and why you shouldn't do that with the Bible. In that vein and in that light, I present to you this link for your consideration, regarding conservation of the Jefferson Bible. How many thousands of dollars have gone into this project? And is it worth it? What say ye?

Divorce Less Likely Among Believers

Scientific studies show that married believers who attend church regularly are less likely to get divorced than their non-believing counterparts. The Washington Post twists itself into knots admitting this.

Mixing Faith with Fashion

How does your faith affect your fashion choices? Ladies Home Journal profiles 5 women (Conservative Christian, Hindu, Catholic Nun, Orthodox Jew, Muslim) and their fashion choices due to their faith.

March Madness!

Our own staff blogger offers his suggestions for your bracket at Momo's Musings! Check it out before you finalize your thoughts.

The Perils of Facebook

Hilarious! Turns out an Australian teen was so excited about her 16th birthday party that she Facebooked her friends to bring their friends. The invite went viral and 200,000 people signed up to attend.

Care to join?

Tsunami: Washing A Town Away Video

Gawker highlights an astonishing video of a Japanese town literally being washed away in six minutes. It's almost impossible to comprehend how powerful nature is.

Eat to Starve Cancer

SocialTimes offers some amazing TEDtalks (mostly) from the recently hosted 2011 conference. You can't afford to miss the "Can We Eat to Starve Cancer" in which William Li offers some startling insights into avoiding or retiring cancers by eating specific (delicious) foods.

Food for Thought

“Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought.” –Albert Szent-Gyorgi, 1937 Nobel Laureate

My Memoir Shares Him

Rebecca offers some fresh thoughts on turning memoir (be it on the page, on Facebook or on Twitter) into witnessing opportunity at sister blog Word.

Megalomania

The Supreme Court ruled recently that the church led by Fred Phelps is allowed to protest outside of funerals without worrying about being sued. This bothers me on many levels. I'm not troubled by the ruling itself . . . makes perfectly logical sense. What bothers me is that men like Phelps, on the very farthest fringe, can be used to define Christianity. It bothers me that there isn't an elder in Phelps's life who could shown him the error of his ways a number of years ago. It bothers me that this case, in the long run, will only serve to bring more publicity to his shameful behavior and broaden his megalomania.

What to do with Rob Bell...

Rob Bell (author of Velvet Elvis and alleged Emergent Church pastor) is coming out with another book at the end of the month, titled Love Wins.

Rob Bell makes a short, promotional video discussing the book, which can be viewed here.

Rob Bell's promotional video seems to suggest a kind of universalism to that seems to suggest many will go to heaven that aren't necessarily "Christian."

And then after the video is released, and a blog criticizing video is released, Twitter goes crazy about Rob Bells alluded to "universalist theology." "Rob Bell" was in the top 10 of most popular topics all weekend.

And pastors from other megachurches who are almost as famous as Rob Bell, took to their Smartphones to type with their fingers, that Rob Bell is a heretic.

John Piper, leading reformed pastor who has an opinion about everyone, led the calvary stating "So Long Rob Bell." (Ouch!). And then, Joshua Harris of I've Kissed Dating Goodbye fame chimed in along the same lines....

And then gradually, pastors from everywhere came out of the word works to declare in so many words, via Twitter, that Rob Bell was a heretic! (And so many did so that CNN did an article about it.)

CNN mentioned how Rob Bell isn't ordained by an organization, but if he was....WHOA NELLY! They would kick him by now.

All of this, without one person actually having read Rob Bell's book.


And I don't know which side is Rambo, but I think this clip should be a motivating force in this battle which really amounts to nothing...




RAWWWRRR!!!!

And a giant Storm is stirring to overthrow the demon of our age: Rob "Don't call me emergent" Bell!

How is this war being waged again? TWITTER!

I Seriously hate what this world is coming too....

A world without any conviction other than tweeting that you think a certain pastor who has nothing to do with your church or organization is a heretic...

It's like Christians from all over should join together and create a "Heretic Police Department" that tweets exactly who is saying the wrong thing about Christianity.

Oh wait...they already had that...It was called the Catholic Church of the 16th century, and it stopped nothing.

What I am getting at...is we are entering into an age where we have religion without belief. Similar to Decaffeinated Coffee, fat free desserts. In otherwords a world where religion is void of it's substance.

In theory, it is only when the Catholic started understanding that they were making a circus of their religion that they started marching around condemning heretics.... In other words, when the 16th Century Catholics had failed in their own Church that they had to look elsewhere to point fingers at the problem.

You can bet that when a pastor preaches more about what is wrong with the world or other faith groups than what is right about their own, that they have entered a world where their Christianity is faithless and substanceless, since their "True Christianity" can only be defined by the "false Christianity" outside itself.

To the sad thing...

The Nazi's had a thing against the Jews. In order for the Nazi's to progress they had to, according to their rhetoric, exterminate the thing that was holding them back: The Jew.

Many Psychologists have come out with various opinions of what was actually going on with the logic of the Jew in relation to the Nazi's. One of them that fascinated me (whom i don't remember as the source), is that the Nazi in order to not see himself as evil, or as human and fallible...had to project it's sins, and shortcomings onto someone else: Enter the Otherness of the Jew. The Jew who would participate in the German society but refuse to assimilate. In other words, the Jew would be like a German, but never say at the end of the day they were German.

The Jew then was the reminder of the limitations of German Nationalism and the lack of sameness of those even within their same country..

The Nazi's then, instead of realizing it's own limitations....made the Jew the problem.

Thus, theoretically, when the Nazi's were trying to liquidate the Jew, they were trying to liquidate and redeem themselves from their own failures, sins, and shortcomings.

As long as the problem is "out there" then we can tell ourselves we are fine being "in here."

Enter, Nietzsche's term ressentiment.

Is it not a telling sign that the most united the Christian pastors across denominations have been on twitter, has been to speak up against the heresy of universalism and the face professing the heresy (Rob Bell)?

The worse part is..the vehicle used to go against heresy...

Armchair Christians is what we are becoming...one's who tweet about heresy all from the comfort of your own couch!

I think i would like to add the cliche her about the Beam in the eye of a neighbor and first plucking your own beam out.....

But i think you get the picture....

In Conclusion...

While I am in no way a universalist. And , I don't agree with most of Rob Bell's theology (though i am a fan from a far), I am all for Rob Bell actually confronting the issue of heaven and hell.

If we are honest...it is the issue of heaven and hell that should be the hardest for us to swallow. If the idea of eternal damnation makes sense to you, then my hat is tipped to you.

As for me, I don't really know. I believe in heaven and hell, and that people will end up in hell. I just don't like it. I told my one friend last week that if I could, I would opt for there to be no heaven/hell, nor judgment after death, just for the sake of not wanting other people to suffer in the lake of fire, while sinful, selfish me is in heaven happy as can be because i did things the right way....

What i am complementing Rob Bell for then, is not his rumored "universalist" beliefs, but rather that he is making us look at the after-life from a Christian position all over again. Which is a good thing.

My ultimate question, is why aren't more of us looking at the most controversial issue of our religion (heaven/hell), and trying to actually engage the issue instead of settling with "Jesus said hell exists for people, and Rob Bell denies it and therefore Rob Bell is heretic"?

Let's talk about the issue and not the person. Let's talk about heaven. Let's talk about hell. Let's talk about how it looks to the world. Let's talk about whether some of us are using heaven & hell as a bribe to convert people.

I do not agree with universalism and find the issue rather naive. But i'm happy we're at least talking about these issues again. Let's just not cop out and say Rob Bell is a heretic so we don't have to engage the issues further.

Newsflash: Obama actually does something that may actually matter.

If you have not heard, Obama declared that he thought DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) was unconstitutional and asked that the Department of Justice stop defending it in court.

This is news.

Really big news.

In short, with a single press release, Obama has set in motion the necessary measures that will find the battle over the legality of gay marriage to be decided in the Supreme Court.

Expect Media meltdowns to occur on both sides in the coming weeks. Christian Republicans will be declared either fascist or intolerant bigots. Secular Democrats will be called Hedonists and immoral. Both sides will call the opposing side Nazi’s and both will have a grain of truth to their claim.

I will be dismayed nonetheless…

However, I am happy.

I am pro-separation of church & state..

I am opposed to the banning of gay marriage on religious grounds such as traditionally heard with an argument of “Marriage is defined in the Bible as between man and woman, and therefore how marriage is defined in the Bible should define how it’s lived out in our nation.”

But all of this is unimportant to my purpose for writing.

What I do find intriguing is that Obama is actually doing something. Something controversial. He is doing something that puts his beliefs that he declared so publicly before his presidency into action during his presidency. If Obama would have gone into 2012  without doing something controversial he would have  been voted out for being the least influential president since Gerald Ford. In short, Obama has been a big disappointment on simply the grounds that he has been boring.

Most of our most popular presidents are presidents who did something that was controversial for right or for wrong. They stood up for something that was not accepted in the mainstream (e.g. Lincoln, FDR, Truman, Jefferson, and Reagan). No president since Calvin Coolidge has been praised for doing nothing. Obama wouldn’t have been an exception. History will determine whether today’s rebuke of DOMA was right or wrong, but Obama showed today that he at least wants to be a voice of history and not just a name to be memorized in a song listing presidents.

Because, if you do something incredible as a president that will change history…you get pictures of you painted on top of a bear with a machine gun like the picture above of Lincoln.

From the NBA to the NFL to the MLB...

...Pentecostals blogging about sports is right here at sister blog Momo's Musings. You might be surprised how right they are!

Borders Bankruptcy: 6 Reasons Why

Mark Evans offers 6 reasons why Borders declared bankruptcy and B&N didn't. If you enjoy nibbling at insights, this one's worth the read. (And don't miss the comments section either.)

Apologies to sister blog Word for posting here, but I felt like this was a general culture story more than a books/writing story.

Hillsong UNITED: New Album Review

Aftermath--Hillsong United, $13.99

Editor's Note: Check this out on 90&9 for pictures and a review from Hillsong United's 2010 tour.

(Reviewer’s Caveat: To be honest, this isn’t my favorite genre. So take that into consideration as you read.)

Have you ever fought the urge to laugh while singing “At the Cross” on a Sunday morning? Don't look so shocked! You know the line I mean:

Would He devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

No denying the truth behind the sentiment, but it delivers such a funny image in such a straight-faced, melancholy way.

On a related note, this may be one of my biggest problems with Hillsong music. It takes everything so seriously. Everything is earnest to the tenth degree, and the new album Aftermath by Hillsong United is no exception.

This group evolved from the youth movement of the famous Hillsong Church in Sydney, Australia. Aftermath is their first new release in over two years. It focuses on the apparent contradiction that the unspeakable tragedy of the cross created an aftermath of hope.

The music itself is very well done. The arrangements make the most of the material. They often start simply and build with moving crescendos. The repetitive motifs with the guitars get a bit annoying, but the overall sound is high quality. A mix of soloists, both male and female, take turns singing the smooth, silky melodies.

The lyrics are more milkshake than filet mignon, sweet and bland. You probably won’t hear anything you haven’t heard before regarding grace, love, and stars in the sky. And the false rhymes sound a bit lazy. “Shoulders” and “daughters” is not the cleverest match. Aftermathskims along, never quite touching a deeper chord. Perhaps that’s a point in its favor. It’s easy to ignore the words and just exist in an atmosphere of worship. Tune out and tune in.

I’m not saying every song needs a punch line, but even Jesus spoke to everyday people in words they could understand, with mental pictures that tickled their imaginations: a rich man being compared to a camel, a clueless hypocrite with a beam in his eye, a blind man leading another blind man into the ditch. Aftermath lacks this humorous creativity.

Although this album may be uber-serious, it is sincere. But if you like grandiose metaphors comparing God’s love to natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes, avalanches, etc.), then this might be the album for you.

Reviewed by Shannon Dunlap

UPDATED: Aftermath debuted at No. 1 on multiple international retail charts. (But you've probably already heard their first single "Search My Heart" on Christian radio.)

Pentecostal Wrestler Forfeits State Championship?

You did hear about the Pentecostal wrestler who gave up an excellent shot at a state championship because he wouldn't wrestle a girl on biblical grounds, yes?

Pirates Kill American Missionaries

I know the eyes of the world are on the protests in the Middle East (and Madison, WI), but did you know Somali pirates had kidnapped 4 Americans?

Now it turns out that at least two of the four Americans killed by Somali pirates were missionaries.

A Little Privacy, Please?

Just read this . . . I could not believe my eyes! While UPCers and the ACLU often don't see eye to eye, I have to say this is one of the most outrageous things I have heard in recent memory. A job applicant being required to divulge his personal information INCLUDING his Facebook password? C'mon. Really? If I hadn't seen it on the Internet, I wouldn't have believed it. (To be honest, part of me still doesn't believe it).

What Price Fame?

Billy Ray Cyrus admits the fame and fortune that came with The Hannah Montana Show, thus foisting Miley Cyrus upon the rest of us, has destroyed his family. He wishes it had never happened.

And yet, that is the American dream in the early 21st Century, yes?

The Beginning of the End: Man vs. Machine

I just heard about this, and it's probably because I rarely check the news or watch the news...Shame on me...

But apparently IBM has developed a computer named "Watson" to compete in Jeopardy (Pictured). This entire week finds Watson competing against two of Jeopardy's most prolific winners on TV.

Last night in the first match, things ended in a deadlock with Watson and one of the contestants ending the episode with $4,000 each, but this is a week-long competition with the same three players so the draw itself is rather insignificant. More interestingly, Watson had a few computer glitches along the way, such as restating the wrong answer the previous contestant had also answered wrongly.

I have no thoughts on this matter other than the fact that I am waiting for the day that this whole earth lights on fire because of some snarky robots who have outsmarted us, and by outsmarted us, they just realize that humans are terrible, violent people and need to be distinguished for the sake of peace....Yes thoughts like these go through my head when robots play jeopardy.

Recorded Test Run-


Poor Video of some of last nights episode (if it stays up):

Kung Fu Panda- Anti-Christian? An attempt at film analysis

Most of you probably have watched or at least have heard about the recent cartoon film Kung fu Panda. And there is a sequel coming in May.

On the surface, it seems like an innocent prototypical children's cartoon where the underdog hero (Po, the fat lazy Panda pictured above) overcomes obstacles and his own limitations to beat stereotypical Strong Bad Guy.

However, a closer look reveals the movie to be a war of ideology. That is, East vs. West. More specifically, war of religions: Buddhism (reality is false, just "believe" in yourself and you can overcome the illusion of reality) vs. Judeo-Christianity (Man is Fallen/broken in need of God).

The philosopher Zizek summarizes the message of the film as "“There is no special ingredient (to life). It’s only you. To make something special you just have to believe it’s special.”

While the lines that lend credence to this are numerous in the film, the basic idea of what I argue can be seen in one example....

In the following scene, which is the climax of the film we will see the tiger, Tai Lung (the enemy) opening up the Magic Scroll.

As a preface, the Magic Scroll was believed to contain the secrets of the universe and hidden wisdoms. Earlier, Po, who had inherited the scroll, opened it up to find that there was no words on the words but rather just his own reflection on the shiny scroll itself. Essentially, the "wordless" scroll was saying the secret ingredient to life is within you (As in the secret of reality was already within Po as he saw himself in the scroll). Po, accepts this wisdom and goes on to become the Dragon Warrior....

(One need to only watch the first 2:30  to see enough to understand my further analysis below)-



The scene speaks volumes to me....

And if one considers the Scroll equivalent to the Bible or any sacred text..the Secret Scroll in the scene is essentially declaring that there is no such thing as a sacred text. The only thing that is sacred is the individual themselves....if only they believe in themselves. Or to go one step further, it is saying that the only reason the Bible or other writings are sacred is because they are believed to be sacred.

We then see the Tiger get upset as the lack of message within the scroll (because he was believing the Word within the scroll would help him). Notice too that when the tiger opens up the scroll and sees his reflection, he says "it's nothing!" Is this not a jab at the Christian faith which says man is nothing without God and he needs the Word to sustain him? Thus when the tiger says "it's nothing," the movie is saying that when an individual relies on something outside himself for belief, his value is nothing. At such a rage in realization, the fight continues right after Po says "there is no secret ingredient."

Subjective Speculation: At the 1:35 mark in the video do we have an allegorical jab at Christianity wherein Panda's shooting the Tiger up into the heaven's to the point of disappearing in the sky (complete with angelic song to accompany the Tiger's ascension) and the Tiger's fall allude to the "false" resurrection of Christ wherein such an ascension never happened and Jesus was just a man (he comes falling back to earth)

The one last piece of note in the scene is when the Tiger calls Po "just a BIG....FAT...PANDA" and Po replies, "I'm not a big, fat, panda. I am the big, fat Panda." The emphasis on Po's line is that he substitutes an "a" with "the" and thus in a way elevates his own being to the point of divinity. Thus, Jesus is not a Messiah, but rather he is the Messiah. Or similarly, if I were to say "I am THE Joel Riley," the allusion would be that I am an egotistical maniac making himself something of myself beyond that of a normal human being.

I am not preaching that we can't watch such films, but I argue that there are always underlying ideological assumptions in films...and many times in those which we think are entirely innocent (such as children's film). I would similarly argue that the message of Kung Fu Panda, is the fallacy of our age wherein we are told to just "Believe in yourself and you can achieve whatever your heart desires."

Liberal Media vs. the Conservative South

Last week we saw quite a stir with a supermarket in Arkansas censoring a magazine cover that exhibited Elton John holding hands with his partner.

One customer tweeted the censorship and the media latched onto it broadcasting too and fro on tv and on the internet.

This week, we get another similar case wherein it was reported a single restaurant of the fast food chain, Chic-Fil-A had been donating food to the Pennsylvania Family Group that is against gay marriage.

Naturally there has been a media outrage against the convservative restaurant owners and even calls for protests from their food....

As someone who is a big advocate for the separation of church & state, I am for the legal permissability of gay marriage.

That said, i find such instances of leftist "bullying" against anyone who is against gay rights repulsive.

If people want to support private institutions with the money they earn or the product they make, that is their perogative. But I worry for a nation that finds its media against such private investments of money when the investmens seem "politically incorrect" such as a millionare family donating money to anti-gay marriage groups.

I would venture to say that, the idea of being "politically correct" is in itself politically incorrect. Because these "politically correct" liberal hawks look to prey on conversatives in the name of gay rights (and thus argue for some kind of "equality" for gay people.

However, the problem is that when the liberals get mad at tradtionalist Southern institutions, they immediately contradict themselves in their call for equalitiy. That is, the liberals call for gay rights but are at the same time against the rights of conservatives to preach their own view.

The dilusion of these liberal bullies is they assume they are the tolerant, equality-loving people when their agenda is intolerant against those who disagree.

In short, the liberal bullies are saying "equality, tolerance, and freedom for all" for only those who agree with our defintion of what tolerance, equality, and freedom is. Such contradictions are the demon of our society, and we as Christians should never find ourselves in a society where the only beliefs that can be expressed are the ones that the liberals agree with.

If there is any positive to this story regarding chic-fil-a (who sadly had to come out with a bunch of releases saying they aren't anti-gay marriage nor anti-homosexual), it is that the backlash created against Chic-Fil-A by the media will no doubt result in a bigger backlash monetarily against the Liberal Media. Thus the Pennsylvania Family Group should be thankful for the liberal bullies since previous the controversy, all they were getting from Chic-Fil-A was food, will now find more private donations heading it's way from private investors. The liberal media in this instance, while making the most noise, will in the long run only be biting itself in the butt... (clap clap clap).

Unwed and . . .

Every so often, you see a classic example of that beautiful pithy saying, "be the change you want to see in the world." Take this story, written by a former "executive and screenwriter in Hollywood" now serving his community, yea, even the world, as a high school English teacher. The article is a bit on the long side, but is well worth the time. If you don't have the time or inclination for another mouse click, just read this excerpt: "Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer."

It's easy to be drawn in to the drama, to the things that we should rightfully lament. It's difficult to come up with solutions, to work toward being the change that can positively impact lives such as the ones described in this article. What can we do? What are you doing?

How can we make sense of Art?

I was reading a paper this week about the Tower of Babel and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.The paper was quite interesting except for the two page commentary on the above picture which is a famous piece of art portraying the Tower of Babel from the 16th century by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As I looked at the picture initially, I was left empty on seeing "it's brilliance." Sure it's pretty and it would be nice to have it hanging up in my room, but outside of that i couldn't discuss it whatsoever analytically....And the commentary about the piece of art didn't help out that much more....

I guess, as much as I like reading philosophy and not having a problem with spending 20 minutes trying to read a single page of Kant, I can't figure out art for the life of me, and i know as an Apostolic, I am not alone.

I want to understand art, but a love for the aesthetic things in life such as art has been for more or less absent in our movement. And i feel i am beyond repair....

Well, this article was a step towards understanding and the best part is, it was written for Christians who have no previous understanding in art criticism.....

Bill Graham's age won't stop him from saying things that will make you stop and ponder

Billy Graham, all of 92 years old, did an interview at Christianity Today, and it was a very enjoyable read. Graham talks about old age and the struggle to put it into perspective Biblically, as well as advice for the children of aged parents who  suddenly find their independent parents in need of help as they become older....

But perhaps the most interesting remark was when he was asked if he would change anything about his past....

I.... would have steered clear of politics. I'm grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn't do that now.


Unfortunately Graham doesn't elaborate on this position.  And as much as I would like to put words in his mouth of what he meant and why he came to that position, i will refrain (many of the news websites seem to be doing a good enough job as it is regarding this story.)


It is interesting nonetheless though that perhaps the only Christian preacher who has been more influential in regards to politics than James Dobson, now lives in regret of ever having anything to do with politics.

Classical Top 10

Doesn't everyone love top 10 lists? Anthony Tommasini presents his list here. While I can't argue with most of his picks, I think I'd have to swap in Mahler for Debussy and Chopin for Bartok.

MLK: How the Wicked Use Time

"(Time) can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where Does Your City Rank?

Central Connecticut State ranks the Top 10 Literate Cities in the United States! USA Today can't help but offer commentary.

Where does your city rank? Is it a chain bookstore kind of city, or proud to support independents? With Top 10 Crime stats, & Top 10 Vacation spots, is a Top 10 list focused on literacy a very good thing to make people stop and reevaluate?

Give us your thoughts!

NFL Playoff Picks . . .

...and more at sister blog "Momo's Musings." Momo picked the Seattle upset (not I), but the Colts loss wasn't expected.

(& personally, I'm tired of Peyton Manning being nailed for losing playoff games when the team shouldn't have even been in the playoffs to begin with, except for him. Let's keep it in perspective and stop the hatin'!)

New Year, New Diet? Try Twinkies!

Yep, if you're wanting to shed some holiday pounds, the try the Twinkie diet!

The man in this study lost 27 pounds in 2 months by eating junk food! Boo-ya!

Reading in 2010. Writing Hopes for 2011

The crew at sister blog Word shares their reading choices in 2010 (mysteries, poetry, college texts) and reading resolutions for 2011. If you read or write, check it out.

Tumblr Trumps Facebook

A convincing case on why Tumblr is superior to Facebook - you meet more people with the same interests, so that you can actually become real friends, not contacts.

Apophatic Theology

The picture is a very typical explanation of why many people don't believe in God. The typical argument from such a skeptic goes something like, "If God Loves us, then why would he allow  (insert name of personal and/or historical tragedy) to happen?" Exceptional points include but are not limited to: child suffering, eternal hell, or holocaust.

And then the skeptic sits there as if they know that under their statement, no loving God could exist....

EXCEPT...

the problem....

and we must always point this out....

The skeptic is coming from a position as if they know what love is.

The skeptic wants to blame God for things that don't make sense.

Which means the skeptic thinks they know more than God.

Essentially to say something to the effect of "There is too much suffering in the world for God to exist" means that the person think him or herself God to be able to declare when suffering goes "over the edge."

The reality though, is the human being knows they are not God, and thus cannot say what love is. The idea of love is fully beyond our human ability grasp fully (think about all the pastors who say they don't understand God's grace).....

The cross doesn't make sense. Does that mean the Christ's death was false? or the fact that our human minds can't grasp just how great and deep God's love is?

This is where something I have been reading about comes in...

It's called Apophatic Theology.

And it initially confused me whenever I read about it over the past few years. For goodness sake it's a "negative theology." There is not much to like about that.

Except some of the reward is it's a reminder that humans are fallible. God is infallible. Thus Human descriptions of God will never do justice to who he really is (The description of God as I AM becomes even more profound in this regards because it doesn't attempt to describe God).

Anyways, my friend posted this article a few weeks ago and I couldn't help but feel it was a great description (though it does necessitate some rereading) of this theology.

Valentine's Day Anyone?

A coworker tells me she was shopping late on Christmas Eve and saw workers putting out Valentine's Day cards, wreaths, ribbons, bedding and dishes.

Yes, Christmas junk out on Halloween isn't enough. Attacking Thanksgiving with 5 p.m. early-Christmas sales isn't enough. Now Christmas doesn't matter either. It's just another anonymous reason to spend more of your money.

It seems like this type of predatory capitalism -- the mind-blurring, anxiety-inducing capitalism that attacks the 2 greatest non-spiritual benefits of Christianity (peace of mind, quality of life) - must spur a unified Christian response. We've been too lax about how capitalism and consumerism stain our Christianity, believing a great deal before sunrise on Black Friday is worth not sleeping overnight, while a sunrise Easter service sounds preposterous due to its inconvenience.

I fear we've been lulled into a mindless apathy by burbling credit card swipers.

What Christmas Means to Me: Why joyous Nativity Scenes, Johnny Mathis, and Glossy Christmas Cards Creep Me Out. And why The Christmas Story provides therapy

I hate movies or plays that paint Nativities as some Hallmark Moment (see above). You know the ones. Where Jesus is the center of attention. There are glorious lights from Heaven shining down on the Baby Jesus like light beams that give you the illusion that either the Baby is about to be abducted by a UFO tractor beam or (and more likely) the reverse is occurring whereby the UFO light-beam has deposited perfect, pretty, white baby Jesus in his comfortable manger as he lays rested. Outside of the amazing lighting provided by the scene, you get the animals staring at the Baby Jesus like they know what's up and they are there to adore Jesus Himself because He is after all, The King.

And in the Nativity scenes as they are basically presented the audience somehow loses the entire purpose of the Nativity Scene. The fact that after all, God forgot to reserve Mary and Joseph a room to birth Jesus in . And thus in the stable, where all the animals are...we get a room full of hay. We get a room full of annoying animals. Most noticeably absent from the Nativity scene as typically presented is the excrement. Yes, the animals pooped. And yes I don't think that point should ever be overlooked from the Nativity Scene. The stable smelled terrible. The Bible talks about a star noticed by astrologers alone that knew about the Birth of Jesus. The idea of a light-beam, was rather concocted by those who wanted to hide the animal poo that made the Nativity what it really was: The physical setting to show just how low Jesus would go in order to reconcile us to Himself in love.

Let me repeat: Joseph had to watch where he stepped as he set up shop in the stable as to make sure he didn't step in cow feces. Of course I am being overly simplistic, but the point is that the Nativity Scene was incredibly vulgar from the human perspective. And I would argue that this is what God intended it for. It was not planned as so to be the scene of pretty lights, happy smiles, and self-aware animals that stare upon the Messiah that we have made it out to be. Such a "cover-up" can become slightly irritating to me in regards to Christmas.

Christmas is about God as a baby. Not for an "awww, isn't that cute?" moment, but rather to hammer home the concept that when God was most fragile as a human being, he was sleeping as the lowest of society amongst animals. The baby who should have been killed by Herod, was indeed alive, but it was not some happy ending. Rather, the beginning of the story of Jesus amidst all the cow dung and hay was a rather positive one, only in relation to the ending of the story of his humanity which was that baby all grown up dying in even a more humiliating manner than how he entered into the world.

And i'm not even going to comment on the mess of the birthing process itself. I mean in the 21st century, they still are quite painful to even think about, and the mess involved is extravagant to say the least. Lord knows how much worse a first century birth is when it is performed in a stable and the baby being born is no less than God Himself. Poor Mary.

That is why i cringe at Pretty Christmases now. The ones with the perfect family with the perfect Christmas card with the perfect smiles looking at you saying "such is life." The same Christmases with the Johnny Mathis music playing in the background. And there are trips to the soup kitchens too because there is an agonizing guilt we want to get off our shoulders knowing that we are living a relatively comfortable lifestyle and there exists the lowest of men who are not as spoiled as us.

It is not that Christmas is not a time for the family or a time of thanksgiving/celebration.  It certainly is. But it's as if somewhere along the way we have stopped thinking about the smelliness of the Nativity and what it means to be family and replaced each with focusing more on viewing Christmas as an image of neatness/wholeness and then trying as best as we can to replicate that image of what Christmas should be like.

And we can all sing Christmas Carols with the snow falling all around us outside. And have shiny trucks drive through our town that endorse sugary beverages:

And in such Christmas seasons, we want to live up to an an image of being pretty. Spotlights on the Nativity, Christmas specials on TV, etc....

But love, as I understand it, doesn't revolve around building an image of perfection and loving that image. As if the Baby Jesus can only be Jesus if the scene is presented so perfectly.

No, love is entirely opposite. Love penetrates the "cover up." It's not that there is this whole "everyone is fake and we need to be more authentic" kind of rhetoric. For surely we are all trying to cover up wounds and secrets that we ourselves are too ashamed of to even confront ourselves.

Love does not exist "in spite of the weaknesses" (as if they need to be excused), but rather love is what it is when it takes the imperfections and the weaknesses as an extension of who you are and still loves you all the more.

Let me give an example...

I have one side of the family whose Christmases I attend that I do not enjoy going to. Words and smiles and hugs are exchanged. Pictures taken. The "How Are YOUUUUU?" questions are plentiful. The cordial responses are given. Presents are exchanged which neither side really liked receiving and as you leave, you say to yourself "thank God that's over." And everyone here are Church Going Protestants. And my sweater looks neat.

 Because, the reality is,  for that Christmas Party I played every part except the part of playing myself. If I were to be myself at that Christmas party, I  would have been thought a monster. If I told you how I really am, or the problems in my family, or that this past month has been the most confusing of my life, they would have thought of me as being a depressed Debbie Downer to the whole spectacle of magical Christmas happiness that was going on in the Christmas party. So I covered up and played the part you wanted me to play in this family Christmas.

And then there are those Christmases which I miss dearly. They no longer happen. They usually happen on Christmas Eve (I write this on Christmas Eve), They revolve around the other side of the family. A few of the crucial uniting members of the family passed away in recent years, so the celebrations have ceased.  But the celebrations....there was always fighting. Cursing. Scandals. The most intense games of trivial pursuit you could ever imagine. Insults are thrown. And even one time there was a real fight between two of the sisters over a flirting boyfriend. Mind you they are all adults too. And I loved this Christmas dearly because in the fighting, there was never anything personal at stake. At the end of the night fighting sister would be sleeping on the shoulder of passed out brother and all was right with the world. This was real love. 

This was a Christmas where the drama was never hidden and each person acted as they really were and since everyone really did really love each other, the Christmas messy fighting almost had to happen to be able to really love each other. If one uncle did not voice his complaint about the insult of his receding hair line his sister had mentioned, he would have covered up his resentment and would have went home bitter because he wasn't able to be himself, and thus if someone were to love him that evening (where the cover-up happened), they weren't actually loving him, but an image of him that kept his real feelings hidden. 

Thus, to me, the ugliness of the Nativity scene is what Christmas should be about. The messy scene of the animals and the smelly poo that Jesus was born amongst...perhaps that was a radical image God wanted to portray to us humans of how he saw us in our sinful state from Heaven. Thus the Nativity  is Jesus saying "I know exactly what it is like to be human and the messiness that is implied with all the confusion and loneliness  And it's precisely because I love you with this mess included that I have come down here to be born in the "thick" of it as an indicator that I LOVE YOU and not an image of who you think you should be to me." It wouldn't be that we are to live in the mess, but rather that we should not hide the mess from ourselves or God. It is only when we confront the mess and it's frustration and bring it before God and say "This is me" that we can begin to experience God's love.

I don't know if any the above makes sense. I know that in the past month a lot of mess has come to the surface in myself and those in my family. Initially I wanted to hide some of it. Ignore other aspects of it. Live in denial of the mess. Because Christmas was not about the mess. "Can't this wait until January?!?" But I can also say that I have found love amidst the confusion more than ever with my family. Sure the confusion is still there. But being honest and not "covering" the mess has made me see that perhaps all my Christmases in the past were mere illusions since family member X was dealing with problem Y but told no one about it, and so what I thought was family member X last year was actually just an image of family member X. But now with Problem Y acknowledged and being warred against, family member X can be family member X for perhaps the first time in a long time at Christmas.

In the movie The Christmas Story, the entire film is about this concept of trying to cover up the pains of living and trying to insulate humanity from being itself in order to "enjoy Christmas." Yet when the family tries to be as American and Happy as possible living up to an image of what Christmas should be, more and more gets hidden underneath the surface of each member in the family so they can't be themselves....

See Exhibit A where the main character is obligated to where his pink bunny suit that his aunt made him for Christmas where upon Ralphie finds his entire freedom taken away from him in order to appease the image his  diluted aunt has of him:

"while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

He died for us in the most wretched of  states wherein we were drowned in the horrible excrement that sin is. And because of the messy Nativity and the painful crucifixion we know all the more that whoever we are today with all the loneliness and chaos that lives inside of us that we can't tell anyone about, Jesus died for that person too. Because that is you. And when you begin to realize that Jesus still loves us with this mess included we can begin to confront it, and fight, and get better....

At the end of the Christmas Story the family has finally resigned itself from trying to live up to the image of "perfect Christmas family." Their Christmas dinner was even stolen and eaten by the neighbor's dog. So the family takes whatever courage they have left and descends to the local Chinese Restaurant on Christmas Day (Chinese Restaurants are for the most part open in reality on such a day)... 

 (Link to the actual scene as embedding is disabled)

There the family partakes in the most American of Christmas celebrations: a celebration where the Chinese employees are singing "Deck the Halls" complete with foreign mistranslation. What happens next is the dinner is actually brought to the table and it is none other than a duck whose head is still on the body itself. The dead duck that they are about to eat is "smiling" at the family. Whereas for most families such a Christmas dinner would be depressing...this family has lost all pretensions of living an image of what Christmas should be and has decided to accept the irony of life as is and laugh at it. Instead of being offended at the duck with the head on it, the family points out the horrible reality to the cook who simply cuts the head off  and expects the family to be completely at peace now with the duck. And they are. They begin to laugh....as if now for the first time, the family is living life without the insulated comfort that seeks to mute the awkwardness of reality without illusions. Thus love/God/family/Christmas cannot be lived until we see the dead duck head attached to the duck to fully enjoy the duck itself. Translation: We need the awkwardness of what it means to love each other in all it's abnormalities back in our Christmasses to fully enjoy the reason for the season.

A Crime for Our Times

So here's a great way to make royalties on your indie tunes: upload them to iTunes, then steal credit cards to repeatedly download the songs so that you can drown in royalties!

Yep, it's all here and more.

No Christians at Christmas?

The New York Times Ross Douthat offers an even-handed look at 2 books evaluating Christians in America today. It includes gems like this:

"Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, he argues, the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight."

Then ends on a positive note.

Frankly, IMHO Christians have been punching below our weight for at least 5 decades now and it's time we broadened our spiritual ambition for our culture today.

Read the entire column and see if you agree.

Life Magazine: Pictures of the Year

Life Magazine reveals the pictures of the year, with commentary by . . . (wait for it) celebrities. No, we can no longer trust the unknown people who spend their lives choosing pictures, we must have actors and authors do this for us.

Aw well, they're still beautiful.

Think on These Things: Celebrity and Shame

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity." -P.J. O'Rourke

Pop, Soda, Coke

I’m always interested when the great soda-pop-coke debate gets going. Having grown up in a bastion of urban dwellers who refer to carbonated beverages solely as pop, and then having traveled to New York at the impressionable age of fifteen years old, I discovered that there are people in the world (and not a small number of them) that refer to pop as soda, or even, gasp, as coke. Would you like a coke? Yes. What kind? To me that was unfathomable. And yet, here’s a beautiful map, and article, that finally puts the debate to rest. It doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters where you grew up.

Picasso Trove

I’m not sure how to begin.

I used to love Picasso’s work. My grandmother was an art teacher. She particularly enjoyed works from his “blue period.” I went to the National Gallery, among other museums, and ooh’ed and ah’ed over works such as “Guitar” or “The Tragedy.” I was greatly moved by observing the latter. I’m still moved by the painting today although it carries a quite different meaning for me than it did then, some twenty years ago. I had a fondness, and great appreciation for his cubist works as well, for a time. It used to be, back in the day, that my favorite three artists were Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso.

Now I can’t stand Picasso’s work. It offends me. I find myself enraged when I see it. I simply keep walking through the gallery and I can’t even look at it. He was notoriously misogynistic and his hatred of women comes through loud and clear in his work.

Now we have this couple in France that have dug up a mint’s worth of his work. If you haven’t heard about it, and you’re interested, you can read about it here. I have had mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, I believe the couple’s claim. I believe in the fundamental goodness of people and when someone tells me something I am inclined to believe them. On the other hand, it sounds awfully suspicious. And it makes me sad that it will probably end up costing thousands of dollars to fight it out in court.

Are We Thinking Biblically?

Francis Chan questions if most Christians think biblically today. He makes a convincing case most of us dont!

Can’t We All Get Along?

I was alerted to the following article about religious tolerance recently. If you don’t feel like clicking the link, here’s a short excerpt for your consideration. As religions such as Islam, Buddhism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints “become more familiar to Americans, especially through personal friendships and familial relationships across religious lines, they too will enjoy a more positive image.” The article is interesting and makes some good points although be warned, you may be a little provoked by the content. I was.

One of my beefs is condemnation or mischaracterization of religions without any rational discussion. This is not the same as saying that everyone’s going to heaven. I certainly don’t believe that. Although I will not enter that debate here. I do believe there is room for meaningful discussion which might include some positive spin on some aspect of a Muslim’s faith, or the faith of a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Maybe that is because I have some friends who believe differently than I do.

Boy visits heaven. He'll tell you it's real...and an example of my skepticism

Sometimes friends send videos on Youtube. Sometimes you get so irritated that the video was of an interview that happened on Fox News, that you have to cease you're paper at once and make a comment about it.

Here's the video...and in short, it's  a boy who had an out of body experience who visited his dead grandpa in heaven and saw God (who was really big) and saw Jesus as well (who had blue eyes and his smile lit up the heavens)...



First off, this isn't news (note: I hate Fox News and CNN equally).

My friend asked me for my thoughts on the video.

Here is my reply:

Possible. I'm skeptical. But I will say there is some solid cognitive explanation for what's going on. Here is a 15 minute excellent podcast discussing the topic of "out of body experiences" scientifically (but far from boring).









In short in the experience of the boy, I am not sure he visited heaven. It's possible that what is going on in his brain that I think is going on is a very "real" experience in that just because I understand how an out of body experience happens in the brain does not mean the experience is false. But in short, for an out of body experience, the brain is shutting down and collapsing and falling apart and loosing connection to the rest of the body left and right...and the brain doesn't know how to make sense of it...the body parts are unable to send signals back and fourth to the brain (Ground Control to Major Tom, can you hear me? (silence)).....


In this chaos and confusion the brain recognizing these differences and looking for any plausible explanation of what's going on and thus...heaven (for an already Christian family) must be the explanation. Images, composed, etc...Essentially "going to heaven moments" on the brink of death are just a coping mechanism in the head for to fill in the gaps of confusion that are caused by the body shutting down (thus when you hear your're whole life: :"When you die, you go to heaven." Your brain can never fully accept death. So it tries to simulate what it's been told it's whole life will happen upon death. And with science today, people can be recovered and restored in spite of the death the brain is preparing itself for and thus the brain sees this as a descending back to earth from the heaven it was preparing itself for (tunnel of light, hearing God's voice, etc...)


There are many similar reports from people who don't even believe in God, or during less traumatic times (this "experience" happens to pilots all the time where they have so many G's against them that their brain is disillusioned and next thing the pilots know is that they are watching themselves fly the plane from outside the plane "Out of Body Experience" and at this point everything is just delusional and your brain is trying to organize itself and tell itself a story that it simply cannot keep up with...This comes out best in the podcast link above)


I don't like being a skeptic. And this doesn't hurt my faith one bit. 

Biggest evidence for me: Jesus had blue eyes according to the boy. (what his image and perception of Jesus was before the experience and God "having the whole world in his hands" and thus being very big).

Can’t Afford to Fly to Paris to See the Mona Lisa?

Wait. That’s not a picture of Lisa Gherardini.

There are three museums I haven't been to that I want to go more than any other. The Louvre, the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum. Two of them have a pretty decent website. I was just reminded of this the other day when a friend pointed me to this article.

One of my favorite objets d'art are cylinder seals. There's one here at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art from Assyria dating back to about the 13th century BC. And you don't even have to visit NYC to see it. And then there's the Parthenon, in the guise of what are known as the Elgin Marbles, and all of the drama associated with the pillaging of sites back before there were laws prohibiting removing artifacts from their home country.

The "50 Amazing" exhibits yield some gems but also some missteps. Not all of the sites are great, (nor do they all play well with Chrome, my favored browser) but all of them offer the potential of numerous hours of happy time-wasting.

The other nice thing about online museum browsing: you don't have to worry about them closing the ancient near east exhibit early on you because they don't have the staff to provide security and everybody else in the museum wants to see the Impressionists.

Because...well...It's really all I've been thinking about....

This week I became an internet crack addict. And not just the internet in general, but addicted to scrounging through the various ugly text-heavy backpages of the internet in hopes of uncovering a Slavoj Zizek article or essay here or there. Between being really sick and trying to write what i could without sounding like a maniac, I did nothing else except try and read Zizek (contemporary philosopher).

His style is hard to keep up with. But I quickly got acclimated. Because, he was my therapist that I had been looking for in my postmodern cynicism that has really weighed heavy on my shoulders the past 6 or so months (really, it's been kind of like an intellectual nightmare, but for me, philosophical difficulties cut me deeper than a real relationship ever could).....

And Zizek was my guide, acknowledging the advantages of post-modernism but also acknowledging it as entirely empty, and he did so using the same deconstruction tools post-modern thinkers love to call their own (thus I felt I was not being converted for a foreigner, but rather felt like it was a man who walked out of my plight a while ago, but decided to come back and rescue me as well because he was one like me)...

So in short, Zizek in one, what seemed like endless week, politely asked for entry into myself (his philosophy at least) and with a little shove hear and dusting there, his philosophy has made a believer out of me....

Because, last night....I read an essay of his....and it blew me away. Zizek is an atheist, but he calls himself a material Christian. And the following essay is one of the main reasons why (the philosophy of Christianity being his attraction).....I was taken back in the essay. I have no words really. Just know that when I was done reading it....I felt like this kid:



Not only was Zizek showing me the out of the postmodern futility, but he was doing show with Christianity as the better way...but also presented in a way I had never thought about it....A way that shows how not only is Christianity a fantastic ideal, but it is, in itself the way past the cynicism of our age...

Suddenly Christianity became not a way to salvation, or a way to heaven, or a "help," but the only explanation for life here and now.

In short, here is the essay...it's very dense and difficult to read through, but if you find the strength to follow his stream of consciousness style....it's of the most infinite reward...

http://www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm

Zizek I feel, in this essay, is giving us what Christianity will look like past a postmodern world when and if the world decides to pick itself up and walk on from it's cries of meaninglessness in the death of an absolute.

Sound of Music? Only the Most Racist Movie Ever

Slavoj Zizek, if you can tolerate his accent is one of the superstars of contemporary philosophy. I have become infatuated with his ideas ever since I read an essay discussing his thought a few weeks ago. One of the ways he works best is finding points of his theories working in film and culture to connect the dots. Here is Slavoj dissecting the racism of Sound of Music (you will never watch the film the same way again):