Category Archives: religion

(No) Peace in the Middle East

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This short film offers a simple answer to a complex question: Why has there not been/ will there not be peace in the Middle East?  Simple answers often require a lot of qualifiers, but this actually does a pretty good job.

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We could of course turn this into a discussion of Bible prophecy.  There has never been peace in this region, and the Jews have been, are and will be despised by all nations.  When Pilate said he did not want this man’s blood (Jesus) on his hands, the Jewish mob cried out “Let his blood be on our hands, and on our children.”  It’s hard to not make the correlation between that event and the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70.  The first century diaspora is why there were 10 million European Jews in 1936.  The Holocaust resulted in 100,000 Jews immigrating to the United States, and more importantly the creation of the Jewish state described in the video.  I find it hard to miss that hand of God in all this.

Many students of prophecy also believe there will be a miraculous peace brought to the Middle East by the Anti-Christ.  Now we are really stirring the pot.  Like I said, good video.

This Just In…

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There are two things I never do; one is over react in a restaurant if my order isn’t right.  I rarely send anything back, and when I do it’s with a lot of respect for the kitchen staff and multiple apologies.  You should never act like a jerk to the people who are spitting in preparing your food.  The other thing I don’t do is complain about the postal service.  No matter how bad it gets, keep your mouth shut if you ever want to see your mail again.  It’s not like they have competition.

Becky Garrison’s new book Jesus Died for This? went on sale in August.  A batch of our local mail was misdirected, and just discovered this morning.  The postmark on what would have been my advanced copy was July 21.  I’m not bitter, I just bring it up to say this: I’m reading it now, and will post a review as soon as I’m able.  Keep in mind that Garrison is a satirist, not a theologian.  Her books combine hard-hitting journalism and good common sense with frequent LOL’s.  Read more about the book and author here, and perhaps purchase a copy for $14.99.  There is also an audio download and e-book available as well.  My review will be up in a few days.

I was introduced to Becky Garrison when I reviewed The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail for the Internet Monk.  You can read that review here.

The Body of Christ

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John Lennon’s quote that “we are more popular than Jesus” sparked controversy and protest once it reached the United States.  That statement, part of a much larger discourse, was taken terribly out of context.  Here’s what Lennon really said:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Lennon was commenting on the decline of Christianity in England (and all of Europe for that matter) and over there no one even got upset.  In it’s context, what Lennon was saying was true. Continue reading →

More Popular than Jesus

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Update: this is a very good introduction.  Read the whole thing here.

Yesterday, Oct. 9, would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday.  Huge crowds gathered across the street from his former New York apartment, at the appropriately named Strawberry Fields Park.  He’s still fondly remembered, both here and in the UK, some 30 years after his death.  Google honored his birthday with their first animated doodle.

Back in 1966, protests and violence erupted in the United States after Datebook quoted Lennon on the cover of their magazine saying that the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus.”  Concerts were cancelled, KKK members rallied, the Fab Four once thought they were the target of gunfire.  Well… here’s what Lennon had really said:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

We still remember Lennon 30 years later; and despite what you see on the covers of Time, U.S. News & World Report and so on every Easter, Christians still remember Jesus some 2,000 years later.  Lennon had studied many religions extensively.  There are much more vocal enemies of Christian faith today than anything he said back then.  Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.

“His disciples were thick and ordinary.”  Yes they were; and yes we are.  And we the body of Christ.  That my friends is the Gospel.

Who Is Jesus?

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Who is Jesus?  Sounds simple.  And you could answer simply.  But no matter how you respond to the question, we all know that in reality it just isn’t that simple.  Everyone has a default image that comes to mind when we hear the name Jesus.  The question becomes “Which Jesus are we talking about?”  That my friend is the right question.

UPDATE: I’ve removed the link to the Who’s Jesus website because that blog has been deleted by it’s author.

Who is Jesus is also the title of a blog I’ve just been reading.  The author identifies himself/herself only as C.  You don’t learn a lot about C by reading the blog, but I already know a lot by the clues that are given. Continue reading →

There Is No Christian Nation

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I read an e-mail just moments ago that started with these words: “A Christian Nation cannot put up a Christmas scene of the baby Jesus in  a public place, but the Muslims can stop normal traffic every Friday afternoon by worshiping in the streets.”   After a couple more paragraphs, several images are shown of Muslims bowing to pray on Madison Ave. in New York.  I’m trying hard to ignore certain things so that I can focus on having a coherent point and not go off on some tangent rant.  Such as pointing out there is no such thing as “normal traffic” in New York City.  The Muslims haven’t stopped traffic from moving; New Yorkers did that back in the 70’s.

Where is this so-called Christian Nation? Because we don’t live in one. Continue reading →

Stephen Hawking Settles Things Once and for All

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Stephen Hawking’s latest book, The Grand Design, goes on sale next week.  Here’s a preview:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.  “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” Continue reading →

Baptism and Re-Baptism

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There’s a story in 1 Samuel about the Israelites carrying the Ark of the Covenant into battle with them.  They had beaten by the Philistines and wanted a rematch.  So they carried the Ark with them into battle so that, in their own words, “it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.”  Rather than asking God to save them they thought “it” would save them.  They confused the symbol with the thing it represented.  The symbol is not the thing.* Continue reading →

There is No Such Thing as a Ground Zero Mosque

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There is an old saying that goes “You can’t believe everything you hear.”  In this day and age, what with viral videos, soundbite political ads, Twittering, mass e-mail forwards and ever-shortening attention spans, we do tend to believe everything we hear.  Research is time consuming and considered perhaps somewhat unnecessary in the information age.  This is especially true if a piece of information creates an emotional response.  We hear something that makes us mad, and in a blind rage forward e-mails, talk out of our heads, or fire off a heated blog post.  Does it matter whether or not the info is true?

And that brings us to the Ground Zero Mosque. Continue reading →

Jesus Would Not Burn a Koran

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Last Wednesday I asked the question “Would Jesus burn a Koran?”  I was responding to recent events in the news regarding Terry Jones and his Gainesville, FL church.  Jones and company will be hosting Burn a Koran Day on September 11th, marking the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.

That post was somewhat stream of conscience as I worked through the issues and hoped we would all arrive at the same conclusion.  I have worked those ideas into a sermon, with more focus on exactly what Jesus would do and why.  The major points are:

  1. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches us to live counter-culturally.  He speaks on anger, retaliation, going the extra mile, turning the other cheek, and the golden rule. Continue reading →