Crazyanity

 

Today is Halloween. Of course, a good Christian should have nothing to do with this sick, wicked holiday. After all it’s Satan’s day. So let’s all get up a petition to get the day renamed “Harvest Ween” or something less demonic-sounding. At the very least we should provide an alternate venue for our children. Something healthy and wholesome in the church gymn-atorium with costumes of Bible characters. And we should remember to pray for all those lax parents who need to wake up and be very afraid of this day. After all, I heard that covens of witches perform human sacrifices of children they nab on this most wicked of nights. ( I know it’s not an urban myth because I heard it on Christian radio.) Okay. Time out. Maybe right-wing talk radio’s fear mongering  needs to do a little fact-checking.  Like the fact that Halloween IS a Christian holiday. It goes back to the 1500s. The day was the Hallowed Eve (by the way, hallow means holy). It was the night before All Saints’ Day. Young, Christian boys would dress up to mock the devil. Martin Luther had it right. “The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him.”  Or as the Bible says, “Greater who is He who in us, than he who is in the world.” So let’s all take a break. Take a pitchfork to Old Harry. Study a little church history and stop trying to muck with a Christian Hallowed day.

Warning: David Letterman’s humor is in bad taste

It was the shot heard round the world. A cheap shot at Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old’s expense. Something from which young Willow should have been spared. But that goes at the bottom of an already long list of unfortunate things this young teen has had to endure over the past year. Add this to a mother who ambitiously accepts a nomination that would bring your older sister’s premarital shame into the limelight. Or the ridicule that results from a clueless parent trying to bluff her way through questions about world affairs. Or having siblings with first names that sound like moving parts in a Chevy engine  (Willow definitely got the best of those freakshow monikers). Or the embarrassment of every dumb thing your parents do being broadcasted to the planet. Remember how embarrassed you were to be seen with your parents at 14? Multiply that times a gazillion. Oh, and by the way, snarky cheap shots, tasteless jokes and lame non sequiturs have always been Dave Letterman’s brand of humor. Kinda surprised people are just noticing it.

Kill Bill

If you can snatch the pebble from my hand, you can say so long to David Carradine. R.I.P.

Capitalists gone wild

The Russian newspaper Pravda doesn’t think Obama is a socialist. They think he is a commie. Apparently, it all started with public education and televangelists.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas than the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama.

Thou shalt not kill

Does abortion terminate a life? Without question. Does a woman’s right to privacy trump an embryo’s right to live. Sadly, it seems to. At least, it always has. That’s right. Always. Roe v. Wade made it legal, but abortion has always been available. Late term abortions, in particular. In fact, leaving unwanted babies to die by exposure was once the state of the art. A grizzly procedure that makes partial-birth abortion look almost humane. Which brings us to the big question. If  abortion stops a heart beat, is it then murder? If we look at the Bible, I’m afraid I would have to say “no.” At least, the God of the Old Testament––who instituted capital punishment for everything from killing a man to dishonoring your parents–– didn’t require the taking of the life of someone responsible for the death of a child in utero (Exodus 21). Which, at the very least, makes me reluctant to call our President a baby killer. Or abortion murder. However, most pro-life Christians are not nearly as reluctant to pull their punches. Some even pull the trigger. Which is how an abortionist came to die this Sunday. At his church. As he worshipped his Savior. As his wife watched on from the church choir loft. Murder. Plain and simple. And the saddest part of all? People who call themselves followers of Jesus are reading this and smiling.

The Unlikely Disciple

Being a disciple of Jesus means different things in different denominations. For Methodists it’s performing good works and regular church attendance. For Pentecostals its having a special prayer language and a gold-leafed baby grand. For Presbyterians it is possessing a large library, a iPhone with a ESV Bible app and a micro brewery. For the Baptist students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University it is having a burden for the lost. That’s why every Spring Break they send a busload of smiling, clean-cut kids to Daytona Beach for mass evangelism. Last year, one of these tract-pushing, Bible-thumping, soul winners happened to be a unregenerate, left-leaning non-believer named Kevin Roose. He describes his baptism in Christian witnessing in his new book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University:

Around 11:00 pm, the Jesusmobile pulls up to Razzle’s. Razzle’s is a Wal-Mart-size nightclub with a squadron of earpieced bouncers manning the velvet rope and a set of revolving laser lights that overflow onto the sidewalk. We won’t be going inside, Scott says, but we’ll stand just outside the rope, witnessing to people waiting in line.

The first surprise is that there are at least two other groups of Christian evangelists here. One group, a youth team from a Florida church, has set up a shaved-ice machine on the sidewalk. They’re making sno-cones for the Razzle’s patrons, which almost seems like cheating. (Some Christians call this “gastro-evangelism.”) The other group, which is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ, has done something truly brilliant. A well-funded national organization, Campus Crusade rented the ballroom at a hotel next to Razzle’s and set up a fake party inside, complete with strobe lights, a security team, and attractive models paid to stand outside the hotel and gossip loudly about the great party inside. When would-be clubbers enter the room, they quickly realize they’ve been duped — instead of bar specials and trance music, they get gospel tracts and a salvation message.

Our group has no such Trojan horse, just the same Way of the Master routine we used on the beach. Witnessing at Razzle’s, where everyone we meet is either drunk or well on the way, makes communication a little harder.

“Excuse me, sir. Would you help me with an opinion poll?” I ask.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Who is the greatest person you know?”

“Hmm … gayest person I know … I’d have to say Richard Simmons.”

Roose recently shared with NPR how his semester at Liberty opened his eyes to the sincerity and compassion of these young Christians. Roose never did open his heart to Jesus. But the experience opened something else. His mind. Funny how so many liberals can have such closed ones. There’s irony.

Give me that Sci-Fi Religion

The Scienitologists are having a tough week. First, the French legal system put them through the wringer, now Wikipedia is barring them from editing their Wikipedia article. All’s left now is for the paparazzi to catch John Travolta kissing Tom Cruise.

In your face, Darwin

The Brits look at Ned Flanders and the Evangelical survival of the fittest:

The great battle has to do with religion and modernity. Ever since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have predicted that religion – and particularly the effusive brand of religion now practised by evangelicals – would be doomed by modernity. The high priests of the Enlightenment mocked Christianity as a refuge for superstitious freaks. Edward Gibbon was never happier than when chronicling the absurd activities of the likes of Saint Simeon Stylites, who for more than 30 years lived on top of a pillar 21m (70ft) high and 1m square. In his novel La Religieuse Diderot mocked the religious for their psychological oddities and deviant pastimes, not least flagellation.

The founders of modern sociology, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, predicted the secularisation of the world. Ned’s fellow moustache-wearer, Friedrich Nietzsche, loudly announced God’s death. Marx cursed the opium of the people. Freud saw religion as a mere neurosis. Ever since Darwin, educated European thought has viewed religion as a dying cult – the refuge of the ignorant, the superstitious and a few guilt-ridden Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

The land of Ned and Homer, of course, has always been different. While the French slaughtered priests during their revolution, seeing religion as a bulwark of the ancien régime, America’s Founding Fathers separated Church from State, in large part to protect the former from the latter. The First Amendment set off a fierce competition between America’s “multiplicity of sects”, with a succession of evangelising religions vying for people’s attentions: the Methodists converted an eighth of the country within a generation of the revolution. While Europe’s state-sponsored religions shrivelled, America’s free market kept faith alive.

Art imitating art

The ubiquitous Obama poster has just received a summons. Apparently, the AP photographer who captured the original image of the president wants a cut of the action.

The Astute Beatle

Over the past few years, Paul McCartney–the “cute” Beatle–has managed to expunge John Lennon’s co-writing credit on such classics as Yesterday and Elenor Rigby.  He has reissued an entire album with the “proper mix.” And now he is taking credit for being the Beatle who first wanted to give peace a chance. Given time, he may make us doubt whether John Lennon ever existed at all.

Can I get an Amen?

Here’s an interesting chart I stumbled on to. Apparently, the tendency to seek the Almighty in prayer is as strong among Democrats as Republicans. Which is odd, considering the papable antipathy that liberals generally have toward all things not secular. Now clearly, the African-American demographic helps the Democrat numbers and I am sure that many a staunch Democrat is praying to our Mother/Father God, the goddess Sophia, Krishna and, of course, the great and exalted Oprah. But the encouraging thing to me is the number of my evangelical friends who are praying for the President-elect. One of my friends told me this week that although Obama is not a leader, totally clueless on foreign policy and has a lot of silly liberal economic ideas, my friend daily prays “that Christ will invade his heart.” Translation: change his position of abortion rights and gay rights. So yes, the Left seems to pray as much as the Right does. The difference is that the Right prays that Christ will invade and the Left simply prays that Bush will not.

And we thought this guy was dangerous!

Apparently, the Christian Right are more worked up about Barack than they were about fictitious warlocks. A recent mailing of scare tactics from Brother Dobson are as fantastic, dark  and demon-filled as anything conjured up by J.K. Rowling:

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts.

All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action.

I prefer to stick with the warm assurances of Holy Writ: “If God be for us, who can be against us? ” and “Greater is He who is in us, than he who is in the world.” Dr. Dobson, get a life.

Best-dressed Michelle

It is amazing that a woman who shops at the Gap can be voted best dressed. And a woman who has a $150,000 wardrobe from Neiman’s and Saks Fifth Avenue just gets voted dumb. Darn you, Liberal media!

Gidget goes to Washington

This is really like a bad Reese Whitherspoon movie. She is cute, perky–and despite those media elites and all– she’s holding her own debating the seasoned U. S. Senator played by some old guy with capped teeth and a bad weave. Yep, this must be a movie. She is standing at the podium in siletto heels and take-me-serious  librarian glasses, saying folksy things like “Doggone it” and “I betcha.” And now, she has broken more than the glass ceiling; she has broken over 200 years of decorum. She has just given the American voters a “shout out.” Please. Wake me when this movie is over.