The Rev. Fred Phelps claims to speak for God, and today the Westboro Baptist Church preacher gets to make his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. A friend noted this morning that all the media attention is probably a dream come true for Phelps.
I suspect she’s right, but I’ve watched Phelps and the Westboro Church for 25 years now. I live quite close to them in Kansas. Whatever joy today brings, I think their dreams and their lives must be hell on earth. Let me explain.
My Christianity post continues to wander around the net, collecting comments and links (Thanks to Zoe Pollock and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.). For days now I’ve been thinking about one of the 65 comments that popped up on Bilerico. This stuck in my head because I used to say the exact same thing. What a surprise to discover that I’m now in a different place!
My alter ego is John Forest who posted the same comment on Bilerico and on his own blog. (Thanks for writing, John!) He said:
What if your problem is not Fundamentalist Christianity? What if your main problem is the restrictive notion that: it is not OK to be not OK with someone/some group?
I’m beginning to think I wrote a litmus test, not a blog post in Monday’s “Wherein I Confess To My Christianity Problem.” In comments I’ve received in private conversations, here on this blog, on Facebook and on Bilerico where I cross posted, the discussion has been interesting, to say the least.
Some people seem to only see my anger at Christians and cheer me on. Others say I’m stereotyping Christians and boo me. Still others say I’m stuck in the delusion that I must be OK with everyone no matter what they do to me. One guy at Bilerico called me a loser.
I should probably turn in my goodness card. I blew up — via email — at a well-meaning Christian who wrote to tell me that all I needed was prayer to find the Holy Spirit. This happened about a week ago. I’ve been mulling over the incident ever since and have realized that I need to make a confession: I have a Christianity problem.
To be specific, I’m rather famous among my friends for responding with an instantly arched back, flattened ears, puffed up fur, bared fangs and a loud, prolonged hiss to any mention of Jesus, Christ, The Bible or traditional churches. Like a tabby that turns a corner to unexpectedly bump into a pit bull, I find myself thrown into battle mode.
This is decidedly odd given that some of my best friends are Christians. I’m not joking. Two of them are even ministers. I vacation with them, laugh, debate and explore spirituality with them. These two aren’t mere acquaintances. They’re call-in-the-middle-of-the-night-when-I’m-desperate friends.
Most people I spoke with in India shared the same gratitude and love for their beloved Ganesha that I did for Jesus. Does this, as the Bible has been traditionally interpreted to suggest, mean that all those beautiful, hardworking, sincere people are going to hell, forever?Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, argues that morality comes from both biology and culture.For the first time in such a visceral way, the morality of eternal hell - a cornerstone in the Christian faith - struck me as severely lacking.
There will be no self-flagellation here; if anything, the message should be hopeful: if we are more conscious of the shared mistakes that define our humanity, we can live more comfortably in this world we have created but will never fully understand. It will not make us right, but could help us be wrong better.A group of Veterans Affairs counselors argue that the guilt and remorse troops feel when they see or do bad things in war creates a psychological wound. The group is calling that wound a moral injury.
They argue that service members who don't talk to loved ones, clergy or some other confidant will become convinced what they did is unforgivable, leading to recognized symptoms of PTSD, such as withdrawal, self-condemnation and avoidance.
"Christ 'established here on earth' only one church," the document said. The other communities "cannot be called 'churches' in the proper sense" because they do not have apostolic succession - the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ's original apostles.
According to the AP story, even the Eastern Orthodox church is "wounded" because it doesn't recognize the Pope as church leader, even though it has apostolic succession. But
Protestant churches are only "ecclesial communities" and can't provide salvation.
This isn't surprising. Pope Benedict is trying to undo all the work done by Pope John XXIII, who did his best to open up to other branches of Christianity. Benedict, who was a very right-wing cardinal before he became pope, is desperate to take the church back to the Middle Ages.
I don't expect much of the Roman Catholic Church these days, so I might have ignored this report except for a similar statement I heard on an NPR report the other day. A woman -- a Protestant Christian of conservative views -- was being interviewed about whether she would vote for Mitt Romney, a Mormon.
She wouldn't, she said, because neither Mormons nor Catholics were Christians.
Now apparently there is a debate within the Mormon Church about whether they are Christians -- they believe in Jesus Christ, but they also believe in the later teachings of the Book of Mormon -- so perhaps it is not inaccurate, or even insulting, to say that Mormons aren't Christians (though I'm sure the woman who said it meant it in a negative way).
But the woman threw in Roman Catholics without being asked. And her assertion is ridiculous -- of course Roman Catholics are Christians. Still, it seems that lots of Protestants would like to believe that they aren't, just as lots of Roman Catholics would like to believe that Protestants aren't either.
Given the chaos in the church of the first few centuries after Christ -- when even Jesus's disciples preached different interpretations of his teaching -- it is ridiculous for the Roman Catholics to assert that they are the only true church. It's equally ridiculous for Protestants -- who were formed because they "protested" the Roman Catholic Church -- to deny the Christianity of Roman Catholics.
I don't see Jesus having much sympathy with either side in this squabble.
