Category: Religion

Trio

From a report in the Los Angeles Times:

When referring to the Trinity, most Christians are likely to say “Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

But leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are suggesting some additional designations: “Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-giving Womb,” or perhaps “Overflowing Font, Living Water, Flowing River.”

Then there’s “Rock, Cornerstone and Temple” and “Rainbow of Promise, Ark of Salvation and Dove of Peace.”

The phrases are among 12 suggested but not mandatory wordings essentially endorsed this month by delegates to the church’s policy-making body to describe a “triune God,” the Christian doctrine of God in three persons.

The Rev. Mark Brewer, senior pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church, is among those in the 2.3-million-member denomination unhappy with the additions.

“You might as well put in Huey, Dewey and Louie,” he said.

Blogging the Bible

At Slate, David Plotz decides to read the Bible and share the experience. (Here’s the background — What happens when an ignoramus reads the Good Book?)

A believer, Plotz has gotten the story from creation through Lot in the first two installments — Genesis, Chapters 1-7 and Chapters 8-19. One sample to whet your interest.

Creation Story, Take 2. This is confusing. Here is an entirely different Creation, in which God uses an entirely different method and carries it out in a different order. And second Creation has a very different view about men and women than first Creation. In Chapter 1, after God has made everything else, He makes man and woman together, “in His image.” Not in Chapter 2. Before he makes plants and animals, He forms man from dust and blows in his nose to vivify him. Nothing about “in His image” here. And no woman, either. Only later, after the plants and animals have been made, does God create woman, from Adam’s rib. In second Creation, the woman is made to be man’s “helper.” In Chapter 1 they are made equal. Why is Chapter 2 the Creation that conservatives have settled on, with woman as helpmeet? Why not first Creation?

We all worship something

Pope Benedict XVI is appealing to a new group of admirers: marketers seeking not blessings but pontifical product placements.

Since his election last year, the pope has been spotted wearing Serengeti-branded sunglasses and brown walking shoes donated by Geox. He owns a specially engraved white Apple iPod, and he recently stirred much publicity with a pair of stylish red loafers that may or may not be from Prada.

Wall Street Journal

Dilbert apologetics

At the The Dilbert Blog Scott Adams has been asking the cosmic questions and begun to reach some conclusions:

I categorize people’s reasons for believing this way.

Dumb Reasons
————————

1. An authority figure told me it was true. (They all lie)
2. It’s written in a book. (So is Spiderman)
3. How else could reality come into existence? (Ignorance is not evidence.)
4. My holy book accurately predicts things (So does Moby Dick. It’s been proven.)
5. I was raised this way.
6. It’s just obvious that God exists, you stupid heathen.

Slightly Better Reasons
———————————

1. I talked to God and he answered. (The Mormon method)
2. I feel Jesus/God/Allah inside me.
3. My prayers are sometimes/often answered.

Excellent Reasons
—————————

1. I’m hedging my bets just in case it’s real.
2. Belief gives me immediate real-world benefits, socially, health-wise, and happiness-wise. And if it turns out to be true, that’s a bonus.
3. I have studied the historical and scientific evidence and concluded that there is plenty of reason to believe in God.

‘My Easter Bunny Can Rise From the Dead.’

Helpful Tips for Fighting and Winning the War on Easter by J. Chris Rock. Here’s two:

Tip No. 3

Have each member of your family write a letter every day to Just Born, Inc., makers of PEEPS. Suggest they make PALMS instead, marshmallow fronds that deliciously celebrate Christ’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. Great writing exercise for the kids!

Tip No. 5

Mothers, throw that “Easter” bonnet your child brought home from art class right in the trash. They’ll cry (trust me on this one), but tell them that if they really loved Mommy they’d make you a crown of thorns out of a paper plate.

The other Saint Francis

Saint Francis Xavier was born in Navarre on this date in 1506.

According to the Patron Saints Index Francis had quite a résumé:

Nobleman from the Basque reqion. Studied and taught philosophy at the University of Paris, and planned a career as a professor. Friend of Saint Ignatius of Loyola who convinced him to use his talents to spread the Gospel. One of the founding Jesuits, and the first Jesuit missionary. Priest.

In Goa, while waiting to take ship, India, he preached in the street, worked with the sick, and taught children their catechism. He would walk through the streets ringing a bell to call the children to their studies. Said to have converted the entire city.

He scolded his patron, King John of Portugal, over the slave trade: “You have no right to spread the Catholic faith while you take away all the country’s riches. It upsets me to know that at the hour of your death you may be ordered out of paradise.”

Tremendously successful missionary for ten years in India, the East Indies, and Japan, baptizing more than 40,000. His epic finds him dining with head hunters, washing sores of lepers in Venice, teaching catechism to Indian children, baptizing 10,000 in a single month. He tolerated the most appalling conditions on long sea voyages, enduring extremes of heat and cold. Wherever he went he would seek out and help the poor and forgotten. He traveled thousands of miles, most on his bare feet, and he saw the greater part of the Far East. Had the gift of tongues. Miracle worker. Raised people from the dead. Calmed storms. Prophet. Healer.

Why Eat Peeps at Easter?

How the marshmallow chicks found Jesus.

Candy historians speculate that the Peeps’ link to Easter has more to do with the pagan origins of the holiday than its Christian roots. Eggs, and consequently chicks, are a long-standing symbol of fertility and rebirth, an appropriate image for a holiday that celebrates the coming of spring. Originally part of a pagan fertility ritual symbolizing new life, the egg became incorporated into Easter as pagan rites were absorbed into Christianity with the Christianization of Central Europe.

NewMexiKen believes that bunny Peeps are heresy. True Peeps are chicks and yellow. Period.

Witches

The examination of witnesses at the Salem Meeting House began on this date in 1692. Before the 17-month ordeal was over, 25 had died — nineteen executed by hanging, one man tortured to death, and five who succumbed to conditions while in jail. More than 160 people were accused, most jailed and many deprived of property and legal rights. Those who confessed and accused others were saved; those who maintained their innocence were executed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Last year NewMexiKen had more information on Salem from the Library of Congress, Witch way did they go?

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras, literally “Fat Tuesday,” has grown in popularity in recent years as a raucous, sometimes hedonistic event. But its roots lie in the Christian calendar, as the “last hurrah” before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. That’s why the enormous party in New Orleans, for example, ends abruptly at midnight on Tuesday, with battalions of streetsweepers pushing the crowds out of the French Quarter towards home.
…

Carnival comes from the Latin words carne vale, meaning “farewell to the flesh.” Like many Catholic holidays and seasonal celebrations, it likely has its roots in pre-Christian traditions based on the seasons. Some believe the festival represented the few days added to the lunar calendar to make it coincide with the solar calendar; since these days were outside the calendar, rules and customs were not obeyed. Others see it as a late-winter celebration designed to welcome the coming spring. As early as the middle of the second century, the Romans observed a Fast of 40 Days, which was preceded by a brief season of feasting, costumes and merrymaking.

Catholic Roots of Mardi Gras from American Catholic, which has more.

Shrove Tuesday, and I’m off to IHOP

Shrove Tuesday is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday which is the first day of Lent. It’s a day of penitence, to clean the soul, and a day of celebration as the last chance to feast before Lent begins.

Shrove Tuesday is sometimes called Pancake Day after the fried batter recipe traditionally eaten on this day.

But there’s more to Shrove Tuesday than pigging out on pancakes or taking part in a public pancake race. The pancakes themselves are part of an ancient custom with deeply religious roots.

BBC – Religion & Ethics, which has more.

Their Own Version of a Big Bang

WAYNE, N.J. — Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

Los Angeles Times

Key quote: “He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.'”

A little provocative thinking for Sunday

The New York Times Magazine has some Questions for Daniel C. Dennett, a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, who has written a book promoting the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology. Two of the interview exchanges:

So what can you tell us about God?

Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world – that’s a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.

Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

Isn’t it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don’t need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.

Five books in five days (4)

The End of Faith by Sam Harris was NewMexiKen’s third book in my project to read five books in five days. I began book four, M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn last night, so am almost back on target.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris argues that religious faith is the problem in the world — a problem that endangers us all. The more fundamental the belief — Judaism, Christianity and Islam most of all — the more threatening it is.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

Harris is unlikely to make many converts, nonetheless he is convincing in his analysis of the danger. He is less convincing in his later chapters when he discusses alternative forms of belief and spirtuality, once we are weaned from the religious beliefs of our ancestors. Still, it’s a remarkable and worthwhile book.

“The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself….”

“Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls [i.e., rape victims], rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. Its is a failure of ethics.”

Jesus Without The Miracles

“[T]he relevance of Christianity to most Americans…has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.”

Erik Reece in Jesus Without The Miracles: Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas from Harper’s. An excellent article.

Thanks to Albloggerque for the link.

Myths of Modern America

Wash Park Prophet concludes we are a Christian nation only in Gallup polls. The entire entry is worth a read; he ends with this:

Most Americans aren’t really very different, even though we aren’t as trained to recognize it as such. Many Japanese parents teach their children Confucian proverbs. Americans are as likely to offer their children moral guidance form Aesop and the Brothers Grimm and Winnie the Pooh, as they are from the Proverbs or the Book of Job.

This is why there will never be a full fledged theocracy in the United States. While Christianity has made some narrow inroads into the American mythology, for example in the Pledge of Allegiance and the “In God We Trust” motto, which were themselves bad decisions, the Christian majority is illusory. Many nominal Christans in America don’t believe in Noah much more than they do in Batman, and many people who give doctrinaire answers on the phone to pollsters asking about the miracles of Christianity and the Creation story, are about as sincere as a parent asked by a child about Santa Claus. Decorum and good breeding dictate a certain answer, but that answer isn’t always sincere when the truth really counts.

Best line of the day, so far

“Jesus says Christmas shouldn’t be about picking fights and organizing boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees. Do you really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he’s going to appear on Fox to say, ‘Worry about genocide and hunger later – first, let’s battle with liberals over what holiday greeting to use’?”

Nicholas Kristof channeling St. Peter in a conversation with President Bush

Another way of looking at it

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

From an essay by Penn Jillette, explaining that he isn’t an atheist. He is a believer. He believes there is no God.