Some evangelicals are more evangelical than others

The recent Pew Survey said that 57% of evangelicals believe non-Christians can go to heaven without converting. So the Southern Baptists did their own survey, which showed that only 20% of real evangelicals commit unorthodox thought crimes.

So there.

Add comment July 7th, 2008

Brain scans of tongue talking

Scientists recently took brain scans of Pentecostals while they were speaking in tongues. Turns out their language centers took a bit of a nap while they did it.

1 comment August 9th, 2006

All right, I’m Jesus, so listen up

Add comment July 15th, 2006

The tribulation = living purgatory?

While reading Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind, Slacktivist arrived at this theory of the doctrine of the Tribulation:

The Great Tribulation, according to this theory, is a kind of living Purgatory.

LaHaye, of course, does not believe in Purgatory. It is, after all, an extrabiblical innovation now abandoned even by those parts of the church that once accepted the idea. The case for Purgatory was based on a handful of fairly opaque, symbol-heavy passages of Scripture which were magnified through the prism of a complex interpretive scheme that imposed its own cosmology and chronology. It is, in other words, very much like the case for premillennial dispensationalism. Except the case for Purgatory was probably stronger.

And more on Left Behind from Joe Bageant:

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus — who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe — merely speaks and “the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle.” In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses” Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

1 comment May 9th, 2006

How not to embarrass yourself talking to an atheist

Where was this when I was fifteen? This and much more here:

All right, what about “The Bible is thousands of years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!” Once again, let’s turn that around: “The Tao Te Ching is 2500 years old. There must be something to it, for it to have survived that long!”

Doesn’t really want to make you want to rush out and become a Taoist, does it?

(Hat tip to Sysrick.)

Add comment March 18th, 2006

Innumerable Numbers of the Beast

Including but not limited to the neighbor of the Beast, the retail price of the Beast, and, as you requested, the Square Rool of All Evil™ (while supplies last).

I once had a phone number that started with the Mark of the Beast: (617) 666-xxxx. It was when I lived in the parsonage.

2 comments March 6th, 2006

Would you like a free informational video?

Slacktivist explains exactly what’s wrong with evangelicals’ signature form of evangelism.  Excellent discussion in the comments thread, too.  (Hat tip to Tommy Tanaka for the email heads-ups.)

Add comment February 22nd, 2006

The Jesus mythologies

Seeking the Light provides an excellent overview of the many, many overlaps of biblical stories of Jesus and the mythologies of Greco-Roman mystery cults: baptism, divine birth, water into wine, riding a donkey, communion, crucifixion, resurrection, second coming.

Perhaps the thing that makes the Jesus stories unique (and I’m not sure of this) is that they’re supposed to be historical. I’m guessing, and I don’t know, that mystery cultists wouldn’t have insisted that their myths actually happened, and that they knew someone (who knew someone) who saw it. The later Early Church (after a couple or three centuries anyway) always insisted that its teachings went back to this or that Apostle.

Yet insisting that the Jesus stories are unique for their claims of “historicity” doesn’t solve the problem. Why all the overlap? It can’t just be coincidence. The overlaps are just too many, and coincidence would be a cowardly explanation anyway.

One possible explanation: the historical Jesus embodied (or nearly embodied) these overlapping mystery cults myths through his actions. But why would God do it that way? What’s so important about the mystery cults to God that he’d incarnate as one of them? Seems quite a stretch.

And we know that Christianity kept absorbing the mythologies of the peoples it encountered. Take Norse myths. There are several elements of Thor and Odin that get wrapped in to Christian conceptions of Jesus and God. And the goddes Hel provides more than just the place name for eternal punishment.

It’s obvious that much of the mythology surrounding Jesus is not unique at all, except (perhaps) in its insistence that these things actually happened—which itself leads to problems. This blows a huge hole in the side of the fundamentalist ship.

But there are things about Jesus that are unique. The teachings, in Matthew and Luke especially, are unique, even if they’re a development of earlier prophets and rabbis. They’re certainly the most radical form of those two schools, and still quite radical today. It doesn’t surprise me at all that someone who taught what Jesus taught—and in the social/political context he taught it in—would get a lot of attention. And certainly still should.

Add comment February 17th, 2006

Introducing the Prophet…Bono?

Slacktivist reports on a recent example of real biblical prophecy in our times:

Bush got his photo op with Bono, but it was a bit like King David posing for photos with Nathan. Speaking truth to power is the task of the prophet, and also, perhaps, of the rock star, and that’s a bit of what happened yesterday at, of all places, the National Prayer Breakfast.

What did Bono have to say? Slacktivist has extensive pull quotes, or you can read the full text here. Summary: God is with our planet’s poor people, and the US had best figure out whose side God is really on. And Bono only has the bulk of the biblical prophets to back him up.

Tags: bono, prayer breakfast, bush, poverty, africa, aids, prophecy, biblical prophecy

Add comment February 11th, 2006

Prophets come in All Shapes and Sizes (and Faiths Too!)

Chutney posted about Oral Roberts Black Son, Carlton Pearson a while back. It sounds as if Velveteen Rabbi might have been as impressed as I was with the This American Life broadcast about Pearson’s break with his fundamentalist roots. Velveteen Rabbi makes some really interesting connections between Pearson and Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, an ordained Rabbi. Velveteen Rabbi quotes Reb Zalman:

In an interview published in Paradigm Shift, his interviewer asks what made him leave the [tag]Lubavitcher[/tag[ community. "That's a long story," Reb Zalman replies. "But one of the things was that doubt was not permitted." He left [tag]Chabad[/tag[, and began to interact with and learn from the wider religious world. Today he teaches that no tradition has an exclusive franchise on the truth, and that every religion is a valuable organ in the body of humanity.

I am thankful for the voices of people like these two who have risked so much to choose another path.

Tags: Carlton Pearson, Velveteen Rabbi, Zalman

1 comment February 6th, 2006