unarmedman wrote:When things like this happen, it taints the general view of christianity as being somehow bigoted or racist, when in fact these acts have nothing to do with christianity. that's when others will commit the fallacy of composition. but not without good reason - some who profess Christ as their savior are really messed up! i mean, when you think about it in this sense, christianity is a made up word. Christ didn't say "become christians" he said "take up your cross and follow me".

i'm glad i was able to expand on my original thoughts a bit more. if i didn't make sense somewhere let me know and ill try harder.

Okay, well perhaps you or Wiggins could respond to this. If you were to do so, I think it would go a long way toward helping people understand what in fact Christianity means to you. (Re: Xianity and politics, etc, I've already dumped my personal load here.)


On a side note, my dad emailed me a sermon he gave on the book of Micah a few weeks ago. Here's an excerpt:

LAD's dad wrote:It's dog-eat-dog out there: one hostile takeover after another.

And we have to get rich any way that we can, even if, like in Micah's day, it is on the backs of the poor. (And we are so much more civilized in that we keep the poor at a distance, usually in other nations, so that we don't even have to see them.)

Sometimes we even have to work against the grain to find out who we are victimizing and where they are.

So we better get rid of these crazy prophets, sent by their crazy God. Let's cast them and their message off the edge of our postmodern world view, into the abyss of the past - that savage, intensely physical and immediate world that can't possibly have anything to do with us.

It would be easy to conclude that the prophets and their messages are anachronistic, part of a dead and distant past, an age before the coming of Christ,
But in this morning's scripture reading you have just heard the words of Micah in Chapter 2:


Woe to those who plan iniquity,
to those who plot evil on their beds
At morning¹s light they carry it out
because it is in their power to do it.

Or as the Living Bible puts it, 'Because they can, they do.'

Doesn't that seem familiar in our time and place?
And if you want to hear some other scathing indictments that sound remarkably familiar, check out Micah 6 & 7, for phrases like "Is there no end to getting rich by cheating? Don't trust anyone; the rich man pays them off and tells them who to ruin."

Goddamn, the day I thought I'd be sitting in Taiwan quoting my dad's sermons on a message board based out of Steve Albini's recording studio. The day!

God, I am so late with this. Please pardon the slight impertinence of my retort.

While it is true that there are a lot of dumb fucks in the south, those that classify the south as a region to be cast off into the gulf are illustrating their own dumbfuckery. You must remember that prejudices are formed very early in life and tend to stay with you for the whole term. My father is a bigot to the bone and to this day when I am in situations where bigotry and racial prejudices may come into play, many times I have to quell my initial reaction with more reasonable thought. Much like any other reflex--you've got that initial instant of irrational thought before your brain really kicks in. Well one thing to remember in that regard is that we are only in the beginning of the third generation since segregation. My black adult friends all lived through it. I have met the parents of some of the 16th street church boming victims. I have been in the same room with MLK's right-hand man Fred Shuttlesworth. And I live just two blocks away from the former headquarters of the Birmingham KKK, which was in the upper floor of a City Hall to illustrate its legitimacy. It is still very real to many people over 40 who were brought up during segregation and whose ideas were formed and lived based on the color or reasoning of their parents. A well-meaning grandparent might ask if you want some "nigger toes" (brazil nuts) and think no harm of her language. It's just something that's around, but it's around less often than the yanks would like to believe.

This retarded prejudice is something that will fade with each generation and assuming it will be gone within 3 generations is just expecting too much. These beliefs are deep-rooted for those who hold them and are not something that can be casually dropped like a preference for a particular brand of toilet paper.

On a related note, by the time the present generation grows up we'll all be one homogenized mass anyway thanks to TV and especially the internet. It's already happened to a great extent, but once a generation of parents have grown up in a culture where media nutures more than environment, there should be little left to make fun of about natives of any paticular region. It's really odd how many of the more rural places my band plays have the hippest-looking punksters in attendance because people in those areas have to get more of their info from centralized sources rather than direct experience and environment.

Easy targets are fun to hit. Christianity, southerners, pop music, et al. are delightful to blame because they require no effort. And in truth, blaming these groups is a very simple approach to solving complex problems. If it makes you feel better, then great. Just don't believe it as being any more truthful than a bigot blaming integration for the state of public education.

Hello Christians of Electrical Audio. Good day to you.

areopagite wrote:Easy targets are fun to hit. Christianity, southerners, pop music, et al. are delightful to blame because they require no effort. And in truth, blaming these groups is a very simple approach to solving complex problems. If it makes you feel better, then great. Just don't believe it as being any more truthful than a bigot blaming integration for the state of public education.

I believe we are going out of our way not to take cheap shots at christians here. I even go as far as saying that I would like to take cheap shots, but I stop myself, then evaluate my thinking and take a shot-that-might-be-mistaken-for-a-cheap-shot because I think the point is worth making that christianity has a lot to answer for as an institution and community, and I can think of no reason not to hold christians accountable for their christianity, with all the associations and history it implies. I invite you to provide me with a reason.

Surely the evils of christianity are not the fault of those outside it. So step up. Let's hear a defense of the Crusades. Let's hear a defense of the Inquisition. Let's hear a re-iteration of the biblical defense of slavery. Let's hear about those classes of people who you would condemn as an "abomination": Men who wear blouses, women who wear pants, the uncircumcised, men with an injury to their testicles, menstruating women, homosexuals, slaves who are not subservient enough to their masters, those who might question the authority of Caesar, those who would wear two kinds of fabric. Let's hear how God's rules about waiting a month before raping a captured woman prisoner from a neighboring tribe and making her your sex slave really mean something other than what they say. Let's hear how God can order Onan to have sex with his brother's wife, then kill him when he pulls out of her, because spilling his seed is the worst thing he can do (apparently worse than fucking your brother's wife because "God told you to."). Let's hear how Lot's daughters are worthy of our respect -- how they represent some biblical ideal -- because, when they wanted children but had no husbands, they got their dad drunk and fucked him.

This Bible, this sick self-serving book of land deeds and rape and vendettas and misogyny, you want us to run our world based on its lessons? I think that's a very simple approach to solving complex problems. Tell me why, and why I shouldn't hold christians accountable for the influence they have brought to bear through history. Seriously, I'd love to hear it.

A lot of people ask themselves what Jesus would do when they have a problem. I never do that, myself. But if I have a real problem, one of those real complex ones areopagite refers to, I'll ask myself 'What would Koresh do?'

Christianity is usually the first thing a human being has to rebel against in their life.

Therefore, it holds a very special place in our hearts, because it was the first tangible, real proof that the world is run by a series of arbitrary, mythological, and hypocritical rules that have little to no real, consequential merit...from a book edited by a one King James, who was, by most accounts, not inclined to take the good book's warnings on the disasters of same sex coupling to heart.

I also find it to be one of the most wonderful ironies that I am surrounded by atheists who are willing to accept someone's right to believe in Jesus Christ, without as much as a second thought. A premise, I think, that is at the core of the "teachings" of Christ.

Also, I would like to add that I grew up in rural Texas. Which, for those of you in the know, gives this statement a ridiculous amount of girth. ha!

Also also, black metal would not exist without Christianity. This is important to remember.

This Bible, this sick self-serving book of land deeds and rape and vendettas and misogyny, you want us to run our world based on its lessons?

That's the Old Testament. Like Christian Jacques Ellul said in The New Demons (if I recall correctly), the Old Testament is in parts a truly embarrassing book for Christians.

The Old Testament is really the Jews' book. I haven't quite figured out what the Christians have it for. Why do they even read it? Bigoted Christians seem to love it though, because it's the only place in the Bible where you can find quotes to support hatred, misogyny and beating your children. Except for the Roman letters. Paul, that bastard, who some Muslims seem to think was an incarnation of the Anti-Christ.

larsxe wrote:That's the Old Testament. Like Christian Jacques Ellul said in The New Demons (if I recall correctly), the Old Testament is in parts a truly embarrassing book for Christians.

Then why do I hear from Christians about how "every word is God's truth?" Every word? I'll take them at their literal meaning when they use that language. And I'd like them to defend it, or at least be able to mount an argument for it, especially since they are prone to leaning on it for their political and moral perspectives.

Come on, somebody step up.

I think the Christian church itself is aboudned with all kinds of corruption, from the Popes suspected 200$ dinner plate to the "go to church on sunday or burn in hell."

I don't go to church, but I do study the bible. With the risk of sounding like a moron here, the book has a lot of valuable information. I am also into freemasonry. Uh oh! I said it.

As for the south and evangelical christians,..... people that beleive anything to an extreme, cloud there own vision to outward ideas. Chrisitianity as a unified whole is pretty easy to rag on, especially because no one's ever tried it. Eh, it makes me happy.

Then why do I hear from Christians about how "every word is God's truth?" Every word?

I think you will be hard pressed to find a Christian in this forum that will adher to such a notion or defend it. Christians here seem to be more moderate. Perhaps I'm wrong.

The general consensus among Christian theologians of the world, I think, is not that the Bible is "God's truth", "God's word" or any such thing. Rather, they see the Bible as a collection of stories about people's encounters with God. These stories may have been distorted before they were written down, some people may have made them up, or perhaps tried to inflict their own politics into them. Granted, this is a very convenient method of filtering out biblical content that's out-of-touch with the moral values du jour. It is also a method that puts into question the value of the Bible as a religious document. (If it's all personal politics and made-up stories, what's the point?)

This perspective, however, is probably nearer to what the average Christian of world sees of the Bible than the position that you describe. From catholics in Italy to protestants in Sweden to liberation theologians of Central America, I don't think anyone adhers to the notion that "every word in the Bible is God's truth." Altough they may not have reflected much upon the question, if they did (or perhaps, if their clergy did) I think their position would be closer to what I described above.

The right-wing Christians of the United States of America are actually closer to the views of Muslims in this question; many seem to see their holy scripture as the Word of God and nothing less. At least the Quran and Hadiths settles the question for Muslims by firmly declaring that this is indeed the case.

I'm not a Christian. But I think be it would be a mistake to extrapolate certain theological standpoints of United States Christians to Christians in general. If there are any Christians here that subscribe to the notion that the Bible is the Word of God, I too would be interested in hearing how they could have a personal relationship with such a God.