Maggie's Farm

So, so tired of the Jesus-haters

How can anyone hate Jesus, whose message of love transformed, and challenged, the world?

Every year we go through this, and it is wearing me out. But I guess that's what the ACLU and their ilk intend to do: to attack the culture on multiple fronts with their endless supply of lawyers, and wear us down, break our hearts, and fill us with despair. Instapundit found this open declaration of war on Christmas.

Our Bird Dog did a gentle defense of Christmas the other day, which I appreciated. Do the haters know anything about Jesus, or what he preached to us all, Jews and gentiles alike? Why not find out? The American Princess has this to say:

"If we want to show respect for other religions as a society, we need to acknowledge outrightly the traditions and honor of their cultures, not simply try to homogenize the society into an atheistic or secular banner. Give them their due, their 2%--don't force us into a conglomeration of non-descript individuals.

Of course, conformity is central to liberalism. The idea that we are all the same and should all be exactly the same is the foundational principle of the Workers movment. Its the second verse in Imagine, and its scary.

Time to take Christmas back."

Hear hear. But the strongest words come from Paul at Powerline, in a piece entitled Jewish Leaders Freak Out:

"As Feder suggests, it is not the "religious right" that is seeking to transform this country. In the America to which Jews flocked, homosexuals could not marry one another, the Ten Commandments were publicly displayed, and our coins said "In God We Trust." If liberal Jews wish to reverse all of this, it's their right to try -- that's one of the things that makes our country great. But to demonize those who want to preserve the traditional social, moral, and religious arrangements strikes me as vicious and not very smart."

Paul didn't quite say "Love it or leave it," but almost. Would I move to Israel and tell them to remove their menorahs, and to shut up about Moses? Or to Uganda and tell them to get rid of their god and all of his strange minions so we aren't "offended"?  Let's get a little "tolerant" and respectful here.

As the Princess points out, Christian niceness and tolerance and accommodation makes Christians relatively easy to roll over, manipulate, and get the better of. We are taught to turn the other cheek. To all of you Jesus-phobics and Christian-haters, I beg you to find some other place to create an atheistic, tradition-killing paradise. Maybe Russia - woops, that didn't quite work out - maybe consider Saudi Arabia, Uganda, France or Mongolia. Or is the anglophone world the weakest in spine, the most tolerant, and thus the best target for your plans?

And thank you heartless souls for leaving us alone in the future. We've had enough.  The ankle-biting is just too intolerant and cruel, and just plain annoying. A push-back should not be necessary, but we have had it with lions in the Colosseum. Been there, done that. Enough with the lions.

I have a better idea: learn about Christ and his message to the world, and understand and respect this powerful message, even if you don't accept it. If you have a better and more holy message, lucky you. Cling to it, but leave me alone.

And, no - I don't care what Bush has on his Christmas card this year.

C.S. Lewis

Gopnik in The New Yorker takes a fresh look at the complicated life of the beloved (at least in the US) story-teller, medieval literature scholar, and Christian apologist extraordinaire:

"The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end."

Was he a prig, a sensualist, a saint, or a mensch? A fantasist constricted by dogma? An everyday neurotic, mixed-up writer?  I'd guess the latter. Read the whole thing if you are at all interested in this brilliant and fascinating fellow who was transformed by earthly love, and then loss, late in his life.

A brief bio of Lewis here. There are lots of C.S. Lewis websites. Here's one.

By the way, Disney's (!) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes out Dec. 9. Can Disney possibly do it justice?

And finally, if you ever wondered in which order the Chronicles of Narnia ought to be read, here's the website on that important subject. (I read them out of order.)

Newdow Marches Onward

His next goal is to remove "In God We Trust" from currency.

We used to call irritable and intolerant people like this "cranks." (See today's reference to the guy who pulled his daughter out of the school choir because of "Pick a Bale of Cotton.") Nowadays, cranks are taken seriously. Is this "progress"? Or is it letting the lunatics run the asylum?

Evolution and Religion

51 percent of Americans do not accept the theory of evolution, and believe that God simply made man. Only 15 percent believe that God played no role in the evolution of man. New CBS poll here.

I find those numbers startling, but not disturbing. People think whatever they want, but I have never experienced any conflict between science and religion, and I assume we have been given a brain to use the darn thing.

Robert Pollock, a molecular biologist at Columbia and a re-born Jew, if one can use that term, wrote an excellent essay on how his faith and his science come together:

Why do we ask what is right? How do we know which answer to believe? What difference can any answer make, in the span of a necessarily mortal life? Those non-scientific questions did not then appear, nor do they now appear, to be mysteries that may yet be resolved by molecular biology. Rather, they seem to emerge in most of us in what is a wholly unscientific but necessary way; in their absence a person will be freed from the necessity to ponder them, at great risk to one and all. Molecular biology must nevertheless continue to ignore these matters of moral norms, which leaves science with a gap that bothers many molecular biologists and others who cannot see why these questions of norms are not being acknowledged.

Any current issue of molecular biology or any other science, placed in the context of moral norms, is therefore no longer simply a problem in science, but rather, it becomes a problem in science and religion. There are two ways for this to happen: either it becomes a problem in religious science, or in scientific religion. The latter seems to me much less interesting than the former. A good example of scientific religion would be the futile attempt to pin religious meaning and purpose on the facts and evidence of natural selection, even though the mechanism of natural selection is demonstrably devoid of moral content.

Religious science on the other hand is simply what happens when one introduces the notion of moral norms to any current scientific agenda, and sees how that agenda might change. Neither compulsion nor certainty are embedded in the choice to expand the agenda in this way. One may turn away from one's science for guidance, not because molecular biology still knows too little, nor because of religious dogma, but simply because molecular biology cannot approach these questions at all, even to ask them. And in turning elsewhere one might reasonably be interested in the remarkable emergence in all cultures at all times of systems of thought and insight that address precisely these questions, systems we call religions.

Read entire in Crosscurrents.

Imago Dei

Brian has some interesting thoughts about man being made in God's image, with some Egyptian texts too. Read Parts One and Two. Real Meal.

The C of E is terminal

Not surprised, from what I have heard. I know they threw out the Ten Commandments years ago, I know they adopted secular, leftist values rather than religious ones, and I knew that the weighty theologian John Lennon convinced them that God was obsolete, and I knew no-one was going to church in England any more - why would they? You can get the secular propaganda from the newspaper and the telly (the C of E blames the West for 9-11, for example. For all you can tell, the Bishops are Moslem).

The C of E is going down the same dead-end path as the main-line US churches. The Protestants tried a revival in opposition to the C of E in the 1600s - and it was a great success in keeping Christ alive in the English-speaking world, even though they tried to kill my ancestors. Time for another revival in England, and let's just bury this useless corpse of a "church." God will surely not miss such a travesty of his will and his word.

Piece on the subject by Mullen, on Farewell, C of E.

The Modern Christian Gospels

Tod Bolsinger points out an interview which spells out the current "gospels":

There are really three gospels that are heard in our society. One is forgiveness of sins. Another is being faithful to your church: If you take care of your church, it will take care of you. Sometimes it's called discipleship, but it's really churchmanship. And another gospel is the social one—Jesus is in favor of liberation, and we should be devoted to that. All of those contain important elements of truth. You can't dismiss any of them. But to make them central and say that's what discipleship is just robs discipleship of its connection with transformation of character."

I could not agree more. Read his piece and his link.

The Ouija Board approach to the Bible, and How the Bible reveals truth

From Evangelical Outpost:

There is an old preacher’s tale of a young man who turned to the Bible for guidance on making decisions. Using the text as a divining rod, he would flip through the text and let his finger land on a verse, using the result as a divine insight into how he should decide. One day while wondering what to do with his life, he flipped his Bible open and pointed to Matthew 27:5. He read, "[Judas] went and hanged himself." He decided to try again and on the second attempt landed on Luke 10:37, "Go and do likewise." He tried flipping one more time and arrived at John 13:27, "What you do, do quickly."

Although we might find the story amusing, most Christians have done something similar themselves. Eventually, though, we outgrow the “flip and point” method of guidance. As we mature in our faith we begin to recognize that just because the Bible is the word of God does not make it a sanctified Ouija board that will answer whatever questions we might ask. Unfortunately, we often discard such childish approachs only to replace them with more sophisticated, yet equally flawed, hermeneutical methods. Once such approach is what philosopher Roy Clouser calls the “encyclopedic assumption”:

Read entire.